Saturday Fiction (Lan xin da Ju yuan)

 

Director Lou Ye

Lou Ye and Gong Li

Gong Li

Mark Chao, Lou Ye, and Gong Li

Lou Ye, Gong Li, and Pascal Greggory

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SATURDAY FICTION (Lan xin da Ju yuan)                       B+                                            China  (126 mi)  2019  d: Lou Ye

So mysterious, so full of secrets.

Lies!  Deceit!  Murder!  Betrayal!  Espionage!  What’s not to like about this murky and shadowy presentation of Shanghai in the lead-up to the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, specifically Shanghai’s “Isolated Island” period, with relatively neutral sanctuary corridors divided into an International Settlement and a French Concession, completely surrounded by Japanese-occupied territory following their 1937 invasion (Second Sino-Japanese War).  This film is drenched in tense mood and noirish atmosphere, appropriating the past with a contemporary sense, where nothing is as it appears, instead it’s a puzzle piece world of spies and counter spies, as China has become a treacherous wartime intelligence battlefield of camouflage and deceit for both the Allies and Axis Powers.  Taking three years to be screened in the United States after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival, seemingly lost in the pandemic, Ma Yingli’s screenplay is based on the novels Death of Shanghai by British-Chinese writer Hong Ying and Shanghai by Japanese writer Yokomitsu Riichi, creating a lurid picture of a city in flux that tries to present itself as going through normal activities, but underneath there’s a nefarious plan afoot to radically extend the theater of war into the Pacific, where the element of surprise is of utmost secrecy, a matter of national security, where lives are viewed as expendable in order to carry out this devious plan.  That is the backdrop for the return of iconic actress Jean Yu (Gong Li, once the darling of Chinese films in the 80’s and 90’s, best known for her creative-romantic relationship with Zhang Yimou in 8 films, or fellow Guangxi Film Studio graduate Chen Kaige in 3 films, providing yet another spellbinding performance) to Shanghai after an absence of many years, ostensibly to appear in the play Saturday Fiction directed by her former lover Tan Na (Mark Chao), who also plays the lead male role in the play, while the theatrical character resembles Marlene Dietrich, seen smoking while dressed like a man, wearing suspenders attached to trousers, featuring a dancing scene fueled by American jazz music that erupts into pure chaos on multiple occasions as reality intrudes, serving to remind audiences of the boundary between cinematic space and the real.  With captions counting down each day of the week of December 1, 1941, her Mata Hari-like goals are to free her ex-husband in prison (Zhang Songwen) and steal the shocking secret of the Japanese, dividing her time between the Lyceum theater and the luxurious Cathay Hotel in the French district (renamed the Peace Hotel after the war), which is entrenched in a hall of mirrors atmosphere, reflecting the paranoia and surveillance inherent in the setting, where every character in the hotel is hiding something, and no one can be fully trusted.  Somewhere in between she is accosted on the street by Bai Mei (Huang Xiangli), an aspiring actress, magazine reporter, and obsessed fan who has memorized all her lines in an attempt to ingratiate herself, craving to be allowed access to the rehearsals, and while viewed suspiciously, most likely a Nationalist (KMT) government agent with her own motives, whose leadership is simultaneously fending off a second front with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while fighting Japan, Jean Yu thinks she may be of some service due to the extreme difficulties of her tasks at hand, becoming essentially a living double in a relationship based on mutual exploitation.

This film is not presented in a conventional narrative style, but feels essentially abstract in nature, blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, with no musical score, shot in black and white by Zeng Jian, often with a shaky handheld camera, mostly in a darkened palette where humans are little more than shadows moving in the night, yet even in this subdued manner, Gong Li shines, as always, where something is driving her, bottled-up deep inside, yet her character remains as opaque as the film itself, like a hard-to-crack enigma.  “That woman is too mysterious,” a man says of her, “She’s like a box of secrets,” though near the end she ends up with a gun in her hand, fending off intruders, which is a completely different side of her, like seeing a gun-toting Ingrid Bergman in Ingrid Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942).  Existing somewhere between Lou Ye’s Tiananmen Square epic historical drama SUMMER PALACE (2006), which was banned in China, officially censoring the filmmaker for five years, and Ang Lee’s erotic WWII Shanghai spy thriller, Lust, Caution (Se, jie) (2007), this is a film built around international political intrigue, where swirling in the air are matters of extreme urgency, with a variety of languages spoken, including Mandarin, English, French, German, and Japanese, as characters come and go, often incoherently, creating an uncertain and suspended atmosphere, while at the same time recalling the complex historical moment that is the backdrop to the events of the film, yet what’s never in question is the infamous timeframe of the Pearl Harbor attack, or as President Roosevelt described it, “a date which will live in infamy.”  While that incident is never seen, it’s a precarious time in history, giving what we do see an undercurrent of gravity, as little is otherwise known about the dates that precede such a momentous moment in history, as that seems to be of special fascination for the director, where the people living in these times are completely unaware of what’s about to happen, instead they are simply living their lives as usual, following their daily routines and pursuing their goals, interweaving the destinies of different people during complex times, dividing time between the spaces of the theater and hotel, while also moving between on-stage and off-stage.  The film is entirely fictional, with a surprise twist at the end, where information is obtained through a mysterious use of hypnosis, with Jean Yu in yet another disguise, yet she refuses to pass along the information to her superiors, maintaining her allegiance to China, which needed outside military intervention to fend off the stranglehold of the Japanese military occupation.  What’s never in doubt is the star status of actress Gong Li, who is catered to like an international star, yet underneath the surface, with its myriad of changing characters, it’s hard to get a read, even between good and evil, as there are so many artificial façades, betrayals, mysteries, and enemies, where the only certainty is the deception in the air, with a supreme challenge of shooting on real locations, recreating the year 1941 in the heart of metropolitan Shanghai.  We are reminded that Stanley Kwan already made a love letter to the city of Shanghai in Everlasting Regret (Changhen ge) (2005), also shooting on real locations in contemporary times, but due to the rapidly modernized face of the city, most of the only remaining preserved historical sites were indoors.

What prevents this from being more greatly appreciated is the meandering style, where the fragmented editing can be jarring, subversively using a combination of long takes and jump cuts, mirroring the past and the present, freely moving between Jean Yu’s mysterious stage performance and her own dealings as a saboteur, as the secrets she holds are matched by the theatrical secrets she plays on stage, yet what’s remarkable is that the director always concerns himself with the contemporary post-socialist society in which he lives, offering a veiled critique underneath the historical theatricality.  According to the director notes, Lou has made a film “about the destinies of different people during a time of complex world crisis,” which speaks to the present as much as the past.  From the beginning, theater, politics, and human relations appear linked under an artificialized idea of performance that makes it difficult to achieve truth, as theater and espionage are shown as equivalent worlds of fiction, yet the filmmaker continually provides Yu’s female eyewitness perspective (rare in male-dominated spy movies), elevating the level of ambiguity from reality and performance, as well as history and fiction, with the Japanese becoming increasing violent and aggressive, especially towards the Chinese, their sworn adversaries, with Japanese imperialist forces oppressing the seemingly peaceful neutral Isolated Island of Shanghai, unleashing sweeping attacks at specified targets.  At the center is General Furuyama (Joe Odagiri), a target of the film’s spy operations, who is a bit of a blank slate, despite efforts to flesh out his character with a tragic backstory, yet extracting vital military communication codes from such a high ranking intelligence officer appears to be Yu’s real agenda, assisted by fellow Allied agent Saul Speyer (Tom Wlaschiha), disguised in the role of the Cathay Hotel’s manager as he welcomes Yu into the premises away from the prying eyes of paparazzi.  She is acting under the orders of French spymaster Frédéric Hubert (Pascal Greggory), who supervises Yu in her various missions, yet her intentions are anything but clear.  Constantly circling back to Tan Na’s theatrical production of Saturday Fiction, continually moving back and forth, intermingling the different perspectives, we are reminded that she remain as mysterious and inscrutable as possible, emphasizing that she is “unknowable,” a “woman of mystery,” always wondering what role she is playing now.  But once the wheels are set in motion, all hell breaks loose, feeling more like a noir-drenched dreamscape than any existing reality, as there are some beautifully staged, rain-drenched atmospheric moments, yet they are transformed into a John Woo-like hail of bullets, where it’s odd to see this much gunfire in an art film, though seeing Gong Li with a gun in her hand recalls the famous Jean-Luc Godard dictum, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” highlighting his belief that cinema requires only two core elements, sex and action, to create a compelling, audience-grabbing story.  Often associated with his French New Wave style, the premise suggests that complex plots are secondary to strong visual dynamics.  There’s a Nietzsche quote referenced in the film from Beyond Good and Evil, “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love,” accentuating themes of obsession and theatricality, while also blurring the lines between reality and performance in this spy thriller, yet other than Li’s character, and the various transformations she undergoes, nothing is individualized, instead there’s an everchanging fatalistic landscape of deceit and betrayal as the dominoes start falling, erupting in a shocking amount of blood and violence.   

Note

The titular Saturday Fiction, also known as Libailiu, was a popular and highly influential literary magazine in China from 1912 to 1949, which flourished in Shanghai, largely consisting of serialized novels that focused on entertainment, romance, and scandal, targeting the urban middle class with recreational, rather than political or educational, purposes, explaining in its inaugural issue, “On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, everyone is engaged in their professions; only on Saturday and Sunday do they have leisure time to read novels.”  At the time this film takes place, it had temporarily ceased publication during wartime, already long forgotten, dismissed as escapist, reactionary, and decadent, becoming a footnote in history, with filmmaker Lou Ye reviving its memory by utilizing it in an intricate play-within-a-play structure.

One Fine Morning (Un Beau Matin)

 

Writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve

Léa Seydoux with the director

ONE FINE MORNING (Un Beau Matin)                B+                                                           France  Great Britain  Germany  (112 mi)  2022  d: Mia Hansen-Løve

Premiering at Directors’ Fortnight at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Løve describes her films as “imagination and experience meeting,” as they tend to be about women who find themselves on a journey of discovery during pivotal moments in their lives, reflective of her own personal experience, a practice she has established throughout her career with films like All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonée) (2007), Goodbye First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse) (2011), Eden (2014), Things to Come (L'avenir) (2016), and Bergman Island (2021), where this story was written just before the death of her father, exploring the lasting impact of such an imprinting relationship.  Both of Hansen-Løve’s parents were philosophy professors, with her father also working as a translator, while she studied German and minored in philosophy at university, with this film establishing profound philosophical implications that mirror her own journey, yet she’s one of the few filmmakers to offer a deeply meditative portrait of humanity with such a light touch.  Producing gentle slice-of-life films, shot on 35mm by Denis Lenoir, who also shot her three previous films, this features a woman in her thirties who works as an official interpreter during a turning point in her life, having lost her husband years earlier, raising her young daughter alone in the bustling city of Paris, yet two life-changing events collide with a resounding impact, the declining health of her father, a longtime professor debilitated from a neurodegenerative disease, no longer able to care for himself (her father suffered from the same ailment), and romantic sparks from a lifelong friend who is unhappily stuck in a loveless marriage, offering sober reflections on loss and separation while simultaneously a new love develops.  Often blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, with a flair for subtle nuances and precise observation, Hansen-Løve’s films are built by establishing rhythms of life, using narrative strands to establish character, much like a short story writer, creating a naturalistic language of her own that is tender and poetic, designed to establish empathy, and can be uniquely transformative, bearing some resemblance to the meticulous detail of André Téchiné, a master technician whose elegant films are similarly actor-forward and delve into the complexities of human emotion and relationships.  There’s also a minimalist simplicity to this film that resembles the tender father-daughter relationship in Ozu’s Late Spring (Banshun) (1949), both offering a haunting glimpse of life without adding documentary detail.  In an interesting aside, the lead protagonist is a translator of the works of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss author who wrote in German, reading her published letters to Klaus Mann, one of Thomas Mann’s children, which is the subject of Mia Hansen-Løve’s next film project, something percolating for about fifteen years, developing an obsessional interest, turning into a made-for-TV miniseries (The Flame), though Hansen-Løve acknowledges she doesn’t even own a television.  This film was written with Léa Seydoux in mind, a generational French actress who typically exercises emotional restraint, which was evident early on in films like Christophe Honoré’s La Belle Personne (The Beautiful Person) (2008) and Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Épine (2010), before becoming a breakout international star after the success of Abdellatif Kechiche’s controversial Palme d’Or winning film Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2) (2013), the first to award the prize not only to the director but the two lead actresses as well.  Seydoux reported the male director’s style was overly abusive during the sex scenes, and repetitive, taking ten days to complete a lengthy sex scene, making her feel like a prostitute, so Hansen-Løve was very protective of her (Mia Hansen-Løve Denounces Hollywood's Sex Scenes), acknowledging she is an extremely shy actress, so she worked to establish a degree of safety and trust before shooting the kissing and graphic sex scenes, where it’s significant to point out that women filmmakers demonstrate a different awareness in this area, with Seydoux praising the director afterwards, insisting, “Mia has a remarkable blend of precision and sensitivity.”  While Hansen-Løve acknowledges she finds it much easier to direct women, making films exclusively with female protagonists since 2015, Seydoux has rewarded her with one of her finest performances, where the self-contained, raw emotion on display is the centerpiece of the film, allowing larger issues to fully penetrate on a deeper scale.   

Sandra Kienzler (Léa Seydoux in an unglamorous role wearing no makeup, with a short-cropped, Jean Seberg-style pixie haircut), lives with her young 8-year old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins), who still sneaks into her mother’s bed at night to snuggle, exhibiting a warm and affectionate relationship, where it’s clear they enjoy each other’s company, doing projects together, seen picking her up after school, while also making regular visits to grandparents, including the director’s own 98-year-old grandmother with all her mental faculties still intact, and despite things physically breaking down over time, she refuses to be viewed with pity, and her father Georg, played by an aging Pascal Greggory, who once appeared as an effusive talker and jealous love interest in Éric Rohmer’s PAULINE AT THE BEACH (1983).  Georg has an established reputation in academia as a renowned German literature and philosophy professor, a man who values “clarity and rigor,” but his health has taken a sharp turn for the worse, diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a creeping brain deterioration already affecting his ability to read and write, leaving him nearly blind, including symptoms of dementia, where he’s having a hard time living on his own, unable to complete his own thoughts, but Sandra patiently cares for him with a noticeable tenderness, often completing his sentences, but he’s already exhibiting extreme signs of forgetfulness, needing guidance for every mundane activity, like eating or going to the bathroom, while there’s a heartbreaking sequence where she has to instruct him how to open the door.  While in the park with Linn, she runs into an old friend of her husband, Clément, Melvil Poupaud, who once starred as a young heartthrob in Éric Rohmer’s A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été) (1996), having shed his boyishness yet still maintaining a middle-aged charm, as the director establishes a rhythm alternating between beautiful and sad moments, with Sandra going through a roller coaster ride of constantly shifting emotions.  Their troubled romance subverts the norm, becoming a messy and unvarnished affair filled with unpleasant twists and turns, resembling our own troublesome lives, where there’s always an unwelcome or unexpected intrusion.  His job as a chemical cosmologist takes him to the ends of the earth, having recently returned from Antarctica, studying extraterrestrial meteorite dust left around the globe, (5200 tons of meteorite dust falls to Earth every year), where the extended time away from home has put a strain on his marriage, yet they manage to joke around over who kissed the other first, igniting a torrid love affair, her own avenue of escape from the brutal reality of her father’s disease, though he yo-yo’s back and forth dividing his time between the two women, unable to break away from his wife and young son.  Adding to the distress, Sandra’s mother Françoise (Nicole Garcia), who divorced Georg ages ago but helps care for him, reveals that he can no longer live on his own and that they need to find a nursing home, a deeply depressing prospect, as it’s difficult to spend any time in these dreary facilities because patient care is not prioritized, so they are basically left on their own.  With no other options, however, he moves around through various facilities in an arduous odyssey searching for the right one, exploring public versus private, discovering beds are not readily available, revealing the shortcomings of available services, while at the same time, they have to pack up his belongings and try to figure out what to do with them, which is an emotionally exhaustive process.  This may be the most true-to-life of any of Hansen-Løve’s films, as it’s grounded in such distressing and emotionally frustrating experiences that just about everyone has to deal with, as parents grow old and infirmed, where this is about having compassion for old age, while also learning to deal with deadly diseases inevitably leading to tragic endings.  This film hides none of that, told in measured tones fluctuating between the summer and winter seasons, exposing the toll it takes on family members, ONE FINE MORNING (2022) | Official Clip YouTube (49 seconds), yet paring this traumatic experience with the Madame Bovary consequences of adultery, while reserving all moral judgement, makes this feel distinctly French.  There are joyous moments as well, like when Sandra and Clément take a break from having nonstop sex in her cloistered apartment and visit an art museum, where she blends in with Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie (Seydoux appears in a Louis Vuitton ad in the same location), or the affectionately drawn mother-daughter moment when Sandra asks Linn for a lick of her ice cream and then steals the whole cone, or the hilarious Christmas Eve family reenactment of the arrival of Santa and his reindeer to the delight of giggling children who are discreetly tucked away and listening with their ears to the door.

Hansen-Løve is known for compassionate character studies, and here they are vibrantly created, filled with personality and charm, especially Françoise, an aging 60’s radical who still thrives on disruptive and often illegal civil disobedience protests with Extinction Rebellion, adding a jolt to her personality, though Sandra at one point indicates she’s not particularly trustworthy, all of which gives her a distinctive edge.  Sandra and Clément can be exhilarating together, featuring scintillating dialogue and naturalistic sex scenes, but then they’re bogged down by issues with his family, who we never see, with the camera remaining focused upon Sandra, who is caught between hope and disappointment, staying fixated on her phone waiting for a response from him, One Fine Morning Movie Clip - I Love You (2023) YouTube (1:02).  Her job as a French-German-English interpreter takes her into formal diplomatic sessions taking place in closed-door parliamentary meetings, her profession isn’t reliant upon one culture or language, embracing a larger world sensibility, so there’s a curious cinematic reference when we see Sandra in a theater watching Brigitte Helm in the Hanns Schwarz German silent drama THE WONDERFUL LIES OF NINA PETROVNA (1929, which allows her to be seen in a silent setting.  Yet one of the most dramatically compelling sequences happens at a Memorial tribute commemorating the Normandy D-Day landing (D-Day: The Allies Invade Europe), a chilling historical reminder, and while the scene is short and compact, probably just a minute or so of screen time, the power of sacrifice still resonates with its hair-raising implications.  At the nursing home, Georg talks constantly about his girlfriend Leila (Fejria Deliba), seen only briefly, and while she visits regularly, he can be seen wandering the halls searching for her, as she’s the only one he actually remembers, having forgotten everybody else, including his daughter, who is completely devoted to him.  Sandra finds a notebook her father used to keep track of his declining health, which reminds him of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an astonishing and somewhat surreal revelation, feeling trapped in the illness, like being caught in an abyss where there is no beginning and no end.  She also identifies a rough manuscript for the memoirs he always intended to write, which she reveals to her family during a Christmas dinner, noting the title of one of the notebooks was written in German, Um einem schönen Morgen, which translates to One Fine Morning, with this film serving as a transmitted completion of that unwritten work.  Included in the director’s submitted ballot for the once per decade 2012 BFI Sight and Sound poll for greatest films, Mia Hansen-Løve, listed again on her 2022 ballot, (All voters - Sight and Sound), she includes Maurice Pialat’s The House in the Woods (La Maison des Bois) (1971), an expansive six-hour film made for French television, yet it unfolds with a literary style, using a recurring musical theme that plays at the end of each of the 7 chapter headings.  She employs a similar device here, where a recurring musical theme feels like pages turning in a book, Jan Johansson - Liksom en herdinna (Official Audio) - YouTube (2:57), borrowing this theme from Bergman’s THE TOUCH (1971), also featuring an adulterous affair, with suggestions that music carries with it the memories of those associated with it.  In similar fashion, there’s a beautiful moment where Sandra, looking at her father’s extensive library collection with complete editions of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kafka, his most prized possessions that took a lifetime to accumulate (actually filming her own father’s books), confesses “I feel closer to him around his books than when I’m around him.”  This association lingers well after death, as these memories are our way of holding onto those we cherish.  Perhaps the most heartbreaking moment occurs when she brings her father a CD player, allowing him to listen to his favorite music, yet when she plays his most beloved piece, Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 20 in A, D.959 - 2. Andantino YouTube (7:17), he recognizes it instantly, but quickly needs her to shut it off, as it’s too painful for him, written with the composer’s knowledge that his death was imminent, playing again in her head during the bus ride home.  It’s a tragic reveal, as he’s already lost his ability to read, which he valued more than anything, where all that’s left is a further descent into forgetfulness.  Charged with understated filmmaking, the subtle yet poignant power of this film offers clear insight into death and aging, yet it’s never overwrought or melodramatic, interjecting humor in the most improbable moments, offering a surprising amount of clarity that few other films can offer, making beautiful use of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in an eye-opening panoramic view of Paris from the dome lookout, ending with a film-defining song, Bill Fay - Love Will Remain (Official Audio) - YouTube (2:24).