Ciao.

"During a time when American independent cinema either grunts elliptically under moody skies or chatters banally cross-legged on the living room floor, the purposeful, probing dialogue in Yen Tan's Ciao feels like a throwback to an entirely different reality," writes Eric Hynes in indieWIRE. "When characters talk in Ciao, they aren't being elusive or withholding for a gradual or sudden reveal, they're honestly trying to make sense - and to help one another to make sense - of difficult circumstances and emotions. The filmmaker's faith in dialogue as crucial to narrative and character development as well as to personal recovery and romance may at first seem Clinton-era quaint, but it's really just plain effective. Nothing but cheap suspense is lost when information and honest feelings are exchanged in Ciao, and what's gained is something more lovely, complicated, and true."

Updated.

Writing in the Voice, though, Ed Gonzalez finds that "the film's calculatingly minimalist style is in many ways as affected as all the gay Amerindie films at which writer-director Yen Tan snottily thumbs his nose."

"Shot in muddy video, Ciao weds a story that sounds (and often plays) like a pornographic quickie with a torturously ambitious visual style," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Though it's a bit of a relief that someone in American independent cinema apparently knows how to use a tripod, Mr Tan has only traded one contemporary visual cliché (dribbling camerawork) for another (the art-house long shot). But holding a shot until the cows come home, are milked dry and put out to pasture once again does not an art movie make."

Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant: "These male leads laudably manage to keep the plot from wallowing in a generic cesspool of trite sentimentality, but the tension between style and substance apparent even in the first scene ultimately proves terminal: the filmmakers' zeal to poeticize the messiness of life smoothes Ciao into a dull, picturesque chamber piece."

At the Sunshine in Manhattan.

Update: "There is a strong Asian sensibility in Ciao, from the static, symmetrical imagery to the suppressed emotions hiding just beneath the surface," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "While Tan is Malaysian, the film is a predominantly English-language drama starring Caucasian men. This tone might be too jarring for some viewers, who will find the dialogue and delivery to be stilted and artificial. While I can see where they're coming from, I also can't deny the genuine emotion I felt as the film unfolded. By the end, I had succumbed to it completely."

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2008 7:52 AM