So, without further ado:
Aleksandra / Alexandra
The festival had great timing with this one considering the current crisis in the Caucacis. Sokurov’s masterful Alexandra follows the titular babushka as she travels into deepest Chechnya to visit her grandson, an officer stationed there. The concept is entirely surreal and is matched as such by the typically stylized performances and the deep, textural sepia of the images which makes the whole thing feel like somebody seriously muddied their oil paints, denaturing all of the primary colors, and which injects a vague air of death and dust into the rather bleak proceedings (it does not look dissimilar in that regard to his The Second Circle). That being said, Alexandra is the closest any Sokurov film has come to neo-realism, even invoking Rossellini as when our Mother Russia wanders from the barracks into the war-ravaged landscape outside, befriending another grandmotherly figure, an ex-teacher who speaks fluent Russian and escorts her through half-bombed-out buildings to her apartment so that our heroine may rest her weary legs. It is hard not to read the film as veiled allegory, which is in no way a criticism here. The figure of the mother has always been fundamental to both Russian socialist realism (dating back to Gorky’s Mother) and Soviet Propaganda (Mother Russia being like the Russian equivalent of Uncle Sam, only more guilt-inducing). She is a symbol to rival the bear its very self. And Alexandra Nikolaevna is, in her combination of irascibility and regal nobility, tremendously ursine, in no small way because she is portrayed by the physically broad and utterly regal opera legend Galina Vishneskaya, who though decrepit is not about to be knocked over by much of anything. Sokurov is one of those hermetic filmmakers who seems to work best when his films are at their most accessible and universal and in that regard Alexandra sits next to Mother and Son and his recent Hirohito pic The Sun as one of his very greatest fiction achievements. Though it has a sad familial intimacy and representation of military dehumanization upon men and those close to them in common w/ his Father and Son, this is by far the superior film. It ends, profoundly, w/ a sigh. Sokurov’s idol Tarkovsky would be proud indeed.
The festival had great timing with this one considering the current crisis in the Caucacis. Sokurov’s masterful Alexandra follows the titular babushka as she travels into deepest Chechnya to visit her grandson, an officer stationed there. The concept is entirely surreal and is matched as such by the typically stylized performances and the deep, textural sepia of the images which makes the whole thing feel like somebody seriously muddied their oil paints, denaturing all of the primary colors, and which injects a vague air of death and dust into the rather bleak proceedings (it does not look dissimilar in that regard to his The Second Circle). That being said, Alexandra is the closest any Sokurov film has come to neo-realism, even invoking Rossellini as when our Mother Russia wanders from the barracks into the war-ravaged landscape outside, befriending another grandmotherly figure, an ex-teacher who speaks fluent Russian and escorts her through half-bombed-out buildings to her apartment so that our heroine may rest her weary legs. It is hard not to read the film as veiled allegory, which is in no way a criticism here. The figure of the mother has always been fundamental to both Russian socialist realism (dating back to Gorky’s Mother) and Soviet Propaganda (Mother Russia being like the Russian equivalent of Uncle Sam, only more guilt-inducing). She is a symbol to rival the bear its very self. And Alexandra Nikolaevna is, in her combination of irascibility and regal nobility, tremendously ursine, in no small way because she is portrayed by the physically broad and utterly regal opera legend Galina Vishneskaya, who though decrepit is not about to be knocked over by much of anything. Sokurov is one of those hermetic filmmakers who seems to work best when his films are at their most accessible and universal and in that regard Alexandra sits next to Mother and Son and his recent Hirohito pic The Sun as one of his very greatest fiction achievements. Though it has a sad familial intimacy and representation of military dehumanization upon men and those close to them in common w/ his Father and Son, this is by far the superior film. It ends, profoundly, w/ a sigh. Sokurov’s idol Tarkovsky would be proud indeed.9/10
Tie saam gok / Triangle
An utterly berserk three-handed game of exquisite corpse in which Hong Kong genre stalwarts Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and Johnnie To (in that order) combine forces to build a heist film in triptych, Triangle is one drunken faltering beast of a thing. The order, if anything, seems ingenious. Tsui Hark starts us off in full Time and Tide mode w/ his typical scattershot combination of pharmacological stylistic kineticism (extreme close-ups fused w/ dizzying action) and narrative noise (endless plot points / apparently incidental characters dispensed like manic throwing stars), Ringo Lam reigns things in, cooling down the craziness w/ his typical second act morality play (this time without the black suits and skinny ties of which Tarantino is so fond), and then Johnnie To, the youngster here, loses his crazy shit all over the finale as things degenerate into a batshit metaphysical slapstick farce of radical contingency and explosively intersecting trajectories. So basically this is a game where everybody brings there own set of tools to bare, fucking w/ each other and seeing if they can nullify each other’s contribution. Not surprisingly the whole thing comes off as a bit of a navel gaze and unfortunately Johnnie To (the most fundamentally talented of the bunch) tries way too hard and consequently succeeds in undermining the whole project, though his section is the most amusingly diverting for all that. Because of him the film comes off like a lesser Sabu effort (Sabu being the Japanese genre metaphysician of radical contingency - Johnnie's Nipponese equivilent). All in all the film is a whole lot of fun and an utter ridiculous mess by the end. Will definately please fans of this sort of thing though it may be soon forgotten. I'd see it again.6/10
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