24 Frames per Century is part tribute to Jean Luc Godard's Le Mepris (1963). While that film tried to wrestle with the transition between the classical and modernist eras of cinema, this film, tackles the modern and the postmodern eras, and beyond. There's a particular kind of optimism that it espouses, that in the future, films may be experienced in different ways, perhaps even in the palm of one's hand. Time will only tell when the reel will be changed anew.
Mad Ladders juxtaposes two manifestations of fervent belief; the fanaticism of fundamentalist cults and the capitalistic idolatry made evident in contemporary pop culture. Both seem different, but are tied together closer than is apparent.
Indefinite Pitch, with its monologue about silent films and reality and New Hampshire, feels disjointed and alien. It makes sense only if you engage in the clever intellectual exercise it tries to get you to join, but it made me feel strangely cold.
***
Dantza is tone poem, musical, cultural exhibit and dance film all in one. It perhaps requires more background on the cultural context behind its dances and music (all from a certain region of Spain), but even without the context it is a mesmerizing experience.
Macau in transition serves as the backdrop of Tracy Choi's 2016 film Sisterhood. It tells the story of two women - Sei and Ling, who befriend each other while working at one of Macau's many massage parlors. Years pass after their friendship is forever changed by a single event. Sei, now a middle-aged wife based in Taiwan, learns that Ling has tragically passed away.
While one country breaks free of its colonial roots into a hazy, uncertain future, the women of this film create their own spaces, with the presence of men pushed to the periphery. In the process of creating that space, Sei and Ling form a bond that neither can articulate, a bond undefined and unnamed, a bond that feels out of place in a society still bound to colonial and societal traditions.
The film's third act feels a bit rushed, but the melodramatic payoffs prove more than effective nevertheless - reducing this reviewer to a blubbering mess on more than one occasion.
Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy sees the Thai director veer deep into experimental territory and explorations of form. The entire film is structured after a stream of tweets from twitter user @marylony. At one level, we see how strange social media storytelling can be - stripped of all context, tweets strung together sound like soundbites and snippets of a nonsensical story. Instead of trying to mold those tweets into some sort of sense, Nawapol leans into that absurdity, often taking these snippets and soundbites literally while writing his script, reverse-engineering a story out of tweets that have different contexts entirely.
And yet, something magical happens as the film goes on, as Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy transforms into a surprisingly poignant meditation on loneliness and mental health, as it depicts the helplessness we sometimes feel when we lose control over our own lives. It serves as an astonishing portrait of uncertainty and youth served in a contemporary package, its themes unraveling like a sculpture that only reveals its true form once you step back and see the whole thing.
Daigo Matsui's follow up to 2016's Haruko Azumi is Missing (aka Japanese Girls Never Die) is formally inventive, far more personal and a bit more optimistic than its predecessor. A youth theater troupe is commissioned to perform a version of Simon Stephens' play Morning, but the play is canceled before it even gets a chance to be staged, leading to the actors rehearsing the play anyway. One would think that the movie would match the depressing tone of Stephens' play, about the youth committing casual, horrible acts. But Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops feels like a rebuttal to that play, one filled with anxiety, yes, but also unbridled hope.
Shot in one take, the film follows these young actors as they try to prepare for a play that will never get shown. To further blur reality and fiction, their real names and the names of their characters in both the movie and the play within the movie are all the same. The aspect ratio changes as the film shifts from rehearsal to real life, but sometimes even that distinction makes it hard to tell which is which. And that formal experimentation works - the scenes play out like a distant memory, half-remembered, of disjoined sights and smells (like in the film's title), of memories of friends and colleagues that have perhaps moved on to other things.
The film's mantra, spoken repeatedly near the end, is "we are the cosmos made conscious." As it refers to the youth at large, it is both elegant and riddled with paradoxes - pointing both to the insignificance of our lives compared to the vastness of the world, and the unique place we have in it despite that smallness.
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