10/13/2002 Entry:
"CIFF - Day Seven"

So, after taking two days off from CIFF, it was back on the saddle again Friday, boosted by the fact that my boss gave us a half day. I already had advance tickets to Unknown Pleasures, and after a perusal of the schedule on the train ride home I decided to also check out Springtime In A Small Town.

Springtime In A Small Town is a new film by Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang, whom I was not familiar with before now. He was apparently banned from making films in China for some time, and this is his first film in ten years. Looking around for some biographical information, this is about the best I could come up with. In Springtime, a man (Liyan) is visited by an old friend (Zhang) who discovers that Liyan's wife (Yuwen) is his childhood sweetheart. This love triangle provides the framework for the rest of the film. I fell in love with this in the first half, largely because of the truly beautiful cinematography by Pin Bing Lee, who also worked with Wong Kar-Wai on In The Mood For Love, as well as several features by Hou Hsiao-hsien. Many times his camera seems as if it is floating, its incredibly fluid. There are almost no static shots in this film, the camera is always on the move. Sometimes, it is barely perceptible, as if it was a balloon in a soft breeze, then it will quickly dart to follow the action somewhere else. The effect is truly mesmerizing, and the lighting, always capturing the perfect mood, adds to the effect significantly. Unfortunately, about halfway in, the movie took a turn South for me. The scene in question is one in which Yuwen and Zhang drink heavily at a dinner celbrating Liyan's sister's 16th birthday. It seemed really forced, like the script was trying too hard to force a confrontation to further the story. It could certainly be argued that it was in fact Zhang and Yuwen trying to force a confrontation, but it didn't feel that way to me. The following events were tainted by this, and Liyan's eventual response to it all felt totally wrong. I did not feel that this character would have reacted in the way he did, which left me unfulfilled about the film as a whole despite my earlier joy.

There is a scene about 1/4 of the way in, where everyone goes for a boat ride, and they sing a song to the tune of The Blue Danube. While watching this I thought to myself, "Why would anyone ever use a tune that is so heavily associated with another film? Particularly one as highly regarded and canonical as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Don't they think about these things?" It was someone in another forum who put forth the possibility, which I had foolishly neglected to think about, that Tian did this on purpose to resurrect the soft floating beauty 2001's waltz in the sky, taking the viewer's preconceptions about the piece of music and using them to his advantage. It is a wonderful scene, certainly the most outwardly happy in an otherwise pretty sad film, and its also the one that works the best because you know that everyone's emotions whatever they may be are boiling under their skin. Its too bad the rest of the film couldn't have kept this going. Even still, this was probably the third best thing I'd seen in the festival to that point.

I went from this straight into another new Chinese feature, Unknown Pleasures, by young filmmaker Jia Zhangke. His second film, Platform, has acheived seemingly mythic status as one of the great undistributed films of the last few years. Sadly, I missed its one showing here in Chicago out of nothing more than sheer laziness. I had been meaning to go, and just couldn't get my ass up off the couch to go to Evanston. I do suck. Anyways, I was not a huge fan of this film. It had a couple nice scenes, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. I am not a total narrative guy, but my semi-narrative favorites seem to have a certain visual style and mood about them, and Unknown Pleasures was shot in stark digital video. The one scene which grabbed me most was shot in a nightclub, if for no other reason than it was visually much more interesting than the rest of the movie. Also the way Jia cut to the scene worked really well too, probably the only thing in the film which could be termed as "showy." The film follows the steps of two young unemployed men as they go through their paces, and it they just never grabbed me. Some have compared it to Hou, but I thought it had far more similarity to Tsai Ming-Liang just in terms of mood and general feel, but without the compulsive oddness that Liang brings to the party. I bet that if I was to do some research about modern day China and the wys in which this film frames those events I would find a lot more to be interested in, but at the moment I'm not really inspired to do so. Still, I have heard so many good things about Jia's other films that I would love the opportunity to see them.

Thus ended Day 7.