Jakarta int'l film festival showcases new Asian cinema

By Dini Djalal

JAKARTA (JP): Before bankruptcies swept through Asia in the last years of the 20th century, the millennium was going to be called the Pacific Century.

That judgment has been reconsidered. Yet if the spate of Asian films shown at JiFFest this year is any indication of a renaissance -- economically, politically, culturally -- the so- called Far East may be rising after all.

The majority of films under the festival's "New Asian Cinema" category are, without overstatement, sublime. They are visually beautiful, emotionally touching, and unexpectedly optimistic. Like cheerleaders, the directors whisper to Asians struggling with poverty and urban alienation: move forward, accept no defeat, retain your dignity.

Some of these directors are no stranger to praise. Zhang Yimou's best films -- Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live, all starring his former muse Gong Li - are regarded internationally, not only in Asia, as modern masterpieces.

Not One Less is familiar territory for Zhang. A sensitive portrait of the ordinary tribulations of a remote mountain village, the film won for this revered cinematographer yet another Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival. Along with Singapore's Eating Air and Thailand's Nang Nak, Not One Less was shown on the festival's first day.

If you missed those showings, don't miss the other glimpses of China's cinematic ascendancy. Director Zhang Yuan, whose work is familiar to MTV audiences, is a candidate for Zhang Yimou's mantle. He too has an honest eye, and Crazy English highlights his gritty, direct approach.

The documentary follows motivational speaker Li Yang as he galvanizes crowds from the Forbidden City to the Great Wall; the final product is a hilarious piece of reality theater.

Seventeen Years, shot in a 100-year-old prison, is as sober, and won Zhang the Best Director prize at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. Inspired by a real-life story of a young girl who unintentionally kills her stepsister, the tale is a poignant portrait of redemption.

Shower, by fellow music-video veteran Zhang Yang, is also an elegy to atonement. Shower is arguably the feel-good movie of the year; rarely have I heard audiences laugh so generously, as they did at the festival's premiere.

Perhaps MTV helped polish sense of humor of these directors; it certainly improved their editing and framing skills. Every carefully sketched scene in Shower has a purpose. There are no extraneous moments, no pretentious quips, no unnecessary fancy shots. Make no mistake, this is a beautiful movie: beautifully filmed, beautifully acted, beautifully structured. But it is a lesson in simplicity. Avant-garde cinematographers who see this film may be shamed into reconsidering their techniques.

Scriptwriters should take note too. The plotline -- revolving around a father and his two sons -- is so delicately presented that one remembers not the names of the characters, but their sanguine faces and singular voices. Like his retarded brother Erming, the eldest son, a businessman who left Beijing to make his fortune in southern China, barely speaks at all.

Together they communicate with their father, the aging master of a bath-house, in delicate but awkward gestures -- much like the way a modernizing society tries to relate to its heritage. Urban dwellers around the world are familiar with the tug-of-war between the traditional and the modern, but the dilemma is often condescendingly painted as a hostile, zero-sum game. Shower forsakes a black-and-white depiction for, quite fittingly for an Asian production, a multihued portrait of compromise and congruence.

For example, when the yuppie son buys his father a contraption which essentially would make his livelihood obsolete, the father revels rather than scorns the apparatus. And when the father reprimands some local mafioso harassing a deadbeat-debtor in his bath-house, the gangsters respect his authority. Even when so- called progress wins, tradition can -- and does -- continue too. Buildings are built and bulldozed, as are fortunes, but families and friendships survive. Life goes on, bridging the past with the future. If you're feeling depressed about the future of humanity, go see Shower - you'll be skipping all the way back home.

Three Seasons, by 26 year-old director Tony Bui, is less buoyant, but no less exquisite. If Shower is a giggly teenager, Three Seasons is the moody, introverted sibling. It is the first American film shot in Vietnam since the war and it features Vietnamese actors. The story weaves its threads around four characters crossing each other's paths while forging their own journeys. Her long hair trailing over her modest dress, lotus- picker Kien An harks back to the days of yore. Rickshaw driver Hai, weary with urban hardship, gets misty-eyed about the past too, yet he nevertheless falls for a miniskirted prostitute. Young Woody sells trinkets to tourists, among them former G.I. James Hager (Harvey Keitel), who is looking for the daughter he left behind in the war. All seemingly have no place in the new Vietnam.

Fine performances and superb camera work carry the film. Cinematographer Lisa Rinzler, who has worked for legendary director Wim Wenders, plays with shadows and showers; most of the film unfolds at night and in the rain, giving her palette texture and luster.

In the downpour, the characters -- symbolizing the nation's disparate elements desperate to forge a unitary identity -- collide with the nation's glaring neon lights, and still maintain nobility and faith.

One can criticize the ending as being too tidy, almost Hollywood-influenced. Yet one can also argue that a more bleak conclusion, one which dismisses the optimism underpinning modern Asia, is more structured and predictable. Life is not -- and both Shower and Three Seasons soar for saying so.