The White Meadows (Keshtzar haye sepid)

THE WHITE MEADOWS (Keshtzar haye sepid)           B                  

Iran  (93 mi)  2010  d:  Mohammad Rasoulof

Mohammad Rasoulof was arrested in March 2010 along with fellow Iranian director Jafar Panahi, which was part of the government’s reaction to reports from inside Iran that called the June 2009 election of President Ahmadinejad a fraud, effectively calling it a dictatorship where artists in Iran may no longer speak freely.  Rasoulof was released shortly afterwards, but Janafi was held for nearly three months.  After seeing this film, playing as part of the Iranian Fest at the Film Center, a story largely told in code where the metaphoric imagery is designed to obscure its intent, one would think Iran has replaced Siberia as the cruelest place on earth.  The story unfolds through a mysterious series of events all taking place on the white islands of Lake Urmia in the northwestern part of Iran close to Azerbaijan, the largest lake in the Middle East and the third largest saltwater lake in the world.  Reminiscent of Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk’s THE ISLE (2000), which is easily one of the most gorgeously photographed films ever seen on the surface, but one of the cruelest and most extreme under the surface, this film similarly features one of the most hypnotic settings, where the ravishing beauty hides some of the most grotesque human behavior on the planet, an example of the kind of backwards thinking that still exists in remote areas in Iran that rely on an archaic, yet rigidly dogmatic rule of law.

Like a modern day Charon, a boatman who transports the dead across the River Styx, Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) is an old man of the sea who rows his boat across the white saltwater seas of this desolate purgatory using a small glass vial to collect the tears from the small clusters of inhabitants who live on these white islands, where custom has it their tears will turn to pearls.  He gains the trust of the people by bearing witness to their heartbreaking stories, always as a silent observer, never intervening in their affairs.  When the villagers are unhappy with the gods who will not bring them rain, they sacrifice the most beautiful young maiden in a marriage to the sea, whose tears Rahmat collects before they carry her through a purifying ring of fire and set her adrift on a wooden raft to be carried out to sea.  When a young boy swims out to join her, the villagers collectively stone him, leaving his body brutally injured where Rahmat collects his tears as he progressively weakens.  Rahmat literally throws salt on his wounds, which only makes the pain worse.  On another island, the elders are unhappy with a painter who paints the sea red instead of blue, where they bury him up to his neck for Rahmat to collect his tears before bathing him in the saltwater, then instruct him to climb a ladder and keep staring at the sun, hoping this will cure the problem.  When it doesn’t they pour monkey urine in his eyes.  When that fails, they send the painter and the stoned victim to a desolate island to be prisoners of a deranged warden who otherwise lives there in utter solitude.  When the stoning victim eventually dies, he is sunk to the bottom of the sea with a floating device that serves as his headstone, where we see a graveyard of headstones of those buried at sea.        

Ebrahim Ghafouri is the cinematographer capturing the breathtakingly poetic visual imagery, all forming a kind of backwards mythology of harsh cruelty.  Perhaps the cruelest irony is saved for the film’s editor, who happens to be Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s leading directors who has made only a single feature film following his censure after the banning of CRIMSON GOLD (2003) in Iran, a film that upset the Iranian religious hierarchy because it featured a suicide, police routinely rounding up innocent civilians on the street, petty thievery, the drinking of alcohol, also prostitution and homelessness in Tehran.  There’s even slang, and the use of the word “dude” spoken by an Iranian in the script.  For this crime, he’s been unable to secure adequate funding to make more films, so in order to work he’s forced to take a secondary role as editor of this film.  Interesting that both filmmakers were subsequently arrested, where only the future will tell if either filmmaker will ever make another film in Iran.     

American Mary

AMERICAN MARY               D+   

Canada  (100 mi)  2012  d:  Jen and Sylvia Soska         Official site

Doesn’t everybody just love a good horror movie?  Well, that’s not exactly what this is, as instead it’s kind of a tongue-in-cheek stab at torture porn, a subgenre of one of the most hideously gruesome forms of sadistic horror, and one that seems to have little if any redeeming value.  Apparently some find this sort of thing entertaining, however, as evidenced by Eli Roth’s two HOSTEL (2005, 2007) movies, the first grossing ten times the initial budget, and the highly profitable SAW (2004) franchise, where the original was made for $1.2 million but grossed over $100 million dollars worldwide, churning out nearly one movie a year ever since, where the latest, SAW VII (2010), is a 3D effort.  While torture porn appeals to the basest form of crude and grotesque behavior, featuring explicit scenes of sadistic torture, dismemberment, and mutilation, where the gory action sequences are presented as freak-show sensationalism, the effects of watching this stuff is largely unknown, though one would think the mentally unstable should stay away.  Some films, like Rob Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005), initially thrown into the mix, probably don’t belong, as they pay homage to earlier 70’s era drive-in, grindhouse B-movies, representative of the golden age of exploitation, schlock films filled with buckets of blood and gore, where the melodramatic hysteria is met with equally over-the-top visualizations, all made for next to nothing, usually for satiric effect.  The Kuchar Brothers, for instance, were masters of the low budget aesthetic, working alongside 60’s underground legends Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, which eventually spawned John Waters and his outsiderist cult films of the 70’s, a director who expressed an equal amount of joy and influence from highbrow “art” films and sleazy exploitation films.  But the father of modern horror pictures is Dario Argento, who interestingly began his career as a screenwriter teamed up with Bernardo Bertolucci and Sergio Leone for the spaghetti western ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) before venturing out on his own, where his claim to fame is giallo films combining high quality, art film production values with nudity, gore, and shocking horror, not the least of which might feature throat slashings or decapitations along with unusually stylish camerawork.  It’s the unflinching content of high production slasher or splatter films that establishes a connection to torture porn, where only snuff films remain an untapped exploitive resource. 

Unbelievably, even a snuff film was presented for the first time at the Cannes Film festival this year, according to Scott Roxborough and Patrick Brzeski from The Hollywood Reporter (Cannes: Ultra-Violence Peppers Competition Selection - The ...). 

Pushing the envelope furthest is Atrocity Exhibition, showing in the Short Film corner, which its director Ebadur Rahman has described as “Cannes’ first snuff film.” Says Rahman: “Cannes has been showing fake ‘extreme content’ for ages: Any film by Tarantino, Takeshi Miike, or Kim Ki Duk is at least as violent as mine. What’s different about Atrocity Exhibition is, I didn’t fake it.” Asked whether viewers might have to look away during screenings, Rahman says: “I would hope so.”

Not only has the SAW franchise legitimized torture porn, providing a large audience and a new avenue into horror films, always a lucrative movie business,  but South Korean filmmakers Park Chan-wook’s OLD BOY (2003) winning the Jury Prize at Cannes (a Tarantino favorite) and Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta (2012) winning the Best Film at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, all but give the genre the artistic seal of approval.  Not so fast, some may scream, as some parted company with Park Chan-wook’s next offering, SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE (2005), where Cinema Scope and freelance writer Michael Sicinski writes an open letter of protest to New York Times critic Manohla Dargis in condemnation of the film (see reviews dated 9/15, 2005 Toronto International Film Festival), calling it “a repugnant piece of shit.”  This kind of outrage is a natural extension of the product, as it’s meant to be revolting, just as Mary Harron’s over-the-top use of surreal horror in American Psycho (2000), something this slightly resembles, is meant to be outrageous, which brings us to Canada’s the Soska sisters, Sylvia and Jen, interviewed here by The Guardian’s Steve Rose (Guardian: Soska Sisters):    

Horror was a natural direction for the Soskas. As kids, they'd lurk in the horror section of the video store looking at the backs of the boxes, they say. "Mom eventually caved in and let us watch Poltergeist when we were 10," says Sylvia. "We were like, 'We can handle it mom.' Then bedtime came and we were scared… fucking… shitless. And my mother did something that would forever change the way we look at horror movies. She sat Jen and me down and explained what we had actually seen. She explained the director, the actors, the prosthetics, the sets, everything. And she told us how these were very talented artists who collaborated with the intention of scaring the audience. We were like, 'Wait a minute. It can be your job to scare people for a living?'"

The eventual film-making course didn't go well, though. They became so disillusioned that their graduation project was a fake trailer, partly inspired by Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse and partly by the film school's list of things not to put in a graduation movie. "Necrophilia, bestiality, vomiting… we put in everything we could," says Jen. "Half the audience walked out, and the other half was laughing so hard you couldn't hear the intentionally disgusting language."

Horror tends to be an exclusively all-male domain, where women are used as fetishistic objects to scare out of their wits, from Fay Wray in KING KONG (1933) to Jamie Lee Curtis in HALLOWEEN (1978), where scantily clad girls are seen staying in a secluded cabin in the woods from I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) to THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2011), but there are notable exceptions, such as Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (1999) where the roles are reversed.  AMERICAN MARY will not be for everyone, as it’s graphically disturbing throughout, but it is a horror film with a uniquely female perspective.  Much like Tarantino, the Soska sisters not only have an admiration for the horror genre, but a certain reverence for its form, where the film is basically a series of horror set pieces filled with twisted and strangely unlikable characters.  Seen almost entirely through the impressionable eyes of Katharine Isabelle as Mary (talk about a working actress, IMDb lists 10 movies made after this one with another four either filming or in post production), an attractive young medical student who is having trouble making ends meet, painting a much rosier picture to her Hungarian grandmother on the phone, but despite getting harassed by an over-controlling professor, even though she’s the best and most promising student in class, she needs to make money fast.  So she answers an ad for what she thinks is a dancer at a strip club, but due to her meticulously detailed resumé that indicates she’s in medical school, the sleazy owner Billy (Antonio Cupo) pays $5000 cash up front and sucks her into an under-the-table, highly specialized offer of stitching up mutilated bodies that have been pulverized and left for dead from vicious beatings.  Afterwards, she immediately starts receiving calls from the Diane Arbus world of the bizarre requesting “extreme body modification.” While Mary is a professed innocent to this looming underworld of desired body disfigurement and mutilation, where despite the unpleasantness associated with the often gruesome task, the lucrative offers are extremely generous, making it difficult to turn down. 

The film’s saving grace is the exaggerated tone throughout, something of a satirical spoof, where Mary has an absurdly comic dialogue with many of her patients, some of whom feel more like a childlike collection of dolls or specimens than human beings, where it’s as if her subconscious has a voice through her exotic bodywork, giving her a titillating sense of empowerment.  Dressed in skimpy outfits, stalkings and stilleto’s, she’s always dressed for the male idealization, as if Xena the Warrior Princess has suddenly been transformed into someone’s idea of a male sexual fantasy, where working out of her own apartment, she becomes an underground cult sensation, dropping out of medical school and maintaining a thriving practice, where she quickly picks up the affectionate online nickname “Bloody Mary.”  The Soska sisters themselves appear onscreen as a pair of batshit crazy sisters that surgically wish to exchange arms with one another, so there are obviously other issues at play here, all of them disturbing, including an underlying thread throughout of nonchalant sadism, becoming an anatomically precise horror show of disfigurement.  Delving into SAW territory, Mary even holds her professor captive (as it was after all he who crossed the line), as she experiments with particularly difficult procedures on him just for practice, leaving him something of a whimpering human stump.  Where the film does tread new ground, expressed with demented relish, is portraying a highly distinctive, feminist sense of controlling one’s own body image while also adding, just for good measure, a righteous sense of feminist anger and revenge, going where no one has gone before, so to speak, as it has the desired effect the sisters are looking for, where much of what we see is pretty disgusting.  The heavily artistic production design might actually be called outlaw biker fantasy porn, as biker guys get off on drinking heavily, naked girls, and beating the crap out of people, and here they get to watch their fantasy sweetheart stitch their mangled victims back together again, where every last detail is explicitly prohibited outlaw behavior.  While the underlying comic element may be subversive, there were no laughs heard in the theater, as the experience is meant to be nauseating and revolting.  This may be highly appealing for deviants of all kinds, or people who enjoy watching sadistic behavior for their theatrical entertainment, but there remains an open question whether this graphically grotesque material adds anything significant to the world of cinema.  

Pieta (2012)

PIETA             D+                  

South Korea  (104 mi)  2012  d:  Kim Ki-duk

Senselessly appalling and repugnant throughout, this pathetically dreary film features overly brutal, utterly despicable human behavior from start to finish, yet it stupefying won the Venice Film Festival, which makes one wonder what else was in competition?  Actually, this was not the initial choice, as while the speakers were at the podium announcing their awards, they initially awarded Best Film to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012).  However, the festivities were interrupted from a live telecast when a festival official whispered something into the ear of the speaker, where Venice rules only allow any given film a maximum of two major awards, and The Master had already been issued Best Director and Best Actor, awarded jointly to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix.  So after a brief but embarrassing delay, the Jury, headed by American director Michael Mann, handed out the Golden Lion Best Film to Kim Ki-duk’s PIETA ("Venice Film Festival Jury Yanks Top Prize from 'The Master' (Exclusive)").  Other overlooked films at the fest included the latest from Harmony Korine, Takeshi Kitano, Brilliante Mendoza, also Marco Bellochio’s equally dreadful Dormant Beauty (Bella addormentata) (2012), Ulrich Seidl’s downbeat Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube) (2012), Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012), which had the critics thoroughly confused ("Terrence Malick's To The Wonder confounds Venice press"), but also the near brilliant 2012 Top Ten List #7 Something in the Air (Après mai), Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical account of the political slide after May ’68.  Apparently the Italians held little interest in the French student movement, although in March of ’68 Italian students shut down the University of Rome for 12 days during an anti-war protest.  Kim Ki-duk is one of the few directors to receive more praise abroad on the festival circuit than he does at home, as he’s never been embraced by Korean critics or audiences, and was attacked ferociously in the press by film critic Tony Rayns in a November/December 2004 Film Comment article entitled Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk, claiming, among other assertions, that he’s a purveyor of gratuitous violence and misogyny purely for shock and that he “shamelessly plagiarizes,” something Western filmmakers quite commonly do.  Largely self-taught, from a lower class background with no formal training in film, Kim usually focuses on marginalized characters leading morally questionable lives that seem to exist in a universe all their own. 

What apparently captured the attention of the festival was the completely uncompromising aspect of the film, where at least on the surface, the film presents an artificially exaggerated view of a descent into a mercilessly brutal world that only exists in the world of movies, displaying a sadistically crude human quality that has come to be known as torture porn, where the audience is treated to endlessly repetitive sequences of sad and pathetic humans at the bottom of the food chain who are subjected to ruthless cruelty, where Lee Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a collector for underworld loan sharks, and if the money is not there he savagely breaks bones, feeding arms and limbs into industrial machines, or cracking them himself, turning his victims into cripples in order to collect the insurance money needed to repay their debt, subjecting each individual to excruciating pain and a lifetime of dependency on others.  This is shown in such a dispassionate manner, including all the desperate pleading followed by endless screams, that one quickly grows disgusted with having to sit through this nonsense.  The picture of Lee Kang-do is a pathetic wretch of a man, someone with no scruples whatsoever, that trolls the bottom of this Hellish existence by terrorizing weak and thoroughly moronic creatures who would idiotically stoop to borrow money from such an inhumane brute that prowls the neighborhood inflicting nothing but pain.  Out of nowhere, an older woman, Cho Min-soo, arrives at his door claiming to be his long-lost mother, apologizing profusely for abandoning him in childhood.  At first he finds it ridiculous and throws her out, calling her an “Evil bitch!”  But when she persists, he treats her with the same callous disregard he shows everybody else, viciously raping her on the spot.  Despite her prolonged agonizing moans of despair, she doesn’t leave him. 

Somehow this new mother in his life becomes an Angel of Forgiveness, pathetically sobbing her apologies, absolving him of all crimes, cleaning his house, buying him food, and regularly cooking for him.  Her presence suddenly alters his mindset, where he worries about her and begins to depend upon her kindness.  But she is more of an Avenging Angel, a kind of Satan in disguise complete with her own agenda, which sets him in an existential turmoil.  Due to the relentless monotony of neverending brutality, the film bears a similarity to Mel Gibson’s dreadful THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), as both are mindless and nauseating films that are little more than sadistic displays of human torture.  The problem here is the exaggerated tone, where every emotion is so over the top, where characters yell and scream at one another all the time, constantly bickering, calling each other names, making threats, carrying out their threats, screaming in pain, where the film is one long, continuously procrastinated revenge saga, ugly, grotesque, and mercilessly brutal.  Lee Kang-do comes to personify the lowest form of human existence, evil incarnate.  Some have suggested he’s supposed to represent the ruthlessness of capitalism, a heartless economic system that doesn’t care who it destroys, that hears no sympathetic pleas, but simply bulldozes and lays waste to people’s lives in a momentary frenzy of violent, catastrophic destruction, and then moves on to the next person.  Others find meaning in the title, where the Pietà is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture by Michelangelo, a subject in Christian art depicting an all-forgiving Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, the first of a number of Michelangelo sculptures with the same theme.  Anyone who’s seen Kim’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER…AND SPRING (2003), where the director himself plays the part of a monk, knows his familiarity with Buddhism and reincarnation, where this overly simplistic parable of evil incarnate seems to suggest that even the lowliest, most despised and hateful creatures on earth have redeeming qualities, where their lives can earn redemption, if not in this life, then the next, much of it underscored by the Kyrie eliason (Lord, have mercy) section of a Catholic mass.  The quietly poetic qualities expressed in the final few moments of the film offer a peaceful visual transcendence, completely at odds with the gruesome violence that comes before, where death chants in a state of perpetual darkness bring the film to a close. 

Breath (Soom)

BREATH (Soom)                                       C                    

South Korea  (84 mi)  2007  d:  Kim Ki-duk 

Apparently the Kim Ki-duk controversy is still brewing, as one of the scathing accusations made by film critic Tony Rayns in the November/December 2004 issue of Film Comment is that Kim “shamelessly plagiarizes,” calling Kim’s 3-IRON (2004) a rip-off of Tsai Ming-liang’s VIVE L’AMOUR (1994).  Now nearly four years after the film opened in Korea and at Cannes, and three years after it premiered at the U.S. Palm Springs  and Portland film festivals, this movie is finally getting a release in Chicago, and the film also has the Tsai Ming-liang imprint (for Christ’s sake, the message here is that Tsai Ming-liang’s films are starkly original), namely THE HOLE (1998) or again in THE WAYWARD CLOUD (2005), where Tsai inexplicably makes a quick exit from the monotonous, dreary reality depicted onscreen with a jolt of color and musical extravaganza, breaking out into the nostalgia-tinged artifice of song, which is a complete shock to the system.  Also doing a riff on one of his own themes, namely the changing seasons, Kim mixes the two together in what initially feels like a satire on Korean cheerfulness, where that ever present artificial smile is ingrained into the culture.  But he goes nowhere with this idea, so by the end of the film it really does feel like he simply stole the idea.  This film is structured around a loveless and near wordless marriage (only the husband speaks), set inside a spaciously modernized apartment that probably didn’t come cheap, where artistically inclined Yeon (Park Ji-a) creates sculpture objects while her boring, completely unimaginative yet overbearing husband, Ha Jung-woo, barks out orders and commands that she simply ignores.  His authority is passively undermined by her mute response.  Instead, she’s fascinated by the TV news reports about a convict on death row that has attempted suicide twice by jabbing a sharp object into his throat, but has recovered each time, effectively extending his date of execution.  The husband callously turns off the TV and tells her to find something better to do.         

Yeon finds herself inexplicably grabbing a taxi cab heading for the prison asking to visit the condemned killer Jin Jang, none other than Chang Chen, or 14-year old Xiao Si’r from Edward Yang’s autobiographical A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), now seen some twenty years later sitting on death row, also playing a mute character due to the throat injury (evidently the Taiwanese actor speaks no Korean).  While she has no business whatsoever getting in, after an initial rejection, the warden, played by the director sitting in an enclosed booth with cameras following her every move, mysteriously allows the visit, including every known violation of prison security, where she speaks plainly and openly to this prisoner, recounting a personal story of her youth, returning home to her husband afterwards who is stunned and perplexed, thinking all along that his wife never left the house.  But she gets a taste for it, buying herself a bright yellow spring dress and hops back in a cab for the prison, this time plastering the walls with a colorful décor, adding flowers and turning the room into a spring paradise, placing a boom box on the table and sings some karaoke style ode to spring, which couldn’t be more preposterous, as she has a terrible voice.  After another frank discussion where she reveals some more deeply personal thoughts, she leaves a picture of herself as a little girl for the prisoner, which of course the other prisoners fight over once he’s back in his cell, which he shares with 3 others, none of them ever uttering a single word.    

At some point, the artifice of the musical number joins the script as well, becoming blatantly absurd with only rare moments of humor.  You’d think the film was heading somewhere, as the song’s artificial cheerfulness does seem to be a statement about the nation’s identity, as this is how Koreans continually express themselves, this is the face they show even during troublesome times, and both Yeon and the condemned man actually share a life of drudgery, yet both remain mute on the subject.  There’s no evidence however that this is what Kim had in mind, as Yeon develops a blasé attitude about her family and casually returns for summer karaoke, where the summer beach décor is especially outrageous, especially when the prisoner puts on the giant-sized plastic dark glasses, but by now the storyline is following an all too predictable pattern, as she returns for fall, and yes even winter – no surprise.  What gets ridiculous is the empty-headed idea that somehow this kind of bone-headed therapy is actually helpful to Yeon’s marriage.  In other words, the director starts taking this outlandish idea seriously.  Well all one can say is thud, as there goes all interest and plausibility, as all that’s left is watching the director lose his grip over his own material.  What makes Tsai Ming-liang’s material work so well is his complete lack of pretentiousness, even in scenes that are plastered in highly decorative artifice or absurd humor, as there’s an authenticity underneath that simply doesn’t allow pretense.  His films express genuine human concerns, where the drama can take any number of directions, but there’s a universality that’s unmistakable.  Not so here, as Kim’s storyline plods on, growing predictably repetitive and ever more pretentious, losing every ounce of credibility earned by the originality of that first musical sequence.  What was initially amusing and clever, perhaps still holding up the second time, but repeated four times, as if a marriage can be saved by the spin cycle, couldn’t be more ludicrous.  Chang Chen and Park Ji-a are both excellent, and their unusual performances are to be admired, but there isn’t an ounce of believability here, as the director simply became enamored with his own idea and undermines it, leaving behind a movie that’s pretty to look at, but not much use to anyone.