Too Big A Film

Mammoth (2009)
Directed by: Lukas Moodysson

Mammoth lives up with its title not only with the involvement of whales, mammoths, elephants, and galactic planetarium shows in the movie, but simply the plot itself and the effects of globalization (though too big a word, but we’re talking about mammoths here) shown in the film. It can be said that it is quite ambitious for a film to make such an attempt of correcting–with an obvious clear of the throat–large-scale issues like religion, race, prostitution, and the OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) phenomenon.

The plots aren’t exactly made to fit a puzzle, but rather to present the scope of it: a high-class American family who lives in Manhattan, a Filipino maid trying her very best to work and earn money for a house, two young boys who long for their mother, and a fledgling Thai prostitute. Their lives intertwine but their messages are quite loose, not that much compact to say something as concrete as a slab of a message. One can say the parallelism between the mother-child relationship is apparent: both Ellen (Michelle Williams) and Gloria (Marife Necesito) are working hard for their family (though in Gloria’s case, the husband is an absentee), but the movie insists on underlining the pity on Gloria and the hardship of OFWs to live in uncharted waters, the emphasis enough to sense that the movie aims to come clean, aims to show the world that it is for the proletariat, that American wives are failed housewives, though I sense this is but sheer double-faced shit of a movie who wants to tell something while telling the otherwise.

Truth be told, I think the story revolved on Gloria (preposterous enough to say that Gael Garcia-Bernal and Michelle Williams have, after all, secondary roles, though they still are vital to the story). Gloria linked the West and the East, taught her alaga Jackie the Filipino culture, and made possible the almost separate plot in the Philippines.

Then comes the affair between Leo (Gael Garcia-Bernal) and the Thai prostitute-slash-tour guide Cookie, who after spending a day teaching the right Thai words, led to an affair. It can be noted, though, that at first Leo didn’t want anything: he went to a club, met Cookie, gave her money and told her not to accept more clients that night. It seems charitable, yes, though one couldn’t help but suspect another attempt to come clean: oh, it tells, foreigners are not that bad. Though Leo still slept with Cookie in the end, he left his two watches and a $3000 ballpen (awesomely made of mammoth ivory–an astounding attempt for organic unity) as a token of gratitude and guilt.

The projection of third-world Asian countries as dollar-fantasizing maids and prostitutes are quite biting (reality bites, I know): even Gloria’s eldest son Salvador, despite being a ten-year old boy who solely wants the return of her mother, had made attempts to earn money (for an afternoon he helped a sari-sari store to weigh kilos of rice) and help his mother with the assumption that it would shorten her stay abroad.

Another angle, which some critics have noticed is that it dethrones marriage from its conventional seat: in the movie Leo, after a romantic fling with Cookie, went back to New York with a new sense of direction after signing his million-dollar contract, probably tinged with regret but nevertheless felt that his wife wouldn’t really care, that all is well if the family stays together, and of course, with Ellen’s line to wrap it all up, “oh, and I have to hire a new maid.” Really, life is easy on the other side of the world.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on June 8, 2010 at 9:41 pm, filed under Films. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Coincidences

A year ago a friend would tell me how he is indebted to watch films made by Wong Kar-Wai. Sure, he’s Chinese, but do they make good movies? When the stereotype of popular Chinese movies gets on your head with all those Bruce Lees and Jackie Chans kicking around as if high on opium, with women floating, men cartwheeling around and the crowd speaking in belligerent Chinese, it isn’t impossible to give up your hopes for a good Chinese movie.

In The Mood For Love is a movie that would spare me from the mockery cineastes might dart on my despicably “caged” tastes for movies (too Western are my tastes). It sure sounds like a Chow Yun-Fat film in the Forbidden Palace with eunuchs and mistresses serving tea, a predicament in the Emperor’s head which probably comes from the incense, but this type of romance is mature: it comes from the minimal dialogues, from the warm Chinese colors, from the images of cigarette smoke, the amorous nasals of the violin (download the violin MP3 here), the warmth of dimsum in a rainy evening, the silences, heels on wood, all shanghaied into an hour and a half of bliss and longing for… well, romance. The plot is thoroughly hushed, nothing sexual, everything just sensual (and I mean that in every sense of the word)–the arching spine of Mrs. Chan clinging on her silk Chinese dress, her regal hair-do; the sleek, business-mannered Mr. Chow with his hair on pomade and his suit without any crease even if it rained so hard.

The use of mirrors are masterful enough to show different angles in the screen: Mr. Chow’s pen writing martial arts serials, the serious expression on his face, the empty stares of Mrs. Chan, the dashing fuchsia blankets. Very rich in details, this movie offers you what most romantic films forget: that pictures/images say a lot more than the lines.

In a restaurant Mr. Chow asks Mrs. Chan for dinner. Though there still is the small talk, the movie takes us out of the conventional and instead concentrates on the chili paste, the pork sliced, the tea about to be drank. The cadence of their conversation becomes synchronized with the camera: a dramatic close-up for empty silences, a fast panning of the camera from the spine of Maggie to her facial expression when confronted with a rather piquant question, which could be, for instance, “where did you buy your bag?” when they both know this leads to somewhere else than the affairs of the bag’s whereabouts.

Though Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan are closely observing their formalities (usually they part with “I leave you in peace,” somewhat a Chinese expression for strangers), the movie suggests more than that. It tells not only the neighbor-friendly relationship of the two, but the other side of the camp: their absentee lovers, both suspiciously in Japan, probably undergoing the same things they’re doing.

I couldn’t resist but associate the movie with Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels for some reason I couldn’t express coherently: maybe the way Nick Joaquin writes it so rich with details, Wong Kar-Wai enacts with the same degree of expertise, with the stills and the sudden swoosh of the camera. This Wong Kar-Wai movie did its job of enlightening me from my “closed-door policy” regarding Chinese films.

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on May 22, 2010 at 4:55 am, filed under Films, Opinion. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Who is the thief?

The Bicycle Thief (1948) is my first black-and-white movie to finish (Jean Luc-Godard’s Alphaville I fell asleep), the reason I’d rather not disclose for it might enrage a throng of cineastes. Set in post-war Italy, this movie fronts a man whose bike was stolen in his first day of job hanging up posters. The bike is a strict requirement for his job, and with Italy at the mercy of its own failing post-war economy, there was no other job for him. It will render his family penniless, a future bleak, a pocket full of fuzz, a pride spat with shame.

It somewhat changed (deconstructed is somewhat a heavy word) my perception of a thief, of a murderer, a drug dealer. Thieves are thieves when caught, just as men are bad when caught. That’s just the way it fucking is, and this movie features it in classic black-and-white, with the wife donning the archetypal emotional weakness, who couldn’t hold her tears, who sold four layers of bedsheets for the bicycle; and the child, Bruno, a supporting protagonist (or arguable an anti-hero) to aid his father in the journey. At some point the child would even reprimand his father about things. It was he who even remembers vital information (the serial number, the brand) about the bike, and that made him part of the search, for.

At one scene near the bridge, the father Antonio slapped Bruno’s cheeks out of hopelessness for the search, for he “got on his nerves” already, and little Bruno cried. Antonio abandoned Bruno from the search and told him to stay at the same spot he left him; later on Antonio would hear within earshot an accident of a boy drowning and he would assume it was Bruno, for he was red with the pain on his cheeks, and red with hatred of knowing better than his father.

It can be said, too, that this has a big impact on the 1948 audience, for this is, after all, post-Mussolini. Life is unfair, after all, and Bruno’s eyes tells it with a stare of a rich boy who eats mozzarella on bread on a family table with people drinking bottles and bottles of wine, and Antonio saying, “to eat like that, you should earn a million a month.” Bruno stopped eating, laid the same mozzarella-on-bread he envied on his plate, for maybe it wasn’t for him, for maybe it costed his father a lot, but Antonio hurriedly added with guilt, “no, go on and eat.”

This entry was written by Kevin, posted on May 21, 2010 at 8:22 am, filed under Films and tagged 1948, Alphaville, black and white, Italy, Mussolini, review, The Bicycle Thief, thieves. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.