I’ve seen only four MIFF films thus far (once again, my viewing seems loaded towards the end, with three films on the last day). This year, I’ve actually written slightly fuller reviews of two, which complicates the format of my usual MIFF round-up.
Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008)
Review here.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Marina Zenovich, 2008)
Review here.
Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar Wei, 1994/2008)
Nobody likes to seem stupid, so there can sometimes be a reluctance by critics to admit they just didn’t get a film; and at an individual level, it can be hard to decide whether comprehension problems lie with the viewer or the film. So as I wandered, confused, out of Wong Kar Wei’s Ashes of Time Redux (I have not seen the 1994 cut) I wasn’t sure whether I hadn’t gotten into it because it was confusing, or if it was confusing because I hadn’t really gotten into it. (It’s a bad sign when you find yourself making a mental note of a photogenic camel). It was a bit of a relief to find even complimentary reviews (like this one) making reference to the confusing plot. The film always looks good, as you’d expect from one of the great director / cinematographer teams (Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle) but the disjointed narrative was inherently distancing. Apparently, it was a troubled production, and that’s ultimately what it feels like: confusing not out of pretension, but because it was an expensive epic that was never quite put together properly. I was going to suggest that in that sense it was like a Hong Kong Heaven’s Gate, but it’s not that bad: it says something that despite my disorientation, I remained interested throughout.
The action scenes, incidentally, were choreographed by the great Sammo Hung, but you wonder why they bothered – it’s not really that kind of film.
Wonderful Town (Aditya Assarat, 2007)
I enjoyed this understated romance set in a small Thai town rebuilding after the 2004 tsunami, although there’s not that much to it. It starts as kind of post-tsunami Lost in Translation: a slow burn relationship movie between a male hotel guest ,Ton, and the female manager, Na, with the setting being as much a character as the two leads. Assarat uses the desolated town to inform the depiction of his closed-in and emotionally isolated characters; the town is so empty the pair seem to exist without any kind of social context. It’s an effective device, but it means that it seems somewhat abrupt when in the latter half of the film Assarat tries to show how others respond to their affair – prior to that they had seemed almost in their own little world. I also found the concluding sequences disappointing: in their own downbeat art-film way, they were as formulaic as if Ton and Na had enjoyed an emotional reunion at the top of the Empire State Building.