Don Juan First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Serge Bozon’s follow-up to Madame Hyde (2017), Don Juan, seems to continue that film’s revisionist update of a classic tale, while also returning in some fashion to the unorthodox musical genre that La France (2007) so brilliantly embodied. Here, the connection is much more narratively explicit: Laurent (Tahar Rahim), an actor who has been left at the altar by his fellow actor Julie (Virginie Efira), begins to see her face in nearly every woman he meets, before she comes back into his life, acting alongside him in a staging of one of the plays that explores the emponymous character. From this simple set-up, Bozon instigates a dizzying swirl of scenes and techniques, constantly shifting to fit his screenplay co-written with his partner and fellow filmmaker Axelle Ropert. Initially, it appears as if the film will continue entirely in the absence of Julie: while he waits, Laurent begins interacting with a number of women in turn, each played by Efira in a succession of delightfully absurd wigs and costumes, where the line between his recognition of them as Julie or as a stranger is deliberately hazy. Contrary to the expectations engendered by the title (Laurent isn’t revealed to be an actor until after this first day), his attempts are uneven, fumbling, and often violently rebuffed, utilizing Efira’s fieriness and the hollowed-out obsession in Rahim’s eyes to great effect. But once Don Juan begins focusing on the play, it becomes much more circumspect while still retaining its galvanizing capacity for surprise. A tight orbit is drawn between disparate characters: the director, the untested actress initially cast in the role that Julie will come to play, a wise old man (Alain Chamfort) who lives in the same hotel as Laurent. These scenes could act well in isolation, each reflecting another part of Laurent’s headspace and his willingness or unwillingness to pair off with people. A drama teacher, also played by Efira, gives a reading of the play that applies precisely to the film at large: neither Don Juan or the women he seduces are especially interesting in isolation, and so things cannot be viewed separately, or the viewer should not be forced to take one side or the other. This quality runs throughout Don Juan, nowhere more apparent than when Julie reappears and the two fall back in love. The pas de deux between her and Laurent is literalized by a number of dance poses that they float into during this section of the film, and the director’s decision to stage the play with an open background that leads into the outdoors gives the impression of “reality” bleeding into the play, the two becoming inseparably intertwined just as Laurent and Julie have become, or at least have appeared to. Despite the use of sung musical moments at crucial junctures, Don Juan is almost a kind of deconstruction of the viewer’s expectations of a musical. Almost all the songs are solos, and yet Bozon has his actors stand almost totally still while his camera is mostly static, an oddly discomforting feeling heightened by the actors’ singing abilities. The three singing actors (Rahim, Efira, and Chamfort) can all hold a note, with Efira perhaps being the strongest, but Rahim, while not bad, does appear to be hesitant at most times, with his songs forming the majority of the film. His strongest musical moments, apart from a duet with Efira, might be the opening, where he moves in time to a piece of music, which is hilariously interrupted many times by a buzzing phone; and a scene at a wedding where people dance exaggeratedly around him. The musical qualities of Don Juan might come through most forcefully in the strength of Bozon’s direction. Working on digital for the first time and without his usual cinematographer and sister Céline Bozon (the film was shot by Sébastien Buchmann), Bozon frequently shoots his actors just off the center of the frame, creating an angular feeling to many of his shots emphasized by the precise cutting that sharply shifts perspective and location within a scene. The colors are rich and bright here. Where the pastel colors of Madame Hyde served that film’s uncanniness well, the directness of Don Juan demands a bold approach that doesn’t sacrifice intricacy. In the confidence of his direction and the elusive turns of the narrative, Bozon supplies this in spades.

A New Old Play First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Without getting too far into Bresson’s dissection of the irreconcilable differences between the artistic media of film and theater, there has been a longstanding interest, and thus conundrum, in how to depict the staging of a theatrical production on film. From Busby Berkeley backstage musicals to The Golden Coach to Rivette’s masterpieces to Vanya on 42nd Street to of course Drive My Car, films about theater are typically just as much about the communal nature of the endeavor, the relationships that are formed in the intimate times of living and working together. And then, there are those films, like The Travelling Players and Platform, who use theater and performance as a means to convey and explore the grand sweep of history, as the relatively static nature of performance and style is met by larger social and government forces over decades. Qiu Jiongjiong’s feature debut, A New Old Play, fits in very much with this lineage of acting-troupe-epics, running just under three hours and spanning the 1920s to the 1980s in the Sichuan Province. Unlike its predecessors, however, it totally focuses on a single actor clown, Qiufu, based on Qiu’s own grandfather. It also explicitly takes a retrospective look: the film begins with two demons arriving to bring him to hell, and the rest of the film threads this long journey alongside a chronological retelling of his ascent to stardom in the New-New Troupe and Opera School (at age seven) and how he, his family, and his collaborators weathered World War II, the Chinese Civil War, and the upheaval that the Chinese Communist Party introduced into an already fraught environment. In a sharp break from the documentaries that have made up Qiu’s work to date, A New Old Play instead opts for an approach that emphasizes artificiality and stylization of these spaces of the past and supernatural. Seemingly every scene takes place on a set, each crafted to maximize what feels like a hand-crafted quality to the film, where the distressed and flat quality permeates the backdrops of man-made structures and landscapes alike. A golden statue is embodied by living flesh, ocean currents by billowing fabric, and brick walls look like plywood painstakingly painted to suggest the mortar without fully defining it. All of these might strike one as budgetary necessities, but the effect here is far from, say, the nightmarish distortions of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or the opposite approach of reflection of present onto past in Platform. Instead, this abstraction suggests an archetypal base to build on, a physical closeness of space and a continuity between the “real world” and the purposeful unreality of theater, literalized in a shot that tracks right as bricks are rolled on-stage from a daytime view of distant mountains, then off-stage into the painted night sky and distant city. And while Qiu is free to mix-up his style, throwing in oblique angles and handheld when necessary, much of the film is shot in single-direction tracking shots and tableaus teeming with people, where the distinctiveness of the faces meld into a tapestry of expressions and reactions, all similar but none totally alike. That quality serves the film well: Qiufu is certainly the main character, set apart by this supernatural intervention and his obdurate commitment to craft even as his fellow cast and crew fall away due to the ravages of time, while also being instantly recognizable thanks to his ever-present large ears and red nose and beanie. But this is as much a portrait of community, leaving plenty of time to consider how people contend with the weight of change and history, each interaction another building block in a conception of history that is resolutely intimate and aggregative. Even the intertitles that help clarify when the next decade has passed for those very unfamiliar with Chinese history — as someone of Chinese descent, the careful but never overstated intertwining of history into the narrative moved me — convey these changes in more poetic terms. All this while, Qiufu is on his way to the afterlife, where he will have to drink a soup of forgetfulness to enter, or otherwise wander as a ghost among the living. This voyage into the unknown carries the same genial tone as A New Old Play, of a resigned acceptance of the inevitable that carries with it a whole world of mystery and discovery. The film closes with Qiu himself appearing in front of the camera, one of the most fitting cameos in ages, as he implicitly puts himself in the lineage of these performers and artists who have contributed to a rich Chinese folk tradition. On the strength of A New Old Play, such a gesture is more than earned.

The City and the City First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

There’s something to be said for the narrative and structural principles of incoherence, attempting to evoke a fractured place, culture, or time through a jumble of stories. The results can certainly be mixed, suffering from a surfeit of complications, or otherwise failing to link together its strands with anything more than the faintest of ideas. But in the right hands, it can be a revelation, little pieces adding up to a grand portrait that continually surprises as it digs deeper and deeper into the unknown. The City and the City, the first directorial collaboration between Syllas Tzoumerkas (The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea) and Christos Passalis (an actor known for Dogtooth and his appearances in Tzoumerkas’s past films, making his directorial debut here), falls somewhere in the middle of these two impulses in its chronicling of the Greek Jewish community Thessaloniki and its severe persecution by Nazi invaders in 1943. Across six chapters, something of a vague narrative develops as characters, including a Jewish family, drift in and out of the stories told, but many moments initially seem random or disconnected, linked only by the shared air of unease and dislocation in both narrative and presentation. Tzoumerkas and Passalis’s directorial presentation ascribes to a similar level of free mixing. While The City and the City appears to all be set in the 20th century, stretching from World War II to somewhere in the 1980s, at least several scenes make no efforts to hide the present state of the city, with modern cars and bright lights rushing by these people clad in period garb. Even the scenes more visibly set in the 1940s have a slippery relationship: the first chapter cuts between an impoverished clothes seller filmed in black-and-white — surrounded by a cascade of languages including Turkish, Armenian, and Ladino — and a richer Greek family filmed in color; the ordinary implication would be that these take place in separate times, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. The City and the City finds more of a focal point when it deals directly with the horrors of the Nazi occupation. An especially striking sequence depicts forced physical exercises run by the soldiers, where they torment men in extended takes whose camera focus seems to only capture a small circle in a different part of the frame with each shot. Such devices, along with the use of archival footage and explanatory intertitles, creates a more vivid sense of history and direct effects than many of the more deliberately obscure episodes. Perhaps The City and the City’s most incisive element comes in its chapter title cards: each one shows a particular government organization who forms the principal aggressor for the part. Crucially, this extends both before and after the Nazi occupation; while the penultimate scene, appearing to be either a flashback to or a revelation of a secret backroom where fascist torture is still taking place, muddles things too much, the central message becomes clear in these indicting moments: oppression will always threaten those not in power, especially the people of a specific community.

RRR First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

S. S. Rajamouli’s latest epic RRR begins with perhaps the most unexpected first song possible. A young girl, Malli (Twinkle Sharma), is singing to Catherine Buxton (Alison Doody), the wife of a Delhi governor (Ray Stevenson) who is visiting the Gond tribe in a forest located in the modern state of Telangana. After being charmed by this plaintive voice, the Buxtons trick Malli’s family into selling her as a plaything, severely beating her mother when she tries to resist. This, as the first of the three title cards that makes up RRR’s title helpfully points out, is The StoRy: a colonial force brutally asserting its force and power over the native people, with Malli’s innocence both registering strongly on an individual and a national, allegorical level. But such an appellation is as much pretext as it is the driving force for the narrative: the film quickly becomes the story of two real Telugu revolutionaries in an imagined account of a friendship that the two formed in the 1920s: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan). The two are presented, at least initially, as literally elementally opposed forces: Raju is introduced as The FiRe, first seen as a police officer fighting through literally hundreds of people to capture an Indian man for a superior, while Bheem is The WateR, whose opening scene finds him trapping an enormous tiger. At first glance, this appears to be the central conflict of the film, with Bheem, the tribe’s protector, attempting to rescue his lost lamb while Raju, the traitor cop, attempts to find the “outsider” in the teeming throngs of Delhi. But after an extraordinary sequence that finds the two of them meeting and then saving a boy caught in the water below a train derailment by jumping over a bridge and wrapping themselves in an Indian flag to avoid the flames, the title card, 30 minutes in, at last comes in and the entire dynamic shifts. RRR — which doesn’t stand for anything, as Rajamouli chose to use a title that could appeal to as wide an audience as possible given the grand sweep of the narrative; the fan-contest winner in Telugu was Raudraṁ raṇaṁ rudhiraṁ, which translates to Rage War Blood — thus presents a title, and a narrative, that is both united and divided. The two men, who clasp hands both in the air and underwater, quickly become best friends, sharing an interest in general frolicking and their impossibly productive workout regiments, while they both continue with their missions. The first revelation of their identities and perceived betrayals on both their parts comes to head at the final scene before the InteRRRval, during Bheem’s chaotic assault on the governor’s palace, before it is revealed that Raju actually joined the police force to obtain weapons for his own state’s revolution against the British. The cascading revelations about Raju and their effect on Bheem introduce an interesting, fitting balance of motivations. Bheem is never anything other than himself, a principled and kind man who will nonetheless do anything it takes to bring the tribe’s daughter home, while Raju’s character is complex and conflicted, equally committed to his ultimate cause though it requires active participation in the subjugation and maiming of his own people. But such concerns, and how they dovetail into the wider portrait of betrayal and redemption, arise just as much out of the time spent with building brotherhood as it does in the gloriously artificial action sequences. RRR is truly a packed film, but its 182 minutes never feel unjustified, and while the character relationships are simple and almost preordained from each character’s first appearance — especially with Jenny (Olivia Morris), the One Good British person who Bheem falls in love with, and Sita (Alia Bhatt), Raju’s fiancée — much of the pleasure of the film comes from the slow assemblage of every piece into place. It might be a machine, but it is one of magnificent intricacy and care; even the obvious CGI enhancements — including the wholly artificial animals — retain a great impact because of their firm grounding in real bodies and choreography. (It should be noted here that others more knowledgeable than I have written about the potential use, whether intentional or not, of the film to support the facist Hindu nationalism of Modi, though all antagonism in the film is directly squarely towards the British colonizers.) Any accurate survey of RRR inevitably (and rightly) devolves into a recounting of the most memorable set-pieces that Rajamouli crafts with swooping cameras, exaggerated angles, and rhythmic editing: the song “Naatu Naatu,” which begins as a rebuke to English pretentiousness at a party and becomes a joyous competition between men and women alike to see who at the dance will be the last one standing; a prison break that involves Raju dual-wielding rifles while sitting on Bheem’s shoulders; the sheer chaos of the raid on the palace, with so much action going on in the background as Bheem and Raju face off with hose and torch in hand, respectively. But what sticks just as vividly in the mind are the defiance of Bheem as he is lacerated by a spiked whip, his refusal to kneel inspiring the crowd of Indians to stampede the guards; the improbable spectacle of the governor being launched from his car and firing his rifle in mid-air; Raju maintaining his figure while in prison by exercising even as he is being starved. RRR’s rousing narrative derives its power equally from its central supermen, so incredibly statuesque and charismatic, and its feel for communal action, each scene another cog in this tale of sacrifice and resistance. In terms of sheer spectacle in the current landscape, Rajamouli and his collaborators are nigh unmatched in viscerality and clarity of vision.

Singing in the Wilderness First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Chinese documentary has long been a vibrant and all too underseen area of filmmaking, even before the international recognition of masters like Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing. In reaction to the overt stylizations and lavish filmmaking of the Fifth Generation, which itself rejected the Cultural Revolution’s social realism, the Sixth Generation operated in a neo-realist fashion, skirting the lines of documentary in its use of non-actors and much more quotidian plots. Concurrently, full-fledged documentarians like Wu Wenguang and Yue Jiang began their own even more independent movement. The newest trend appears to be Chinese documentarians who received their education in the United States, making films resolutely about their native land while maintaining a certain distance in form and/or subject matter; Zhu Shengze is the foremost leader of this loose movement at present. Another member is Chen Dongnan, who makes her feature-length debut with Singing in the Wilderness. The documentary, shot over close to a decade, follows the farming people of the Little Well Village in Fumin County of China’s Yunnan province. They belong to the A-Hmao subset of the Miao people, a historically oppressed and poor minority within China who were pushed to the mountaintops by the Han Chinese majority thousands of years ago. This village, in stark contrast to the vast majority of China, which mostly follows either atheism or folk religions, has embraced Christianity, and their church choir, conducted by Long Guangyuan, has become a backbone of the community. Once Zhang Xiaoming, the county propaganda minister, becomes enraptured by their untrained yet passionate singing, their rise to international fame begins, leading to appearances in Beijing and Lincoln Center, events which challenge the group’s identity in the face of government advertising and mandated subject matter. At the same time, the film follows two choir members as they embark on marriage: Zhang Yaping (referred to simply as Ping in the chyron), who has a volatile relationship with her husband from another, bigger village, and Wang Jiansheng (Sheng) who longs to become a preacher and chafes against the farming lifestyle and his arranged marriage. Chen cannily ties all of these threads into a larger tapestry of the sweeping nature of China’s modernization and image creation that people like Jia have also captured so astutely. What makes this particular instance special is its specificity, in both the ethnic and religious aspects. Throughout, there is the implicit idea, never directly commented on by the villagers, of a certain exoticization: before their first performance, the villagers, who normally otherwise wear fairly modern clothing, are given traditional garb that emphasizes uniformity and tradition which, as a village elder observes in one of just two talking heads, has already mostly faded away: he sings part of a Miao ethnic song before sadly noting that he’s forgotten the rest of it, and that there are no more people who remember such songs. Instead, the villagers find their identity in these songs which aren’t in their native language: Singing in the Wilderness, at least in its international releases, probably ought to note the many times where the film switches between A-Hmao and Mandarin: the former is used during most of the conversations between villagers, including in their urban settings, and the latter is used during the semi-common use of voiceover, the singing of songs (secular and non-secular alike), and official announcements; an especially notable recurring theme is Sheng’s use of Mandarin rather than A-Hmao during his sermons, presumably in an effort to be able to minister to a wider region of China than his immediate people. This tension between the village and the wider world recurs without ever necessarily being used as a cudgel to emphasize the beauty of the former. While it is startling to see Europeans being led through a guided tour of the village, along with almost a shock-cut to promotional footage and a performance of “Mamma Mia” on China’s Got Talent, Chen does not solely rely on such wild extremes, instead carefully drawing out how each incursion relates to the villagers’ predicaments. This especially comes to the fore in the turbulent emotional journeys both Ping and Sheng go on; crucially they are both linked explicitly to Christianity and singing, two pursuits seen as incompatible with the prescribed means of life. Singing in the Wilderness, aside from decrying the corrupt aborted land development that drastically cut down on farming space, doesn’t aim to suggest that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but Chen’s faithful evocation of a resolutely modern type of struggle resounds with a clarity all its own.

Andrew Norman Wilson

1. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (2019)
2. Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016)
3. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: The Old Victrola (2019)
4. Impersonator (2021)
5. In the Air Tonight (2020)
6. The Unthinkable Bygone (2016)

1. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (2019)
2. Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016)
3. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: The Old Victrola (2019)
4. Impersonator (2021)
5. In the Air Tonight (2020)
6. The Unthinkable Bygone (2016)

On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online's Kicking the Canon section.

One of the primary games played by the motley, ever-expanding group of Hong Sang-soo lovers is that of contextualizing and recontextualizing each film within his rapidly accumulating body of work. His films reverberate across each other, as the continual additions to the “infinite worlds possible” shed new light on the ones that came before it. With this in mind, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (2002), Hong’s fourth of twenty-seven and counting features, stands as a sparkling example, as both one of his strongest early films and a Rosetta Stone for the work to come. It’s well worth situating Turning Gate among its predecessors that it effectively built upon and broke away from. Hong’s debut, The Day a Pig Fell Into a Well (1996), utilized a network narrative in four parts, tracking each of the points in a love rectangle and their bleak circumstances, which culminates in a possible double murder. Opting for less overtly drastic stakes, The Power of Kangwon Province (1998) acridly captured an overlapping two-part portrait of two lovers. The first Hong that utilized his trademark twists on structure was the black-and-white Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), a complex recounting of a budding but fraught relationship in two mirrored sections of seven chapters each, where the events play out in radically different ways and end up privileging the viewpoint character. On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate also takes place across seven chapters, but the structural and narrative similarities between it and the preceding films largely ends there. It is — to a degree greater than even The Power of Kangwon Province’s duplicated vacation undertaken by each of its lovers — a vacation film, where Kyung-soo (Kim Sang-kyung), a floundering actor, makes an impromptu visit to his friend Sung-woo (Kim Hak-seon) in Chuncheon. After some misadventures, he becomes involved with Myung-suk (Ye Ji-won), a dancer friend of Sung-woo’s who quickly becomes far more emotionally interested in him than the reverse. After things go south and Kyung-soo boards a train, he randomly encounters Sun-young (Chu Sang-mi), a married woman who once knew him in their youth but whom he’s forgotten. After they have a brief affair, Kyung-soo is quite literally left out in the rain, his own passionate love for Sun-young rejected. Tied up within all this is the legend of the Turning Gate at Chungpyung Temple, which Hong unusually uses as a structuring metaphor rather than as the incidental bit of color favored in other films. It tells the story of a commoner who, after being beheaded for falling in love with the daughter of a king, transformed into a snake that wrapped itself around the princess. To be rid of it, the princess went to the temple and told the snake to wait there for some food. The snake eventually went after her but was driven away by rain and lightning; the connection to Kyung-soo’s eventual trajectory is made explicit in both the English (but not the Korean) title and the final chapter card. Hong’s films rarely rely on metaphor as stringently as On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, but it would be too much to ascribe the sole or true meaning of the film to just this broad outline. For one, aside from the scene in which the legend is recounted by Sung-woo, the seventh chapter card, and the last scene, the Turning Gate is never truly invoked; the men even turn back from the Turning Gate, claiming that it’s nothing special, thus denying both Kyung-soo and the viewer the visual linkage that might trigger an additional significance at this early point in the film. Instead, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate resonates even more strongly as the first example of Hong’s predilection for doubling, here accomplished through almost an inverse approach to character interactions across the film’s halves: Kyung-soo goes from the pursued to the pursuer, quite literally following Sun-young back to her house and continually returning in his efforts to court her. Hong’s repetition, as literalized and tweaked in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, is, as in his later work, subsumed beneath the basic pleasures that were nearly fully by this point: of watching characters chat over food and soju as scenes play out over a series of misunderstandings and casual revelations. Hong’s writing, too, more closely resembles his later work than the previous three films, with the phrase “Even though it’s difficult to be a human being, let’s not turn into monsters” being repeated at least twice, a humorous koan that reflects both Kyung-soo’s blinkered perspective and an overarching mystery to these replaying circumstances. Hong would return to his more bitter side with Woman Is the Future of Man (2004), before beginning to evolve, using longer scenes and introducing his trademark zooms in the films to come, eventually blossoming into one of the most improbable mainstays of arthouse filmmaking. But On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate remains a great lodestone, an early hybrid of the impulses that would come to define his filmmaking that remains as humorous and disarming as ever, both in and out of context.