"Accomplishments"
At home: With Decision to Leave, I've seen 10 of Park Chan-wook's films now, and he has yet to do me wrong. In fact, this murder mystery/romance is top tier for me. A man falls off a mountain, the police suspect foul play, his wife is investigated. But the detective is rather too entranced by this Chinese immigrant, and from there, as is usual in director Park's films, there's no telling where it's going to go, and I don't want to blow any surprises. Suffice it to say, the film looks gorgeous, and there's an especially interesting play between high and low places, mirroring the relative positions of the two main characters - a cop above all reproach and a woman (Tang Wei) whose hand may be bathed in blood. Park's visual tricks to show the detective and surveillance work are clever and lean into the theme of obsession at the heart of the romance portion of this tale, blurring the lines between the detective's compulsion to solve a crime, and his feelings for the suspect. A beautifully tragic crime picture.
Tang Wei's first starring feature, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, is really an incredible debut. This World War II drama has her play a student who gets into the spy game during the Japanese Occupation, so she can lure a high-ranking collaborator (Tony Leung) into a deadly trap. Even if it takes years. Even if she has to sacrifice everything. Even if she falls prey to Stockholm (Shanghai?) Syndrome. I would call the notorious NC-17 sex scenes (real or not, there's no straight answer on this) erotic if they weren't so brutal, and they are ultimately a distraction. The audience shouldn't be wondering if the actors are actually having sex while its attention should be on the complex emotional drama, certainly not worth getting an actress blacklisted for three years in her home country (Leung suffered no such indignity). Nevertheless, this is a striking unfolding tragedy, no matter which way it ends for the couple. I had it on my list for Tony Leung, who is my favorite actor, but it's Tang Wei's show, and it's making me want to revisit some of the films I've already seen her in without really registering her name.
Bi Gan offers a visual feast in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a man's quest to find the woman he once loved (Tang Wei), but who never followed him into exile a dozen years ago. The first half of the film can be hard to latch onto, despite the superlative cinematography, because it really is a journey into memory. It feels fragmentary by design, and you're often caught flat-footed, wondering if any given moment is the past or the present. Things are hidden from view, caught in reflections, revealed and recalled, until the tapestry is complete enough that things start to make sense. The second half contrasts (and thus justifies) the second, which is an hour-long, dreamlike, unbroken shot (which was also in 3D - and cleverly announced - in theaters, though we lose any oddness this would have added on our ol' flatscreens, if indeed even the theatrical experience could sustain it). In both haves, the actors move in decrepit villages where everything has rotted and broken down, a ghost world that ties into the world of fading memories. I wasn't sure at first, but by the end, I was completely sold.
I'm not entirely sure how the cameras work in The Villainess, but the action choreography is more than a little insane when you factor that its POV must also be included in there. No doubt there's a lot of trickery involved, digital joins and so on, perhaps responsible for that juddery look, but it's all about creating a visceral feeling that hits hard and puts you inside the action. Is it too much? Maybe, but as an action fan, I still enjoyed its guts. The story has a lot of complications too, as we follow an assassin who doesn't know her love interest is secretly her handler, nor that her ex-husband is still alive and her prey. Fate seems to have decreed that everyone she loves die. Flashbacks reveal the backstory, so the audience is often playing catch-up, but it's worth it. I do feel the loss of certain elements when the third act turn comes, but it's in keeping with the themes and mood of the film, which is certainly John Wick-adjacent (the motorcycle chase allegedly inspired a similar scene in JW 3).
When there's an execution at a prison, is it just another work day for the warden? Part procedural, part psychological drama, Clemency has it rather weighing on Alfre Woodard's character. And by saying "rather", I'm downplaying a strong, naturalistic performance. The point of view is mostly hers, but sometimes shifts to Aldis Hodge's man on death row, a man possibly falsely accused, and moving from hope to despair while he waits for his day. Supporting roles for Richard Schiff, Wendell Pierce and Danielle Brooks... there's a lot of acting power on the screen. Despite the pretty strict realism, the title might give you hope as well that the Governor will make that call, but there's a bleakness to how things unfold that makes you doubt it, all of which puts you in the characters' head space. Thematically, a lot of the characters are at the end of their particular ropes and there's absolutely no sense that we're glorifying the death penalty, nor do sentimentality or didactics expose the film's point of view. Things just are, with consequences.
Beauty and the Dogs (the French title, "La belle et la meute" has a better consonance, "meute" means "dog PACK", in Arabic, I don't know) provides a harrowing night for its Tunisian heroine as she is raped one evening, and spends the next 12 hours, more or less, trying to get justice. The system is already gamed against her, but even worse is that policemen did the deed. Between a bureaucratically disinterested health service and antagonistic, corrupt cops, the details are Tunisia's, but it's hard to imagine things going much better in any other country under those circumstances. Mariam Al Ferjani is strong in the exhausting role, and the sense of naturalistic dread created by director Kaouther Ben Hania as palpable as the events are frustrating. The short time frame also leaves you with ambiguity as to what happens next. Things cannot be resolved, and there's no card to alleviate your anxiety. Instead, it ends on a "Based on a true story" notice that does anything but.
Un couteau dans le coeur (A Knife Through the Heart, but actually translated as Knife + Heart) takes us back to Paris 1979, where Vanessa Paradis plays a gay porn producer, and to my surprise (I guess I mostly remember her as a waifish teenage pop singer), she's rather good. A masked killer starts violently murdering her cast, and the police are so unmotivated, she has to take things into her own hands (while also being a complete train wreck). And THEN, things get really weird, and simply agreeing that the supernatural is real in this world isn't enough to explain everything. But given the amazing color work in this flick, the weirdness can be ascribed to it attempting a modern giallo (and succeeding!) - it looks gorgeous. The whole serial killer thing is actually my least favorite part of this - it's fine, but it's something of a trope - while my favorite is the porno scenes produced as part of this world. Artsy and entertaining in a "they probably don't make them like that anymore" kind of way.
Sion Sono's Antiporno is absolutely surreal, and it's by turns hard to latch onto and a little too didactic, but it does have some very interesting layers AND its bold colors make it quite beautiful to look at even if the characters are rather repulsive, or at least, off-putting. One of the difficulties is that several realities are true at once. Kyoko is a young woman acting a part for a movie, but also is that character, but also merely has a fantasy about getting the role. You can pick one, but the film doesn't ask you to because it's more about exploring sex in life and in film (in one reading), and the use (and I'm choosing that word carefully) of women in film, and perhaps how sex positivity has been co-opted (or invented) by the Patriarchy to make women actively want to be "whores" on film, not just accept it as a reality of film-making. And of course, Antiporno also has a lot of nudity and softcore sexual situations, fetishism, etc. ITSELF, showing male-dominant ideas at work, but perhaps slightly skewing them towards a female erotic POV. Perhaps. What we have here is a character who knows she's a character trapped in a fiction she finds disgusting, but the film might be just life, with its own "directorial" expectations.
Comics: Originally published as The Electric Sublime, Image has just released W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo crazy art history mystery-adventure as Art Brut Volume 1: The Winking Woman. It's kind of like Doom Patrol's "The Painting That Ate Paris" turned up to 11, and as someone with more than passing familiarity with art history, I will say Art Brut's biggest flaw is that it is so SHORT! I really wanted this to be a monthly (and perhaps the "Vol.1" is meant to promise more). Arthur Brut has the unique ability to jump into a painting and explore the world behind the canvas, though at the cost of his sanity when he's in the real world. And yet, he must help the agency that investigates art-related weirdness, like the Mona Lisa suddenly winking. Who is destroying the great masterworks from the inside? Weird (and violent!) stuff keeps happening at such a pace, I wanted the comic to slow down and work itself out at 6 issues rather than 4. Prince shows he's got comedy chops in back-up features that play Arthur's early adventures as rip-roaring Silver Age comics, so we get a little more of this world than just the main story. Still left me hungry for more.
Another mini-series (this one a mere 3 issues) I wish had been a continuing project is IDW's Star Trek: Lower Decks by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio. It's just the one storyline, with the bridge crew making Second Contact with a planet that seems centuries away from FIRST, while the Lower Decks characters create a sentient Dracula on the holodeck and have to deal with THAT. It gets the tone of the show, and the characters' personalities, absolutely correct. Not only is the story steeped in Trek philosophy (and not just references), providing comic takes on well-worn tropes, but to make up for the slower pace of a comic compared to a cartoon show these days, there are asides from characters and writer at the bottom of most pages, and a bunch of fake ads, logs and other materials at the back. Huge fun, just like the show, and I can't believe this can't be sustained for the length of the show's existence. It's not like Lower Decks is likely to get very many tie-in novels given its format, so tie-in comics should be Mariner, Boimler and the rest's stomping grounds.
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