The main problem with indie films is that the easiest way to make something with serious emotional depth involves having all your characters be perpetually miserable. And if I learnt anything from the Pan-Asia Film Festival, I learnt that this is not just a Western problem. All across the world it seems, independent filmmakers are drawn to misery like flies to honey. That’s not to say that making sad films is bad. There’s just a right way and a wrong way to go about it. At Pan-Asia for example, the right way was called Come Rain, Come Shine and the wrong way was called Three And A Half.
The former is a South Korean film written/directed by Yoon-ki Lee. Its central characters are a husband (Hwang Ji-seok, played by Hyun Bin) and wife (Young-shin, played by Su-jeong Lim). The movie opens in the midst of a drive, when Young-shin suddenly she tells Hwang that she is leaving him for another man. The main action however occurs later, back at the house. There, trapped inside by torrential rain, the couple tentatively pad around each other, trying to come to terms with the new distance that exists between them.
The latter meanwhile is a film written/directed by Iranian Naghi Nemati. Hanier (Samaneh Vafaiezadeh), Banafsheh (Shooka Karimi) and Homa (Negar Hassanzadeh) are all prisoners on leave, determined to escape Iran so they never have to go back to jail. Their aim is to be smuggled out. However Hanieh has no wish to leave Iran. She has business to take care of in the depressed border town the three have taken refuge in.
The reason I have chosen to review these two together, is that both these films share multiple elements. Both make heavy use of pathetic fallacy: their characters lead their lives in a very gloomy world, and often surrounded by rain. Such surroundings reflect the similarly melancholy main characters, and their emotionless performances. Both films also reject a simple, past-to-future narrative, their storylines instead interspersed with flashes of things yet to be. But the dominating similarity is the films’ sense of imprisonment, the fact that in both, the characters are stuck in a prison existing more in their heads than in reality.
The difference between the films is that Come Rain Come Shine Three executes this sense well and Three and A Half doesn’t. It does this by realising a sense of imprisonment is a more a characteristic of theatre than of film. As such, films that make use of it do well to adopt the trappings of theatre: for example, limiting space. The drama of Come Rain Come Shine feels all the more tense for the fact it all takes place in a single enclosed space. The couples’ house, surrounded by the rain, becomes a physical representation of the cage inside their skulls.
Meanwhile, though Hanier of Three and A Half seems imprisoned, her freedom of movement around town and country gives a completely different impression. It feels far more that her imprisonment is something chosen, rather than something forced. And how can you sympathise with someone who moans when they are the cause of their own misery?
The other necessity is the setting up and maintenance of a single clear problem. In Come Rain Come Shine, this is that a couple who have broken up are now forced into spending time in each other’s company. We know the problem: as such we can understand the conflict, and feel the pressure of it beating against the prison walls. Three and A Half by comparison never clearly states its central issue. It doles out information in small chunks, and as soon as one mystery is resolved, another takes its place. There’s no consistency here, and it leaves the film feeling episodic and unsure, and with no time to build tension. This in turn, leaves us feeling nothing but bored and unsympathetic with Hanier’s unhappiness.
Really, it is these integral story components that set these films apart. The acting in both films is great. Come Rain Come Shine is shot better: Yoon-ki Lee is a masterful visual artist, flowing from distance, to intimacy, and back, with a skill so great it is all but invisible. But this is only really icing on the structural cake. Three and A Half may not display the same level of skill as Come Rain Come Shine, but Nemati is still a good director. It’s just nothing could really save the material he was working with.
In short, what we have here are two, deeply-serious, rather miserable little films. The difference is, is that one is an arrestingly tense study of two characters whose relationship has detonated, and are being poisoned by the fallout. The other meanwhile is a drab, purposeless squib of a film that truly earned the total disinterest of its audience. Truly: good stories are made in the smallest of details.
Reviewer: Adam Brodie
Film: Come Rain Come Shine
Directed: Yoon-ki Lee
Stars: Hyun Bin, Jung-woo Ha , Hye-ok Kim
Film:Three And A Half
Directed: Naghi Nemati
Stars:Negar Hasanzadeh, Shokouh Karimi , Mehdi Pourmoussa
Here's a video on this years festival
No comments:
Post a Comment