I had the pleasure of getting some positive feedback on the blog today from and A.A. buddy whose been hitting a lot of the same screenings that I have. We sat together for the Cédric Kahn. Aside from noting my brilliance (a sentiment with which, it should go without saying, I am entirely in agreement), he suggested that it might behoove me to stop writing “with” as “w/” and “your” or “you are” as “yr.” He also suggested I put up a photo in which, as per my new recovery-based lifestyle, I am shown not quite so stoned. I am taking all of these suggestions under advisement. I think I will most likely go with “with” from now on. I’m still happy with “yr.” And the photo fucking stays. For now. It’s the only remaining copy I have of that image and I have feelings of partiality towards it. Not long after it was taken I was wandering the streets in full psychotic collapse, invisible, Sanskrit catechisms materializing on every surface I touched, shooting down airplanes with my watch, and being chased by international media and the military, plants and bugs spilling from me. A cure for environmental degradation fused with my DNA by virtue of a potion I had taken at the hands of a guerilla dance troupe. I must not forget where I come from (a place I can return to very easily for the price of a drink).
As far as the films go, it seems that the dominant idiom this year is the post-millennial fable. They just keep coming. On one level I am enjoying it. On another it makes for films that are occasionally too cute by half. We’ll see if the theme persists. Part of me is hungry for something a little more blunt. Too much feyness makes me hungry for raw meat.
Kûki ningyô / Air Doll
Kore-eda has tended to work pretty slow. All of a sudden he has brought in one feature each for two Cannes Film Festivals in a row. I’m afraid the rushed pace sort of shows. My feelings for Air Doll while it was playing out before me were of a considerably more amenable-to-its-charms character than they are now after a little cursory distance from its expertly cast spell. A somnambulist fable about a blow-up sex doll that has “found a heart,” as the doll herself has it, and come to life, Air Doll shouldn’t work at all. And it wouldn’t in the hands of any director other than Hirokazu Kore-eda, possibly the only living filmmaker capable of executing with heart-limning panache such a ridiculous concept. (Which is not to say that I was not entirely won over by Cherry 2000 (‘87) as a pre-adolescent boy). The doll (named Nozomi after her owner’s lost love) is played as an animate sentient creature by impassive and wry one-hell-of-an-animate-sentient-creature-herself Korean starlet Bae Du-na, who smiles with one side of her face with girlish bemusement at the new wondrous-if-sad world she robotically traverses during the day whilst her sad-sack owner is busy waiting tables (though he is so ashamed of his lowly position that he even lies to a blow-up doll about his professional status). She even gets a job herself working in a video store. (Ah, the video store: that substitute for the cinema, that place of worship for we lonesome urban souls yearning for connection. As such, a video store is to the cinema what a blow-up doll is to a sex partner. No?). Though it is a heart that Nozomi claims to have found, it is her lungs which first betray that something is stirring within, as following a few deep breathes she gets up, crosses the room (her seams still showing on her newly humanized skin) and sticks her hand out the window to allow a few drops of water to sensually drip upon it. It turns out that air is not just what fills the doll up but is also the principal subject of this Aristotelian film (which might just as easily have been called De Anima in homage to the Greek philosopher). Air, aether, the breath of life, whatever you want to call it. Negative space, the gentle breeze, the space in-between. It is not negative space, the film insists, but the connective tissue that conjoins us in our lonesome corporeal solitude. Air is the subject of Air Doll (and this is why Blow-Up Doll would be the wrong title in case you were wondering). The cure for urban loneliness, then, is the admission that we are all one. It is to emerge from out of our illusion of solitude for just long enough to bask in the gratitude and wonder demonstrated, for we the viewers as for the characters she impacts, by wise-because-innocent Nozomi. That the same forces that bring, as one of her poetic mediations reminds us, pistil and stamen together on the whim of a tremulous gust breeze through our lives as well, elevating us above the sad solitary plight of the living (as when Nozomi, filled with helium, in perhaps the film’s most beautiful scene, floats in a room surrounded by blow-up planets and constellations), filling our lives with buoyant-making substance invisible to the eye. Air Doll itself is a roving zephyr, sweeping together its various structural elements au hazard, and it works extremely well while you are watching it, blowing softly over you and its own pretty surfaces (shot by Mark Lee Ping-bing, Asia’s finest photographer). Unfortunately the film is handicapped by too many elements for it to do anything other than give most of them short shrift. Kore-eda seems to be inspired by Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in his structuring of the film’s story around an innocent who unknowingly and without intending to inextricably alters the lives of the people with whom she comes into contact. Unlike Dostoevsky, however, Kore-eda is not able to provide enough space for these tangential lives to breathe, so that we are left with blithe shorthand characterizations of figures on the margins who are all brought together in what is supposed to be a touching operatic apotheosis at the end of the film but instead becomes the movie’s flattest section because we are all of a sudden realizing how little we know or care about any of these people. It would have been a good way to end a miniseries but not a feature film. At least not this one. What Air Doll does well it does remarkably. Some passages here are as great as any you will ever see. Sadly its fundamental airiness means it can only go so far towards attaining the lofty broadly-encompassing goals it sets unreachably before itself.
B+
Les regrets
Cédric Kahn’s new dry-ice comedy is another of his dark battle-of-the-sexes two-handers w/ a clever sense of humor, palpable sexual energy, a title which pretty much tells you, like his L'ennui (’98) before it, exactly what the film is a philosophical rumination on, and two actors so perfectly cast (Yvan Attal and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi are the movie) that the motherfucker pretty much directs itself. Throw on a score by Philip Glass and it’s a no-brainer that yr gonna have a pretty good night at the movies. The screenplay is actually pretty ingenious too. It uses structuring narrative elisions and fill-in-the-blank backstory to cunning effect, keeping the audience in a position of having to do more leg work than is often the case with such films. Attal and Tedeschi play onetime lovers who bump into one another when he returns to his childhood home to see to the last days of his dying mother, and to set about making the resultant funeral preparations with no help from a deadbeat brother, years after a not-so-amicable separation in which too much remained unsaid and explanations were not proffered. He has gone on to a fairly successful career as an architect working in concert with an attractive wife unable to bear children, she has returned from a life in Africa with a mulatto child and is currently living with a backwoodsy drunk named Franck. There reintroduction to one another spawns a whirlwind affair, he promising to drop everything for her and she in turn being fearful that their relationship is doomed to fail as it did the first time. Regrets that eat away at them from within beset them each. But it are his regrets that threaten to fuck up life for both of them. His pride will no allow him to let her off the hook this time. Overwhelmed at the speed at which things are progressing, the two of them communicating (or strategically failing to fully communicate) their reactivated feelings through increasingly terse text-messages, she developing cold feet and, instead of picking up with her onetime beau where they left off, deciding to flee with Franck to Chile, thus driving Attal’s Mathieu into paroxysms of possessive mania and explosive, hilarious jealousy. Things come to a head in a mad scene of l'amour fou turned loose in the streets. Kahn plays fast-and-loose with audience expectations, leading us to believe that we are watching a prospective Chabrol-style crime film in which nobody seems sufficiently amped to actually commit any acts finally explicitly criminal in nature, though the edge is briefly and amusedly flirted with. Kahn seems to be always at his strongest when teasing his audience. Romantic regrets remain the subject of the film, and seem to serve as an anarchic energy force within bourgeoisie society that works expeditiously and unchecked in order to keep bland and suffocatingly banal lives interesting. An epilogue finds our two characters reunited once again three years after the shit goes down. This time it is her regrets as opposed to his that may be set to throw the whole frenetic roundelay into play once again, he with a new wife and now a child to add to the mix. As with many of Kahn’s previous films, Les regrets works as a what-not-to-do portrait of contemporary masculinity, and Attal brilliantly personifies the kind of world class cad that they only make in France. Fucking hilarious. And unlike Air Doll, this is a film that works better and better the more that you think about it. A real pleasure.
A
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