posted by Scene -- @ 12:02 AM

This is the Remix: "Sarkar" and "2046"

A lot of films are about film. Whether cumbersome Hollywood remakes, movies about making movies, or movies that reference other movies in a post-modern game of tag, cinema today is all about the meta, forever wink-winking and nudge-nudging us in the darkened theatre.

Results of this trend vary, and while the more dismal of these films are usually hack-work, the better of them gleefully play in the pool of cinematic history, recontextualizing and adding new meaning to the collective memories we share as children of the movies.

In two very different ways, both Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar and Kar-Wai Wong’s 2046 cannot exist in a vacuum. Each film carries with it a distinct recognition of and reliance on past films, and without having seen the films from which they sprang, it is easy for the viewer to not get what is going on, or to miss the point entirely. This is cinema at its most voracious and insular, demanding not only your attention but your dedication as well.

With Sarkar, Varma completes his “Underground” trilogy by remaking Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, this time in Hindi and set in India. Though I am unfamiliar with the rest of Varma’s work, the general consensus among fans and critics seems to be that this film is one of Varma’s most aesthetically beautiful. It’s not hard to see, with Sarkar’s sublime combination of lush colours and striking drabness, spotted with white fabrics that burn holes into the screen and through our retinas.

Breathtaking visuals aside, adapting a film that appears on any critic’s list of Best Movies of All Time seems unnecessary and destined for irrelevance. Unlike, say, Quentin Tarantino, whose homages are mostly of films that nobody has heard of, Varma goes straight for the canonical jugular. This type of adaptation is more akin to what Hollywood often does with hit foreign films, keeping the same plot and general narrative, recasting the roles with white American actors, and arbitrarily moving the setting to somewhere in the U.S.

It is the recasting that works best here, as Varma (wink-wink) casts real-life father/son actors Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan in the Marlon Brando and Al Pacino roles respectively. Watching the two play off each other is truly a wonder, and it is their chemistry that buoys much of Sarkar through the deepwater it gets itself into. Amitabh plays Subhash Nagare, aka “Sarkar”, a politician/hero for the masses/gangster who simmers and stares with great intensity. Where Brando mused and pontificated, Amitabh keeps a rage seething just below the surface that is intangible and unsettling. Like Brando’s Don Corelone, Amitabh’s Nagare erases the line between hero and villain, at once caring yet caustic, eliciting both fear and empathy from the characters and viewer.

Nagare uses his own means to bring justice for people who cannot turn to the government for help. This is Sarkar’s world, one of blurred and slanted morality, where orthodox religion and constitutional laws play a part, but both remain in the corner of the frame as if the lawmakers and gods themselves can’t call who is right and who is wrong.

It has always confounded me when Hollywood remade foreign films without any regard for their cultural context. Like when Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? was remade with Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere, the removal of Japan killed what made the original film so energetic and cathartic. Without the repression of Japanese society as the backdrop, the movements of Lopez and Gere were much less, well, moving.

In Sarkar, without America (the epitome of capitalism and fatalistic idealism) swirling with the characters’ old-world values and Italian sensibilities in a melting pot of the American Dream gone wrong, what we are left with is an empty shell of plot, one size fits all. While the swelling musical score is fantastic, the costumes and production design brimming with beautiful Indian baubles and set pieces, there really is no valuable cultural shifting going on. It’s homage and nothing else, a cover song.

With Kar Wai Wong’s 2046 what we have is not so much a cover but a remix. Unlike Varma, Wong draws from his own films for influence, taking past themes, images, and even characters, and refashioning them into something entirely new and yet dependant upon the past for recognition. Self aware, Wong works this into his stories, which often deal with chance meetings and de ja vu: to the characters as well as the audience everything feels like it has happened before.

2046 sees the return of Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, reprising his role from In the Mood for Love), now much less of a romantic and more of a playboy, sporting a suave moustache and serial-dating his way through life. Where Mood stretched a single relationship painfully and without consummation, 2046 runs through several of Chow’s relationships, relishing in sex and physicality in contrast to the previous film’s restraint.

In Mood Chow met and fell in love with Su Li-Zhen Chan (Maggie Cheung). In their spare time they worked on a martial arts serial novel, furthering the film’s sense of nostalgia by immersing themselves in a romanticised past that never really existed. In 2046, Chow writes not of the past but of the future (the titular year 2046), and yet his futuristic tales deal with the literal past — his relationship with Li-Zhen.

This temporal palindrome is one of Wong’s recurrent motifs, and through all of his films there is a yearning for what is not there, no longer there, or never was there. His fetish for clocks and constant references to years and dates is post-modern and yet prescient. Often his films express anxiety over the reunification of Hong Kong with Mainland China, which occurred in 1997 (see: the expiration date on the cans of pineapples in Chungking Express). In The Mood for Love ended in 1966, the year of the start of the Cultural Revolution. 2046, both the room number of Wong and Li-Zhen’s meeting place and the year that Chow writes about, is forty-nine years after 1997 — the year before the end of the fifty-year grace period allowed to Hong Kong to govern itself before China takes over.

Obsessed with anxiety and nostalgia, Wong’s characters struggle with the falseness of the future and past. But Wong takes this too far in 2046, throwing time to the wind, confusingly jumping back and forth between the future and the present and being only about the past.

Which begs the question: what is love at first sight anyways (Wong’s favourite trope), if not a nostalgic feeling of wonderful de ja vu? This is what made In the Mood for Love such a complete, enduring work, that its love story could stand alone from all the grander cinematic cartwheeling. 2046, on the other hand, though stunning visually and somewhat fascinating, fails to engage on any level other than intellectually. Like Chow’s character, the film is perhaps romantic underneath, somewhere, yet cold to touch and not living up to its potential.

Sarkar follows too closely to its original’s story, and never once lives up to it. Much of its strength and power comes only from referencing the The Godfather, which lingers in the memory and fills in the holes that Sarkar cannot fill itself. 2046, on the other hand, strays too far from its original, presenting a once-loved character as an unrecognisable misanthrope, and trading the heartfelt love story for a clinical, cold examination of human beings who don’t act like human beings. Both films, while perhaps unsuccessful, are interesting and noteworthy, but without the source material to fill them, these buckets are either half full or half empty, depending on whether or not you’re already a fan.

Jef Catapang.

posted by Scene -- @ 2:13 PM

All Ages: Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle"

(originally published in Halfway Magazine)

Hayao Miyazaki is the most imaginative and consistent filmmaker in the world today. Although it is sad that he is often relegated to the sub-genre of animation — Spirited Away should have been in the Best Picture category — it is of note that, along with Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) and others, animation post-Eisner’s Disney is being lifted from the mass-production assembly line and back into the respectable realm of auteur filmmaking.

Howl’s Moving Castle is the latest feather in Miyazaki’s cap. It is a precious film, so overflowing with ideas and visuals that our boring flesh and blood and concrete world could never contain its charm. Good animation possesses an innate precocious sensibility that even CGI effects are at pains to achieve, which in part explains why the live action Fantastic Four was so far from the bar set by Bird’s similarly super-powered and family-centered The Incredibles. Aside from marketing forces, it is this precociousness that drives so much animation to feature children characters. Miyazki in his old age ingeniously stretches this sensibility to the world of senior citizens.

Castle features Sophie (Emily Mortimer), a young haberdasher who spends her free time making hats for herself from straw and lace. It is a clear day in her unnamed village when the famed Moving Castle comes limping through the countryside. Her fellow workers fawn and fan themselves in an echo of modern-day celebrity worship, sharing rumors of Howl (Christian Bale) and his reputation for eating the hearts of young beautiful girls. Howl’s castle is a wonder in itself, a hulking mass of conjoined parts that move independently of each other, bobbing and breathing, brought to life by smokestacks and pulleys and four tiny legs.

When Sophie unknowingly runs into Howl on the street, she’s taken off her feet literally and figuratively. Howl is equally enamored with the young girl, but it is his attraction to her that draws the wrath of the jealous Wicked Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall). Jealous of her youth and beauty, the witch places a curse on Sophie that transforms her into a ninety-year-old woman (now voiced by Jean Simmons).

The most remarkable thing about Sophie’s transformation is the ease with which she accepts it. At first frightened by her reflection, it is mere minutes later that Sophie says “oh well, at least now my clothes will match me”, and goes walking slowly through the streets ready to start a new phase in her life. She approaches old age with a simple curiosity that grows to a state of joy and contentment.

She seeks out Howl and his magical powers, and ends up working in his castle as a caretaker and housekeeper. There, she becomes the latest addition to an oddball family, each with their own personal curse: the fire-demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal) who must keep the castle powered and will kill Howl if he stops burning; Markyl, Howl’s apprentice who is talented beyond his years but must adopt an old man’s beard in order for people to take him seriously; Turnip-Head, a former prince now scarecrow who bounces around on a stick, following Sophie, and often landing upside-down in a ditch; and Howl himself, who’s heart has gone missing, is dodging the King’s war draft, and transforms into a winged creature at night to fight untold of demons.

Miyazaki draws together many elements that flesh out Howl’s universe. From a political landscape rife with real world issues, to a detailed geography featuring several countries and even an otherworldly dimension, to a believable network of witches and wizards and demons, Howl’s world is much more contained and structured than those seen in Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. This, however, may also be the film’s drawback, as the viewer spends too much time keeping tabs of everyone’s alliances, where they came from, figuring out whom is cursed by whom, who transforms into what, and remembering where exactly everyone is located. At its worst it can be frustrating, at its best it distracts from the wonderful story and visuals.

The idea of transformation is the central theme. The Wicked Witch of the Waste is cleverly named, for, embodying the ideals of the West, she is superficial, greedy, fat and lazy. She is carried around in a hansom cab, perpetually sweating, heavily bejeweled and ostentatious with every laboured breath. When her transformation comes she turns into a kindly old woman, at times senile, though still tunnel-visioned with greed for (literally) Howl’s heart. Her only lucid moments are those of selfish wanting.

In fact, none of the characters change too much with their metamorphosis. Howl remains childish and dashing, noble and petulant. Sophie is forever caring and kind and bottling up her frustration with her circumstances. An interesting aspect of the film is how Sophie once in awhile, temporarily, morphs back into a younger version of herself, sometimes as a teenager, sometimes seemingly in her thirties or forties, and yet it is never dwelled upon or made a cause for rejoice. Like the Moving Castle itself demonstrates, change is a part of life, and no matter where you go or what you look like, you are never anything but yourself, never anywhere but home.

Each character and their respective curse comes with an important clause: you cannot talk about your curse. Therefore, Sophie is unable to tell her new friends of her true age, Howl dashes off at night to place only Calcifer knows about, and Calcifer cannot tell Sophie the secrets of Howl or the castle. Even Turnip-Head never gets to relay his story until the end, for he no longer has a functioning mouth. Miyazaki ventures to show that in order to grow you must not dwell on the past. In demonstration, the most rewarding part of Sophie’s life starts when she is ninety years old, and Howl and Calcifer must give up the castle in order to truly find their homes.

The messages and themes of Howl’s Moving Castle may seem overly cheesy or simplistic to some, but I’m willing to bet that merely depends on your stage in life, regardless of age. The deftest stroke of Miyazaki is that he restores a sense of wonder, intelligence, grace, and respect to two age groups that are often seen as a generation off from being “real people”.

Ever the humanist, Miyazaki’s concerns and politics may not reach everyone, but even the darkest cynic or hardest realist cannot marvel at the magical visuals displayed onscreen.

Jef Catapang.