Something in the Air (Après mai), Directed by Olivier Assayas (2012)

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Après mai, Carole Combes, Charisse Gendron, cinema, Clément Métayer, Cold Water, European cinema, French cinema, Lola Créton, Olivier Assayas, Something in the Air, Sylvain Jacques

The original title of Olivier Assayas’ new film, Après mai, signals that its young protagonists have arrived late to the leftist movement that crested in May 1968 with a general strike and the occupation of the Sorbonne. It is now 1970, and the group including Gilles (Clément Métayer), in their last year of high school, argue the schismatic politics of Marx and Trotsky, revolution and art. During a confrontation at the school in which a guard is wounded, student leader Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann) is arrested. He does not give the names of the others, and they graduate into the world.

Assayas portrays youth with great lyricism; the scene in 1994′s Cold Water of the all-night bonfire at a decayed estate evokes the revelers’ willingness to pursue mystery and beauty wherever they lead. In Après mai, the path branches. Gilles, a skinny mop head with puppy-dog eyes, loves the beautiful artist Laure (Carole Combes), who leaves him for the wealthy producer, Jean-Serge (Sylvain Jacques). Traveling with friends to join an activist group in Italy, he falls in with the earnest Christine (Lola Créton), who says of his love for Laure: You want to be her. In Italy, fellow-painter Alain (Felix Armand) hooks up with Leslie (India Menuez), an American flower child en route to Asia. Radical politics, sex, art, mysticism—all beckon.

But as the friends gradually peel away—Christine to make documentary films, Leslie to attend college in the U. S., Alain to paint—Gilles’ inclinations emerge. Turned off by the rhetorical films made by Christine’s collective, he lets her drift away from him, landing back, briefly, in the arms of Laure, now a drug addict.  At another of Assayas’ gorgeous episodic party scenes, this one at Jean-Serge’s sprawling country house, Gilles shows Laure his drawings of her. She says they are his best work, and he burns them: they are for her eyes only.

This time the bonfires spread, and the house catches fire. Laure stands at a window, perhaps jumps. In a final scene, Gilles watches a film of her walking toward him, blurry with sunshine. The film sacrifices Laure to Gilles; her failure as an artist ends his identification with her and immortalizes her as his muse.

Paradise: Faith, Directed by Ulrich Seidl

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Charisse Gendron, cinema, European cinema, Maria Hofstätter, Nabil Saleh, Paradise: Faith, Ulrich Seidl, world cinema

A woman, a man, a crucifix, a cat: with such slender means does Austrian director Ulrich Seidl create the complex domestic hell of Paradise: Faith, the second installment of his Paradise trilogy, between Love, about a female sex tourist in Kenya, and Hope, about a teenage girl’s sojourn at a weight-loss camp.

In Faith, Catholic Annamaria (Maria Hofstätter) takes time off from her job as a medical technician to evangelize in poor and immigrant neighborhoods, toting a statue of the virgin in a sack. In the afternoons she returns to her house, a place as geometrical and tidy as the clinic where she works, to play hymns on the harmonium, flagellate herself in front of a hefty crucifix, or scoot around the house on her knees, a cilice tied around her midriff (she sets a timer for this mortification). She appears to be quite happy, almost giddily in love with pretty, gentle Jesus, until one day her husband, Nabil (Nabil Saleh), returns after a two-year absence. Nabil’s legs are paralyzed as the result of crashing his car while drunk.

What could Jesus be thinking, to burden her with such a heavy cross as a flesh and blood man with opinions, feelings, needs, and desires? Annamaria does her duty, cooking  Nabil’s meals and making up a bed for him on the couch, but can barely abide his intrusion on the serenity she has achieved since he left. A rapprochement is out of the question—Jesus, who saved her when her life with an alcoholic spouse came to a disastrous end, has taken a spouse’s place in her bed. That Nabil does not worship Jesus—he is a Muslim, religiously tolerant but with some cultural expectations about the role of a wife—is almost beside the point. As for Nabil, he suffers sharply from Annamaria’s coldness, her rules—no TV, not even for a man who cannot leave the house—and her religious mania. When he tries to make friends with a cat staying at the house temporarily, Annamaria locks the cat—an emblem of both the rejected Nabil and her own animal nature—in the basement.

She has one moment of remorse, sobbing over the prostrate man, who has fallen asleep in exhaustion, like Mary Magdalene over the dead Christ. But when Nabil is at last goaded by frustration and the conviction of his rights as a husband into dragging Annamaria to the floor, prepared to rape her if she does not acquiesce, she is equal to the ensuing struggle. In their prolonged wrestling match, as they pant, flail, and bop each other with slippers, swaddled in the cilice of their marriage, they resemble Paolo and Francesca, circling hell in an embrace.

 

Beyond the Hills, Directed by Cristian Mungiu

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4 months 3 weeks and 2 days, Beyond the Hills, Charisse Gendron, cinema, Cristian Mungiu, Eastern European cinema, film, LGBT cinema, Romania, Tatiana Niculescu Bran, world cinema

Beyond the Hills intensifies director Cristian Mungiu’s exploration of friendship between women, already deeply examined in 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. In that film, set in authoritarian Romania, an intelligent, resourceful young woman obtains an illegal abortion for a pretty but helpless friend. In additional to enduring obstacles and risks, even to arrange for the hotel room where the procedure will take place, she sleeps with the sleazy abortionist as part of the deal. The experience scars her more than it does her friend, whom she discovers enjoying a hearty breakfast the morning after the abortion, ready to put it behind her. A new, unequal stage of the relationship begins with the protagonist’s realization that her friend cannot gauge her sacrifice.

In Beyond the Hills, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), a young nun in a Greek Orthodox religious community in rural Romania, comes to town to meet the train of her friend Alina (Cristina Flutur), now living in Germany. In this first meeting since leaving the orphanage where they grew up, Alina clings to Voichita, sobbing. She has discovered that she cannot live without her. But Voichita has discovered God.

Alina, in her expedient ponytail and running suit, has chosen the West and personal freedom, while Voichita, her hair covered by a black veil, has chosen service, community, and obedience to a black-bearded patriarch (Valeriu Andriuta). When she explains to Alina that she still loves her, but that to love her more than God would be improper, Alina accuses her of parroting dogma. Yet Alina’s disrespect for Voichita’s choice—which decrees that they can no longer share a bed—does not stifle her passion for her friend. It only stokes her rebellion against the patriarch and his faith. In one of many discordant scenes, she taunts him with the proposition that a miraculous icon reputed to dwell within the inner sanctum of the church does not really exist. When he produces the image, she shatters it. She is literally an iconoclast.

Alina’s rage pitches her into a fit, and the nuns take her to the hospital. When she is discharged, she has nowhere to go, and the patriarch yields to Voichita’s plea to allow her to return. But the community worries about Alina’s health, physical and spiritual, and about the havoc she wreaks on their lives. Reluctantly, knowing the risk and doubting his own powers, the patriarch agrees to perform an exorcism. The nuns create a crude cross and chain Alina to it, padding the chains with rags. She resists with superhuman strength, but the nuns prevail. Hour after hour, the patriarch reads over her the scriptures banishing the devil.

In the morning, the nuns tell Voichita that her friend is at last calm, lucid, and gentle. Voichita runs to the church to find that it is true. Alina lifts her head, smiles strangely at Voichita, and collapses. Medics arrive and shoot her full of adrenaline, as if their salvation depended on her survival, but she is dead, and the religious folk are arrested. Voichita goes with them into town, although she took no part in the exorcism. She is wearing Alina’s sweater, her head is uncovered, and her eyes wear a new, unclouded expression.

Beyond the Hills is based on a nonfiction novel by Tatiana Niculescu Bran.

Like Someone in Love, Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

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Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy, Charisse Gendron, cinema, Denden, Iranian cinema, Like Someone in Love, Rin Takanashi, Ryo Kase, Tadashi Okuno, Taste of Cherry, Ten, world cinema

As in a number of Kiarostami’s films—Taste of Cherry, Ten, Certified Copy—crucial scenes in his new film, Like Someone in Love, take place in a moving car. This is appropriate to Kiarostami’s unique method of plot development. A master of the slow release of information about the confounding complexities of human lives, the director holds a film in an evolving present, traveling in a real or metaphorical car down an undulating road to an unknown destination. Beginning in medias res, without recourse to flashbacks or voice overs to provide exposition, the films gradually reveals that the driver of the car is en route to his own grave site (Taste of Cherry) or to a delightful Italian pension where she will try to kindle a fire in a man who may be her husband (Certified Copy). The end of every film arrives with a feeling of profound and unexpected emotion. We are suddenly there.

Early in Like Someone in Love, Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a sociology student and call girl, is maneuvered into a cab by her club owner pimp, Hiroshi (Denden), for a 45-minute ride to the suburban apartment of a retired sociology professor, Takashi (Tadashi Okuno). She doesn’t want to go. She has planned to have dinner with her grandmother and study for an exam. If she takes the job with the professor, she will miss her grandmother, who has traveled from Akiko’s village to the city to check on her, and she will fail her exam, and she will lose her alibi for not spending the evening with her fanatically jealous fiancé, Noriaki (Ryo Kase). After a minor tantrum, however, Akiko enters the cab, directs the cabbie to circle the train station where her grandmother waits, sheds a few tears, and settles in for a nap so she will arrive refreshed at her assignment.

At the apartment, like a true geisha, Akiko entertains the professor, Takashi, with polite attentions and flirtatious chatter, including a dirty joke she has heard at the club and doesn’t understand. After a discreet interval, however, she strips and climbs into bed, insisting that the elderly widower join her, sweetening the “let’s get this over with” message with the pretense that she is tired. And she probably is tired. Poor Takashi, who has prepared a romantic dinner, blows out the candles and follows her into the bedroom. Possibly he just lets her sleep.

In the morning, Takashi, most solicitous of johns, drives Akiko to the university, where the jealous Noriaki confronts her on the steps, demanding to know where she has spent the night. When she runs off to take her exam, he climbs into Takashi’s car, mistaking him as the girl’s grandfather, for a heart-to-heart talk about those mysterious creatures, women. Seeing that the relationship is headed for unhappiness if not disaster, the old man councils the young one not to marry Akiko, who soon enough returns and straps herself petulantly into the back seat.

Then they are off to Noriaki’s garage, to repair an engine belt in the professor’s car. The situation in the car among these three sympathetic but compromised people is, of course, a minefield. How the frustratingly passive Akiko has gotten herself into this mess raises the question of whether she represents a particularly immature individual designed by fate to ruin a lonely and/or horny old man or a vulnerable country girl surviving in the city while negotiating the virgin/whore sexual mores of traditional/modern Japan. Takashi, genuinely concerned for Akiko’s welfare, is in the end not her grandfather but her customer, with a limited right to call the shots. How to reconcile his exploitation of Akiko with his gentleness? And Noriaki might be less of a tyrant, were he not resisting the knowledge that his fiancée is a prostitute who has advertised her wares all over town. After all, he is correct. Everyone is lying to him.

Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player

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Charisse Gendron, Charles Aznavour, cinema, David Goodis, European cinema, film, François Truffaut, French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, Marie Dubois, New Wave, noir, Shoot the Piano Player

Truffaut and Godard worshiped American noir. But unlike hard-boiled heroes stateside, who do what needs to be done no matter how lousy the breaks, French heroes of the New Wave shrug at the notion of meaningful action.

Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour), the protagonist of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960), could be the model for Henri, the existential cat video star. Formerly a concert pianist, Charlie now plays dance music in a bistro, punishing himself for his wife’s suicide. One day she had confessed to sleeping with his agent to further his career. Seeing that she is in despair, he tells himself to comfort her. Lacking the will, he storms from the hotel room, and she throws herself out the window.

Now, raising his kid brother, with the help of the prostitute next door, makes a life of sorts. But fate won’t leave him alone. With one hand, it delivers a wonderful girl, Lena (Marie Dubois). With the other, it serves up more brothers, amiable chuckleheaded thieves running from a double cross. Soon a pair of goons are after Charlies’s hide.

Charlie does act, once, to stab a jealous rival for Lena who is trying to choke him to death. Now the goons and the cops are after him. Lena, who has all the guts and enterprise he lacks, packs Charlie into the car and drives him to his brothers’ hideout in the country. When she returns to the hideout to tell Charlie he has been cleared of the murder charge, he sends her away in a fit of Gallic pessimism.

But it is too late, and as the goons storm the hideout she is caught in the crossfire. An unforgettable shot of her body rolling down a snowy hill recalls the fall of Charlie’s wife from the hotel window. Two strikes, you’re out. The next we see Charlie, he is back at his honkytonk piano, nursing his resignation in the face of his own weakness and the absurdity of fate.

The Seventh Continent, Directed by Michael Haneke

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Amour, Birgit Doll, Caché, Charisse Gendron, cinema, Dieter Berner, European cinema, French cinema, Funny Games, German cinema, Leni Tanzer, Michael Haneke, Seventh Continent, Seventy-One Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Udo Samel

Michael Haneke explodes the nuclear family, or allows it to implode. In Seventy-One Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), a husband and wife nearly adopt first one desperate child, an orphan, and then another, a runaway. They renege on the orphan, and soon after they bring home the runaway, the wife is killed in a shooting spree. In Funny Games (1997), two sadistic youths force members of a family to torture one other. In Caché (2005), a family receives mysterious videotapes of scenes from the husband’s past, leading to false accusations and the suicide of an old acquaintance. In this year’s acclaimed Amour, a devoted elderly couple barricade themselves in their tasteful apartment while the woman dies by inches.

Is Haneke an ironist, demonstrating that we encounter our fate in the act of trying to avert it? As a friend pointed out, in each of these films repetitive camera shots of enclosed spaces—a car in a car wash, a fish tank, a sealed room, a television—insist that barriers themselves invite calamitous intrusion. Or is Haneke a scourge, punishing his characters for insularity or for more malicious, though hidden, faults?

The gunshot that explodes the family in the making in Seventy-One Fragments comes from the outside, courtesy of a crazy university student. But the do-gooder couple on the verge of adopting a needy child has already rejected a previous needy child, suggesting a moral implosion as catastrophic as a bullet to the heart. The normalcy of the family in Caché masks typical tensions—a worn marriage, an uncommunicative teenager—that do not necessarily point toward tragedy until an anonymous avenger excavates the husband’s childhood cruelties. And while mortality inflicts the greatest pain in Amour, here too Haneke shows us a canker in the rose: the exclusivity of a relationship that banishes an adult daughter, even as it keeps the dreaded medical system at bay. Explosions or implosions?

The Seventh Continent, one of Haneke’s earliest features, begs this question. Anna, Georg, and Evi Schober (Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, and Leni Tanzer) tenderly care for each other in their comfortable house in the suburbs. Anna and Georg make love in the morning before work, Georg strokes Anna’s cheek when she is upset by an accident on the side of the road, Anna tucks in Evi each night at bed time, writes newsy letters to her in-laws, and comforts her brother and business partner, Alexander (Udo Samel), who is recovering from a breakdown following the death of their mother. Georg receives a significant promotion when his crotchety supervisor retires.

The couple surprises everyone with the news that they are emigrating to Australia. Georg quits his job, Anna turns over her optician’s practice to Alexander, they withdraw their money from the bank and sell the car. Then Georg writes a letter to his parents, to be found after his death, explaining that the family has decided to commit suicide. In the lengthy, masterful sequence of the film depicting their preparations and deaths, the family experiences a lifetime of emotions, from cheerful industry to horror. Implosion, certainly, the choice to cheat death by dying preemptively. But explosion, too—ruin inflicted by a director for whom the very expectation of happiness proves that one does not deserve it.

 

Tabu, Directed by Miguel Gomes (2012)

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Ana Moreira, Carloto Cotta, Charisse Gendron, cinema, Claire Denis, European cinema, F. W. Murnau, Henrique Espírito Santo, Isabel Munoz Cardoso, Laura Soveral, Miguel Gomes, Portuguese cinema, post colonial cinema, Tabu, Teresa Madruga, world cinema

In the form of a diptych in counter-chronological order, reversing the structure of its inspiration, F. W. Murnau’s Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), Miguel Gomes’ Tabu tells a story of love and revolution in 1960s Mozambique. Shot in black and white—this is a film about race and a film about historic cinema—part one of the diptych takes place in contemporary Lisbon, where the pious Pilar (Teresa Madruga) worries about social injustice and the welfare of her aged neighbor, Aurora (Laura Soveral). Resisting the marriage suit of a friend (Cândido Ferreira), who dozes beside her at the cinema while she silently weeps, or praying fervently at a demonstration, Pilar has married a life of service. Whether her sacrifices bring about the good, the director does not indicate.

Pilar believes that Aurora is losing her mind and needs medical care, but she cannot convince Aurora’s African maid Santa (Isabel Munoz Cardoso) to ask for money from Aurora’s daughter. The suggestively named Santa has her orders, and not bugging the daughter is one of them. What is more, the elegant Aurora makes trouble, gambling away the household cash, pawning and retrieving her fur coat, and accusing her maid of poisoning her. Aurora herself confesses to Pilar that she has blood on her hands. So perhaps Santa resists Pilar’s efforts to help because she resents the old woman and wants her to suffer, or because she cannot afford to be fired by the daughter, or because she believes no medicine could heal Aurora’s spiritual ills, or because she is the agent of righteousness, more of a saint even than Pilar.

On her deathbed, Aurora asks Santa to deliver the message of her impending demise to one Mr. Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), whom Pilar locates in an old person’s home. By then Aurora is dead, but Ventura attends her funeral and goes with Pilar and Santa to a café, where he embarks on the story that composes part two of the diptych, that of his youthful love affair with Aurora in Africa. This part, silent movie style, contains no dialogue, only Ventura’s voiceover.

Having traveled on his motorcycle to the foot of Mount Tabu (there is a Mount Mabu in Mozambique), the handsome adventurer Ventura (Carloto Cotta) lands on a farm next to the beautiful game hunter Aurora (Ana Moreira) and her energetic young husband (Ivo Müller). The husband has given Aurora a cute baby crocodile (yes, a symbol of her adorable, untamable, appetitive soul), who escapes and is found in Ventura’s pond.

The husband goes away on business, the crocodile makes a bee line for Ventura’s place, Aurora follows it, and the inevitable occurs. She and Ventura not only go to bed, but fall passionately, fatefully, and eternally in love.

Ventura joins a rock band led by his buddy Mario (Manuel Mesquita). In white suits, shades, and longish hair, the band poses for publicity shots and performs The Ronettes’ standard “Baby, I love You” (as recorded by The Ramones) at a pool party as Aurora and her husband and their friends dance the twist. Ventura confesses his adulterous obsession to Mario, who insists that his friend give up the affair. It is a sin. The lovers know this and try to separate, but when Aurora discovers that she is pregnant, they run away together.

Gomes does not trivialize the pair’s erotic bliss or their anguished consciences, but subtly juxtaposes their liaison with the brewing guerrilla campaign against Portuguese rule, which erupted in September 1964. Aurora and Ventura, doubly cocooned in colonial and amorous oblivion, fail to notice that history is taking place around them—until, ironically, the guerrillas take credit for a crazy murder resulting from their affair. The murder splits them apart forever, although both return to Portugal, Ventura immediately and Aurora later, presumably during the Carnation Revolution of 1974, when the Portuguese left Mozambique en masse.

Although synopses of the film reliably refer to the young Aurora as selfish, restless, and headstrong, Gomes, smarter than his reviewers, hardly intends her as a belle dame sans merci who ruins men’s prospects and destabilizes the social order. The social order is already awry. Akin to Maria Vial, the protagonist of Claire Denis’ brutal film about Europeans in Africa, White Material, Aurora represents something more resonant to modern viewers than a femme fatale. She is the crocodile in the swimming pool, an intractable white woman who, identifying with her adoptive land if not its people, fails to recognize that she paddles in an artificial pond. Even at the end of her life, after she has paid in decades of self-denial for her fault of adultery, she has not asked herself why her “black witch” of a maid might want to poison her.

Sister, by Ursula Meier

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Agnès Godard, Charisse Gendron, cinema, Claire Denis, European cinema, French cinema, Gillian Anderson, Léa Seydoux, Queen of Versailles, Ursula Meier, women directors

Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), twelve years old, and Louise (the enchanting Léa Seydoux of Farewell My Queen), pushing thirty, live in a high-rise at the base of a ski resort in Switzerland. The building, faceless and grim, stands in the middle of a gravel lot where Louise passes out from drink when she tires of her life making beds in the local motels. Skinny little Simon contributes to the household by absconding with ski equipment up on the mountain, hauling it home in a plastic toboggan, and selling it cheap to the town kids who love to ski but can’t afford the luxurious gear sported by the tourists. Simon himself can’t ski—when has he had time to learn? Louise stays out all night, leaving the boy to his own devices, and comes home with bruises on her face. They are yoked to each other for survival, yet the yoke weighs heavy. No one will marry Louise with a little boy in tow. And Simon will never work hard enough at his dangerous trade to stay ahead of Louise’s appetite for booze and sexy jeans.

We long for them to be free, mostly for an adult to intervene and find a home for Simon. The possibility is dangled in front of us. When he is inevitably caught stealing at the resort, we hope that the proprietor will call the authorities and a nice women cop will get him into the foster care system. But no, he is just thrown into a gondola with the hotel garbage. When he becomes obsessed with a pretty American family on vacation, it seems momentarily possible that the mother (Gillian Anderson) will take more than a casual interest in this child who is obviously lying about his wealthy, distinguished parents. But no one is rescued in this film, in which lighthearted glimpses of Simon and Louise tussling in the snow are sunk beneath scenes in which he pays her in hard-earned cash for the privilege of sleeping beside her. Louise is emotionally stunted, sure, but life has not been kind to this beautiful and rebellious girl, and she too has adopted the mentality of a thief.

The breathtaking cinematography of alpine Switzerland, of snowy mountains, evergreens, blue skies, and bright ski togs—of beauty barely noticed by the protagonists, preoccupied with getting by—is by Agnes Godard, the long-time collaborator of Claire Denis.

The Connection, Directed by Shirley Clarke

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American, Charisse Gendron, cinema, J. Hoberman, Jack Gelber, Living Theatre, New York State Education Department, Panic in Needle Park, Roscoe Lee Browne, Shirley Clarke, Warren Finnerty, women directors

The 50^th anniversary re-release in May of director Shirley Clarke’s first feature, The Connection, earned tributes from J. Hoberman, Manohla Dargis, Richard Brody, and others. Everybody agreed that it was about time the girl got some notice—something more appreciative than denying the film a license (as did the Motion Picture Division of the New York State Education Department in 1961) because the characters refer to heroin as “shit.”

Based on the Obie Award-winning play by Jack Gelber, which premiered in 1959 at The Living Theatre, The Connection communicates its roman a clef naturalism—we see the main character, Leach, shoot up, we see his pals pop a boil on his neck, we see the square documentarian Jim Dunn barf when he gets high for the first time—with maximum staginess and minimum melodrama. The film is amateurish in the best possible way, eschewing dramatic acting (several of the actors have few credits beyond the Living Theatre and films by Clarke and Jonas Mekas) in favor of a blunt delivery that nicely characterizes the impatience of folks in need of a fix.

The premise is that Jim Dunn (William Redfield) is buying a round of dope in exchange for making a film on junkies at Leach’s apartment. We get to know the characters while they wait for the man—what a great device for maintaining Aristotelian unity! Jazz musicians Freddie Redd, Jackie McClean, Larry Richie, and Michael Mattos keep us entertained with a practice session; Solly (Jerome Raphael) philosophizes as the gentle Ginzbergian bookworm; Ernie (Gary Goodrow, whose credits include the Drunk Swinger in Eating Raoul) gets paranoid as the black sheep rumored to have thrown a comatose kid out a window; and J. J. Burden (Roscoe Lee Brown), the off-screen camera operator and a former junkie, comments selectively on the proceedings. Keeping him off-screen is Clarke’s stroke of genius (he is on stage in the play), giving him an elevated status as a witness of both Jim Dunn’s foolish voyeurism and the self-destructive antics of the junkies. Leach (Warren Finnerty, who also had a role in The Panic in Needle Park), should perhaps have a less obvious name; he’s an anxious hipster freaked out about his boil, the stigmata of his addiction and what his friends insist is his queer sexuality. That boil, I’m willing to bet, was an inspiration to Jim Carroll’s The Downtown Diaries and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.

At long last enter the dealer, Cowboy (Carl Lee, who later played in Superfly), strangely accompanied by Sister Salvation (Barbara Winchester), an evangelist in a bonnet. Apparently the two have met while putting in time on a street corner, and he doesn’t exactly mock her religiosity: she’s so square she’s hip. Cowboy never turns on the typical movie pusher’s genial menace. Gorgeous in his white pantsuit, he’s too smooth for that jive, or maybe just too smart to show it to the camera.

 

Mekong Hotel

Tags

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Asian cinema, Charisse Gendron, cinema, LGBT cinema, Mekong Hotel, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, world cinema

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 59-minute Mekong Hotel seems to be part of a bigger project, enmeshed in his filial relationship with Jenjira Pongpas. The actress, who played a benevolent ghost wife in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, has changed her name to Nach (“River”) and moved back to the banks of the Mekong with her American veteran husband. Nach believes the river will be turned into a desert when an upstream dam project is completed. Thus Mekong Hotel is in part Apichatpong’s tribute to Nach and elegy for a natural and cultural entity. But the director also makes symbolic use of the river, which carries with it the debris of its previous “lives” even as it perpetually changes. Similarly, the people in Mekong Hotel bear the burdens of their former selves, their appetites and sufferings, as far back as 600 years. The “hotel” itself in which the film takes place (it is now a boat house) boasts Grecian-style statuary left over from Southeast Asia’s colonial period.

In this film, the actors and crew play versions of themselves, but with archetypal dimensions. Jenjira Pongpas, the “auntie” who lives next door to the hotel, turns out to be a “pob” ghost, cursed with a craving for flesh. The young man who owns the hotel, Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), discovers the ghost’s presence in the neighborhood when his dog is partially devoured. (Sakda also plays the role of “Tong” in Uncle Boonmee. Perhaps that is his real nickname, or a name whose significance is lost on Western viewers.) Before the auntie reveals her true nature, her daughter Phon (Maiyatan Techaparn), visiting from the city, begins a romance with Tong at the hotel. But the young lovers are separated when, after apologizing to her daughter, the auntie eats the young woman’s entrails, witnessed by the horrified Tong. Sometime in the future, the auntie and the young woman return to the hotel, the old woman to inhabit Tong’s body in order to eat flesh and the young woman to remind Tong of his promise of love. But Tong (who looks exactly the same) claims to be an old man now, long married, who will not return as a human for several lifetimes.

While this ghost story plays out, Apichatpong (who goes by “Joe” instead of “Weerasethakul”) talks with the company, urging Sakda to lose weight and to borrow a cuter tee shirt, preferably a sequined disco number, while Sakda complains that all the director’s clothes are black and say “Joe” on them. They joke about jeans made to emphasize the crotch and lean on the hotel balcony, watching youths weave patterns in the water on aquatic ski mobiles and referencing old boyfriends. Apichatpong also interacts with the guitarist Chai Bhatana, who provides the gently bluesy sound track, and the videographer Chatchai Suban. The other people, too, talk amongst themselves, Pongpas, as the auntie or as herself, telling the young people about her envy of the Laotian refugees who had more food aid than the native Thais during the war. This is the director’s way of showing that we walk among entities who are certainly projections of our synthetic imaginations as well as people with their own histories, and possibly among ghosts as well.