the terrorist. (w&d edward yang, w. hsiao-yeh)

I only managed to catch one film in the Cinemateca Yang season. The Terrorist, which I dimly remembered having seen on MUBI once upon a time, is a beautifully layered work. A novelist leaves her husband (in order to write?) for a former lover. The husband starts to construct links between the novel she publishes and real life. It leads him to a seedy underground world, where a photographer, an extortionist pimp and his female accomplice operate. She is the bait which allows them to steal from rich men. Where do the lines between the fictional and the real cross, all of which is occurring within the context of the fictional, which the film is? And who are the terrorist, to whom the accomplice is connected, as the photographer discovers. The levels of story within story are almost Borgesian. It’s the kind of astute, literate, playful film that Anglo-Saxon culture tends to shy away from, unless there’s some kind of sentimental kernel, something which Yang decidedly resists. 

the ice storm (d. ang lee, w. rick moody, james schamus)

Ang Lee’s nineties hit is such a curious film. On one level it is a hideous examination of suburban USA, a world where the bad haircuts and fashions match the dubious morals in the time of Nixon. On the other it’s a tender-hearted coming of age tale, peopled by a whole school of future stars, including Maguire, Ricci and Wood. Lee skewers the vacuous suburban world with real dexterity, helped by some great acting from Kline, Joan Allen and Weaver. At one moment, Weaver, on her hilarious waterbed, one of many succinct touches, is seen reading a Philip Roth novel. We have been transported into a ghoulish world of wannabe predatory men who are in real life a bitter disappointment to their women, either as husbands or lovers. Only the children, lead by the gloriously off-beat Maguire., hold out some kind of hope for a better future, once the ice has melted. (Of course we now know that the ice is melting far too fast and the better future is as illusory as ever). It’s intriguing to see how effectively the outsider, Lee, disembowels the North American culture, in a fashion neither Hanecke or Wong Kar Wai, for example, managed. Sadly I didn’t get a chance to see any of his other films in the Cinemateca cycle. A last note - the strangeness of hearing Bowie’s voice at the end in the song that covers the closing credits. For all that Bowie might have ended up spending the last years of his life in New York, he sounds resolutely un-American, faintly out of place, like the man who fell to earth, albeit, the Englishman who fell to earth. 

days (rizi) (w&d tsai ming-liang)

 This is the type of film which depending on your point of view:

Offers a transcendent view of humanity

Gives art cinema a bad name

Only exists as a result of the existence of a festival circuit.

Of all those, the third is perhaps the hardest to argue with. The opening shot, which might be five minutes long, of a man staring out of a window as a storm rages outside, unseen, sets the tone. The film is composed of single shots, most lasting at least 90 seconds, if not much more. A man prepares food. A man has some kind of acupuncture treatment. A man has a massage. For the first half of the film I speculated that this was all leading towards some kind of revelatory finale. The man is a boxer or a hitman or an astronaut. In fact, the denouement is the ten minute (?) massage scene. The man then pays his masseuse, and then finds himself missing him. Apart from the slightly salacious aspects of the massage, which is far from erotic, there is no pay-off, no denouement. The film marches on with its rigid, inflexible portrait of humanity, tightly managed within the single shot, with no need for dialogue or artistry. It’s painting by numbers, rudimentary, tedious, perhaps revelatory. Only the act of memory will determine the film’s true impact.