Anyway, I got here in plenty of time and picked up a badge, but probably should have bought a ticket for opening night film Bookworm earlier, but that's on me. It's okay; writer/director Ant Timpson has a lot of friends and fans at the festival and I'm sure the seat went to someone who was really psyched to see it. It gave me a little time to eat, lay in a few supplies, and then catch Swimming in a Sand Pool. That'll leave a hole in the schedule later, but okay.
Then it was across the street for 4pm.
Today's plan is to see if there's any place around here playing Customs Frontline and then live in Hall for the short feature Confession and the long feature The Count of Monte Cristo.
Swimming in a Sand Pool
* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
Swimming in a Sand Pool has Interesting pedigree, with the director of Linda Linda Linda taking on a script adapted from a teenage girl's school play, which feels like it should probably hit with more impact than it does for me. Obviously, teenage girls might feel differently. Japanese teen girls, doubly so.
It has four teenage girls arriving at their school swimming pool, drained with sand on the bottom. Arriving first, Miku (Reina Nakayoshi) puts earbuds in and practices and Awa dance on one of the lane markers; she's soon joined by Chizuru (Mikuri Kiyota), star of the girls' swim team and choosing to lay on her stomach and practice her strokes rather than go cheer the boys' team on at Nationals. Neither wants the other to watch what they're doing. They're joined by Kokoro (Saki Hamao), focused on beauty and boys, and Yui (Sumire Hanaoka), the outgoing senior captain of the swim team. PE teacher Ms. Yamamoto has brought Chizuru and Kokoro here during summer vacation to have them sweep the dirt out of it as a way to make up the swimming class they skipped, retreating to a classroom as the girls get more talking that sweeping done.
The "kids hanging out" genre is a venerable one, and this one is certainly interesting for how (original?) writer Nakata Yumeka was a student when writing it, which likely cuts down any "40-year-old man trying to capture how 15-year-old girls talk" complaints. Still, it's mostly a film that seems content to bounce these young women off each other, hinting a bit at connections to one another and an offscreen boy, but eventually building to a really good line and a pretty good speech, such that it eventually gives the impression of the rest of the movie being reverse-engineered to get to those specific lines as much as feeling like where these characters go. It ends up being about the idea of girlhood but not so much about these girls.
I like the performances, and how the casting and the body language captures what these girls represent and what we know about them; for all this is still very much a play with more people talking rather than doing, there's palpable physicality to it. Reina Nakayoshi's Miku has a dancer's grace and the sort of body insecurity that goes with it, there's physical strength but social awkwardness to Mikuri Kiyota's jock, and a confidence tinged with hostility to Saki Hamao's Kokoro. These girls are all dealing with powerful emotions but very seldom become clichés of teenagers who are just constantly overpowered by their hormones, a sense that they've started figuring out who they are but are also just starting to figure out how being women affects that.
The story may have started life as a high-school play - you can see the convention of the individual entrances in the first act once you know what to look for, and a kind of clunky bit of explanation or two toward the end - but that likely gives Yamashita a fair amount of room to create it as a movie, playing around with what's going on above the pool and within it, occasionally going afield to see what the other girls are doing as they leave others to have one-on-ones. One thing I'm curious about is the sound design, where you hear the baseball team practicing in the adjacent athletic field more or less constantly throughout (the dust they kick up is why the pool needs to be swept) and it's a nifty sort of metaphor for how boys are becoming this insistent background noise in a teenage girl's head even before the film makes it explicit.
There's enough going on that I wonder if the film might have been stronger with a different translation; it's got some abrupt transitions and "now we're going to talk about gender" bits that don't quite play well in subtitles, enough to make one wonder if underlining those points is giving others short shrift. Oh, and I kid, but minus a couple points for how it looks like none of them have ever swept a floor in their lives, though. I feel like even the surliest teen is going to accidentally clear more dirt just leaning on their brooms.
"98%"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
"98%" is the type of short film you get when a horror fan with strong passions gets behind the camera: Earnest, passionate, and happy to use some nasty violence to make its point, but maybe needing a little filling out. Like the idea, like the enthusiasm, not entirely sure this is the best way to put them together.
It opens with the uncomfortable, to say the least, end of some sort of video shoot, with ringleader Jung-min (Joo Young Woo) taunting one of the disabled participants the she's just made him able to do more, before cutting to him about to shoot another one, expecting to pick one person up but instead seeing Eunhye (Park Yun), who isn't visible handicapped - she's a knockout, actually - but who does have some pretty severe hearing loss. So he shifts the sort of exploitation he's planning, but soon finds that it's not wise to try and get Eunhye to do something she doesn't want.
When you start to break "98%" down and parse it, it's easy to come out with "well, that's problematic" as a take-away, but that's not really it's issue - horror is supposed to be problematic, pushing into extreme cases where, yes, the disabled often have to debase themselves and sacrifice their dignity to survive and their revenge is awful but viscerally satisfying. I don't know that what is done to Jung-min feels right, even emotionally, but it doesn't have to. It probably also doesn't matter that the tone and structure of it has issues - maybe it does better without a priming bit of violence in the beginning? - or that it's the most conventionally attractive that gets to fight back. It hangs together well enough, but it's maybe messy in enough ways to nudge past "horror is allowed to be messy".
4PM
* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
There's an early temptation to look for something that will make 4pm more complicated or twistedly rational than it is, but the filmmakers are often able to resist it so that what twists are there remain simple, enough that I suspect a second viewing would not actually change its weird, darkly comic pleasures as it usually does. The movie is what it means to be, and that's plenty in this case.
Professor Jeong-in (Oh Dal-soo) and his wife Hyeon-sook (Jang Young-nam) are not quite ready to retire, but they're maybe trying it on for size with Jeong-in's one-year sabbatical, having bought a house in the country on the water and found the place suits them. Intending to be neighborly, they attempt to introduce themselves to the doctor who lives next door, Yook-nam (Kim Hong-pa), a cardiologist who mostly does house calls rather than working out of an office. He's not home when they call, so they leave a note asking him to visit any time, which he does at 4pm the next day. It's weird and uncomfortable for the newcomers, though, as he tersely answers questions, imposes on their hospitality, and occasionally just stares ahead saying nothing until he leaves abruptly at 6pm. Then, the next day, he does it again. And again. What game could he possibly be playing?
And while the source material for this Korean movie comes from Belgium - a novel by Amélie Nothomb adapted for the screen by Kim Hae-gon - it's hard not to think of Poe when watching it as Jeong-in's narration, ready to embrace the protagonist's worst impulses, certainly makes it feel like a cousin to "The Tell-Tale Heart", a man talking himself into murder. There's something more to it, though: It's hard not to get the sense that this Kim and director "Jay" Song Jeong-woo are examining the fragility of the social contract: Yook-man breaks it by being singularly, deliberately unreasonable, and Jeong-in, an intelligent and urbane person, doesn't exactly know what to do with that. He can't bring himself to break social norms in response, so he tries to outsmart Yook-nam, politely laying verbal trap that should either get Yook-nam to respond like a reasonable person or disengage in defeat, immediately considering escalation to violence. Yook-nam, meanwhile, knows that Jeong-in intends to be reasonable, and his ability to not be bound by that lets him keep pushing. It's a tight little microcosm of a lot of confrontations today, where bullies exploit that most people do not want to be bullies.
Not that Jeong-in is entirely or even primarily a victim here; the filmmakers aren't exactly being subtle by showing him reading a book titled "The Infinitely Evil Nature of Man" (or maybe they are, given that the title is in English). Perhaps there's something inherent and inevitable about where Jeong winds up trying to go; he's got the inner monologue of someone quite willing to treat this sort of thing as inevitable in the sort of way that doesn't necessarily include himself until he must. He constructs the narrative that makes him the least guilty, with the sort of sophistry that half-convinces.
It works in part because what's going on is so absurd; the film is constructed to let one laugh at the audacity of Yook-nam's bad behavior and the stumbling awkwardness of Jeong-in and Hyeon-sook responding to it, and the filmmakers and cast tend to sell it as flummoxing rather than cringe. Kim Hong-pa gives Yook-nam a wily boundary-pushing energy that feels like it could be innocent fun until it veers hard in the other direction, and Oh Dal-soo does nice work in alternating between smug and put-upon manners. Jang Young-man maybe doesn't get to participate quite as actively in the part of Hyeon-sook, but she does kind of nail how the person who just wants to stay out of it can feel simultaneously sensible and cowardly. Song is also canny in how he takes great care to not make this feel like a loop where the gag is repetition, finding different ways to shoot scenes (I love an overhead shot that rotates like the hand of a clock jumping to the next tick). It feels more like an escalation than a slow burn even though it's mostly passive-aggressive.
It may be too much; by the end: There is a bit of a sense that someone didn't know how all this would keep evolving and took the quickest path. There are laughs from the film's final absurdity, but also a sense that the movie needed to end somehow and this is as good a way as any.
No comments:
Post a Comment