Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971)

Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)
French Title: Quatre nuits d'un rêveur

After tackling Dostoyevsky with A Gentle Woman (1969), Robert Bresson follows it up with another adaptation of the Russian writer's work. Four Nights of a Dreamer has less of A Gentle Woman's mortal themes and dire scenarios, and instead Bresson creates his sarcastic, ironic romantic comedy (well, it's certainly not your typical comedy but the film is indeed funny). The plot is spread throughout four nights, as the title suggests, wherein a man finds and loses love.

The man is Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts), a painter who seems to have trouble finding love. He admits that he is never in love with women, but to an ideal woman. At one scene, he glances on a beautiful girl shopping and as she walks past, decides to stalk her until another beautiful woman passes his fancy, for which he changes targets. Jacques is definitely a dreamer and lives in a fantasy he has created for himself, and hasn't quite perfected. His loft is riddled with unfinished paintings, and whenever a visitor arrives, he hides them. It's as if Jacques is always trapped in a perpetual search for perfection and even in his art, he can't really achieve --- very similar to the way he discards a romantic attraction when another beautiful woman passes by. Being a dreamer, a person in an everlasting search for an unattainable ideal, Jacques ultimately is never in love. He finds the girl she is stalking to an older individual, and upon arriving home, he voice records a perfect scenario wherein that girls decides to just suddenly elope with him. He plays the recorded scenario over and over while he paints, capsulating him inside a dream that he has created himself.

One night, Jacques saves Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) from suicide. Marthe is the exact opposite of Jacques, a woman who is bored to her wits and forces herself to fall in love with her mother's boarder (Maurice Monnoyer) just to get away. She is a dreamer herself as when the boarder moves to America, promising her that upon his return they'll get married, she wraps her entire existence on that dream that when she hears news that the boarder finally returned and she never got a word from him, she decides to just commit suicide. Yet unlike Jacques who insists on ideals, Marthe is grounded on reality and knows the hierarchy of life and fantasy.

It's an entirely humorous proposition by Bresson that Jacques falls in love with Marthe, who remains in love with her lover. Bresson interrupts possible moments of romance with what is typically suited for such scenes. One night wherein Jacques would finally uncover his love for Marthe, a cruise ship passes by and the sound of Brazilian musicians singing a lovers' tune would interrupt his endeavor. Every night, Bresson plays a cruel joke against the male dreamer and climaxes his clever satire when Jacques finally gets what he wants.

Jacques and Marthe walk as a couple when the boarder shows up, and calls Marthe. Typically, the sacrifices Jacques has already made would ensure Marthe's changed loyalties, but Bresson, in an ingenious attack against romanticism and lovers' dreams, insists on the illogical. Marthe walks towards the boarder and gives him a torrid kiss, returns to Jacques and pecks him a number of times and in a twist of human unpredictability, returns to boarder and walks away with him. Jacques is left a dreamer in search for that perfect ideal that may never arrive.

The Departed (2006)

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)

Finally, something good has come out of the recent Hollywood fetish of Americanizing popular Asian films. Just this year, two Americanized Asian films left me in regretful boredom (Alejandro Agresti's The Lake House and Jim Sonzero's Pulse). Martin Scorsese's reworking of Infernal Affairs (Andy Lau & Alan Mak, 2002), the first of a trilogy touted as Hong Kong's answer to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Trilogy, is an amazingly exhilarating feature from its first minute to last. William Monahan keeps the story of Infernal Affairs intact, updating it with some interesting details and additional characters and finally, uprooting the plot from the seedy underbellies of Triad-run Hong Kong to within the hugely Irish-run organized crime scene of Boston.

The title also gets a face lift. The Hong Kong films address relations that compares to a torturous afterlife. the American remake merely describes its set of characters as departed, or in less stylized language, dead. The title is apt. Almost all deaths in the film are caused by gunshots to the head (I can think of three deaths wherein the characters die in a different manner, two of which are still caused by gunshots, and none of which ends with survival), where there is no assurance of survival, no uncomfortable middle ground wherein one is given an opportunity to address his life decisions and the results of such in his afterlife. It seems that Scorsese instantly wants his audience to know that the characters in his mob film are dead men walking. He twists and turns them in situations wherein the only way out is death. In an uncomfortable twist of logic and Scorsese's dry humor, he appropriates the dictum that "dead men don't talk," especially dead men who weren't given a chance to talk at all. In the film where the value of life is equated to the revelations that could be spewed, the theme of death is all too palpable.

The story is simple. There are two sides: the police and the Irish mob. The Irish mob is headed by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), a hedonistic and very hands-on mob leader. He dotes and lets Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) into the police as his rat, who gives his benefactor early warnings as to the police's operations and other very pertinent information. The police, under a very fatherly Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and his mercurial assistant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), puts Billy Costigan (Leonardo di Caprio) into the Irish mobster's inner ring by delegating years to make his transformation from cop to criminal believable. Two rats in both opposing sides, racing to discover each other.

But the film is a lot more than the plot whisked away from the Hong Kong original. Monahan successfully made the effective storyline into a purely American tale, a tale that Scorsese would be able to handle with his trademark talents. The plot is rooted in an American scenario of racial conflict: Irish against Blacks; Irish against zealot Catholics; American paranoia against the fastly developing Communist China. Then Monahan also intricately details the American police bureaucracy into the picture: making two department heads (head of Special Investigations Department played by a testosterone-laden Alec Baldwin), instead of the original one; adds the FBI into the picture complicating red tape and bureaucracy further. Monahan, with the help of a very macho-thinking director like Scorsese heats up the sexual politics and the romance, with the entry of a more believable, more humanly erring psychiatrist girlfriend (Vera Farmiga) of both opposing rats, as compared to the beautiful yet largely useless poster girl of the original film. Farmiga's psychiatrist adds a feminine dizziness into this machismo-driven picture. It's an altogether grittier picture, and with the careful eye for these little details, makes the outrageous plot a bit more plausible, and churns out a complexity that is both enticing and exciting.

Scorsese has been accused of being an Oscar-whore ever since he made two big budgeted epics that came too close to finally giving him the award. What Scorsese can't be accused of is being a lousy filmmaker. Scorsese doesn't waste any time in brewing up with useless details, instead he opens the film with Costello quoting, and like an evil pedophile, recruiting an Irish kid from an ice cream parlor with candies, milk, and a comic book. Costello storms up each scene he's in. His unpredictable nature, quick-tempered yet nobly fair (he pays up a huge sum of money after breaking Billy Costigan's hand numerous times) demeanor, makes his character into such a memorable personality, an improvement to Eric Tsang's triad leader, which I thought was a brilliantly played stereotype. Nicholson plays up the role with a deranged confidence that is both curiously comedic and scary at the same time.

Monahan juices up the mobster lord's role to the detriment of Queenan. One of the emotional thrusts of Infernal Affairs is the relationship that developed between the cop boss and his secret agent. It's a quiet paternal relationship that achieves full emotional power in one of the film's important plot movements. In Scorsese's remake, the relationship is kept to a minimum, or is at least shown subtly. There are little instances wherein I sense a bit of the fatherly relationship of Queenan and the undercover cop rise, and when it does show up, it makes the inevitable end to the relationship, more poignant. Juxtapose their relationship to Costello and his rat's, wherein the code alludes to such relationship, but in the end, results in something remarkably ironic.

The hugest difference I saw between Scorsese's The Departed and Infernal Affairs is the fact that the latter contained a religious thrust, a Buddhist implication that seemed to describe the relationships established in the film as a hellish endeavor. Scorsese's thriller is as mortal its title suggests. Religion and the accompanying salvation in the afterlife it promises is merely a backdrop. There seems to be a battle of good and evil in the film, but the Church is a non-player, and goodness is a wishy-washy thing. Evil, on the other hand is present in Costello's person. Scorsese seems to turn Boston into a battleground where evil has already won and the devil as finally incarnated on Earth. The stench of corruption is outrightly manifested. Even the supposed agents of goodness (in this case, agents of the law) act in despicable means, and again, have that impermanent tendency of turning into evil.

The Departed is a lot of things: a superb remake of a Hong Kong film, arguably superior to the original; a return-to-form for Martin Scorsese, an intelligently written police thriller, and easily, one of the best American films of 2006.

Pulse (2006)

Pulse (Jim Sonzero, 2006)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo (2001) is arguably the best horror film ever made in the past decade. Yes, that rules out Hideo Nakata's influential Ringu (1999), and all the Shyamalans, Cravens, and Amenabars from the top spot. Kairo has that odd mix of creeping terror and philosophical possibilities, all cramped up in a free-flowing narrative that isn't dragged by typical conventions of what is supposed to be scary and what is not. It also has Kurosawa's distilled directorial tact; making sure that his scare tactics doesn't go overboard --- showing just little by little, until all of a sudden, apocalypse has already invaded the plot. Wes Craven probably thought Kairo is pretty excellent too. He bought the American rights to the remake after all, rewrote the entire plot to follow American horror conventions, plucked out a nobody director out of nowhere to helm his written and rewritten screenplay, and release it to the public.

Jim Sonzero is the nobody director. Well, probably not exactly nobody. He does direct MTVs and commercials, but other than that, he's pretty much unknown in film world. He takes in the project, probably not understanding what made the original film such a wonderful piece of horror filmmaking. He goes all out, as if he were directing a 30 second commercial for a telecommunications corporation. First five minutes to the film, my eyesight has been overloaded with images of cellphones, people calling through cellphones, laptops, computers, and other gizmos. Sure, the film is about these modern modes of communication, but to practically drown the film with reminders through recurring images of such is, to a certain extent, insulting to the intellect. After all, Kurosawa did imply on the theme, as well as other exciting themes and possibilities, without overloading his film with outright and overt images of what he intends.

The direction is one of the serious faults in Pulse. Another is Craven's rewriting of Kurosawa's story. The beauty of Kurosawa's Kairo is that it's open to so many possibilities, so many theories, so many explanations, that just through it's open-endedness, it's a terrifying creature. Craven insists on his own interpretation, and with Sonzero's directing, literally grabs their audiences' hands and forcedly feeds their interpretation like it was very good, when in fact, it's quite crappy. Ghost-like creatures thriving on this mysterious bandwidth that scientists suddenly open up to provide faster and more efficient modes of communication, spread through viruses --- all of that invented theory to Kurosawa's masterpiece is quite a load of crap, and to sit through Craven and Sonzero's theory branching to more ridiculous stuff, is really quite a painful experience.

When I was in high school, whenever I didn't have time to read the thick novels assigned, I would just buy those Cliff Notes to make sure I have enough information to pass an examination. Afterwards, I'd try to read the novel and a world of difference occurs. Sonzero's Pulse is pretty much like a Cliff Notes of Kurosawa's Kairo. Craven and Sonzero cook up a more swallowable and easier-to-watch version of Kurosawa's sprawling nightmare vision. It's dumbed down a hundred percent, the characters shrunk into television soap opera students with problems with romance and all those boring stuff that's better left to television, and adorned with computer graphics and thick make up to make the ghosts look scarier. For others, it might be enough, but for those who really want to get a more satisfying experience, I suggest you just find a copy of Kurosawa's Kairo and forget this version ever existed.

Who Killed the Electric Car? (2005)

Who Killed the Electric Car? (Chris Paine, 2005)

Chris Paine's documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? opens with a funeral parade. Several testimonials follow suit, all declaring the good traits of the deceased. It turns out that the deceased is not human at all, but an electric car. The entire funeral parade is in fact part of the program by former electric car owners who are now protesting General Motors' retrieval of the environment-friendly consumer vehicles. The electric car in in truth dead. General Motors, against the rabid campaigning and vigil of activists, has terminated the last few units left, and left some for automobile museums. Paine weeps the unfortunate passing of what could have been a solution to the many problems that surround gas-powered vehicles, and then starts pointing fingers at the likely suspects.

It's a very well-presented documentary of a topic that I think is of important relevance. The first half of the film is told like a clever testimonial to the dead. Paine presents the history of the electric car, avidly describing the fact that these cars have existed alongside fuel-powered ones a century ago. It remains a mystery why the electric cars totally disappeared, only to resurface in a hopeful and probably one of the few bravely political mandates that ever came out of California: the mandate that would slowly phase out fuel-powered cars in favor of electric cars. Paine shows the importance of such, environmentally, economically, health-wise and politically. After telling the story of the rise and fall of the electric car, Paine starts to dissect the details in CSI-fashion and determine who caused the death of the electric car.

The documentary is narrated by a very boring and bored voice of Martin Sheen. Sheen's voice doesn't have the complementary power his visual presence provides and turns the documentary's important messages into a sort of infomercial extravaganza that doesn't quite effectively match up the magnitude of the film. Paine's efforts can be observed. He comes up with several interviews with politicians, ex-employees of General Motors, celebrities (including a bearded Mel Gibson who miraculously doesn't say things that can damage his or the film's reputation), advocates, environmentalists, and an aging inventor and his sweet wife. Paine also shoves up some archived videos from the David Letterman Show (showing a Tom Hanks who is so enamoured by the electric car), a Naked Gun film (which surprisingly and disturbingly accurately describes the reason behind the silent maneuverings to make sure that not a single electric car be driven in the highways of California), and the administrative proceedings that completely toppled the important electric car mandate.

It's a cool and intelligently pieced out feature. There's a sort of sadness by the fact that the only piece of hope or joy the documentary provides is the idea that there are now hybrid plug-in cars in existence or in development (that doesn't really help the cause since electric cars are already an available technology, why spend more cash for something safely in between). It quite feels that the documentary is entirely a lost cause, a mere precaution for what could happen in the future by good-natured technology that may drive huge corporations out of profitable existence. Overall, Paine made a documentary of a story worth telling, and it is told with coherent competence, but above that, there's really not much else. Paine's call for action is not emotional enough to disturb, his documentary not passionate enough to rouse attention.

Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Bullets Over Broadway (Woody Allen, 1994)

Struggling playwright David Shayne (John Cusack) is ranting about how it's so difficult to have an honestly "art-ful" play to get financing in 20's Broadway. Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly), one of the dozens of girls in a chorus line, rants to her mobster lord boyfriend how she is still a bit player for so many years. The solution, according to director Woody Allen, is to put mobster money to fund the playwright's drama. The consequences are plenty: Olive turns out to be a very wooden actress with a difficulty in memorizing lines; she also brings along Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), the bodyguard who seems to have a knack in making revisions to Shayne's work. The result is probably one of the funniest films Allen ever made.

It helps that Allen didn't cast himself as the struggling playwright. Although he does inject a lot of the stereotypical neurotic New Yorker he usually plays into the character, Cusack molds David Shayne into a less cardboard cut-out character, and thus, giving the character a youthful and more balanced charm that doesn't get tiring.

Jennifer Tilly is wonderful here. Her hoarse voice fits the personality of the character like a glove. She throws Allen's witty lines like it naturally came from the social climber's own consciousness. When she rants about how the black pearls given to her as a gift by her boyfriend comes from degenerate oysters, it bursts out so perfectly that the inevitable consequence is a well-earned chuckle. She fits the mold of unawarely talentless ambition-driven skank with so much earnest eager that it's so pathetic, its pitiful.

Diane Wiest plays the Broadway prima donna Helen Sinclair, who topbills David Shayne's play. Shayne and Sinclair eventually develop into an odd couple who respectively seems to be both in love with each other's external personalities. In fact, Allen insists on the theme of whether one is in love with the artist or the person, and exemplifies such with the relationship that comedically develops between the prima donna and the playwright, and later on, between Shayne and his real girlfriend Ellen (Mary-Louise Parker). Wiest delivers a performance to match Tilly's outright crassness. Wiest is at all times classy, histrionic, and the most affectionate of all drama queens. Her Helen Sinclair possesses a low-pitched seductive voice that is at the same time gorgeous and dangerous. But Allen doesn't turn her into a femme fatale, but a bagful of laughs. He makes use of Wiest's low-pitched voice to turn the mundane line "Don't speak!" into a source of chuckles.

Bullets Over Broadway is not the most visually stunning of Allen's work. Carlos di Palma's cinematography is, as always, quite uninspired. Allen does recreate the look of 20's New York with costumes, sets, and dialogue that allude to that dangerous decade. The film mostly works because it contains bravura performances from almost all fronts (Jim Broadbent's desperately dieting thespian turns a rather inept and unoriginal comic sequence into a hilarious riot). I sometimes don't quite buy Allen's philosophical musings on art, theater, and love, but upon a backdrop of this kind of intense comedy, it doesn't come off as impendingly high brow as other Allen films like Deconstructing Harry (1997).

Imprint (2006)

Imprint (Takashi Miike, 2006)

Imprint, Takashi Miike's contribution to the television series Masters of Horror suffered a fate of not being in television due to its content. Instead, Imprint, carrying the acclaim of its prolific helmer, has landed a spot in many film festivals and has finally reached its audience with the release of its DVD. It's typical gross Miike (the Miike of Audition (1999) and Ichi the Killer (2001)), just a bit more glossy and with all its actors and actresses speaking English (even if they're not supposed to). Of course, it's understandable. The target audience of the segment are middlebrow Americans who would probably turn off their television sets once it occurred to them that they are required to read subtitles. The problem here is that the English spoken is accompanied by a thick and almost ununderstandable accent, resulting to a jarring viewing experience.

The plot is probably the richest among the other segments in the television series' first season (although John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns is my favorite of the batch). An American tourist (Billy Drago) travels to an island to find Komomo (Michie Ito), a sweetheart he left behind but promised to bring back to the United States. He visits the whorehouses of the island, determined to find her golden haired Japanese girlfriend, but is only successful in hooking up with a prostitute (Youki Kudoh) with a gruesomely malformed face and an even more gruesomely mysterious past. It seems that the prostitute has some knowledge of what happened to Komomo, and in a series of flashbacks, tells the American the fate of his love.

There's a rich visual style Miike makes use of here. He turns the unidentified era of Japan into a time wherein whores are equated with freaks, monsters, and demons. Miike paints his film with bright colors, which to a certain extent disservices what he aims for. The result is mightily fantastical, and at times, abusively eye-straining especially when scenes of gratuitous violence is draped with bright eerie reds. More interesting is Miike's choice of turning his characters into anti-social outcasts. The American is blanketed with a mysterious past, and is played by Drago with a curiously hysterical tone, turning his love search into an absurdist nightmare. Komomo, who is described by the prostitute, as golden hearted, is portrayed as having a bit of insanity accompanying her fiery red hair (she insists that she's a princess in the midst of the fact that she prostitutes herself for meager coins). The most intricately designed character however is the prostitute --- her face divided into two halves (a normal one and one that is curiously monstrous); her hair is much too big for her meager frame; her dispassionate voice concealing a horrific story.

Imprint also has Miike's faults. Miike tends to have no restraint, turning his film into carnival fare instead of compelling cinema. Imprint is the most carnival of fares. Miike's desire to create something absurdly beautiful out of what is inherently disgusting and abrasive turns the film into a grandiose confusion. The prostitute describes her hometown as the most impoverished community in her province, but that doesn't stop her poor mother in putting up brightly hued windmills each time she performs her odd business. The images resulting from Miike's incoherence provide for an atmosphere of odd dread that the Brothers Grimm achieved with their fairy tales. Miike is a compulsive filmmaker, leaning more towards what looks horrific, violent, and shocking, thus sacrificing basic concepts of logic, and common sense.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005)

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (Robert Greenwald, 2005)

An anti-Wal-Mart protester compares Wal-Mart's dawning on the town of Inglewood, California with Godzilla's destructive invasion of Tokyo. It's not really an accurate metaphor for Wal-Mart's destructive forces. I have a soft spot for the oversized reptile. Godzilla is also a victim despite looking like a heartless monster. Wal-Mart, based on political documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald, is nothing but a vicious victimizer, descending on little American communities, exciting consumers with its bargain prices bought by a Faustian contract with the demon of greed.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is obviously one-sided. The documentary doesn't give any opportunity for the Wal-Mart management to air their side. I doubt the management will ever give their side, at least not in Greenwald's documentary. Greenwald's allegations, aside from the typical aftereffects, like the closing down of small time shops because of impossible competition, of gargantuan retail corporations landing a pimp spot in any locale, is of immense damaging potential that retaliation from the management would only seem futile and conveniently rehearsed. Actually, Wal-Mart management indeed lends a voice to Greenwald's striking documentary. The film opens with Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott in an archive footage excitedly wowing a crowd of Wal-Mart associates with opportunities of earning more. The film also contains several of the glossy and equally sleazy inaccurate Wal-Mart commercials Greenwald makes use as a sort of divider to his documentary's many issues, and as a target for stirring yet humorous sarcasm.

Greenwald's attacks range from the obvious to the real eye-openers. Greenwald makes an obvious effort to put a human face on the several businesses that Wal-Mart forcedly closes. It's an emotional touch to an already tired issue that Greenwald seems to be mightily concerned with, and as that, rejuvinates the point with a more humanist rather than an economic concern. Then Greenwald mostly centers on Wal-Mart's deliberate labor abuses, both in America and its foreign factories. Wal-Mart's concern against labor unions and any similar activities is quite distressing --- the way they spend an amount of money for security cameras to detect union activities within their premises, but neglects any security spending for their very own customers; the way they hire multitudes to hinder an impending labor voting. Greenwald tries to connect sexual and racial discrimination in the Wal-Mart workplace with the management's seeming lack of concern for such. It's kind of ill-placed in the documentary but is still nevertheless very telling.

Overall, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price is compelling stuff. It adds more insult to injury that Greenwald makes use of former employees (even some of those who have spend a quarter of a lifetime working for the retail corporation) who have become disgruntled of Wal-Mart's inhumane ways. Greenwald even makes his way to China and other offshore sweatshops to put a human story to the often told tale of sweatshop workers laboring for a fraction of a dollar per hour. It's amazing research work and Greenwald puts all the stuff together in coherent and scandalizing fashion. With the immense difference between the cost of the products sold and the actual cost for their manufacture, you can't help but wonder what happens to the more than one thousand percent profit being made. Greenwald doesn't let the major culprits get away without being smeared like their unjust corporate vehicle: The Walton Family and its boisterous mouth Lee Scott get majority of the profits to fund their anti-apocalypse bunker and a fleet of jet planes and helicopters.

Ashes of Time (1994)

Ashes of Time (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)
Cantonese Title: Dung che sai duk

In Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time, there is no present. Wong allows his characters to narrate their respective plots in a way wherein the imagery shown seems to be more like splices of memory rather than events taking place in the present. It's not the wisest of cinematic narrative techniques. For sure, it's not one to ensure commercial success (Ashes of Time was a box office failure especially when compared to its huge budget and the amount of time to make it). However, the technique ensures the film a detachedness that turns the beautiful visuals into moving poetic images rather than plot-driving mechanisms. Indeed the film feels and moves like a dream --- disconnected and inhabits a vague passionate form that sweetly blends into a mythical reality.

Ashes of Time took many years to make that Wong made Chungking Express (1994) in the middle of the former's production. It's every Hong Kong director's dream project. It includes almost everyone who's somebody in Hong Kong show business, and as cinematographer, Wong only had Christopher Doyle, arguably the best cinematographer around, to work with. Wong also had legendary Sammo Hung to direct the action choreography (although I really can't tell since the action is filmed like a mnemonic blur to insist on the artistry of the fight scenes). But in the hands of Wong, almost all of the intrinsic positive aspects of the production is completely wiped off, and instead, reshuffles everything to make a masterpiece that is completely his own, not Doyle's, not Hung's, not even the top actors and actresses that are in his employ. Ashes of Time is such a dizzying yet heartfelt vision that it is undeniably Wong's.

The plot is based on a traditional Chinese tale, but is transformed into an episodic glance of the intimate love lives of sword fighting heroes. It's a rather thoughtful transformation. When typical films of the genre would concentrate on virtues of brotherhood, heroism, and valor, Wong decides to pervade his film with non-virtues of romance, infidelity, burning passions, regret, and mistrust. Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) is an agent for mercenaries. People with problems would come up to his desert house to negotiate murders and assassinations. Yearly, his friend Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka-fai) would visit him in his lonely abode. One time, Huang Yaoshi brings him a pot of magical wine which erases memories of the past. Ouyang Feng doesn't drink a drop of the wine, but Huang does so. One of Ouyang Feng's clients is Yang (Brigitte Lin), a warrior who dons both masculine and feminine attire and is known as Yin when she's female, who wants to have Huang Yaoshi killed for breaking a promise. Ouyang Feng finds work for a number of mercenaries. One of the mercenaries who used to be employed by Ouyang Feng is a swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) who longs to be back to his hometown before he turns thirty, the age wherein his doctor predicts he will lose his sight completely. Another warrior that is employed with Ouyang Feng is Hung Chi (Jackie Cheung), a bare-footed yet fast-handed swordsman who is constantly being followed by his wife.

It's not a very easy plot to follow, and Wong complicates the story by telling it with mere glimpses. However, Wong makes one thing clear --- that the film is not interested in heroics but in the repressed emotions and longing that are trapped inside the hearts of these powerful swordsmen. The cinematography tells it all. Wong shoots the action scenes with a sense of perpetual slow motion. It seems that the violence and the sword fights are mere blurs in the memories of these heroes, that it is impossible to coherently put them in visual form. Doyle's camera keeps on detailing faces and other objects of note rather than accurately showing each motion of the sword or piece of flesh that gets wounded or punctured. However, when scenes of intimacy occur such as during a night wherein a longing Yin caresses the body of a sleeping Ouyang Feng, and Ouyang Feng doesn't react since he's imagining the caresses to be from a woman (Maggie Cheung) he has left behing long ago, Doyle's camera suddenly oozes with a passionate intensity that is quite accurate with what humans really recall. It is those precious moments of intense emotions, and not those wherein emotions are heightened artificially by violence and adrenaline, that is retained in our memory.

Ashes of Time is arguably Wong's more ambitious film. With the film, he injects the genre with a very rich human emotional complexity sacrificing narrative coherence, choreographic grace, and literary resonance. Instead, Wong declares these genre caricatures as passionate human beings being tormented by a state of everlasting mnemonic religiosity. It is that torturous adherence to a sorrowful memory that drives them to seek an easy way out by downing a wine that relieves them from memories of the past like in Huang Yaoshi's case, or by merely following a fate dictated by an inescapable past like Hung Chi's travels with his wife would tell. But as Ouyang Feng states in the end, the magical wine is merely a joke, an unrealistic dream, that men wish for but can never really attain.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973)

Private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is woken up by his cat in the middle of the night. The reasons for the awakening are as mundane as possible --- the cat needs to be fed --- but the events that tail Marlowe's sudden awakening seems to be more nightmarish than real. After bringing home from the thrift store some cat food that doesn't match to his cat's taste, an uninvited friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) asks Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana, allegedly escaping some bit of trouble he has caused. The trouble seems to be a bit bigger than what was described when upon Marlowe's return, he is harrassed by the police who is investigating the murder of Lennox's wife. He is incarcerated for three days, and after release, is hired by a wealthy wife (Nina Van Pallandt) of an alcoholic novelist (Sterling Hayden) to locate and rescue the husband from the clutches of a quack psychiatrist (Henry Gibson).

The Long Goodbye is perhaps too bright to be a noir, but when night strikes and the mysteries start unraveling, it is almost indubitable that the film has noir roots. Set in Los Angeles where America is slowly mutating into a colony of new age fanatics. Marlowe lives in the penthouse of a tall compound building. His neighbors are a bunch of marijuana-smoking, yoga-practicing, and perpetually half naked women who seem to be catching the attention of Marlowe's frequently uninvited visitors. The Long Goodbye's Los Angeles is a town of degenerate weirdos, with Marlowe the biggest weirdo of them all. He frequently talks to himself when his only companion cat is in absentia. He is far too smart to be a private eye, and he states that his practice does not delve into divorce stuff --- probably the only client base private eyes have during the seventies. Like the gate guard of the exclusive beach side community who imitates noir screen actors and actresses, Marlowe seems to be living in a perpetual era of crime thrillers and murder mysteries when in fact, the seventies are slowly transforming into an age of police procedural and artless, mystery-less murders.

Leigh Brackett's dialogue, adapted from a Raymond Chandler novel, is populated with topnotch wit that oddly seems out-of-place underneath the bright California sun. The domestic drama between the writer and his wife is heightened by a sterling approach to the subtle emotions sparking between the two. The writer says that his writer's block is almost equal to his impotence, and the wife quickly alludes to the fact that their marriage has impotence written all over it. The net of connections between the original murder mystery and the beachside literary couple seems to be a lot looser than the noir of the forties or the fifties, but the written work, in the hands of Robert Altman flows with earnest ease, and welcomes parody and commentaries within the tense structure of the genre.

The Long Goodbye is supplemented by a repetitive playing of John Williams' somewhat incomplete song of the same title. The song never reaches a refrain or a second stanza but is often repeated in different styles and rhythm, and from different sources. Like Altman's film, the Williams song is smoky and nebulous in form. Altman's visuals inhabit a somewhat aerial form, often drifting in and out of locations then steadily concentrating on the face of Gould (and Gould's face isn't exactly one that matches the hardened faces of the anti-heroes of noir). It's an effective visual style, coupled with Altman's aural mastery. It's a dizzying roller coaster ride of perhaps the last murder mystery that Hollywood will make which is in the vein of the original noirs of old. Other films will follow suit, but I doubt they can replicate Altman's extraordinary vision and wit in telling this crime tale.

A Gentle Woman (1969)

A Gentle Woman (Robert Bresson, 1969)
French Title: Une femme douce

Adapted from Dostoyevsky's short story, A Gentle Woman, Robert Bresson's first feature film in color, is as elusive as the title character's intentions. The film opens with the woman's suicide by jumping off her apartment. It's a suicide scene that is uncharacteristically filmed --- a sudden noise from the balcony erupts the serenely lighted apartment room, Bresson then cuts to the exterior, the woman lands violently while her white scarf floats in what may seem like a peaceful release. The rest of the film evokes the total opposite of the suicide: dark, trapped, and suffocating.

Dominique Sanda plays the woman. Her skin is pale and her gentle facial features resemble an delicate marble statue, worthy of admiration and idolatry. A pawnbroker (Guy Frangin) does exactly that. When she was living, the pawnbroker takes an attraction upon first sight. Impoverished, the woman pawns her crucifix. The pawnbroker takes the golden cross and offers back the statue of Christ, and paying the woman more money than what the golden cross is worth. Unaffected by the pawnbroker's expectant generosity, the woman gives back the excess of what the golden cross is worth. Undaunted, the pawnbroker offers something more: a life of happiness where the poverty she has lived through will never happen again. The two marry and try to live off a loveless relationship. Outwardly normal, the two challenge each other in bouts of jealousy and struggles for control.

Even at death, the woman is subject of adoration. The pawnbroker recalling their relationship to his elderly maid Anna (Jeanne Lobre) surrounds the body of the woman in pious reverence. The pawnbroker walks around the still beautiful corpse, trying to objectively determine the cause for the woman's emotional demise. He does point out several instances where an obvious emotional void is present --- the woman purposely puts herself in a position wherein the pawnbroker would catch her and consume himself of an unbated jealousy. Yet there are no outward signs of hatred or marital discord. Everything is shown in quiet touches and gestures that dictate a deeply rooted source of marital dysfunction.

It's a questionable salvation, the woman's suicide. But in Bresson's mind, it perhaps may be a valid release from the earthly pains of a loveless relationship. One may argue that a more rational resolution for the woman's dissatisfaction is a legal divorce or an informal separation. In my opinion, the release or salvation that is sought here should elicit permanence. In Bresson's claustrophobic portrayal of a dead end relationship where the beginning is already met with a misunderstanding of the primaries of a smooth marital relationship, the woman's choice of release seems appropriately (although questionable in terms of morality and social acceptability) realized. The woman's face upon death evokes a quiet peace that cannot be found when she was living. During her lifetime, her eyes contain a fiery and purposeful force that antagonizes her gentle outwardly ways. In her death, she is truly an immobile idol, her soul released from an earthly prison that is also imprisoned in a marriage that is unevenly invoked. The pawnbroker pleads for the woman to open her eyes for at least a second, praying to the idol for a momentary miracle that can never happen. Why succumb to a second of human conflict when the soul has already reached pacification?