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The Big Long Film Report (part 1)

photo of a sidestreet in Melbourne

The Montreal World Film Festival has had me haunting the cinemas for the past week. Films seen to date (recommended films marked with *):

The short film "Roundabout" by Australian actor-turned-director Rachel Griffiths has simply the most effective and ingenious use of sound I have ever encountered in a film of any length. I enjoyed "Martha's New Coat", even if the story is not unusual — the story of a teenage girl looking for her father had been given the most sensitive treatment with excellent music and photography. Maybe I am biased, but there is something about the rhythm of Australian films that I love (by that I mean films written and made by Australians, not films coming out of the Warner Brothers studios in Sydney).

Dealing with existence in the most subtle way possible, "Bokunchi" is a delicate poem from beginning to end. Like other films from the region, it carries deep-set symbolism and unspoken ideas.

"You Fang Chu Zu" (I don't care how they spell the first word in the program, it's wrong) is a film shot without apparent extra lighting or any kind of tampering with the original scene. This is not one for those who can't handle having time stretched in a film; it requires certain amount of patience ;) Very subtle and delicate humour, good photography, with almost no music throughout the entire film. My only criticism is the level of Chinese that has been used in the script — it seemed to me to be too elegant, too sophisticated, too clean to be conceivably used your average Malaysian-Chinese in a real dialogue. I am apt to believe that most Malaysian-Chinese don't speak like that unless they've spent 13 years in a Chinese-medium school. Afterwards, I asked two middle-aged Malaysian men what they thought about the film — not surprisingly to me, they found it too "arty". One said, "And we don't smoke that much!" Still, I'm happy to see a film of this kind from Malaysia make the film festival here.

Now, a word about bad films. The two films from China, "The Story of Lotus" and "When Ruoma Was Seventeen" (Ruoma de shi qi sui) I found deplorable. Unfortunately films like these win audience because of the very beautiful photography — but hey, China is a beautiful country. Bad acting (the actresses are too cutesy and don't know how to cry), bad stories (completely lacking in real body), terrible music but ... breathtaking images. Here we might be seeing a new kind of tourist propaganda — selling China to potential tourists through bad films with beautiful photography. What bugs me is that people fall for it (like the woman sitting next to me in the cinema) without truly making an effort to see past the surface and learn to understand the culture.

"Three Days of Rain" is interesting, but by no means original in terms of the execution of its storyline. The word 'souffle' comes to mind. It is light, yet addresses some very true and dark issues within our society, contrasting between the "haves" and "have-nots", the fortunate and the under-priviledged.

I saw "The Man Who Wipes Mirrors" last night and loved it for its simplicity and poetry but I think half the cinema didn't share my sentiments. Nevertheless, it is an elegant film, sometimes feeling a little long but I wouldn't know how to shorten it. :)

"The Delicate Art of Parking" probably ranks as the best film I have seen so far this festival. A sensitive humorous "documentary" into the lives of parking enforcers.

So there you go ... I think you'll understand why I haven't been blogging much these days. ;)

Posted by sniffles at September 04, 2003 11:37 AM