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Reviews
Ruoma de shi qi sui (2002)
Slow, Simple, Stunning
It's slow, it happens on a small scale, it's layered like lacquer, and at the center of it is a story that has happened everywhere in the world. But "When Ruoma Was Seventeen" takes this story -- the coming of age and first disillusionment of a young girl -- and sets it among the silvery terraced rice paddies of Yunnan (which, based on this film, has to be one of the most picturesque places on earth) and inside the heart of a simple and ravishingly beautiful 17-year-old member of the Hani Tribe, one of Southern China's many ethnic groups.
Most of the story actually takes place in Ruoma's face. The young woman who plays her is incapable of a false note. She is guileless and transparent, living with her grandmother and working in the local village selling grilled corn on the cob. Into her life comes a wanna-be photographer from the big city, a nice enough guy who wants to prove to himself that he's an artist. Hard up for money, and seeing how many foreigners want to take Ruoma's picture, he sets up a business charging tourists to pose with her. He keeps most of the money, but the bits he gives her are more than she's ever seen before. Slowly, she begins to fall in love with him.
They couldn't be more different. He's a city-dweller, a person who has made the compromises modern life seems to require. She's a girl who has probably never told a lie in her life and who doesn't even have the guile to try to hide her growing love. By now I'm sure everyone has guessed the ending, but it doesn't matter: this is a film about spirit, not story. Nothing big happens but what happens is shattering. And yet there's also recovery and resilience, and always beauty, beauty, beauty. I saw this film four days ago and I've thought about a hundred times since then. See it for yourself.
Ineo gongju (2004)
A wonderful film
This is a really remarkable movie about the relationships between parents and children, about time and loss, and about understanding others. Na-Young works in an office and lives with her ineffectual father and her relentlessly unpleasant, perpetually angry mother. She has no respect for her father and dislikes her mother, even though it's obvious that Na-Young is slowly becoming an unpleasant woman, too. When her father disappears, Na-Young goes back to the island where her parents met and her mother worked as a pearl fisher -- but somehow Na-Young finds herself face to face with the young women who will -- 30 years or so later -- become her mother. And no, this is not explained, and who cares? It's not like it's possible anyway. It happens. As her mother's life unfolds over a memorable few months, Na-Young is there as a friend. She sees her mother's aspirations and heartbreaks, and of course all that changes Na-Young's perspective.
But the film doesn't turn into Hallmark in Korean. There are no simple explanations for why we change as we get older, no miraculous reconciliations, no unconvincing character reversals. It's just a beautiful film about deepening our understanding of those who share our lives. It's gorgeous to look at, and the central performance -- the same actress plays both mother and daughter -- is pretty close to miraculous.
All in all, a wonderful film.
Ohayô (1959)
A Funny and Extremely Serious Comedy
For viewers who have seen only one or two of Ozu's statelier films -- say, "Tokyo Story" or "Equinox Flower" -- "Good Morning" will be a surprise. Two children take a vow of silence to coerce their parents into buying a television set: that's pretty much the whole plot. But what happens as a result affects almost every aspect of life in the nondescript, gossipy, elbow-to-elbow suburb in which the boys' family lives.
This is a comedy, and like all good comedies it's very serious. The boys' act of rebellion is very un-Japanese, and it threatens many of the politely ritualistic social behaviors that mask and deflect the tensions in Japanese society. Whole alliances among the village's women teeter and threaten to topple. The family's authority structure is upended, with the all-powerful father crumbling against the stubborn silence of two little boys.
What wins in the end is love -- or rather (Ozu must have found this particularly funny) love and television. The resolution will probably tear you up (it has brought moisture to the eyes of everyone I've seen it with) but it represents enormous changes in Japanese society -- the collapse of patriarchal authority, the invasion of foreign culture, and especially English-language culture, and the inexorable rise of that great leveler of aesthetics, television. Ozu saw the future, and he wasn't in it.
So naturally, he presents all this in a gentle, even sweet-natured comedy. There may be greater Ozu films, but it's hard to think of one I actually like more than "Good Morning."
Calla (1999)
Romance with a Time Twist
This is not the best Korean love story ever filmed (that may be "Il Mare") but it wasn't as unsatisfying to me as it was to some people. It takes the premise of someone going back into the past to save someone he loves and gives it a genuinely ingenious twist, which I won't reveal, except to say that if you see it coming you're a lot smarter than I am.
A young man named Sunwoo is bemused to find a single calla lily on his desk each morning when he goes to work, and occasionally he picks up the telephone only to hear piano music. Investigating, he discovers a nearby flower shop in which two young women work. One of them, Jihee, is especially beautiful, and Sunwoo finds himself falling in love with her.
Eventually he gets up the nerve to tell her how he feels -- but only on the phone. He arranges to meet her in the top-floor lounge of a hotel, only to arrive as she is killed by the man who is holding her hostage.
Stunned, he takes the elevator down and finds that he has been delivered into the past. Once he is over his shock, he realizes he has been given a chance to rescue Jihee. From this point on, nothing goes as the viewer would expect.
The film's narrative is a bit disjointed, although that may be partly the fault of the English subtitles, which aren't perfect. (They're not Hong Kong-terrible, either.) The leading actors are attractive, but only one of them -- the other young woman in the flower shop -- really came off the screen for me. And that's probably the movie's biggest problem, because we want to be fully invested emotionally in the characters. Still, all three of them are pretty and nice to look over the length of the film.
Overall, a pretty good movie -- one I can recommend especially to romantics. A lot of it happens around Christmas and there's lots of snow, so huddle up under a blanket with someone you love, or (at the very least) like quite a bit. You'll be better friends when it's over.
Siworae (2000)
Pretty, and Pretty Close to Perfect
'Il Mare' is a beautiful film -- beautifully shot, beautifully written, beautifully acted. It's as romantic a film as I've seen in years.
Two attractive young people live in an isolated beach house two years apart. Each is hiding from unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. When the young woman moves out she leaves a note in the house's ornate mailbox asking the house's next occupant to forward her mail. She is hoping for a letter from her lover, who is studying abroad and from whom she has not heard in some time.
When she gets a reply, it is from a young man who claims that he is the house's first occupant and he doesn't know how her letter got into the mailbox, but that he'll keep his eyes open for her mail. The young woman moved out of the house in 1999; the young man's letter is dated 1997. They are living two years apart, but the house's ornate mailbox somehow makes it possible for them to correspond.
Over the course of their correspondence they open to each other and it becomes obvious that they are soulmates. But . . . they are living in parallel universes, separated by two years. She tells him exactly where she will be on one day two years previously, and he goes and sees her, but of course she has no idea who he is.
The story moves forward inevitably but unpredictably, and there are almost guaranteed to be tears at the end. But more than the story, and more than the strength and beauty of the film's stars, what impresses is the way the story is told: through ravishing colors, perfectly composed images, amazing cinematography, even beautiful music. (Music can be the downfall of Korean romantic films.) There is hardly a frame of this film that could not be frozen and framed.
See it, before Hollywood gets hold of it and spoils it. (It's all over eBay, with perfectly good English subtitles.) This is one to own.
Distance (2001)
Beautiful and Bewildering
I love Koreeda -- "Afterlife" and "Maborosi" are two movies I'll watch over and over, and Afterlife actually changed the way I look at my own life.
But I don't understand what happens at the end of DISTANCE. I've read all the other members' comments, and none of them really seems to work for me. Even if the mystery man is the cult leader's son and he's only pretending to be the dead girl's brother, who's the old man he visits at the hospital, whom he claims as his father, although he isn't? Who's the family whose photo he assembles on his computer? And how long has he been friends with the other pilgrim to the pier? And why make the point that the ashes of the cult members were never found? (Normally, I wouldn't even worry about that, but in a movie this bewildering it's hard to know what is or isn't important.)
Anyway, that's enough of that. For most of this film I was completely engaged. The long setup pays off by delivering the characters to a sort of enchanted forest, where they shelter in the cottage that housed the cult to which their dead brothers, sisters, wives, etc., belonged -- and with them is the man who fled the cult before it committed its crime, who betrayed them. The night passes in alternations of rain and moonlight and the people gather, regather, make fires, and smoke (and smoke) and very slowly begin to try to make some sense out of the mystery that crashed over them and washed away the people they loved and thought they knew.
Every element in this section of the film, which fortunately is the longest, works to put you into the rooms these isolated people briefly share, to put you into the rhythms of their conversations and the pauses that punctuate them, and to give you the feeling that you have been part of this improbable, somehow magical, night. The acting, the hand-held camera, the mostly natural light, the absence of any kind of frills, focuses you on the extraordinary actors and beyond them, to the reverberations of fading tragedy that vibrate through these lives like a gong.
And then, when the film's characters finally return to the garish, amphetamine-paced hurry of their daily lives, for just a moment you realize what drove the cult into the forest in the first place.
It's a great film with an absolutely impenetrable final 15-20 minutes. I'd love to hear some other theories. I don't suppose Koreeda has written anything about it.