Over the weekend at Jeonju, I was able to see eight films along with a master class lecture by Claire Denis.  Overall the quality was very high, with three truly great films (A SEPARATION, THE TURIN HORSE, 35 SHOTS OF RUM), one very good (MEEK’S CUTOFF), one good (HANJI), two average (SECRETS, OBJECTS and DREAM OF ELEUTERIA), and only one failure (CYRANO AGENCY). I should be attending another seven or so films with another lecture before I leave, but I thought I would write a review of the films I’ve seen so far. Here they are, in ascending order of preference.

CYRANO AGENCY (2/5 stars): My least favorite film of the festival so far, a mainstream Korean romantic comedy from last year with a clever premise that doesn’t hold up to a feature length film. The plot involves an out of work acting troupe who become professional Cyrano de Bergeracs for lovelorn men, concocting schemes, scripts and performances to make the female target fall in love with their client. The first half hour works well enough, and it may have been best suited as a television series. But then the heavy contrivances start, and the film and characters become as artificial as the romance they create. There are some decent moments of emotion, but it ultimately fails, although differently than Hollywood. It thus is worth seeing if you want an example of mainstream Korean genre. Otherwise, not so much.

DREAM OF ELEUTERIA (2.5/5 stars): Like Alexandre Sokurov’s RUSSIAN ARK, this Filipino drama of a young woman being sold into marriage with a German is told in one long take. And while it is clearly a good marketing ploy within the art cinema, it comes off as a gimmick and the story would have been much better served without it. The real-time aspect forces everything to be laid out in expository dialogue that would make Christopher Nolan cringe. Also, much of the movie is simply Sorkin-style walk and talk and does not really take advantage of a long take aesthetic. The final framing of the film is emblematic: a nicely framed shot of Eleuteria’s younger sister watching her sister sail away, which is ruined by dialogue explicitly pointing out what we as an audience can already deduce.

SECRETS, OBJECTS (3/5 stars): A sexually explicit Korean indie drama by director Lee Young-mi, who is making her feature debut after many acclaimed shorts. The taboo subject matter of an older female professor lusting after her young research assistant is compelling and worth exploring, but it is not as risky as it wants or thinks it is. It also includes a rather cloy and annoying device of a photocopier and a digital camera as narrators, perhaps to soften the controversial subject matter. The first half is a rather class-bound story of a rick woman’s fantasy with a very romantic/idealist view of love and lust. It does take an interesting narrative turn to focus on the young man and his background, and it provides a glimpse into the hidden world of women only bars where young men work as stripper/prostitutes. But unfortunately it bails out at the  conclusion, becoming just another romantic comedy about overcoming social differences. Not a bad film but much wasted potential.

HANJI (3.5/5 stars): The latest from Im Kwon-taek, and his first in digital. Im’s eye remains great, and this is a beautiful film in terms of lighting and composition. The story is also much more compelling than one would think from the description. It is based on an actual government project to restore the hanji paper industry, and the film, although a dramatic narrative, is also Im’s attempt to let both Korean and non-Koreans know about hanji’s cultural legacy. There is a tension here, as in many of Im’s works, between wanting to recognize and celebrate older, “purer” forms of Korean culture and recognizing the futility/potentially reactionary element in this quest. This tension is expressed through the flawed lead character, who is nevertheless let off the hook and even celebrated in his folly, as shown by the final conversation between his wife and his lover. A unique film, if nothing else, not among Im’s best but a worthy contribution to his filmography.

MEEK’S CUTOFF (4/5 stars): A fine addition to the now familiar revisionist western sub-genre. The story centers around a small band of travellers whose guide, a man named Meek, gets them lost in the middle of the harsh western landscape. The view of the west here is quite striking and realistic, a grey, almost moon-like terrain reminscient of Monte Hellman’s 60s westerns like THE SHOOTING and RIDE THE WHIRLWIND. Director Kelly Reichardt also makes use of extreme alternating contrasts between day and night scenes and employs the old Academy ratio of 4:3, giving the film a simultaneously old-fashioned and contemporary look. Very materialist and grounded in approach, this is almost exactly what you would expect if the director of WENDY AND LUCY made a western. And if it lacks the emotion and character development of that earlier film, it is still compelling and probably more intellectually engaging, with an ending bound to please and annoy in equal measures.

35 SHOTS OF RUM (4.5/5 stars): Shown as part of the Claire Denis masterclass, 35 SHOTS OF RUM may be her most accessible and likable movie. As Denis confirmed afterwards, this is a loose remake of Yasujiro Ozu’s LATE SPRING, translated to a contemporary Franco-African father and daughter and also drawing on Denis’ own family history of her mother and grandfather. A quiet and assured style, with a great mood and rhythm typical of Denis, with one sequence set to the Commodores’ “Night Shift” that is not to be forgotten. The masterclass that followed was fine, not so much a lecture as an extended question and answer session, helped by the fine questions of moderator Chris Fujiwara and the crowd. Denis revealed many of her working methods (including her view of the continued need and relevance of film as a medium) and her own philosophy around the cinema. She proved herself to be, like most French directors, a real cinephile herself, discussing not only Ozu but also Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. She even argued for the continued relevance of post-colonialist theorist Franz Fanon. Somewhat off the cuff and not as riveting as Pedro Costa last year, but still enjoyable and informative.

THE TURIN HORSE (5/5 stars): The latest and reportedly last film from one of the last modernist masters, Hungary’s Bela Tarr. A film with very little in terms of story. Perversely, there is more plot in the anecdote that begins the film and from which comes the title. In 1889 in Turin, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a horse being whipped, and threw his arms around the animal and sobbed. He spent the rest of his ten years being cared for by his mother and sisters, insane and unable to function. The film begins with this story, told over a black screen, and concludes with the line, “Nothing is known of the horse.” The plot we are given involves the horse’s owner and his daughter, and takes place in their small house and their land outside as a storm rages outside. If the word “God forsaken” had not not been invented, it would have to be to describe this particular place. The film is 144 minutes long and contains 30 shots. It is structured as taking place over six days. There is very little dialogue and only two extended speeches. One is a Nietzsche-like rant about everything being debased and the disappearance of the noble in the modern world, given by a character who briefly appears to borrow liquor and is never seen again. The only other extended dialogue is the daughter reading (with difficulty) the Bible. If this is Tarr’s last film, it is a fittingly apocalytpic end. Tarr’s earlier masterpiece, SATANTANGO, recalled Andrei Tarkovsky, stripping the religion away but not the mystery and spiritual sense. A similar reading can be given to  A TURIN HORSE in relation to the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer. God seems absent here, but there remains a mystical element of the unexplained.

All this said, the reason to watch this film, and in a theatre if possible, is Tarr’s truly amazing black and white images. No one else even attempts to make films like this, and the lighting and composition here are almost beyond literary descriptions. It is like getting to witness a great classical painter work in this new medium (which is now itself dying with the coming of digital). Tarr’s use of sound is impressive as well, an alternating between a hypnotic, menacing non-diegetic score by Mihaly Vig that recalls the work of Phillip Glass in Errol Morris’ documentaries with very concrete diegetic sound. As usual, Tarr is working with repetitions, repeating images and music with variations that form the complete work. Not as grand as SATANTANGO and lacking even the slim sense of hope of that film, this is still essential to anyone interested in film as artistic expression.

A SEPARATION (5/5 stars): The winner of the top prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, and although I haven’t seen the other competition films, it is hard to imagine it wasn’t deserving. The story is bookended by the separation of a couple, Nader and Simin, but the main drama involves a dispute between the husband Nader and another couple whose wife works caring for Nader’s ailing father. After a dispute in which Nader pushes the woman, he is charged with murder because the woman was pregnant and had a miscarriage. This leads into the main dramatic action, putting the audience in the same position of the characters and providing no easy answers or truths. The adjective heart-pounding is usually reserved for action spectacle, but no other word better describes this utterly compelling story. Director Asghar Farhadi displays a great sense of character with a strong but subtle formal rigour, not in the experimental vein of Abbas Kiarostami but a film the imprisoned Jafar Panahi would have appreciated. It is a shame it might get undervalued by festival critics who only want Iranian cinema to be formalist exercises. As much as I love Kiarostami’s films, there is room for other approaches, and the mass appeal of this drama doesn’t make it any less valid as art.

 Like most of the other great films at this year’s festival,  A SEPARATION is completely unpredictable and has the freedom to go anywhere, unlike the Hollywood mainstream, whose films often have a limited number of moves. Not that Iranian films don’t have their own limitations, of course, but as Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, they are able to make these limitations part of their cinema. Because of the Islamic rules around the depiction of gender relations, most Iranian films have to be social and have to deal with humans as social animals. There is nothing overtly political about  A SEPARATION, but by simply showing these characters and the drama that results partly from the social rules, Farhadi is able to make a profoundly political work. It is unlikely that this film will not be at the top of my ten best list for 2011.

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