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Following festival coverages can be a frustrating business for the common cinephile. As someone who's often on the other side of this dynamic, reading about films that are months or even years away from general release may induce all manner of negative feelings. Think of envy or the put-upon disinterest of someone who's set on divesting eagerness and spare himself the dissatisfaction that comes with it. For those who feel the same way as The Film Experience continues to house this prolonged TIFF 50 rundown, here are two titles for which you won't have to wait too long… or at all. And to make things more interesting, both films share the meta-cinematic intrusion of documentary crews into their narratives. Now, there's a double feature for you.
After its world premiere in Toronto, Steve, Tim Mielants' follow-up to Small Things Like These, is already on limited release. And then there is Yeon Sang-ho's The Ugly, a Korean drama that arrives in US theaters next week…
STEVE, Tim Mielants
Rather than capitalize on the success of Oppenheimer with projects of similar size and scope, Cillian Murphy has dedicated the last couple of years to small independent cinema. In this humbler register, he's delivered even better work than the biopic portraiture that earned him a Best Actor Oscar. Mielants' adaptation of Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These is probably the Irish thespian's greatest achievement, as far as I'm concerned. That's all the more impressive when one considers how much he remains in minor key throughout an Irish drama of sublime simplicity and insight. Steve, the director-actor duo's follow-up, isn't quite as remarkable but still well worth your time. And even if Mielants stumbles, Murphy never does.
Based on Max Potter's Shy novella, Steve sets its scene in the 1990s, where the titular character serves as the head of a reform school for troubled teenage boys. This title change between mediums proves an interesting choice, as it signals the text's fragile balance of the pedagogue's passionate yet beleaguered perspective and that of their students, who, in one way or another, feel rejected by a mainstream society that treats them as little more than an inconvenience. Shy is our main avenue into the youth's psyche, often framed within the film-within-a-film device of a documentary crew that has come to the reformatory with dubious intent. Are they there to humanize these so-called delinquents or looking to make some salacious exposé on an entire generation gone to the dogs?
Such structural, thematic, and narrative tensions are never fully resolved. By the end of Steve, I'm not sure Mielants has figured out how to negotiate between them. In some way, that feel of a fundamental instability lends the picture the sweaty sheen of urgency one may struggle to achieve within a period context. On the other hand, these mechanisms muddle an exercise that might have benefited from a more streamlined audiovisual strategy. Perhaps it could lean less on tremulous cinema verité hand-held camerawork, wild zooms, video intercut with digital and whatnot. I'd have welcomed some formal discipline and a less clichéd mess of visual idioms, all stinking of the desperate attempt at projecting "authenticity."
It's a shame because the text is quite strong, shining brightest when contemplating how the boys' purported anti-social tendencies intersect with the feelings of insufficiency hammered into them by outside forces. Even the notion of wrapping up the whole narrative in one hellish day works better than it has any right to, contriving a pile-up of misfortunes that nonetheless feel plausible within the parameters established from the start. Still, the cream of the crop are the performances, starting with Murphy in top form in what can best be described as the 90-minute crashout of a man trying to keep a crumbling castle from collapsing on top of him and his wards.
Emily Watson is also excellent in a supporting role, encapsulating the distorted generosity that such institutions can embody. She superficially cares about the boys, yet regards them with a stigmatizing distance verging on disdain. Like Murphy, there's a necessary restraint that keeps the whole thing from pratfalling into caricature or, worse, cheap sentiment. That said, the real stars are the juvenile players, all remarkable in their own right, zapping vitality into the project and a jolt of quasi-neorealist outrage. As Shy, Jay Lycurgo merits special praise, for he must walk the tightrope between confirming the audience's worst expectations about this boy while demanding his rightful dignity, inviting us into a bottomless well of self-loathing that should have no place inside someone so young. If you'll allow me an indulgent classic film reference, I'd compare him to Curtiz's angels with dirty faces, here presented without the veneer of Old Hollywood romanticism.
THE UGLY, Yeon Sang-ho
Nihilism is a hard philosophy around which to build engaging drama, often leading artists to circle down an endless spiral of hopelessness and risk turpitude, redundancy, tedium beyond belief. While I'd like to say Yeon Sang-ho's The Ugly confronts these challenges and overcomes them, I'm not sure that's the case. The director, who made his name with horror divertissements such as Train to Busan and Peninsula, opts for somber drama when adapting his own graphic novel, Face. Indeed, somberness is the name of the game, with Yeon predicating the project on a stripped-down aesthetic whose general focus on actors' expressivity further underlines the absence of one particular visage.
The story starts in something resembling in media res, when, during a documentary shoot, the team is shocked by the discovery of a corpse buried in their subject's garden. He's Yeong-gyu, a blind stamp carver whose delicate work matches the besotted loveliness of his musings on all the beauty he cannot see. The documentary was his son's idea and it's with the curious Dong-hwan that the film sets itself on a path of discovery, collecting testimonies in search of dark truths. Because the body isn't a stranger but Dong-hwan's mother and Yeong-gyu's long-lost wife, a woman whose own relatives seem eager to forget. Her unforgivable sin? Ugliness.
This hideousness is the reason why her face has been stricken from record, including people's memories. Logically, when The Ugly descends into flashback, the mise-en-scène does everything in its power to preserve this total erasure, perpetuating the cruelty of those who rejected her and keeping us, like her son, unable to grasp who she was past an appearance deemed too monstrous to regard or remember. While gimmicky, Yeon's strategy is consistent with the text, sharing its mercilessness toward an abstracted character on whom various prejudices of South Korean society befall like blows of flesh against flesh, bone, and bloodied rock.
As if to pour salt and a squirt of lemon on the open wound, Yeon has actor Park Jeong-min play both the young carver and his son, attacking the same traumatic experience from different perspectives for maximum pain. The double performance is solid enough to sustain the casting flourish, though it never matches Kwon Hae-hyo's depth as the older Yeong-gyu. Then again, few actors can match the gravitas of Hong Sang-soo's favorite avatar for his own self-reflections. None of the other actors, even those other than Park, can reach his level, which means the film can end on a high note as it ultimately cedes the stage to him.
In any case, this doubling down of a son's view of his mother's degradation contributes to a feeling of unrelenting misery and lack of variety across the multiple testimonies and narrative culs-de-sac. The film's thesis is as clear as its inevitable conclusion from early on, so the audience feels trapped in a prison of exploitative scenarios, driven to boredom. More concerningly, the viewer might be driven to indifference – I know I was. It comes to a point where one can't even react with indignation, the spectator numbed into a state of placidity. Which might make for a cohesive social indictment on the filmmaker's part, but mostly fails as a piece of cinema.
Steve is now in theaters, and it'll start streaming on Netflix on October 3. The Ugly hits theaters next Friday, September 26, courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment.