Hong Kong International Film Festival 2008 Wrap-up

Perhaps the one familiar concept that lingered with me throughout this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) was uttered in Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, a documentary on the infamous cinematic man of mystery directed by Variety chief film critic Todd McCarthy. Rissient framed cinema and cinema-going as a kind of ‘warfare’ and the more films I sat through, some pleasantly and others torturously, it made sense that in some ways this is all a grand battle to find and champion the good over the bad and to desperately fight the ticking clock that threatens to rob us of all that rich cinematic history and foreign terrains still to explore. This point is not new but it did feel good to have it reiterated forcefully and I kept it close to my heart together with Rissient’s declaration, “It’s not enough to like a film, you have to like it for the right reasons.” So what better battle ground then for the hardcore cinephile and casual moviegoer to enter onto than the HKIFF, one of Asia’s key film festivals, and separate the trash from the treasures and go head-to-head with fellow fest-goers over whatever new titles caused debate?

The festival is getting big, make no mistakes about it, and with an Asian Film Awards (AFA) ceremony, a marketplace (the Filmart) and an attached film-financing forum (the HAF) all coinciding at the same time there’s little doubting that the HKIFF is trying to reposition itself as a counterforce to Pusan’s dominance in the region. I’ll move beyond the glitz, the biz and the glamour (although I couldn’t resist sneaking a peek at the red-carpet photos of the AFA) and stick to what matters: the films. The festival has, in part, earned a ‘cinephile’ tag thanks to a long-held tradition of terrific sidebar programmes which have drawn attention to the masters (recently: Ozu, Visconti and Michael Snow), maverick Asian auteurs and establishment actors, experimental work or rarely seen gems of Chinese/Hong Kong cinema. This year fest-goers were treated to retrospectives on Edward Yang, Zhu Shilin and Ingmar Bergman; a collection of films directed, acted or produced by Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang; directorial focuses on Japanese young-gun Ishii Yuya and controversial maverick Wakamatsu Koji, not to mention American indie pioneers Charles Burnett and Gus Van Sant; a sprinkling of Maya Deren shorts; and regional focuses on Israel, Taiwan and Czechoslovakia. Combined with the usual programme strands highlighting, in particular the latest from mainland China, Hong Kong and Asian digital work, it’s little wonder that the festival runs close to three weeks!

Knock-out masterpieces arrived in the form of Wang Bing’s He Fengming, Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day, Diao Yinan’s Night Train, Jose Luis Guerin’s In The City of Sylvia, Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Ploy, Wakamatsu Koji’s United Red Army and a handful of others and I hope I did in fact like them for the right reasons. Hong’s latest once again preoccupies itself with the romantic/lustful tribulations of a male artist – this time an award-winning painter – but there’s a number of key departures from his previous work which marks this as an entirely refreshing development in the career of one of contemporary world cinema’s greats. Shot on HD and set mainly in Paris, Night and Day takes on a diary-like narrative form replacing the internal mirroring plot devices of old and there’s plenty of insights about Korean masculinity when divorced from the motherland. Diao Yinan’s Night Train boasts some of the most elegantly refined and precisely composed imagery of recent Chinese cinema and thankfully it has an emotionally gripping story to match the formal beauty: a female bailiff looks for love in the rural provinces when she’s not executing prisoners and she soon falls for a man directly related to one of her deceased detainees. Striking stuff and my pick for the festival’s best film.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang has returned to Thailand (after a brief journey into Hong Kong waters with Invisible Waves) for Ploy and his latest screened as part of the festival’s “Auteurs” programme alongside films by Hong, Guy Maddin and Roy Andersson. Pen-ek is one of Thailand’s most successful mainstream filmmakers and his previous films Last Life in the Universe, Monrak Transistor and 6ixtynin9 have all showcased his strong abilities as a striking visualist (he also works for the premiere advertising agency The Film Factory which may in some ways explain this) and a perfect conjurer of moody atmospherics. Ploy centres around a thirtysomething couple who have just jetted in to Bangkok from the States for a funeral, clearly suffering from a festering case of the ‘Seven Year Itch’. They check into a swank hotel but the husband decides to hit the lobby’s bar for a quick drink; once there, his eye catches a teenage girl who surely must be donning one of cinema’s great afros. He invites her back to his room (where his wife is asleep) which of course complicates his ailing marriage. Elsewhere a hotel maid checks into one of the vacant rooms and indulges in all kinds of sexual fantasies which may or may not be connected to our main couple’s woes. This terrific film is charged with a dreamy ambience which occasionally and smoothly parlays into immodest tension, when the wife (played by famous Thai soap actress Lalita Panyopas) decides to venture off on her own mission of infidelity, and certainly qualifies as his most sensual and visually impressive film to date.

Wang Bing had three films in the festival with a total running time of seventeen-and-a-half hours: one piece of video art Crude Oil, a documentary He Fengming and a short Brutality Factory (part of the State of the World omnibus). Wang can surely be labelled one of world cinema’s most important filmmakers and certainly one of the key artists from China’s current DV-cinema boom. Crude Oil explores the complete making of the precious liquid from a humanist and industrial perspective so the overall picture is clear as to what really goes into a drop of the stuff from back-breaking, monotonously repetitive labour to the mechanical whirrings of a bulky machine. There’s a precise reasoning behind Wang’s “cinema of total disclosure” and it imparts both socio-political and aesthetic pleasures for those willing to allow themselves to nestle into Crude Oil’s rhythms of the everyday. The other intriguing aspect of this slab of cinema is that perhaps non-deliberately Crude Oil almost resembles a horror film like The Thing except the monster lurking to ensnare these men in this horrible location is our rapacious consumption of oil. Wang keeps the camera inside a small workers cafeteria for the first few hours of the film and the tension mounts as to the harsh conditions outside. We see glimpses of the harsh night as a worker wanders off outside and comes back in to grab a smoke but when the camera finally turns its gaze to the tough terrain located outside, somewhere near the Gobi Desert, the effect is quite stunning and shocking. Later the film’s flickering final shot, a faintly lit moon threatening to disappear from sight, surely is a warning that we’re close to exhausting the good times with the earth’s finite resources. Again the real-world implications associated with this shot are far more scary than anything in Hostel or Saw.

Another kind of horror film, He Fengming, explores the anti-rightist period of China’s communist history when many innocent people were thrown into labour camps or worse for sometimes little more than writing an article which could have been misinterpreted by a Party cadre. Fengming is an elderly lady living in a modest apartment and the entire film consists of her meticulously mining her heart-breaking past for information on how her family was destroyed thanks to the anti-rightist campaign. Some might think that a film boasting just one old woman and one apartment would be tedious but the film is edge-of-your-seat stuff, and Fengming’s calm but emotional storytelling is vice-like gripping from start to end. Again Wang strips cinema down to its most essential to force you to focus on the only thing that’s important here: the storytelling and the decaying visage of a woman shattered by the gale-force winds of history. The short Brutality Factory mines similar territory, a look at the torture of a woman who won’t squeal on her allegedly anti-communist partner, with shocking effect.

The festival’s Midnight Heat selection offered up an assortment of genre flicks with mixed results. Taking its cue from the ten commandments, The Ten includes an impressive cast of familiar A minus/B plus actors (Winona Ryder, Paul Rudd, Liev Schreiber, Jessica Alba, Gretchen Mol, Famke Janssen and Adam Brody) but comes to little more than a series of underdeveloped comedy sketches which would be far more appropriate in a sophomore college revue. Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django (just confirmed for this year’s festival!) finds the prolific Japanese shock-meister turn to the Italian oaters of the sixties for inspiration bringing Quentin Tarantino with him for the ride (there’s global consensus Quentin that you need to stay behind the camera from now on, m’kay?). Equal parts Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, it’s wildly stylish with plenty of violence and the opening even pays homage to the Querelle-ish visuals of Miike’s 2006 effort Big Bang Love. It would be safe to say that Australian audiences can expect all prints to be subtitled in English because the barely-there phonetic English soundtrack is likely to cause severe confusion. The French schlock horror flick Inside could have been more appropriately titled, There Will Be Blood…Lots of It! and would have fully delivered on that moniker. This outrageously bold film is a relentless, pummelling exercise in pain and uses its slither of a premise (a pregnant woman is stalked by a mysterious woman who wants her baby) to extract some jaw-dropping moments of violence. When Inside kicks into gear it operates like only the best late-night genre flicks do, unleashing set-piece after set-piece of stabbing, cutting, fighting, burning, etc and drenching the screen in crimson rivers of blood. Given Knocked Up and Juno’s strong veneration for motherhood, the perversity and deranged shenanigans of Inside seems like the perfect antidote to the feel-good charm on display in those familial daydreams. One thing’s for sure though: Inside should carry a warning, like rollercoasters, that pregnant women should stay well away.

The Asian DV Competition prize went to Takahashi Izumi’s What The Heart Craves, a moderately successful look at a small group of youngish urbanites and the delicate social network that unravels after a simple magic trick. Much more dynamic and formally assured however was Ishii Yuya’s Of Monster Mode which finely oscillated between lyrical tenderness and unhinged insanity, one minute opting for laughs and then the next turning deadly serious. Crossroads, pitched itself somewhere at the junction of Betelnut and 13 Princess Trees and felt at least 45 minutes too long and overly familiar. Sweet Food City is not entirely successful but alerts a filmmaker ready to graduate to far more fascinating things in the future if he keeps a similar level of formal experimentation intact. Woo Ming-jin’s breezy Days of the Turquoise Sky is another Malaysian film to arrive with young people in its sights but is so gloriously wrapped in its easy-going charm that it’s near impossible not to warm to.

A quick round-up of bravos: Brian De Palma’s Redacted is by far the best thing he’s done in ages and leaves little doubt that the Coalition of the Willing are stuck in a terribly immoral, hopelessly futile quagmire. Redacted’s attempt to check the pulse of the YouTube age feels a little clunky but De Palma seems effortlessly in control of his politicising and need to throw in jolting thrills, a mix which has rarely worked for him in the past (I’d also give it credit purely for the fact that it successfully takes the piss out of the earnest European doco genre). Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town (confirmed for this year’s programme) is, in short, wonderful; another major alert signal that Thailand is breeding a great crop of talented indie filmmakers, some of which you may just see soon in the upcoming focus on Thai cinema. Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World is a visual stunner and a subtle alarm-bell that the world needs to have re-calibrated its resource-gluttony yesterday. Touring the Antarctica, Herzog finds kindred spirits who are willing to pit (or align) themselves to harsh, uncompromising natural environments but Herzog seems less convinced about man’s future to co-exist with the earth (hence the pun of the title). The real beauty of the film comes from deep beneath the icy ceilings when the camera lurks to the bottom of the ocean and finds all kinds of weird and wonderful worlds co-habiting with our own.

Finally a shout-out to Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, a revealing portrait of someone who discovered, promoted and championed great cinema with a passion and zeal that successfully elevated emerging talents firmly onto the world stage. If most of us are film-loving foot-soldiers then Pierre Rissient surely must be the Commander-in-Chief, an aggressive, passionate, intelligent and ruthless man whose love of cinema knows no bounds. At one point Sydney Pollack describes him as, “an animal that clamps onto your leg” and elsewhere we learn of Rissient’s bully-boy tactics as a PR man who would corner critics and force them to accept a film’s brilliance. Rissient’s name is unlikely to register with most people but after watching Man of Cinema you’ll understand just how important he’s been in uncovering and championing some of contemporary cinema’s major figures. Admittedly the documentary tips into hagiography intermittently but considering that Rissient is a man who thoroughly deserves the sort of championing he’s done on the behalf of others for most of his life, I’m willing to let that pass and get swept up in the salutes. What a list of salutes they are too: Clint Eastwood, Claude Chabrol, Rolf de Heer, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Quentin Tarantino, Olivier Assayas, Jane Campion, Abbas Kiarostami, Edward Yang, John Boorman, James Toback, Charles Burnett and on and on. Our very own David Stratton joins the chorus with a funny anecdote about Rissient’s one night stand with a certain mega-watt starlet and the freakish Svengalism Rissient possessed in predicting The Piano’s Cannes top-prize win and the date which it would screen at the festival. My favourite yarn of the film though goes to the story about Rissient and Fritz Lang going to see Deep Throat and the famed German director’s restless eagerness to see the titular act.

In an age of nonchalance (who can blame us considering the dreck clogging the arteries of local cineplexes?), Sahara-desert-dry academicism or solipsistic blogging Man of Cinema takes us back to a completely different age when film-love was quite a different ball game. But considering the festival screened marvellous new work by Diao Yinan, Wang Bing, Ishii Yuya, Aditya Assarat, Edwin, Ho Yuhang and Hong Sang-soo to name but a few I would argue that the future is still bright and worth continuing the good fight for.