In Part B, TIM WONG tells us what rocked his boat, and what sunk it entirely.


» [Part A] | Part B

Size Matters

THE CONUNDRUM in tackling the festival every year is that no matter how hard you try, it's a beast that can never be tamed. And for the buffs that trade in their two weeks annual leave, prior social engagements, time with family/pets/loved-ones and the prospect of remaining humanly sane? It's one bastard they'll never knock off. Gossip of certain possessed individuals raising the bar to the high-seventies hit the rumour mill post-festival, and may sound Guinness Book of Records-bound for sheer endurance/ridiculousness, but the fact there's a whole other B-side remaining (160-odd films overall) makes for a pretty sobering reality check when you're one of those people who just Wants To See It All.

I chalked up a shade over forty this year, and bearing in mind I had to will my fingers into typing at the end of each day, it's as close to comprehensive as I'm going to get. But like others, I was still burdened by the notion that I was always missing something; that I was forever encountering a clash or an overlap or a toss-up of Sophie's Choice proportions. I'm here trying to surmise the festival, and yet given such surface scratching, it now seems kinda pointless. On those grounds, the following wrap should be considered piecemeal at best. Nor am I going to deny that my navigation of the programme was fractional and not nearly as adventurous as it could've been. And even though size, and certainly choice, is a good thing, I'll be the first to admit that I underestimated the enormity of proceedings, and lacked a hold on festivities which, quite honestly, got the better of me.

Fatigue, one of many hindrances, stepped in the way of talk-of-the-town highlights like The Wayward Cloud, Pin Boy, The Ordeal, Look at Me, Bride of Silence, the African films, and Werner Herzog's double, all the while quashing an intrepid spirit for the unknown that I thought I had, but didn't in the wake of festival jetlag. Elsewhere, the lightweight failed to coax me from the drowse of heavy thought: My Summer of Love, in one instance, passing me by in a blur of girl-on-girl foliage and Goldfrapp-tickled ambience that probably should've left more of an impression at the time, but for said reasons didn't. Occasionally, I lost all sense of coherence: Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence a particularly tumor-inducing number, what with its post-Matrix/Primer-esque tech-garble and unfathomable visual brainwash. J. Hoberman calls it the best anime he's ever seen, but all I was worried about was keeping my eyeballs from popping out of my head.

Steamboy on the other hand required no concentration at all – just a willingness to absorb endless cascades of destruction. Katsuhiro Otomo spent ten years engineering this Victorian redux from scratch; visually, it shows, although in other places – namely, its rudimentary scenario pitting man vs. machine vs. super-sized moving castle (it makes Miyazaki's look decidedly minute, although isn't nearly as cool) – it reads like the back of a cereal box. Perhaps it is nothing more than a lobotomized Akira, but when exhaustion kicks in, all of the above's rendered moot. Whole cities are trashed; impossible contraptions fly and explode; things unfold at a blistering rate of knots; and the world as we know it just about ends. This is forthright simplicity in the most agreeable sense, and when it's conducive to the sound and fury of animation on steroids, it's capable of invigorating even the slumberous like me.

Coupled with Duck Season and Howl's Moving Castle, Otomo's spectacle rounded out an essential triptych of "crowd-pleasers", for use of a better term. What Steamboy had going for it on its own though, was that it did things en masse, in numbers, and with plenty of volume and scale. Others seemed to follow suit: in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, no less than 500 child laborers were collated and plonked in front of the world's biggest piano as part of a dastardly scheme to sweatshop the recital of classical music; in Yes, words were cannoned from the barrel of an iambic pentameter with such prosaic mass destruction that nothing – not even religion, politics, racism or terrorism – was spared in the barrage; whilst in Kung Fu Hustle, hoards of axe-wielding triads were dispatched in their droves with the precision of a tenpin strike. I don't doubt for a moment that Stephen Chow is some kind of mad scientist of the movies, and if ever a film benefited from the rally of an audience laughing in unison, this is it. But hysteria is an intoxicating thing, and it's easy to lose sight of how degenerative the film is when you're drunk on its barrel-scraping humour and gaudy special effects.

Bigger is better, but with limited time and energy in reserve, much of the festival's girth went uncharted and remained undiscovered. Consequently, I never really ventured beyond the outlines of what I had penciled in from day one: almost everything from Out of the Past (The Man from Laramie, East of Eden, the Nicholas Ray retro) was consumed; sideshows were devoured with any sort of infamy attached (Dumplings, High Tension etc.); plus anything on the coat tails of a marquee name or a critical rave I made a beeline too. The results were satisfying, if not foreseeable in the face of playing it safe: The Child another dip into the gene pool of its elder plight-ridden siblings; 3-Iron, with feature-length silences and characters that refused to talk, sure sounded like every other Kim Ki-duk film; as anticipated, Birth hovered over the cradle of Rosemary's Baby with an overwrought seriousness; and while near-perfectly formed, Tony Takitani was just nice in an obvious way (although not being well read, the Murakami element was lost on me).

Equally unobtrusive, David Gordon Green's Undertow emerged as a typically peculiar-yet-low key riff on southern discomfort; Bill Murray and Jim Jarmusch were expected to reign supreme as kings of cool in Broken Flowers, only to cancel each other out; and since we're on the subject of covering old ground, both Inside Deep Throat and Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession engaged in two-fisted handjob of America's counter culture-via-80s whiplash, alternating in parallel between applauding/blackballing the rise and fall of an era which never fails to inspire or captivate, but appears so increasingly scorned by the bitter and twisted of those fucked over, that it's about time we all moved on.

Plain sailing for the most part, but as past sorties have proven, it was only a matter of time before the boat was rocked and I was left reeling, stumbling from the theatre, dazed and confused and in love with the movies once more. This year, women seemed to dictate the course of sheer awesomeness: Hou Hsiao-hsien picked up (sort of) from where he left off in Millennium Mambo, casting his Ozu-filtered lens on the free-spirited halo of another 21st-century gal in Café Lumière; Zhao Tao annoyed the hell out of all in search of a band aid, only to waif it up as the disassociated theme park-idol of Jia Zhang-ke's brilliant global microcosm The World; Arnaud Desplechin fused the very atoms of cinema to make Emmanuelle Devos the center of the universe in Kings and Queen, a film far too vast to even begin to describe; and then there's Zhang Ziyi, who guys clambered from all corners to see bitch it up in 2046. The film clearly had the most in raptures; despite oddly resembling a series of Vogue fashion spreads, it stood firm as the convergence of everything good about Wong Kar-wai. And cinema-as-a-time-capsule doesn't come more poignant, unfurling as the long goodbye to a pre-millennial oeuvre of girls, girls, girls. By its end, we've bid farewell, ushered in a new century, and edged closer towards the future just that little bit more.

But Claire Denis took the proverbial cake for me from behind the camera with The Intruder, a film that knocked me around enough to regard it as the best of the fest. It's an epic in the most interplanetary sense: an alien masterpiece, one that demands a second or third viewing of which I'm doubtful of ever getting. One of those rare of-the-moment discoveries, I may have missed it altogether had Denis' name or international word-of-mouth not alerted me to its presence – at which point I would have read about it in a spiel like this, before tearing my hair out. Frustrated, I would have probably blamed the impossible size of the festival at hand. Which of course is an argument dismissed every single year. Because where would the fun be without the obsessive pen marking of the schedule, the frantic rush from session to session, the personal battles with what-to-and-what-not to see, and all the darkness in between?

» [Part A] | Part B




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