Hong Kong International Film Festival 2013: Nobody's Child, Bu Wancang, 1960

The very first shot: a lamb, alone on the wide meadows, bleating, almost childlike. Much later in the film, the main protagonist, an orphan girl (later superstar Josephine Siao in a very early role), is saved in a cold winter night by a jacket, given to her by the old travelling street artist, who has become something like a father for her. However, the jacket ist clearly made from sheep wool. So in a way, the lamb from the first shot (never to be seen in between) has returned in a crucial moment.

Nobody's Child is a low profile melodrama from a prolific and largely forgotten time of the Hong Kong film industry. There were probably hundreds, if not thousands of small scale films like this made around 1960, before the big budget Shawscope extravaganzas began to dominate the field. Thousands like it, but not a single one exactly like it. Nobody's Child has a fairytale-like, but somehow underdeveloped plot, routinely permuted into a film both naive and touching (the girl, looking in horror in the background through a window, realizing that she is about to be sold away) - and just a little bit weird: The storyline is strangly mirrored, if not displaced entirely, by the animal world - starting with the very first shot of the lamb. 

The orphan, living with a good foster mother and a limping and therefore bad foster father (there are no really bad people in this film, only bad animals: wolfs, roaming the white, innocent snow), escapes being sold for the first time, because a cow is sold instead of her - a strange shot of the cow's behind being moved out of the cage. Later, the orphan doesn’t get eaten by wolfs, but two show dogs do, and she doesn't die in the cold, but a show monkey does instead (after suffering bitterly and being treted by a doctor who's pretty irritated about the taking over of the animal world), and when the travelling artist finally also has to give in, not the girl, but only his third dog stands guard at his grave. Sometimes, the animals are just in the way of the humans, insist on taking a few seconds of screentime away for themselves, as when the street artist collides with another man on the streets, setting loose a group of ducks which escape cheerfully from their sorry fates. In the end, the girl moves on, together with the third dog, away from the camera, towards an uncertain future - she holds the dog on a leash, but who is she kidding: she'll go wherever the animals might lead her.

in passing: Hong Kong International Film Festival 2013

Jungle Love, Sherad Anthony Sanchez, 2012

More arthouse smut. Although unfortunatly most arthouse distributors wouldn't touch a film like this with a stick. If Longing for the Rain could be a very distant cousin of seventies erotic cinema with its open-ended plotlines and protagonists driven by real curiosity, then Sherad Anthony Sanchez' gloriously disjointed, unashamedly vulgar Jungle Love takes its cues from modern day, web-based, gonzo-style pornography; minus the ugliness and the dictatorship of the pleasure principle. Everyone's not the same when it comes to sex; this simple insight changes everything. The unedited POV-style scenes observing people talking (to off-screen-voices) about their bodies, their tattoos, their sexual preferences, or something else entirely might feel aggressive in the beginning, however, all these scenes rapidly evolve into elaborate playacting. Nobody's in control.

In one scene in Sherad Anthony Sanchez' masterpiece Imburnal some young guys spy on couples making love in the barely lit sewers; no context, just some strange, unknown bodies moving around and glowing in the dark. Jungle Love feels like an extension of this scene; not of the sex itself, but of the imaginary aspect of it (that is, its poetics has something in common with the gaze of the curious, inexperienced boys). The jungle isn't a place of primitive, uncodified fulfilment, but of various erotic potentials, which might or might not be realized.

Petal Dance, Hiroshi Ishikawa, 2013

If this is realism, why does your clothing style always exactly fit the landscapes you cross? (Not a bad film, though)

Hong Kong International Film Festival 2013: Longing for the Rain, Yang Tian-yi, 2013

Yang Tian-yi made only documentaries in the past. At the beginning of Longing for the Rain, her first fictional feature film, she announces the limit of the documentary in a self-conscious, somewhat aggressive, but still playful way. The very first images are interview-style statements of everyday chinese women talking about everyday chinese problems, most having to do with money. Then a harsh cut, the documentary setting vanishes, the space becomes fictionalized, liquid, another woman enters the scene. Her story - the rest of the film - feels like a countershot to the first short segment. Obviously, this new woman is rather well off and her problems aren't of the everyday kind.

The first real discovery of the festival. A film about a chinese upperclass woman who has vivid and plaesureful sex-dreams about a ghost. A somewhat trashy premise... And the great thing is, the film isn't afraid of the lure of trashiness. On the contrary, it gives in, like its protagonist, to pleasure. Yang Tian-yi and her cameraman obviously had a lot of fun shooting the stylized sex scenes (every single one plays out in a decidedly different way, but all are in sharp contrast to the much rougher looking non-sex scenes), even a joint shower with the grandmother can turn into some kind of erotic play, other sequences are set to high-flying classical music. But pleasure is never constant, always fleeting. The images - never in danger of crystallizing into static beauty - move along in frantic pace, a busy film in a busy world, but not in a Soderberghian-trancelike-everything's-connected-and-look-how-beautiful-digital-cinema-can-be-when-you're-only-interested-in-surfaces-way. The world of the film is fleeting, but not ever-fleeting, but instead made up of a series of discrete shocks. Desire doesn't get lost along the way, but it changes shapes and objects, like when the protagonist and her female frien visit different priests of different religions, maybe to get rid of the ghost, maybe to come closer to him. They just don't know beforehand.

Odd twists and turns lurk behind every corner. When the husband leaves his ghost-ridden wife and takes their daughter with him, all seems to be set for a turn into proper festival cinema territory. However, the film doesn't behave after all, the ghost lover insists on staying, the religious ceremonies become weirder and more insisting (one detail among many others: a somewhat delirious woman smoking and chanting at the same time), the protagonist's always inquisitive, whimsical gaze gets ever more capricious, seeking the body of the monk instead of transcendence.

Hong Kong International Film Festival 2013: Outrage Beyond, Takeshi Kitano, 2012

(This is my first english language posting on Dirty Laundry and my first serious try at writing in english on film. I'm not a native speaker, much less a native writer. Please bear with me.)

After visiting Japan for the first time and spending ten days in Tokyo, mostly in its busy but not quite hectic streets, I arrived in Hong Honk yesterday evening - also for the first time. And after taking a first, tentative walk through its not quite as busy but a lot more hectic streets, I started my festival with Takeshi Kitano's Outrage: Beyond (a film shot in 35mm; unfortunately, the screening copy was as a badly transferred dcp). That is, with a return to the mean streets of Tokyo. And while immediately recognizing / reremembering some parts of the city's fabric - for example frosted glass windows, which embody for me af decidedly japanese notion of semi-privacy; the pachinko-parlour, in which one of the film's most stylized scenes is set; also those surprisingly big cars that roam the narrow streets; these narrow, meandering streets themselves - I was much more taken by the restrains and abstractions Kitano's own style imposes on the city. Of course, every film stylizes space - and maybe in gangster films this stylization is always more obvious than in other genres. But Kitano's film is a rather extreme case (compared to, say, Miike's buzzling takes on the Yakuza genre or to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's structuralist dtv-pieces; not to speak of the fullness of experience Fukasaku's masterpieces made palpable).

The iconic cityscape itself is all but absent from the film - only in the the very first scene Kitano allows himself some long shots of the harbour area. Later the film plays out like intimate theater - even in the scenes that are set outside. Outrage Beyond is set in an extremely controlled, almost tomb-like space, which perfectly (maybe: sometimes too perfectly) corresponds with its storyline about selfcontained male violence. There are only three short scenes in the whole film involving women, and in one of them, the very first one at the harbour, the woman is both already dead and invisible. The rest is post-heroic masculinist genre mechanics in restricted spaces with a somewhat ritualistic feel to them. But for the most times, there are no rituals being performed any more. And even if they are, they look more like parodies gone wrong than like the real thing.

Outrage Beyond isn't very inspiring as a whole, or as a classical genre piece, the main storyline about Otomo's reluctant revenge on his old foes just doesn't make much sense, psychologically (or even: anti-psychologically), the actions of his opponents don't make much sense, period; other characters, especially the two cops and some young thugs who terrorize some workers on a baseball batting cage (in one of the most interesting, but unfortunately also most atypical scenes of the film), have some great scenes but are all but wasted when the higher Yakuza ranks take over the action. However, as auteur cinema Outrage Beyond is great, greater than the comparatively showy first part and maybe even greater than Kitano's art films from the Nineties.If only because of Kitano's great sense of detail. Details of space, like the short establishing shots, often not at the beginning of the scene, but inserted in the middle of a conversation. And details of movement through (off-screen-)space, like in a magnificent scene set in and especially outside of an elevator, which makes particularly great use of Keiichi Suzukis fantastic score (a slow burning blues gitar combined with some electronic gadgetry).