akt's space

Curling is the name of a game played on ice in which players by two competing teams try their best to guide over the slippery surface of an ice game ring (called “curling sheet”) 8 heavy granite blocks (called “rocks”), polished into the form of a cheese cake after an initial slide by a team member towards a marked circle ( called a “house”) . The team which gets the maximum number of rocks closest to the centre of the house. It’s a bit like the French game of “boule”, except that it is played on ice instead of on the ground. It is a game which calls for a great deal of co-operation between its team members. But for me, it is the name of a Canadian movie by the film critic turned director Denis Côtè’s I saw yesterday morning, the fifth in my HKIFF list.

In many ways, it is a strangely haunting film. We see endless expanses of pure white snow, over the woods, the fields, the highways, interspersed with scenes inside a lonely out of the way cabin off the highway, a bowling alley, two motels and finally a children’s snowboard playground. It almost feels as if the winter snow is a silent observer of all that is going on in the film.

As the film opens, we see in close up the freckled face of a girl of about 12 called Julyonne (played by Philomene Bilodeau). She is being examined by an opthalmologist and is told that she has got astigmatism and must wear a pair of corrective spectacles. We learn that she does not go to school. We next see her at home, talking to a man who fixes her dinner. He is her father Jean-Francois ( played by Emmanuel Bilodeau, her real life father). Their conversation is spare, almost purely functional although they apparently get on well but we see little signs of any strong or even warm emotion on their faces. There is a calmness and expressionlessness as blank as the snow outside of their house in snow-bound Quebec. We are next shown a scene of Jean Francois wiping the floor of a bowling alley, in silence, with bowling pins in the background. A new young girl Isabelle ( played by Sophie Desmarais) in heavy make-up and an exaggerated hairdo (which changes every time we see her) and dressed like a sexy doll, is arriving to work there. He looks at her for a second or two but continues to wipe the floor. After work, his boss tries to formally introduce her to him and engage him in conversation and says that he must bring out his daughter girl Julyvonne to play at the bowling centre a little more with her new assistant. He says that one should not “hide in the lake to avoid being wetted by the rain”. Isabelle, a Spanish girl, doesn’t understand the French proverb and asks what it means. His boss explains it to her. Jean Francois makes a non-committal reply. We next see the father and daughter walking home at the side of the highway in a blazing blizzard, is questioned by a passing police patrol car officer who offers to give them a lift home but is rejected by the father .

As the film develops, we learn that Jean Francois does want her child to go to school because he does not want her to pick up bad habits from the other kids and not too effectively home schooling her, that the child’s mother Rosie is in a woman’s prison, that out of boredom Julyvonne would often glue her face to the window of her house to observe in silence what is going on outside her house,that she would even look at a man stopping his car at the side of the highway in the distance to pee, that she would lie besides some corpses lying unattended in a nearby forest, that she often asks to see Rosie, that she is allowed to see her only once during which she was embraced for the first time by someone, that being allowed to listen to the radio would be regarded by her as a great reward for having behaved well according to his father’s standards (the song being played as she dances to its rhythm is signficantly Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now”), that one day Jean-Francois found another unattended young boy at the side of the highway, apparently frozen to death, that there is a suddenly a trail of blood leading from the girl’s white bedsheet to the toilet, that the girl watches a tiger behind a fence in a zoo (?) lying in the snow. The images and scenes are never explained. They are merely presented and juxtaposed. We never know what happened before or afterwards.

What is Denis Côtè is trying to suggest by his images? Are they mere enigmatic symbols? Perhaps we may get a clue from two scenes: the first shows Jean Francois being invited to play a game of curling by the proprietress of the motel where he and his daughter are living but he merely watches despite enthusiastic exhortation to him to join in and the second towards the close of the film when he imitates the motions required to win the game of curling and hitting the extended hands of each member of the team in blue uniform in celebration of his having done well and embracing the proprietress (probably in his imagination) and burst into a dance but only after he had gone out and had a casual sexual encounter with another lonely woman in another motel during one of his period of anxiety and had talked during that brief escapade to an old proprietor of another motel with a sign “fermé” upon its main entrance, about the joys of rabbit hunting and the final scene, in which he is bringing his daughter to a children’s snow board playground where we see children having fun with their parents so she can be with children of her age, something about which she has been asking her father for permission to do and which up till then, he has steadfastly ignored. For once, it was day time and not dark as was most of the other scenes.

Like “The Ditch” which I saw earlier, there is no movie score. The only music we hear is that at the party at the bowling centre and the one heard on the radio at Jean-Francois’ bleak and bare home. Is the silence of the film part of the message? The film looks like a cinematic jig-saw puzzle. We’ve got to fit the pieces together. It’s a tale of loneliness and the need to connect. There is a subtle irony: the girl’s mother who wants to be connected is locked inside a prison ( we are not told why) whilst two persons who are free not within heavy prison gates appear to be voluntarily isolating themselves from society, living alone in an attempt to avoid being “contaminated” by society’s bad habits and therefore living a kind of marginal existence outside the pale of normal human intercourse in a kind of solitude a deux.

Are Jean-Francois and Julyvonne happy? Should they continue to stay outside of normal social intercourse? Is the director suggesting at the start of the film by the image the Julyonne does not have the two pupils of her eyes correctly focused that she does not see the world with the correct perspective? Is Jean Francois’s boss pointing to the core of his employee’s problem when he used that French proverb about the avoiding the rain by drowning in a lake? Is the role that best fits Jean Francois is that of a clown, the role that he was given by his boss at a children’s birthday party at the bowling centre? Is Julyvonne fascinated with the danger of the sleeping and yawning tiger behind the fence? Does she prefer the company of corpses to her solitude? Is the director suggesting that there may well be other children dying of solitude in Quebec apart from Julyevonne? That the menstrual blood of Julyvonne indicates that she has arrived at another stage in her life in which she needs some changes in the way she has been brought up and is that not why the proprietress of her motel suggest that instead of cleaning up the mess of her blood on the floor, it would have been easier if she were to give Jean Francois another new room altogether? Is the true meaning of the game of curling the process of enthusiastic participation in it rather its results? Do we “win” merely by playing? Denis Cóté does not give any easy answers. He prefers to show us, to give hints, allusions and enigmatic symbols rather than to tell us. The photography is sensitive, the winter snow and silence overpowering and the acting very natural. I’d give the minimalist film a 2A.

In “Man and Crisis”, Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish existentialist philosopher, says” man can come to such a pass that, although he must do something to live…he finds no occupation which satisfies him, nor do the matters on his material and social horizon or the ideas on his intellectual horizon move him to anything which seems satisfactory. He will go on doing this or that, but he will do it like an automaton, without achieving any sense of solidarity between himself and his acts; these acts he considers of no account, without meaning. When this happens, there surges up in him an unconquerable loathing of the world and of living, both of which seem to him to have a character which is purely negative…These men try to resolve the problem of living, that is, of treating with things and with neighbors, by reducing contact to a minimum…man,in effect reduces life and the world to a corner, to a single fragment of what it was formerly. This is simplification in the face of desperation, in the face of feeling lost in an excessive richness of life…all those appetites and possible pleasures, but none of them full and complete…he who has truly despaired feels this quality of negativity extending throughout the entire ambit of his life, with no single point in the whole span where he can make himself secure…our own period is constitutionally one of desperation..a period of disorientation. But insofar as he is disoriented, and not yet oriented, he is despairing…in these situations, man find himself facing not a whole series of ways out, but a dead end…As Spaniards say, he is between the sword and the wall…man denies his whole life except for a single point which, thus isolated, becomes exaggerated, exacerbated, exasperated. He pretends that life consists only of this, that this single point alone is important and the rest is nothing…Man who is lost in complications aspire to save himself in simplicity–a universal return to nudity, a general call rid oneself of, to retire from, to deny, all richness, complexity and abundance.” To me, this rather long passage from the Spanish philosopher, although originally meant for some other purpose, describes to a T the 4th HKIFF film I saw last night, The Leap Year.

As the film opens, we see a rather ordinary, slightly plumb dark skinned young Mexican lady shopping in another perfectly ordinary looking supermarket, goes home, returns home, talks to his mom and young brother about some trivialities, makes a telephone call to get some information to write a newspaper or magazine article and then goes to the window of her tiny dark studio flat with the barest of furniture, wall decoration, the only window of which looks into a small patio below and the window of the opposite flat. Through the slit at the corner of her cheap cloth curtain, she voyeurizes the young couple sitting intimately on a sofa. She reaches her hand to her crotch and masturbates.

She eats, she writes, she talks to her mother and her brother, she puts on make up before her dressing table, changes her dresses, goes out, picks up men, takes off her clothes once she is inside her flat and have sex with them. The men would leave whilst she is sleeping or think that she is still sleeping. She does not find out their name until after she has made love, nor does she need to know who or what they are. Neither does she care to tell them who or what she is. She picks up a young man who says he is a designer, Arturo, likes the way he makes love. The first time, he hits her butts whilst banging her. The second time, he hits her face. The third time, he belts her. The fourth time, he pisses on her. The fifth time, he burns her breast with a butt of a lit cigarette. The sixth time, he passes the blade of a knife around her neck, her breast.

The woman crosses each day of the month of February with a cross. Shortly before that, she learns that she is fired and has been promised an exploration of another position The 29th day was completely blotted out. It was the day her father died four years ago. On the previous day, she was told on the phone that she is fired but that the editor will see if he can get her another position. She tells her sadistic lover to come the following day and make love with her again and plunge the knife into her so that she can feel the blood running over her own body as he makes love to her. She tells him that she will prepare gloves for him so that no fingerprints will be left and nobody can find out who the killer is. On the following day, she puts on a white gown, places a pair of white glove on the coffee table and a knife, plus a towel and arranges them neatly into a pile. She stays a short while in front of a picture of the Holy Virgin, probably asking her to intercede for her for what she is about to do. The phone rings. It is his brother Raul. He is coming up. She quickly puts away the stuffs on the table under the bed. He enters. They embrace. He has just broken up with his girlfriend. She consoles him. He lies on her lap. She strokes his hair and shoulder. The film ends.

It is a minimalist film. Save for the first scenario, the entire film is confined to her bedroom and what goes on within. The bedroom is her uterus. It protects her egg. There the egg is born. There she finds the only activity which give meaning to her life. It is there she intends to end her life. When life is an endless routine, when the only activity which makes her feel she is still alive and therefore still human is love-making, it is surprising what some people will do. As Ortega y Gasset says, in such despair, people may then desperately try to reduce life to one single activity and hope in that single activity to be a climax of both pleasure and pain, of activity and inactivity, of life and death. Love-making has become a ritual. In the Genesis, God is said to have created the world in 6 days and on the seventh day, He rested. Perhaps the woman in the film wants to round off her life of physical pleasure the same way, an eternal rest, the rest to end all temporary deaths at the height of orgasm. Perhaps the only person she really loves is her father. That’s may be why she plans to end her life on the fourth anniversary of the day her father dies, perhaps so that she may be joined with her father in a different world. But we really do not know. We only know that she kept her father’s shaver which she uses to shave her body hair. Whatever may be the true reason she chooses to die on that anniversary, her plans are interrupted by life: the life of the only living person she truly loves and cares for, her brother. She is redeemed by her affection for her brother. A macabre film.

In this film by Michael Rowe, the only thing we learn about this 25 year-old journalist Laura, played by Monica Carmen, is that she lives in Oaxaca, Mexico, has a mother and a brother. She does not appear to have any friends. All her life she never really has any love, only love making. She longs for the kind of love which she despairs to find. Is that may be why she allows Arturo to torture her and ends her life?

The HKIFF has begun for me last night! It began with a bang! I am not so sure I like the bang. It hit me. It dazed me. It puzzled me. It hit me with boredom. It dazed me with stupor. It puzzled me how easy one could pass for an author of a so-called “art film”.

As the film “The Ditch” (2010) opens, we see some people huddling on the ground of some yellow dirt. On screen right, there appears part of what looks like the side of a tent. Two figures approach. Then a third appears in the distance.The last figure was the director of a labour camp. The two newcomers were asked to go into a hole dug into the ground: a ditch, euphemised as “Dormitory No.8”. To the left was a row of a dozen beds with some yellow dust-covered quilts. To the right there was an opening serving probably to let in a bit of light and fresh air. Along one side of the dug-in mud wall we see some worn out looking wooden sideboards with hot water flasks and eating utensils. People moved about in silence, expressionless, with little interaction. We are then shown people sitting on their bed greedily slurping something up from a shallow metal soup bowl. Some workers moved in, approached one of the beds, wrapped something up, tied it with pieces of strings and bundled it out. It was a dead body. Outside, we are shown a row of people shovelling listlessly, without enthusiasm, without strength, at the side of what appeared a long ditch in the vast expanse of the Gobi Desert. Some one fell. Others tried to drag him up. He had no strength even to stand up. He was hauled upon higher ground to give him more air and probably left to die.

This goes on and on and on. We are shown more people dying, people scraping, struggling for every bit of food, eating seeds from what sparse vegetation there may be on the ground, an old man vomiting, another picking up the undigested seeds from the vomit on the ground and putting them into his own. Two of those inside that underground room got letters: their wives were divorcing them whilst in another corner, an illiterate old man was asking a literate one to help him write a letter home, asking them to send more food supplements. We are shown more scenes of bodies being bundled up and dragged out from the “ditch”, every morning and of people knowing that they are going to die and asking their friends to help them deal with their bodies after they go. One young man Lao Dong told another Xiao Li to hide his body at a corner in the hole for several days until his wife Gu arrives from Shanghai and for her to bury him but if Gu does not, then take him outside and bury him. The wife arrives, discovers him dead, cries in ear-piercing shrieks and wants to find his body, but not before she has given away in despair the biscuits she brought for her husband for those in the cell to share, then begs to be brought to where her husband is buried. Nobody knows. She begs again. Then she was told to go see the supervisor. She goes, sees a petty proletarian official, got a lecture on evil middle class rightist value from that keeper of the death register book because she demanded to know where her husband’s body was and swore not to leave until she did so. She returns to the cell and begs for more information. Nobody gives her any. She goes out all alone. She looks around. There were hundreds of earth mounds about. She digs one, two…. She does not find her husband, digs the dirt with her bare hands, covers up the corpses again when she finds a body other than her husband’s. Finally with information of her husband’s cell mates who initially were reluctant to let her know the horrible truth that later corpses were not buried but simply left piled up along the dust, she finds it. Her husband’s mates help her burn it with scraps of twigs and leaves, setting up a bon-fire amidst the wasteland.

The scenes depicted were those at Jiabiangou, one of the thousands set up during the Anti-Rightist movement following the “Let A Hundred Flower Bloom” movement launched after the spectacularly disastrous “Great Leap Forward” 1958-1961 in which Mao urged the Chinese people to do in one day what the West would take twenty years. In the “Hundred Flower Bloom” movement, later described by Mao as “luring the snakes from their den”, Chinese intellectuals were encouraged to voice their opinion on how the Socialist Revolution might go forward. The result was a flood of criticism more than the Chinese Communist Party could swallow.Those who honestly voiced their opinion were accused of having rightist bourgeois thinking , the equivalent of being accused of being a devil or a witch in Medieval Europe, and sent to so-called Labour Camps for “re-education”. Jiabiangou was one of them, in the middle of nowhere in the Gobi Desert. Some three thousand political prisoners were arrested and sent to the Jiabiangou Labour-Re-education Camp – which was only built to hold fifty inmates – in the middle of the Gobi Desert, more than 2,500 of whom either were starved to death or if not died of dysentery or simply exhaustion.

Partly inspired by Yang Xianhui’s novel Goodbye , The Ditch is said to recount the harrowing story of life at the labour camp. The co-maker, screenplay writer and director of the film ,Wang Bing devoted several years to interviewing survivors of the camp, who shared their devastating and chilling experiences. Because of unbearable hunger, prisoners were forced to forage for scraps of food: leaves, seeds, rats, even human vomits and feces and human flesh from dead bodies of other inmates, so severe was their hunger. As the film ends, one of the inmates was told to stay behind to help the camps’ director because the authorities knew that it was impossible for the current batch to do any useful work because they were rationed only 8 ounces of fluid food per day and had to be sent home by a train because the daily deaths was more than they could handle.

It was a film with potentially explosive emotional impact. But director Wang Bing chose to use a spare documentary style, without music, without story line, just bare, stark “reality”: the reality of hunger, death, despair in that darkest hour of Chinese history. Nothing is made of the stunning immensity of the Gobi Desert or its desolation. There was no plot, no explicit drama, no use of the camera through panning, close-ups or camera movements etc. The camera was static. So were the scenes depicted. There was no music. Nor any contrast between the silence of the dormitory of death and the howling cold winds of the Gobi Desert outside nor that between the spectacular sunrise or sunset of the desert outside and the murkiness of the dormitory of the dying within. Nothing stands out: a landscape of uniform boredom, unrelenting bleakness and unmitigated gloom. I find it particularly unendurable that the director subjected us to the non-stop shrieking of Gu for more than two minutes when she learned of her husband’s death. It was positively enervating and shows an utter lack of artistic sensitivity or restraint. Probably, the director never read LaoTzu. Others may like it. But for me, it’s a colossal flop. It is an artless “documentary” which passes itself off as a feature film or more likely its reverse. Perhaps, it was deliberately “artless” so as to enhance the sense of “verisimilitude”. I can understand Wong Bing’s dedication to unearth for us this now forgotten episode of Chinese history, he having spent three years tracking down and interviewing survivors and wardens of this forsaken corner of the Gobi Desert on what actually went on there but I suppose there are more interesting ways of doing so than merely “reproducing” what obviously is a “staged reality”. As it is, I find it as dry as the sands, as monotonous as the landscape and about as moving as the empty expanse of the vast Gobi Desert skies. But I do like that dramatic scene in which an old CCP party cadre who had served the Revolution since 1938 confronted the camp director. There should have been more scenes like that to create more dramatic conflict and emotional tension!

The Saturday sky was gloomy. I sought solace in something darker than the sky. I immersed myself in the complete darkness of a movie theatre. I found myself in a sunny California suburban home. Nicole Kidman was tending some flowers in her garden. She rejected her neighbor’s gingerly last-minute invitation just across the garden fence for another one of her neighbor’s cook out for her family and friends. She had to attend a support group meeting that evening.

It was a film adapted David Lindsay-Abaire from his own Pulitzer prize-winning Broadway play of the same name, directed by John Cameron Mitchell and starring Nicole Kidman as Becca Corbett, Aaron Eckhart as her husband Howie Corbett, Dianne Wiest as her mother Nat and Tammy Blanchard as her sister Izzy.

Them we are shown that Howie returns home from work to find his wife cooking something before the oven. He approaches her from behind and wishes to be intimate. She says she is not in the mood. The husband goes to a corner to sulk and was watching a black and white video on a small I-pad. We are next shown the couple attending a support group meeting in which a Latin couple was reminiscing how they missed their lost son after 8 years saying that perhaps God wanted him as an angel and took him. Becca bursts out saying that if God wanted an angel, he could certainly make one. Everybody was surprised. The Corbetts excused themselves and left. Becca never returned but Howie did.

We’re next shown Izzy coming to visit Becca. They chit chatted. It was obvious that Izzy was trying to pick up men at bars and later got into trouble in a brawl with another woman and Becca had to bail her out. She is unrepentant and said the other woman deserved her punches and later announced that she was pregnant. Becca brought her some clothes of Danny, the son of 4 she lost 8 months ago, saying that her sister could save several hundred dollars but Izzy said she was not sure if it was a boy. Nat said that it was likely that Izzy might have a girl. Nat left with the clothes she brought and threw them into a garbage dump. Becca sees a child on a supermarket trolley whining for a three dollar chocolate bar at a supermarket and the child’s mother resolutely refusing to let him have it. She couldn’t control herself and told the mother to make the child happy. To be expected, she was told to mind her own business but when challenged whether she had a child, she could no longer control herself and slapped the woman, stunned into instant silence.

Next we are shown Becca trailing a teenage boy in a school bus, followed him to a public library, and read the book he just returned. It was called Parallel Universe by Alan Guth, a physicist and cosmologist. She tried to go to Sotheby’s to meet old acquaintances but was told that all her old colleagues had gone. In the meantime, she continued to track the teenage boy and finally caught him playing truant. They got talking in a nearby park We learned that he was the driver of the car who knocked down her son Danny, whilst the latter was chasing their dog in the street. He admitted that he might have been driving a little too fast. She said she did not want to blame him and that it was just an accident. There were tears in their eyes in the silence.She learned that he was drawing a half finished comic about a parallel universe in which a father might meet his dead son in another universe through a “rabbit hole” in the universe or what some scientists called “worm holes” in the universe through which one may burrow down inside further and further until one emerges into another universe where the outcome of what actually happened on our earth might be regarded as only one of a number of possible alternative versions, rather like the rabbit holes of C. S Lewis’ Alice in Wonderland. He promised that when it was finished, he would show it to her.

In the meantime, we are shown that Howie also lost interest in the support group, took back the Danny’s dog from Nat’s house, was angry at it and then felt sorry that he was. It was obvious that the dog was the only living reminder of the Danny he lost. He began to take pot with another female member whose husband had left her and nearly had an affair with her but pulled back at the last minute when she was waiting for him at the doorsteps of her house. He returned home and found the boy just entering his house which he had finally decided to sell at the insistence of Becca, who did not wish to be further reminded of her losses. Howie was surprised, angry and suspicious how well it appeared they knew each other. Becca tried to explain that it was not what he thought and explained what the comic story was all about. He finally understood that that was Becca’s way of effecting the closure to the grief caused by the loss of their son. When the film ends, we are shown the couple sitting facing the spectators with her hand reaching for his, caressing it with an expression of silent tenderness.

It was a simple film of how different people cope with loss of their son. Howie needed external emotional support. Some people relied on God. Becca wanted to deal with it her own way, with anger, with finding out what caused Danny’s death and the personality of the person who killed her son. Her connection with Danny was paradoxically through understanding that killer whom she found to be just a talented high school senior about to enter Connecticut College to do astrophysics. There was a scene in which Nat and Becca was talking to each other as they were putting away the clothes and toys of Danny into the cellar of Becca’s house because once prospective buyers saw all those toys of Danny’s room and learned that he was dead, they instantly lost all further interest in buying their house. Nat said that when she lost her 29-year-old son Arthur, a drug addict, she felt that no matter how rotten he was, he was still her son and somehow he could never completely disappear from her mind but that with time, it became bearable and that her memories of him, might even at times be good, instead of being painful. It had become part of her life.

It was an excellent film. I like it that the director never overplayed anything: no moral preaching, no platitudes, no easy religious “solutions”, no excessive display of emotions. Everything quietly done, with all the normal anger, embarrassment, attachment to the memories, objects associated with lost ones, refusal to believe that he is gone, the occasional pangs, the desire to start afresh and the difficulties of doing so, the displacement of one’s anger on to people around them and even on to their mates, relatives and friends, the trivial marital tensions, the desire to escape into drugs, sports or to start new and hopefully more satisfying emotional relationships etc. and finally its resolution through acceptance understanding and love.

Nicole Kidman was excellent as Becca. She shows, the ostensible indifference, cool, occasional embarrassment, quiet pain etc so well she has been nominated for an Oscar as the best actress for her role in this film. Dianne Wiest is equally good as her mother: the anxiety not to offend and yet motherly understanding of the pains of her daughter etc. It proves once again what a good script can do with some good acting. A well spent one hour and 32 minutes!

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