LAFF ’12: Return to Burma

Coca-Cola may have just announced its imminent return to Burma, but China maintains a chokehold on its client state’s closed economy.  Such is the situation an expatriate construction worker finds on his homecoming.  Regardless of potential political liberalizations, economic opportunities remain few and far between in Midi Z’s Return to Burma (trailer here), which screens during the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival.

After years of working and saving in Taipei, Wang Xing-hong is returning home.  He had planned to travel with his co-worker Rong, but instead he will carry his countryman’s ashes.  Transferring from bus to bus he hears the saccharine radio jingles proclaiming the promise of progress through new elections.  Yet, he arrives home to the same depressed provincial town, except now maybe even more so.

Traveling between Taiwan and Burma is an expensive and complicated proposition.  Clearly, Wang would prefer to stay and put down roots.  Simultaneously, his sporadically employed younger brother is about to leave for Malaysia in search of work.  The fact the neighboring country offers greater opportunity than the more richly resource-endowed Burma is a testament to decades of government mismanagement and plunder.  Yet, that is the state of things.

The pseudo-characters of Return are a lot like New Yorkers compulsively discussing comparative rents and maintenance fees at a dinner party.  Viewers will leave knowing the market wage for just about every form of manual labor in the country as well as the start-up cost for numerous small service proprietorships.  The lesson is clear—do not relocate to Burma.  By the way, Midi Z and his colleagues obviously call it Burma and not Myanmar, unlike the military junta and the legacy media.

Shot surreptitiously on the streets of Yangon and Mandalay, with non-professional actors kind of-sort of playing themselves, Return is the first domestically produced Burmese feature (evidently ever).  It was also more or less illegal.  Perhaps not surprisingly, it is closely akin stylistically to the Digital Generation school of independent Chinese filmmakers.  Deliberate and observational rather than action-driven or chatty, the film is really all about conveying the experience of Burma’s underclass—and that includes everyone except the top military and government officials.

It is probably a small miracle the Burma-born Taiwan-based Midi Z and his crew-members were not imprisoned during the Return shoot.  They earn considerable kudos for vividly capturing the atmosphere of Burma.  There are times when you can practically smell the humid night air.  Still, the languid pace and hardscrabble living conditions have a rather claustrophobic effect.  It is a worthy but wearying look inside the isolated society.  Recommended for dedicated Burma watchers (but not necessarily casual connoisseurs of Asian cinema), Return to Burma screens this Friday (6/22) and Saturday (6/23) as an International Showcase selection of the 2012 LA Film Fest.

LAFF ’12: P-047

They are temporary occupiers.  Nearly invisible in their mall jobs, Lek and Kong break into affluent apartments to borrow a few hours of the tenants’ lives.  They rarely steal anything outright, unless they are sure it will not be missed.  Unfortunately, there seems to be something not quite right with their world on a higher metaphysical level in Kongdej Jaturanrasmee’s P-047, which screens during the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival.

Lek is a locksmith, whose skills are wasted in his kiosk.  Kong sells magazines, but fancies himself a writer and ladies man.  At Kong’s instigation, they start invading strangers’ flats to experience how the more prosperous live.  They carefully observe each target before their home invasions, but one day the inevitable happens—violently.  From there, all bets are off.

What starts as a pretty grounded excursion into petty crime and economic voyeurism takes a sharp turn into the meta-weird, challenging viewer assumptions regarding objective reality and discrete character identity.  Perhaps Lek and Kong are the same person, though in many respects, this does not seem to be the case.  Yet the hospitalized Lek takes on much of Kong’s persona, while befriending Oy, a strange fellow patient who compulsively sniffs found containers, in search of scents past.

P-047 is clearly intended as a head-scratcher.  Even the appearance of the title digits remains deliberately open to interpretation.  Despite the unwieldiness of the reality-problematizing later scenes, Jaturanrasmee still hooks viewers in quite readily.  Thai recording artist Apichai Tragoolpadetgrai is particularly notable expressing Lek’s social awkwardness and desperate-on-the-inside alienation.  In effective contrast, there is something clearly a little off about Prinya Ngamwongwarn’s Kong.

Frankly, P-047 seems to even lose itself down the stretch.  Nonetheless, the premise is so intriguing and many scattered sequences are so fascinating, one wants to assume all the pieces add up to something significant, somehow.  That counts for something.  The haunting use of Debussy’s Ballade and Umpompol Yugala’s icy cinematography also contribute substantial style points.  Selectively recommended for connoisseurs of Thai film and post-modern cinema, P-047 screens this Wednesday (6/20) and Sunday (6/24) as an International Showcase selection of this year’s L.A. Film Fest.

LAFF ’12: FOUR

His name is June, but unlike Johnny Cash’s Boy Named Sue, he is more sullen than angry.  He is also sexually conflicted (no kidding).  At least he has found someone willing to listen to him: a middle-aged middle class husband and father who should not be trawling for teens on the internet.  They constitute one of the two couples circling around each other on a fateful Fourth of July night in Joshua Sanchez’s FOUR (trailer here), which screens today at the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival.

Joe really ought to be at home with his emotionally deteriorating wife, but instead he has arranged a clandestine rendezvous with the teenaged June.  Pretending to be at an out-of-town conference, he has left his daughter Abigayle to mind her mother.  More or less home alone, she will have to field the clumsy advances of Dexter, a would-be basketball star with a drug problem.  Suspecting something is fishy with her upright father, Abigayle starts encouraging Dexter out of spite.  Connections might be made, but the results are not what you would probably call romance.

Frankly, there is something creepy about a film that considers a grown man sexually pursuing a teenager (not of legal age) sympathetic in any fashion.  Indeed, June and Joe’s “courtship” scenes are criminal (according to Joe, the character) and most certainly unsavory.  Yet ironically, Wendell Pierce’s admittedly richly nuanced and fully dimensional performance as the older man makes it all the more difficult to draw a bead on the film’s ethical-moral framework.

Pierce and his voice, HBO fixtures in Treme and The Wire, are quite compelling, but the breakout star has to be Aja Naomi King as Abigayle, completely engaging portraying her character’s intelligence as well as her bitter capriciousness.  Unfortunately, both of their potential partners are rather bland screen presences.

Sure to be a special interest to New York theater patrons, FOUR is based on Christopher Shinn’s play and boasts Neil LaBute as one of its executive producers.  Given the film’s interracial pairings, many critics will surely be tempted to compare FOUR to Crash.  It would be a dubious compliment.  At least Sanchez creates a memorable late-night in-the-moment vibe.  A highly problematic film featuring two quite accomplished screen turns, FOUR is not necessarily recommended, but it will likely find an appreciative audience nonetheless when it screens today (6/15) and Monday (6/18) as part of this year’s LA Film Festival.