Sundance ’20: Nine Days

You’re being watched, so try to do something interesting. In this case, the surveillance isn’t dystopian. It’s cosmic. Someplace outside of existence, a lonely caretaker watches 25 lives unfold on POV TV screens, until he suddenly has a vacancy in LA-based Brazilian filmmaker Edson Oda’s revelatory feature debut, Nine Days, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

This little prairie house looks like could be a location in Fargo, but instead it is found on a plane beyond our own. It serves as Will’s headquarters, where he observes the 25 mortals he approved to be born into life. His only occasional contact is Kyo, he serves in some sort of coordinating capacity for a number of such outposts. He will be visiting more frequently while Will interviews prospective souls after the unexpected death of one of his 25 lives.

She was his pride and joy, but for some reason, the classical musician appears to have taken her own life. Maddeningly, the video is ambiguous, so Will obsessively reviews her archive, looking for clues. Regardless, he must choose her replacement, so he begins the nine-day process of elimination with the group of souls mysteriously summoned to the house. The top candidates seem to be the tough-talking Kane and the free-spirited Emma. For better or worse, the recent tragedy colors his selection, but his own experience weighs just as heavily. Unlike most of the characters existing in this space, Will was once alive, but it didn’t work out so well.

Clearly, Nine Days bears the influence of Kore-eda’s After Life, both thematically and stylistically. At the very least, you have to give Oda credit for ambition by picking such an incomparable film to pay tribute to. That makes it even more impressive when Nine Days steps out of its shadow and indelibly establishes its own identity. Be warned, Oda aims for a massive emotional crescendo and pulls it off with devastating impact. We are talking about the full “Captain, my Captain,” getting-choked-up-in-spite-of-yourself effect here.

Shanghai: Gong Li Lights Up the Foreign Concessions

We tend to forget Japan fought with the Allies in WWI. Afterward, British and American interests were just as determined to exploit the Foreign Concession system as their Japanese counterparts. Yet, Shanghai’s complicated and contradictory multinational governance made it one of only two completely open safe harbors for Jewish refugees during the so-called “Solitary Island” period. Obviously, the city is the perfect place to conduct espionage. Unfortunately, one of America’s best agents has just been murdered, but his friend and colleague intends is out to find the killer and make him pay in Mikael Håfström’s Shanghai (trailer here), which opens this Friday in select theaters.

Paul Soames has assumed the cover of a National Socialist-sympathizing journalist, but he is really a democracy and freedom loving Naval Intelligence officer. However, his friend Conner was the true idealist. Yet, his prescient warnings about National Socialist and Imperial Japanese aggression were routinely ignored. Soames soon deduces Conner seduced Sumiko, the opium-addicted mistress of Tanaka, the police captain of the Japanese Concession and more importantly the local intelligence chief. Now suspiciously missing, Tanaka is turning the city inside out looking for her.

Soames’ search for Sumiko brings him into the orbit of gentleman gangster Anthony Lan-Ting and his society wife Anna. Lan-Ting has accepted an alliance with the Japanese for the sake of business, but his wife has secretly risen through the ranks of the resistance. Soames ingratiates himself with both Lan-Tings when he saves Anthony from an attack on Japanese officers organized by his wife, but executed without the surgical precision she had expected. She genuinely loves Lan-Ting, but like the wife of the local German military contractor, she finds Soames jolly fun to flirt with. Yet, as Tanaka cranks up the pressure, the attraction shared by her and Soames becomes more seriously ambiguous.

If you watch Shanghai soon after Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home, you will be astonished by Gong Li’s range. While she just rips viewers’ hearts out as the achingly tragic mother in Zhang’s literary masterwork, she plays Håfström’s noir heroine with all the va-va-voom you could ever hope for. She makes the screen smolder, even opposite a little twerp like John Cusack. Yet, she also compellingly projects the inner turmoil of a woman whose loyalties are divided between her husband and her country. It is a big, juicy, psychologically complex role, but Gong has the skills to pull it off.

Cusack just is not right for a Rick Blaine-ish romantic role, but fortunately, his gee whiz, fish-out-of-water persona works well enough for most of his solo scenes navigating the various intrigues. Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Conner with characteristic intensity in his flashbacks (too bad he wasn’t the one paired up with Gong), but the ever-reliable David Morse is grossly under-employed as Soames’ embassy contact.

Of course, Gong owns the film, but Ken Watanabe basically walks away with every scene she is not in. He is hardly another Captain Renault, but he is no Maj. Strasser either. Watanabe rather keeps us guessing, humanizing Tanaka, while playing his extremes to the hilt. Strangely, Chow Yun-fat is the one most conspicuously short-changed for screen time, but you can rectify that by watching The Last Tycoon, a natural companion film that focuses on a similar gangster-turned reluctant patriot. Unfortunately, Rinko Kikuchi is just squandered as the seldom seen Sumiko.

Attentive eyes will also spot future-star-in-the-making Andy On as one of Anna Lan-Ting’s comrades-in-arms. His appearances are brief, but his screen presence and action chops still come through loud-and-clear. Also look for Benedict Wong, who is quite good in the small but significant role of Juso Kita, Soames’ informer.

Håfström shifts gears from big historical set pieces to noir intimacy relatively adroitly. Hossein Amini’s screenplay intelligently incorporates the circumstances of the Foreign Concessions, as well as the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. Although he is clearly riffing on Casablanca, he wisely avoids paralleling the Bogart classic beat-for-beat. As a result, it all works quite well, in a pleasingly old fashioned kind of way.

Frankly, it is rather baffling why Shanghai’s release has been so long-deferred. In the intervening time, On’s star has risen, but Cusack’s has fallen, yet Gong remains on top of her game. She is more than enough reason to see Shanghai, along with Julie Weiss’s elegant costuming, Watanabe’s slyly villainous turn, and an unusual deep and accomplished supporting cast (blink and you miss Downton’s Hugh Bonneville). Recommended for fans of historical espionage thrillers, Shanghai opens this Friday (10/2) in key markets.

Marco Polo: A “Latin” in the Court of Kublai Khan, on Netflix

He wrote the equivalent of a bestselling memoir, before the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press. Dozens of hand-written manuscripts of The Travels of Marco Polo have widely circulated, making it rather difficult to determine the canonical truth of the celebrated merchant’s life. That might be frustrating for scholarly biographers and historians, but it rather takes the pressure off filmmakers dramatizing his life. Before securing his fame and fortune, the young Venetian (or “The Latin” as he will often be called) finds an unusual place in the Court of Kublai Khan, becoming enmeshed within a geo-political struggle between two ancient dynastic powers in Marco Polo (trailer here), an original ten episode historical series premiering on Netflix this Friday.

Polo never knew his father Niccolò Polo, until the Venetian trader made a brief homecoming, before setting off for Asia once again. Desiring a paternal relationship, the younger Polo invited himself along, but it is soon apparent he is quite well-attuned to rhythms and mysteries of the Eastern world, perhaps even more than his father and uncle. In fact, the great Kublai Khan accepts Marco Polo into his service, when Niccolò Polo offers to barter him in exchange for trading rights along the Silk Road. Of course, the son is quite put out by this, but his father promises to return, which he will, but maybe not in the manner he imagined.

Valuing Polo’s shrewd observations unclouded by courtly biases, Kublai Khan often dispatches the Latin to report on flashpoints within his empire. Not surprisingly, Polo’s favor rather displeases the Khan’s Chinese-educated son, Prince Jingim. Frankly, Polo is not exactly close to anyone in court, least of all the Khan’s trusted ministers. However, he will develop something approaching friendship with Byamba, the Khan’s illegitimate son with one of his many concubines. Polo also becomes ambiguously involved with Kokachin, the Blue Princess, the last surviving noble of a conquered people, and Khutulun, the Khan’s independent-minded warrior niece.

Regardless of historical accuracy, writer-creator John Fusco spends enough time in the Khan’s harem to make the broadcast networks curse the FCC. As Mel Brooks would say, it’s good to be the Khan. Yet, despite the nudity and hedonism, some of MP’s strongest action figures are women. As Khutulun, Korean actress Claudia Soo-hyun Kim credibly wrestles men twice her size and projects a smart, slightly subversive sensibility. Olivia Cheng also displays first class martial arts chops (sometimes naked) as Mei Lin, a Song concubine who infiltrates the Khan harem on the orders of her war-mongering brother, the villainous Imperial Regent Jia Sidao. Zhu Zhu’s Kokachin might be more demur, but she is still quite compelling, balancing her vulnerability with resoluteness. Of course, international superstar Joan Chen frequently upstages everyone as the iron-willed Empress Chabi.

Italian actor Lorenzo Richelmy holds his own as best he can amid the exotic locales and pitched battles, maintaining the necessary fish-out-of-water earnestness. However, he is no match for the British Benedict Wong (son of naturalized Hong Kong parents), who absolutely dominates the series as Kublai Khan. Although he put on considerable weight for the role, it is his commanding presence that really seems huge. Likewise, Tom Wu is terrific delivering the goods for genre fans as Hundred Eyes, Polo’s blind tutor in the martial arts.

In the initial episodes, MP offers more intrigue and Game of Thrones style decadence than actual fist-and-sword action, but the martial arts melees increase as the series progresses, with the threat (or promise) of an epic war hanging over everyone’s heads. There is a lot of setting-the-scene in episode one, but it quickly sets the addictive hook in the second installment and reels in viewers from there. Kon-Tiki directors Espen Sandberg & Joachim Rønning give the pilot an appropriate sense of mystery and sweep, which carries forth throughout the show. Based on the six episodes provided to the media, MP definitely seems to maintain its passion-fueled energy and richly detailed period production values. Highly recommended (so far), Marco Polo launches for binge-streaming this Friday (12/12) on Netflix.