I’m actually already here in Vancouver, three excellent movies into my time at this year’s Film Festival. But as a kind of a preview, I want to highlight some of our previously published coverage of films that will be playing here over the next couple of weeks.
Hong Sangsoo is of course the headliner. His Grass, which premiered earlier this year, will be playing in the second week of the festival, after I leave town. Fortunately, Evan and I had a chance to see and talk about it earlier this year. Like The Day After and Hotel by the River (which isn’t playing VIFF but will be at the New York Film Festival this week), it’s a black and white film starring Kim Minhee. All three films are melancholy, meditations on death and suicide informed by a Christian spirituality. I think Grass, the Purgatorio of Hong’s Divine Comedy, is the best of them.
Evan and I were split on the documentary People’s Republic of Desire when it played SIFF earlier this year. He found it too formally boring to really get anything out of its subject, the online celebrity culture of contemporary China, while I thought that was kind of the point, that despite the apparent newness of the world, all the old evils will reassert themselves.
Yang Mingming was the most adventurous of the several solid titles in SIFF’s Chinese film program this year, and I’m glad to see it pop up again here at VIFF. The director herself stars as a young woman with a hot and cold relationship with her mother (played by Nai An, who also stars here at VIFF in Ying Liang’s A Family Tour). Yang “mixes tones cavalierly, one minute wrenching personal drama told in close-ups of anguished, sweaty, tear-stained faces, the next a jaunty scooter trip through Beijing’s warren of hutong alleys, the next those same alleys turned to the scene of unnamable, invisible dread. The result is a highly unstable film, lurching from lyricism to (self-)excoriation, coming dangerously close to resembling life itself.”
Also in VIFF’s Gateway stream is Jeon Go-woon’s Microhabitat, which I wrote about this summer when it played the New York Asian Film Festival. It’s a polished, warm film about a young woman who “chooses homelessness when price increases make sustaining her budget of cigarettes, whiskey and rent unsustainable. She couches surfs from one former college bandmate to another, all miserable in their own way while she remains pure, the only one of her peers not to compromise her independence and joy in life’s most basic consumptive pleasures.”
Finally, I was mixed on the documentary Matangi/Maya/MIA when it played at SIFF. Made up almost entirely of footage the star shot herself, long before she became famous or even., apparently had any idea of becoming a musician, it’s a fascinating look inside the mind of a creative person who hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to create. It kind of falls apart once she becomes famous, skipping from controversy to controversy, but I imagine that happens to all of us when we get old.
Seattle Screen Scene 