posted by Scene -- @ 10:21 PM

Black and White, and Red: Pedro Almodovar's "Bad Education"

Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education begins and ends with title card sequences that frame the whole sensual dream with exacting perfection. The beginning sequence is all reds and blacks, sensuality and death, as pieces of papers are ripped away revealing faces cut and torn and arranged ominously like artwork by a deranged child. Music stabs away in the background, violent strings stolen from the nightmares of Bernard Hermann. The end sequence features square tiles from a blue garage door blown up into cards detailing what happens to the characters after the movie is finished. The last tile doesn’t stop its magnification, zooming in at breakneck pace until the entire screen is filled with the film’s final word: "passion". And there it is gigantic, ominous, and suffocating.

Bad Education is a rare treat, a throwback film that refuses to languish in references and nostalgia. This is a 50s noir, though, make no mistake about it. The seedy characters, the corruption, all are present except maybe the Big City as location. But unlike traditional noir, the lighting here (except for a few flashbacks to a boy's washroom) is neither harsh nor sparse. Instead, the colours lush to their fullest with Almodovar, unlike so many other directors attempting neo-noir, evoking the emotional intent behind chiaroscuro lighting rather than merely replicating its aesthetic. The femme fatale walks through this film in all her seductive glory, and yet, there are no females present in this narrative. There is also the requisite murder mystery, poking through the film’s bright aesthetic like a man’s cheekbones through a slather of woman’s makeup, but there is no detective here, at least not in the sense that we are used to.

When Gael Garcia Bernal walks into film director Enrique Goded/Fele Martinez’s office, he claims to be Fele’s old friend Ignacio Rodriguez. He says he is now an actor, going by the stage-name of Angel, and that he is looking for work. Though it is hard to tell through Bernal’s scruffy beard, hunched shoulders and desperate grin, this is that scene in noir movies where the broad sashays into the detective’s office, crosses her legs, and asks for help in solving her husband’s murder.

Noir is often concerned with shadowed identities, but Almodovar goes straight to the heart of the issue. Angel pitches a short story to Fele for cinematic adaptation called “The Visit”, a story that begins in the truth of their shared pasts as boyhood lovers in a Catholic school, and imagines a future where Ignacio doesn’t grow up into an actor named Angel, but a transvestite drug addict named Zahara (also played by Bernal).

Almodovar cuts from the past to the present, from fiction to truth, back and forth until the narrative resembles the torn, sheared artwork from the film’s titles. Differing characters fold and mesh and penetrate each other’s personas, with different actors playing the same characters, or the same actors playing multiple characters. Almodovar isn’t just piecing together a murder mystery; he is piecing together lives, and more, piecing together individual people, taking whole persons and violently ripping them like paper, like virgins, and stitching them back up again with glue and semen.

Physically, the characters penetrate each other, mixing and matching and permeating, just like their identities. The couplings begin clumsily, awkwardly, but eventually all things settle into their places; their sex is passionate, their mysteries are solved, and their previously enigmatic motivations become clear and unmistakeably human.

Bernal’s ease of performance is astonishing. He floats from role to role and emotion to emotion, and there is not a moment in this film when the movie is not his. Like his girlfriend, Natalie Portman, did this year in Closer, Bernal displays himself on screen, physically and otherwise, and holds the camera’s eye to the point where our gaze becomes disconcerting. He, like she, plays lewd and damaged and gruesome, and yet, dares the camera (and us) to not fall in love with him.

The characters do, each one’s heart and body chasing after him or his story and the truth about each. But when the truth is finally revealed, the characters fall apart just as the narrative finally comes together as a whole.

We are left with title cards and summaries of the future, each detailed on tiles of a door, pieces of a puzzle, square and logical and interlocking. “Passion,” says the last card, perhaps in explanation. As if you didn't know it by now already.

Jef.Catapang

posted by Scene -- @ 8:55 PM

Passionate Trajectories: Zhang Yimou’s "The House of Flying Daggers"

The House of Flying Daggers begins with a summary of politics: the current government is corrupt, there is a group of revolutionaries known as The House of Flying Daggers sworn to fight the government for the People, and, of course, the two factions don’t like each other very much.

However, this politicised background, like much in Flying Daggers, is merely a ruse. For the film concerns itself much less with politics than with passions. And though this movie begins with the former, it ends with the latter, with three lovers stumbling around both physically and metaphorically, grasping tenuously to their last gasps of lust, love and, ultimately, life.

Mei/Zhang Ziyi plays the blind daughter of the recently deceased leader of The House of Flying Daggers. Posing as a dancer at the Peony Pavillion – an establishment where young girls dance, serve, and entertain boorish men – she attempts assassination on police official Leo/Andy Lau Tak-Wah.

Leo is a high-ranking officer in the General’s police force. He sends one of his comrades, Jin/Takeshi Kaneshiro, to pose as a customer at the Peony Pavillion after information is leaked that the new blind dancer is actually connected to the Flying Daggers.

Jin is dragged off in mock arrest for indecency, while Leo attempts to divine Mei’s true skills as a dancer (and, by extention, as a fighter), by playing 'the echo game'. One of two It Scenes amongst cineastes (the other being the breathtaking battle in the bamboo forest), the echo game is played by Mei, who, responding to the sound of pebbles thrown by Leo against a multitude of drums, must respond by shooting out billowing sleeves of fabric following the exact pattern of the pebbles.

Director Yimou indulges his most sumptuous of motifs: here, the majestic fabrics of Judou and even Hero, always graceful, are given a forceful performative assertiveness that borders on impossibility. Both feminine in their softness, and masculine in their directive energy, Mei’s sleeves encompass the whole of her complex character: fleeting, transitory, beautiful, deadly, decorative, assertive, feminine. The scene’s visual poetry is both simple pleasure and yet painfully intricate.

Appropriate that this kinetic performance immediately follows the fragility of her previous performance for Jin. There, Mei sung a song, soft voiced and with slow dance movements, seeming meek, tiny, and cute.

Who is this girl, who at one point sings softly of love and takes tiny, blind steps, and who the next moment leaps through the air, grabs a sword with her sleeve, and attempts to kill a man in cold blood and with even colder precision?

Rest assured, she isn’t what you think, and for that matter, neither is anyone else. Taking plot cues from bad noir, murder mysteries, and soap operas, the characters are constantly revealed to be someone else, working for someone else, loving someone else, to the point where everything is at once both true and false at the same time.

There is a scene where, just before her rescue by Jin, Leo taunts Mei with the threat of torture. Holding her next to an elaborate machine, he guides the blind Mei’s hand: “This is where your leg will go, your arm here, your back here”. He warns her, “you’ll never dance again after this.” Mei stands still, a heap of breath and exasperation. Leo cups his hand behind her neck and draws her face close to his, sneering. Sadistic, this scene appears, until of course we find out that Leo and Mei are actually partners within the House of Flying Daggers, and more than that, they are lovers. In retrospect, the apparently sadistic is revealed as sado-masochistic role-playing foreplay, sexual and heated.

And yet still…does she have feelings for him or not?

In The House of Flying Daggers, the truth changes so often as to say that the only truth is change itself. “Call me Wind”, says Jin in lieu of his real name, expressing his carefree spirit, his lack of direction, and most importantly his lack of definition. This is an evasion, of course, but one that proves to be truer than the truth.

In wanting to become the wind, Mei and Jin wish to become free and playful, free from the politics, playful in their love affair, forever young and innocent of society’s affairs. But there is more to the wind than that. There is the wind that sends her fabrics beautifully through the air, that flows through their hair as they ride, that makes them look so otherworldly and perfect as they fly and fight. But this is also the wind that changes seasons, that kills color, that ages the flowers, that whistles through the bamboo spears aimed for their heads, and that buoys the flying daggers looking for flesh to pierce.

Mei’s ethereal fabrics are ripped from her shoulder several times during the film. The resulting flash of perfectly porcelain skin has the odd effect of rendering Mei both immortally young and mortally fragile. Although she has ambitions for being wind, she is undeniably, beautifully, and perhaps sadly, beneath the billowing sheets, simple flesh. So alive and kinetic are her supernatural fight scenes; so clumsy and childlike are her love scenes.

After all the roles have been exposed as lies, Mei is reunited with Leo after three years apart. “You haven’t changed,” he says. “I’m still Mei,” she smiles. And yet, this comes at a point in the movie where we are least sure of who exactly Mei is and where her true passions lie. Still Mei but who is Mei? Whom does she love and how staunch are her political views?

The answer comes soon enough as Leo attempts to rekindle his physical affair with Mei, again with a clunky love scene rolling on the floor. Mei resists, however, and Leo, realizing the truth about Mei’s love for Jin, tries to force her. Tsk tsk, forcing the wind. A single dagger flies through the air accordingly, stabbing Leo, ever so appropriately, in the back. “You cannot force a woman against her will,” says Nia, the new leader of the House of Flying Daggers.

The House of Flying Daggers seems less a group of social revolutionaries than a fringe society of rebels, at once progressive and regressive. One would assume their fight for the downtrodden People would be driven by love and compassion, and yet, their group seems to look down on both love and compassion. They order Mei to kill Jin knowing full well their feelings for each other. They send Mei on this mission knowing of Mei and Leo’s past relations with each other. They seem to have little regard for the human emotion known as love.

Progressively, women seem to take a powerful role; Nia being the leader, the Peony Pavillion headmistress being her second-in-command, and Mei seeming a pivotal player in their schemes. But the House’s hierarchy seems too, well, hierarchal to be revolutionary. Mei serves tea to Nia’s stand-in as if she were royalty. All henchmen lurk in the background, heads down in reverence to their leader. Is this their cause as well? Or are they merely pawns to their leader’s endgame, much as Leo asserts that he and Jin and the rest of the officers are to their General’s?

Mei’s Flying Daggers uniform is appropriately asexual. Whereas before she inhabited both spheres by wearing a silk robe and a sword, or both men’s clothing and a flower in her ear, here both the men and women of The House of Flying Daggers wear bright green and conical hats; there is no distinctive dress between the sexes. No longer blind, no longer tailoring her roles and dress to what is expected of her from the men in her life, Mei is at her freest, and yet, being uniform, at her most trapped within a role.

As the seasons change in the background, Mei’s sublime greens contrast with the mise-en-scene and trap her forever in her own skin, wanting to be wind but so starkly contrasting with the changes of nature. She and Jin have their first and last real love scene, their blues and greens and muted skin shades standing against the dead fields like a bloodstain on white shirt. Post-coital, they lie among the weeds, looking so alive in juxtaposition and yet also dead and buried.

The battle that at first seemed political is now nothing but a passion play. Leo shoots two daggers towards Mei, the old “if-I-can’t-have-her-than-nobody-will”. Jin comes riding back to be at Mei’s side, for the second time, but is attacked by Leo. Here, two former comrades now fight each other for reasons of love and honour. Gone are the flying and the swiftness and the scenery’s greens. Here, the snow falls and the two are breathy, tired, their swords chip, they elbow and head-butt and scream with a lack of grace. We see the police descending to the Flying Daggers’ hideout, but we do not see the giant battle.

The only battle the film is concerned with now is the one between Mei, Leo, and Jin. Leo fights hard, convinced that what was his in reality was robbed away by Jin, who was only playing a game. And is this what politics becomes to individuals? Reduced to a series of you took what’s mine, you have what belongs to me, I want what you have, etc.?

Vonnegut once wrote, “You are what you pretend to be”, and this is seen throughout the film’s reversals. In the end, by freeing themselves from politics and their roles within the system, Mei, Leo, and Jin consign to ceasing their existence, to becoming wind in a way they perhaps had not intended. In embracing romanticism, they in turn embrace tragic, useless death.

The film’s political tensions no doubt will lead to a bloody battle, but the film’s main concern is with the passions of humans, and thus nonetheless leads to a knife in the back, a stab in the heart, a friend aiming to take another friend’s head off.

Mei, the one who most embraces and embodies her varying roles, lies still in the field, free at last, wholly dead, and forever young. “There exists no city or nation that has been more cherished than a beauty like this,” sings Jin now, as Mei once sang to him during their first initial role-play. By this last scene, whatever the film’s confused politics may be, we are now sure where lays its heart.

Jef.Catapang