Looking back to look forward at film festival
By Jane Freebury
JAKARTA (JP): With the Asia Pacific Film Festival over there are winners and losers. The winners will reflect on their merits and wonder at the process that catapults them above certain equally deserving fellows.
This year the Asia Pacific Festival held in Jakarta last month had to manage the irresolvable contradiction of being required to judge the best from among a widely disparate set of entries. There were films which came from countries that have a long and distinguished history in cinema with a developed industrial infrastructure, and there were films which had struggled out of countries with patchy histories in film production and poor infrastructure.
Government subsidy is the norm in some of the countries in competition, in others it is virtually unheard of. The national film cultures of the Asia Pacific region have very many different starting positions. Should it therefore be argued that the festival should recognize the deserving above the best? That is clearly a contradiction to resolve.
Films resulting from disparate contexts will also reflect a country's familiarity with international film culture. Under tight censorship, filmmakers and local audiences are not in a position to judge the standard of their own locally-produced films against international standards.
This year the jury could not agree on the category of "special award" -- in part because the terms of the award are not clearly specified. Should a mediocre film from a country not in receipt of any award receive an award for "social awareness" over, say Once were Warriors?
This year's festival dealt with these contradictions by indeed choosing the best in craft, artistic and performance categories. But this process of selection is costly if there is among the delegates the expectation that all participating countries, whatever the merits of their films, will all go home with awards.
The two categories for acceptance for this year's festival were dramatic and non-dramatic. That is all. No individual categories for action, science fiction, children's, comedy or even for horror film or thriller. Dramas tend to do best in this kind of open competition.
The five films nominated for best film did little to reflect the diversity of films screened for judging. There was no action film among them. There were four in competition, three from Hong Kong, which we know to be a favorite genre among this region's audiences. Two science fiction films were submitted, one from Thailand and one from Japan, but neither gained an award. Perhaps one could have won in a children's category. There was the anomaly of a 3.5 minute film from Australia entered in competition against fiction features of 60 minutes or over. It was considered but impossible to give serious consideration, at video-clip length.
For future clarification, the festival committee could reconsider the notion of "best" (best film, best cinematography and so on.), because if that is exactly what is meant then it needs confirmation. If, on the other hand, "best" could be read to mean the best in achievement (as compared to what a country was previously producing), then the awards system should be structured to clearly specify this and make that sort of recognition possible.
Films from South Korea have traveled well and are the subject of feature articles in international film journals. Taiwanese new wave cinema has been celebrated around the world. Korea submitted four films and received only a single award while Taiwan won five. Two of the nominees for best film, The Last Tattoo and Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang, failed to win anything at all. Vive l'Amour and Once Were Warriors, films acclaimed at other festivals, failed to win so much as a nomination. Delegate disappointment was patent. Puzzling outcomes will continue while there are anomalies in the selection process.
But there is also the X-factor: seven jury members with seven professional perspectives. Beyond the point at which it is possible to agree on quality, there is the issue of subjective taste.
The Lovers for me was a delight in magic realism. If you caught it at the screenings you were lucky. This love story, based on an old legend, is given new life with charming performances from the two young leads, Wu Chi Lung as Leung Shan Pak and Charly Young as Chuk Ying Toy. Their affair ends as it does for star-crossed lovers.
The controversial Vive l'Amour was no love story but a minimalist piece with central anomic characters hungry for intimacy. City locations provide the chilly, empty ambience for three lost souls, trying to make connection. I would have expected a film such as this to come out of the West, with its scenario (after Antonioni) of alienated protagonists wandering the lonely landscapes of the mind.
While it was the only film to cause passionate argument among the judges immediately after screening, it was hard to understand the judges' decision at Venice which gave it the Golden Lion. Will they wonder at a our decision to award Hsiao Yu?
Hsiao Yu is a co-production and as such is allowed within the terms of the Asia Pacific. But again this needs to be further specified to avoid future confusion and conflict. If you caught the credits for Hsiao Yu they revealed that this film involved the work of a long list of Americans. Permissible, but the issue of the international or regional co-production, now growing in number, needs careful definition.
Hsiao Yu, the work of female director Sylvia Chang, is predicated on solid dramatic foundations, without avant-garde pretension. It concerns the plight of illegal immigrants everywhere in an encounter of cultures at the level of relationships, between the dissolute white American, Mario and the young lady, Hsiao Yu, an illegal immigrant who marries him in order to later acquire citizenship.
Women
Hsiao Yu was one of just several festival films directed by women -- others included Margot Nash's Vacant Possession and Shuhaimi Baba's Playground. They all had a common centerpiece -- a central role played by fine female actors. Rene Liu won Best Actress but Pamela Rabe and Tiara Jacqueline did not, because it is the fine performance within a fine film that wins the day.
The Two Flags was another personal and idiosyncratic favorite of mine. The well-constructed play recorded on film, located in the home of a Korean war widow who is so alone she needs the warmth of her pet dog asleep alongside her at night. Two men, one young and one old, show up asking for shelter from the freezing temperatures of the snow-bound mountains and from the fragments of North and South armies that both patrol nearby mountain spines. The elderly refugee (the festival's Best Actor, Dong-Hwi Chang) sees the poor dog off and establishes his legitimacy, based on the woman's needs. But an even better proposition is offered by the young man when he returns, and the old man is dumped. Then cold turns warm again for the old man when another refugee arrives.
Another personal favorite was Out to the World. A celebration of the Koreans' love of movies with a script scattered with references to Hollywood. Echoes from the filmmakers' particular favorite, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, carried the film through to its somber conclusion in the no man's land between North and South.
Swinger from Sydney. This cheeky little piece was surely never a serious contender in the dramatic category. With its single camera movement and its big band swing, it was clever but no match against a solid fiction feature of hundred or more minutes.
The Taiwanese Ashes of Time was a conundrum, overwritten as Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang was underwritten. Perhaps the material managed to sneak out from under directorial control, but I loved this imaginative and moody tale told with a wonderful camera eye. Excellent out-of-focus slow-motion action sequences registered dynamic energized images of horsemen in battle.
Ashes of Time was shot on location in the desert in mainland China. With its flashback construction, great sound design, use of beautiful formal imagery to develop its own system of film language, Ashes of Time stood out for me among the films at the festival. With many examples of routine cinematography among the festival films, the camera of Christopher Doyle here looked wonderfully adventurous.
Chaos was a very distinct possibility confronting the makers of The Turning Point. Said to have involved some 3,000 shots, this editing tour de force made dynamic use of flashback intercut with present time. There were big bold horizontal wipes and vigorous (criss) cross-cutting between scenes. Backwards and forwards like a weathercock the action moved -- but when you think back on it the film was dialogue-based and mostly took place in living rooms and offices.
Cinematography and sound, music and editing for 47 Ronin recreated the world of early 17th century Japan. Excerpts chosen for screening at the presentation of awards were drawn from the brutal fighting scenes, also beautifully rendered. The music and the soundscape created were exquisite, even with the occasional use of silence. 47 Ronin is a fine film that deserved a place in the five nominated best films. But it looks to the past, with nostalgia at that, and was considered to have little new to say for today.
The plight of an indigenous people was the subject of New Zealand entry Once Were Warriors. Like the Maori male leads, this film is big and burly and delivered with an urgency that makes fewer compromises to aesthetic pleasure than the measured aesthetic restraint in 47 Ronin. Instead it is happy to declare itself as propaganda for indigenous people everywhere who struggle to restore identity despite dispossession.
The Last Tattoo fared better with the judges. It also begins brutally with the murder of a U.S. marine but restraint prevails. The screenplay is based on the period of a United States presence in New Zealand as recreational visitors in World War II. The screenplay turns on the strategies on both sides to maintain the fiction that this glamorous presence had no repercussions on the sleepy local community. The film's closing shot leaves Kelly, a little more frumpy than usual, on the shore as her Captain glides off, back to the ships waiting in the silvered harbor under a full moon.
Nurse Kelly Towne is played by Kerry Fox, the terrific actor who played Janet Frame in Jane Campion's Angel at my Table. By turns plain and beautiful, she fills her character without acting. In fact all the female leads from the antipodes -- Kerry Fox, Pamela Rabe in Vacant Possession and Rena Owen in Once Were Warriors -- turned in strong performances worthy of recognition.
Which brings us to Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang. Indonesia's entry from director Garin Nugroho stood in a class of its own outside other local films which failed to impress.
Bulan is interesting, but undercooked. It opens in a particularly arresting manner with a dancer in traditional dress, a cascade of long hair and a pistol in hand, performing in silence. This sequence is one of the best moments of the film. The relationship between the three protagonists was not explained and the film carried on without developing the drama to give resonance to the final conflagration and parting of ways. Performances were rather wooden, but the screenplay offered little scope for the actors to develop. Images in search of a screenplay.
In other respects the film documents the traditional at odds with the new, as in the director's previous film Surat Untuk Bidadari. A poster for the movie Ghost slides by the old man as he takes a ride in a becak (pedicab). A gamelan is tuned in a room with graffiti declaring "Never Die".
Bulan is lovely to look at but that is not enough. Not that it was too artistic, as I saw suggested somewhere. Never would a film be disadvantaged for its artistry, but Bulan is underwritten and relied far too heavily on its imagery.
The judges' final decisions -- to award and not to award to Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang or any other worthy film -- could well have done with a supporting statement to explain the choices in all categories, rather than leave these decisions for the press to make conjecture and speculation. Juries are accountable, after all. Perhaps the Asia Pacific Film Festival can consolidate its priorities before it looks forward to next year's venue, Auckland.