Art House Beat: Vengeance, The Anchorage, Last Train Home, and!3{2}A Secretly Important Man
Vengeance (NWFF (Oct 22-23)
There hasn’t been a genre film director as versatile and virtuoso as Hong Kong’s Johnnie To since Howard Hawks. Like Hawks, To excels at both screwball comedy and action pictures, although his comedies are somewhat lesser known in the US than his gangster tales. His hit men and bodyguards are as integral to the Hong Kong film industry as Hawks’ private eyes and gunslingers were to Hollywood’s studio era. Both directors lean towards themes of professionalism as the dividing line between the civilized and the feral, with that professionalism extending from the film’s characters to its performers and crew.
To has made nearly fifty pictures over the last three decades, rarely missing a year and sometimes directing as many as four features in a single year. With so much product, there is a surprising lack of duds. One of SIFF’s programmers recently said that the question wasn’t whether or not one of To’s pictures would be featured at the festival, but deciding which of that year’s pictures would be the one. This year they showed “Vengeance.” If you missed it you should mark the 22nd and 23rd of October on your calendar and get over to the Northwest Film Forum to enjoy what is possibly this year’s most exquisitely directed film.
Like Hawks, who remade “Rio Bravo” twice, To has a predilection for exploring variations on the same theme. Where “The Mission” and “Exiled” examined what happens when hired killers fail to complete their assignment due to sentiment getting in the way of professionalism, “Vengeance” deals with the allegiance such killers have to their bosses. Unlike the earlier pictures, the ethics here are more clear-cut, with the unheroic trio in accord on how to proceed with their mission upon discovering they have accepted a job from their boss’s enemy. One of the unique qualities of the script is the blatant honesty in the dialog. There is no lying, double-crossing, or subterfuge. On occasions when a simple “yes” or “no” might be too hostile a response, a question of loyalty might be answered with a “We know you and you know us.” This is not an evasion; it is a declaration of war.
Another thing tying “Vengeance” to the earlier films is the cast, several of whom appear in all three films, and the three principals, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Suet Lam, and Simon Yam playing essentially the same characters they played in “Exiled.” The wild card here is aging pop singer Johnny Hallyday, who plays Costello, a French chef come to Macau to avenge the killing of his daughter’s family. Costello proves he is serious, not only by offering the assassins everything he owns in return for their help, but by his speed in assembling a firearm while blind-folded.
To takes care of all necessary exposition in the first six minutes, and there is never any ambiguity in the plot. This kind of clarity is new for the director, who is prone to a casual unfolding of story that becomes more complex in its telling. The picture is anything but simple, however, with To finessing some ambitious sequences. In one case, the hit men hired by Costello are examining the scene of the killings, with flashbacks to killings intercut into their investigation. As a result, we see the two groups of assassins almost simultaneously going about their business in the apartment, one commissioning the killings and the other investigating them, but the shared space of the two groups places them visually in the same brotherhood.
One might think somebody who has made as many gun crazy gangster pictures as To might be getting a little low on fresh ideas, but it isn’t so. Bullets are blasted through doors and walls, they propel a riderless bicycle, and move toward one of their final targets from behind the most unique barrier since MacBeth’s walking forest. The final suicide run foregoes the ecstatic embrace of death that pushed brotherhood a little over the edge in “Exiled” in favor of a more elegiac end for this loyal, brave and true brotherhood of death.
The Anchorage (NWFF, Oct 22-28)
The reclusive Ulla, played by director-cinematographer Anders Edstrom’s mother, is filmed over three days at the end of October. It begins in the dark, before the woods are colored by the sun’s light, as the middle-aged woman walks through the woods to the rocky shore of the Baltic Sea where she takes a nude swim in the icy waters. Directors Edstrom and CW Winter, who wrote the screemplay, integrate her into shots that combine the natural elements of water, rock, air and trees into single, breathtaking images. The soundtrack is rich with the many sounds made by wind and sea, proof of how much there is to listen to in a seemingly silent landscape. Following her through her daily routines, we think at first how empty her life is. Then, as we learn to see what she sees and hear what she hears, it becomes apparent that she is living a life much fuller than those in more noisy and crowded circumstances. By the end, we are so enraptured by the slightest detail that the revelation of a facet of her dress that signals the changing of the seasons relieves a certain tension we didn’t even realize was gripping us.
I am Secretly An Important Man (NWFF, Oct 22-28)
“I Am Secretly An Important Man” is an excellent documentary on a sad, sick soul who found a place for himself in the sad, sick arts community of Seattle, where mental illness and physical morbidity have traditionally been preferred to the creative output of healthy imaginations. Steven Jesse Bernstein impressed the locals with such stunts as reading his often trite poetry while swishing a rodent around in his mouth, an event captured with gut-twisting lucidity in a grisly piece of archival footage. Director Peter Sillen does not confine the scope of his film to Bernstein’s mad escapades in the junk-sick Seattle of the 1980s, but offers a succinct overview of the man’s life. A surprising number of ex-wives, girlfriends and offspring come forth to testify in his behalf, revealing a person who loved and laughed and played (when he was not crippled by his schizophrenia) with all the attributes of a normal person. Jerry Heldman’s recollections of the Llahngaelhyn coffeehouse, where Bernstein found shelter and encouragement upon arriving here in 1967, also suggest Bernstein had a broader creative base than the depressive angst of the scowling death–rattle that became his public mantra. In the end, he became another unfortunate martyr, a suicide at the age of 40, deified by a hellish society of middle-class brats, to the sad, sick belief that the only true art is to be found in madness.
The Last Train Home (Egyptian. Oct 22-28)
In the world’s largest human migration, China’s 130 million migrant workers return home to visit family on Chinese New Year. Lixin Fan’s documentary focuses on the difficulties one family faces in making this journey. From the stress of obtaining train tickets to the long waits in train stations, Fan observes the dense movement of travelers throughout the holiday season. The views from the train are spectacular, and the comments from the passengers, from China’s odds of victory in the Olympics (“We have billions of people while America only has a few million”) to the need to sew big pants for American use (“Ever see a Chinese with a 40 inch waistline?) provide moments of intermittent hilarity.. Fan shows how the need to leave home to find work threatens family stability, and climaxes the film with an emotional outburst that is somewhat self-conscious and false. For the most part, however, “Last Train Home” offers a glimpse into the personal struggle for financial equilibrium in an economy that does not favor the worker.
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