Slow and Steady Wins the Race: It Follows

[Note: This post contains major spoilers. Updated 11/19/15.]

Pivoting off Noah Berlatsky's 2011 Atlantic essay “What The Thing Loses by Adding Women,” a brief discussion on this writer's social media feed recently tackled the question of whether female sexuality—or, more specifically, male characters' perceptions of and relationships to that sexuality—is an essential element of horror cinema. As Berlatsky observes, even in films where female characters are completely absent, such as John Carpenter's 1982 horror masterpiece, that conspicuous lack establishes a potent subtext. Aside from a handful of features where the male presence is largely asexual—The Devil's Backbone and The Blair Witch Project come to mind as noteworthy examples—male anxiety regarding female sexuality (and maternity) seems to be lurking beneath the surface of many, many horror films.

This is particularly the case in the slasher subgenre, where a murderous, usually male maniac stalks and slays a succession of usually female victims. As Carol J. Clover famously articulated in her seminal 1992 study Men, Women, and Chainsaws, female sexual purity and desire play prominent thematic and even narrative roles in such features. In Wes Craven's meta-slasher Scream, horror aficionado Randy (Jamie Kennedy) points out that the unwritten rules of the subgenre dictate that a teenage character (especially a girl) who has sex will usually be gruesomely murdered shortly thereafter. However, even when the killer's motivation hinges on sexual transgression, as in the Friday the 13th series, the hapless adolescent victims (the “Meat”) are usually unaware of that fact.

Not so in writer-director David Robert Mitchell's new indie horror flick It Follows, in which teen heroine Jay (Maika Monroe) has an inaugural assignation with her new, older flame Hugh (Jake Weary) in the backseat of his car, only to be subsequently chloroformed, tied up, and debriefed. Hugh regretfully explains that he has “given” her something by having sex with her, just as it was given to him. That something is the singular attention of a malevolent shape-shifting entity, which will now follow Jay wherever she goes until It catches her. What exactly will happen to Jay should she fall into Its clutches is initially ambiguous, but it's clearly Not Good. Hugh barely has enough time to give Jay some rudimentary advice for surviving Its pursuit (“Never be in a room with only one exit.”) before It arrives, assuming the form of a nude middle-aged women who walks slowly but deliberately towards them. Hugh then hustles Jay away and unceremoniously dumps her in front her house, underwear-clad and sobbing, in a manner that says, “Good luck. It's your problem now.”

In this way, It Follows takes that which is subtext in most horror features and integrates it directly into the story: sex equals death. What's impressive about Mitchell's film is how this approach results not in a crude, exploitative treatment of adolescent sexuality, but an astonishingly cerebral work of cinema, blending aspects of social realism, teen melodrama, occult horror, and the slasher flick into an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. To an extent, this is because the film leaves a significant amount of white space where another horror film might have doodled in a convoluted backstory and mythology. It Follows reveals virtually nothing about the origin or nature of its monster. The film simply establishes the Rules and then observes as Jay and her small circle of allies puzzle out how (and if) she can escape Its unnatural and seemingly implacable pursuit.

Even characterization takes a backseat to the film's primary concerns. The characters are not cartoonish, but neither are they particularly well-developed. Blonde, doe-eyed Jay harbors a faintly myopic view of the world, but like most Final Girls she's made of tough stuff. Her no-nonsense little sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) is affectionate, but also aware that she is overshadowed by Jay's age and beauty. Gawky Paul (Keir Gilchrist) is a childhood friend of Jay's, and obviously quite desperately in love with her. Bespectacled Yara's (Olivia Luccardi) main attribute is that she is perpetually snacking while nose-deep in her distinctive pink clamshell e-reader. (Yara functions as a kind boorish yet erudite Greek chorus, offering choice quotes from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot that comment on the film's events.) Later this quartet is joined by Greg (Daniel Zovatto), the older, easy-going guy across the street, who also happens to have a romantic history with Jay. That is as much as the viewer learns about the principals, but more details would be superfluous. By not sweating elaborate character- or world-building, It Follows can invest all its energy in the two essential tasks of all great horror films: scaring the viewer and making them think. 

On both counts, It Follows is a resounding success, being perhaps the first truly frightening and thoughtful American horror feature since 2011's Take Shelter. The galvanic character of the film's terrors stems in part from adherence to a kind of lo-fi magical realism. Whether by choice or necessity (the film's budget was a relatively paltry $2 million) or some combination of both, It Follows is a film that squeezes every ounce of unnerving dread out of seemingly mundane people, objects, and settings. The entity Itself is the personification of this horror-on-a-shoestring philosophy. Like the titular germ-like organism in the aforementioned The Thing, the monster in It Follows has no native form. It apparently cannot speak, but its guises are superficially human. At times these are terrifyingly familiar to Jay (Yara with a bloodied face) and at times they are completely bizarre (a partly unclothed young woman in fake vampire fangs and makeup, urinating obviously down one knee-socked leg). Although It Follows has no elaborate creature effects, it manages to make ordinary figures like an elderly woman in a hospital shift seem physically menacing.

While some jump-scares make an obligatory appearance, It Follows is mainly a horror film of long, agonizing stretches in which the characters (and viewer) are simply waiting for something to happen. It is established early on that the monster moves at a slow, steady walking pace. A victim might buy some time by, say, getting into a car and driving like hell for hours and hours, but It will always catch up. This lends much of the film a sense of weary, sickening anticipation, and reveals the peculiar genius of Mitchell's approach. The viewer will often find themselves nervously scanning the out-of-focus background of each shot, straining to catch the first glimpse of the monster as It mutely plods into view. The natural expectation created by cinematic negative space becomes a canvas which the filmgoer covers with their own anxiety.  The viewer thus experiences, in some small way, the frazzled, heightened state of animal fear in which Jay spends most of the movie's events. In one superlative shot, the film utilizes a glacial 360-plus degree pan from within a windowed hallway to suggest the omni-directional vulnerability of the preoccupied characters. (This is only enhanced by the slightly smeary quality to the film's digital photography, which prevents the viewer from getting a clear glimpse of distant figures while the camera is in motion.)

Credit where credit is due: Mitchell's disciplined control of the film's protracted pacing and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis's exceptional camera work would not be nearly as effective without Michael Perry's anachronistic production design and the film's distinctive, retro-synth score by Disasterpiece (the working moniker of musician Rich Vreeland). Although Tangerine Dream's iconic Thief score is a prominent point of reference for the latter, Disasterpiece's work also evokes a host of late 1970s / early 80s horror films, including Apocalypse Now, The Shining, Scanners, The Fog, and the first A Nightmare on Elm Street. (Panos Cosmatos' Cronenberg-esque 2010 experimental mind-fuck Beyond the Black Rainbow leaps to mind as well.) It Follows' score lends a melancholy aura to even relatively mellow scenes of teenage suburban idleness, but it's the prominent use of relentless metallic droning when the creature appears that injects the film with such an ominous tone. This wall of sound creates an impression of psychic assault, like a satanic migraine lancing straight into the cerebral cortex. The creature that stalks Jay might be a flesh-and-blood predator that can maim and even kill, but it is also an entity born of fear, apparently capable of reading its quarry's mind and adjusting its shape accordingly.

The score's vintage flavor also enhances Perry's stellar design, which places the film in an ambiguous period when electric typewriters, cathode ray tube televisions, and e-ink pocket tablets coexist. The odd contemporary details aside, however, the whole film has a distinctly throwback feel, what with its boxy American cars, nonspecific latish twentieth-century fashions, and a teenage existence where diversions seem limited to games of Parcheesi, midnight creature feature movies, and the occasional clumsy lay. This lends the film a weird, unsettling aura pitched somewhere between the cinematic Americas of Steven Spielberg and David Lynch.

The film's Detroit locations, meanwhile, suggest an environment that is crumbling and forgotten, perhaps even a post-apocalyptic setting. (One could almost believe the decay is staged, if Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 2011 documentary Detropia hadn't revealed far worse urban rot in the Motor City.) It is a landscape of decrepit row houses overgrown with weeds, ugly public buildings long overdue for upkeep, and half-demolished concrete edifices that wouldn't look out of place in some abandoned corner of post-Soviet Ukraine. Even the suburbs of this environment seem to sag: the houses are dim, smoke-stained spaces full of shabby furniture and cheap, outdated fixtures. This place's economy hasn't just declined; it's packed up and lit out for the Territory. Like the 1970s-80s Yorkshire saga Red Riding, everything about the look and feel of It Follows' setting suggests an earthly purgatory. It brings to mind a line from Zbigniew Herbert's doom-laden “Report From a Besieged City,” a poem also quoted in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis:

here everybody is losing the sense of time
we were left with the place an attachment to the place
still we keep ruins of temples phantoms of gardens of houses
if we were to lose the ruins we would be left with nothing

Late in the film, the screenplay allows details from the real world to seep into the story, when it is observed that the adolescent characters dwell on the suburban (read: white) side of 8 Mile Road, Detroit's notorious demographic dividing line. Parent-imposed restrictions on their younger wanderings once prevented the kids from venturing across this racial and economic boundary to the nearby Michigan State Fair—which, in one of those unspoken ironies, is now defunct and has been replaced by an unrelated fair in a more distant suburb.

The aforementioned parents rarely appear in It Follows, which shares many themes with the aforementioned A Nightmare on Elm Street: shameful family secrets, generational disconnection, and the irrelevancy and impotence of adults with respect to the dangers their children face. Jay and Kelly's widowed mother (Debbie Williams) is glimpsed only at the film's periphery, her face never entirely visible even when she is roused from her stupor of alcohol and grief. A similar off-handed depiction of parental figures can be observed is Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, a feature that likewise focuses its attention on the mindsets of its adolescent characters. Adhering to the teen viewpoint is entirely fitting, given that It Follows is concerned with the loss of sexual innocence as a psychological experience rather than as just another peril that sets parental hangs wringing. 

Indeed, the prevalence of false parents among the monster's faces—Hugh's mom, Greg's mom, and Jay and Kelly's dad all make an appearance in Its rotating wardrobe of masks—hints that the parents are part of the problem. Given that It often appears naked or in underclothes, there is an element of incestuous ickiness to the creature's menace, perhaps plucked from the Freudian nightmares and longings of its victims, or perhaps based on past incidents of abuse. This incestuous aspect to Its threat is usually only vaguely implied, as when It appears as Jay's deceased father in a grimy undershirt and boxers, and then begins viciously throwing objects at her. Rarely, it becomes quite explicit, as when It assumes the form of Greg's mother—her night robe open to expose her breasts—in order to gain access to his room and savagely assault him. This jarring scene is when the creature's previously indefinite intentions become grotesquely clear: It literally rapes its victims to death.

This mingling of sex and death contains a potent erotic charge, of course, owing in part to the perverse sexuality at play when women are threatened with or subjected to violence on film. The sequence that opens the film—one orthogonal to Jay's story—depicts a teenage girl, Annie (Bailey Spry), fleeing from an unseen assailant down her street in broad daylight, clad only in underwear and high heels. This brings to mind not only the terrorized Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) stumbling naked and sobbing out of the dark in Blue Velvet, but also local news director Nina's (Rene Russo) vivid description of her show's spirit in the recent Nightcrawler: “a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” Within ten on-screen minutes of Annie's savage murder, Jay not only has sex, but is stripped down to her (virginal pink!) bra and panties, drugged, and bound. This places her in a position of absolute helplessness at the hands of her boyfriend Hugh. (He's not the "real" threat, of course, but the image is still a disturbing one.) One doesn't need a degree in feminist film theory to recognize the linkage between female peril and male arousal. Indeed, the confusion of sex with violence in the male erotic imagination is hardly a new phenomenon. In Yara's reading material of choice, The Idiot, Myshkin's romantic rival and frenemy Rogozhin quite openly discusses both his sexual longing for and his murderous rage towards the “sullied” woman Nastassya, admitting that the two urges are inextricably linked in his obsessed mind.

Such readings also underline one of the film's other primary themes, that of mortality and its link to sexual awakening. Not for nothing is orgasm described as la petit mort: the fleeting sensation of calm transcendence that follows a sexual climax, which provides a kind of existential clarity. Such insight is not available to children, who are ignorant of both sex and their own mortality. In an early scene, Hugh expresses a wish for a return to the blissful ignorance of childhood, when he was not cognizant of either sex or death. Orgasm, and thus sex generally, opens the mind to a secondary loss of innocence, that of mortal awareness. One could identify the entity that follows in the wake of sexual experience as the Grim Reaper, lurking in the background for the rest of a person's life, even in their happiest moments. The inescapable certainty of this specter of death then colors everything, spurring subsequent sex acts as a kind of proverbial whistling past the graveyard.

Needless to say, the monster in It Follows elicits numerous other metaphorical interpretations, from sexually transmitted disease to post-traumatic stress disorder induced by childhood abuse. The frequent references to “passing” or “giving” the creature's curse to a sexual partner favor the former, but It Follows is ultimately a work that operates more clearly as a nightmare scenario than as neat allegory. As with slasher films, it's tempting to indict the film's worldview as anti-sex or at least morally conservative. Granted, the monster's predations have led to a recurring pattern of desperate one-night stands, followed either by gruesome death or another link in a daisy chain of disingenuous sex. If the film has an ethos, however, it is one that favors emotional intimacy and sex positivity. The film's ambiguous ending sees Jay and a freshly deflowered Paul walking hand-in-hand down a suburban street, the couple perhaps being followed by It or perhaps not. Having established that the curse's donor retains their ability to see the normally invisible entity, the recipient has a natural ally, but only if they stick together and watch each other's backs. It therefore becomes apparent that it is not fucking per se that gives the monster strength, but the endless cycle of fucking followed by callous abandonment. Inasmuch as the characters have any hope of defeating It someday, that hope arguably lies in sleeping with as many of their trusted friends as possible.

2015 Classic French Film Festival: Beauty and the Beast

[This introduction to Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast was presented on March 13, 2015 at the Webster University Moore Auditorium as a part of the 2015 Classic French Film Festival.]

This is the fourth consecutive year I’ve served as a presenter at the Classic French Film Festival, and for me it is an especially exciting return to the podium. In part this is because Cinema St. Louis has entrusted me with the honor of introducing the festival's opening night feature. And in part it is attributable to the fact that tonight’s film is among the most iconic, influential works of both French-language and fantasy cinema. However, the lion’s share of my enthusiasm stems from the sheer distinction of tonight's feature, Jean Cocteau's 1946 film Beauty and the Beast. It is, in a word, a spellbinding creation.

Although the film was adapted from Marie Leprince de Beaumont's beloved eighteenth-century fairy tale, Cocteau faced an uphill battle in bringing his cinematic version of Beauty and the Beast to life. Filmed in the lean, post-Occupation years of late World War II, the production was troubled by shortages and technical setbacks. Moreover, the landscape of French cinema at the time was dominated by poetic realism, setting Cocteau's film in opposition to the prevailing tastes of filmgoers and critics. If his press notes for the film's American release are any indication, the director was exasperated by the French public's inability to accept Beauty and the Beast on its own terms. As he indicates in the film's preamble, Cocteau's wish was that viewers approach this fairy tale with the absolute receptiveness of a child.

This is not to say that Beauty and the Beast is a puerile or simple-minded work. Indeed, it is a far cry from the sweet story of love triumphant that one might expect. Although twentieth century cinema had a penchant for sanitizing and infantilizing fairy tales in the process of translating them to the screen, Cocteau's approach to the source material is psychologically knotty, erotically charged, and strangely contradictory. 

The broad strokes of this Beauty and the Beast are familiar, such that even today's elementary school set would likely find it comfortable territory. The film is replete with the tropes of medieval literature and folklore, from fey curses to a magic mirror to a pair of vain, wicked sisters just begging for their comeuppance. De Beaumont's original tale is in part a gender inversion of the medieval motif of the 'loathly lady,” a hideous crone who is restored to loveliness by the affections of a noble-hearted suitor. Cocteau's adaptation also features allusions to classical mythology, befitting the director's persistent fascination with such legends in his films, plays, poetry, and designs.

Despite this well-worn lineage, Beauty and Beast continually upends expectations regarding the contours of a neat and tidy fantasy fable. Plot elements are introduced and then quickly forgotten or discarded. The boundaries between the mundane and magical, normally sharply delineated in fairy tales, are uncannily smudged in Cocteau’s telling. The villains wear their hearts on their sleeves, while virtuous Belle remains a conflicted and enigmatic figure to the end. Far from being cowed by the Beast, this Beauty seems to straightaway discern the romantic and sexual power she holds over him. When the Beast is at long last transformed into a beaming prince, Belle's reaction is one of vague disappointment. This was notoriously mirrored by actress Greta Garbo, who allegedly stood up at the conclusion of a screening and demanded, “Give me back my Beast!”

Certainly, the film's lead performances are central to its otherworldly charms. It’s difficult to imagine the feature succeeding so splendidly without the coquettish, luminous presence of Josette Day as Belle, or without Cocteau’s longtime partner and muse Jean Marais as the Beast. Hissing, snarling, and shrieking like a raspy mountain cat from beneath the layers of fur that conceal his chiseled countenance, Marais nonetheless conveys the sense of a profoundly shamed and troubled soul. One can easily understand why the actor regarded it as one of the most challenging and successful roles of his career.

Even absent its leading man and lady, however, the film would still stand as a sumptuous and amazingly tactile realization of the fantastic, a novel stripe of cinematic magic. If tonight is your first encounter with this magnificent work, it is the marvels of the Beast’s enchanted castle that will doubtlessly linger: disembodied arms holding aloft candelabras that ignite on their own accord; statues that exhale smoke and study interlopers with bright, moving eyes; a locked pavilion filled with riches; a living bed and talking door; a glove and necklace ensorcelled with faerie glamour. Through the power of the Beast's magic, tears become jewels and a loyal steed always knows its rider's wishes. To experience these wonders requires only that, as Cocteau entreaties, we set aside our adult cynicism for a short time and say the magic words, “Once Upon a Time…”

SLIFF 2014: Life of Riley

Cinephiles often characterize prolific French filmmaker Alain Resnais’ lengthy “late period”—spanning roughly three and a half decades until his death this past March—as an era of formal experimentation. There is merit in this description: Resnais drifted away from the anxious severity of features such as Hiroshima mon amour and Muriel in favor of a disarming playfulness. Beginning in the 1980s, he started toying with the relationships between cinema and other mediums, from operetta to comic strips. Most conspicuously, Resnais adapted several theatrical plays into features, often using them as an opportunity to try out some newfound cinematic technique or stylistic flourish.

Sometimes, however, experiments fizzle. Such is the case with Resnais’ final film, Life of Riley (French: Aimer, boire et chanter), adapted from British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s play of the same name. Resnais previously directed film versions of Ayckbourn’s Intimate Exchanges and Private Fears in Public Places. In the latter (retitled as Cœurs, or “Hearts”), Resnais unaccountably transforms the writer’s desolate tale of disaffection into a sudsy yet poignant comedy. While disappointingly airy and oddly over-praised by critics, Cœurs at least feels like a good faith attempt to translate a work from stage to cinema. The same can’t be said of Life of Riley, which in many ways plays like Cœurs’ more ungainly, half-assed cousin.

Set in present-day Yorkshire, Riley features a cast of three men and three women, paired off into three male-female couples. Kathryn (Resnais regular Sabine Azéma) and Colin (Hippolyte Girardot) are modestly bourgeois—he's a doctor, she's a dental receptionist—with a row house in Leeds and the free time to perform as amateur actors in a local troupe. Fellow dramatic society members Jack (Michel Vuillermoz) and Tamara (Caroline Sihol) are living lavishly on the latter's self-made fortune, which also supports Tilly, Jack’s teen daughter by a previous marriage. Meanwhile, schoolteacher Monica (Sandrine Kiberlain) has recently fled to the country to live with her older lover Simeon (André Dussollier), a taciturn widower and farmer.

The link between these characters is the eponymous George Riley, who is Monica's ex-husband and a mutual friend of the four wannabe dramatists. The gimmick is that Riley never actually appears onscreen. He is not some cryptic, hovering Godot-like figure, however. He stands astride the film's events, the unseen mover and shaker behind the plot. Inevitably, his name intrudes into every conversation, as the characters are all infatuated with him after a fashion. The screenplay's sly joke is that each person describes a somewhat different impression of the man, who seems to be in the habit of peddling self-serving and contradictory half-truths. As a result, Riley scans as a man-shaped dotted outline rather than an actual character—or, alternatively, as a mirror that reflects each person's weaknesses. The only truism that emerges is that Riley is something of a disingenuous son-of-a-bitch.

The story begins with a bitter revelation: Colin has learned through a colleague that Riley has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and that he has only months to live (if that). Gathered together to rehearse a new play at Jack and Tamara's luxurious estate, the four friends are shell-shocked by the news of Riley’s illness. Bizarrely, they resolve be to cast their friend in the play, ostensibly to distract him from his grim prognosis with art and camaraderie. Meanwhile, a conflicted Monica attempts to disentangle herself from Simeon so that she can care for Riley during his remaining days, despite the fact that a part of her still loathes her ex-husband. Detailing the plot any further would be superfluous. Everything that follows in Life of Riley is essentially a flurry of posturing, manipulation, and bad judgment emanating from the film's set-up.

On paper, Riley makes for a wry little tale about self-delusion and faux-virtuous narcissism, but Resnais makes some unfortunate choices in the process of bringing it to life. He presents the film in the manner of a shoestring theatrical production, complete with the painted canvas backdrops and chintzy props one might encounter in a community theater filled with preening fifty-somethings. (Hey, just like the play within the film!) It’s an amusing but one-note gag, and while it doesn’t particularly enrich the material, Resnais’ commitment to it hobbles the film in some respects. He and cinematographer Dominique Bouilleret shoot most of Riley in sleepy medium shots. When an extended monologue occurs, the film cuts to a jarring close-up in which the speaker is suspended in a green-screened cartoon limbo. Each scene change is signified by a dissolve to a slapdash illustration of the next setting, in a shot that often lingers awkwardly for far too long. The performances match the film’s style, with the majority of the dialog delivered in a hurried, emphatic manner that would be more fitting for live theater. (Vuillermoz in particular tends to play to the nosebleed seats, to the point where Jack almost seems like a cartoon character.)

Ultimately, Resnais’ efforts to recreate the absurdity of a low-rent theatrical production just seem limp and half-hearted. The “play-as-cinema” conceit isn’t an inherently dubious conceit, of course. The problem is that a lot of blandness lies between, say, the contemptuous Brechtian harshness of Lars von Trier’s Dogville / Manderlay dyad and the ornate unreality of Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina. In contrast, Riley’s conspicuous fakery is just underwhelming, and never amounts to much thematically. A generous viewer could argue that Resnais is highlighting the silly play-acting and flagrant phoniness that are the stuff of human relationships, but that seems a woefully banal subject for such formal effort. Ultimately, the film’s primary effect is to compel the viewer to seek out a polished live production of Life of Riley to witness it in its original form.

SLIFF 2014: New World

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

The underworld war of succession is one of the stock stories of East Asian gangster cinema. Hong Kong director Johnnie To's lyrical and marvelously vicious Election films are the contemporary exemplars of the subgenre, but that certainly hasn't dissuaded other filmmakers from trying their hand at such stories. For New World (Korean: Sin-se-gae), screenwriter-turned-director Hoon-jung Park blends a tale of mob warfare with an undercover cop psychological drama, and the result is an engrossing, tightly plotted thriller.

There's deep cover and then there's deep cover. Officer Ja-sung (Jung-Jae Lee) is in the latter category, having spent nearly a decade infiltrating and then working his way up through the ranks of Goldmoon, the most powerful crime syndicate in Korea. He's managed to position himself as the lieutenant to the organization's heir apparent, Jung Chung (Jung-min Hwang), a swaggering mongoose of a man with all the tastes and self-control of a teenage boy. However, when the group's chairman suddenly dies, the grasping, eerily composed Joong-gu Lee (Sung-woong Park) begins to make a play for the Goldmoon crown, sparking a bloody struggle during the lead-up to the syndicate's election.

As it happens, Ja-sung is on the cusp of leaving the undercover life, but his superior—the rumpled, ruthless Chief Kang (Korean cinema icon Min-sik Choi)—is not about to let his inside man walk away at such a crucial moment. In contrast to many crime thrillers, the police in New World have no grand scheme to take down the syndicate Once and For All. Kang is a realist, and knows that the syndicate can never truly be undone, as a new leader will always rise to fill a power vacuum.  Kang does believe, however, that Ja-sung can nudge the outcome of the election, pushing Jung Chung and Joong-gu Lee into a mutually destructive conflict while handing the throne by default to the group's weak, older vice-chairman. Only three people know of Ja-sung's true loyalties: the police commissioner (Ju Jin-Mo), Chief Kang, and handler Shin Woo (Ji-Hyo Song), whom Ja-sung visits under the pretext of receiving private Go lessons. Such secrecy is for the policeman's safety, but it could also put him in a nasty position if his police confidants were unable to vouch for him.

In this and other respects, New World's plot recalls the acme of the modern “mole” film, the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (and its American remake, The Departed). What Park's feature does slightly better than either of those films, however, is foreground the characters' psychological anguish, and in particular the undercover protagonist's terror, rage, and moral confusion. Lee proves to be a fine choice for the lead, as the physicality of his acting matches the film's approach. His wiriness and chiseled cheekbones lend him a feline demeanor befitting a mobster clad in Ermenegildo Zegna, but his perpetual frown also gives him a dourness that complements Jung Chung's libertine ways.  Lee is skilled at conveying the anxious weariness of a man who has labored too long at the same high-stress task.  When things begin to go south and his cover is jeopardized, his skin seem to go waxen and onion-thin, and his expressive, darting eyes become the rats that squeal on him.

This isn't to say that New World lacks for more visceral pleasures, such as wince-inducing violence, unexpected narrative swerves, or those moments of pure cinema that have become a standard feature of the East Asian gangster picture. In one jaw-dropping scene, an enormous, hand-to-hand battle royale unfolds in an underground parking garage, where hundreds of goons scuffle in a sea of suits, sunglasses, and flashing knives. Said brawl culminates in a gruesome, sloppy close-quarters elevator showdown that is the antithesis of Captain America: The Winter Soldier's precisely choreographed take on the same.

Overall, however, New World is at its most intriguing and memorable when the action, such as it is, consists of Ja-sung's increasingly desperate attempts to maneuver his way unscathed through a lattice of falsehoods (most of it of his own construction). Indeed, it is a remarkably talky gangster film, full of brooding conversations between allies and harrowing cat-and-mouse games between enemies (Does he know? Does he know I know he knows?). This is hardly a surprising feature, given Park's history as a screenwriter. That pedigree is also apparent in the way that the characters are gradually revealed to be more nuanced than an off-the-cuff assessment might suggest. It's particularly prominent in the case of Jung Chung, whose goofy antics conceal a vicious, amoral cunning, which in turns hides a startling sentimentalism.

New World also has some structural tricks up its sleeve. While the film's events are presented mostly chronologically, Park and editor Se-kyung Moon often toy with the viewer's assumptions about off-screen occurrences. (Rule of Thumb: Don't make inferences about anything that isn't actually shown.) This creates a recurring sensation of sour-gut fearfulness, where characters—and the viewer—become wary of trusting their own instincts.  Ultimately, New World proves to be a nervy, consuming work of character-centered drama, more than earning its 134-minute running time, a rare enough feat in any genre.

SLIFF 2014: The Tribe

It's tempting call the concept behind writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky's The Tribe (Ukrainian: Plemya) a gimmick, but to do so would undersell the feature’s merits as a bold formal and dramatic achievement. The film tells the story of Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), the new kid at a Ukrainian boarding school for deaf children and teenagers. Nearly all of the film's characters use Ukrainian Sign Language to communicate, and the few that do not are conveniently muted by barriers or ambient noise. What's more, the film has no subtitles for the benefit of those not conversant in USL, requiring most viewers to puzzle out the non-verbal dialog through close observation of facial expressions, body language, and the context of each scene within the broader narrative. To experience The Tribe is, in essence, to be subjected to 130 minutes of language immersion.

Notwithstanding its characters and setting, The Tribe is emphatically not striving to be an authentic or revealing portrait of Deaf culture. Sergey's tale is an extraordinary one, and (one hopes) not representative of other adolescents' experiences, deaf or hearing, Ukrainian or otherwise.  The film follows Sergey's initiation into an inner circle of older teen boys who stride through the school's halls unfettered by its rules. At night, this clique runs a multifaceted and ruthless criminal operation with the aid of a few staff and faculty. Their underworld enterprises include robbery, drug dealing, and, most significantly for the film's events, the prostitution of a pair of female students. The Tribe thus reveals itself as a rather ugly teen crime picture, as opposed to a mere boarding school soap opera. In fact, the deafness of the characters proves almost incidental to the film's plot. There are only two moments where a character's inability to hear has serious implications, and one of those moments occurs in the film’s final scene.

Ultimately, Slaboshpitsky's choice to present Sergey’s story in sign language has two consequences. First, it illustrates that deaf people are just as capable of greed, lust, violence, and outright foolishness as hearing individuals. It's a banal observation, perhaps, but one that is rarely encountered in a mainstream cinematic landscape that tends to either disregard minority characters or treat them as unwilling emissaries for their entire group. The Tribe's characters are simply people who happen to be deaf, and like all people they can be cruel creatures under the right circumstances.

More significantly, the absence of both spoken dialog and subtitles creates a kind of self-imposed formal challenge for the filmmakers. The characters are blunt, broad individuals presented mostly without backstory, and the film eschews flashbacks, cross-cutting, and convoluted plotting. The focus is on conveying the present moment with as little ambiguity as possible. Slaboshpitsky's style aligns him fairly decisively with the “slow cinema” of contemporary eastern Europe: liberal use ultra-long shots; extended stretches of silence; an absence of non-diegetic music; and a mise-en-scène that can best be described as chilly yet awkwardly intimate. Reconciling this sort of removed, realist aesthetic with the need for narrative clarity is a tricky task, and it's a credit to Slaboshpitsky's skills as both a screenwriter and director that he pulls it off with such supple ease.

By foisting this challenge upon himself, Slaboshpitsky is similarly challenging the viewer to attend closely to each aspect of the film. (Not that one shouldn’t be attending closely to every film, which is one of The Tribe’s many worthy takeaways.) Slaboshpitsky’s feature is, in effect, a lesson in how to watch movies. The importance of composition and editing in cinematic storytelling come into sharp relief as the viewer attempts to riddle out exactly what is occurring within each scene, and how those scenes relate to one another. The film’s sound design is also crucial, for while The Tribe has no spoken dialog, it is far from silent.  It is a film of rumbles, gasps, thuds, giggles, and clatters, a film where the emphatic slap of a signing person’s hands can be as potent as any screeching tire or bellowing monster.

What’s more, the film’s conceit and style provide fascinating opportunities for the performers. By necessity, The Tribe is composed almost entirely of medium and long shots, as close-ups would conceal the actors’ signing and body language. Yet The Tribe is still a film, and a highly naturalistic one at that, where the “big” performance style of the live theater would be a poor fit. The actors must therefore balance the clear expression of meaning with the realist constraints of the production, and they generally do so to fantastic effect. (The one glaring exception is a schoolyard fight where the choreography, such as it is, comes off as laughably phony.) In what will inevitably be one of the film’s most notorious sequences, a sexual transaction between two students unfolds with aloof explicitness, captured in a long single take from a clinical distance. Watching the actress in this scene convey her character’s gradual slippage from bored annoyance to anguished need as she receives the boy’s urgent thrusts, all without saying a word, is a deeply uncomfortable and yet extraordinary experience.

The brilliance of The Tribe is that the extra effort it demands of the audience does not turn the experience of watching the film into an ordeal, like some plate of vegetables to be choked down for one’s own good. It is, in fact, a quite sordid and absorbing tale, full of criminal misbehavior, cold-blooded opportunism, and the ruthless enforcement of tribal boundaries and taboos (as the title suggests).  Slaboshpitsky utilizes the film’s extended shots and yawning silences to establish an atmosphere of persistent dread, in which terrible violence seems to be roiling beneath a brittle layer of mundane monotony. Indeed, The Tribe is especially dismal, as every character seems more venal than the next, Sergey included. He is the protagonist strictly because the film generally follows his viewpoint, and not because he is in any way a conflicted antihero. In truth, Sergey is revealed to be an acutely stupid and dangerous creep, a hot-head who seems capable of almost any depravity given the right motivation. The fact that one cannot look away as he shuffles his way down into damnation is a testament to the extent of Slaboshpitsky’s talents, as well as the dark, elemental allure of a tale where evil turns on evil.

SLIFF 2014: I'm Ten, Then I'll Catch Eleven

The adjective that most readily comes to mind with respect to Jimbo Yoshimasa's I'm Ten, Then I'll Catch Eleven (Japanese: Boku wa môsugu jûissai ni naru) is "gentle". It is a story about delicate thoughts and emotions, presented in the most delicate way. Which is not to say that it is ephemeral. Yoshimasa's film operates within a mode of marvelously tactile social realism, wherein his camera often assumes the vantage point of ten-year-old protagonist Shogo. In this, the film recalls the work of Korean-American director So-yong Kim, and in particular her poignant tale of childhood disillusionment, Treeless Mountain. Where Kim's features contain an relentless ache of loneliness, however, Yoshimasa's is defined to a significant extent by its warm, sweet tone. Indeed, I'm Ten is practically a conflict-free film, a trait that brings to mind the animated works of Hayao Miyazaki. There are strains and anxieties fluttering through the film's events, which take place over a winter break in Japan, but they are of a profoundly subtle nature. The pleasure of the film lies in watching as Yoshimasa and his performers expertly tease out the story's emotional contours from a relatively sparing screenplay.

Inasmuch as I'm Ten has a plot, it concerns Shogo's wrestling with the Big Questions of morality, life, and death. This plays out through two connected storylines. The first focuses on Shogo's hobby of collecting and mounting insects, a passion passed on to him by his father, who works overseas for long stretches. Just as Shogo is beginning to share this pastime with his eager classmate Kanon, his father returns from the Indian subcontinent with a new outlook on life. He espouses a reverence for all living things, and resolves to give up collecting, lest he pin a beetle that was a human in a past life. This development coincides with a family visit to Shogo's grandfather, whose is so devoted to his deceased wife's spirit that his actions teeter between piety and eccentricity. (His daily routine includes providing her ashes with constant verbal updates on family activities.) These myriad events leave Shogo wondering about the mystery of mortality, and specifically about what constitutes conscientious behavior towards the dead (and the freshly reincarnated).

Despite its subject matter, I'm Ten is not an angst-wracked, funereal sort of film. Shogo is at an age where his response to death is one of modest confusion and curiosity rather than despair. He is concerned foremost with questions about the intersection of the tangible and intangible. Is his grandmother still "there" in the jar of white ash? Is the reincarnated person still "there" in the butterfly that he freezes and mounts? As one might expect in a child, Shogo's response to disorientation is often imitation. When his father becomes vegan, he too quickly and adamantly renounces animal protein. He carefully observes his grandfather's ritualized actions at the household shrine, and later attempts to replicate them. Shogo's mimicry is consistent with the film's ethos, which ultimately favors a fumbling, open-minded approach to life and death, until one finds a set of behaviors that feel respectful and meaningful. It's an outlook that frowns on bullying and smiles on accommodation. No characters in I'm Ten attempt to convert others to their way of thinking, and the tension that arises from differences in belief are of a soft sort that intertwine with other social dynamics. (The mild but very real friction between Shogo's parents over the father's newfound beliefs is conveyed through some masterfully understated acting.) It's a quiet, lovely little film, one that conveys a child's complex and elusive feelings with marvelous nuance.