Shades of Caruso

BFI LFF 2011: Let The Bullets Fly / Dendera

Forgive me for this, but my final report on this year’s London Film Festival requires a bit of a digression. A crisis of confidence paralysed me after seeing two mystifying movies, and it’s affected the way I see movies in a way that’s not entirely positive, and I feel like it’s something that I need to work through. It’s partially caused by my visceral hatred of travel. Though I’d love to visit China and Japan, home of my favourite non-Western cinema, it’s not about to happen. Daisyhellcakes is the one with the Wanderlust; I’d rather just sit here and pick up snacks from the table using one of those robotic grippy hands. As a result all I know about both countries I’ve picked up from rumour and gossip, much of which sounds kinda general and probably skewed by empathy-gaps in the gossiper, or from what I see in their culture.

It goes without saying that this is unreliable. If I were to believe the cultural output of the UK was accurate I’d think the country has two halves: one prevented by law from progressing past a technological or historical level that would offend the average Amish, with courtly manners being the only distraction from all the handsome but grumpy men riding around on black horses; the other a modern urban hellscape populated by grizzled Cockneys called Roy “The Aardvark” Bulletface or Danny “The Damson” McScrofula, all of whom have passionate love affairs with their shotguns only matched in intensity by their loyalty to their “mam”. It comes to something when the movie that I think most speaks to the state of modern England is Attack The Block.

For all I know China isn’t a country where 50% of the population can fly through the air and do twenty roundhouse kicks in the time it takes to reload a gun, and the other 50% are cowering bureaucrats wearing oversized glasses. And Japan isn’t a place where the populace is dealing with a terrible epidemic of sinister dark-haired schoolgirls appearing in doorways. I should go there and check this out, but it’s not on the cards. Too late for that, and I hate travelling further than this sofa. Sadly that means that understanding the culture of both countries leaves little room for the small details, the cultural and historical tidbits that provide a better idea of what it is to be Chinese or Japanese. Even without the language barrier, there are times when being a tourist in the cinematic world of China and Japan is as baffling as being dropped into Kowloon with no money and no guide.

Which brings me to Jiang Wen’s Let The Bullets Fly, currently the highest grossing domestically produced film in China’s history, and second only to Avatar overall. The majority of the LFF movies that drew my initial attention were the big ticket events (Shame, A Dangerous Method, The Artist), or films by artists I liked and trusted, for better or worse (Bernie, Restless). Let The Bullets Fly (and Daisuke Tengan’s Dendera) were wildcards, picked in the hope that they would surprise me. Ticket prices for the LFF are pretty reasonable (£7 for an afternoon ticket for BFI members is better than the normal afternoon prices for the West End Vue, and a bargain if you take into account the prices of other cinemas in the area, e.g. the Leicester Square Odeon, whose cheapest afternoon tickets for Tintin in 3D were nearly £20). Nevertheless, the cost stacks up, and lack of time and cash meant I had to carefully select just a sprinkling to add variety.

In that case a Hong Kong action movie starring Chow Yun Fat seemed like a no-brainer, but it was not to be. Any attempt to summarise the plot here would be futile, other than to say that Jiang Wen plays an outlaw who may or may not be the infamous Robin-Hood-esque “Pocky” Zhang, who teams up with conman Tang to trick corrupt mobster Master Huang (Chow Yun Fat, in fine form) into thinking he is a newly arrived mayor come to collect tithes. Zhang’s plans end up enraging Huang to the point that they end up in a war of attrition, double-, treble-quadruple- and quintuple-crossing each other until most of the cast is either dead or maimed, and some viewers are lying in their chairs in a state of frustrated stupefaction, their brains tangled into knots trying to deal with the constantly twisting narrative.

To be honest, as long as you’re paying attention it’s not so bad; thank Buddha for a movie that actually expects the audience to pay attention. The trouble is that I can’t help but think that it’s my ignorance of those tidbits of Chinese culture that made the experience baffling and annoying, as so many moments in the movie seemed to make no sense. An early scene with Zhang’s godson Number Six being accused of theft was an early warning that I was out of my depth. Six proves his innocence in a way that, shall we say without spoiling, stretches believability to breaking point, certainly from a Western perspective. It seems unlikely that anyone would go to the lengths that he does to prove that he’s not a thief, at least from the way I saw it.

This was only the beginning. A scene with Zhang, Huang and conman Tang bartering for a share of Huang’s fortune, all the while debating the existence of the mythical Pocky left me utterly baffled. At various stages of the conversation I became convinced that Huang knew that Zhang wasn’t a Mayor, but was in fact Pocky, but then two seconds later I thought the opposite. At one point I thought Zhang had admitted he was Pocky, and for the next five minutes just got more and more exasperated. It just got worse. One double-cross involving a bunch of dead soldiers made absolutely no sense whatsoever, if you take into account the laws of physics. By the time Zhang and his men were shooting question marks and exclamation marks into an iron gate for no apparent reason I just gave up. Was this a joke? A mistake with the translation? A cultural reference I would never understand?

It’s tempting to say I thought it was great and just move on from there, but I honestly can’t. This confusion completely ruined Let The Bullets Fly for me, even though I was never bored during it, and certainly enjoyed many scenes. Jiang Wen is particularly good as Zhang; this is the first time I’ve seen him since he appeared in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, and he effortlessly holds the screen while Chow Yun Fat goes overboard as Huang and his hapless comedy-relief body double. Nevertheless, as the incomprehensible and overlong finale finally came to an end after what felt like hours of repetitive feints by protagonist and antagonist, all that mattered was that this movie, so popular in its country of origin, just made no damn sense on a narrative or filmmaking level.

Friend of the blog and prolific B-Movie Message Board poster Beggar So’s Hat saw a subsequent performance and reported that he greatly enjoyed it (N.B. The very excellent Mr. So’s Hat has kindly left a mini-review in the comments beneath this review; please skip down and absorb his considerable knowledge of Hong Kong cinema). I trust him; he’s a bigger fan of Hong Kong cinema, and has more experience of untangling these befuddling Eastern plots, which sometimes bear as much resemblance to a McKee three-act structure as James Corden does to Donnie Yen. Perhaps I’m just too sensitive about this, and how my response to Hong Kong cinema is selective — e.g. I’ve seen 30 minutes of Jackie Chan’s Police Story about 100 times, and the other 70 minutes twice, and I’ll leave you to guess what happened in those 30 minutes. It’s also the case that Eastern cinema is often edited into international cuts that drop stuff that doesn’t translate well. Even my beloved 13 Assassins has chunks missing, including this awful scene that would have wrecked the meticulous set-up to that final battle.

My concern over my culturally-ignorant responses was exascerbated when I saw the Rotten Tomatoes page for Benny Chan’s unexpectedly compassionate historical drama Shaolin, which mixes bursts of action and melodrama with a message of Buddhist optimism. Chan focuses on the redemption of some pretty unapologetic villains, and takes the time to show their passage from callousness to empathy. That makes for a longer movie than most, but it’s time that’s well spent. Nevertheless, even though it has a Fresh rating, the consensus seems to be that there isn’t enough action in it.

This surprised me. I can’t imagine a Western movie being criticised for that. In fact, as soon as a movie stops being about themes and starts being about chases and fights, critics usually complain that it has abandoned story in favour of dull crashing pyrotechnics. Why is non-stop action a requirement of Eastern cinema but not Western cinema? Is it because ::gulp:: many Western critics don’t get those movies either? Or is that an unintended consequence of the predominance of action releases around the world, that expertly choreographed fighting has now become an expected element in Eastern movies in the way the first thing that comes to mind when people mention Bollywood are extravagant musical numbers?

Is it possible to ever assess a different culture with a measure of objectivity? Almost certainly not, but then I’m quite happy to admit that I’ll give a bad movie with some funky FX and pyrotechnics an easier ride just because those are two things I like. Even so, my biases and ignorance sometimes talk too loud, and drown out a fairer voice, as with Dendera, which was the last movie I saw during the festival. It’s a sequel to Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad Of Narayama, which depicted a village that consigns its elderly to the nearby snow-swept mountain to die in order to conserve the minimal resources in the area. Dendera takes that idea further; what if one woman refuses to die when it’s her time, and prevails for so long that she ends up building a village of her own, filled with the women she saves from certain death?

This woman (Mei, played with fearsome intensity by Mitsuko Kusabue) wants nothing more than to destroy the village which discarded her, and sees the arrival of Kayu (Ruriko Asaoka) as a sign that the time for her vengeance has come. Kayu challenges her on this, maintaining that it was their time to die and such thoughts of survival have upset the order of things, not to mention preventing them from passing into the afterlife that has been promised them. The debate between Mei and Kayu rages until the village is attacked by a bear which threatens their very existence, derailing their plans for much of the latter half of the film.

Pretty much as soon as Kayu is rescued by the women of Dendera and begins arguing for death and obedience, my cultural ignorance about Japan took over. I began thinking about the legendary Japanese respect for the elderly, here turned on its head, and the depictions of societal deference in Western tales about Japan (I blame Michael Crichton). It was impossible to watch this movie — a movie with some feminist meaning, mixed with action — with clear eyes; all I could see was myself. That and a terribly unconvincing fake bear. Any suspense in the final hour is undone by the image of a man in a bear suit galloping through the woods; Mamet and Tamahori’s The Edge by way of Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man.

Of the two movies, Dendera is a more solid piece of work than Let The Bullets Fly. Tengan elicits strong performances from the entire cast, especially Kusabue and Mitsuko Baisho as the leader of the town’s pacifist group, derisively referred to as the Cowards. It’s a movie that promises many things; it’s ripe with metaphorical power which dwindles as the movie trudges toward the final showdown between Kayu and the bear. Subplots are dropped and points are obscured, with only the unexpected finale to wrap things up in a reasonably satisfactory way.

Not that any of that mattered to me by the end. The confidence-sapping poison that had been injected into me during Let The Bullets Fly began to take hold during Dendera, so that by the end I wasn’t sure I could ever have a reliable opinion on it. The last half of the movie, which seemed to have veered so far from what I had enjoyed about the first half, made no sense to me on a narrative or emotional level. I became restless and annoyed; why wasn’t the movie doing anything logical? Why were the set-ups of the first hour abandoned like this? I thought the movie was going to fit in a box, but by the end the 3D shape I had imagined had liquefied and started to leak out of the sides.

Was it the movie, or was it me? Can I really be expected to understand all of the subtleties of a movie made in this alien culture? And who’s to say I can understand my own culture? As mentioned earlier, I loved Attack The Block, but my interpretation of what it meant might have been based on my incomplete misunderstanding of youth culture. My experiences with modern youth culture are restricted to trying to understand dubstep, which ended ignominiously during my third listen to Benga’s Diary of an Afro Warrior — a good album but Jesus Christ, I get that it’s called Diary of an Afro Warrior, Benga, and you don’t have to remind me with the phrase, “You are listening to Benga, Diary of an Afro Warrior,” inserted between every goddamn song! #GrouchyOldMan

In that case, can I ever get it right? Are these reviews just ways for me to broadcast to everyone that I’m an ignoramus? They’re meant to be my attempts to work out my feelings and theories about narrative, but perhaps I’m just setting myself up for a fall. Are my thoughts as unreliable as Chris Tookey’s, whose inability to see movies from any viewpoint other than that of anti-modernity, anti-political-correctness Middle England means he has pretty much zero worth as an objective, insightful critic (see his recent slating of Andrea Arnold’s remarkable reinvention of Wuthering Heights)?

The experience of watching Dendera suddenly became a whirlpool of doubt and recrimination, in which I came to an awful conclusion; I’m just not cut out for this game. It has long been my hope that I would make something of this writing malarkey, but as I struggled to interpret Dendera on a deeper level than just, “Pretty photography, bit muddled thematically, lots of snow,” I began to question everything I’ve ever said about films. Maybe the negative comments I’ve received calling me an idiot and saying I’m full of shit were right. Maybe this recent article about how blogging has ruined film criticism had a point. Maybe I should give up.

The fact that these London Film Festival reviews are here should give you a clue as to how I feel now, though it’s not as simple as that. I’m sticking with it for a while longer, but the doubts remain. It was only the experience of seeing The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn that put me back on track. As soon as Dendera finished I rushed out to see the latest Spielberg movie, still shaken by my crisis of confidence but eager to give this movie a try. This was a risk. While most folks seem to have grown up reading Hergé’s books, I was more of a 2000AD kind of guy, and tasteful Belgian comics moved me not a jot. The only reason Tintin appealed to me was because it was the first Spielberg movie in way too long, and I was curious to see what he would do with the performance-capture.

So wasn’t watching this movie while feeling fragile a bad idea? I had no frame of reference here, other than to think Tintin was a dull character. Would I be mystified again? Would this be the nail in the coffin of my blogging career? Thankfully, no. I have no idea whether Speilberg’s movie honours Hergé’s creation or insults him, as pretty much everyone working at the Guardian seemed to think. What I do know is that my initial scepticism about the movie vanished at the halfway mark, as it became obvious that this filmmaker, who has meant so much to me since childhood, was reinvigorated by the use of this new performance-capture toy, and was using it in a way that no one else had before. The succession of eye-boggling action set-pieces pinned me to my chair like an amazed butterfly. It’s a miraculous achievement just for the “one-shot” chase through the streets of Bagghar; it’s one of the most important action scenes in the history of cinema, one which film scholars will be studying for years to come.

But what do I know? I’m not a Tintin fan, so I can’t be trusted on this. Well, in a sense, yes, but as someone who adores Spielberg, who isn’t averse to performance-capture in movies, who doesn’t immediately pull a disgust face every time someone says the word “Hollywood”, I think my viewpoint has some worth. Everyone’s does, because their tastes have been shaped by the things they have seen and enjoyed in the past, and they can articulate something specific about every movie from that angle. I might not be able to tell the difference between the Thompson Twins but I can spot a lovely bit of Spielberg’s kinetic framing a mile off. While others have interpreted Spielberg’s Tintin as a cultural insult, I experienced a breathtakingly fluid experiment gone right, a triumphant meshing of technology and innovative storytelling that demands to be seen, no matter what the massed ranks of the Guardian say. This is the gift that Spielberg gave to me; the gift of shutting up the voice of my doubt, at least for now.

As statements of intent go this isn’t much of one, but for what it’s worth I’ll keep doing this for the time being, explaining why movies or TV shows moved me or repulsed me, in the hope that this connects with others. My reviews are obviously subjective, and I don’t have the gift of cultural omniscience, so there’s bound to be a lot of things I miss out or misunderstand. But this is what I have to offer. Thank you to everyone who contacted me about this series of blogposts; all comments were appreciated and received gratefully. I’ll be back soon for my Listmania! picks of the best and worst of the year, in which I will praise Kenneth Lonergan and make some mean-spirited jokes about what a nutjob Ayn Rand was.

December 9, 2011 - Posted by admiralneck | 2000AD, Andrea Arnold, Attack The Block, Ayn Rand, Benga, Blogging, Chow Yun Fat, Dendera, Dubstep, Jackie Chan, Jiang Wen, Kenneth Lonergan, Let The Bullets Fly, London Film Festival 2011, Performance Capture, Shaolin, Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, The Guardian, Zhang Yimou