Sundance: Kumiko Hunts "Fargo"s Hidden Treasure

Sundance coverage continues with Nathaniel on the fascinating oddity "Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter"

Meet Kumiko (Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi from Babel), pictured above, a mopey Japanese woman in a red hoodie. This picture of her is not quite complete. While Kumiko is a mopey Japanese woman in a red hoodie there's more than just moping going on inside her, however  opaque her inner life remains. She's a quiet "Office Lady" who is miserably depressed and finds consolation only in her pet bunny Bunzo (who steals nearly every moment he's in) and her taste for treasure hunting. The movie, inspired by true events, opens with an, I assume, metaphorical search for a buried videocassette of Fargo. Once Kumiko watches it she becomes convinced that the movie is real and that Steve Buscemi's treasure awaits her in Minnesota. The red hoodie remains but she'll keep piling on other memorable attire over it on her journey from cold urban Tokyo to freezing rural Minnesota, as if the journey itself will protect her, weigh her down, or bury her. Or all three. 

The film's great strength is in its eery expressive visuals whether that's a surreal burst of shifting wet orange light (which turns out to be an airplane being de-iced I think?), odd textural juxtapositions like cloth over static tv screens, or smart visualizations (and sound mixing) which amplify Kumiko's solitude and emotional disconnect. Given the writer/director team's (Nathan and David Zellner) aptitude for mood building and imagery and the sparse dialogue, the film hardly needs to spend as much time in Japan as it does -  I confess that it took me nearly half an hour to settle into its wavelength. Kumiko doesn't always help, remaining a frustratingly impenetrable character. And yet worries about accessibility seem off point since Kumiko herself just can't connect.

The inciting image in "Fargo"

Eventually the movie curdles into something like a dark Asian companion piece to The Purple Rose of Cairo in which Kumiko continually wills the Coen Bros' classic to consume her. It's a tough sit but I found it rewarding and singular, especially in its presentational clinging to old technologies. Kumiko watches VHS, hand sews treasure maps, and despises her cel phone; she just isn't fit for the times, unable to connect in Japan or America. An ignorant but well intentioned old woman underlines this in one brilliantly succinct joke, handing the confused young woman an old paperbook of "Shogun". 

Grade: B+... it really grew on me 24 hours after seeing it
Distribution: I'd say unlikely but you never know.

Sundance: Puccini Goes Avant-Garde

Sundance coverage continues with Glenn on "The Girl from Nagasaki"

Avant-garde cinema isn’t for all audiences. The Girl from Nagasaki proves that it’s not for all directors, either. For whatever virtues Michel Conte has as an artist and a photographer (of which I am unfamiliar), filmmaking may not be of the same league. His debut feature, co-directed alongside his wife Ayako Yoshida, is a wild re-interpretation of Puccini’s famed Japanese-set opera, Madame Butterfly that dissolves into an assault of seemingly meaningless imagery; an experimental, visually symphonic and unfortunately misjudged piece of cinema.

Taking the story of Cio-Cio San and her breakdown at the absence of her American soldier husband and father of her child, Conte’s film at least fails while attempting something bizarrely different. Sadly, in his effort to turn the table on the conventions of narrative film, he has crafted a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster with bits and pieces grafted from the likes of Peter Greenaway, Tarsem Singh and Alejandro Jodorowsky and yet which lacks the profound power found in those artists’ works and compositions. Including crucifixion and BDSM fetish imagery, performance art and meta stylisation, it can’t help but feel like a confused hodge-podge of ideas that never form into a compelling whole.

Beginning with what appears to be a (admittedly impressive) visual effects company demo-reel of the explosion of the nuclear bomb over Nagasaki, it’s worth it as a work of intriguing technological ideas – and in 3D no less – but Conte falls too often into the sort of ridiculous embellishments that people mock experimental cinema for. I’m not sure what the director was trying to say with repetitive sequences of Geisha women rolling around in slick paint, but I assume he got the idea from a fashion photography layout. At the opposite end, a sequence involving David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is particularly laughable for its bonkers and obvious use of symbolism. By the time Cio-Cio’s descent into mental breakdown occurs in the third act there is little to distinguish it from the rest of the movie.

Unlike some of the giants of avant-garde cinema like Luis Buñuel’s kinetic and disturbing Un Chien Andelou, Bruce Conner’s own nuclear bomb montage Crossroads, or Sidney Peterson’s The Petrified Dog, Conte’s film wears out its welcome all to quickly around the time Christopher Lee (!!) emerges amidst a dinner party of faceless Japanese geisha mannequins. The images, some intoxicating and beautiful, rarely feel as if they hold any weight or new insight into the tragic operatic tale. I’ve had Malcolm McLaren’s delicious 1984 “Madame Butterfly” in my head ever since seeing it, and at only six minutes long it still proves to be a radically more satisfying twist on the Puccuni original than The Girl from Nagasaki. 

Grade: C-
Distribution: Unlikely, although even whilst disliking the film I would applaud anybody for taking it on board. 

Animated Feature Contender: The Wind Rises

Tim Brayton will be looking at the key contenders for Oscar's Animated Feature race. He previously reviewed Ernest & Celestine, Frozen, and Letter to Momo. This week: The Wind Rises.

It’s easy enough to expect great, career-capping things of the final film of any important director even when it was largely an accident of timing that it worked out that. And when the director in question has openly announced his retirement with his film still fresh in theaters, that makes it that much more tempting to view it as some kind of Overt Statement. In the case of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises, it’s a bit hard to say what an Overt Statement might actually consist of, but we can get this out of the way and then relax: there’s nothing about this that feels like a grand farewell to an artform. Far from being a summing-up, it’s probably the least characteristic film of the director’s canon, except in one respect: it makes the fascination with flight and objects in motion, a concern in every single movie he’s made (if only in a very small way), the central driving force of its plot.

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Animated Feature Contender: A Letter to Momo

Tim, our resident animation guy, sounds off on the eligible films vying for Animated Feature

Between now and the announcement of the Academy Award nominees on January 16, I’ll be taking a look at some of the films submitted for the Best Animated Feature award: specifically, the smaller, more easily-overlooked films from non-U.S. animation studios. For it strikes me that they are the more deeply in need of love and attention than the more visible mainstream American productions likely to dominate the race. Also, I don't imagine that anyone is desperate to have a conversation about Free Birds.

Our first subject is the oldest on the submission list: A Letter from Momo from Japan, which premiered at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival, only making its stateside bow this year.

[Does it deserve the comparisons to A Spirited Away? Find out after the jump]

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Oscar Contenders Stack the Decks at Asia Pacific Screen Awards

Glenn here. Rarely discussed by Oscar commentators for reasons unknown to me are the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Held annually on the Gold Coast in Australia, these awards recognise, well, cinema from Asian and Pacific regions. This year's batch of contenders are from a typically diverse group of nations with several high profile Oscar contenders in the mix. Amongst this year's roster of nominees are the foreign language submissions from Palestine (Omar), Iran (The Past), Saudi Arabia (Wadjda), China (Back in 1942), Hong Kong (The Grandmaster), Singapore (Ilo Ilo), New Zealand (White Lies), South Korea (Juvenile Offender) and Kazakhstan (The Old Man) as well as films amongst the long lists for animation (The Wind Rises) and documentary (The Art of Killing). Just imagine if Japan had chosen Like Father Like Son and India had chosen The Lunchbox!

Some history and this year's nominees after the jump.

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