Asians made themselves conspicuous in Venice, and the issue was not the prizes they won. Film directors from former blank spots on the cinematography globe now actively offered their views on the world and art, views as original as they were mature. Theirs is totally different from European filmmaking, although they are likely to have studied the latter in depth. Now, armed with all the formal discoveries of veteran filmmakers, Chinese, Korean, and Iranian producers seem easily to climb the highest summits
Without doubt, Kim Kim Kiduk of Korea led the Oriental assault with his full-length Address Unknown. With several screenplay awards to his name, Kim Kiduk is obviously among the movie festival favorites. His new production justified all expectations. Address Unknown left the audience dazed with admiration. The setting is a small town not far from a US military base, where everybody seems to live in two dimensions, trying to escape from their utterly hopeless daily routine, indulging in most desperate illusions. An old veteran wants to receive a medal for past combat merits. His son Jihum is daydreaming about Junok, the girl next door. Her eyesight is affected after a childhood accident and she wants to regain it at all costs. Chang-Guk, the illegitimate son of a GI, assists at a dog slaughterhouse, hoping to find a better job, and his mother keeps writing letters to faraway America, trying to find her old sweetheart, but her letters keep returning, stamped “Address Unknown.” Relationships among the personae are built on a fragile balance of love and hate, with no alternative. Sooner or later everything ends in death and maimed flesh, and the long-awaited letter arrives from America too late. Its explosive concentration of human misfortune does not look overly dramatized, because from the outset Kim Kiduk introduces a counterweight in his picture: compassion with all unknown addressees all over the world.
The aura of attention to a man in the street and his life story marked the best Asian films: Yan Yan Mak’s Brother (China), about a young Hong Kong native traveling across the country, to the Tibet, searching for his older ne’er-do-well brother. A restrained but precise portrayal, with a whole gallery of markedly real to life characters; Fruit Chan’s Hollywood, Hong Kong is a comedy of character, a little overweight with absurdist black humor. Zhu Wen’s full-length debut, Seafood (Hong Kong), stood a bit to the side and quite deservedly won the special prize in the Cinema Today category. It is a simple, even minimalistic production, with no props, a hand-held camera using natural lighting, several characters, and with an indisputable mastery, nay virtuosity. The plot boils down to a confrontation between a suicidal girl and a cop trying to prevent her taking the fatal step. It is built so the audience never knows what will happen the following moment, in the next scene. Outwardly simple, the plot has sever underlying themes unfolding with every bend in the story and climaxing in a totally amazing finale.
Speaking of the cinema today (and perhaps tomorrow) in the truest sense of the word, only one film title comes to mind: Flower Island, a Korean-French production whose thirty-year-old director Song Il-gon, graduate of the prestigious filmmaking school in Lodz, won the 1999 Cannes Grand Prix for his short, Picnic. His first full-length picture is very unusual and it stood out among the experimental as well as traditional productions in Venice. Three women, each with her own problems, are eager to reach the blessed Island of Flowers where all misfortunes vanish. They are travelers in a valley of laments, and the environs, so very changeable, reflect their inner realities. Finally they get to the long awaited island, and each finds peace and happiness there in her own way, including death. The survivors return to the mainland, back to life in the real world, life that will never be the same. Much could be said and written about Island, one can watch it over and over, taking one’s time and savoring every scene. It is like a garden of stones. Even a small step in the wrong direction changes the whole view and there is always a part of it hidden from one’s eyes. Regrettably, finesse is becoming something like a damnation for really good movies. Song Il- gon’s picture falls under the festival category, meaning that it is certain to be ignored by commercial movie theaters and that it is not likely to appear in Ukraine anytime soon. The Mostra leadership adhered to a tactic of semi-recognition tactic, and Island received a consolation prize from the youth jury, while the Areopagus looked the other way. The chairmanship of Nanni Moretti, an inveterate realist and master of large-screen autobiographies obviously played a negative role.
Two films from Central Asia were luckier. Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot (best direction) is an unhurried account of everyday life in contemporary Iran. A woman activist of the election committee finds herself on a remote island on election day. While canvassing, she learns from her own experience how difficult it is to instill the traditional democratic model in an environment formed by age-old traditions. This film, with its mild humor and excellent supporting cast, reminded me of Soviet cinema after the war; perhaps because the Iranians remember something about the cinema we former Soviet people have long forgotten.
The next lucky Asian team was from India with Monsoon Wedding. I have already mentioned the confusion caused by the jury’s decision awarding the Golden Lion to the Wedding (see last issue), perhaps it was just that director Mira Nair knew how to please a big-time international jury (her Shalom, Bombay! was nominated for an Oscar and received a couple of prizes at Cannes). Wedding is a family saga, quite colorful and dramatic, and most importantly English-speaking. It is brimming with virtue relying on the golden mean. Precisely what the jury appreciated, and for Moretti et al. it must have been a politically correct decision; for Mira Nair, a long step toward the Oscar, which she obviously regards as the peak of her career and which she will eventually get, of course, after another such production, large-scale as much as mediocre. The only thing leaving one wondering is the role of Venice: What kind of precedent did the jury create rewarding already established filmmakers? It was not discovering hidden talent, nor was it sweetening a bitter pill (remember the recent dispensation of prizes among film directors from former Yugoslavia?). Maybe an attempt to somehow adjust the international cinematic mainstream? Of course, everyone understands that films about one’s home and inviolable family values are currently in demand, that pedophilia is bad, and a legitimate wedding is good. Fortunately, people in the filmmaking world are known for acting contrary to set rules.
Europe and, in part America defended their honor in this undeclared clash of civilizations. Those attending the Mostra could mention other names, but I will take advantage of my authorship. Without doubt, the Serbian Goran Pascaljevic’s new film How Harry Became a Tree attracted considerable interest. Shot on location in Ireland (in itself unusual), it has Joycean range, without trifles and with every character molded as though from legend, with love till death do them part, devoted friendship, inveterate hatred, and hearty laughter. A true epic, gripping the audience, never letting go till the final scene when Harry, outwardly a lone wolf, inwardly a poet, turns into a tree.
Damien’s Deep Breathing (France, FIPRESSI Prize) offers an altogether different kind of poetry. Shot in black and white, strangely physiological here and there, it also focuses on the rural temperament, but here every character emerges forced and indifferent. This is why the young hero sees everything like a vague nightmare where life costs very little. This was perhaps the festival’s only film offering a most incisive study of adolescence and all the attendant perils.
The United States came up with characteristically box-office productions, with only one pleasant exception to the rule. The unbending experimenter Richard Linklater’s Waking Life was an amazing mix of animation and an intellectual dialogue. Actually, it is a full-length (at times drawn-out) animated cartoon that stays in one’s mind long afterward.
Dog Days by Austrian Ulrich Seidl was another festival favorite. For the successful documentary filmmaker venturing a feature constituted quite a risk. The result could be described as a comedy of manners. More precisely, a bitterly sobering reflection on that inner desert dominating so many hearts; it would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Many of the characters, mostly successful middle-aged bourgeois, are eternally preoccupied by irrelevant details. Each of them sooner or later picks up a strange girl, apparently a local goose, a chatterbox but otherwise quite harmless, and treats her the way he does everybody else around him: with indifference and cruelty. The young silly woman is punished for no reason, although she appears the only creature making some sense in that life. The quiet truth of the Days could not but pierce the armor of the main prizewinners and Seidl was awarded the Grand Prix. Well, at least one point scored in all fairness.
Summing up, the Mostra is far from being the last word in the film world. Cannes and Berlin stand considerably higher in Class A, but we are not speaking of prestige. Rather, we have in mind paradox and principle. They can be substituted in the world of art, provided everything is done beautifully. Venice-58 proved a success in that it succeeded in recording such a substitution. Today, just being a nonconformist or experimenter is not enough. At the same time, there is a lack of parades inherited from the past century, which have actually gone threadbare within. Truth is not what lies in between; simply every movement on the screen should perhaps be driven by paradox. Paradox, in turn, provides new principles in the end. This is what the Korean and Chinese film directors seem to have learned well; ditto European masters like Paskaljevic, Odoul, Seidl, Lindberger, and Linklater.
One question remains: What will the new principles be all about and what paradoxes will they beget?
