posted by Scene -- @ 1:00 AM

Sin City

Aptly named, Basin City (Sin City for short) is a gutter of debauchery. Guns, torture, cigarettes, nudity, and ninja shuriken, all play a part in the film version of Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novels. Credited to two directors and featuring a guest appearance from a third, using a comic book for both a script and a storyboard, adapted from a comic book that itself hyperbolised film aesthetics, filmed on digital on a soundstage with an entirely CGI’d background, Sin City is not just post-modern, it’s post-everything. It’s post-caring. The aim here is not to deconstruct, reconstruct, reference, comment on, invent, or reminisce. Sin City simply is what it is: visceral and shockingly new, despite its familiarity.

Rodriguez and Miller’s obsessive attention to detail in bringing the comic to life drapes the film in rigid artifice. Driving scenes are rear projected and the exaggerated chiaroscuro lighting is always just so off. While some shots feel organic, others are forced and awkward, the directors tailoring their compositions to the askew perspective of Miller’s pencils. Aesthetically, it’s the most beautifully expressionistic film of recent memory. Even the tired effect of dabbing black-and-white images with spots of colour works well, whether chilling (Becky/Alexis Bledel’s haunting blue eyes) or humorous (Dwight/Clive Owen’s red Converse shoes). It’s an uncompromising style, and to the film’s credit it never gets stale.

Sin City the movie is held together by a vague structure, its plot strung together from several stories and volumes of Sin City the comic book series. Characters do roam in and out of each other’s stories, but it is the overarching sensibility and style that is the real story. Every revenge story begets another revenge story, women are sexualised and punished, and men are backstabbed or castrated (or both). It plods relentlessly, a marching parade of hookers with hearts of gold and men with grit teeth and cocked guns.

It would be a mistake for one to read too much into all this, searching for a commentary of some sort, for Sin City is all too sincere about its heroes and their characterizations. True, everyone is coloured a shade of grey in a black-and-white world, but this is more for looking cool than anything else. The film clearly chooses sides, and despite everyone’s penchant for sinning, there are clear angels and devils.

After enduring numerous deaths and bloodbaths the film is surprisingly able to dig deeper for its conclusion and actually shock you with further violence, both sexual and combative. It reaches a fever pitch, Bruce Willis’ Hartigan taking one last wheezing stand against the embodiment of Sin City’s deviance, That Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl). Hartigan endures physical punishment after physical punishment, all in the name of redemption, protecting one girl where he failed to protect others. He pleads for Nancy (Jessica Alba) to not scream, for it is audible victimization that gets That Yellow Bastard off.

In the end, That Yellow Bastard is castrated and disposed of, though instead of allowing Sin City’s wall of too-rigid black-and-white dominos to continue falling, Hartigan takes his own life, removing himself from the circle of revenges. But despite the nobility of his intentions, the cycle begins anew nonetheless; another female to be punished, another male to kill and then be killed. No matter how its citizens may struggle with their morality or against their fates, Sin City - as location, story, and text - remains bigger than the arcs of its characters.

Jef.Catapang

posted by Scene -- @ 10:50 AM

The Constant Gardener

Want to find out if your favourite independent/minority/international director has sold out to the Hollywood system? There are a number of litmus tests you could run, a number of telling questions you could ask. For example, does their new film feature beautiful white people saving the lives of brown-skinned secondary characters? Check.

But be careful with what assumptions you carry into The Constant Gardener. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles follows up his stunning City of God with a tale that is both global and introspective, both formulaic and non-conformist. It’s a hard film to categorize, which, in tandem with the criminally misleading title, explains in part how this gem of a film failed to garner the audience it deserved.

It’s a love story wrapped in a political thriller, starring Ralph Fiennes as the reserved diplomat and Tony Blair apologist, Justin Quayle, and Rachel Weisz as his passionate left-wing activist wife, Tessa. By establishing their relationship, the film ties both ends of the spectrum together and pulls, yanking their matrimonial knot into a political noose. And while other films tack on a love interest in order to appease the marketing department, the romance between the Quayles is the heart of The Constant Gardener, using Justin’s love for Tessa as a necessary jump-off into the world of government corruption and corporate dealings in the Third World.

Rachel Weisz exudes class and compassion, and it is her performance that anchors the film. Even as Justin delves deeper into the mysteries, Weisz’s Tessa reminds us that without love and compassion none of the policy-making or activism matters. It’s a lesson learned too late and too painfully for Justin, whom Fiennes unravels with sublime subtlety, carrying him from calm plant pruning in drab offices to sweaty, panicked car chases through unmanageable terrain.

Filmed on location and among locals, Meirelles does not create a world so much as captures it. The story is superimposed upon the reality of the situation, which results in beautiful, sometimes incongruous images, and a tension as fascinating as the story itself. “Everybody here needs help, we can’t help everyone,” says Justin to Tessa at one point, unconvincingly excusing themselves from helping a couple of locals, their otherness and subsequent guilt mirroring that of the film crew and actors themselves.

But that is also what separates The Constant Gardener from the rest of its class: it shows regard for accountability, does not dismiss or denounce the factor of guilt, and stays remarkably grounded in the human aspect of the story. The Constant Gardener ends on a note that is not only unapologetically polemical, but also unmistakably and beautifully romantic. In the end -- unlike with so many other rote thrillers -- the white characters rightfully and insightfully fail to save the day, and all we have left are our own bleeding hearts, newly beating.

Jef.Catapang