Aventurina King

I went to the library today to see Jia Zhanke's "The World".  The librarian eclipsed herself for ten minutes, then came back, shrugged her shoulders and stared into her computer screen: "It was stolen".  Ok.  So i watched Jia Zhanke's "Uknown Pleasures".  It had to be a film from Jia Zhanke. I have recently become addicted to chinese movies, and particlarly, to 6th generation chinese film maker's movies (Ye Lou's Su Zhou River is a must).

"Unknown Pleasures" is not a film for action movie buffs.  It's the type of slow, seemingly simple film that you decide to switch off a boring half hour after you put it on.  But just as you are going to do that, a scene suddenly tingles that emotive gland in you and gets nostalgia, regret,and even anticipation flowing.  So I continued watching untill the end. 

For the first half hour of the film, unbearably long still shots project banal scenes in the two male protagonists lives.  They are jobless and bored 19 year olds, so these scenes show them dragging their feet around the cement-less streets of the chinese slums, sitting like couch potatoes smoking through whole packs of cigarettes or just standing, their expressionless faces staring into the dump's distance.

Then the women come in. The shots continue at their Tsai Ming Liang-esque pace (Tsai Ming Liang is a Taiwanese film director renouned for his snail paced movies), but the protagonists become enlivened by their surge of love (or lust more probably).  We learn more about them.  Bin Bin becomes an object of sympathy as he is rejected by the army because of his hepatitis and later by his girlfriend because of his inexpressiveness.  His companion pursues a tacky clothed singer, and brushes up against her gun-equipped boyfriend. The movie left me hanging.  It cuts off just as the characters set off on their first dramatic adventure (a bank robbery).

So I've been watching a few movies recently. Some oldies--François Truffaut's 400 blows, Jules et Jim and Farhenheit 451 (although i can't say i managed to get through the last one without lapsing into an irrelative conversation with my Truffaut dvd-party goer)--some newbies which I will discuss more in detail. 
Layer Cake: great!  Narrates a hellish week in a British drug dealer's life (swearing with a British accent almost beats swearing in French!) as he one by one breaks all his rules of good dealer conduct.  He teams up with other men in crisp white shirts under dark suits to buy millions worth of stolen merchandise from a hysterical cocaine addict.   Murder ensues as our protagonist fights off the wrath of a swarm of powerful dealers which all claim the stolen goods.   The film adds just the right amount of humor to lighten the darkness of its subject matter.  The protagonist (he never reveals his name) gets in deeper and deeper trouble with a comical excitement at becoming a real criminal.  He gets out of his trouble with a wit that never fails to surprise and wins over even my sympathy (I have a drug phobia).  It's too bad that by the end of the film, the comic takes over and there is nothing left but black humor and caricature as the happy drug dealers settle down into a golf course equipped palace life amid cigar smoke and vintage champagne.  The last scene makes me ask myself whether the whole movie was just a spoof of a drug dealer's existence.
Sideways:  Not that funny!  I'd say witty bordering on comic.  Some self deprecating remarks such as "I am an excrement wiped tissue surging in a sea of waste" from the failed writer (followed by "I didn't even write that, Bukowsky did") squeeze the laughter out, but they are rare.  The rest of the interjections deal with how failed the failed writer's life is.  I waited for the whole movie wishing he would finally pull himself together, get through his two year past divorce and plunge into a new relationship.  Only the last 10 seconds finally rewarded me with an answer.  His best friend Jack, a uber horny actor who drags him on a crazy sex rampage accross California just before his marriage is just so so.  Rather revolting than comic, his impersonations of diabetes medecine commercials didn't seduce me.  But, even though the movie progressively laps from the half hearted comic of two men blundering through vineyards on one of those life changing rides, into the depression of the failed writer, it does pose some interesting questions about marriage (although it probably doesn't realize it) and the value of emotion versus sex.  Why is it that marriage, the ceremony which finally makes sex between two people a lawful act is seen in today's society as a castrating event? The week before marriage comprises the bachelor's party and countless jokes about the sorry condition of the chained husband: "you're getting married, my condoleances" as the barman says to Jack.  Why then do people get married if they see it as a funeral, the funeral of their life of pleasure?  And if emotions motivate men to get married, as they do in the movie when Jack cries and admits that he is nothing without his wife, then are they opposed to sex?  Are sex and love that separate?  The film doesn't answer these questions, and I probably won't, even after some thinking.

Two things induced me to read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.  The first is a fact:  The Da Vinci Code has remained on the bestseller lists since its publication in March 2003.  As further confirmation, over the past two years, the familiar crimson cover has appeared persistently around me--hiding the face of a Columbia security guard, on a tea table in a nursing home in Miami, above a punk's spiky wrist in the London tube.

The second is my circle's reaction to The Da Vinci Code: "That was the worst book I ever read!" "Dan Brown must have a vocabulary of like, 200 words maximum."  This intrigued me. How bad of a book can acquire so large a readership that it practically becomes a canon in the thriller category?  My spring break gave me the chance to find out.

 

The prologue of The Da Vinci Code plunges us into the midst of murder.  (What better way is there to yank the reader's attention than with technical descriptions of blood and pain?)  The man being murdered is Jacques Sauniere, “renowned curator” of the Louvre Museum.  His thoughts (italicized streaks in the fabric of macabre prose) reveal he is the sole possessor of the truth.  His death means the truth will be lost forever.

The murderer shoots the curator in the stomach, enabling him to survive for 15 minutes while “his stomach acids seep into his chest cavity slowly poisoning him from within”.  Sauniere uses these last moments to write a coded message to his grand daughter Sophie, a cryptologist, clueing her in on the truth and telling her to find Robert Langdon.

Back in the Paris Ritz hotel, at 12:32 am, Robert Langdon, “renowned” professor in symbology at Harvard university is awakened and escorted to the murder scene by the French police.  The bull-like police chief, Bezuch Fache, believes that Sauniere’s coded message incriminates Langdon.  Sauniere’s granddaughter arrives on the scene to orchestrate her own and Langdon’s escape from the museum and the police.  For the rest of the 500 pages (the equivalent of three days and nights in the fiction), the outlawed cryptologist and symbologist scurry across Paris and England from clue to clue towards the truth.

The French police, Britain’s Scotland yard and Interpol are not alone pursuing the couple.  The murderer, almost immediately identified as an albino servant of the devout catholic sect Opus Dei, also wants the truth.

What is the truth?  Eventually, this question is answered, but not before The Da Vinci Code dangles the answer like a donkey’s carrot, just out of the reader’s reach, for the first half of the novel.

And the trick works.  The reader follows the carrot; irresistibly flips through the pages.  Moreover, as the pages turn, more carrots appear, more teasing unanswered questions—what did Sophie see her grandfather do that fatal night that was so scandalous? How does Opus Dei plan to acquire infinite power?  What does Leonardo Da Vinci have to do with all this?  Fortunately, all these carrots lead in the same direction.  They are distributed individually at about 100 page intervals and each of the answers drives the reader closer to the end of treasure hunt.

It is a pity these carrots, these answers constitute the only driving force of The Da Vinci Code.  The characters are lifeless, dully simple.  Langdon mostly acts as he would at Harvard, he lectures.  His monologues on feminine symbols, the life of Leonardo DaVinci, the Holy Grail run on uninterrupted.  Sophie (unlike the Harvard undergraduates who make off-color jokes during Langdon’s classes) listens in admiring silence.  Aside from that she muses on her grandfather’s life and cries over his death. 

The prose is trite and flowery.  The spooky settings are almost always badly lit and include walls “evaporating into darkness”.  Their description is complemented by irrelevant paragraphs taken out of touristic guides.  In the middle of Langdon and Sophie’s breathless escape from the Louvre, we learn that the Mona Lisa is “a mere thirty-one inches by twenty-one inches—smaller even than the posters of her sold in the Louvre”.

The suspense and curiosity aroused by unanswered questions is all that keeps the reader going.  Even then, it is a precarious process.  Like jam spread too thin, the answers are scattered so parsimoniously throughout the work that the reader almost tires of being led on and starts to gives up on finding the answer.  But just when the paperback is about to be shut and tossed, it drops one of its secrets and sparks the hope of finding other answers.

The suspense creating mechanism of the novel is painfully bare to see.  The three plots—Langdon and Sophie’s quest, the police’s pursuit, Opus Dei’s advance—are interwoven so as to cut each other off strategically.  Just when an answer is about to be revealed, that is.  This is becomes a leightmotif and almost all of the chapters end in an anticlimax, a teasing sentence: “Well lieutenant, the agent said, walking to the computer and launching a piece of software.  It’s the strangest thing …” “he whispered. “this cryptex, I think I know what it is…”.

It works, keeps the reader reading.  The Da Vinci Code is a functional thriller, it fulfills the single requirement of a page-turner.  But it is like a functional clock.  The beauty of its miraculous functioning is tainted when its back pops open and reveals its internal machinery.