As per my usual festival postings, I’ve divided these posts according to my day of attendance. This year I managed to attend on 4 days for a total of 11 films. My haul was excellent overall, with only a couple of mediocre films and no actually bad films.
Personal Shopper [2016]
The film tells a story of a personal assistant – mostly shopper – Maureen (Kristen Stewart), who loathes her client, a fashion superstar Kyra. It also tells the story of a Maureen the medium, who is looking for a sign of her dead twin brother Lewis, who died of a heart condition that affects Maureen also. Maureen and Lewis had a deal that whoever goes first gives a sign to the one left behind. There are signs, but the movie leaves answers about the supernatural bits intentionally unclear.
The film blurs the line between the realistic and the supernatural. Some events are clearly supernatural, but they are not given an explanation. Some events look at first like they might be supernatural, but turn out to be natural, and then are mixed up with more supernatural events again. And the final resolution, Maureen making contact with something and finally getting some answers, eventually leaves everything even more open for interpretation.
There are two things I would like to point out about the film.
First of all, it plays with our genre expectations. The whole film is shot in a very realistic manner, which plays havoc with our expected interpretations of events, when the supernatural enters the picture without the usual genre trappings.
Second, and I never thought I would utter this out loud, Kristen Stewart, who occupies almost every shot of the film, is absolutely magnificent. Most of the time she is apathetic bordering on depressed – all ennui and detachment – but there are scenes, where she is touched one way or the other, and you buy it every time. Truly a magnificent performance.
- Director: Olivier Assayas
- Watched on: 16th Sep 2017
- Watched at: Kinopalatsi 2
- 4.5/5
On the Beach at Night Alone [2017]
The film is divided into two halves that seem to depict two possible outcomes of a painful personal event. Young-hee (Kim Min-hee) is an actress, whose career is in decline, and who has just had an affair with a married film director, who is now somewhere else. In the first half of the film, it seems like Young-hee has escaped the scandal to Hamburg. She is living with a friend there, who doesn’t seem to be that close. Otherwise she is surrounded by strangers and is intensely alone with her feelings. In the second half Young-hee is back in South Korea with her friends and family. There are endless soju soaked dinners and she seems to be more happy with the familiar faces around her, but in the end, the loneliness is there – just in a slightly different form.
Hong and Kim admitted to a similar situation – a relationship between the actress Kim and the married director Hong – prior to this film. Many critics have looked at the film as a confession, but I’m going to leave that bit alone and let the film stand on its own merits.
The film is very much worth seeing for a couple of reasons:
Kim Min-hee is spectacular in her role as Young-hee. You can feel the raw nerve endings when she is isolated, and you can see them when there are happily drunken people everywhere. Young-hee clearly has feelings for the director and she is conflicted by the current situation – is it good that the affair happened and how is the director feeling about it? Kim’s sorrow and confusion are palpable and powerful.
The director, Hong Sang-soo, is great at composing confusion. Everything feels as uncertain as Young-hee’s feelings are. Hong has toned down his usual gimmicky style slightly and there are only a few explicitly weird elements to the film. This time around he builds the confusion more by making it feel like someone else is telling the story and getting some of the details completely wrong, or like someone is remembering the events after a drunken night and not getting everything right.
Hong uses extended shots throughout the film. This lends the film and the events in it a gravity and realism that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. It highlights the performance of Kim in that it is carried through the long shots without flaws. It also contributes to the overall atmosphere of reflection of Young-hee’s feelings.
The parts of the film combine to strengthen each other and build up to a whole that feels unified. It is a touching story of loneliness that is supported and intensified by the mise-en-scéne and the acting.
- Director: Sang-soo Hong
- Original Title: Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja
- Watched on: 16th Sep 2017
- Watched at: Korjaamo Kino
- 4/5
Bobbi Jene [2017]
A documentary about the modern dancer Bobbi Jene Smith and her leaving Ohad Naharin’s world famous Israeli Batsheva Dance Company in order to follow her personal career ambitions.
The documentary’s subject matter combines Bobbi’s very ordinary personal problems – can her relationship work, when her lover is 10 years her younger, should she put her career ambitions over her love life and her current comfortable life situation, her parents don’t understand her life choices that seem to exclude procreation – and her very extraordinary career as a an extraordinary dancer in probably the most extraordinary dancing company in the world currently.
The personal side is interesting. The dancing side is the reason I went to see the film. The film has been criticized for this very duality, but I see a strength in it. It let’s us see an artist, who pours everything in herself into her art, and lets the viewer in on her more personal moments as well, which shows us the everything she is pouring into the art.
The documentary quite uniquely manages to capture a time period in Bobbi’s life, that forms a full circle – it contains Bobbi’s last moments in Batsheva, her choreographing and practicing her first solo piece, and finally the first public performance of that piece, that is born out of the episode of leaving the company.
Although I see a strength in the personal being mixed up with the art, the personal takes too much space from the art. Although the film depicts an interesting piece in the life of an artist, the execution lacks ambition. But these problems are not big ones and the result is a unique look into the birth of a wonderful piece of art.
- Director: Elvira Lind
- Watched on: 16th Sep 2017
- Watched at: Korjaamo Kino
- 3.5/5
Wet Woman in the Wind [2016]
For the 45th anniversary of the Japanese Nikkatsu studio’s Roman Porno series of films, the studio launched a reboot. The Roman Porno films gave unusual amounts of freedom and a small budget to the directors with just the expectation of some amounts of nudity. The results were energetic and artistic films, with some amounts of nudity. If this film is used as a measuring stick, the reboot is producing similar results.
In the film’s center is Kosuke (Tasuku Nagaoka), who is trying to isolate himself from everything after his marriage was ruined by an affair that ruined another marriage as well. The isolation is ruined by a sexual whirlwind, Shiori (Yuki Mamiya), who drives a motorcycle off the pier, where Kosuke is reading a book, and within minutes of getting out of the water, is nude and is wriggling her way into Kosuke’s life. Ghosts of Kosuke’s past keep reappearing despite his best efforts and the situations are complicated by Shiori trying to get into Kosuke’s pants by complicating the situations with the ghosts.
The result is an enjoyable, energetic, surprising slapstick with some amounts of nudity (mostly from the waist above). The film has a sort of B film feel to it in that anything can happen and often at least some of it is such intellectually surprising content that it rises above the soft core porn starting point into a film of real merit. Based on this, I will try to find more of the Roman Porno films, original and reboot.
- Director: Akihiko Shiota
- Original Title: Kaze ni nureta onna
- Watched on: 16th Sep 2017
- Watched at: Kino Engel 1
- 3.5/5
In the Footsteps of a Turtle 