Wind Traces (Restos de viento)

Director Jimena Montemayor

WIND TRACES (Restos de viento)              B                                            

Mexico (95 mi)            2017  d:  Jimena Montemayor

One of the best examples of child acting seen all year, reminiscent of Jim Sheridan’s IN AMERICA (2002), where in each the common denominator is an indescribable death in the family, allowing greater space for these children to evolve.  Ana (Paulina Gil), the older child, is usually placed in charge of younger brother Daniel (Diego Aguilar), while their mother Carmen, the remarkable Dolores Fonzi from PAULINA (2015), languishes in her own world of confusion and pain, unable to comprehend life without her husband who dies mysteriously before the film begins.  While little backstory is ever provided, the film is set in the 70’s, largely so that it is a period of time audiences will universally view as the past, as times were different then.  When their mother oversleeps, the kids are late for school, so she just allows them to stay home, initially hoping they can do something fun together, but it’s clear their mother is a bit unsettled, never really getting it together, where she drinks too much and continually pops pills to keep her going, wandering in her own confusion.  As a result of her aloofness, these adorable kids are on their own, free to pursue whatever they please, much of it spent in their imaginations.  In one of the first remarkable sequences, which reappears in different variations, Daniel can’t sleep, envisioning some apparition in the house that resembles a mix of Native American mythology, an antlered head, a face mask, with arms that look like tree branches.  What’s perhaps most intriguing is the brief inner narration by Daniel that accompanies the vision, as he seems to be reading from a school book about the history of Navajo Indians, who believed in a blend of the spiritual and natural worlds, that everything on earth is alive and their relative, worshipping the winds, the sun, and water.  While the Navajo are also cautious about death, they rarely talk about it.  Similarly, Carmen initially tells her children that their father is not really gone, that he’ll be coming back.  Daniel’s vision seems to be the returning spirit of his father. 

While the writer/director is Mexican, shot in and around Mexico City, Fonzi is an Argentine actress, which contributes to her feeling of detachment and being out of place.  According to the director, if she was Mexican, there would be family intervention, as relatives would come look after the mother and children during their loss.  But in this film, beautifully shot by María Secco, the family appears to be isolated, where the only friend the kids have is another young boy without a father, as they are viewed and treated as outcasts by other children, who have a rude way of handling any signs of vulnerability.  The two kids are priceless throughout, showing changing emotions and a remarkable assuredness, while each exhibits their own unique personality, yet the relationship with their mother couldn’t be closer, as she heaps hugs and affection on them both, perhaps loving them too much.  In this way she resembles Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), both films about a woman in trouble, where each seems to love the idea of being with children, allowing themselves an abandoned, carefree spirit, as it’s the world of adults that gives them problems, retreating into some dark place, succumbing to the depths of depression.  Some of the stand-out scenes involve flashbacks, showing Carmen in slow motion walking into a bar, dressed elegantly, holding a cigarette in a proudly distinct fashion, becoming a fascinating sexual force to reckon with, looking around the room, knowing she commands attention.  Fonzi’s outstanding screen presence is overshadowed by the downbeat nature of the film, where her character struggles with daily mental lapses, finding herself out of sorts, not really being there for her children, who for the most part must fend for themselves.  Because of this less than heroic view, she is not really recognized in awards consideration, yet she provides one of the most devastating performances of the year. 

There are repeated trips to the bar, as Carmen can’t really keep herself away, always drinking heavily, but none more precious than when her kids help her get dressed, picking out a necklace, brushing her hair, just hovering over her with an intense purpose, knowing she’s about to leave them alone again.  One of the saddest scenes is watching Carmen sing karaoke, already reeling from alcohol, choosing a lush Mexican ballad about remorse, being lost in time, a stand-in for her own deteriorating psychological state, where minutes and hours slip by without notice, lost in a haze, where an uncle does try to intervene, witnessing her rambling and incoherent thoughts, bringing her home safely.  Among the more powerful moments of the film are the extended wordless scenes, filled with a kind of personalized, cherished intimacy as viewers recognize how they are deeply impacted by sorrow and loss, with the kids showing greater resilience, more capable of expressing their feelings than their mother, who is completely overwhelmed, tragically haunted and continually stuck in a temporary paralysis.  Carmen retains her dignity throughout, however, despite her internalized wounds, and transfers enormous pride to her children.  Ana is the one that recognizes the full extent of her mother’s addiction, emptying liquor bottles, awakening her mother when Daniel thinks she might be dead, where viewers have enormous empathy for these children, who show such heart in the way they look after each other.  Innocence is a predominate theme throughout, much of it seen through a child’s eyes, traipsing through forests, connecting to wind spirits, where they are sensitive enough to see and hear things that others miss, like the Navajo spirit world, which builds to a beautiful climax, accentuated by inventive music by Emiliano Motta, where the mother seems to snap them out of their reverie, bringing them back to their senses, finding, at least for a moment, some restorative balance in their lives. 

On the Beach at Night Alone (Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja)

Director Hong Sang-soo

 

ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE (Bamui haebyun-eoseo honja)        C+                  

South Korea  Germany  (101 mi)  2017  d:  Hong Sang-soo  

On the beach at night alone,

As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,

As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

—Walt Whitman, brief excerpt from Leaves of Grass, 1855, On the Beach at Night Alone by Walt Whitman | Poetry Foundation

While the entire film community at large is in near unanimous approval of this film, praising it to the hilt, with some even claiming it may be the director’s best film, don’t believe them.  Having now seen eleven of this director’s films, this is the first real misfire, becoming the most superficial of all his films, suggesting he’s lost some of his perspective, at least for this film.  While overtly autobiographical, though hardly identical with reality, this film utilizes actress Kim Min-hee to the point of over-saturation in an overtly transparent attempt to regain her stature, which apparently worked, winning the Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival, the first award ever handed out to a female actress in a Hong Sang-soo film, as she is in nearly every shot of the film, with all the attention of the script paid to her throughout.  Going through recognizably similar personal travails that she’s had to endure in real life, caught up in a scandalous adultery affair with this director, who left his wife to be with Kim, which left a stain on her career, though here Hong continually puts her up on a pedestal, viewed as an acclaimed celebrity, where she’s grown used to hearing people sing her praises and literally worship the ground she walks on, as one after another genuflects at the altar of this actress.  One quickly grows tired of every secondary character in the film thinking exclusively of her, where the director, apparently, expects viewers to adore her as he does, which feels like manipulative overkill, actually cheapening the film and dulling the senses.  In true Hong fashion, the film is well-crafted, told in two parts, where each mirrors the other, but is discernibly thin, mostly revealing what we already know, offering precious little insight, where they come across as two people who think only of themselves.  If there is one common feeling that pervades throughout the film, it is overpraise, and neither the director nor his lead actress actually come to terms with this inflated view of themselves, as instead it’s written into the narrative.  People that place themselves so far above others aren’t really that interesting, as they deludedly view themselves in a substantially different manner than anyone else, thinking they and they alone are worth thinking and talking about, becoming overly egocentric, actually minimizing the influence of others, or ignoring them altogether.  As if he’s above the fray, Hong misses an opportunity for true self-awareness, which have been a mainstay of his films since the beginning, making this feel more like a travesty. 

A wintry air provides the natural setting of the latest Hong film, opening with a sublime and distinctly heavenly passage (the opening phrase) from the Adagio movement (17:28) of one of Schubert’s breathtakingly beautiful final works, Schubert / Rostropovich / Taneyev Quartet, 1963: Quintet in C major, Op. posth. 163 - Complete YouTube (53:27), as the film opens in Hamburg, Germany of all places, a beautiful city situated on a gorgeous waterfront.  Young-hee (Kim Min-hee) plays a famous actress who is taking a break from all the publicity in Seoul swirling around her illicit affair with a married filmmaker that ended badly, perhaps getting as far away from the scandal as possible, visiting an older friend who lives there, Jee-young (Seo Young-hwa), who loves the natural beauty of the town, as the two smoke off the balcony, take walks, or visit bookstores, where a terminally ill man strangely describes his own piano compositions, “These are simple pieces, but if you go deeper, they become more complicated,” which could easily be a reference to Hong’s own film career as well.  As they walk around the city, Young-hee is continually waiting for the possibility of an expected friend to meet them, though nothing is certain.  As Young-hee explains it, “He knows where I am.”  Having lived with a man for ten years, suggesting “men all want the same thing,” Jee prefers living alone, free from compromise, or interruption, rebuffing her younger friend’s offer to dreamily live together in this European city, though Young-hee clearly wants to see her mystery friend, but is instead content to openly share her romantic regrets with Jee, still stung by heartbreak, acknowledging she’s still in love with this man, but confused by the disconcerting state she’s in, wondering “Where’s love?  It’s not even visible.  You need to see it in order to search for it.”  Eventually having dinner in the home of a local couple (that incudes Mark Peranson, editor of Cinema Scope magazine), before the night is done, they find their way to the beach, where the scene fades to black before beginning again, listing new cast credits.  Each half is shot by a different cinematographer (Kim Hyung-koo and Park Hong-yeol, respectively).  When the lights come on, Young-hee is all alone in a darkened movie theater, a familiar place in Hong films, an often indistinguishable world where reality and fantasy intersect.  As she walks out the theater door, she begins to reconnect with old friends who happily welcome her back to South Korea, now staying at a beachfront hotel overlooking the sea in the coastal city of Gangneung, which we are reminded is revered for being the most livable city in the country, according to some poll (exactly the same with Hamburg). 

The reintegration process moves slowly, first meeting one friend for coffee, who has to abruptly leave before another arrives, leaving her a moment to smoke outside, singing a mournful song to herself before embracing a flower in bloom.  This coffee collective eventually meets for the first of two dinner sequences, where we see Young-hee drunkenly lash out at others, suggesting they don’t know what they’re talking about, calling all men idiots, then exasperatingly raising her voice to condemn those at the table as people who aren’t even “qualified to love,” literally dismissing them from her stratosphere, before turning to the woman beside her and offering her a kiss.  After a short embrace, the two women depart, leaving the others embarrassingly caught off-guard and a bit befuddled.  The next day we find Young-hee dressed in her familiar overcoat, sleeping on the beach, with the pounding waves seen over her shoulder.  A man wakes her up, claiming he was worried about her, and asks her to come warm-up with his friends, as they’ve built a fire.  They are members of a film crew that happen to be in town for a film shoot, meeting up later for a second dinner sequence with the director present, who, it turns out, is Young-hee’s romantically connected director, Sang-won (Moon Sung-Keun), but she is so inebriated she tells him he looks like a grandpa.  He, on the other hand, becomes obsessed with telling her how “pretty” she is, where all his cohorts at the table agree with his assessment, behaving like puppets, affirming everything he says like a religious mantra, actually mocking the sincerity of his thoughts.  Continually shining the light on this actress, the director offers nothing but platitudes, heaping praise upon her that she seems more than delighted to absorb.  When he breaks down, obviously still not over their relationship, it only affirms the hold she still has on him, reading a passage from a book that he wrote for her, recalling how it felt when it was happening.  While the two are clearly in their own little world, the others at the table are ignored and treated as if they’re not “qualified” to be there, but they are, presumably observing this private moment which is unlike any other that they’ve witnessed, offering a rare window into the vulnerability of their lives.  Returning to the earlier scene at the beach with Young-hee asleep in her overcoat, it is viewed from a different perspective this time around.  After she is awakened, there is a long pan to the right where the film crew sits around the fire, returning back to the place where Young-hee was lying but she’s no longer there, as if it was all a mirage, before continuing the pan to the left where at the far edge of the screen we see her being carried off on the back of some strange man, fading to black, with a final credit sequence playing in utter silence.