CINDERELLAS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE: THE PRETTIEST GIRL AT THE BALL

There's no inherent reason to compare a Korean horror film and an Australian feminist parable, but throughout the entirety of 2006's Cinderella, from director Bong Man-dae and screenwriter Son Kwang-soo, I couldn't keep myself from thinking about Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty from 2011 (whether I'd have made the same connections if I'd seen the films in chronological order, I leave as an exercise for some alternate universe incarnation of this blog). Both take key stories from Western European folklore and bend them until you can only see certain vague elements left in place, which are used to explore the way that folklore and contemporary media alike construct an idea of appropriate female behavior. Sleeping Beauty is, ultimately, an academic piece, while Cinderella is, ultimately, a genre film, and this difference speaks to the enormously different way that one watches them; but it's no secret that genre films have a special privilege to act as social commentary.

Regardless, Cinderella's appropriation of dribs and drabs from Charles Perrault's fairy tale is, for a very long time, almost totally invisible. Almost all of the most interesting and distinguishing elements of the film, in fact, start to show up in the last third, and I shall do my very best to indicate them without going full-on into spoilers, but the sensitive might want to have their parachutes ready to go; I'll let you know when to jump out of the review.

First and most visible of the film's tweaks to the basic formula is that our evident Cinderella and her mother are related by blood, and have what appears to be a splendid relationship. Hyeon-su (Shin Se-kyung) is a high school student, the beloved only daughter of Joon-hee (Do Ji-won), a well-known plastic surgeon. She's also cornered a perhaps ethically dubious market: the film doesn't really clarify the point, but Joon-hee's habit of working on her daughter's school friends feels a bit fucked-up on face of it. The girls, obsessed with finding ever more incremental ways of making themselves look prettier and prettier, don't seem to find anything wrong with it, and if anything, it appears to help with Hyeon-su's popularity among her peers. And at this point, I shall allow that the "seems" and"appears" aren't my way of being coy, but the film's way of being a bit foggy in execution. Structurally - especially once we get to the twists - Cinderella is something like a slasher film, and that goes to include the rather wan characterisation of everybody outside of the innermost circle of characters. In the early going, the movie is longer on cryptic mood than on narrative clarity, and when it starts to tilt in the other direction, there's not the foundation for it. And thus, instead of an ensemble, Cinderella has "that mass of girls who are friendly with Hyeon-su in some capacity".

The cryptic mood is awfully lovely, though. Quite without forewarning or explanation, the movie dives into random paranormal activity: Hyeon-su, carving a clay bust of Su-kyoung (Yoo Da-in), her friend who has just gone under Joon-hee's knife, accidentally slices the knife across the sculpture's cheek, and within seconds, Su-kyoung is bleeding from a nasty gash in the same place that simply appeared from nowhere. We're off the races from there, as the girls are visited by an apparent ghost in the form of - you'll never believe this - a pale girl with long black hair. And horrible things start happening to any of Hyeon-su's acquaintances who've had work done.

There are quite a few individually striking moments generously scattered all throughout Cinderella: the clay sculpting scene, a sequence in which a child is not quite murdered through suffocation, a face-painting party gone severely awry. Bong's ability to marry sickening horror imagery with a gauzy, damn near fantasy-like sense of mystery is utterly admirable. Where things fall apart is, well, where things come together: though more of its component parts are effective than otherwise, the film doesn't succeed in bringing all of those components into a cohesive whole. Cinderella ends up feeling like a collection of horrifying anecdotes centered on the idea of plastic surgery, rather than a fluid movie. The story is underdeveloped, and neither the director nor his game leads - both Shin and Do are quite effective, the latter brilliantly combining unfathomably cruelty with a genuinely tragic layer of maternal tenderness - do much to compensate for it.

But eventually, the film runs out the clock on trying to be crafty, and just about halfway through, we finally learn what's going on, kind of, in the form of a huge, inelegant backstory dump. And here's where the morbidly spoilerphobic must take their leave, though I shall do my level best to speak in vagaries.

Unlike the vast majority of contemporary horror and especially contemporary ghost stories, Cinderella becomes vastly more interesting and effective when it starts to explain things. It is, for one thing, only at this point that the grotesque irony of the title announces itself in all its glory, and we understand the film's critiques of the beauty industry and the individual women who would sacrifice anything for physical attractiveness; and also, on a more elemental level, it's here that the film finally indulges in the mythic angle of familial depravity that the phrase "a horror film version of Cinderella" implied from the beginning. The shocks, even the ones that we've more more or less figured out, hit hard, revealing a depth of nastiness in the characters and the society that supports them that's hard to prepare for, and the slow scare scenes, gratifyingly replacing the more generic jumps and jolts of the film to that point, are the best kind of inexorable. Despite the potential for elaborate, frequent gore effects, Bong holds off for maximum effectiveness as a punctuation mark, instead of a gross-out twist. Everything contributes to a bafflement of sympathy and identification; the implication of the final sequence unnervingly suggests that it's possible for someone to be so broken by emotional malnourishment that suicide in order to become a restless ghost could seem like a great bargain, since it allows for the paranormal toolkit to get revenge on everyone who has wronged you. This is not a film in which being wronged makes one victim, but just a different kind of aggressor.

As intriguing as Cinderella turns out to be in the end, I can't claim that even in its absolute best moments, it's an especially terrific example of Asian horror. The flip-side is that there's nothing that it does which makes it worse than the average of its genre; it's solid horror filmmaking that's not particularly inspired and could easily be trimmed into something that gets through its middle a little faster. It's very much the kind of movie that's best appreciated by people who've already liked things very similar to it, and I would not like to think of it as anybody's first experience with K-horror; but it's definitely got more than a little to recommend it to genre habitués.

Read More

BITTERSWEET SYMPHONY

A review requested by Andrew Milne, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Throughout his career, director Kim Jee-woon has been an unapologetic generic magpie, unified only in that whether he's making a psycho-thriller like A Tale of Two Sisters, an absurdist Western like The Good, the Bad, the Weird, or even an American-made action film that fumblingly tries to serve as a comeback vehicle for a retired star, like The Last Stand, he's always primarily making character dramas. The generic elements inform the way that psychological arcs develop, but they are never more important than the basic, driving question: who are these characters, and why do they make the decisions they do?

And on those grounds, it might even be the case that A Bittersweet Life, Kim's 2005 follow-up to his big breakthrough A Tale of Two Sisters, is the director's masterpiece. It's mostly a standard-issue revenge thriller set in the world of Korean gangsters, which is hardly a slight: for something so tawdry on paper, the Korean revenge thriller genre has produced a remarkable number of genuinely great films. But that also means it's easy to think you know what's going on with it, and that's not the case. Sure, the basic story about mob enforcer Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) ending up on the wrong side of both opposing factions in a gangster war when he decides to commit an act of mercy in the name of love, proceeds much as it ought to, and even its plot twists seem "right" for it, without any dumbfounding shocks. But it is also far more about what's happening inside Sun-woo's head as this brutally efficient criminal finds himself nudged away from his own life long enough to see it from outside, and finds that it is not making him a terribly happy person. It is, you might even say, making him bittersweet, though you probably shouldn't and neither should I, since the actual Korean title translates more simply as "The Sweet Life". And is thus ironic instead of moody.

There'll be time enough to dig into that, so let me first clarify that A Bittersweet Life is still, chiefly, an action thriller in its design, and for entire scenes that's the mode that dominates. So it's a good thing that it's also an extremely good action thriller, with some absolutely tremendous sequences littered here and there, and the best saved for last. The director and his cinematographer, Kim Ji-yong, employ a very fluid, loose, lithe style of camera movement that tends to glide along with the action and accentuate the movement and impact of it, without turning into John Woo-esque ballets of violence. In fact, the film maintains one steady foothold in a realistic aesthetic that's grounded far beyond the ordinary standards of most action films - or most Korean genre cinema that I know of, frankly. It is, somehow, both shiny and grainy at the same time, full of strong lighting and fully saturated colors that have unnerving presence and authenticity. The texture of the film's innards is profoundly real and tangible, which gives its burly attention to its violent outbursts an added weight. It's not necessarily the case that the action itself is more exciting as a result; but it certainly ends up feeling more tightly knitted to the film's psychological intentions. Sun-woo, living in a more realistic world, is affected more realistically by the brutal actions he witnesses and perpetrates.

Which really is what it always comes down to. It would be giving the film too much credit to compare it to the best of Jean-Pierre Melville, but that's very much the territory that Kim is mining: a man is sick of himself and his world, and the film has a kind of hyper-present presentation of that world. For Melville, this tended towards glossy ennui; for A Bittersweet Life, it's more like a series of increasingly enervating adrenaline rushes, leaving the movie feeling a bit more worn and tattered every time. And, of course, leaving Sun-woo feeling worn. There's much that's great about the movie, but it's hard to imagine it having quite the same impact without Lee in the lead role; there are layers and layers that keep shifting their orders in his performance, sometimes an angry, hard killer; sometimes a sad romantic, sometimes a noble soul trying his best to be brave and moral and even, in the most unexpected places, optimistic. It's immaculately rounded and not at all stuck in the basic track of honor and tension that animates even the best gangster movie performances, though those things are present. Given the film's hoary inciting incident, the old "a beautiful woman melt's the thug's heart" sequence that absolutely wins no points for imagination or subtlety, I might even go so far as to say that the film's ability to feel human and not dimwitted and corny relies solely on Lee's ability to sell Sun-woo as a closet romantic, and make it clear just what an impact, down to his very core, this one woman has on him, and do those things without making a play for us to sympathise with him as a romantic lead. Basically, he has to underplay everything while expressing some very subtle, non-verbal cues as to how his character is re-evaluating himself because he fell in love - I'm honestly not even sure how that works, and yet Lee does it like it's no big deal at all.

Compared to the best of its genre from around the same time - these were the years of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, and Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, which between them set the bar inordinately high for Korean crime thrillers in the mid-'00s - it would be difficult to argue that A Bittersweet Life is necessarily one of the best out there, either stylistically (it is handsome, but in a somewhat conventional way), nor narratively (it focuses on unusual and enlightening aspects of broadly generic story elements). But it might very well be the case that Sun-woo is the most interesting character, and Lee's the most complex performance, to be found in any even superficially similar film of that generation. It's enough to give the film a clear personality and totally unique perspective that help it to stand out even in an crowded field of largely impressive thrillers. The worst things about it are still awfully solid, and the best things are deep and probing far beyond what you'd ever naturally expect from a film of this model, and it's quite a special treat because of it.

Read More

DRIVING THAT TRAIN

Snowpiercer is the absolute best thing.

Okay, so Snowpiercer isn't literally the absolute best, obviously, but it's the kind of film which exists on a plain of such energy and madness that it inspires such an all-in response even if it's stupid. Incidentally, the last movie I saw that made me feel the same "that's the absolute best thing" impulse, for mostly the same reasons, even though I knew that it of course wasn't the best, or even close to the best, was Cloud Atlas. So my take on the film should probably be taken with a hefty ol' grain of salt.

Basically, Snowpiercer is a great, giddy mess of a film, one that picks up as many ideas as it can manage to hold and runs with them as far and fast as it can until it completely blows out. It's the most blunt, anti-nuanced allegory that cinema has produced in years (allegories not being terribly much in fashion at the moment), and its commitment that allegory is so complete that for whatever failures of logic and storytelling structure the movie evinces - and there are failures on both fronts - it's really hard to argue that it ever wanted to succeed as a conventional piece of storytelling anyway. Which has nothing to do with anything, but when one bumps around on the internet and encounters the people raising issues about how the tracks were built, or whatever, one starts to get intensely crabby, in the "were you even slightly interested in actually watching the movie?" sense.

So anyway, Snowpiercer, which I don't think is actually the given name of the train which features so prominently in the plot, but we can still pretty clearly refer to the train as being the titular character, even so. The film sets out its backstory with such intense economy of language and image that I think it would be hard to blame somebody for not catching it: in 2014, an experiment to counteract global warming goes terribly wrong, and the entire surface of Earth is plunged into unlivable, demonic cold. All the remains of humanity is gathered on that train, going around the entire world in an endless loop, and the history of why this is so is doled out piecemeal throughout the film. The passengers are segmented in a rigid caste system: the closer to the back, the more of a nobody you are, and of course the train's engineer Wilford, in the very first car with the engine itself, is the biggest somebody of all, more a god than a human from the way people talking about it. In 2031, there comes a point at which 34-year-old Curtis Everette (Chris Evans) has gotten too sick of the miserable life of people in the far back, and so, encouraged by the cryptic messages received by the wily old Gilliam (John Hurt), Curtis and several of the other strongest members of their car begin a full-scale rebellion, pushing their way along the train, car by car, hunting for Wilford and the children that he stole away from them for God knows what reason.

I doubt very much that it's even possible to have such a lack of imagination that you can't see what this is all about: it's a parable of the 99% against the 1%, with several characters filling in as symbols for particular aspects of that conflict. More overtly and consistently Marxist movies have existed, but you have to go all the way back to Europe in the 1970s to find them. The huge difference between Snowpiercer and e.g. The Working Class Goes to Heaven is that Snowpiercer eschews anything that resembles even the most distorted version of realism. It is first and always a heightened genre film - and more specifically, a South Korean genre film, albeit one which is at least 90% in English and stars Captain America in the lead role. But Korean it is, and you don't need to have seen too many Korean films to understand what that implies in terms of the movie's kinetic energy, whiplash tonal shifts, and commitment to its own weird internal logic no matter how much that logic might start to feel like a liability in the immensely peculiar last act (which, after much reflection, I have decided to like).

So basically, we have here yet another Bong Joon-ho picture; the director's fifth feature and first project since 2009's Mother (which I think is still his best movie, which might really just mean that it's his most consistent), his first in English, and his first with American and British movie stars: Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Allison Pill (in a fucking magnificent one-scene performance) and Tilda Swinton are also in the cast. Though Song Kang-ho and Ko Ah-sung are on-hand to play father and daughter (as they did in the director's 2006 Western breakthrough, The Host), a drugged-out lock-picker and drugged-out psychic, respectively, and it would be a lie to say that the film doesn't seem at least a little bit more comfortable when it's focused on them than when it's focused on anybody else.

But anyway, as I was saying: Bong Joon-ho. There's a certain "let's fucking go for it" energy to every one of his projects that I have seen, and none have ever been so ludicrous ebullient as this. Though it's the director's first adapted project - based on a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette - it fits smoothly into the rest of his career, or at least as smoothly as anything could fit into a stream of films defined mostly by their oblique angles and refusal to fit into clear, pre-ordained shapes. The film is equal parts left-wing agitprop, live-action cartoon (Swinton's high-wire performance as a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Margaret Dumont, done up as a secular religious extremist, is one of the most transfixing things I have ever seen that most transfixing of actresses do; not necessarily because it is as-such "good acting", but because it holds absolutely nothing back, and serves to foreshadow the tonal developments of the second half in a way I fully approve of), balletic action film, and grand tour of Ondřej Nekvasil's outstanding production design, which feels like a Felliniesque romp through individually magical shadowboxes that all come from a completely different place, mixed the smooth lines of futurism, and always so linear and cramped that we never, ever forget that this all takes place on a train.

Not all of these things work all the time, and not all of them are as good as others: for all the obvious love and care that went into the film's big night-vision goggles fight showcase, there's no denying that the film suffers for coming out (in the States, anyway), the same year as the exhaustively inventive martial arts epic The Raid 2: Berendal. And while I do not agree with the criticism, I can't really argue against the complaint that the film goes from not making sense with brio and momentum, to not making sense in a kind of jerry-rigged, emotionally unsatisfying fashion (though I do think that Evans - a revelation here, even after the increasing soulfulness and complexity of his big-ass Marvel movie performances - helps to keep things hanging together through his responses to what happens, and as long as we stick with his perspective instead of trying to adopt some kind of third-person objectivity, I think the climactic revelations all flow reasonably well).

But the thing is, even if its failure were far more manifest and undeniable, Snowpiercer has a level of ambition that is simple not present in the vast majority of films, certainly not the vast majority of films that occupy the same generic territory. It has a level of visual creativity and thematic ambition and performative eccentricity that are much, much too rare, and even when it's not working in the worst way, it still felt more alive and vital than the bulk of movies are even in their best moments. Every moment of genius and every half-formed lump alike make this one of the completely essential films of the year.

9/10

Read More

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2013: MOTHER AND CHILD REUNION

Ever since it won the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, Kim Ki-duk's Pieta has divided its audiences into "fucking brilliant!" or "fucking garbage!" camps just as harshly and brutally as its protagonist acts when he beats delinquent debtors into crippledom. And we now understand, at least in the abstract, where that sharp divide in the audience first comes from.

There's no way around it: this is an intensely violent, and frequently quite unpleasant film. I think that's something that defenders and detractors alike - and let's go ahead and clarify, I count myself a defender - have to agree on; the only difference opinion is not whether Pieta is a grueling experience, but whether that experience ends up building to something. I believe it does; Kim has worn a lot of hats in his directorial career, including that of provocateur, but for all its closely-observed nastiness, Pieta is about more than just human viciousness. The very title already tells us what the assumed point of the suffering is: transfiguration through sorrow. In other words, if the film doesn't grind us into a damp little smear to begin with, how can it ever give us the release of seeing the beauty of pity and forgiveness (and we should note that beyond the religious/artistic connotation, "pietà" is etymologically linked to "pity" - and to "piety", though that word doesn't obviously apply to this film)?

The figure so much in need of pity, both receiving it and giving it back to the world - is Kang-do (Lee Jung-lin), a thug in the employee of some loan sharks. His job consists of approaching those unable to pay off their debts with an offer: if you'll let me beat you until you become permanently crippled, I'll take the social assistance insurance you'll get for your newfound physical limitations, and we'll call it square. Sometimes he goes too far, and the victim ends up dead; sometimes he goes even farther, and the victim is alive in such a devastated emotional state that physical death would be a glossy bit of fun in comparison. It's one such man that we meet as the film opens: having lost the use of his legs, he wraps a chain around his neck in an industrial garage of some sort, he presses a button that begins winching the chain up, and it slowly pulls him from his wheelchair, strangling him with great deliberateness, though in a remarkable moment of restraint, Kim elects to focus on his feet during this process, and not his face. This moment is immediately followed with a context-free scene of Kang-do humping a pillow to orgasm in his solitary apartment, and while the film wins negative subtlety points for this one, it's at least true that this kind of one-two equivalence of hideous death and erotic excitement is the kind of thing you don't forget in a day or a week.

Into Kang-do's completely horrible but self-satisfied life - and not till after a good long sequence depicting in candid but not gore-hungry detail the sort of stuff he gets up to every day at work - comes Mi-sun (Jo Min-su), a middle-aged woman identifying herself as his mother, gone these thirty years since he was the tiniest scrap of a babe. This shakes things up for the mobster considerably; instead of the psychopathic cool be brings to all his jobs, he feels something that starts out looking like genuine, venomous rage for his mother. And this first truly explosive emotion triggers the shift that Mi-sun's steady, dogged presence will encourage throughout all the rest of the film: the development of empathy and guilt, and the realisation that he has destroyed so many lives over the years that atonement isn't even an applicable concept anymore.

Speaking entirely for myself, I find that the ends justify the means in this case, and that all the ickiness of the film is completely paid for by the delicacy with which Kang-do's inner journey (which is less hackneyed than a synopsis makes it sound) is carried out by the director and his two profoundly gifted actors, captured so frequently by Cho Yeong-jik's camera in icon-like close-ups. Maybe not all the ickiness. The big showcase scene of self-mutilation that has been central to so much debate can probably be justified if we take the film's forthright religious imagery at face value; it's not the grossest reference to transubstantiation ever filmed. But the incestuous clinches found elsewhere don't seem to serve much of a purpose that I can detect, besides making sure we're totally confused and creeped-out by Mi-sun. Arguably, the plot needs that to happen, but there are other, less garish ways of putting it across.

That being the case, just about everything else in the whole movie pretty much landed, as far as I'm concerned, sometimes with unexpected grace: there's a twist near the end that ought to trivialise the whole affair, and turn into nothing but a grim wallow in all the ways that cycles of violence destroy us all; instead, it's played in a way that turns into something much weirder and unreal, neatly inverting the mood that the entire film has established (prior to the ending, it's been so realist that it's downright grubby). It finds a register of spirituality that ends up making this long nasty slog uplifting, in its way: despite the complete absence of anything like a happy ending, it's an ending that suggests that we live in a moral universe where true atonement and contrition are recognised and appreciated. Not exactly the way to wrap up a crowd-pleaser, but in the context of the film, it works; I can absolutely see where the abrupt shift of registers from extreme violence to impressionistic religiosity could lose a viewer, and see even more why someone would have given up on the film long before that point. But to me, this is a film about finding a glimpse of hope and grace at the end of a long run of misery and evil, and I can't think of much that's more moving than that.

8/10

Read More