Breath
(2007/Palisades Tartan DVD)/Heartbeats
(2010/aka Imaginary Lovers/MPI/IFC
DVD)/Secret Sunshine (2007/Criterion
Blu-ray)
Picture: C/C+/B Sound: C+/C+/B Extras: B-/C-/C+ Films: B-/B-/C
And now
for three of the more interesting foreign films I have seen lately including
two of the top Korean films of 2007…
The
better of those two films is Kim Ki-Dok’s Breath
about a man sentenced to death for murder and the married, bored woman who
falls in love with him. Aside from the
fact that it is hard to believe she would be allowed to visit him or even have
any contact with him whatsoever, going with this, they have a romance that
covers all four season and she goes out of her way to make this happen.
Starting
as a drama that tests believability, the turning point to a sort of amusing
madness happens early when she dresses a gray visiting room up with wallpaper
(How is she allowed to do this? The film
suggests the warden is amused enough to let it happen, but still…) and starts
to sing a song of spring. It is able to
keep this madness going for the whole film which transforms into something else
sad, palpable and about connectedness and disconnectedness. Her husband is not sympathetic, but his
passiveness and inability to be an available man actually drives her to some of
this, though it is possible she knows the killer from long ago. Chen Chang, Jung-Woo and Park Ji-a star.
Xavier
Dolan’s Heartbeats (2010/aka The Imaginary Lovers) is our lone
French entry and a bold, honest look at young sexuality as a young man (Dolan
himself in the film) and female friend (Monia Chokri) befriend and then fall
for a young man (Niels Schneider) who they become involved with and want
sexually. It starts as a sort of fun
relationship, though it never becomes outright sexual and the object of their
affections seems like a nice guy, but as they start to fall more and more for
him, he turns out not to be as nice as he first appeared, but they are already
in a struggle with themselves as well as to be with him.
You would
never see a film from the U.S.
this honest about sexuality because most of the filmmakers are not that good
here, but this is believable though sometimes more predictable than
expected. How youth becomes cynicism,
joy becomes rejection and happiness is ruined by manipulation and
self-deception is well chronicled here and the acting is good throughout. I like the foreign title more because I think
it speaks more to what filmmaker Dolan was getting at. It may not be a masterwork of cinema, but it
is far ahead of most films that pose to be about the subject and fail
miserably.
Finally
we have a film that is a Criterion release, a major award winner, Academy Award
contender and one of the most overrated films with intelligence I have seen in
a while. Lee Chang-Dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007) is his fourth
film and though he has talent and ideas, the film is a very problematic work
that tries to do one thing and lands up doing another.
The story
seems simple enough with a widow (Jeon Do-yeon) moving from Seoul to the small town of the title (Miryong
translates to it), bringing her very young son with her, but it turns out to be
a trap and a big mistake. It is never
clear why she chooses this town, but then Lee Chang-Dong does this often in the
film, so many times in fact that it becomes a spoof it itself though his
intents seem to be sincere, they are a disaster.
You can
play this game in any film for a while, but there is a point of no return where
this backfires and that happens when her son is kidnapped, she is terrorized on
the phone, asked to leave money somewhere (not telling the police) and her son
turns up dead. A child being murdered or
any child in jeopardy part of a film is a very serious thing to have in your
film, but when you trivialize it like he does here, it is embarrassing and this
is not out of an illicit appeal to morality or that children should never be
portrayed as exploited or killed. It is
just this event is used as a plot device and if you replaced it with another
event (racial murder, The Holocaust or the like that would raise more eyebrows
as if this does not), you would see how this goes wrong.
What then
follows is potentially interesting, but does not work. A married pharmacy couple’s wife who tried to
get her to join their Christian movement (turns out the religion is far larger
in the country that you might think) and though turned down before, the widow
suffering her son’s death accepts the invitation to join what she would have
never joined before. Lee Chang-Dong takes
this part of the film to criticize the abuse of Christianity in his country,
but does not go far enough. Even worse,
to show how desperate and sad the small town is in its dead-endedness, we get a
38-year-old man (Song Kang-ho from The
Host and The Good, The Bad & The
Weird) who might be here for comic relief to some, but that does not last
as the film gets into territory where this would not be applicable, even if
this were a black comedy and it is not.
He is an
opportunist, any possibility he is nice or sincere disappears very early on and
his predatory nature and it becomes a foreshadowing of how everyone around the
widow is out to get her and ruin her life whether they realize it or not. With a dead child, all are more responsible
than even the director seems to indicate, but he sacrifices implication for some
abstract idea (after seeing how flawed the film was, he explains this in the
supplement, soft of) that the film is about all the things we don’t know about
because we cannot see it (“God”, murder, being manipulated by a director
cheating his audience) and how that makes us victims or that the world is about
nothingness unless we dream up it being about something.
Peter
Jackson’s The Lovely Bones had this
problem on some level too (a female murder victim talks from the afterlife as
if it was not a problem she was molested, murdered, etc.), but that was a bad
Fantasy genre work with major, major issues.
This is an outright drama and cannot retreat into multi-million dollar
digital effects or hide behind its actors (you have good performances in both,
which is more disturbing to have to hide said problems behind).
This is
even a fine looking film, but despite taking us to another place we have not
been before, it then hides and cheats with side distractions when the only
possible story here is that a child was murdered and though a man has gone to
jail for it, it is never investigated. Where
did all that money go that she had left for the kidnappers? Did he really act alone? What did the child go through before
hand? Did people in the community enable
the killer? Did any of them participate? How guilty is the 38 year-old stalker? Considering this is on the news in the film,
it is even suspicious the police do not investigate further or that no one is
outranged by what has happened. That is
the only story that could follow, but Lee Chang-Dong goes into what turns out
to be an idiotic direction that is at least passively irresponsible and though
the widow does act out in some form of pain bordering on revenge, the film
inadvertently endorses child exploitation, child terrorism and there is no
alternative reading of the text unless you are naïve or an artsy snob. And to think a longer essay addressing this
is possible.
Anyhow, the
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on the DVDs are soft despite how well
both films are shot, but Breath is
especially softer than expected and I cannot imagine why. Color is even good in both cases for the
format, but the fact of the matter is that both need and deserve Blu-ray
releases at least on the level of the 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition
image transfer on Secret which looks
good and sometimes great form the original camera negative with a nice use of
the scope frame and some great shots (day and night) including some great
color. I might not have liked the film,
but Director of Photography Cho Yong-kyu is a gifted cameraman.
The Dolby
Digital 5.1 lossy mixes on the DVDs are not bad for dialogue-baaed films with
some music, but nothing that really fills out the multiple speakers, confirmed
further with Breath when you switch
to its Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo sound and there is a limited difference. I wonder if both would sound better in
lossless mixes. The DTS-HD MA (Master
Audio) Korean 5.1 lossless mix on Secret
is much warmer, fuller and transferred from its original soundmaster at 24
bits. There are times the sound is
towards the front channels and this too is a quiet film with limited surrounds
and dialogue, but it can also have ambience and just earns its rating.
Extras on
all three releases include a Theatrical Trailer, with Breath adding Filmmaker Interviews, Making Of featurette, At Cannes
clip and Cannes Red Carpet clip, leaving Secret
also offering a nicely illustrated booklet on the film including informative
text and an essay by Dennis Lau called A
Cinema Of Lucidity, while the disc also offers a new video interview with
the director and on the set behind-the-scenes video piece.
- Nicholas Sheffo