New Directors/New Films and Film Comment Selects 2012

[Chris Knipp]

ROSCHDY ZEM: OMAR KILLED ME (2011)--ND/NF


NACER CHERNOUF, SAMI BOUJILA IN OMAR KILLED ME

Injustice to an Arab in a French court

Omar Killed Me/Omar m'a tuer is a good but not great film about a familiar theme: a man framed for a crime he didn't commit, whom people struggle to exonerate. There is an angle of class and racism because the man rushed to a conviction in a French court is a poor Moroccan immigrant, illiterate in Arabic as well as French and hardly able to speak or understand French. The most vivid message is how helpless an inarticulate person must necessarily be in a courtroom, despite in this case having famous lawyerrs. He is put away for the murder of a wealthy widow for whom he worked as a gardener. The veteran French actor Roschdy Zem, himself the son of Moroccan immigrants, chose this theme for his very creditable, but not dazzling directorial debut. One can see why he chose this subject, but one wishes he had waited for something better. Sami Boujila, another big French actor of Arab descent (in his case Tunisian) plays the role of Omar Raddad, the protagonist with great understated power. The costar is the ubiquitous Comédie Française star Denis Podalydès, cast as the slightly oddball writer Pierre-Emmanuel Vaugrenard, who does a muckraking book about the case that helps get Omar early release from prison -- though he has still not been proven innocent, because the court won't allow the case to be reopened. DNA checks might exonerate him, as it has US death row prisoners in recent decades. It's a story that does not end with a bang.

There is something iconic about Sami Boujila in this film, with his erect posture, his pompadour, his broad-shouldered, cheap suit jacket, his blank, stoical stare. The challenge of the role is that Omar Raddad isn't initially at all an interesting character. He's quite inarticulate in French at first, and tight-lipped in Arabic too. He emerges slowly. So does the case, and its secrets never come out. Yes, it's obvious that Omar isn't proven guilty. The blood-message, "Omar m'a tuer," in ungrammatical, probably written by a strong, untutored murderer rather than the wealthy, well-read lady victim. No fingerprints were taken; there is no real forensic evidence. The murdered woman was inexplicably cremated (probably against her wishes) so further investigation of the murder could not be done -- and so on.

As we would expect, Zem's gets good performances. Boujila is quietly charismatic. Raddad's torments and his desperation in prison, his relations with his father and his family during visits and on his release, provide the main human interest. Vaugrenard is a mildly interesting character, with individual touches, including relations with his working-class girl assistant (Salome Stevenin) that have an edge: but this is a sideshow. The lawyers are important in getting Raddad's pardon too, but they don't get in-depth treatment. The main one, Maitre Verges (Maurice Benichou), one of France's most famous defense lawyers, hardly needs filling out here since his work was examined in Barbet Schroeder documentary Terror's Advocate.

There are lively courtroom scenes. But the weakness is that the effort to prove Omar innocent isn't made suspenseful enouugh. The story itself has this weakness: that Raddad has not been provben innocent, so there's no final payoff, like the accuser's draw-dropping court recantation in another current French miscarriage of justice film, Vincent Garenq's Guilty (Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2012). Omar Killed Me feels like a great story -- only it's not quite. Zem's "pacing of a thriller" doesn't quite work because this isn't quite a thriller. It's muddled. The film approaches Omar with total empathy, but the failure to prove his innocence conclusively spoils the story of injustice. And the empathy clouds the sense of a mystery to unravel.

A collaborator on the screenplay was Rachid Bouchareb, who co-wrote and direced all the big French-Arab movie actors in Indigènes/AKA/Days of Glory, the 2006 film about the Arabs who fought for France in WWII. The film is based on several books, including Omar Raddad's memoir, Pourquoi moi? (Why Me?). The many cooks did not enhance the broth.

Omar Killed Me opened in France June 22, 2011, to good review (Allociné 3.3); however some key publications, Le Monde, Libération, Télérama, Cahiers du Cinéma, Les Inrockuptibles, were less favorable. It has been in several festivals, including Toronto and Glasgow.

Omar m'a tuer (85min.) is included in the 2012 MoMA-Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series shown as follows:


Saturday, March 24th 2012 | 6:45 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th 2012 | 7:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

ADAM LEON: GIMME THE LOOT (2012)--ND/NF


TASHIANA WASHINGTON AND TY HICKSON IN GIMME THE LOOT

Girl-boy graffiti duo wander the summer city

Malcolm and Sofia are two young graffiti artists from the Bronx. The novelty is that they're a girl and boy team. There's a potential romance here that never flowers and remains at the teasing level of friendship. Nothing else quite gets fully off the ground either in this good-natured, naturalistic film ramble through a couple of days in the heat of a NYC summer when the pair are trying to raise $500 for their project to write on or "bomb" a giant apple that is used in Mets games. They figure if they can "bomb" it when it pops up to signal a Mets score, it will be the ultimate coup. Together and apart the pair try various ruses, trying to steal stuff and sell stuff to raise the dough.

As Sofia and Malcolm, Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson are attractive and natural. It's a pleasure to watch them interact and riff off each other. But the overall action is only so-so. This is like the Larry Clark of Kids and Wassup Rockers without the sex, the edge, or the variety of colorful characters -- in short without much of what makes those Larry Clark films watchable. Malcolm's encounter with a rich girl (played by Bowdoin student Zoe Lescaze) is the most interesting and Clark-esque digression. Viewers may be less willing to put up with the constant profanity without the Clark edge. The slightly faded-looking photography by Jonathan Miller does the job well, and it's particularly impressive in such a low-budget enterprise how smooth the soundtrack of dialogue is as the characters move through crowds, ride subways, and so forth, and even when they are off in the distance.

Adam Leon has said that the greatest challenge he faced was in the casting and that once that was done, he was halfway home. And indeed Washington and Hickson are attractive, winning, and natural. Because of the hot summer NYC 'hood setting and the teen romance in the air I was fleetingly reminded of Peter Sollett's Raising Victor Vargas , but that coming of age tale, deeply rooted in the Dominican community, with family and romance, has more to offer.

Leon has mentioned the naturalistic 1953 NYC picture Little Fugitive as an inspiration. Another good one might be Shane Meadows' 2008 London 'hood ramble Somers Town, which sings and charms. Maybe Leon will get there next time.

Gimme the Loot debuts at the SXSW festival in Austin March 15, 2012. It is also included in the MoMA-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, in connection with which it was screened for this review. The ND/NF showtimes will be:


Friday, March 23rd 2012 | 6:30 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th 2012 | 2:30 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

ANCA DAMIAN: CRULIC: THE PATH TO BEYOND (2011)--ND/NF


A meaningless death, in animation

Claudio Crulic was a Romanian in his early thirties who was jailed twice in Poland for thefts he apparently did not commit, and the second time he went on a hunger strike that led to his death months later. Despite letters and appeals to the Romanian consul and government and repeated medical examinations, Crulic was ignored by everyone and allowed to deteriorate to a point of no return. It was a scandal that the authorities didn't prevent him from dying in this way, and a minster resigned. The purpose of this 73-minute animated feature is to tell this strange, sad story. The hand-drawn look and the collaged photos plus voice-over first-person narration from beyond the grave by the actor Vlad Ivanov (of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and Pollice, Adjective) contribute to a poetic, Kafkaesque quality. One is charmed (and horrified). and one can identify. A documentary would not have the same effect -- you'd not get the dark humor.

As the voice tells Crulic's tale he seems doomed. For example he says his whole life can be told in a hundred photos. We see the photos, from baby through adolescent raised by female relatives to young adult who quits school early to provide family support, ending with a couple of seaside shots in Italy with his sister. This viewpoint seems reductive. He lists, for example, all the objects that were with him when he died. Before that he lists the objects people bought from outside in Romania. He made a living by purchasing things in Poland and bringing them back to sell. This seems to have something to do with his being considered a thief. The materiality of the account underlines the Kafkaesque absurdity of the life.

After the handling of the body after death and the span of the life have been told, English narration by Jamie Sives, describes the effect of his fast, step by grim step, and the bureaucratic ignoring of his ordeal. The interjection of English as well as the heavy Scottish accent of Siven create a somewhat jarring effect. Animation shows Crulic's last days and death. By the time doctors finally acknowledged the danger his body was in and sought permission to intervene it was too late. A needle punctured his lung, which was already damaged by pneumonia. A long sequence shows his shroud floating away, as if it were his soul. At the end there are some clips from TV about the story covered in the news, the scandal, and the resignation of the government minister.

One might contrast this with the more realistic and physically enacted story of a hunger strike to the death in Steve McQueen's Hunger, in which Michael Fassbender plays the Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands. That was one nation repressing another's independence struggle. This is merely bureaucracy crushing a low income foreign national protesting his false imprisonment. The tragedy of an ordinary man.

Damian deserves credit for treating her subject in a distinctive and artistic way. Hopefully this is a fairly unique incident, but the way a powerless man can be chewed up and spit out by the modern bureaucratic machine is hardly unusual.

Crulic: The Path to Beyond/Crulic - drumul spre dincolo debuted at Locarno and has shown at several other festivals. It was screened for the press for New Directors/New Films (MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, March 21-April 1, 2012) and is scheduled for public viewings:

Friday, March 23rd | 6:30 PM | MoMA
Saturday, March 24th | 2:00 PM | FSLC

[Chris Knipp]

SACHA POLAK: HEMEL (2012)--ND/NF


HANNAH HOEKSTRA IN HEMAL

Dutch girl finding herself, mainly through sex

She is young, she is beautiful (but too thin), she is rich (or her father is), she's annoying, and she's sex-crazed, and did I mention she's annoying? This is Hemel (Hannah Hoekstra), a Dutch girl, and her name means Heaven. She is close to her father Gijs (Hans Dagelet), who's in the art auctioning business, apparently, and maybe Hemel's promiscuity competes with her father's, because he has had a series of affairs all Hemel's life, sometimes with women not much older than she is now. Her mother died shortly after she was born. This is an accomplished film, a beautiful film, and a film that should put its Dutch director Sacha Polak on the international sexy art film map. Hemel seems sex-obsessed and scenes show plenty of frontal nudity and other body-realism, including her peeing standing up, something you may not have seen in a non-porn film up to now. But this isn't a female Shame, though at first it might seem so. Hemel is also looking for a grown up man (another, better father?), and this film unlike McQueen's, at least passingly alludes to a network of complex familial relationships. There is something short of depth here, partly through the limitations of the (annoying, did I say?) protagonist's point of view, partly through the stylish but narratively stunting organization of the film into eight disparate titled segments.

Polak's method, especially initially (she gains greater credibility as time goes on) is too easy and too obvious. She opens with two very white naked bodies lying in plain daylight. This is her first of a series of pickups, the white man (Ward Weemhoff) who shaves Hemel's pubic hair (with the stand-up peeing scene as a bonus). This is not, as in a certain Romanian film, a sequence of effective character development or interesting conversation, though Hemel is annoying, right away. What is developed is the sense that the film is trying hard to seem bold about sex and to show that its protagonist is experimenting in that area. A little obvious variety: she picks up, screws, and dumps an Arab man (Abdullah El Baoudi), who is annoying in his own right (he declares Algerian men, of which he is one, to be the worlds' best lovers), and to whom she behaves in a crudely racist manner, and then kicks him out of bed when he wants to make out after sex. Next comes an S&M guy, who chokes her and knocks her around a bit. And that about does it except for a sexy Flamenco singer in Spain, but she only gets to dance with him. (Contractual obligations, since this is a Netherlands-Spain co-production?)

After the establishment of the sexual obsession, what follows is the "Father and Daughter" segment, which establishes that Hemel and her dad have a solid relationship, if one that is too like a platonic marriage. When Gijs introduces Sophie (Rifka Lodeizen), a Christie's colleague he seems really serious with, Hemel shows jealousy and discomfort. It is at this point if not long before that it becomes clear that, as Variety put's it, "Helena van der Meulen's screenplay is a tad too schematic." More than a tad. Variety is right that the scene when Hemel barges in on a brithday party for her "ex-stepbrother" Teun (Maarten Heijermans), a devout Protestant with a fiancee who's a virgin, they having pleged not to have premarital sex, this adds an interesting, unexpected note and is "well-observed." But Heijermans somehow seems a "tad" too pretty for his character, the whole film leaning too much toward the visual -- helped, naturally, by the beautiful camerawork by Daniel Bouquet.

The next key piece in the not-so-puzzling puzzle is the scene in which Hemel is first in bed with and then walking on the beach with a more grown up, nicer, bearded, married, tight-lipped lover (Mark Rietman) whom she wants to "get inside" and "know about," etc. In other words, she has found a guy who might be of interest outside of bed. Much of the film is about Hemel's close relationship with her father, whose girlfriends she is sometimes close to and sometimes jealous of. Due to the sex obsession and the closeness, for a bit we may be forgiven for expecting an incest scene. Instead, coming in out of a chilly rain, there's "only tea," with an older woman, perhaps an earlier lover of her fathers' -- this relationship is confused -- who seems to have known Hemel when she was very young.

Hoekstra does remarkably for a recent acting school graduate who's never been in a film, just as Polak does well for a director who's never made a feature. This could be straight to video stuff it it were merely sexy and ravishing to look at, but I realize that -- though penetrating analysis of relationships and psychology seem a way off still -- we should cut Polak some slack here. Maybe she and her next protagonist will grow up next time or she will develop more distance between the two. New director, new film: yes; this may be promising. It holds the attention.

Hemel (Netherlands, Spain, 80 min.) debuted at Rotterdam and showed at the Berlinale. It opens in cinemas in the Netherlands March 29, 2012. It was screened for this review as part of the Museum of Modern Art-Film Society of Lincoln Center New York series, New Directors/New Films, where it will show at these times and places:

Friday, March 23rd | 9 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th | 5 PM | MoMA

[Chris Knipp]

PIERRE SCHÖLLER: THE MINISTER (2011)--ND/NF


OLIVIER GOURMET AND SYLVAIN DEBLÉ IN THE MINISTER

Previously reviewed in Paris, Oct. 27, 2011.

The inside/outside of politics and government

The Minister is a fabulously exciting and smart French film about politics, though its politics are so deeply French that aspect of the film may partly be inaccessible to American viewers, despite the otherwise rich human content, the outsider-newcomer role the minister plays and the stresses and shocks he endures. It's obvious for the French to compare it to The Conquest, the rich and well-produced, but conventional, biopic about Sarkozy's rise to power that came out earlier in the same year in France. And it emerges at once that The Minister is the more probing and original film. The Conquest is only about externals. The Minister is by design about both how government works internally, its inner workings, how decisions are really made and carried out -- on the one hand -- and -- on the other hand -- from the protagonist's point of view, how it feels to be new in a high position of government (ministerial level). The latter, in France, I'm feeling, is more visible and sensitive responsibility than in the US, because a government minister is out there in the public eye nowadays than their American counterparts currently are. But besides The Conquest the French also compared The Minister to The Ides of March with Clooney and Gosling, because it came out in Paris in the same week. The Ides of March is a good but not great political thriller whose focus on an election limits its scope to a miniature version of what The Conquest is about. It's superficial. And its stars are in all ways more flashy, and have less depth in these roles than Olivier Gourmet and Michel Blanc. The French critics liked The Ides of March better than the merely workmanlike and unoriginal The Conquest, but they saved their raves for The Minister.

The French title of The Miister is more expressive of the director Pierre Schöller's purpose in making his film. It's L'Exercice de l'État, literally "the exercise of the state," which alludes to carrying out the actual inner workings of national government -- how and by whom decisions get made and carried out. This is why in the film the ministry PPS (principal private secretary) Gilles, played by Michel Blanc, is just as important a character as the Bertrand Saint-Jean, the Transport Minister played by Olivier Gourmet. Both are powerful and selfless actors, Olivier Gourmet of an energy and conviction that are unmatched, Blanc projecting competence, integrity and class. Because politics is conducted by insiders and political aristocrats, it's important that Gilles (Blanc) is a political aristocrat and insider. When, in a totally insiders' decision, Woessner (Didier Bezace), another old-timer and insider, is chosen to figurehead as a PPS the new project to privatize the railway stations, it's Gilles, an old friend of Woessner, who has him over in the evening for a meal of eggas and bacon that he cooks himself and serves with a bottle of the best white burgundy.

But the film isn't just an affairs of state story. It centers on the issue of privitization of stations, but it begins with a terrible bus accident up in the mountains. This shows how tense and demanding the Minister's work is. It also shows how media and image are as important as action. It is obvious though the minister must face the dead children and the grieving parents, it's his public statements and who picks them up and where and how they spin hem that count most on this evening. Before that, in the first image of the film, comes the naked lady who crawls inside the crocodile's mouth, the nightmare of the minister, which shows the way his work pursues him even in his dreams.

But most of all the film is given a unique shape by the theme of the unpreditable in another strain. This comes into play through the "chaumeur inconnu," the "unknown unemployed man," Martin Kuypers (played by an unknown non-actor, Sylvain Deblé). He is the guy hired for a month so the minister's regular driver can go on leave to be with his newborn baby. Perhaps because he needs to connect with somebody -- his phone list has flashed on the screen and he's said he has 1500 contacts but no friend -- Satint-Jean bonds with Kuypers, going to his trailer home and getting drunk with him and his outspoken wife Pauline (Zabou Breitman).

A while later there comes the shocking accident where Kuypers crashes the official car and it turns over multiple times with a horrifying sound, with Saint-Jean's publicity secretary with him, and Kuypers is thrown from the car and dies, and Saint-Jean is with him when his soul leaves his body. The event changes Saint-Jean forever. His survival is a miracle, and strengthens him with the public. Even this is a matter of public relations, because a speech is written about Kuypers, and then Pauline requests a low profile, and the speech must be jettisoned. When Saint-Jean speaks the speech to himself in a whispier at the memorial serivce were the whole main government is present, it underlines the minister's personal, private relationship with this faceless man. It's a brilliant scene underlining the inner and outer aspects of the narrative.

Pierre Schöller isn't a new director but this film is so different from his last one, the 2008 Versailles, that he seems reborn with this long-gestating fim. The Minister debuted at Cannes May 19, 2011, and opened in Paris October 26, 2011 and I reviewed it then (see link above). It was screened for thIs new review as part of the 2012 Museum of Modern Art-Film Society of Lincoln Center series New Directors/New Films series, when it will be shown to the public at the following times and venues:


Friday, March 23rd | 9 PM | MoMA
Sunday, March 25th | 1:30 PM | FSLC

©Chris Knipp 2012

[Chris Knipp]

PABLO GIORGELLI: LAS ACACIAS (2011)--ND/NF


GERMAN DE SILVA AND NAYRA CALLE MAMANI IN LAS ACACIAS

Sweet little uneventful road trip across Argentina

Pable Giorgelli, an editor and documentary filmmaker, has chosen for his first feature the quiet matter of a woman and her five-month-old daughter riding from Paraguay to Buenas Aires with a lonely truck driver and a load of lumber. In this very slow burner, there is hardly any conversation for a long time, and when there is some, it's laconic. But the seemingly gruff driver, who lives alone and hasn't seen his own son for eight years, turns out to have a kind heart that begins to throb a bit for his two passengers. A more conventional, less art-house film would end with wedding bells. This only finishes with a vague promise of meeting to ride together again. Dry though this is, under the surface there's a layer of saccharine. The pair are played with understated but pitch-perfect appealingness by Germán De Silva, as Rubén, the driver, and Hebe Duarte, as Jacinta, the Guarani-speaking mother. The baby girl performs perfectly too. The camera caught the right moments.

Not much external scenery, though, in this road picture -- if there were any to catch -- because the camera spends most of its time inside the cab of the truck. The lensing by Diego Poleri is smooth and unobtrusive. Music is locally occurring only. The smiles are slow to appear but very natural. The virtue of the long time taken for the two adults to warm up a bit and start talking (a bit) is that when they do there is the feel of actual shy people slowly unwinding in real time. But I found myself longing for what I would consider the much more distinctive Patagonian understatedness of the little films of Carlos Sorin. Maybe Giorgelli, who is doubtless well acquainted with Sorin, will open things up more next time; what he gives us on this outing may be smoothly executed and a very mild charmer but it's pretty thin soup. The impression one comes away with is of perfectly managed modulation from tepid to lukewarm.

Not everything feels naturalistic here, either: baby Anahi (Nayra Calle Mamani) goes for an awfully long time before needing to be changed. Practical details (other than Rubén's sit-down meal at a way-station and a couple of showers) are ignored as rigorously as the scenery out the window.

Others have been more enthusiastic. Las Acacias debuted at Cannes in May 2011 and received the Caméra d'Or award for Best First Film. It has subsequently been shown at a dozen other festivals. It has had commercial releases in Spain, Argentina, the UK, Ireland, France and Greece. The French critics were highly receptive (Allociné 4.0). However there are those who feel as I tend to that in this particular example of minimalism there is not enough passion or ambition, almost no there there. Or at least hardly any. But mind you, there are no wrong notes. Giorgelli's feature debut was screened for this review as part of the March 21-April 1, 2012 MoMA-FSLC New Directors/New Films series, where it will be shown to the public at these locations on these dates:


Thursday, March 22nd | 6 PM | FSLC
Saturday, March 24th | 4 PM | MoMA

Las Acacias opened theatrically in the US September 7, 2012 (Quad Cinema, New York). It received generally favorable reviews (Metacritic: 72).

[Chris Knipp]

LEE KWANG-KUK: ROMANCE JOE (2011)--ND/NF


DAVID LEE AND KIM CHO-HUI IN ROMANCE JOE

A plot that mocks plot

Romance Joe/Lo-maen-seu Jo, an intricate 115-minute puzzler written and directed by young Korean filmmaker Lee Kwang-kuk, has an interconnected plotline. It begins with the parents (Kim Su-ung, Park Hye-jin) of a longtime assistant director coming to Seoul to see him but learning from his friend Seo Dam (Kim Dong-hyeon) that he has become depressed by the suicide of the actress actress Wu Ju-hyeon and has disappeared. He recounts the plot of his own screenplay and tries to sell it to them. Meanwhile filmmaker Lee (Jo Han-cheol), maker of the hit film The Good Guy, has been dumped by his producer Gwon (Baek Ik-nam) in the countryside Mt. Godong Motel to force him to finish his next script. Lee is blocked, so when he gets into conversation with the tea-house "hostess" Re-ji (Shin Dong-m) when she brings coffee, he takes up her offer to tell him some good stories if he will hire her for the night.

Re-ji tells about coming upon a guy known as "Romance Joe" (Kim Yeong-pil), a longtime assistant director who became depressed as the result of the suicide of popular actress Wu Ju-hyeon and has come to her little town to commit suicide himself. She stops him. He in turn recalls to her when he was a young boy (David Lee), rescuing a schoolmate, Kim Cho-hui (Lee Chae-eun) who had been about to slit her wrists in the woods after sleeping with a classmate. He later spent time with Kim and fell in love with her.

Meanwhile, to pass the time, as mentioned Seo Dam is telling his friend's parents the story of a script he's working on, It tells about a boy (Ryu Ui-hyeon) who came looking for his long-lost mother Cho-hui at the Arirang Teahouse run by Re-ji. Meanwhile, in Re-ji's story to director Lee, Romance Joe and she meet again when drunk one night and end up in bed together. Romance Joe also ran into a feisty kid who is looking for his mother, having been for some time raised by a relative. In a restaurant the boy meets a small-town hooker, Re-j, who slightly knew his mother. Romance Joe eventually learns that the boy's mother is his first love, Cho-Hee (Lee Chai-eu). I'm telling this badly. The various scenes and stories interconnect, but perhaps not quite. They intentionally leave one somewhat puzzled. (I'm indebted to former, recently fired, Variety film critic Derek Elley, whose knowledgable summary in Film Business Asia clarified plot details for me.)

The movie director decides to turn Romance Joe's story into a movie, but the story doesn't turn out the way he expected.-- a festival blurb.

It may come as no great surprise to hear that Lee Kwang-kuk worked as first assistant director with Hong Sang-soo, on such films as Tale of Cinema, Woman on the Beach, Like You Know It Al, and Hahaha, from 2005 to 2010. The focus on heavy drinking and love affairs and on film directors with ego, writing, and women problems is familiar from Hong. So is the focus on talking indoor scenes that are mostly one-on-one, and the straightforward shooting (in this case by Jee Yune-jeong). And, more importantly here, so is the use of what Gavin Smith, of Film Comment, in a Rotterdam comment on this film, calls "Hong’s blindsiding structural gambits." Smith says Lee "takes them at least one step beyond into a mise en abyme of nested stories and characters. . . The beauty of this playful kudzu-like proliferation of story strands," Smithh concludes, "is that while there are obvious links and connections to be made, it leaves the viewer pleasurably dangling in a no-man’s-land of irresolution in which the remembered and the made-up can’t quite be reconciled into a coherent whole. It’s a shaggy-rabbit-hole story, so to speak."

Certainly Lee carries things narratively further than Hong. In describing his process in making Romance Joe, he asks (in the press notes) why we need stories, why we're so dependent on them. In this film he seems to seek to abolish stories by telling stories. While Hong Sang-soo's narrative lines sometimes seem rambling and unexpected, Lee's here are, in the words of Jeon Chan-il, the programmer at the Pusan International Film Festival, in his commentary on Romance Joe, "monumentally complex" and "even more disjointed, even more abstract, than his teacher's" (Hong's). Jeon finds "severe irony" in Lee's questioning of the need for story while doing nothing but playing with storytelling. Jeon also notes the similarity to Hong in the meta-film approach of a film about a filmmaker seeking to write or complete a screenplay. But he concludes that this film "doesn’t really come across like ‘an imitation of Hong Sang-soo’." Indeed this is fair to say. Lee is not a mere copycat. Hong has given Lee a ready-made vocabulary and grammar, but the sentences Lee forms using them are his.

The scenes in Romance Joe are lively and engaging, for example the ones with the waitress and the filmmaker, who seem to achieve instant intimacy, and the feisty boy looking for his mother. Despite the liveliness of individual scenes, it may be harder than with Hong to watch the film with an overarching comprehension, hard to understand the relation between them, and I'm not the only one who thinks so, if Pusan programmer Jeon Chan-il finds the plotting "monumentally complex" and "even more disjointed, even more abstract" than that of Hong Sang-soo. In fact it's hard not to think that Lee is trying to baffle the viewer, and probably make fun of the viewer's desire for a coherent plot line. But he doesn't seem to have quite achieved that. One Rotterdam commenter felt the film appeals to the mind too much and not to the heart. Lee's effect is arguably even more intellectual than Hong's. Hong's greater narrative consistency lets one develop more feelings toward main characters, ironically viewed though they may be.

But Derek Elley, an astute critic, thinks just the opposite. He thinks that though "the game element is still present" as in Hong, Romance Joe "resonates on an emotional level much more than many of Hong's lighter films, thanks to a tip-top cast that manages to draw characters who are not simply marionettes in an elaborate directorial game." Elley acknowledges that Romance Joe "often requires major concentration to keep all three interlocking stories in one's head as the film freely cross-cuts between them." But he insists (and has proven, pretty much) that "it does all (kind of) finally make sense, and Lee's direction matches the precision of his writing." Elley wants to emphasize his interpretation that Lee's film is rigorously logical and interconnected and so he calls the last sequence, which casts doubt on the reality of what's gone before, "throwaway" and "unnecessary in the circumstances."

That is a bit arbitrary on Elley's part. It seems to me the "meta" element is primary to Lee, and though his scenes are clear, lively, and emotional, what he's doing with them is very much meta-fiction, narrative about narrative -- something that happened in literature in the Sixties, and has come to cinema later in this kind of sophisticated and dense form.

Is Lee's film radical, or just a screenplay in need of further editing? In any case, Lee seems to know very well how to work with actors (including the boy) and the individual scenes are entertaining to watch. They would just be more entertaining if they developed a more coherent rhythm or followed a more meaningfully interconnected structure -- a structure that could be better perceived as one watches. Hong Sang-soo's last couple of films have seemed increasingly self-indulgent, as if he is reaching a self-referential dead end. Lee Kwang-kuk may have taken a flying leap beyond that dead end, if he can sustain the local audience's interest, as the audience prize at Pusan suggests he did this time.

Romance Joe debuted at Pusan in early October 2011 and was shown in the Tiger series at Rotterdam in January 2012. It is also part of the joint MoMA and Film Society of Lincoln Center series, New Directors/New Films, where it was screened for this review. The public ND/NF screenings of the film are scheduled at these two places and times:

Saturday, March 24th | 6:15 PM | MoMA
Monday, March 26th | 8:30 PM | FSLC