NYFF: Cannes Winner "A Touch of Sin"

TFE’s coverage of the 51st New York Film Festival (Sep 27-Oct 14) has begun. Here are Glenn and Jose with their takes on Cannes winner A Touch of Sin. 

Glenn: For whatever reason, Asian cinema doesn’t get too much exposure in cinemas over this side of the ocean. The discrepancy between words written about the subject and people actually seeing them is entirely out of whack, don’t you think? We all seem to hear about these fabulous movies from around the region and yet outside of a film festival it appears all but impossible to catch them, which makes these festivals so vital. Seems like a massive missed opportunity if you ask me, but then I don’t propose to know anything about the movie-watching habits of mainstream or arthouse audiences. I doubt a film like Jia Zhang-ke’s A Touch of Sin will attract more than middling crowds upon its October 4th release date (curiously during New York Film Festival, so they’re surely cutting into their modest box office expectations already), but that would be expected for any 135-minute, violent indictment of rapid capitalism. One as formally rigid and didactic as this even more so. However much I wish it weren't the case.

It’s not a coincidence that Jia’s rise to prominence as the pre-eminent cinematic purveyor of modern day China began right about the time China began its rise as a global super-power. He’s likely China's finest examiner of the country’s industrial transformation with films such as Venice Golden Lion winner Still Life, fellow Cannes competitor 24 City and observational documentary Useless. With A Touch of Sin he’s taken to his homeland’s obscene capitalism and he's not acting subtle. Hello, one scene features a woman get mistakenly for a prostitute and subsequently assaulted with thick wads of cash! Still, it’s a technical marvel and has a propulsive edge if you give in to its peculiar structure. Jose?

Jose: A Touch of Sin might be one of the angriest movies made in recent years. Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes awarded by none other than Steven Spielberg, it is a bleak saga in which characters are connected through their disappointment and eventual violent revenge. Knives, guns and explosives are used indiscriminately to show how China is sinking into an endless pit of corruption and violence and – eek – there seems to be no way of stopping it.

Zhao Tao, Jia Zhang-ke's wife and A Touch of Sin's finest performance

This film takes place in a country where miners are forced to deal with old horses with whips while their employers parade around in Audis and brand new jets. A country where shooting someone in the head over their designer purse or fellating tourists while dressed up like a train conductor are simply means of making a living. There is no hopeful outcome in the movie and watching it proves to be an experience as harrowing as it is terrifying. Jia cleverly populates it with moments of dark humor, only to then hold a mirror to our faces and ask us if we know how much we’re contributing to this decay. It’s rare to see cinema – or art for that matter – so furious and bleak.

Glenn: Agreed. A Touch of Sin is a film that has grown exponentially in my mind since viewing it just a couple of days ago. The way images of tranquillity and brutality are beautifully juxtaposed thanks to cinematographer Yu Lik-wai, the way Giong Lim’s music underscores the imagery with throbbing harmonies, the way its ratcheting suspense and cathartic release duel for supremacy… it’s a towering achievement and a new, even more uber-provocative side of the filmmaker that NPR hailed "the most important filmmaker working in the world today." It is a tough watch, and its structure could easily infuriate, but seeks to constantly rattle the audience to its message.

TIFF Shocker: Isabelle Huppert is "Perverse" Again

I like to start my film festivals with an atypical choice just to get the globe-trotting adventures rolling. So my first screening at TIFF, which I drunkenly forgot the name of the night before --  "Undefebeatable?" "Indestructafeated" -- was a mixed martial arts 'ultimate fighting' movie. I don't only watch movies about actresses, people! Those are just the ones I like best is all. I chased the MMA fighters with some Romanian actressing and French perversity... although it was more like Romanian Actress Perversity (Lhuminita) AND French Actress Perversity (Huppert - who else?)

So basically this was me settling in with each movie on Day One.

Movies make me feel goooooooood.

UNBEATABLE
In many ways Dante Lam's mixed martial arts fighting movie is just one giant wheel of cheese. It's a wheel of cheese so big I was reminded fo the cheez-it commercial as it rolls through Hunnan, Beijing, Macau and into Hong Kong before it slams into its bone crunching finales.  The movie never met a plot advancing montage it didn't like and there's a lot of plot so cue the music again! (I may never be able to hear "The Sound of Silence" without shuddering at the ways its egregiously deployed here and the incongruous things it accompanies.)

Eddie Peng & Nick Cheung are trainee and coach in Unbeatable

Yet despite these deal breakers, the only thing broken is a few bones but no spoilers! The movie totally works and that's largely due to its character focus even though it clearly knows how to stage and film a fight scene, something that too few action movies can claim. Nick Cheung headlines as a one time shady boxing champ who has fallen so far in life that he can't shake the name "Scumbag" even though he's become a decent guy. Taiwanese Canadian actor Eddie Peng is his young fiercely committed protege and the film. Their chemistry is so great that they can even pull off a really funny winking scene about the latent homoeroticism of wrestling without making you hate them The acting from the supporting players is broad, sure, but vivid. The actress playing a young girl Scumbag befriends (I can't find her name) gets some of the best scenes and a really great final moment -- "Come stomp on me!" which makes playful make-believe violence into affection. And also accurately describes both the movies love of its genre and the masochistic impulses of the MMA set. Unbeatable isn't really unbeatable as movies go but it is not remotely unenjoyable. B

CHILD'S POSE
Romania's great actress Lhuminita Gheorghiu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 4 Months3 Weeks and 2 Days) has a doozy of a role in Child's Pose. Her character Cornelia, is a rich and smug society wife. Cornelia is rarely seen without a drink in one hand and a stubby cigarette in the other and she still has hands free for figuratively greasing palms around town, or literally greasing down her son's back in one provocative scene. Let's just say that she seems to be a spiritual film cousin to Angelica Huston's Lily in The Grifters. One might derisively and accurately refer to Cornelia as "a piece of work."

This fine Romanian picture (is there another kind?) won the Golden Bear in Berlin earlier this year and is now the country's Oscar submission for the upcoming Foreign Film race. The best thing about Child's Pose, aside from Lhuminita's intense gripping star turn, might be the way it so thoroughly isn't what it keeps seeming to be. Cornelia is the anti-hero of this fine Romanian picture (is there another kind?) a woman who will stop at nothing to keep her son from being held responsible for a car accident which killed a young boy. But to the movie's credit she doesn't appear to be at first (when your sympathies are with her, or at least warily near her - she's not exactly a warm presence) and doesn't quite remain so even after her often heinous behavior. It's a slippery thorny picture, forcing you to observe lots of ugly situations, and confront relatable if unpleasant emotions as it shapeshifts subtly from biting satire about the entitlement of wealth, to really uncomfortable family drama, to tense bureaucratic police procedural. It finally comes crashing head on into the ugly truth, the very thing Cornelia is most eager to swerve around. B+

Isabelle Huppert as Maud as Catherine Breillat in Abuse of Weakness

ABUSE OF WEAKNESS
I still have psychic scars from Catherine Breillat's breakthrough Romance (1999) though I tried not to hold that against her when viewing her latest. Abuse of Weakness is an indulgent autobiographical picture of sorts though Catherine is now going by "Maud". Contrary to what any synopsis and the film's first couple of reels suggest the picture is not really about the director's physical illness, but about a post-stroke relationship with a conman who fleeced her of all her money.

The film opens exceptionally well with credits over white sheets which begin to move oddly, trouble broiling under the pristine surface. The camera moves until we're looking at cinema's great chilly ginger Isabelle Huppert, as Maud, writhing about naked and then very disconcertingly dropping to the floor, her body betraying her. The first few scenes reenact  Breillat's debilitating stroke and her physical therapy but the picture doesn't really get started until Maud falls for a true "character" she sees on television, Vilko (Kool Shen) telling her assistant that they just don't make actors like that. She invites the criminal to be the star of her new picture and they begin a friendship wherein he drops in repeatedly and begins to "borrow" money from her. He also repeatedly calls her "perverse" which Isabelle/Maud/Catherine obviously enjoy hearing said about them. Vilko is coldly hesitant to help her in and out of chairs and up and down stairs when she's physically struggling but he's right there with a helpful hand to hold down the checkbook while she scribbles on it.

This goes on and on until the film's finale a long virtual monologue though lawyers and children occassional egg Maud on in her own confession. Huppert nails it by underplaying, glassily admitting her own stupidity, and rewitnessing from afar what she just lived from afar, never quite "present" in her foolish decisions. Huppert's face is a marvel, trouble always broiling under its glassy surface. Abuse of Weakness has a fine beginning and a killer ending --  too bad there's no movie in the middle. It's all just a series of check-signings and a very vaguely observed relationship that's never truly examined by the protagonist living it or the director filming an actress reliving it. It's as if Breillat is determined to make the same mistakes all over again, botching her own would be exorcism. C

Miyazaki To Retire (Again)

Anne Marie here, with some news I have been trying desperately to ignore all weekend: Hayao Miyazaki is officially retiring. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time the master animator has announced his retirement. But each time he threatens to leave, a little color goes out of the world.

My feelings at this exact moment.

Miyazaki is one of those unique artists who sees the extraordinary in the ordinary, and draws from a seemingly inexhaustable wellspring of imagination. My favorite film is Princess Mononoke only because it was the first Miyazaki film I saw, and I was thus completely overwhelmed by the movie.

What's your favorite Miyazaki film? Do you fear this retirement is the permanent one?

Interior. Link Post.

AV Club what if you could hit "pause" on pop culture -- what would you catch up on?
Daily Beast an uninhibited interview with the stars of Blue is the Warmest Colour on working with "fake pussies" and watching the movie with their families
Glenn Dunks enters Interior. Leather Bar 
Cinema Blend on Zach Snyder's continued defense of Man of Steel's insane body count -- which ruined the movie for a lot of people, my friends at Panel Culture included, because... seriously, what kind of hero is that?
Pajiba wants to get away from The Getaway 

The New Yorker on the list as the signature form of our time "a comic nightmare of futile enumeration"
Ultra Culture on an important underreported piece of info from that Lars von Trier Uma Thurman Nymphomaniac clip 
Awards Daily Sasha reviews Gravity which she calls a masterpiece. Here's the thing about festivals. They are both a blessing and a curse on the world. One wants to avoid the movies that have upcoming release dates but then you end up being the last person to see them -- i haven't read this for fear of spoilers I'm just saying a lot of reviews are out there now floating in space. How to resist seeing it at TIFF when there are movies that I'm much less likely to get the chance to see next month? 
In Contention on a Marilyn Monroe Bruce Dern prophecy that's coming true with Nebraska
LA Times Jason Reitman's Labor Day premieres - sucks that it isn't in theaters now during, uh, Labor Day.

Oooh, Maggie is staring at you.

That's one version of the new poster for the 50th annual Golden Horse Awards. It looks like a delicious VIP ticket, yes? Basically Maggie Cheung's eyes are the selling point on each poster. The Golden Horse Awards are Asia's oldest film awards and still its most competitive. Nominations will be announced on October 1st and will see how well this year's hot titles like Stray Dogs, A Touch of Sin, and The Grandmaster do. The awards ceremony will be held in late November. Ang Lee, who has won two Golden Horses as Best Director (Lust Caution, The Wedding Banquet) and two Oscars for Best Director (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi), is president of the jury this year.

Review: The Grandmaster

Dancin' Dan here with my take on one of my most anticipated films of the year.

It's often easy to forget that the martial arts indeed are art, despite the fact that the word is right there in their given name. Practioners of kung fu, or karate, or judo hone their craft just as intensely (if not more so) as any painter, dancer, musician, actor, or filmmaker practices theirs. And to watch martial artists perform (that is, to fight) is quite often just as much of an awe-inspiring spectacle as it is to, say, watch Cate Blanchett navigate the course of Jasmine's unraveling. Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster, far more than any martial arts movie in recent memory, understands this.

One might expect no less from a film directed by Kar-Wai, cinema's premiere sensualist. And on this point, at least, he doesn't disappoint. [more...]

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