I saw two Chinese films yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival. The Best of Times, by Chang Tso-chi, from Taiwan, is a drama about two 19-year-old boys who get into big criminal-related trouble. But what distinguishes the film is its formal style, with carefully distanced and framed camera positions, black-outs between scenes, and emphasis much more on everyday family life, than on high-octane plot. It’s really a film about the intractibility of character, and the nearness of death, more than it is a juvenile/gangster movie. The accretion of detail, and de-emphasis of heavy dramatic gestures, makes for an intelligent and affecting film (even if Chang is not the equal of his mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien).
The Eye, a horror film from Hong Kong by the Pang Brothers, is the best new horror film I have seen in a number of years. Like all great horror, it combines visceral thrills with intellectual depth. A young woman, blind for many years, has her eyesight restored due to a cornea transplant. She sees the beauty of the world for the first time since the age of two. But she also sees dead people—and must learn to come to terms with such a burden. The Eye is in every way (except budget) vastly superior to The Sixth Sense, with which it shares this premise. The Pang Brothers make something truly unsettling and haunting out of corny camera and editing tricks: out-of-focus photography, sudden pans, odd framings, abrupt cuts, and the like. The undeparted dead are not evil in this film, but the mere fact of seeing them cannot help being deeply disturbing for the protagonist–and for the audience as well. This is a film about the dangers and fragility of seeing; it is about mortality, and passivity, and the need to come to terms with trauma, and the impossibility of ever really settling one’s accounts, since the world is infinitely unpredictable.
Two Chinese Films
I saw two Chinese films yesterday at the Seattle International Film Festival. The Best of Times, by Chang Tso-chi, from Taiwan, is a drama about two 19-year-old boys who get into big criminal-related trouble. But what distinguishes the film is its formal style, with carefully distanced and framed camera positions, black-outs between scenes, and emphasis much more on everyday family life, than on high-octane plot. It’s really a film about the intractibility of character, and the nearness of death, more than it is a juvenile/gangster movie. The accretion of detail, and de-emphasis of heavy dramatic gestures, makes for an intelligent and affecting film (even if Chang is not the equal of his mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien).
The Eye, a horror film from Hong Kong by the Pang Brothers, is the best new horror film I have seen in a number of years. Like all great horror, it combines visceral thrills with intellectual depth. A young woman, blind for many years, has her eyesight restored due to a cornea transplant. She sees the beauty of the world for the first time since the age of two. But she also sees dead people—and must learn to come to terms with such a burden. The Eye is in every way (except budget) vastly superior to The Sixth Sense, with which it shares this premise. The Pang Brothers make something truly unsettling and haunting out of corny camera and editing tricks: out-of-focus photography, sudden pans, odd framings, abrupt cuts, and the like. The undeparted dead are not evil in this film, but the mere fact of seeing them cannot help being deeply disturbing for the protagonist–and for the audience as well. This is a film about the dangers and fragility of seeing; it is about mortality, and passivity, and the need to come to terms with trauma, and the impossibility of ever really settling one’s accounts, since the world is infinitely unpredictable.