Short Reviews 2005 by Chris Fujiwara
Tony Takitani
This adaptation of Haruki Murakami's short story chronicles the life of an illustrator (Issey Ogata) who breaks the pattern of his solitary existence by marrying a 15-years-younger colleague (Rie Miyazawa). She proves the ideal companion in every respect but for her compulsion to buy huge quantities of designer clothes.
In director Jun Ichikawa's punctilious but soothing mise-en-scène, people and furniture appear cut out against fields of bland, desaturated color. Ichikawa makes superb use of Ryuichi Sakamoto's drained, depressive piano score and of quiet, sparse voice-over narration that sometimes gets out of synch with the action (as in Bresson's desolate Une femme douce, with which Tony Takitani invites comparison at several points). The antifetishism of Ichikawa's style seems paradoxical for a film about clothes, but it suits one that's also about loss and disconnection. The way the film shows things invites the audience to possess them, but only as a flat image in which no intervention is possible or even desirable.
La Niña santa/The Holy Girl
In this film of crisp intelligence and abundant pleasure and surprise, Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel juxtaposes two incongruous situations: a medical conference at a hotel and a group of teenage girls studying Christianity. The link between the two is the encounter between one of the girls, Amalia (María Alche), and the forty-ish doctor (Carlos Belloso) who discreetly rubs up against her from behind as they watch a streetcorner theremin recital. Amalia becomes convinced that the theremin's keening is God's call and that her vocation has to do with saving the doctor or sacrificing herself to his lust. Meanwhile, the doctor struggles against his attraction to Amalia while becoming involved with her mother (Mercedes Morán).
With her shallow-focus close shots, Martel creates an explosion of sensuous fragments not closed off or wrapped up by the narrative, details that splay all over the warm, well-lit space of the film to hook up with each other at odd angles. The visual style is perfectly matched to this convention of characters who become each other's fixations. Alche, with her crooked smile and look of indifferent bafflement, is a marvel.
The Housemaid
Eight years after his retrospective at the Pusan International Film Festival stunned cinephiles, Korean director Kim Ki-young finally reaches Boston. The Housemaid (1960), a popular work from the early phase of Kim's career (which lasted till 1995), tells the cautionary tale of a circumspect music teacher and bourgeois family head who finds he can't keep his hands off the new maid. Accumulating images of isolation and entrapment with much visual flair, The Housemaid is a model melodrama reminiscent of Douglas Sirk, John M. Stahl, and Mexican-period Buñuel.
Like those directors, Kim uses melodrama for social critique. In the later stages of the film, the selfish and destructive maid becomes understandable as the sympathetic victim of class oppression, while the frail wife, hitherto a symbol of goodness, becomes more monstrous than any of the other characters as she takes charge of disposing of the problem created by her husband's infidelity. Kim's melodrama is rarely far from horror, especially in the last section of the film, but as lurid as it gets, The Housemaid is never anything but the logical working-out of a terrifying design.
The Aimless Bullet
Celebrated as a classic of South Korean cinema, this 1961 film depicts the post-Korean War breakdown of society through the decline of two brothers. One is a wounded veteran who has no job and who has turned to drink. Nothing goes right for him: he's offered a part in a film, but when he hears the character's story described as an approximation of his own, he balks at exploiting his war experience and turns it down; the day after he runs into the love of his life, a former nurse, she gets pushed out a window by a maniacal poet. The other brother is a low-paid office worker with a pregnant wife, a demented mother, and a constant raging toothache that he can't afford to have treated.
The unremitting intensity and bleakness of The Aimless Bullet are admirable, though they come at a price. In the theatricalized interior scenes, director Yu Hyun-mok's style can get as oppressive as the script is wordy. But whenever the action moves outdoors, through urban settings of astonishing grimness, the film takes off, becoming vivid and piercing in a manner reminiscent, alternately, of Rossellini and of Kurosawa. The final cab-ride sequence is a depressing tour de force.
all this stuff was first published in The Boston Phoenix and is copyright © 2005 Chris Fujiwara