How does one dissect chaos? When I look at crimes committed by lone perpetrators, there are times when I cannot fathom the reasons behind their outrageous acts. The titular character of Hirobumi Watanabe's Poolside Man is one such cipher. He is literally wordless as he does not speak a single line, and he barely reacts to the people around him.
The film uses the apparent repetition of shots to create a sense of habit as the Poolside Man goes about a daily routine that almost never breaks. Yet the shots are slightly different - as one realizes that these sequences take place during different days. The first runthrough establishes the contents of the habit; the second establishes its nature as a routine. This extended setup takes more than half of the running time, and can be a challenging watch.
Within its black and white frames, our character becomes a blank slate onto which the rest of the world is imprinted. News reports of terrorist attacks saturate his day, yet when juxtaposed with the mundaneness of his daily life, the horrible news feels remote. We see the Poolside Man go to daily screenings of films that involve war and chaos, yet we do not see the movie itself - we only hear the sounds of gunfire and death. The tediousness of this first half serves a purpose, creating the film's initial sense of emptiness, the title character defined by his ennui.
The repetition breaks when his mundane world is interrupted by a coworker who joins him when he is assigned to a different pool. By this time, the film is almost done, and that's probably my biggest problem with the film: it's too overlong, too tedious, stretching out everything so much that by the end my ennui matched the Poolside Man's. The film concludes with a number of striking images, but the character arc of the Poolside Man doesn't exactly pay off or pull through with the momentum it had been building for almost two hours.
Poolside Man is a film that takes its viewers on a ride to nowhere. While I liked its general structure and experimental feel, it didn't lead to anything profound or meaningful in the end.
While probably a relative unknown here in the Philippines, Lee Jung-seob is one of Korea's greatest and most legendary modern painters. The documentary A Painter's View examines his life as he wanders South Korea during the aftermath of the Korean war, separated from his wife and two children.
Lee's art pervades the short 66 minute film. During the postwar period he drew on anything he could - foil cigarette wrappers, exam papers, scrap - works that are now featured in New York's Museum of Modern art.
He sent postcards to his wife, who had opted to stay in Japan, and these postcards were filled with scribbles and cartoony drawings. These postcards and the words that sometimes accompanied them are heartfelt and sincere.
Lee's life is mostly told mostly through narration, rarely through interviews and sometimes through reenactments. While some of the scenes are indeed fascinating, for the most part it's a standard documentary. Lee died alone and penniless in the 50's, but his works have since gone on to received critical praise, with Lee's style helping create a modern art aesthetic that Koreans can proudly call their own.
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