Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 35
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
Asian Cinema Matters!
World culture as we know it would be a shadow of itself without Asian cinema, source of both the world’s most profound art films and its most mind-blowing pulp. The West awakens every now and then to its power and influence — the muscular force of Japanese film, the high-flying action of Hong Kong epics, the meditative wisdom of Iranian and Taiwanese meta-dramas, the sumptuous humanism of China’s Fifth Generation, the lean and ironic ethnography coming from developing nations like Mongolia, Nepal, Lebanon and Malaysia. Fortunately, in a streaming world we have almost infinite options, and no excuse not to get intimate with the cultural experience of what’s now referred to as “Majority World” peoples.
239/365: A Touch of Zen (King Hu, 1971, Hong Kong) (Amazon Prime)
Indisputably the Gone with the Wind of Mao-era wuxia epics, King Hu’s never-forgotten landmark was the first wallop of Chinese genre mayhem many Westerners ever saw, and it won a prize at Cannes. Shot in Taiwan, before Mao’s ban of all fun on the mainland was lifted, this three-hour-plus intrigue-athon begins when an impossibly cool mystery woman (Hsu Feng) moves into a haunted fort, attracting the interest of a local artist/buffoon (Shih Jun) but also bringing in her wake a torrent of internecine conflict, masquerading blindmen, warrior badasses, and a powerful eunuch’s sword-flashing minions. Hu didn’t invent wuxia hijinks here (he did that earlier with Come Drink with Me and Dragon Gate Inn), but the trampolining brio at work was the hi-test in the engine of the Hong Kong assault of the ’80s and ’90s. (The bamboo-grove battle was stolen outright by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and didn’t originally require digital touch-ups.) It’s far from a breathless or economical film; the old-school yarn and serene action editing can be, at such length, almost meditative. Settle in, feel your breathing, and get saturated.
240/365: A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
A four-hour monster, rarely seen until recently at its full length (if seen at all), this Taiwanese masterpiece is one of those films that defines itself as a truth-telling spokes-work for a entire cultural state of youthful being. It’s the 1961 Taipei of Yang’s youth, a lingering tropical paradise beset by more than a decade of unwanted Chinese citizens immigrating by the millions from the mainland’s civil war and subsequent Communist government. The resulting hothouse, perpetuated by the Kuomintang martial law that wasn’t lifted until 1987, created an uneasy social landscape of disposable citizens, bureaucratic malevolence and generational combat; territorial high school gangs waged war in the nightened middle-class streets, between tank convoy runs. The canvas envelopes 20 or more characters — adolescent or preadolescent gang members, hangers-on, siblings and bystanders, parents, school administrators — but eventually we hone in on the habitually defiant 15-year-old Si’r (Chen Chang), and his complex crisis of allegiance and understanding. Taiwan being Taiwan, virtually everything suggests fundamental dislocations: the residue of the Japanese (“Eight years of war with Japan,” Si’r’s mother gripes, “now we live in a Japanese house, and have to listen to Japanese music.”), the ubiquitous American pop (the film’s title is a line from Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”), the random passing of Army tanks, the frequent blackouts, the Americanized gang monikers (Honey, Threads, Sex Bomb, Underpants, etc.), the giant ice blocks seen long before we understand what they’re for (suspected radicals are made to sit on them by state interrogators while writing their confessions), the movie being shot in the studio next to the school that never actually seems to get underway, and (almost) infinitely on. We only discover at the end that the film is a bolero, rising silently to a chilling moment of climactic violence, inspired from a true incident.
241/365: Mother (Bong Joon-ho, 2009, South Korea) (Vudu)
The Oscar-winner Parasite is terrif, but this might be Bong’s best film, seething with his signature brand of narrative risk, razor-wire satiric invention, and genuine pathos. Ostensibly a murder mystery, the film places all of its bets on a lower-class, middle-aged mom (Kim Hye-ja), whose semi-retarded twentysomething son Do-joon (Won Bin) gets himself arrested for the bludgeon murder of a local girl. We slowly realize, as Kim’s diminutive mother relentlessly tries to disprove her son’s guilt and find the real murderer, resorting to flat-out crime, suicidal risk and then much worse, that this overlooked woman (nameless, except for “mom”) is another kind of animal altogether: a peasant herbalist who still cuts her son’s food up for him, who is as determined and fearless as a superhero, and who is also, it becomes clear, absolutely insane. In no time at all (just about the time she unwittingly causes a car wreck in mid-street), Do-joon’s mother becomes an unforgettable cinematic creation, a mysterious and even fearsome agent of rectitude so vividly crafted you remember her as you might a very real and crazy aunt. As usual with Bong, the modern South Korea she wends her way through is an unbalanced character all its own — the police are Keystone Kop fools and sadists (a recurring Bong motif), the social rituals (meals, funerals, even investigated crime scenes) are hair-raising debacles, the society itself is sick with secrets. Bong doesn’t control our reactions to his film — there are gruesome hunks of any Bong film that may seem fizzily funny to many viewers, and vice versa, and you never know how you’ll react.
242/365: Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000, Thailand) (Criterion Channel)
This first film by the great Thai mystery master tries not to be a real film at all, fiction or doc: Weerasethakul concocts a build-a-story exquisite corpse project out of a documentary road trip, allowing Thai citizens of all shapes and ages — an old woman, an acting troupe, deaf teenagers, schoolchildren, field workers — to build on a narrative that begins, randomly enough, with a crippled boy, his teacher, and the “mysterious object” that rolls out from under her skirt. Soon, it’s clear that the crazy story itself — aliens, magic swords, witch tigers — is just a pretense, a chance at meeting, traveling, observing, filmmaking. Weerasethakul’s unique wabi-sabi sensibility, as meta as it is embraceably humane, is here in utero, and his film is a brand-new thing, porous and undefined, gorgeously open to accident and whim.
243/365: The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956, Japan) (Criterion Channel, Archive.org)
Ichikawa sort of signaled the beginning of the Japanese New Wave with films that dug unflinchingly into the then-recent history of genocidal massacre, cannibalism and kamikaze destruction, but this masterpiece harbors something of a broken heart — its portrait of a close-knit Japanese platoon, singing their mournful variation on “There’s No Place Like Home” while scrambling away from combat during the war’s last days and eventually awaiting repatriation as the British attack, borders on the idyllic. But the experience is convincing and genuinely felt, and subject to a dire trajectory: the unit’s beloved lute player Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) is sent into the mountains to persuade a stubborn group of soldiers to surrender, just as the bombs fall. Mizushima’s compatriots fear the guileless private is dead, but Mizushima survives, by masquerading as a Buddhist monk in his return journey through the massive WWII killing fields, changing in the process, surrendering his old life and eventually committing himself to burying the uncountable dead. Consider: a decade after Hiroshima, a Japanese filmmaker makes the most heartbreaking anti-war film of all time. Little about it seems ground-breaking today — it is simply a cudgel on your tear ducts, and arguably the first war film made anywhere that suggests the war finishes nothing, and indeed creates traumas and responsibilities without end.
244/365: Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997, Iran ) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Though this acclaimed Iranian masterwork’s plot is spare and short-short-story simple, the film delivers the electric charge of an elemental experience, with filmmaking so rigorous, so intensely focused, so unsentimental, that it can shock you awake from our universal movie-consuming torpor. Kiarostami won top prize at Cannes, a fact that earned him no friends at home, since his movie centers on the Islamic taboo of suicide. Still, for a good half-hour you don’t know what the film’s about — we watch from the passenger seat as a weathered, middle-class man (Homayoun Ershadi) rides in a Range Rover through the Teheran outlands (a landscape that gives you the impression that Iran is one huge, desolate construction site), searching for a man to help him. There are many laborers, but the man is picky, eventually selecting a few (a soldier, a Afghan seminarian, etc.) and tersely explaining his offer: for a sizable payment, he requires only that the man come to the predetermined spot on a hill where he has already dug a grave and, if he is dead from suicide, bury him. If he lives, pull him out by his hand. Since it is a taboo, the man has difficulty enlisting aid, having at times to glumly cajole his applicants like an exhausted real estate broker. He never divulges why he must kill himself, and that chill mystery haunts the film. In the process, we get to know that man, that Range Rover, and that patiently observed landscape, like we know few in movies. It’s not a film that controls how you feel; rather, it asks you to share and understand a human reality, and that is what, in terms of international cinema, separates the men from the boys. The cast is 100% non-pro, and dazzlingly genuine, although they never actually met each other — it was always Kiarostami, behind the camera, in the other seat. The textures of the film, down to its immaculate camerawork, long suspenseful traveling shots and bare-bones editing, are neo-realism defined and exploded, made with the hand-to-mouth budget, transcendental heart and keen eye of a serious artist.
245/365: A Time of Drunken Horses (Bahman Ghobdi, 2000, Kurdistan) (Fandor, Kanopy)
The planet’s lone major Kurdish filmmaker, Ghobadi has also been the most satirical and least self-conscious of the big Iranian New Wave voices; suggestively, every one of his films, starting here, have found American theatrical release. His films bristles with appalling realism and grim truth in one of the world’s most troubled landscapes, and among film artists of state-less nations Ghobadi may be preeminent because his films have been both accessible and uncompromising. This debut threw down the gauntlet for the filmmaker’s merciless sense of trial, as in ultra-realist fashion his camera follows a family of orphaned siblings high in the snowy peaks of the Zagros foothills who try everything from smuggling to selling themselves, in order to raise money to save a sickly dwarf brother. Thanks to Sharia law and the debt to Italian neo-realism, Iranian movies have always been thick with juvenile tribulation, but this film jacked the idea onto a Biblical level, while still maintaining a terrifying documentary integrity. You never doubt this didn’t happen, and happens still.
*
Other Asian-cinema essentials:
Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964, Japan) (Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Amazon Prime)
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003, Taiwan) (YouTube)
Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000, Japan) (Netflix, Amazon Prime)
Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015, Thailand) (Google Play, Amazon Prime)
Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948, Japan) (Criterion Channel, Archive.org, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000, Iran) (FacetsEdge, YouTube)
What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001, Taiwan) (YouTube)
Pather Panchali / Aparajito / World of Apu (Satyajit Ray, 1955–59, India) (Vudu)
2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2004, Hong Kong) (Amazon Prime)
Ajami (Scander Copti & Yaron Shani, 2009, Israel/Palestine) (Vudu, YouTube)
Grave of the Fireflies (Isao Takahata, 1988, Japan) (Hulu)
West Beirut (Ziad Doueiri, 1998, Lebanon) (YouTube)
Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsaio-hsien, 1987, Taiwan) (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953, Japan) (Vudu)
A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhang-ke, 2013, China) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
About Elly (Asghar Farhadi, 2009, Iran) (Kanopy, Vudu, YouTube)
Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954, Japan) (Amazon Prime, Criterion Channel)
Tears of the Black Tiger (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000, Thailand) (Tubi, FlixFling, Amazon Prime)
Kilometre Zero (Hiner Saleem, 2005, Kurdistan) (Amazon Prime)
The Terrorizers (Edward Yang, 1986, Taiwan) (Asian Crush, Kanopy, Amazon Prime, Mubi)
The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang Yimou, 1992, China) (Vudu, iTunes)
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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