Aventurina King

The Chinese film Summer Palace raised quite a cloud of dust at the Cannes film festival.  It competed without the green light of the Chinese censorship bureau and back home, officials were quick to retaliate.  A group of correspondents reporting on the festival was sent back to China.  The director, Lou Ye, was banned from making films in the middle kingdom for five years.

All this news, of course, muffled the film in an aureole of hype.  It was yet another concrete manifestation of Chinese dictatorship and a particularly public one at that.

What was so threatening about the Summer Palace?  In Cannes, all the mediatic brouhaha suggested that the film was a romanced documentary of the 1989 Tian Anmen square massacre.

I saw the film last night at the Lincoln Center.  It is far from a feature on Tian Anmen.  Tian Anmen lasts ten minutes in the film, and those ten minutes are so confusing that both heads and tails of the event are buried in a marathon of fire, screams and impromptu gun shots.

I guess the montage accurately depicts the 1989 event from a Beida student's point of view: the exhilaration and then the panic of the unknown.  Summer Palace adeptly paints emotions and atmosphere--timid dance steps in a crowded club, cold evening rays caught on pirouetting feathers--but it doesn't do much more than that.  Throughout the whole movie, the camera is scotch-taped to a depressed (albeit gorgeous) college student.  We watch her run, cry and smoke imported cigarettes; most of the time we watch her make breathless love to the school's pretty boy.  They part ways.  He goes to Germany, she becomes more depressed.  He comes back, they meet, they don't like what little they see of each other and in the last shot, he is driving and purposefully ignores her slight figure on the side of the road. 

The skeletal story happens in the interstices of the film's self-indulgent visual orchestrations and the characters remain distant and incomprehensible throughout.

As an adolescent, I spent time yearning for the day I could shed off my childhood and emerge from that embarrassing shell, a confident adult.  Now, in frequent daydreams I grope back in time trying to find a nugget of my former self within my thoughts.  Why was I so fascinated by the feeling of sand slithering through my toes on days at the beach?  How is it I could squeeze a day's play out of a metal rod I found lying in some corner of a library?

Pan's Labyrinth is not a film for children.  It is rife with graphic violence--slit cheeks, gun-holed bodies.  But we experience this violence through the imaginative lens of a young girl, Ophelia, and learn to think the way she thinks, reinterpreting death as coronation and populating sadness with frightening and mesmerizing creatures.

1944's century Spain is in the throws of civil war.  Ophelia's mother overcome by necessity, and impregnated with Ophelia's brother, has followed her tyrannical husband to his army encampment.  Ophelia runs after the flight of a praying mantis through the earthy greens of the surrounding forest.  It leads her to an ancient labyrinth, and in the stone-reflected moonlight, a bark-featured faun bows before her.  She is the lost princess of the kingdom below, and to return to her father, the King, she has to prove her valiance through three tasks.

In the daylight of the adult world, the explosions of rebel gun-shots and grenades near the encampment as the husband kills and tortures with increasing viciousness.  At night, Ophelia is spurred onto her tasks by visits of the Faun.  She imagines ever more fantastical stories to make sense of the escalating violence.  Whether imagination can triumph of fate is a question that the movie leaves unanswered.

There is a sea of breasts in the first scene of The Curse.  Tens of petite female servants wake up and help each other tighten their sashes to the beat of the drums.  They apply rouge on their cheeks and then scurry off in the palace like mice in a test labyrinth.  Cut to the Empress, walking among the kitschy rainbow glass columns of the gilded corridors.  The sea of breasts presents her with her medicine.  She knows the Emperor has infused it with a poison that slowly cripples a human brain.  She drinks it.

Thus begins The Curse of the Golden Flower.  Huge stars implode under their gargantuan weight and director Zhang Yimou has been conquered by the increasing budget of his films.  With more money, more people have a vested interest and it's clear that The Curse is the product of compromise, from the anachronistic medieval male choir (a nod to the Da Vinci Code's box office?) to the featured pop star, Jay Chow.  Zhang Yimou didn't get to production in time and director Feng Xiaogang raked up the talent of set designer Tim Yip and action choreographer Yuan Heping for his competing film, The Banquet. 

The plot is Shakespeare with an incestuous twist: decadence, the rotting stench of human lust and sin packed within the treasure chest of the Tang dynasty palace.  The Empress copulates with the Emperor's first son for a whole three years. The Emperor knows, and his revenge slowly poisons the Empress.  But the Empress has two sons of her own, and the elder will help her take over the throne during the Chrysanthemum festival.  The sea of breasts ominously hovers over and destroys any credible drama.

The Fountain received a 50 on metacritic.

I can understand why. After all it's not a blockbuster, nor a crowd pleaser.  It's visually stunning--a kaleidoscope of colorful precipitations--but understanding requires a considerable amount of digging.

The basic storyline: a medical researcher is losing his wife to cancer and has to choose between spending her last moments looking for a cure, or looking after her.  The whole film is about her death, and his desperate fight against it.  Glum enough.

But instead of sucking the reel into its entropy, her death sends hundreds of thematic tentacles out to illuminate the viewer.  The first of these is the novel which the wife writes.  It tells of a Spanish conquistador who buries himself in the South American rain forest to find the tree of life, and with its power, save the queen.  The Christian theme of redemption is coated with Mayan mythology.  According to the Incas, the First Father sacrificed himself to give birth to the world, upon his death; his body became a tree, the tree of life.  He died to give birth to something bigger and more important.

The next tentacle or parallel world that the film haunts is the imagination of the medical researcher.  In it, he is a futuristic angel that sails through the golden clouds of a dying star.  His vessel is a glass ball, his earth, a patch of dry land with an old massive tree.  At times, he lightly climbs towards the venerable trunk and cuts off a piece of it to eat.

These worlds interweave and illuminate each other like chapters in a book.  They are attempting, with their multiplied scope, to wrap themselves around the idea of death and understand it.  Death means the birth of something else.  What that something else is remains to be discovered.

I saw Al Gore's documentary on global warming yesterday.

It was convincing enough to make me start recycling.  But I couldn't help feeling that all the crucial information was the background, and that the voice, the cinematography and the music it came packaged in was the foreground.  Every changing tone in Al Gore's voice felt calculated.  Early on in the documentary, there was a chuckle gliding under its silk: to communicate that this was going to be a fun, entertaining experience to the college students of his audience. 

Footage of Al Gore staring at his Mac like a Rodin slid in between the cliffhangers of his presentation for a good measure of relaxation.  These images spread out over the subtle although impending clockwork of the score. Tic Tac Tic Tac, time is passing and the earth is getting warmer.

Its true, the earth is getting warmer, the glaciers are melting, the hurricanes are becoming more frequent and more destructive... All this is true, but the Hollywood slapped onto these facts pushes the truth off pitch.

Nevertheless, recycling is on my to-do list.

My first article in the Asia Times.

"That's not really what they said."

I remember sitting in the back of film class laughing to myself at the inaccurate subtitles in French films.  Obviously, I thought to myself, the rest of the class has lost so much in translation.  But after three months of translating subtitles for Chinese films,  I discovered that, in fact, "gained in translation" is really the appropriate phrase. 

In the past few months, I learnt that subtitle translation must be inaccurate.  And that's specifically why Chinese-to-English script translators earn so much money (pay can vary anywhere from one month to a half a year's New York standard salary), because they are basically rewriting the whole movie. 

It doesn't matter whether the Western audience understands precisely what is going on in a Chinese movie scene.  What matters is that that scene has the same emotional impact on a Western audience as on its native Chinese audience.  Translating meaning requires skill.  Translating emotional impact requires something more.

Cannes is a peaceful quarter of Nice.  During most of the year, it harbors numerous retirees.  There is a cute outdoor market where portly ladies call you "mademoiselle" and hand you fresh goods with a stiff politeness. 

To the south of the quaint houses and capillary streets, is the center of the Cannes Festival, that is the Palais (housing the film market and theatres), its long row of five star hotels, and the even larger army of pricy restaurants.  Every year, the festival opens like an unhealed gash and lets in a flood of mini-skirt wearing fans and office-attired production company and press employees with yellow badges.  The stars make themselves scare,  short appearances on TV are interspersed amongst long stays in their Martinez Hotel.  Note it has bright blue shutters that make it look like a cancerous cottage house. 

The Hotel Martinez

On my first day in Cannes, I walked the red carpet, or rather a small piece of the red carpet.  Small technical details on red-carpeting seem appropriate here (and I'm only giving these out because I had no idea of what the red carpet was before going to Cannes).  The Cannes festival lasts ten days, every evening witnesses one to two film premieres.  Stars that attend these premieres, roll up in front of the entrance to the theatre and slowly, very slowly follow the red avenue up through the corridor of photojournalists and disappear in the theatre.  This happens twice a day, giving luxury clothes designer ample opportunities to advertise their summer collections.  Stars desperate to advertise their upcoming movie, but unable to get tickets to the prestigious premiere orchestra seats make their bombastic appearance on the carpet and quickly jump into a discreet van at the back of the theatre. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately (I don t really have the money to buy myself a Dior dress), I was part of the non-star crowd that gets tickets through their company and fill the balcony seats.  Black tie dress is still a requirement, but instead of strolling up the whole carpet, we are siphoned through a small path on the side of the photojournalist's corridor that then swerves to rejoin the red carpet at the very end.   Finding a place in the orchestra requires a tibetan monk's endurance, and by the time i'd finished climbing all those steps, I realized I was very hungry, and that the screen was no bigger than a TV set hanging in the distant black firmament. 

On Cannes parties: I went to two of them, one of which I hosted.  But I could get a pretty good feel of the other parties by reading the Hollywood Reporter's (a film business magazine) daily Cannes party page.  The party's concentration of stars per/square meter, the performances or extra-features and the food and drink.  Depending on these three criteria, the Hollywood Reporter awards parties from one to five martinis.  The Weinstein's party for example was awarded one martini, the decadent Short-bus party was awarded four I believe (or was it three).  Mostly parties are a ring within which film business moguls and minor roles exchange namecards with each other as fast as they can, or journalists and fans in disguise take pictures of themselves with the available stars.

Outside the parties awaits a ring of fans and invitation-less journalists.  Fans are probably the people I admire the most in Cannes.  Starting early in the morning, they camp out on the long avenue from the Martinez Hotel (where the star-guests step into their limousines) to the Palais' red carpet.  Around the crowded entrance of the Martinez, young children run around brandishing the autographs their cute smiles got them.  Adults stay glued to the separating bars like prisoners.  In front of the red carpet, other fans have brought step ladders to have a better view, paparazzis without a press badge climb up in the surrounding trees.   

The Palais