Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) lives a simple life with his wife Akie and daughter Hotaru. One day a man from Toshi's past, Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano) arrives and Toshio lets him live with the family and work for them. It's clear that Toshio's reasons for letting Yasaka in are anything but altruistic, as they have a past together. Soon, Yasaka becomes entrenched in the family structure.
Harmonium deconstructs the family through Yasaka's presence, physical or not, in Toshio and his family's lives, addressing issues of parenting and poor communication between spouses, as well as the Japanese notions of obligation towards peers. Fukada's film is crafted with clinical precision; he holds back from being melodramatic and creates a feeling of tranquility that belies the pitch black darkness underneath the surface..The sensibility feels European, with echoes of Bresson and the like within the film's frames.
Fukada decides to clothe Yasaka in pure white - perhaps a reference to something Akie says earlier in the movie to the effect of "sinners are more beloved by God." It gives Yasaka an almost supernatural look especially when contrasted with other characters in the frame. And when Yasaka transforms visually, you know something has gone terribly wrong.
Harmonium is a devastating film. It gives no easy answers to its questions, but it is cinema done extremely well. It serves as an effective cinematic observation of atonement and guilt.
By the way, the previous post, this post and the post after this one will have reviews of films from the 41st edition of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. These will include acclaimed films that have been screened at other festivals like Cannes, Venice and Toronto. There are also a small number of Filipino films on the lineup, including Brillante Mendoza's Ma'Rosa, Lav Diaz's Ang Babaeng Humayo and a three film retrospective program featuring Mike De Leon.
Without further ado...
Raoul Peck's Academy Award-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, expands upon the manuscript of social activist James Baldwin, applying his words to the state of racism in today's America.
The documentary is part stream of consciousness, part memoir. Baldwin (voiced by Samuel Jackson) gives his own ideas on the nature of race and racism in America, and the film contrass his beliefs with the two other civil rights contemporaries - Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, each with their own ideas on how to tackle the issues of the day. At times the ideas feel too freeform, too much like Jazz, making the film shapeless.
Interestingly, the film examines through Baldwin's words the history of black people in film culture, from the early times when blackface was commonplace, to the sixties and seventies, when people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were sex symbols, even though nobody would have admitted it at the time.
Baldwin examines the anger from both sides; he surmises that the black man's anger stems from rage from years of oppression, while the white man's anger stems from fear, the fear of a boogeyman that , in Baldwin's words, 'only exists in his head.'
I Am Not Your Negro may feel formless, but its individual images are powerful, its truth, disturbing.
With last post's The War Show focusing on Syria, let's move to Egypt this time for Mohamed Diab's Clash, which was screened as part of Cannes' Un Certain Regard category.
The film takes place in the background of violent 2013 protests that led to the removal of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. Morsi himself had replaced ousted president Hosni Mubarak during the 2011 Arab Spring, the events of which are detailed in the 2011 documentary Al-Midan (The Square.) Morsi's removal led to a clash between supporters of the Muslim brotherhood (Morsi's party) and supporters of the police and military that removed him.
The movie takes place over the course of one day, within the cramped insides of a police riot truck. Several people from both the side of the Muslim Brotherhood and the pro-military forces are detained by the police.
Diab uses the claustrophobic setting to create tension, using tight frames to make you feel the discomfort the characters feel. Although the film adds sidestories to develop its characters, these subplots are seldom unnecessary.
The film remains neutral, depicting neither side being more evil or good than the other. Diab molds his characters into a reflection of Egyptian society: rich, poor, religious, secular, Muslim, Christian. Had affiliations not mattered, there would be no reason not to believe these people could be friends.
The most powerful scene of the movie - and perhaps its most tragic - is a moment of respite just before the film's climax, where we are reminded that some of these people participated in the 2011 Arab Spring Protests. We see, just for an instant, the optimism and hope from that time. And just as quickly we are returned to the present time, where Egypt is now deeply divided, one of the dark legacies of the Arab Spring.
Citizen Jane: Battle For the City is a documentary about the life of Jane Jacobs. You may not know her, but her ideas on urban planning continue to influence how people build the spaces we live in.
Citizen Jane plays it like a David vs. Goliath story, pitting her against the New York City government and Robert Moses, one of the most well known and infuential city planners of his time. Jacobs' planning philosophy centered on the people rather than the infrastructure, where cities are planned with breathing space and social interactions in mind.
The film itself is quite entertaining, and Jacobs herself is quite the character. Jacobs' philosophies are also compared to the state of cities today - the rise and fall of the housing projects guided by th philosophies of Moses and his ilk, and the increasing number of high rise monoliths in developing countries like China.
It's all interesting stuff, and it has gotten me to start reading Jacobs' work and counterarguments to her ideas.
Black Code, a documentary by Nicholas de Pencier, reads like a science fiction or cyberpunk novel - cyber espionage, an information war waged by world governments, spying on citizens without their consent. But it's all real: the docu is based on academic Ronald Deibert's novel of the same name.
Black Code takes us around the world, where individuals are harassed, tortured and even killed because of what they said on the internet or because they fought against or criticized the government through the net.
The locales are varied: news outfits for the rebellion in war torn Syria; live streaming protests in Rio de Janeiro, monks in exile in Dharamsala; women's rights activists in Pakistan. All of the stories are unique and compelling in their own way. Togethr, they paint a picture of a world that is in a state of flux, as we enter a new age of information distribution.
The content is chilling, and one can only wonder where it can go from here. As governments slowly catch on to the ramifications of this new age of information, the film leaves it to us to be vigilant, to keep our rights to privacy and free speech protected as much as we can.
No comments:
Post a Comment