SFFILM ’18: The White Girl

This unnamed teenager is a lot like Japanese singer-songwriter Yui’s character in Taiyou no Uta (Midnight Sun) and whoever in the lame American remake. She too is allergic to the sun’s ultraviolet rays—or so she has always been told. However, she is not a singer, but perhaps her mother was—and maybe still is—or not. She is an outsider in Pearl Village, Hong Kong’s last surviving fishing hamlet, but in some ways that helps her appreciate what it represents in Jenny Suen & (co-director) Christopher Doyle’s The White Girl (trailer here), which screens during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.

All her life, the “White Girl” has hid beneath floppy hats, sunglasses, and protective clothing, because her controlling fisherman father assured her she must. Given her resulting pale skin and shy manner, the villagers dubbed her “White Girl” or even “Ghost” and have become convinced she can contaminate their nets with bad mojo with a hard stare. Her only friend is Ho Zai, a scampish little boy living with an eccentric Buddhist monk, at least until Sakamoto, an emotionally damaged Japanese expat fleeing his troubles, starts squatting in the decrepit colonial mansion overlooking the bay.

For the most part, the White Girl and Sakamoto are drawn to each other, because they sense the shared empathy and comradery of a fellow wounded spirit. However, there is also an element of creepy sexual attraction that Sakamoto scrupulously represses. Yet, she will still lose much of her innocence for other reasons, as she comes to doubt the validity of everything her father ever told her. Meanwhile, the resourceful Ho Zai uncovers evidence of the mayor’s plan to sell out the village to a consortium of Mainland investors.

White Girl is a more focused and conventional film than Doyle’s Hong Kong Trilogy, which Suen produced, but it is still much more concerned with mood and vibe than crass plot points. Without doubt, we can see its aesthetic kinship with some of the classic Wong Kar-wai films he shot. It is a quiet, lulling film, but fortunately Angela Yuen and Joe Odagiri can emote though the humid languor as the girl and the squatter. Jeff Yiu is also unusually charismatic for a young thesp as Ho Zai, while Rayna Lee adds some unlikely sympathetic glamor as the village school teacher, Miss Wong. However, Leung Kin-ping probably scores the most points for dramatics with his poignant turn as the girl’s clueless father.

Honestly, nobody would have accused Suen & Doyle of selling out if they had cranked up the narrative a little. Clearly, they believe meandering is part of the journey. Of course, the symbolism of the hyper-connected Mainland developers out to obliterate Pearl Village’s way of life is tough to miss, but that doesn’t mean the message isn’t still needed. Regardless, the mostly attractive and uniformly expressive ensemble redeems the stylistic excesses. Recommended as an evocative and elegiac coming of age film, The White Girl screens again this Monday (4/16), as part of this year’s SFFILM.

SFFILM ’18: Manhunt

Seriously, why didn’t Tenjin Pharmaceuticals just stick to making impotency pills? Instead, they decided to develop a super-soldier drug, because apparently, they have never seen any of the Universal Soldier or Bourne movies. The Japanese firm kept it a secret from their American-educated, Chinese lawyer Du Qiu, but they frame him for murder anyway when he tries to resign as corporate council. Fortunately, the mouthpiece kept in shape, because he is in for a lot of running and fighting in John Woo’s Manhunt (trailer here), which screens during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Considering how many cases Du Qiu won for Tanjin, you would think he would be more fluent in Japanese, but whatever. At least he is an old movie buff, a fact that helped endear him to Rain, a moody and sensitive assassin some months earlier. That chance encounter will be important later. First, Du Qiu chooses the wrong woman to go home with after Tanjin’s gala party announcing Chairman’s Yoshihiro Sakai’s official designation of his son Hiroshi as his successor.

Rather inconveniently, Du Qiu comes to next to the dead body of Kiko Tanaka. Even more discouraging, the initial investigating officer is the blatantly corrupt Mamoru Ito, who forces Du Qiu to escape by shooting a darned unlucky colleague. However, it turns out Du Qiu really has a knack for being a fugitive. Nevertheless, the honest but cynical Det. Satoshi Yamura deliberately lets him slip away many times, because the plot points are just as obvious to him as they are to us. Thanks to all the blind eyes Yamura and his new partner Hyakuta turn, Du Qiu starts to get some answers from Mayumi, the grieving fiancée of Tenjin’s former research director. At this point, Rain and her ambiguous partner Dawn re-enter the picture, to fulfill the contract on his head.

Manhunt is based on Jukô Nishimura novel that presumably made a lot more sense when it was adapted in 1976 with Ken Takakura. Certainly, the earlier film must have had more linguistic cohesion, whereas long stretches of Woo’s version feature Japanese and Chinese characters speaking English with odd syntax, in disembodied sounding voices. There is not much logic to the narrative either. Basically, Tenjin commits random acts of evil, which has to be bad for their bottom line—after all they have to keep two La Femme Nikita-style contract-killers on permanent retainer.

Yes, the screenplay is a mess, but it is still jolly fun to watch Masaharu Fukuyama snarl and brood as the world-weary Det. Yamura. He also develops some rather engaging chemistry with Nanami Sakuraba’s Hyakuuta, who happens to resemble his dearly departed wife, because everyone has to have a tragic backstory in this film. Korean superstar Ha Ji-won and Angeles Woo (daughter of the director) vamp it up nicely as Rain and Dawn. However, as Du Qiu, Zhang Hanyu always looks bored, even when he is running for his life and slipping out for an assignation with the soon-to-be late Tanaka (played by Tao Okamoto from The Wolverine and Batman v. Superman).

Frankly, Manhunt does not have the style or the high gloss of Woo’s best work. However, there is no denying the final action climax is a satisfying maelstrom of blazing guns, smashing batons, and drug-crazed test subjects. This is a minor Woo film, but it is still an idiosyncratic guilty pleasure. Recommended for anyone in the mood for cartoon violence with no real nutritional value, Manhunt screens tomorrow (4/13), as part of this year’s SFFILM.

SFFILM ’18: The Other Side of Everything

Alas, revolutions often fail and one fallen regime usually just begets another that is equally corrupt, or worse. Those are the archly fatalistic observations of Prof. Srbijanka Turajlić—and she ought to know. She was a prominent leader in the Otpor resistance that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic. Before that, her family was branded suspicious bourgeoisie class elements by Tito’s Communists. In fact, her subdivided family townhouse still bears the witness to the Communist era of appropriation and plunder in Mila Turajlić’s highly personal documentary, The Other Side of Everything (trailer here), which screens during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.

For Turajlić the personal is inescapably political, due to her mother’s activism. She stood shoulder to shoulder with her students, because she refused to be as passive as her parents had been when confronting injustice during the Communist era. It started when a jackbooted internal security agent arrived unannounced, consigning the large family to two rooms in their fashionable building. For decades, their own neighbors spied on them through peep holes within their [formerly] own home. As late as the mid 2010’s, Rada the nonagenarian is still holding on, in the two grubby rooms right behind Srbijanka Turajlić’s walls.

Although Other Side is ostensibly about family history, it is a remarkably helpful document for making sense of the current Serbian political climate. Partly, it is because Turajlić and her family have had such a unique vantage point to observe Serbian and Yugoslav history. In fact, her grandfather was a signatory to the original document creating Yugoslavia as a unified political entity, decades before Tito’s rise to power. Nearly a century later, he will play a small part in a tellingly ironic and symbolic development when a grand oil painting of the ceremony is discovered, walled up in the national legislature.

Most of the time, Other Side should not even be described as a two-hander, because Turajlić the filmmaker does her best to keep herself behind the scenes. However, Prof. Turajlić is an undeniably forceful personality, who easily commands the screen. Despite her disappointments, she is still razor-sharp and actively engaged socially and politically (despite her claims to the contrary).

Almost perversely, Prof. Turajlić will absolutely charm viewers, yet leave them deeply pessimistic regarding the prospects for free, democratic civil society in Serbia. She will never bore you, that’s for sure. Given its personal focus, Other Side represents a radical departure from Mila Turajlić’s previous documentary, Cinema Komunisto, but together they provide remarkably compelling, fully contextualized understanding of the Serb and Yugoslav national experience over the past eighty-some years. Very highly recommended, The Other Side of Everything screens today (4/0), tomorrow (4/11), and Thursday (4/12), as part of this year’s SFFILM.

SFFILM ’18: Ulam (Main Dish)

There is a large expat Overseas Filipino population—an estimated 10.2 million, or roughly 10% of the 106 million in-country population. As a result, you would expect to find a growing international market for Filipino cuisine, but it might also morph and evolve as Filipino chefs incorporated other local culinary elements. It took a while, but both trends are finally coming to fruition, judging from the success of the Filipino restaurateurs profiled in Alexandra Cuerdo’s documentary Ulam (Main Dish), which premiered yesterday at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival (trailer here).

As many of Cuerdo’s interview subjects note, there were always a number of Filipino head chefs overseeing high profile restaurant kitchens, but they were still cooking in French, Italian, or Continental styles. Most Asian cuisines were readily accepted by American patrons, but there was still a dearth of Filipino restaurants. However, the success of several new elegant but accessible Filipino fine dining establishments has led to a boom in interest among the culinary press.

Cuerdo is quite fortunate most of them are young and eloquent, especially on the subject of food. Amy Besa & Romy Dorotan, from Purple Yam in Brooklyn, are the veterans among the film’s participants, with twenty years of New York restaurant experience, but the camera loves them. Nicole Ponseca (from Jeepney) is probably the most sensitive to issues of authenticity, since her chef and partner, Miguel Trinidad, is Dominican, but they convincingly argue nobody applies such purity standards to the chefs at Italian restaurants (and besides, no Filipino chefs were willing to join her when she first struck out on her own).

In fact, Ulam is not just about food. It also pays tribute to the entrepreneurial spirit, which is very cool. Perhaps nobody better illustrates that than Alvin Cailan, who started working multiple kitchen jobs (often for free experience) but has since parlayed his Eggslut food truck into a mini-empire that includes “incubator” space for up-and-coming chefs. Of course, family is also critically important to these success stories, especially for Johneric Concordia and Christine Araquel-Concordia’s restaurant The Park’s Finest, where nearly every employee was a relative (often “drafted”), in its early days.

Cuerdo maintains a mostly upbeat, breezy tone, as most viewers would prefer when it comes to their food docs, but there are plenty of positive lessons to glean from it. Along the way, her interview subjects revisit some rather touching memories. They make it very clear that food, family, culture, and honest hard work are all closely intertwined in the Philippines.

The dishes we see all look delicious too. Ironically, in some cases they have taken roadside Filipino food and turned it into haute cuisine, but it is still more substantial and flavorful than most of what you might find in trendy Soho spots. Recommended as a low-stress, pleasantly engaging celebration of Filipino cuisine, Ulam (Main Dish) screens again today (4/8) and Tuesday (4/10), as part of this year’s SFFILM.

SFFilm ’18: Salyut-7

For the last nine years, if America wanted to get an astronaut into space, we had to hitch a ride with the Russians. However, in 1985, the American space program was so competitive, the Soviets worried we could permanently leap-frog them if we recovered their malfunctioning Salyut-7 space station. In what could be dubbed the “Russian Apollo 13,” two cosmonauts were dispatched on an emergency mission to repair or safely scuttle the station. While the circumstances of the mission were blacked-out by the Soviet media at the time, they are now the heroic stuff of Klim Shipenko’s big-budget, big-screen treatment, Salyut-7 (trailer here), which screens during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.

In the atheist USSR, seeing an angel during a space-walk is more than sufficient to get Vladimir Fyodorov permanently grounded (it probably wouldn’t have gone over so well with NASA either). Nevertheless, he is the best pure pilot available to TsUP when a power failure sends Salyut-7 into a precarious rotation. Fyodorov’s mission (which he duly accepts) will be to manually hard dock with the space station, so mission engineer Viktor Alyokhin can restore power and bring it under control. However, it is rotating faster than anyone at TsUP estimated and water leaks shorted put most of the electricals.

Although some of the Soviet authorities are depicted as loutish hard-liners, it is probably a safe bet Salyut-7 would never have been made in today’s Russia if it ended in failure. Nevertheless, if you can overlook some propagandistic nostalgia for the old Soviet days, it is a rather rousing ode to the daring spirit of space exploration. The effects are also first-rate, capturing the awe of the galactic view of Earth in all its glory.

Vladimir Vdovichenkov is credibly square-jawed as the seasoned Fyodorov (based on Vladimir Dzhanibekov) and Pavel Derevyanko is serviceable enough as the more nebbish Alyokhin (modelled on Viktor Savinykh). Their comradery is matter-of-factly convincing, but the scenes of their respective home-fronts are awkwardly manipulative (you know one of them will have to have a pregnant wife). However, probably the best work comes from Aleksandr Samoylenko as the veteran cosmonaut now serving as flight director. He doesn’t quite have the fire of Ed Harris’s Gene Kranz, but he is still notably intense and driven.

Cinematographers Serge Astakhov and Ivan Burlakov give the film an awesome sense of scope and the CGI crafts all look scrupulously true to the real-life vessels. It looks great, so the cheap, tinny-sounding score is an embarrassment bordering on an outright travesty. Despite that distracting shortcoming, the film offers an intriguing peak into the Soviet space program (and should cause viewers to despair over our recent presidents’ costly shortsightedness). Recommended as a manageably nationalistic space-faring adventure, Salyut-7 screens tomorrow (4/8), as part of this year’s SFFILM.

SFFILM ’18: No Date, No Signature

Terhan drivers might spend even more time in their cars than Angelenos. The Iranian capital might just boast the world’s most congested traffic. Reflecting that driving culture, entire Iranian films have been shot in cars, such as Jafar Panahi’s Taxi and Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten. It stands to reason there are plenty of auto accidents, but Dr. Kaveh Nariman’s incident is particularly tragic, assuming it really was the cause of a young boy’s death. The uncertainty will be agonizing in Vahid Jalilvand’s No Date, No Signature (trailer here), which screens during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.

It really wasn’t Nariman’s fault. A reckless driver side-swiped him on the left, forcing him into the motorbike carrying Moosa, his wife, infant daughter, and young son. Nariman duly pulls over and gives everyone a cursory examination, but he dissuades Moosa from calling the cops, because his insurance has lapsed. Instead, he hands over some money for repairs and offers to admit his son into his clinic at no charge. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Moosa takes the money, but blows off the clinic.

The next night, a report on Moosa’s now deceased son crosses Dr. Nariman’s desk as the local head of legal forensic medicine. According to the autopsy performed by Dr. Sayeh Behbahani (a colleague with whom Nariman has a very complicated and ambiguous relationship), the boy died of botulism. There is no denying he had the disease, but Nariman secretly suspects complications from the accident were the direct cause of death. Nevertheless, the revelation sends the guilt-ridden Moosa off in a blind rage, spoiling for a violent confrontation with the sleazy poultry worker who sold him contaminated chicken under the table.

It is amazing how dexterously Persian cinema handles moral dilemmas. In this case, everything is more intense, because all the players are operating outside the law, or at least stretching the boundaries beyond all recognition. Yet, there is something especially perverse about Dr. Nariman’s case, because the more he damns himself, the worse the outlooks gets for Moosa’s resulting criminal case (for battering the rotten chicken seller senseless—literally). Many times, the audience echoes Dr. Behbahani (or vice versa), asking “what do you think you’re doing,” with mounting alarm, while still weirdly admiring his strange sense of integrity.

Looking a bit like a Persian Trapper John M.D., Amir Aghaee gives a wonderfully subtle and quietly conflicted performance. In contrast, Navid Mohammadzadeh rages like De Niro in his prime as Moosa. Based on his meltdown, we understand how his son’s death was just the culmination of all the emasculating humiliations society had meted out on him over his lifetime. It is a very strong cast, most definitely including Hediyeh Tehrani, who is not merely an audience surrogate as Dr. Behbahani, but also a marginalized professional woman, a concerned friend, and perhaps even a spurned lover. That is a heck of a lot of internal contradictions to balance, but she does a fine job of it.

There is no explicit political commentary in No Date, but it is an Iranian film to its core. Everything that happens makes grim, fatalistic sense, but you could not credibly transpose it into another culture. It also proves it is possible to make a tense, suspenseful film with little or no crime genre elements, per se. Very highly recommended, No Date, No Signature screens Saturday (4/7), Tuesday (4/10), and Wednesday (4/11), as part of this year’s SFFILM.