The 2005 Bangkok International Film Festival ran from 13–24 January, showcasing over 150 films from around the world. Like last year, the Festival included special programs on Thai cinema and films of the ASEAN countries (Thailand, Brunei, Cambodia, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Indonesia, and Malaysia), as well as a two-day focus on cinematography.

Adam Jones attended the festival as a correspondent for the Indy. This page records his interviews and reviews.

interviews:

films seen:
2046 | 2004, Wong Kar Wai, 129 min
Ai-Fak (The Judgment) | 2004, Pantham Thongsangl, 110 min
Anatomie de l'enfer (Anatomy of Hell) | 2004, Catherine Breillat, 87 min
A tout de suite (Right Now) | 2004, Benoit Jacquot, 95 min
Birth of the Seanéma | 2004, Sasithorn Ariyavicha, 70 min
Le Chiavi di casa (The House Keys) | 2004, Gianni Amelio, 105 min
Childstar | 2004, Don McKellar, 98 min
Clean | 2004, Olivier Assayas, 110 min
Demonlover | 2002, Olivier Assayas, 129 min
Dogora: Ouvrons les yeux | 2004, Patrice Leconte, 80 min
Enlightenment | 2004, Tanon Sattarujawong, 25 min
La Femme de Gilles (Gille's Wife) | 2004, Frédéric Fonteyne 103 min
Kôhî jikô (Café Lumière) | 2003, Hsiao-hsien Hou, 108 min
Kontroll | 2003, Nimród Antal, 106 min
Last Full Show | 2004, Mark V. Reyes, 18 min
Maa Nakhon (Citizen Dog) | 2004, Wisit Sasanatieng, X min
Mar adentro (The Sea Inside) | 2004, Alejandro Amenábar, 125 min
Mei li de xi yi ji (Beautiful Washing Machine) | 2004, James Lee, 113 min
Moj svodnyj brat Frankenstejn (My Step Brother Frankenstein) | 2004, Valeri Todorovsky, 120 min
Mysterious Skin | 2004, Gregg Araki, 99 min
The Nomi Song | 2004, Andrew Horn, 98 min
Oldboy | 2003, Chan-wook Park, 120 min
Our Film | 2004, Atthasit Somchob, 22 min
Reconstruction | 2003, Christoffer Boe, 89 min
Shutter Kod Tid Winyan (The Shutter) | 2004, Pakpoom Wongpoom & Bunjong Pisunthanagoon, 90 min
Thunder Lannyang | 2004, Yu-Ting Hsueh, 15 min
A Tree in Tanjung Malim | 2004, Tan Chui Mui, 24 min
Touch the Sound | 2004, Thomas Riedelsheimer, 99 min
Vera Drake | 2004, Mike Leigh, 125 min
Yasmin | 2004, Kenneth Glenaan, 87 min
Zelary | 2003, Ondrej Trojan, 150 min

reviews

2046 | 2004, Wong Kar Wai, 129 min
The only thing I really want to say about 2046—about which you can find lots on the World Wide Web—is that I was very pleased to find that the film leaves the future world of 2046 as enigmatically allusive as it was in the film's trailer. Rather, the film is set in Hong Kong on a succession of Christmas Eves throughout second half of the 1960s. The journalist Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) moves into room 2047 of the Oriental Hotel and writes a science fiction story, "2046." "I made up the whole thing," he says. "But I put in it people from my own experiences." Much of the pleasure of 2046 is in watching Chow sublimate his life into his dreamy, imaginary, gorgeous future. "I grew more and more comfortable in my fictional world," Chow says. The same might be said of Wong himself, who has built this film upon not only his usual meditations on love, but also a complicated series of references to his previous films. 2046, formally, is his most accessible movie yet, so it might be a good place to start, but you'd miss so many connections. Probably best to just watch them all in order—one of the great pleasures of contemporary cinema.

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Ai-Fak (The Judgment) | 2004, Pantham Thongsangl, 110 min | [Reviewed upon its original theatrical release.]
"Ai" is a derogatory male title that has some connotation of "wretched"; it's pronounced like a long, sighing "aye." "Fak" is a man's name that sounds like "fock." Which makes the title sound like "I Claudius." (The world is a poorer place due to the English title not being Wretched Fak.)
     Ai-Fak adapts Chat Kobjitti's acclaimed 1985 novel Kham Phiphaksa (The Judgment). The story (as presented in this version) is: Fak (Pitisak Yaowananon) leaves the monkhood to return to his remote home village to help his father, a teacher. His father has married a beautiful woman, Somsong (Bongkoj Khongmalai), who is mentally unbalanced and childish. The father dies. Various superficial coincidences lead the townspeople to suspect that Fak is sleeping with his step-mother. They turn against him. Fak turns to drink. Now the townspeople really hate him. They insist that he leave the village. He agrees only to learn that the school's principal has robbed him of his savings. When he demands justice, no one believes him, and he is beaten near to death. Somsong nurses him back to health, and they leave the town.
     The film starts as a lighthearted romantic misadventure with touches of physical comedy, then quickly turns ugly. There are at least three scenes in which Fak is severely beaten, and many more in which he is otherwise abused.
     Ai-Fak is similar in tone to Lars von Trier's Dogville; both films create an unpleasant sense of outrage in their viewers. Dogville, however, features more developed characters, is less generic, and is more technically accomplished. Ai Fak is sometimes poorly made and sometimes decently made, but it never impresses. There is a fun fantasy interlude in which Somsong taunts a village woman for flirting with Fak, whom she has confused with Fak's father: the interlude is presented in very bright colors and simple backgrounds reminiscent of Wisit Sasanatieng's masterpiece Fah Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger, 2000).
     But Ai-Fak is, for the most part, just unpleasant.

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Anatomie de l'enfer (Anatomy of Hell) | 2004, Catherine Breillat, 87 min
Both Festival screenings of Anatomy of Hell sold out; I snuck into the second screening to watch it from the floor of the lefthand aisle. As did at least thirty others, and every BKKIFF employee in the building. Ever since Catherine Breillat started incorporating hardcore sex into her films, everyone—pardon the pun—wants in.
     I haven't had so much fun watching a film in a jam-packed theater since sneaking into Austin Powers 2 (another movie obsessed with what one can stick inside orifices). Scanning online reviews, I can tell you that many viewers have missed the fact that, whatever else Anatomy of Hell is, it is also a comedy. There are several deliberately funny shots, and the audience I saw it with—again, your pardon—ate them up. (A recent Breillat film bears the title Sex is Comedy.)
     Breillat adapted the scenario from her own recent novel, Pornocratie, which is itself based on Duras's 1983 Maladie de la Mort: A Woman (Amira Casar) and a Man (Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi) meet over the course of four nights in a stereotypically Durasian seaside house. The Man is gay and hates women; she pays him to watch her and give voice to his disgust. They quickly move beyond that premise to do the various things that most people will go to this film to see them do.
     I enjoyed the film for several reasons. For one thing, it's fascinating to look at (and I don't just mean the shots in which characters drink menstrual blood): every shot is stunningly designed, and lit to a beautifully unreal degree.
     Also, regardless of what motivates Breillat to push sexual boundaries, she's arguing for a more serious, and more realistic, cinematic approach to sexuality. Her work has its limitations: the naked bodies belong to beauties like Amira Casar, Rocco "The Italian Stallion" Siffredi, and body double Pauline Hunt. But Breillat is advancing cinema, and should be commended.

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A tout de suite (Right Now) | 2004, written and directed by Benoit Jacquot, 95 min
A tout de suite opens briskly: A young woman awakes while we hear her say in voice-over: "It happened in the spring of 1975. I was 18." The next few scenes rapidly establish the scenario. The woman (Isild Le Besco) is a bourgeois art student. She meets and becomes infatuated by a young Moroccan man (Ouassini Embarek). A few days later he calls her, desperate: he and a companion have just robbed a bank. She hides them at her apartment. Together they escape Paris, then France, then Europe.
     These events occupy only the first thirty minutes of Right Now, which proceeds in a breakneck fashion well-suited to its heroine's impulsive, perhaps self-destructive actions. The film is based on true events but never exploits that fact; indeed, it maintains a respectful distance, never telling us the names of the woman or her companions. Like Gilles' Wife, this film knows that real life is more surprising than genre conventions usually allow, and the plot's ultimate course is unpredictable. Against this uncertainty stand two things: Le Besco's unashamedly bold—and magnificent—performance, and Benoît Jacquot's masterful control.
     Jacquot shot the film rapidly (and, he says, illegally) in stark black-and-white, filming mostly in the interiors where his protagonists spend their time waiting and hiding. (He describes the film's look as "closer to drawing than to painting.") In a brilliant move, he uses deliberately mismatched 1970s stock footage for his exterior establishing shots, heightening the semi-abstract style. When in fact is this film taking place? Ostensibly a period piece, it dispenses with the usual obligations of the genre, opting for anonymous clothes and locations. The mostly quiet soundtrack is empty of the typical parade of nostalgic classics, leaving room for the hum of electric lights and the rustle of clothing, and an occasional, swelling, slightly melodic drone. And beautiful dialogue, and the heroine's even more beautiful narration: "It was the good life. I don't know if it was the true life."
     The result is a film of intense, productive tensions: a period piece abstracted from its origins, spontaneous but controlled, heedless yet introspective. Every aspect of Right Now works perfectly. It's a brilliant film.

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Birth of the Seanéma | 2004, Sasithorn Ariyavicha, 70 min
Birth of the Seanéma was "conceived, written, seanématographed, edited, produced, and directed" by Sasithorn Ariyavicha. She even copyrighted the "Seanéma" language and alphabet that appears on over- and inter-titles throughout the film. So we know who to blame if the movie's no good. Sadly, it's not very good.
     Or maybe I should say that it's not something that many people are going to want to sit through. Birth of the Seanéma is seventy minutes of slow motion, mostly static, black-and-white shots that dissolve slowly into one another, with occasional titles (in Seanéma and English) that spell out an oblique narrative. It's also silent, or near-silent (I could have sworn at times that I could barely make out some sounds, although I may have imagined them)—but silent in the way that John Cage's 4'33" is silent. Its soundtrack is the sound of the projector, folks passing in the outside hallway, whispers, the rattling of ice in cups, straws flexing, the guy two seats to the right tapping on his Palm Pilot, me scribbling notes in my complimentary press notebook, people scrabbling for bits of popcorn and salt at the bottoms of bags, chairs creaking as we all scratch at mosquito bites, the air conditioning, me sighing, others sighing, me belching (having drunk my large Coke fifteen minutes in), scattered cell phones (that for once didn't distract), an audience member coughing repeatedly (probably having finished his soda early), some yawning, lots of fidgeting, the theater doors opening and closing as people leave to pee or simply leave.
     Still, there's nothing inherently wrong with a movie that most people won't like—most people would hate movies by Paul Sharits, one of my favorite filmmakers. The problem is that I can't imagine Birth of the Seanéma receiving an enthusiastic response from fans of experimental videos (like myself). For one thing, it's not experimental. It's also entirely uninteresting to look at, a crucial misstep for a film so reliant on images. My program notes say it was shot on DV, so I wonder how and why Khun Sasithorn ended up with such low-res footage. That the images are mostly low-contrast and uninterestingly framed helps not a whit. Sometimes severe technological restraints lead to wonderful inventiveness: witness Guy Madden, or Sadie Benning's Pixelvision diaries. Birth of the Seanéma, by contrast, only cripples itself.
     Finally, the narrative delivered by the titles is the trite nonsense of undergraduate poetry workshops:

Once there was a girl / who dreamed she was a kite. / And a man / who made the tears of the sky / his own. / And people / who wondered, / 'How old is the world?' / And somewhere in the city / a man / recalled a time in his childhood / when his mother asked him, / 'Which one is the girl?' / 'I am the one,' / said a dragonfly. / 'I am your forgotten memories,' said a dragonfly. / 'I am your invented memories,' said another dragonfly.

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Le Chiavi di casa (The House Keys) | 2004, Gianni Amelio, 105 min
Director Gianni Amelio adapted his screenplay indirectly from Giuseppe Pontiggia's novel Born Twice (which one character is eventually seen reading). He uses an unobtrusive camera to show who's talking and where they're going, often in one shot per scene. The resulting images are functional if undistinguished. Much starker is the plot. The film opens as the young Gianni (Kim Rossi Stuart) prepares to meet for the first time his mentally- and physically-handicapped teenage son, Paolo (Andrea Rossi). Gianni accompanies Paolo to a hospital in Germany for treatment. There they meet Nicole (Charlotte Rampling) and her handicapped daughter, Nadine (Alla Faerovich). Then Gianni, on impulse, takes Paolo to Norway.
     The House Keys has garnered much praise for its observational quality, its lack of melodrama, and the skill of its lead performers, and praise is certainly due, but I'm bothered by aspects of the film. First, there is some convenient melodrama: Paolo wanders off from a basketball game long enough for Gianni to share a crucial confessional scene with Nicole; then the Magic Police bring him back. But more unsettling is how Kim Rossi Stuart, who looks like a cross between Tom Cruise and Jude Law, remains so gorgeous throughout, with the same two-day stubble on his cheeks, his hair always perfectly blow-dried. Elements like that strike deeply at the film's purported neo-neorealism, evidencing a manipulation I've not seen mentioned in other reviews.
     The House Keys didn't work for me, but it's well-made and worth a look; you may be more impressed.

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Childstar | 2004, written and directed by Don McKellar, 98 min
The best joke came when writer/director Don McKellar stood up to introduce the film. He delivered a little spiel and sat down, and then Childstar opened to show Don McKellar acending a stage to say, word for word, what he'd just said. So invite him to your house when you rent the DVD.
     The story in brief: frustrated experimental filmmaker Rick Schiller (Don McKellar) takes a job handling child star Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall) who's in Toronto to shoot a Hollywood action vehicle, The First Son. Rick begins an affair with Taylor's scheming mom, Suzanne Burns (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Plot twists sluggishly ensue, and banal life lessons are learned.
     Those I saw it with dug this film, but I did not. Much of my distaste stems from how ugly it looks: long takes of near-colorless, flat images that obscure the action through framing and shallow-focus. The obscured action is mostly people talking. Their dialogue is labored and supposedly satirical of Hollywood, and there are some funny lines. But this film has nothing of consequence to say about Hollywood. What we see of The First Son is interesting only inasmuch how unlike a Hollywood movie it is. No doubt the filmmakers would claim that was their point, though I suspect it's due to a lack of budget. Also unwatchable is Rick's pseudo-Brakhage experimental film. (I guess the point is that Rick is a bad experimental filmmaker.)
     Watching these bad fake movies is little fun. Childstar does better when it focuses on the relationship between Taylor and a young model, Natalie (Kristin Adams). But the movie calls upon both Adams and Jason Leigh to perform some humiliating material-stuff McKellar himself, conspicuously, never has to do. Childstar is more like than unlike the Hollywood movies it mocks.
     Highly recommended instead: Francois Truffaut's La nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973).

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Clean | 2004, Olivier Assayas, 110 min
This is a conventional and surprisingly commercial (clean in every sense of the word) turn from Oliver Assayas. Maggie Cheung stars as Emily Wang, a junkie who's trying to go straight so that her father-in-law (Nick Nolte) will let her have her son back. This involves little more than her looking like the most beautiful heroin addict of all time. (Cheung of course excels.) Emily kicks her habit but damned if I could detect any changes in Cheung's performance (except to become even more beautiful). She's then handed a job as an assistant manager in a hip Parisian boutique, but drops that to instead record an album with ex-Mazzy Star frontman David Roback. Just like me, the last time I was a junkie single mom. I'm sure the rich and gorgeous deserve my sympathy, but I couldn't care less. And I'm sure Maggie Cheung deserves her vanity projects and the chance to sing songs written by her favorite musician, but I'd rather she make more films with Wong Kar-Wai or Yimou Zhang. Or Jackie Chan!
     As for Assayas: This is several seven-league strides back from Demonlover, which was hardly the paragon of success. Clean is maybe not embarrassing, but it's pretty darn near close.

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Demonlover | 2002, written and directed by Olivier Assayas, 129 min
The Festival held a tribute to Olivier Assayas, and showed four of his films: Les Destines Sentimental (1996), Irma Vep (2000), Clean (2004). And Demonlover, which made some kind of splash upon its release in 2002. Looking at it now, I can only imagine why anyone made much of a fuss. The plot's video-based circularity tells us that Assayas, like a lot of people, saw Lost Highway. The story of corporate espionage that unfolds through numerous, graceless expository dialogues is unremarkable.
     It could only have been the porn. But the hentai etc. excerpted into Demonlover are shocking only if you've never seen it elsewhere (and in 2002 it was already everywhere). Demonlover's characters repeatedly state how interesting and erotic such stuff is, but that won't fool anyone who's spent more than five minutes looking at it. As such, it's difficult to understand why the heroine, Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen), becomes so engrossed by the schlocky pseudo-torture site, Hellfire Club. Oh, yeah, this one promises "real torture."
     Demonlover isn't a bad movie, and it has its moments. The soundtrack is by Sonic Youth and it is nice. Connie Nielsen and Chloe Sevigny turn in strong performances. Denis Lenoir's chilly photography doesn't appeal to me, but it's well-done, if sometimes incomprehensible. There's a funny bit where Gina Gershon's character explains that "starznaked.com" features "stars...naked" (probably while thinking of the numerous nude photos of herself online, though her attitude doesn't betray that.)
     Plot-wise, Diane's ultimate fate re: the Hellfire Club is a clever commentary on the damage she's sustained while working in so misogynist an industry. (Any critic who says that Assayas's film doesn't address Diane's morality has apparently missed this aspect of the film. Diane may think throughout that she's a porno warrior, but she's really been all along just the object of other peoples' fantasies and manipulations.)
     And there's a nice shot toward the end of a boy in Middle America. Sitting at his computer he types: "Zora is Storm of the X-Men. Two mutants have neutralized her powers. She's chained to a bed." And then he turns back to his chemistry homework. His attitude is the right one: this stuff is lame.

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Dogora: Ouvrons les yeux | 2004, Patrice Leconte, 80 min
OK, so this is a non-narrative film in which footage shot in Cambodia is set to music. Contrary to popular opinion, non-narrative movies aren't uncommon, though it is odd to find one playing at your local Cineplex.
     Dogora is ridiculously simple in its structure. The score is broken into several relatively short parts, each of which is set to one or two tightly constrained sets of images. For instance, one section crosscuts between workers in a very yellow field with workers washing cars in a city. In another section, we cut between close shots of dancers' hands and quicker images of boxers. In yet another section, close-ups of the faces of lonely-looking old men sitting by a roadside are intercut with close shots of couples waltzing. And so on. The contrasts are obvious, though Leconte's meaning isn't. Yeah, Cambodia has people who work in the city and in the country and guys who sit alone and dancing couples and boxers...just like everywhere. (They just do it in Cambodian.) It's difficult to figure out what, if anything, Leconte thinks about the material, other than that Cambodia is a great place to shoot this kind of movie. One gets the impression that Leconte simply found the various images pretty, and wanted to set them to music. Call it "Impressions of Cambodia."
     The films that Dogora begs to be compared with are Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and Powaqqatsi (1998). (The made-up word Dogora and nonsense-words of the lyrics recall Glass's and Reggio's use of unfamiliar languages. Why didn't Leconte use Khmer?) People often mock the simplicity of Reggio's rhetoric, which is more complex that he's usually given credit for. But I bet many will line up to praise Dogora, which hasn't a comparable thought, or any kind of argument. Which is OK: Leconte doesn't have to make an argument. But few of his images are interesting enough to carry a film of this length, and even one of the best ones—like the terrific tracking shot of a girl walking alongside and then through water—is only as good as the worst shots in Reggio's films (leaving aside his disastrous Noqoyqatsi (2002).) Indeed, the best parts of Dogora feel like weak stabs at making a Qatsi film: a nighttime-to-daytime sequence of workers picking over a garbage heap, shots of overcrowded pickup trucks bouncing along a dirt road toward us.
     Those two sections can't redeem Dogora. The score, by Etienne Peruchon, is more conventional than Philip Glass's Qatsi music, and far less interesting. In his introduction, Leconte called Peruchon's music the most beautiful he's ever heard. It's certainly the most bombastic. Nearly every piece was a generic choral work that began with a limited number of voices and grew into a frenzy of instruments and singing. You can listen to a very short excerpt of the soundtrack at the film's official site. It's taken from the stupidest piece in the film: a lullaby that's set to shots of—you guessed it—Cambodian children sleeping.
     I can't end this review without pointing out Leconte's repeated strategy of shooting Cambodian people in telephoto close-up. Almost every section of the film ends with such a shot of a child. Well, it's creepy, though I imagine many will find it endearing. Maybe someday a Cambodian filmmaker will be able to travel to France to shoot similar shots of the French. Will people ooh and aah then?

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Enlightenment | 2004, Tanon Sattarujawong, 25 min
A Thai short film about a Western man, Ray (John Kenneth Muse), studying to become a monk in Chiang Mai (a large city in the country's northwest). Two homeless Lisu boys steal his bag, which contains his digital camera. (The boys have presumably been driven into Thailand by fighting in Burma.) Ray's struggles with his studies are paralleled by the boys' own more desperate struggle. The comparisons between these two different kinds of foreigners are far from subtle; for instance, a scene in which Ray recites his commitment to abstain from inebriating substances is followed by a shot of the older boy taking drugs. Two barely plausible plot twists involving the camera allow Ray to turn his training to the boys' advantage. Handsome production values, including two gratuitous time-lapse shots, can't hide the material's thinness.

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La Femme de Gilles (Gille's Wife) | 2004, directed by Frédéric Fonteyne, based on the 1937 novel by Madeleine Bourdouxhe, 103 min
The film opens with stunningly harsh red and black shots of a forge. Gilles (Clovis Cornillac), a steelworker, returns home from work to his wife Elisa (Emmanuelle Devos). They make love. Elisa becomes pregnant with their third child.
     Days pass. Almost at the same time that she realizes that she is again pregnant, Elisa notices that Gilles has begun an affair with her sister, Victorine (Laura Smet).
     La Femme de Gilles is set in 1930s Belgium, when a woman in Elisa's situation presumably had few options. Her two daughters are still young, her family distant. A despairingly funny scene rules out the church as a source of hope. Gilles and Victorine are her only adult friends.
     Victorine chooses another lover, prompting Gilles to wildly confess to Elisa his guilt—but she remains calm. As Gilles raves and bellows over Victorine's unfaithfulness to him, Elisa watches silently. And then, to his and our amazement, she becomes her husband's confidante and advisor. Gilles swears that he will follow Victorine in order to find his new rival. "No, don't," Elisa replies. "I know my sister." Then she adds, "I'll follow her."
     The plot unfolds over the course of one year, from one spring to the next, and it obeys a tragic logic, but the story's development is unpredictable. Scenes repeatedly linger on what in the hands of lesser artists might be mundane—Elisa cooking and cleaning, or walking. But everything here is essential. The camera obsessively studies Elisa's face as she stares, smiling enigmatically. "You're a strange woman," Gilles tells her, and I think we must agree, even as we understand.
     Audiences sometimes mistake the cheap cynicism of movies like Closer for profundities about love's cruelties. For those who aren't so easily fooled, there are sublime works of genius such as Gille's Wife, which foregoes conventional reactions and developments to arrive at a conclusion both heartbreaking and inscrutable.

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Kôhî jikô (Café Lumière) | 2003, Hsiao-hsien Hou, 108 min
So many trains! And little wonder: an opening title informs us that Hsiao-hsien Hou made Café Lumière to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yasujiro Ozu, one of the cinema's greatest directors. Hou's homage is a modern take on Ozu's distinct style. It's a quiet movie, in which naturalistic conversations slowly fill in the back-story, while scenes document everyday activities: cooking, eating, visiting with friends. Talking or not talking. Riding trains.
     The film opens as the young Yoko Inoue (Yo Hitoto) returns to Tokyo from working as a Japanese teacher in Taiwan. After a day at her parents' house she nonchalantly tells her stepmother that she's become pregnant by one of her students, but has no intention of getting married. To do so would mean having to work for her boyfriend's parents, who own an umbrella-manufacturing factory.
     Instead, she spends her time researching the real-life Taiwanese composer Jiang Wen-ye, who lived in Japan during the 1930s, and whose music occasionally flutters across the soundtrack. She's assisted by her friend Hajime (the brilliant Tadanobu Asano), who owns a secondhand bookstore and whose hobby is recording the sounds of trains and train stations. That Hajime loves Yoko is obvious, as is the fact that he will never tell her.
     Cinematographer Lee Ping-ping (In the Mood for Love, 2046) keeps the camera in the low positions favored by Ozu, sometimes moving slightly to follow an onscreen movement, but at other times remaining still, waiting for the character to re-enter the frame. In a departure from Ozu, scenes are usually done in one take—though midway through there's a very satisfying reverse-shot of a previous scene's location. It's exquisite work; Café Lumière was one of the most enthralling pictures at this year's festival. Beautiful scene follows beautiful scene, until it all wraps up gently and sweetly in a superb ending. "It's a womb of trains!" a character exclaims at one point. Yes, and of light.

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Kontroll | 2003, Nimród Antal, 106 min
After an amusing fake introduction, in which the director of the Budapest Metro states his confidence in the viewer's ability to distinguish fiction from reality, Kontroll wastes time with a scene in which a drunk young woman attending a party in the Metro is pushed in front of a train. The movie then gets to work introducing its stock characters, a ragtag team of Metro ticket inspectors. There's the hot-blooded narcoleptic Muki (Csaba Pindroch) , the world-weary elderly Professor (Zoltán Mucsi), the mustachioed, lecherous Lecsó (Sándor Badár), and the obligatory new recruit, Tibi (Zsolt Nagy), who can ask all the questions required for the exposition. And then there's the team's handsome, quiet, sensitive leader, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi). He's been driven underground for Unknown Reasons and now spends all his time in the Metro, dreaming about owls. (Owl: "Am I here in my capacity as a...Symbol?") Will Bulcsú follow his Owl and find love and escape with the pretty Szofi (Eszter Balla)?
     Here's a hint: despite its reception as the hip new star of Hungarian cinema, and despite its handful of charmingly quirky touches, Kontroll is really a 80s Hollywood genre movie shot in the Budapest Metro on DV:

• Forensic workers scrape up a mangled body while discussing how to cook pig trotters. (In the 80s Hollywood version, they'd be eating Big Macs.)
• Bulcsú's gang has occasional run-ins with a rival team of inspectors—who even wear matching leather jackets—leading Bulscu to challenge that team's leader to a contest where they run through a tunnel between trains. (This is the same as in the generic Hollywood movie. Bulscu even brings Tibi along so the race's judge, Cripple (Zsolt László), has someone to exposit to.)
• Bulcsú and his team chase a young prankster in scenes set to generic techno by some group called Neo. I think everyone agrees that even generic techno makes better chase music than 80s rock.

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Last Full Show | 2004, Mark V. Reyes, 18 min
Crispin, a rich, lonely teenager, gets his chauffer Bert to drive him to a rundown Manila cinema known for cruising. There he meets and begins dating the much older Gardo, with whom he becomes infatuated. Their deepening relationship exasperates Gardo's friend Jess, and pushes Bert to finally confront Gardo.
     Last Full Show is ambitious, technically accomplished, and briskly plotted, though to a fault. Two well-done scenes between Crispin and Gardo—one on a public transport and another in a restaurant—nicely emphasize their class and age differences, but made me wish the film would slow down to more deeply explore their relationship. The plot feels too abbreviated for me to fully connect with the characters and understand what's at stake, and why each participant eventually reacts the way he does. Several nice touches—such as the snippets of the movies we catch at the theater, and a very pretty shot of Crispin's ticket stub collection—suggest areas the film could have further mined.
     That said, how refreshing it is to see a short that's too short, rather than overlong. Last Full Show is an impressive first film.

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Maa Nakhon (Citizen Dog) | 2004, Wisit Sasanatieng, X min | [Reviewed upon its original theatrical release.]
In 2000, Wisit Sasanatieng made his first feature, Fah Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger), one of the greatest Thai movies ever and—alongside Danny and Oxide Pang's Bangkok Dangerous (1999) and Youngyooth Thongkonthun's Satree lek (The Iron Ladies, 2000)—one of the country's first films to receive international attention. Domestically, however, it was a box-office failure (though the costumes of its two leads are on display in glass cases at the EGV Grand Theater in Siam Discovery Center). In the years since, New Wave Thai Cinema has disappointed with imitations of Japanese, Korean, and Hollywood movies. (Exceptions include the excellent work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang—who narrates Citizen Dog.)
     Now, four years later, Mr. Wisit has delivered a second feature, Maa Nakhon (Citizen Dog). My first impression is that it lacks some of what made Tears of the Black Tiger so brilliant, such as that film's strong central narrative, and its balance of slapstick and melodrama. But Citizen Dog is a remarkably good film in its own right, packed with beautifully absurdist episodes and images.
     It opens in rural Thailand, with a super-saturated scene set at a farmhouse pulled directly from Tears of the Black Tiger. The simple protagonist Pod (Mahasamuth Boonyarak) moves to Bangkok, where he becomes enamored by Jin (Sangthong Ketuthong), a nearly autistic young woman who can't stop cleaning and who becomes convinced that she must rid the world of plastic. (Mr. Mahasamuth is the lead singer of the popular Thai rock group Modern Dog, which provides the film's soundtrack.)
     Pod pines for Jin as she builds a literal mountain of plastic bottles outside her house and drifts away. His unrequited love forms the plot's center, from which Mr. Wisit spins episodes about the characters Pod meets as he changes jobs: Kong, the motorcycle taxi driver ghost who was killed by falling helmets; Tik, an amnesiac who licks anything he encounters; Jod and Muay, a couple obsessed with having sex on overcrowded buses; and Mam, an eight-year-old girl who insists she's in her twenties, and is followed everywhere by a walking, talking, smoking teddy bear.
     It's all sweet and very delightful. No doubt many will dismiss the film as a lesser, Thai version of Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain—and there does seem to be some influence. Like Jeunet, Mr. Wisit relentlessly presents numerous breathtaking images and repeatedly heightens the film's emotional stakes. He needs to make many more films.

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Mar adentro (The Sea Inside) | 2004, Alejandro Amenábar, 125 min
Alejandro Amenábar's latest film explicitly tackles euthanasia, a subject lurking behind his two previous movies (Abre los ojos (1997), and The Others (2001)). If nothing else, this new effort enriches his filmography and shows off to an even greater extent how amazingly talented he is.
     The Sea Inside is based on the real-life story of Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem), a Galician made quadriplegic by a diving accident who spent 27 years fighting for the right to die. Amenabar's dramatization of the struggle spends a lot of time measuring its effects on Ramón's family and his legal allies, plus a single mother of two from the nearby town.
     The Sea Inside is more complex than it may first appear. As in previous Amenábar films, the entire cast turns in amazing work. Every moment, and every role, works. Much of the film is fittingly confined to Ramón's bedroom, but it escapes at several thrilling moments. (The best, I think, comes when Ramon travels to a court hearing: the montage of scenery he glimpses from the van's window-and the look on his face as he watches-is heartbreaking.) I think many critics have missed that the film's form is deliberately at odds with Ramon's efforts. Even those who support Ramon's right to choose death will find it harder to justify his decision as the film continues—that is a large part of Amenábar's artistry, and one in keeping with his previous films, where he leads viewers to sympathize with unsympathetic protagonists.
     Some will find The Sea Inside overwhelming powerful; some will think it manipulative award-bait. Since when were those mutually exclusive? The Sea Inside is first-rate melodrama.

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Mei li de xi yi ji (Beautiful Washing Machine) | 2004, James Lee, 113 min
Beautiful Washing Machine won BKKIFF05's Award for best ASEAN production, beating out some big competition: the inane but critically-acclaimed Thai film Ai-Fak (The Judgment); Puteri Gunung Ledang (The Princess of Mountledang), the most expensive Malaysian film to date; and the popular Philippine film Babae sa Breakwater (Woman of Breakwater)—plus eleven other films. Of the fifteen entries I saw only Beautiful Washing Machine and Ai-Fak, so I can't judge the award's appropriateness. But I admire the Festival's rewarding so underground a feature.
     An ex-pat friend of mine who has lived in Malaysia for the past few years tells me that underground cinema in that country is very much underground. Films not submitted to the censorship board cannot be theatrically distributed and are limited to screenings at universities and festivals. The scene's most prominent members (internationally) are Amir Muhammad (The Big Durian) and James Lee, director of Beautiful Washing Machine.
     The film's plot: A bachelor, Teoh (Loh Bok Lai), buys a secondhand washing machine that quickly stops working. But then a young Woman (Len Siew Mee) appears in his apartment, apparently mute and subservient to his every command. Teoh immediately orders her to cook and clean for him, then buys her a dress and heels and pimps her out.
     Meanwhile, the film digresses to introduce us to the middle-aged Mr. Wong (Teoh Kah Yong), his daughter (Amy Len), and her longtime boyfriend, Yap (Yap Kok Chong). Later we meet Wong's supposed playboy son, Ah Dee (Berg Lee). I won't give away how the plotlines collide, but suffice to say the Woman ends up living with Mr. Wong. He, like Teoh, adopts her as a live-in maid, cheerfully explaining to his children that she's his new (and much younger) girlfriend.
     The film's concept is a good one, suggestive but still enigmatic. Beautiful Washing Machine works best during its first 30 minutes, when it's more concerned with setting up deadpan, digressive scenarios than with following its plot. There's a wonderfully imaginative sequence involving a recipe for tomato chicken, and Loh Bok Lai's Teoh is creepily fascinating.
     That it all ends rather unsatisfactorily comes as not much surprise, for the film increasingly displays three major problems.
     1. It's beyond the filmmakers' means. "Shot entirely with a Panasonic AG-DVX 100," the credits boast. And for many scenes, video works fine—indeed, many of the film's best scenes are those that were shot with handheld camera in natural lighting. But for too much of the film Lee and his crew pretend that they're working with 35mm equipment, a deficiency exacerbated by the film's second failing:
     2. It lapses into imitation. The obvious influences are Tsai Ming-liang and David Lynch—fine influences, to be sure. But Beautiful Washing Machine cuts it too close at times, and can only suffer by comparison to those directors. The strings of single-shot deadpan scenes shot with a (mostly) stationary camera beg for comparison with Tsai (Goodbye Dragon Inn, What Time Is it There?), but Lee never calls upon his set-ups to work as elaborately as Tsai's; nor are they as interesting to look at. The Lynchian drones and metaphysical plot twists (a la Lost Highway & Mulholland Drive) detract further from the film's more original material. James Lee needs to learn to trust his own, good instincts.
     3. It incriminates itself. The filmmakers obviously want to say something about the ways in which men project their fantasies onto women in order to subordinate them, and how even women do the same to other women. But even as they condemn such behavior, they wring as much titillation as possible from the scenario. Escaping this kind of trap requires real inventiveness; sadly, the film ultimately surrenders to genre conventions. (This is a real shame, considering how imaginative the first forty-five minutes are.)
     I think that these are all understandable failings, given the ambitiousness of the project. And despite its problems, Beautiful Washing Machine is an accomplished, intriguing film that promises fine things from both Malaysian underground cinema and James Lee.

Note1: The ten ASEAN countries are Brunei, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Note2: I can't count how many times I accidentally referred to this film as My Beautiful Washing Machine during the course of the Festival. A missed opportunity--though one less detrimental than with The Shutter.

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Moj svodnyj brat Frankenstejn (My Step Brother Frankenstein) | 2004, Valeri Todorovsky, 120 min
My Step Brother Frankenstein is an annoying film, garishly over-lit and weakly directed, and sloppily written. Yulij (Leonid Yarmolnik), a physicist, learns that he has a twenty-something son, Pavlik (Danil Spivakovsky), who comes to live with Yulij and his wife and two younger children. Pavlik lost and eye fighting as a soldier in Chechnya and now needs an expensive operation. He also suffers from flashbacks and thinks he's still in the war. Despite the premise, the material isn't ever taken seriously, and the entire situation feels unreal: the characters react to Pavlik's presence according to the script's requirements, not any real person would. Though this is in keeping with the film's wild shifts in tone.
     There's a good scene in which Pavlik watches Frankenstein with his brother Egor (yes, Egor) and some friends. Pavlik berates the onscreen monster while Egor and his friends mock Pavlik, leading Egor's girlfriend to take pity on him. It's obvious but it works. Sadly, it mostly made me wish I was instead watching Frankenstein. In another scene Pavlik glares at a perplexed Chechen watermelon vendor, then beats the man. The police let Pavlik go after congratulating him. The film seems to want to claim that Russia's war in Chechnya has made monsters of everyone involved, but that critique is at odds with the dramatic plot of a middle class family learning to accept Pavlik. If the point is that war affects the bourgeois, then why isn't Pavlik a normal son who comes home changed? Yulij is a physicist probably out of obligation to the Frankenstein motif, but his work is never discussed, and the film never tells us how he's to blame for the war or for Pavlik's state (he didn't knowingly abandon Pavlik). The same is true for his son, Egor: how did he assist in the transformation of a step-brother he didn't know? (He teases his brother after he meets him, but what has that do with the war in Chechnya?)
     The film ducks these questions and refuses to deal seriously either with war or domestic drama. In the third act Pavlik kidnaps the entire family at gunpoint and takes them to the countryside, where they're laid siege to by the police. It all peters out to a silly, unsatisfying stop.

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Mysterious Skin | 2004, Gregg Araki, 99 min
Gregg Araki sidesteps most of the pitfalls of his chosen material—alien abductions, pedophilia, and growing up in Kansas—in this adaptation of Scott Heim's novel.
     The film begins in 1981, when Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) falls victim to his pedophile baseball coach (Bill Sage), and Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) suffers a mysterious blackout that leaves him convinced he was abducted by aliens. The two boys grow up in scenes set in 1983, 1987, and the fall of 1991, the alternating plotlines contrasting how they responded to their respective experiences. The two plots finally merge and come to a head in December 1991.
     Araki uses sudden fades to black and quick dissolves to abbreviate scenes and hurry the action along, giving the film a strong sense of direction. Intense performances by Gordon-Levitt and Corbet, Araki's sensitivity, and a compelling sense of abstraction all keep the material engaging and affecting, even if it sometimes strays into more clichéd areas. (Though the film's ending is powerful, I wish it had been more original.)
     What most irked me in Mysterious Skin were its occasional capitulations to the indie-film convention that Middle Americans are nuts. We cut, for instance, to Brian's mom (Lisa Long) firing away with a pistol at beer bottles before heading inside for her chores. More disturbing is the film's eking laughs from its portrayal of the alien-abducted farmgirl Avalon (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and her father as dumb, socially inept hicks. Still, those felt like minor grievances, given the film's focus and accomplishments.
     Araki also puts to good use songs by Sigur Rós, Slowdive, Curve, and Ride—very refreshing choices for a film set in the 80s and 1991.

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The Nomi Song | 2004, written and directed by Andrew Horn, 98 min
The Nomi Song chronicles the brief rise of German-born Klaus Nomi to semi-stardom in the New York New Wave scene. You probably won't recognize anyone that Horn interviews, but that's sort of the point: they belong to the thousands who crowded clubs and formed bands that never made it. And The Nomi Song suggests that that may have been a good thing. Success, when it came, did little for Klaus Nomi other than to sever what friendships he had. When he died of AIDS in early 1983, he did so pretty much alone, abandoned by his fellow artists as he had abandoned them.
     Only one participant in The Nomi Song still holds a grudge: Nomi's former neighbor Ann Magnuson, who long warned her friend against his self-destructive behavior. Everyone else, though, seems to have made a separate peace. (One man aptly points out that the story of the rise and fall or Klaus Nomi is rather common in rock.) The talking heads-style interview segments are fairly routine but contain some nice surprises. Behind one participant there's a shirtless, muscular man, partially concealed by shadows, holding a white disc like a spotlight. All interviewees speak before New Wave backgrounds inspired by Nomi's art. (Nomi's grandmother, for reasons nicely left unexplained, is seen only as a cardboard cutout.)
     Besides the interview footage, The Nomi Song contains the obligatory black-and-white tracking shots through the Village set to songs by Television. The documentary is at its best when it presents archive footage of Nomi and company performing or just goofing around. There's also footage of Nomi singing backup for Bowie on "The Man Who Sold the World" on Saturday Night Live.
     Horn very wisely delays the inclusion of Nomi's peculiar and beautiful voice until at least twenty minutes into the film. Horn and other friends had known Nomi for some time before he ever sang in front of them. When we finally hear Nomi sing, the effect is similar to what those friends must have then felt: stunned.
     The Nomi Song is perhaps most valuable for its making available a good deal of Nomi material that must have taken Horn forever to track down. It feels like a fitting tribute.

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Oldboy | 2003, directed by Park Chan-Wook, 120 min
Oldboy is tamer than Park's previous revenge-thriller, the horrifically gorgeous Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), but it still delivers a fair share of jaw-dropping moments, such as an astonishing single-take hallway battle scene, and an excruciating bit of tooth-yanking torture. Not to mention the part where the film's deranged antihero, Oh Dae-Su, eats a live squid (actor Choi Min-Sik reportedly ate four in the course of filming).
     As that last example indicates, Oldboy is sillier than Mr. Vengeance, and it contains many digressions that delight even if they don't all add up. For instance, very early on we watch a lengthy scene of Oh performing drunkenly in a police station; it's fun, deliberate misdirection. Soon after that incident, Oh is abducted by mysterious forces who take him to a criminal-run prison/hotel, where he's kept for fifteen years.
     That hotel is surely one of the great spaces of cinema, and the scariest prison since the one featured in Kurosawa Kyoshi's Cure (1997). Park keeps us there with Oh for a while, lovingly detailing the place's multiple horrors: there's a TV, and a fake plastic window showing a sunny daytime scene. There's a scary portrait, like a melting-face Jesus. There are trays and trays of fried dumplings. And there's the rinky-dinky music that plays right before the knockout gas comes seeping in. (That's when Oh's unseen jailors enter to cut his hair and clean him.)
     Watching TV, Oh learns that his wife has been murdered and that he's the prime suspect. He spends the next decade-and-a-half training his body and digging an escape tunnel, only to suddenly be released and given new clothes, money, and a cell phone. Then his unknown adversary calls him, inviting him to track him down.
     The plot is actually very satisfying, as the villain, Lee Woo-Jin (Yu Ji-Tae), is just as outrageous as his complicated schemes. Rest assured that he has his own peculiar reasons for going to all this trouble. Oh mounts against his sadistic nemesis a campaign of sheer violence and spectacle. His enemy may have unlimited resources, but Oh has a ballpoint hammer! He's aided by the cold-handed sushi chef Mi-Do (Kang Hye-Jeong)—she's the one who serves him the squid—who he suspects may be mostly a liability. But oh poor Oh: he can't even guess at the truth.
     Park, who shot to international acclaim with Joint Security Area (2000), is the latest exciting new talent from South Korea, currently home to the best cinema in the world. See his movies any way you can.

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Our Film | 2004, Atthasit Somchob, 22 min
An aging couple (the filmmaker's parents, it would seems) makes merit at a temple, where the man buys and releases a pair of eels, then hits at a tree to make it drop its mangos. They drive slowly home where they dance to a traditional Thai song. Then they go to a resort in Pattaya. Throughout, the wife narrates to the camera about her husband's illness, and how she's had to care for him. The simple camcorder footage is delightfully perplexing, noticeably lacking exposition and featuring indeterminate gaps between the scenes, as well as sudden changes in aspect ratio and sound quality. That the film never reveals what, precisely, is wrong with the husband pays off nicely in the film's final moments and led a friend of mine to some interesting speculation. The eccentricities never feel forced, making it all very enjoyably curious-you can't tell if what you're watching is a joke, or even what kind of joke it might be.

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Reconstruction | 2003, Christoffer Boe, 89 min
"I've nearly finished my story," the author August tells his wife Aimee. "I know how they will meet." Aimee (Maria Bonnevie, in a dual role) will soon encounter Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) in the Copenhagen Metro; their eyes will lock while watching a magician perform a trick with a cigarette. We've already seen the trick in a black-and-white intro to the movie, and we've already seen Alex introduce himself to Aimee in a café, a scene that will soon be repeated, though with a different outcome. Despite these reshufflings, Reconstruction is mostly chronologically straightforward, and not all that difficult to follow. Its major postmodernist twist comes after Alex spends the night with Aimee: he returns home to find his flat gone and his girlfriend Simone (Bonnevie again) unable to recognize him, as though he's become someone totally different. Even Aimee may or may not remember him, though her motivations are very much unclear.
     Despite Reconstruction's contemporary look and flashier touches (a la Lars von Trier and Wong Kar-Wai), it's a very familiar film, a metaphysical fantasy of the kind popularized by Borges's fictions and the Noveau Roman. Its main influences would seem to be Resnais's classic Providence (1977) and Nicholas Mosley's 1969 novel Impossible Accident, which John Frankenheimer adapted as Story of a Love Story (1973). Toward the end, the plot even sucks up a bit of the Orpheus myth, and Boe works in a shot that suggests Jean Cocteau's classic treatment.
     It's to Boe's credit that such a simple genre film works so well. One strength is his mining of Alex's plight as a metaphor for how little we often know those we love. Furthermore, Reconstruction is dramatically staged, pleasantly acted and charming to look at, with rich, grainy 16mm photography (blown up to 35). Lacking, however, is the soundtrack. Barber's Adaggio is used for three crucially dramatic scenes and it works okay, but I wish Boe had found a less-overplayed piece of music (or commissioned something new). Similarly, Bonnevie's dual-casting and the metatextual voiceovers feel unnecessary and are hardly original—though I guess they don't hurt.
     Reconstruction is a solid first feature. I hope that, with this under his belt, Boe will push harder his next time out.

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Shutter Kod Tid Winyan (The Shutter) | 2004, Pakpoom Wongpoom & Bunjong Pisunthanagoon, 90 min
The first Thai movie that I saw upon arriving in Bangkok was Bhandit Thongdee's Hien (The Mother, 2003), a forgettable tale concerning a long-haired, rotting, dripping wet female ghost—the kind Asian moviegoers have been mad about since Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On (2000) and Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998) (which was based on the 1995 TV movie Ringu: Kanzen-ban—which, in turn, was based on Kôji Suzuki's 1989 novel).
     Hardly a week passes without a new addition to the genre, A-list or (usually) not. Even the US is falling prey to New Wave Asian horror. In addition to Gore Verbinski's 2000 remake, Ring, and Nakata's forthcoming English-language sequel, Ring Two, Ringu inspired two Japanese sequels, a TV series, and a Korean remake. Shimizu, meanwhile, remade Ju-On as The Grudge, which is basically his fourth sequel/remake of his original TV film, and is about to release his (supposedly) final Ju-on: The Grudge 3. Since even the directors who originated the fad keep returning to the well, one can forgive aspiring young filmmakers for heading there themselves. 2004 saw at least one worthwhile Thai addition to the genre: Shutter Kod Tid Winyan, which was the highest-grossing Thai film of the year.
     First-time directors Pakpoom Wongpoom and Bunjong Pisunthanagoon have the formula pretty much down. A young couple, Ton and Jane, run over a young woman at night and then find themselves relentlessly pursued by the her ghost, a rotting, pale-faced, tangled-hair young monster who emerges, a la Ju-On, from sinks—when not popping up in bed and right behind our heroes and wherever else we by now most expect it.
     The plot is almost joyfully confused, serving as a kind of greatest hits of the genre. It all begins as a rather straight Ringu rip-off: a ghost appears in some photographs, and friends of Ton and Jane die one by one. Events then veer into more Ju-On-esque territory, as we learn that Ton and his friends share a dark history with the ghost. One character, sensing the shift in inspiration, obligingly jumps off a balcony.
     The shocks and scares work well enough to enjoyably pass 90 minutes in a theater (though the bangs accompanying the ghost's sudden appearances grow wearisome), but Shutter works best when Mr. Pakpoom and Mr. Bunjong push their material into fresher territory. There's a funny, Thai-centric take on the tendency of these ghosts to appear when one is in the bathroom, and a very scary twist at the end that's based on a traditional Thai ghost story.
     Furthermore, there's a pretty part in which Jane stacks a series of photos the ghost has taken, then flips through them, creating a handmade movie within the movie. Even if the directors don't realize it, they've created a clever bit of self-commentary on a tenuous connection that the genre assumes: just how do these ancient, campfire-tale ghosts wind up haunting modern technology like cameras and videotapes? Why, through an act of cinema.
     The Shutter definitely won't be the last Ringu/Ju-On rip-off, but it's probably one of the last to have been well enough made to coast by on such blatant imitations.

P.S. I can't believe that no one involved with this production realized how much better an English title Shutter is than The Shutter: Not only does it not sound stupid, it's a pun, and it avoids falling in with that crowd of The Noun-style titles so horribly in vogue these days.

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Thunder Lannyang | 2004, Yu-Ting Hsueh, 15 min
A documentary/interview with Chuan Jin-Tsai, a master of Baguan Opera Music in Lannyang, Taiwan. After growing up playing in his father's troupe, Chuan abandoned music as a young adult to work in the mines and then as a food vendor, but eventually made so much money selling ice cream that he was able to found several opera troupes and revive the form. This video production would have benefited from devoting more time to demonstrating Chuan's craft; instead, it mucks about with an unnecessary elaborate titling device and distracting edits. But at fifteen minutes it's a pleasantly informative documentary that, if anything, feels abbreviated.

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A Tree in Tanjung Malim | 2004, Tan Chui Mui, 24 min
A girl spends the night of her eighteenth birthday hanging out with a slightly older friend, "The Beautiful Loser," who publishes love poems in the local paper. In the morning she'll leave to study in Taiwan—though that fact barely registers, this film is so pleasantly low-key. We understand at once that these two friends have fritted away many nights as they do this one, singing songs and telling stupid jokes, or just sitting around, discussing anything but an attraction they may or may not share. (The film wisely leaves the precise details of their relationship vague.) The solid sound production and unobtrusive camera work are central to the film's voyeuristic pleasure, though the simplistic shooting style sometimes weakens the dramatic impact: one scene that could have been fantastic, in which the two characters watch the lights go out in an apartment building, is instead merely OK. But another scene, a long take in which the girl waits at the bottom of a stairwell for her friend to return with a book, fascinates as the minutes silently pass. Naturalistic performances, excellent dialogue, and a real chemistry between the two performers help make this short video a treat.

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Touch the Sound | 2004, Thomas Riedelsheimer, 99 min
The opening scenes establish that Evelyn Glennie is an enormously talented percussionist. After twenty minutes of amazing music, the film turns to the subject of her deafness. Is she? When she turned eleven a doctor told her that she was, but she refused believe that should stop her from being a musician. Thank God. One reason why Touch the Sound is a fantastic documentary is that it devotes a good amount of its running time to presenting Glennie performing in live sessions with Fred Frith—amazing stuff worthy of its own concert film.
     Glennie asks us to explain how non-deaf people hear, and then suggests that she simply hears differently—perhaps even more completely. She tosses these ideas out while playing a walkie-talkie as though it were a theremin, standing among the ruins of a Scottish castle on a cliff by the sea. Later, in Japan, she performs with chopsticks on plates, glasses, and a soda can. Surely, confronted by such majestic scenes, the viewer must reexamine her or his assumptions about deafness, hearing, music, and sound. This is a fantastic film.

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Vera Drake | 2004, directed by Mike Leigh, 125 min
You've no doubt already heard that Imelda Staunton, who stars as the titular character, is amazing, and she is, as is everyone else. In a Mike Leigh film, that comes as no surprise. More remarkable is that, forty-some years into his career, Mike Leigh has made his most beautiful film yet. Vera Drake was magnificently designed by Eve Stewart and Ed Walsh, and masterfully shot by Dick Pope; it is a marvel to behold. And yet all anyone will talk about is its subject.
     The film introduces us to the aging Vera Drake as she cheerfully goes about her daily business, cleaning wealthy homes, comforting the homebound, and cooking dinner for her family of four. Her routine the next day is exactly the same as before, except it includes a quick stop at a rundown apartment, where she performs an abortion.
     Vera, unbeknownst to her family, has been "helping girls out" for twenty years; she regards it as a duty. Leigh, like his heroine, proceeds matter-of-factly, unflinchingly. He also contrasts—none-too-subtly, but effectively—the class politics of the issue, neatly developing a subplot in which a raped young aristocrat spends 100 pounds to visit a private spa. Leigh's direction throughout is thoroughly engrossing.
     When the other shoe finally drops, the film continues in exactly the same manner, silently observing as Vera and her family are methodically destroyed by the laws and logic of the state. The investigating detective and his assistants proceed as they must; the solicitors and magistrates proceed as they must: everyone does exactly what he or she must do, and not without sympathy for Vera. The film's only hint of a villain is a judge portrayed in cameo by Jim Broadbent: in two quick shots, Leigh suggests the politics underlying the nuances of judge's decision, if not the decision itself.
     So, although all anyone will probably talk about is abortion, Vera Drake's broader subject is how bureaucracies dehumanize their citizens, a subject about which it it totally convincing. This film is, in all its aspects, a masterpiece.

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Yasmin | 2004, Kenneth Glenaan, 87 min
Yasmin's about as good as topical social realism can ever be. The solid cast suffers through an the occasionally ridiculous script (by Full Monty scribe Simon Beaufoy) to make a movie that can be shown in high schools in order to teach kids that Muslims Are People, Too.
     Archie Panjabi carries the film with a wisely understated performance as Yasmin Husseini, the daughter of a Pakistani emigrant to England. She suffers a marriage of convenience to the newly arrived Faysal (Shahid Ahmed) even though she's keen on her coworker John (Steve Jackson) and has never had much time for her Muslim heritage. All that changes on September 11th, after which she finds herself harassed at work and by the police. Her conflict at work comes to a head in a well-done confrontation at the local pub. Her confrontations with the police lead to an interestingly opposed, if not unexpected, conclusion.
     Director Kenneth Genaan moves briskly through the material, making good use of found footage from 9/11 and the War on Terrorism. Some sections of the plot, though, are unnecessarily melodramatic, such as a police raid and a slight car crash, and especially a subplot in which Yasmin's younger brother Nasir (Syed Ahmed) gets recruited to be a militant Islamicist. More time should have been devoted to less conventional developments, such as when Faysal brings home a goat. Or to just watching Panjabi play Yasmin—she's terrif.

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Zelary | 2003, Ondrej Trojan, 150 min
"Same old game, gentlemen?" asks Eliska (Anna Geislerová). "It's getting boring." The gentlemen are her comrades in the Czech WWII resistance. Eliska's more right than she knows; the first half hour of Zelary, which documents her work as a spy, bored me silly. Then the spy cell is compromised, and Eliska is sent off to a remote section of Czechoslovakia (Zelary) with a sawmill worker, Joza (György Cserhalmi), whose life she'd helped save. Incredibly, she's instructed to marry him and sit out the rest of the war with her new identity as Hanna.
     If you accept that premise (Eliska does with little complaint), you'll find the next hour an improvement. The opening provides no real clue as to why Eliska would agree to become Hanna, abandoning her responsibilities and Richard, her surgeon boyfriend. (She's told that Richard emigrated without her, but I wonder if he was forced to marry some rural Czech lass.) Her new husband Joza is, like her, a cipher: his chief character trait for the first forty-five minutes is that he likes to eat bread, there being three shots of him tearing away at a chunk of it with his teeth.
     But after we all settle in at Zelary, Hanna warms to Joza, and the film enters an idyllic period that documents their developing relationship. The strong chemistry between the two leads makes me think that the material would have worked better as a smaller, more intimate film, and not an obligatory epic of WWII.
     The Zelarian stock types act out a good half-dozen unnecessary subplots as repeated slow fades to and from black unfortunately diminish the action. There are some pretty landscape shots, especially of a forest during a rainstorm, though the camera never lingered long enough for my tastes. But watching Hanna and Joza fall in love was enough of a treat that I relented and was happy to let it all idle by. Eventually a crisis occurs and lives are forever changed, as the genre insists. It all winds up in a fairly affecting conclusion.
     Zelary is based on a novel, Jozova Hanule by Kveta Legátová, that's based on true events; real life was never so much like a WWII movie. But despite its clichés and slower sections, Zelary will reward your patience enough should you choose to watch it.

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