FILM R-POINT DIRECTOR KONG SU-CHANG

‘The point of no return’
Kong Su-chang’s R-Point (2004)

Synopsis: Vietnam, 1972. Private Kim and Lieutenant Choi, a distinguished officer who was awarded the Choong Moo for service in defence of his country, are on R & R. They take up with some hookers in Nha Trang, but in the night Kim is murdered. Choi finds and executes the assassin, a girl, point blank. Back at camp, Choi is brought before Lieutenant Colonel Han who agrees to forget the incident if he leads a platoon into R-Point — a rural area, now designated hostile — to find missing soldiers, presumed K.I.A. Choi acquiesces. In R-Point, the platoon encounter their first insurgent: a peasant, not unlike the girl at Nha Trang, who seems to be fighting all alone in the forest. After a brief firefight, they leave her in a pillbox, ostensibly to rot, but not long after the girl reappears to them again in the night . . .

R-Point (which U.K. distributor Palisades Tartan has seen fit to rebrand this year with the new title Ghosts of War) finds a deliberate balance early on between light and dark, empathy and wickedness, virtue and evil. Its broad range of characters provide variations on these themes; at some point, all of the soldiers caught in R-Point confess either to living a life of deceit in which they have wronged their loved ones, or a cruel and violent life determined by their honed indifference to the “enemy”. It’s some time before we learn who is truly guilty (or, to borrow pre-war language used at the time to describe the French cause in Indochina, “impure”) and who is not, but the maxim “Those who have blood on their hands will not return”, conveyed to the soldiers in the form of an ancestral warning that seems to pervert Confucian philosophy, seems relevant to all. Ostensibly a down and dirty cautionary tale in the tropical hell of Vietnam, the film charts the repercussions of these many and various indiscretions, as one by one the hapless soldiers are targeted by a host of judgmental apparitions, and one by one they each take their chances.

Thematically, R-Point is more ambitious than this. For one, director Kong Su-chang doesn’t address the war directly. His film instead assumes audience foreknowledge of North and South Korean participation in Vietnam and perhaps too, though less expected, the cumulative benefits to the South of this participation (in the form of loans, subsidies and preferential trade arrangements with the United States). The specifics aren’t of importance in the film, but the historical arrangement itself, forged between President Park Chung-hee and the Johnson and Nixon administrations respectively, is far from irrelevant. According to Time (1999), the largest single source of foreign exchange for Korea in this period came in the form of war-induced revenues (U.S. defence-related expenditures, U.S. government grants, exports and production for U.S. consumption); the success of Korea’s economic development program therefore hangs heavy over proceedings. To the film’s credit, the viewer is always aware of the likely consequences of this participation, and as the many allusions to separated families,

divided armies, and struggles for reunification particularly make clear, the infusion of foreign capital into the South at such a dramatic rate inevitably impacted its relations with the North.

To those already primed for an anti-Vietnam War statement then, or for any critique of Korea’s support for American military intervention (Iraq included), the film does at least play well: the soldiers wait anxiously for their orders to return home after the mission, though in what condition they expect to find their country under the authoritarian leadership of its dictator remains unclear (it is appropriate that Su-chang sets his film in the year 1972). In this respect, Korea’s very participation in the war, which the film sees negatively, seems to underlie the economic recovery of the specific period — Su-chang’s implied message being that Korea, like the soldiers in his film, must in some way acknowledge its own guilt.

The director is also inspired (as one might expect of a script which places so much emphasis on borders and territory) by the merging of old cultures. R-Point’s setting is an isolated island (which we’re led to believe was of some strategic importance to colonialists) and this evokes the passing of several distinct phases in Vietnamese history: the nation’s split from imperial China in the 10th century, its colonisation by the French in the late 19th, its struggle for autonomy and self-rule during the French-Indochinese War, and the American Vietnam war, viewed itself to be a lost cause, and hence “passing,” even in 1972. The film is most effective when tinkering with these cultural stresses and inventing massacres. Kim Byung-chul’s Cho, an educated mortician’s son, tells the group as he reads from a stone marker that the Chinese executed hundreds of Vietnamese in the area, then dumped them in a lake, terrestrialised it, and erected a Buddhist temple to bring harmony to the site; later in the film a harmless interloper relates another story, this time an act of near-genocide committed by an unknown enemy. The latter tale is relayed by an American marine, the victims he describes are French colonialists; indeed the American himself guards a nasty secret, prohibiting Choi’s men from entering the second floor of their headquarters and snooping around the rooms where a lot of his platoon’s hardware is stored. So, while there is an inevitable loss of depth in any Vietnam film that neglects the Vietnamese experience directly (the identity of the ghost that haunts Choi so persistently is up for debate — is she Viet Cong, is she even Vietnamese — frustrating assertions that Su-chang has feminised the native experience at all), it becomes plain that R-Point is happier gesturing towards these cultural dichotomies. We quickly build an impression, then, of R-Point as some kind of slavish purgatory.

Director Kong Su-chang cut his teeth co-writing the Vietnam movie White Badge (1992), If It Snows On Christmas (1998), the Korean adaptation The Ring Virus (1999) and Tell Me Something (1999), the third highest grossing domestic film of 1999

R-Point as slavish purgatory: Lieutenant Choi (Kam Woo-seong) in Kong Su-chang’s R-Point (2004)

In terms of visual spectacle, Su-chang makes splendid use of an intimidating landscape (location shooting exclusively in Kampuchea, Southern Cambodia) and on occasion he provides the unexpected: a reconnaissance mission in which all but one of the platoon vanish in the undergrowth, never to resurface (the scene elegantly held in long take from the remaining soldier’s vantage); or a plantation filling with white headstones as Choi, the man caught in the middle, grasps finally the implications of his mission. After a promising start, though, the film does catch in a familiar groove. The infamous Bokor Hill Station (now Palace Hotel) is an incredible four-storey building from rooftop to entrance, its scorched outer walls red with lichen, the entire complex in reality decimated throughout by mortar shells, by gunfire, by looters of the Khmer Rouge, yet in accordance with Su-chang’s preferences, and needless to say with the eye of his cinematographer Seok Hyeong-jing, the palace is only ever substantially used at night. The “atmospheric” reveal early in the film is extravagant waste (the site cannot be seen for mist), and from then on Bokor barely appears in full light again. In another example, Su-chang aims to convey a spiritual presence: shifting visual register whenever the ghostly apparition appears, his first-person shots are hokey adornments detracting from subtle transitions (the camera rising portentously from the reeds to a solitary light above) or an actor’s expression.

Choi and Sergeant Jin Chang-rok (Son Byung-ho) hope that rescue will come soon

On this note, the performances are generally strong. Alone in Love (Han Ji-seung, 2006) star Kam Woo-sung underplays the charismatic Choi, a fearless and competitive fighter who merely awaits the inevitable return of the girl he killed lawlessly in Nha Trang. Son Byung-ho succeeds in creating great menace as Jin Chang-rok, the largely dispassionate growling sergeant who wants to turn the place into a bristling death camp. As their temperamental young charges (split between a grudging respect for Jin and enthusiasm for Choi) the aforementioned Kim Byung-chul as the nebbish Cho Byung-hoon, Oh Tae-kyung as sixteen year-old Jang Young-soo and Park Won-sang as the older, surly, good-natured Mah (aka, Sergeant “Cook”) supply rounded and sensitive performances, enough to offer a glimpse that is into their pre-war lifestyles before the blood falls out of the sky.

The incredible Bokor Hill Station, used here as the setting for an abandoned colonial French plantation

It was probably, therefore, a mistake to introduce across the board ghost story conventions into an intense psychological drama — the film suffers for this. An unnecessary plot-point — initiated by the arrival of some American squaddies who cryptically just check in to see if the lights are still on — the idea that an evil spirit, like a curse spiral, is disseminated through people, while obviously supported by the mythologies of Asian cultures, feels like a vain gesture, a conceit which this budget production sadly cannot do justice. Had Su-chang allowed his characters’ increasingly suicidal behaviour to stem from the confusion and suffering caused by war — if Choi, Cho and Jin had inched closer to the “darker side” of humanity as it is described in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, U.S.A.) by undergoing a natural process of initiation — his film may have had more of an impact. But as a useful primer on why Korean horror of the early 00s, and more broadly East Asian ghost stories, are often so complex and engaging, R-Point is pretty much required viewing and ranks as one of the smartest Korean thrillers of 2004.

Disc: Little improvement on Tartan’s original Asia Extreme release (in fact, the opposite is the case, as Justin Bowyer’s sleeve notes are absent). The rebranding is no problem, but some godawful package design by Tartan (the original still of Bokor is excised, replaced with something more palatable to Western eyes) will confuse any viewer on the look out now for a wooden barn (there really is no excuse for this and fans will notice). Otherwise, an acceptable not expert transfer, Dolby Digital 5.1, D.T.S. (which pays dividends in some outstanding scenes), comprehensible subtitles, the usual prerequisites are here.

The film carries a commentary with director Kong, producer Choi Kang-hyuk, and location supervisor Kim Wan-shik. The two anecdotal featurettes “1972 Vietnam” and “Special Effects” are quite self-effacing, but the key elements of principal photography and post can be found in “Mission R-Point” and “Broken Radio”, the latter an amusing overview of the Foley artist’s responsibilities at work, twinned with a glimpse of the final scene in various stages of the mix: pre-effects, pre-score, etc. The feature commentary is surprisingly candid. You suspect the director would have been satisfied if audiences responded to his film as allegory, but on the evidence here he seems content with the more literal readings that members of the crew return to him. One interesting aside early on about the lighting in a key scene gives some genuine insight into the first-time director’s working partnership with his cinematographer (a repeat of this in the Hollywood system would have been downright inexcusable and the D.P. fired). Any commentary in which the speaker drops the line “and the moths were really obnoxious,” and the director sneers at his own product placement, is sweet in my book.

This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

4 February, 2011

FILM | THE REEF | DIRECTOR | ANDREW TRAUCKI

Eyes watching horror and calculated assaults in,
Andrew Traucki’s The Reef (2010)

In horror cinema the appetite for explicit, punishing and phantasmagoric deaths is insatiable. At the Frightfest screening of Final Destination 5 (Steven Quale, 2011, USA) this year, the artless nature of gymnast Candice Hooper’s (Ellen Wroe) death was so breathtaking, so lingeringly unashamedly brazen, that we very nearly gave this one sequence a standing ovation in the aisles (it received enthusiastic applause instead). By the time Miles Fisher’s Peter decides much later on in the film to intervene in the Final Destination schema (he fixes, in the third and dullest act, to kill off a survivor in order to save himself), not one Frightfest attendee in Cinema 1 that night wasn’t wishing for a return to the Fischli & Weissian chain-reaction of death that made Candice’s earlier comeuppance so memorable. Her death scene is up on YouTube with a three hundred thousand view count and rising. This fetishistic adulation of the “death spectacle” (very much the USP of the Destination series) is largely absent from The Reef (2010, Australia), Andrew Traucki’s low-budget horror film about a group of stranded vacationers who are stalked by a Great White as they navigate the Coral Sea Islands. This absence allows for a more interesting cinematic world. The gags may be staler (this is the most humourless Australian thriller I think I’ve seen in years), but Traucki makes particularly effective use of the first-person camera, exploring the potentialities of objective and subjective camera work in underwater photography. Our sense of fear, curiosity and alarm derives in great part from this point-of-view structure: like all slasher films, The Reef teases us, it makes us look, and then it hurts us. So in addition to our common hunger for the death spectacle, there is then the simple fact that we pay good money to experience an assault of sorts on ourselves; the pleasure of surviving unscathed, though deeply shaken, simultaneously liberates and excites us.

In some respects The Reef is a film about our compulsion to look at and register horror. Carol Clover (1992), who’s written extensively on horror cinema and particularly on our spectatorial need to see horror films, uses the phrase “eyes watching horror.” Her phrasing can and does encompass many eyes of horror: the victim’s eye looking in at horror, an innocent who sees telepathically the harm done to others, the eye of the killer itself, the “memory eye” which visualises people or events otherwise lost in the past, and not least the spectatorial eye which is assaulted by horror over and over (from Hitchcock and Powell to Hooper and Craven, through even to Gens and Laugier). Those familiar with both the fatalistic desire of protagonist Heather Donahue to capture the eponymous entity of The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999, USA) on film and with the cartoonish assault which floors her in the final reel will recognise in The Reef similar strategies at play, though clearly reformulated to achieve different ends. In The Blair Witch, for instance, the many “incidents” captured by the documentary filmmakers on handheld cameras in the dead of night are memorable for being disorienting but also for containing absolutely nothing—as Mallin (2001) states: the film “makes the fact of not seeing the proof of a malevolent otherworldly presence.” Mallin adds that “the story is about the need to complete the story.” As consumers of narrative, we search for information and certitude—our personal “project” as an audience therefore is to become active participants and to “see” in the footage of The Blair Witch Project that which the documentary filmmakers ultimately failed to see and fully grasp for themselves. In The Reef, more than simply involving us in the scene, first-person cinematography is used repeatedly to train our spectatorial eye to similarly drop its guard—to borrow terminology used by Cumbow (1990), it imposes a way of seeing, a vision, on the audience, a vision that is not necessarily adversarial but which plays to and plays on our compulsion to look. Inevitably, as the film moves on, we begin to search for the thing that now hunts us.

Two things occur from the outset. Firstly, The Reef owes much to its unique geographic location. Set in the Coral Sea off the coast of Queensland, the film traces the plight of four victims—Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling) and Kate (Zoe Naylor), and Matt (Gyton Grantley) and Suzie (Adrienne Pickering)—as they use small sections of the Great Barrier Reef to escape the dangers of the open ocean. Filmed almost entirely offshore and in ubiquitous light, Daniel Ardilley’s camera moves effortlessly from the pastel-blues and off-white glare of the surface to the clear warm waters of the reef and the ominous voids that appear beyond its magnificent sections of coral. So effective is the approach that the whole endeavour feels like an underwater movie. It becomes quite clear early on that The Reef offers audiences of popular thrillers, especially those in the west, respite from the animated environments that plague the screen victims of Open Water (Chris Kentis, 2003, USA) and Adrift (Hans Horn, 2006, Germany). The ocean is idyllic, the characters bathed in sunlight, the currents aid their survival plan, and errant objects that appear on the surface are visible at much greater distances. In this environment, not only can we see telltale signs of danger adequately from far away, we also see adequately enough below the surface (rarely have the two approaches been coupled competently in Hollywood film). This produces an uncanny affect. One could argue that the film channels and exorcises Joseph Sargent’s Jaws the Revenge (1987, USA)—the third sequel in the Universal franchise—for the fact that Traucki’s staging of the drama recalls the Ellen Brody character’s nightmarish vision of herself swimming alone in crystal waters, a vision which betrays a fatalistic longing to return to the ocean despite her overt fears. When we dream we are not so much in control of our bodies as watching our bodies forcefully rebel; common-sense takes a walk, and reality dawns on us cuttingly fast. This dream-logic marries well with The Reef’s fantastic environments: human rationality, emotional reasoning and decision-making at the non-conscious level all figure large in the film. A sequence in which Matt breaks away from the tightly-grouped party of survivors in order to retrieve a stray kickboard is a sound example of bodily rebellion: the scene works cheerfully as suspense, but we instantly write off Matt’s chances because his actions are foolhardy, no one in their right mind would ever attempt the same thing. Yet Matt’s compulsion to swim for the kickboard overtakes him, primordial feelings—I have a body, it must be protected—kick in. Another immersive set-piece—in which Luke and Kate, still far from making landfall, make it to several coral clusters that break the surface of the water—plays well too, but once again seems more in keeping with our expectations concerning fantasy and dream-logic. The conceit is so effective allegorically, and in addition it plays so well on primordial feelings (during, and especially in the hours after the film), that the entire sequence delivers an authentic experience for us as viewers—in Todd McGowan’s (2007) words (used about a different film but helpful here too) it keeps us in the attitude of questioning. With its survival theme and fantasmatic set-pieces set in colourful environments, The Reef feels like a wish-fulfilment narrative dreamt up by an anxious, and fevered, and desiring Luke.

Stranded: Kate (Zoe Naylor), Luke (Damian Walshe-Howling), Suzie (Adrienne Pickering) and Matt (Gyton Grantley)
consider their options, while Warren (Kieran Darcy-Smith) looks on in The Reef (2010)

The second point to make concerns the first-person camera. Thankfully we’re spared in this scenario anything quite so roundly stupid as a Jawsian camera—mounted behind the dorsal fin in Jeannot Szwarc’s not-terrible sequel Jaws 2 (1978, USA); sharing the nodding, bobbing shark’s-eye-view in Jaws: The Revenge; or matter-of-factly conjuring shark-vision through a goldfish bowl in Renny Harlin’s godawful Deep Blue Sea (1999, USA). However, Traucki uses unusually long takes of the stalking shark, pieced together from footage shot with underwater cameras from the safety of a cage and a boat respectively, in order to create the illusion of the first-person subjective camera. This footage, remastered, edited, and digitally cleaned, becomes everything that Luke sees underwater through his goggles, or at the very least it privileges an omniscient film-world camera that captures the same things Luke sees. The film makes good use of this device to generate tension—it is Luke who monitors the shark as it circles the defenceless group and only Luke; the others remain none the wiser. But more than a gimmick, the first-person camera is used over and over again. This makes clear two things: that the filmmakers aim for a verisimilitude which is difficult to attain (particularly for low-budget productions) without recourse to authentic underwater footage of real sharks; and secondly, that the first-person camera becomes effectively the reactive gaze of slasher horror cinema—it performs the same job as Pablo’s (Pablo Rosso) infrared camera in the memorable closing moments of [Rec.] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2007, Spain), as Heather and Josh’s cameras in The Blair Witch Project.

What excites me about this approach is that the film affords us, albeit in edited form, several opportunities to observe characteristically small changes in the Great White’s threat display. The sharks (we use here the plural because the film-shark is of course represented by many different Whites) move slowly from non-aggressive posturing into a subtly more pronounced display advertising at first bulk and body length, and then jaw size and gape. Of course, Traucki’s footage of the shark circling its prey still provides a distortion—a White which has been drawn to a fish carcass by human agency via chumming moves in on its prey very differently to an unmonitored White that is provoked by something far larger, less familiar, and potentially more dangerous than itself, like a swimmer—therefore, we are still watching an imaginary. The available footage is configured and manipulated for fantasy cinema, thus the shark’s behaviour is still misrepresented. But considering we’re in an age where Hollywood productions (and news organisations) can barely do a thing with Whites, Makos or even Reef Sharks beyond recapitulating the same tired representational strategies employed by Steven Spielberg thirty-six years ago, this sense of a half-turn towards real-world experience and real-world behaviour does at least offer us, as engaged audiences, possibilities for making sense of the cinematic White shark in less mercurial ways.

Thus bringing us to the importance of looking. In The Reef, looking is about as helpful as screaming and kicking. Luke lowers his head into the water compulsively, both to see if the threat is still real and to see from where the next attack is coming, but he gleans no useful information by doing this (he can’t help the others because the shark is unpredictable, fast and, in its circling patterns, mildly hypnotic); all he can do is look. Why, then, does Traucki make him look so often? We, on the other hand, scrutinise the frame and anticipate the assault because we need to see, it is part and parcel of our masochistic (to cite Clover again) investment in pain. We do so not out of curiosity, but of necessity. The most interesting aspect of The Reef for me concerned the nature of this desire to look. On the one hand, the subjective camera is very clearly a device which can be manipulated by filmmakers (in this case Traucki) to create a desired effect: to heighten suspense, to collapse the visible distance between the shark and its prey, or to launch a visual attack on an audience. Being on the receiving end, we either overlook this system of production in order to preserve the illusion of an autonomous world, or we suppress our direct involvement altogether and remain detached. On the other hand, the very cinematic image generated by the subjective camera takes on and brings into being a variety of meanings/ideas which move cinema beyond the technical aspects of its construction. On this website, we’re mainly concerned with the latter. This idea that cinematic images in some way convey or hold consciousness, or thought, inspires many of the responses on these pages. In the end, The Reef is possibly no different from a film like Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960, UK), which brings the protagonist Mark’s victims face to face with their own deaths, but which critically trades on Mark’s own masochistic identification with their suffering. Traucki’s film turns on a similar pleasure: the very human compulsion to see with our own eyes the horror which is about to befall us.

29 September, 2011

FILM I SAW THE DEVIL DIRECTOR KIM JEE WOON

Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (2010)
‘Battle not with monsters’

Noteworthy for being the first feature in which South Korean director Kim Jee-woon has no formal writing credit (and less so for the number of cuts — seven — which were made to appease the Korea Media Rating Board, a sensationalist story which is publicised anywhere the film plays internationally), I Saw the Devil is an undeniably engaging thriller, thanks in no small part to the slapstick mannerisms of lead actor Choi Min-sik and the streetwise populism of megastar Lee Byeong-heon. The film’s formidable pairing of internationally renowned stars, its relatively high profile crew including Lee Mo-gae (who also shot this year’s Secret Reunion, in addition to Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters and The Good The Bad and The Weird) and Nam Na-young (who has edited mainstream works like Castaway on the Moon, Insadong Scandal, and The Doll Master), its spotless production values and big budget (the reported $6 million is extraordinary for a horror thriller) immediately suggest a multi-purpose event movie, a highly marketable package which its makers hope will capitalise on international territories and help rekindle industry fortunes in light of a poor 2009.

But if I Saw the Devil is indeed intended as a blockbuster then it’s a curious one with a far from expansive audience. The casting of Lee in the lead role of Kim Soo-hyeon is the only concession to a female demographic, while the presence of content that showcases violence, nudity, bloody gore, cannibalism and dismemberment is likely to appeal to a predominantly male adult audience (the film’s 18+ rating, which prohibits teenagers, severely limits its prospects at the box-office). Even in Korea, where it was distributed by Showbox, the marketing aestheticised the bloody conflict between the two stars, pairing them off in tight smoky close-ups, and barely noting the presence of other cast members. Crucially, I Saw the Devil premiered this August in Korea one week after its biggest rival, Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere, and it has not measured at all well since in aesthetic, critical or financial terms — this despite the reappearance of its major star (Choi Min-sik) after a five year screen absence.

Motivated by a need to punish the man who murdered his fiancée and then desecrated her body,
Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byeong-heon) embarks on a ruthless campaign of vigilantism which transforms him ultimately into the object of his own obsessive rage

I Saw the Devil opens with the discovery by the roadside of a stranded car and a vicious assault on its sole occupant, Joo-yeon (Oh San-ha). Her assailant, Kyeong-cheol (Choi), snatches her body from the scene and returns her to his lair where she is summarily executed, dismembered and the body parts deposited by a culvert shortly thereafter. However, it turns out that Joo-yeon’s fiancé Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee) is a highly skilled and well-regarded federal agent; with the Chief’s unspoken blessing, Soo-hyeon vows to hunt down the culprit and seek violent revenge against him. Thus his reason for tracking Kyeong-cheol is already a spurious one: convinced that Joo-yeon’s execution was itself a meaningless and predatory act, he requires neither an explanation nor necessarily a confession from the man responsible; he instead administers his own punishment, matching brute force with brute force. When Soo-hyeon finally overcomes his prey in the film’s key setpiece (a much publicised night sequence shot in a series of greenhouses), he tags Kyeong-cheol with a sensor, breaks one of his hands, and then leaves him in his own burial plot, ostensibly to die but in truth to recover. It is only after he has fully regained his composure and been tempted to assault another that Soo-hyeon next intervenes, a decision, partly judicious, which endows his vengeance-driven acts of violence with a peculiar moral quality.

On this very theme, Park Hoon-jung’s script plays fast and loose with an assortment of morally superior and inferior characters. On the one hand are those innocents who are overpowered by unimaginable evil, like Soo-hyeon and Joo-yeon, who are in many ways the contented couple happy with their lot before Kyeong-cheol tears them apart; in addition, there are Soo-hyeon’s father-in-law, ex-Squad Chief Jang (Jeon Gook-hwan), and his sister-in-law Se-yeon (Kim Yoon-seo), both virtuous people who implore him not to take revenge and risk throwing the family further into turmoil; and Han Song-I (Yoon Chae-yeong), a nurse working in the practice of the old doctor (Kim Jae-geon) who treats Kyeong-cheol after his first showdown with Soo-yeon. Fleshing out the pathological element of the film are the first two suspects on Soo hyeon’s hit list, Jjang-goo (Yoon Byeong-hee) and the unnamed cyclist (Kil Geum-seong); two taxi burglars (Lee Seol-goo and Jeong Mi-nam) who opportunistically prey on hitchhikers in the night; Kyeong-cheol’s old buddy Tae-joo (Choi Moo-seong), a cannibal whose pathology is never really explained (though he fits the cinematic tradition of the now obsolete slaughterhouse worker); and Tae-joo’s insane accomplice Se-jeong (Kim In-seo). As this short list demonstrates, I Saw the Devil is acute in presenting a range of virtues and vices for a distinct range of character types, not individuals. This places added pressure on actor Lee Byeong-heon who must work doubly hard to convey his character’s transformation from devastated victim to haunted perpetrator through several key exchanges with his animalistic adversary. For his part, Choi seems to be in his element (though no way near his best), trumping Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady from Cape Fear (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1991) with a technically brilliant performance which sees him meting out remorseless forms of punishment in one scene and in the next tumbling from his car like a startled Foghorn Leghorn.

Since Choi’s Kyeong-cheol is classified as irredeemably psychotic from the outset, tension in the picture can only and does ultimately stem from those vengeful cinematic moments which appear to codify Soo-hyeon, the “good” man in this equation, as psychotic — at least in the tradition of these typically “Korean” / Shakespearean serial-killer films. It therefore follows a line of thrillers, procedurals and horrors — Nowhere to Hide (dir. Lee Myung-se, 1999), Park’s Vengeance trilogy (2002/2003/ 2005), A Bittersweet Life (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2005), A Bloody Aria (dir. Won Shin-yeon, 2006), Beautiful Sunday (dir. Jin Kwang-gyo, 2007), The Chaser (dir. Na Hong-jin, 2008), The Man From Nowhere, even an icy drama like Yang Ik-joon’s sterling Breathless (2009) — which both renounce traditional distinctions of good and evil, and debunk the myth that violence can be in any way constructive or personally rewarding. As portrayed in this movie, vengeance distorts and disorients the hero ethically; I suspect it is not necessarily the monster that Soo-hyeon fears becoming, but that other state of being: isolated and widowed; heart-broken and alone. Soo-hyeon will fully crave the attention again of his soul-mate long after the credits have rolled and Kyeong-cheol’s body found, but Joo-yeon will never answer him, his faith in prayer will diminish year upon year, and so too his sense of purpose. What interests me about this film, then, is that the desire which drives Soo-hyeon to sadism and brutality does not destroy him — this experience, this course of action, while indescribably harrowing, lacking any semblance of a cathartic resolution, and almost certainly tarnishing the man forever, is in some way necessary.

It therefore detracts from the well-acknowledged pattern of the films noted above by shifting the emphasis away from salvation, and in a sense vengeance itself as an abstract concept, onto two core ideas instead: mechanical ritual, and mutual identification. In order for Soo-hyeon to truly experience and release grief he must revert to a truer nature. The film, therefore, taps into the mechanical act of the ritual itself to make its point: vengeance, in this context, can serve a purpose; rather than free Soo-hyeon from grief, it frees him to grieve. The memorable climactic shot in which Lee’s Soo-hyeon is seen wandering aimlessly in Kyeong-cheol’s neighbourhood utterly consumed by unbearable sorrow is an interesting one. Has the terrible nature of his obsession at last hit home? Or does he despair for his own salvation? I trust that neither concern matters to him; he grieves for Joo-yeon. The only other vengeance film to touch on a similar theme is the truly harrowing masterpiece, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a film which ultimately has more to say on the reality and pain of grief than anything on offer here.

14 November, 2010

FILM | VINYAN | DIRECTOR | FABRICE DU WELZ

Vinyan (2008)
‘Some things are better left not found’

The intertextual nods to psychological thrillers, horrors and survival adventures in Vinyan, Fabrice du Welz’s second feature which charts the metaphorical retreat of a grieving couple into the jungle, serve as a reminder of his relative inexperience at making his point primarily through images. Specifically, the works of Hook (Lord of the Flies), Roeg (Don’t Look Now), Cronenberg (The Brood), Lynch (The Lost Highway), Coppola (Apocalypse Now) and of Uruguayan filmmaker Chicho Ibáñez Serrador (Death is Child’s Play) provide du Welz with more than he can chew, most in their own way jungle survivalist tales of a sort, some so painstakingly detailed and expertly crafted on a cinematographic level that the successful tend to operate outside language. The way in which Vinyan traces the division of its traumatised couple, the Belhmers, is a bit rotten, the outcome a pale but not uninvolving conception of fantasy in which emotional connection and intimacy is sacrificed for the power and force of mimicry. The cluttering of diegetic space, the muddying of dialogue on the soundtrack, the consuming threat posed by the communal world and the iconography of this world matters more. It’s disappointing, because in interview du Welz is a good guy, self-aware too (a rare thing, even rarer to hear that he’s learning from mistakes), the sometimes contradictory public responses to his first two films (this and Calvaire) enough to stir serious reflection on his part; he too displays an obvious affection for Thai society, and in this film’s early Phuket street scenes, fashionably composed in a tight frame and bumping shoulder to shoulder with hookers, vendors, traffickers and vagrants all, we glimpse sometimes the objects of his fascination. It’s a shame, then, that he denies repeating here the stylistic choices of others, most blatantly Coppola, when the less conventional film techniques he employs appear conceived for that very purpose. None of this undercuts importantly his themes, which are well worth exploring in detail and I’ll get to below, but the cumulative impact of this repetition, with little or no variation in tone and light, weakens the quality, and ultimately the weight, of our interest.

At a fundraiser evening, footage of children in a Burmese jungle is played to aid workers Jeanne (Emmanuelle Béart) and Paul (Rufus Sewell), a grieving middle-class white couple who lost their preadolescent son, Joshua, to the Asian tsunami disaster of 2004. The blurry image of a boy, his back turned to camera, the colour of his shirt calling to mind for us the red-caped figure of Don’t Look Now but for Jeanne the distinctive brand of her son’s favourite football team, serves as an inducement to action. Although the quality of the magnified image is poor and the isolated figure an anonymous jumble of pixels, for Jeanne and Jeanne alone the video has some authority. I suspect that not even she is convinced finally of its credibility (the video attests to the existence of a boy, not her boy), but it is nonetheless her belief that Joshua (wherever he may be) needs her, a belief premised upon seeing this stranger in the video which in some sense does contain the soul of her missing son. She may or may not relinquish finally her belief in the material existence of Joshua, the mystery is to a point irrelevant, but what’s far more intriguing is her compulsion to inhabit, to enter into and thus occupy, presumably for the sake of occupying, the timeless physical space pictured in the video. With this in mind, her quest to track down the boy which structures the film feels like a ritual of initiation motivated by an immutable sense of personal, i.e., parental (and since it is of importance, maternal), duty.

Jeanne Bellmer (Emmanuelle Béart) in Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan (2008)

Alternatively Paul, who sees what his wife sees, is just another supportive husband, sceptical from a rationalist’s perspective but always trying to give her what she wants, his conviction that in time Jeanne will accept the thanklessness of their impossible mission penetrating deeper into Burmese territory and turn back. It’s with Paul’s story that the film’s passing acquaintance with Roeg’s aforementioned begins to cement, the strictures which he has placed around such metaphysical concepts as the supernatural and the invisible start to loosen, and the connection between his desire and Jeanne’s own all but severed completely. As a vulnerable man, susceptible to the fraud of human traffickers and moreover voiceless in their company, we sense that Paul will reinforce somehow his position come the resolution—the tragedy which split the family so potent to effect some kind of transformation in his character—but unlike Jeanne, he seems to get by in reality suffering less torment, almost certainly owing to less responsibility. He’s not welcome in the fantasy, and for knowing this he is constantly ill at ease.

In summary, their quest to track down the boy is on the one hand an escape into fantasy, a fantasy which it appears is motivated by the anguish of Jeanne’s lonely reality; on the other, it is a ritual of initiation motivated by maternal duty. Though both hypothetical scenarios support a metaphorical reading of the film, only the former scenario (the flight into fantasy) honours a redemptive reconciliation with the memory of Joshua; the latter scenario (in which the fantasy becomes a rites of passage and both parents learn to tolerate the loss) moves away from Joshua, towards something confounding and altogether uncomfortable. I favoured the latter reading, but it’s of course entirely reasonable to interpret Vinyan in accordance with the former. For example, in some instances the “cinematic” quest for reconciliation with lost loves, with lost children, results in what McGowan termed in response to the films of Lynch a “deadlock,” an alternative reality into which one necessarily withdraws in order to escape the tormenting cause of desire (and yet at the same time finally realising that desire). This is why the Belhmers can only, ideally, connect with the memory of their boy, and not the boy himself—so for this reason, I take it for granted that Joshua is dead. The deadlock which Jeanne and Paul, both figuratively “in the dark” about the fate of their son, encounter returns them to their original starting positions—he, as the guilty party, and she as the primary caretaker. In fact, the privileging of her initiation rite over the film’s climax goes some way towards supporting this. The denouement depicts the mother’s apparent socialisation into a posse of feral children who swarm around her in great number; Paul, however, for committing the cardinal sin of leaving their son apparently unsupervised at the time of the disaster, is in the scene shunted from view entirely, his body yanked to the ground where it’s beaten and stamped on, his intestines routinely stripped and pored over by the same cannibalistic children. Here, then, it appears that Jeanne finds salvation in the demented illusion created by and for herself, a fantasy wherein the failed father is indicted for denying (until it’s too late) his crime and the mother deserving of her privileged role pictures herself as a madonna; this hopeful conceit is echoed in the sunlit beauty of Vinyan’s final image, an affectionate portrait of Jeanne, now a giggling mom again, surrounded and tickled by dozens and dozens of worshipping children.

Affectionate portrait: Jeanne Bellmer (Emmanuelle Béart) in Vinyan (2008)

This is all good stuff from a theoretical perspective and it’s helpful that du Welz leaves any uncertainties we have as audiences hanging, but this isn’t a sympathetic portrait, the essences of the mood and feeling I sense beyond du Welz's control. The final shot provides a fine example: seen as a purging of guilt and sorrow, it’s the moment at which Jeanne’s soul rises from the torment and into the light, the infants guiding her away from Vinyan and towards peace. But I’m unconvinced. If Jeanne’s successful withdrawal into fantasy requires that she find salvation in the illusion, then the image of salvation which it finally produces is imperfect. For that reason, it’s difficult to believe in her salvation. Though consistent with our general understanding of fantasy (Jeanne’s reemergence as a madonna figure offers respite from the pain of her desire to see Joshua again), the provocative final image of the film feels far from redemptive or cathartic. Or even pleasant. Far better to begin from a point at which we can all agree that the mother gives up on herself, and then move on to further details. Thus her stay of execution, which is generous against anything afforded her husband, is precisely that, and is therefore less likely to be a spiritual reprieve or second birth. As to the question of whether or not she can mother successfully again, the film rests on a harsher note. Mother no more, not even a bona fide surrogate, she becomes a material plaything, poked, prodded, fondled, pushed and pulled. I guess this is intended as it was damn well conceived, to be wholly innocent that is (if a little uncomfortable to witness), but it poses implicitly the question “what becomes of Jeanne outside the fantasy?” The positive resolution that occurs within the metaphor obscures something more hopeless and psychologically troubled occurring outside it. Rather than embrace the supernatural nature of the culture and draw from its Buddhist code in the hope of achieving spiritual rejuvenation, she, I suspect, surrenders to its darker underbelly beyond the fantasy.

18 September, 2010

Film4 FrightFest 2010 Video Nasties Panel

EVENT | VIDEO NASTIES: MORAL PANIC, CENSORSHIP AND VIDEOTAPE / PANEL DISCUSSION | VENUE | THE EMPIRE LEICESTER SQUARE, LONDON

Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape (2010)
Whooping it up at FrightFest:
on the need to flog the BBFC for all its failures
(30 August panel discussion)

Trust us English to build up so much resentment over a piece of legislation that wasn’t enforceable. Jake West’s imperturbably neat Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape screened on Monday morning to an enthused FrightFest crowd, and was followed by a panel discussion featuring many of its contributors. The documentary addresses a captivating and downright ludicrous period in the history of film regulation in this country: the attempted expulsion from within its borders of every kind of video “nasty” deemed unsuitable, chiefly by moral activists and rightwing sections of the press, under the outdated Obscene Publications Act. Though the pacing is rarely quicker than that of television, West’s film is scrupulously ordered, its story very well told, and the arguments of its key collaborator Martin Barker acutely felt. It is also impossible to watch in that it has scant regard for the visual invention of its subject matter or worse still the visual appreciation of its audience. Mark Hartley’s account, for instance, of the commercial growth of Australian exploitation cinema, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), uses film footage and high impact motion graphics with the latter bumping, bleeding, splashing and folding into the former—the whole thing is about as cinematically subtle as the subjects it devours, but it is at least brave and bold with it, familiarising us with striking images of the era and animating the one-dimensional characters, objects and dialogue bubbles that appear in their advertising. The best Video Nasties can do, evidently lacking the budget for rotoscope artists and 3D animators, is to drape newspaper clippings in the empty portion of frame and stack together, to the dim accompaniment of The Damned no less, brief clips from the 72 films included on the D.P.P. list. It is a motley thing, redeemed by the penetrating insight of an expert who has already covered this matter elsewhere, and with better contributors.

The Video Nasties panel discussion—which involved West, Barker, producer Marc Morris, Tobe Hooper and Allan Bryce—tested, appropriately enough, the current mood at FrightFest. The decision by the B.B.F.C. to recommend 49 cuts to Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film, which it says would approximate three minutes 48 seconds of footage, has obviously angered fans here. Many in the FrightFest audience who openly derided the B.B.F.C. for its assessment of the film opposed the passing of the Video Recordings Act originally in 1984, thus, they know something of the potential idiocy of mostly conservative politicians (including the newest clones of Graham Bright) and talking heads—a key note to which the Video Nasties film turns ultimately. This sentiment carried through into the panel discussion, where the B.B.F.C. was roundly stomped. The solidarity this inspired in the auditorium, particularly among the most vocal fans who knew that much admired filmmakers like Neil Marshall and commentator Kim Newman were in their vicinity, all felt a bit sorry, the cheering and applause an expression of allegiance without real foundation. The session might just as well have ended on director Jake West’s note that the prime purpose of these FrightFest audiences is to back the principle, supported by the casualties of the Video Recordings Act, that adults have the fundamental right to pick and choose their entertainment. Again, this drew applause from the crowd, and while the sincerity of their reaction cannot be doubted, I question the herd mentality that strings them along.

It was fashionable over the course of FrightFest to condemn the B.B.F.C. on the specific issue of A Serbian Film, which cannot play in Westminster City Council unless cuts are made, but not, however, its report for the I Spit on Your Grave remake, which required 17 cuts, all of which were duly made by Anchor Bay Entertainment. To which the response must be, why this distinction? According to its August 26 report, the B.B.F.C.’s proposal for compulsory edits to A Serbian Film were necessarily intrusive, and as such the 49 proposals clashed with a number of formal strategies (interrupted time schemes, the unreliable protagonist) that deliberately complicate the narrative; the cuts applied to specific images in I Spit on Your Grave, by contrast, resulted in less narrative or thematic disruption due to its more forgiving structure and the higher level of narrative redundancy. This fired the perception that the B.B.F.C. were responsible, however indirectly, for withholding from the public again a film of quality, a film equally if not more interested in the politics of ideology and narrative complexity than with generic provocation. FrightFest, therefore, pulled Spasojevic’s film to honour the festival’s “global integrity” and the “director’s [original] intention,” while I Spit on Your Grave, a far bigger picture with an established pedigree (in the form of a classic predecessor), played to a substantial audience on Saturday night—to which I’m inclined to argue that few here I’m sure would protest on the key matter of principle if A Serbian Film had been eligible to play in its B.B.F.C.-certified format. It would still have drawn enthused festivalgoers, just without quite so much rowdy bullshit.

It would be wise, therefore, to have a sense of the thing that one is rallying for before decrying this a return to the dipshit madnesses of the eighties. Today, the B.B.F.C. provides, as wittertainment fans know all too well, what it terms “extended classification information” for every film it examines. The E.C.I. text for I Spit on Your Grave is available freely online, together with the press release qualifying its proposals for A Serbian Film. It is, therefore, fairly transparent about its findings ... and yet it relies on public consultation largely to refine its guidelines and as a film and videogames regulator it operates from the starting position that the representations of a film or videogame have direct, predictable effects on us as consumers. I’m reminded again of West’s concluding note about the principle that as adult consumers we should be free to choose our own entertainment. The final word of the session went to Martin Barker who impressed upon his audience the value of producing intelligent film criticism for the internet, his point that our responses, if serious and evaluative about film, should serve to counter the earliest stages of reactionary public opinion in the event of a future video nasties scare. This makes far more sense to me, for being more constructive and persuasive than venting resentment in an enclosed, comfortable environment.

2 September, 2010

EVENT | TOBE HOOPER RETROSPECTIVE | VENUE | THE EMPIRE LEICESTER SQUARE, LONDON

‘Eggshells (1969), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
and Tobe Hooper Total Icon Interview Q&A’
Welcome step up for still imperfect FrightFest

To boost the profile of the 2010 FrightFest film festival and to keep sweet the major online and high street retailers, the Phoenix AC, Total Film magazine and headliner Film4, on whose sponsorship deals the festival so depends, the organising committee of the UK’s dominant fantasy/horror film tribute have secured several UK premieres ahead of this Autumn’s London Film Festival (13-28 October), and invited a handful of directors to make a contribution. This year, the major star to excite anticipation across the PR departments of all its investors is Eli Roth. The Last Exorcism, which he’s publicising in his capacity as star producer, rounds out the festival on Monday evening and is bound to gratify sponsors, punters, organisers all. Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape, on the other hand, sounds far more deserving of its premiere. A historical account of the so-called “Video Nasties” fuss that descended on the country in the eighties, the documentary promises a comprehensive overview of film censorship and classification at a time when the BBFC, under the direction of James Ferman, struggled with the implications of home-video exhibition, as well as new criteria for assessing the nature of cinematic violence. The premiere also gives occasion for an as yet undisclosed celebrity panel discussion immediately afterwards.

Without some rehearsal, though, these onstage events can reflect poorly on their subjects. Friday afternoon’s Total Icon attraction (27 August), which welcomed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) director Tobe Hooper for a retrospective of his work in the enormous space of the Empire 1 auditorium, should have been compelling but was a bit drab. There were some shortcomings for which the interviewer, Total Film journalist Jamie Graham, cannot be blamed: I generously include here the onstage seating and lighting arrangements, the muddling of which meant Hooper’s face was perpetually in Graham’s shadow (come on, sort that out); and the positioning around the stage of other Film4 and Total Film people, synopsising and videotaping for their online channels, must have riled those unfortunate to be seated, and thus not compensated, directly behind. However, other weak points in Graham’s control undoubtedly diminished the experience. Less inquisitorial interviewers get away with their style because, more often than not, they’re being harried for time (for the opposite approach, see comedian Joe Cornish’s brilliant Q&A with Edgar Wright, the main event two weeks ago at the BFI), in which circumstances the quality of interview is largely set by the interviewee (and based on their appearances in London over the last two years, Danny Boyle and Terry Gilliam, both funny and extrovert, are great at steering interview). Hooper, however, is an introspective man: serious and contemplative onstage, cheery and interesting when one-to-one with fans, if evasive when questioned he is unlikely to expand an issue (and why would he?) unless an interviewer persists or relaxes his approach. Graham’s stiff questioning reflected the tone of the magazine he co-edits, which has never done much to help its readership understand the cinematic works that so inspire either its staff or its commercial alliances with DVD retailers. Far better would it have been to shake up this antiquated routine, thematise the questioning in line with the two Hooper works in exhibition (The Texas Chain Saw, and his 1969 debut, Eggshells), and throw the rest out to the FrightFest audience who are far more adept at cross-referencing Poltergeist (1982) with Invaders From Mars (1986) and Death Trap (1977). In such a case as this, those who attend the more upmarket In Conversation events at the BFI Southbank must bear in mind the FrightFest’s humble origins as a celebratory knees-up in the Prince Charles ten years ago, a vital qualification, still relevant today, which does little for the Head of Film4 Julia Wrigley’s claim that while “some cultural commentators may look down on horror,” and hence by extension this festival, they’re fools to do so.

Tobe Hooper is an introspective man: serious and contemplative onstage, cheery and interesting when one-to-one with fans, if evasive when questioned he is unlikely to expand an issue (and why would he?) unless an interviewer relaxes his approach

Those who left the room early, diverted by the need to claim a spot in the autograph queue (and damnit, I envy all who now own a signed Texas Chain Saw poster), missed a treat. The interview may have been short and routine, but the five minute Q&A afterward elicited some really fun responses: from Hooper’s tactful assessment of Eli Roth’s career to date (more a delicate sidestepping) to his high praise for Guillermo del Toro’s, from his fond memory of working with British icon James Mason on the Stephen King miniseries ‘Salem’s Lot (1979) to the friendly gibe he made at compatriot Gunnar Hansen for his similarly congenial historical embellishments. Spirited, as well as candid, we glimpsed in this brief final session a clever and important director, the once ambitious filmmaker responsible for one of the most gruelling productions in North American movie history, whose distinctive Texan growl so familiar from commentary was like some kind of music to many ears, mine included.

29 August, 2010

FILM PARANORMAL ACTIVITY DIRECTOR OREN PELI

Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007)
‘What happens when you sleep?’

So, Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, still in the news right now for scaring the pants off audiences the world over, is the “scariest movie of the year” and it’s no surprise to learn that the digital camera has everything to do with its success. The film has been spooking, chilling and thrilling millions of us as we share helplessly in its first-person POV: whether locked off in its familiar position at the foot of the tormented couple’s bed, or as a constituent part of the action itself, the first “eye” so to speak into the loft and the first through the blinds downstairs registering the chill of night. Via our complete immersion in the reality of the home video, we become linked (again) to one character, one subjectivity, and we are asked to feel the loss of that character finally when he and the camera is abandoned; when the film abandons us.

For those who don’t know, Paranormal was produced for $15,000 by Blumhouse Productions, it was sold for $300,000 to Paramount, who then marketed and distributed the movie domestically at an estimated cost of $10 million. It was well-reported that by its fifth weekend the film had dispatched Lionsgate’s Saw VI at the box-office and grossed in the region of $62 million across 1,945 playdates. As a result, it’s gone on to accrue the status of a small cultural phenomenon, with many claiming that if you don't watch it in a crowded cinema then you shouldn't watch it at all. So, firstly, I declare I saw it late on a Saturday night in the heart of London’s Leicester Square, with a great audience that was clearly up for a lot of howling and derision. I note this from the outset because, unlike Sanchez and Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project, there’s very little confusion, human agency or narrative jeopardy in Paranormal to trigger unease on the part of the viewer: I can imagine for instance that, when viewed in isolation, the experience of watching Paranormal Activity at home or on a computer is entirely banausic. Secondly, the film builds to a final dramatic movement which it intends as a rallying crowd-pleaser but which is also, surprisingly, genuinely interesting on reflection. The graphic image of Katie lying in bed in broad daylight, for instance, nearly comatose under the influence of whatever force now commands her, eerily recalls the obscure black and white photograph glimpsed earlier of her torpid “double,” long since deceased — a photograph that is discovered incidentally by Katie’s boyfriend on a website that looks as old as the web itself. And though the scenes in which Katie rocks back and forth for hours at the bedside are largely played for giggles, the sight of her body vanishing unceremoniously in the open doorway and into the darkness of the stairwell invariably recalls the highly staged and downright brilliant photography of FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922).

Katie (Katie Featherston) in Paranormal Activity (2009)

There’s been some commentary in the press about what precisely it is that affected audiences are taking away with them after a screening. Mark Kermode, for instance, is these days regularly questioning the film’s efficacy as horror (from a position of non-partisanship), asking why some viewers are taking its apparent jouissance so close to heart. That isn’t to say that the film’s pleasures are necessarily orgasmic of course, at least not in the traditional literary sense of a thumping, exploding, attainable pleasure that leaves you drained, tingling and sweetly enervated; no, rather the film comes closer I think to forging a (possibly intense) connection between the self and the diegesis, which the fantasy then propels beyond boundary. In other words, the filmmakers make us participants and scare us, but the film does something else — something less to do with horror, then, and more to do with the comforting zone, the behavioural routine, of domestic familiarity. It is true, admittedly, that horror (or “paranormal activity”) is the central pleasure here, given that we are aligned with characters who experience shocks, bangs and frights first-hand. Over the course of the film we’re presented not with the vision of a demon or apparition but the sensational affect of that demon. We hear its clumping (one presumes) hooves enter the bedroom, we see the powdery trail left in its wake (apparently testament to its corporeality, albeit in another dimension seemingly), we witness both its brutal attack on Katie and, in a manner reminiscent of Sidney J. Furie’s bulky 1981 horror The Entity, its salacious attempts to defile her when vulnerable. Those who read the film as a straightforward horror tract, unproblematically supernatural at its core, will see in Katie’s “possession” the creature’s influence clearly, not least in the film’s rousing final moments when she “kills off” her boyfriend’s annoying camera (as my viewing companion remarked at the time “it was worth the £10 just for that”).

For me, Paranormal Activity recalls Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a film in which the director’s roving eye ritually prowls the communal spaces of an American high school (hallways, canteen, library, football field) over and over again, until the institution feels properly “lived in,” as familiar as one’s own workplace. This same routine behaviour of the roving lens is evidenced in Paranormal, albeit less discreetly. If horror is the catalyst which moves the spectator beyond the self — if the “fantasy” breaks the boundary of self-control, permitting us to sample one of the possible delights of jouissance in the final reel — then importantly the warm domestic setting of the Katie and Micah household forges this connection from the outset. I suggest that affected audiences lament the loss of this connection in the aftermath of the film. I don’t think audiences are troubled by effects (neither aural nor visual), but rather by a sense of lack; what we lament “losing” is precisely this emotional connection which we forge with the domestic milieu, with the familiar. How many times, for instance, does the first-person camera, with which we are aligned, wander out into the hallway in order to see downstairs? Not surprisingly, the ritual leaves its mark on us, as participant-spectators. We glimpse the white teddybear at the end of the hall so often that it becomes imbued with personal history (the prize that Micah (the subjective “I”) won with Katie (“my girlfriend”) at the fair on a biting winter’s evening). And we see that big-screen TV so many times that its mystery, its attractive commodity glamour, inevitably fades like the formerly intoxicating appeal of an ex-lover. So we’re no longer simply transgressing our own spectatorial position of detachment (in which process we are aligned with the camera to mimic a POV), but we are beginning to “learn,” behaviourally, the lives of others, the rituals and routines of tangible characters as if we have lived in their place. There comes a point in the film when the camera (having been waved so many times around the kitchen and either deposited on a countertop or left in the living room watching from afar) becomes almost childlike in its voyeurism; we, too, mimic the POV, and so we begin to experience the house (or at least, the kitchen area) for a moment as the vulnerable child, tracing the contours of the kitchen units like a pranksterish sneak.

Importantly, then, the “surface” value of spectatorial mobility is supplanted by the first-person experience, by the ceremony and propriety of domestic ritual. The POV, therefore, is no longer about action, or story “event” as evidenced in Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), nor is it necessarily “about” the documented quasi-reality of Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980), nor the promise of interactivity and mobility offered by The Blair Witch and [Rec.] (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007). Paranormal Activity is about lived experience. At its heart it is about the home, about our personal attachment to our homes, and our established customs in the home. That may seem like an obvious point to make, but it signifies nonetheless an interesting development in the aesthetic of handheld “found footage” movies. A first-person POV film that chimes with its audience on account of its depiction of ritual behaviour, and custom, is I think finally, demonstrably, tapping Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious.

6 December, 2009

FILM SICK NURSES DIRECTOR PIRAPHAN LAOYONT, THODSAPOL SIRIWIWAT

Sick Nurses (2007)
‘Take a deep breath. This is going to hurt’

Piraphan Laoyont and Thodsapol Siriwiwat’s Suay Laak Sai (English-language title ‘Sick Nurses’) follows the exploits of six nubile young things who have been selling off the body parts of their less well off (i.e., dead) patients on the black market. Several of the girls are besotted with a male doctor named Tar (Wichan Jaruhinda), including Nook (Chidjan Rujiphun) and her more innocent sister Tawan (Chon Wachananon). When it is revealed that Nook and Tar might already be lovers, Tawan threatens to expose the group’s scheme to the authorities and is summarily executed. The girls store her body safely until it can be sold, but as they begin to engage in their normal leisure activities the vengeful spirit of Tawan returns to avenge herself.

Jo (Dollaros Dachapratumwan), Yim (Ase Wang) and Nook (Chidjan Rujiphun) in Sick Nurses (2007)

Sick Nurses invites comparison with another Thai film, Monthon Arayangkoon’s The Victim (2006), a horror-thriller-mystery hybrid about the evils of cosmetic surgery, so-called ‘beauty’ doctors, and medical technologies. Both The Victim and Sick Nurses are noteworthy as crisis-film metaphors: the former trades on apparently conservative fears of female subjectivity, sexual identity and star consumption; while the latter envisions an industrialised Thailand wherein the promised democratic ideal of (feminine) beauty is sadistically twisted and homogenised by the rise of mass consumer cosmetic surgery. Unlike its predecessor, however, Sick Nurses is heavily uneven, combining marketable scenes of attractive young females enjoying themselves and each other with effects-driven set-pieces of transgressive body horror — content which, simultaneously gory and unbelievable, flips the movie’s tone on its head and alters the viewing experience irreparably. Anyone who’s seen the film will recall the most memorable sequences in which the binge-eating nurse and the two identical twins are forced to their deaths by the avenging ghost in ways that are disproportionately out of kilter with, and undercut, the melodrama that brings these young women together.

Insofar as it is a film about past injustices and the attempts of its female characters to make amends, Sick Nurses inevitably recalls Nakata Hideo’s 1998 classic Ringu — along with its sequel Ringu 2 (1999) and prequel Ringu O (2000), not to mention popular imitators like Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) and Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (2003), both written and directed by Takashi Shimizu — nonetheless, it sits well in the Thai horror tradition. The importance paid increasingly to indigenous traditions, local stars and local audiences by filmmakers and distributors challenges the simplification of Thai horror production as derivative — Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (1999), for instance, is a powerful domestic benchmark, while Bin Bunluerit’s startling Krasue (2002) is the very antithesis of Nakata’s formally and iconographically conventional ghost story. It may be wickedly silly (there are long creeping tendrils of hair, it has girls falling in love all over the place, and the ending is positively scatological), but Sick Nurses at least updates the kaidan or ‘avenging spirit’ film by highlighting the changing role of women in Asian societies and by critiquing glamour culture in Thai media.

11 October, 2009

Ae (Kanya Rattapetch) in Sick Nurses (2007)

FILM HANSEL AND GRETEL DIRECTOR YIM PIL SUNG

‘What lies beneath the surface ...?’
Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel and Gretel (2007)

I recently saw Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel and Gretel with a packed daytime crowd at the Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival. The plot concerns father-to-be Eun-soo, who jack-knifes his car one morning on a remote stretch of country road and awakens later, mobile-less, in the thick of dense woodland. Yeong-hee emerges in the dead of night, an unsettlingly flirtatious presence — with ruby lips and round expectant eyes — and shepherds him back to her family cottage, the magical “Home of Happy Children”. She introduces her saccharine yet clearly anxious parents, in addition to her siblings: Man-bok her 13-year old brother, who is short-tempered and impulsive, and younger sister Jung-soon, who is the veritable household pet: adorable, needy and coddled by everyone. No surprise then that the cute darlings are holding their parents (who are in fact strangers) against their will and have instructed them to pose as a family unit. It transpires that Eun-soo has entered a world in which the fantasy of a parental authority is paramount to the childrens’ way of life.

Home of Happy Children: siblings Man-bok (Eun Won-jae), Jung-soon (Jin Ji-hee) and Yeong-hee (Shim Eun-kyung) in Hansel and Gretel (2007)

Hansel and Gretel is less a morality tale or critique of modern capitalism than a simple drama about abuse, revenge and willful self-delusion. As the only adult, Eun-soo is literally besieged by the primitive and sadistic impulses of a dysfunctional family which must perpetually overcompensate for an absence of adult authority figures. And the girl Yeong-hee, who has such trouble articulating herself in a manner that isn’t apparently solicitous, can only relate to others using language which she was forced to learn from her abuser. Indeed the story — which concerns the retreat of three once good but now very screwed up children into an immersive fantasy world that exists only in their damaged hearts — is potentially a profound and touching one.

Sadly, the film’s pastel-color style and asexual cartoon quality is hardly compelling. It could have been a fun repository for imaginary critters, subterranean arching passageways and other fairytale tropes — diegetically speaking this is, after all, not the adult Eun-soo’s film but rather the childrens’, for they (like Ofélia in Pan’s Labyrinth) conjure the world we see

Ultimately, the film overcomes the resistible call of its let love conquer all message once the three surviving children learn to turn their backs on Eun-soo and retreat into their world of self-imposed isolation but, like Tim Burton’s computer-generated production Alice in Wonderland (2010, USA), the film’s pastel-color style and asexual cartoon quality is hardly compelling. It could have been a fun repository for imaginary critters, subterranean arching passageways and other fairytale tropes — diegetically speaking this is, after all, not the adult Eun-soo’s film but rather the childrens’, for they (like Ofélia in Pan’s Labyrinth) conjure the world we see and they have the capacity alone to expand upon its universe — but disappointingly the film appears to draw most of its bunny-based imagery, of which Yim is peculiarly fond, from classic Western sources, chiefly Kubrick’s The Shining and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.

8 December, 2008

FILM THE CHASER DIRECTOR NA HONG JIN

‘He has twelve hours to find the next victim’
Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser (2008)

Na Hong-jin’s South Korean serial killer movie The Chaser opens in Seoul’s Mangwon district. A call-girl picks up her client, “4885”, for the evening and drives on to his home, intending to service him quickly; several days later, her abandoned car gathers parking notices and junk promo cards out in the street, and it’s clear the girl has vanished. The Chaser soon picks up with her boss, Jung-ho (Kim Yun-seok), former Seoul city detective, now defamed and turned pimp. Having called on single mother Mi-jin (Seo Young-hee), his only available girl for the night, to meet with another client, Jung-ho becomes suspicious and discovers that Mi-jin is actually en route to meet 4885. Thus ensues a cat-and-mouse search for Young-min (Ha Jung-woo), the man whom Jung-ho suspects, incorrectly, is reselling his girls onto other pimping rings. Na’s film alternates between Jung-ho’s unconventional efforts to recover his assets, who all seem to have gone missing on the streets of Mangwon, and the rather more sobering work of the investigative team operating out of the local police department, who are roped into Jung-ho’s case once it becomes apparent that Mi-jin is almost certainly the victim of a serial killer.

From this brief synopsis The Chaser sounds like much of a muchness and, indeed, the narrative is overloaded with genre confection. Thus we have: a desperate-mom-in-jeopardy plot (check), psychoanalytic interpretations of the killer’s motives (check), a surrogate kiddie who redeems the defeated hero (check), we have all manner of generalised problems germane to the police and legal communities (check), there are three (count them) chase sequences, and two grisly set-pieces guaranteed to revile some viewers. The film’s comic mid-section, which involves Jung-ho fighting Yeong-min in public before both are apprehended by a local cop, is undoubtedly the most effective. Korean filmmakers are nothing if not adept at using the authorities as inspiration for punchy critiques of postrevolutionary institutional incompetence: recall Oh Dae-su’s (Choi Min-sik) amusing remonstrations with the night-watch cops at the beginning of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), a film which gives the authorities very short-shrift but which also powerfully envisions the pitfalls of vigilantism. The Chaser similarly derives its humour from the public and private humiliations of the local police force and the mayor’s office as well. It would be remiss of me not to add that director Na balances the laughs accordingly by illuminating Jung-ho’s own shortcomings, but as is the way with contemporary thrillers lighthearted derision soon gives way to earnest sentimentality.

Jung-ho (Kim Yun-seok) and serial killer Ji Yeong-min (Ha Jung-woo) in Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser (2008)

Watching The Chaser with an audience at the 2008 FilmFour Frightfest, many of whom treated the film as if it were an action shoot-’em-up or slasher, was an eye-opener in this regard. For instance in the final climactic confrontation, during which the grievously wounded hero takes a serious beating and crashes through a fishtank containing the severed head of the girl whose plight we were meant to have cared about all along, Jung-ho gets the better of Yeong-min and delivers a hammer blow to the face. This earned a round of applause in the theatre, ostensibly because we all needed some relief from the intense action, but it’s likely also that the visual effect itself was comical enough to elicit a response. As in Chang Yun-hyŏn’s 1999 serial killer hit Tell Me Something (whose own as-dumb-as-it-sounds exploding water-tank finale was more convincing as a dramatic showstopper), pleasure-in-violence takes precedence. It is a shame therefore that the rest of film plays to convention: poor Mi-jin lives as a single parent with her daughter in a crowded tower block on the evening that her boss calls on her to attend one last client (thus sealing her fate as Yeong-min’s next victim). With Mi-jin effectively sidelined for the rest of the movie, Jung-ho reluctantly agrees to babysit the stereotypical daughter-in-distress Eun-ji (Kim Yoo-jung), who seems to exist only to reinforce Jung-ho’s compassionate side (for which, in return, he reveals some wholly unnecessary home-truths) until her predictable hospitalisation midway through the second act. At the heart of this manipulation is the moral rehabilitation of Jung-ho who returns from the brink as the film’s savior. To his credit, however, director Na offers something rather more restrained: there is no suggestion, for instance, that this particular brand of blood-thirsty vigilantism is in any way productive; more often than not his actions hinder the investigation to find Mi-jin. But there were some in the Frightfest crowd, with whom I saw the movie, who embraced The Chaser as a high-energy popcorn flick and seemed to want Jung-ho to lay waste to practically everyone onscreen in his fight to track down and punish the villain.

Otherwise, The Chaser is an engaging thriller that successfully redraws the conventional balance of the police procedural by bringing the serial killer in early and devoting a mountain of screen time to the administrative, legalistic business of obtaining confessions and evidence — a fascinating process of discovery which, to director Na’s credit, never becomes bewildering or uninvolving. Interestingly, the Frightfest programme references both Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and the “uncomfortable atmosphere and cruel twists” of Se7en, and while these are adequate (but not wholly accurate) parallels to draw, there are perhaps stronger connections to be made with the likes of the aforementioned Tell Me Something and Jin Kwang-kyo’s crime drama Beautiful Sunday (2007), which is equally as entertaining.

24 August, 2008