Old Yorker

  • Three Times

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zuìhǎo de shíguāng

    Hou Hsiao-Hsien (2005)

    Three Times is constructed as its title suggests, comprising three chronologically distinct stories.  They are linked by the same pair of actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen, who play, respectively, the female and male lead in each story.  ‘A Time for Love’ is set in 1966, largely in the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung; ‘A Time for Freedom’ in 1911, in the city known as Daitotei during the Japanese rule of Taiwan; ‘A Time for Youth’ in 2005, in Taipei.  Leo Robson’s piece about Hou Hsiao-Hsien in the Times Literary Supplement (18 September 2015), triggered by the BFI’s Hou retrospective, observes a decline in the films of this greatly acclaimed Taiwanese director in the course of the last fifteen years, and describes Three Times as taking ‘the model of comparative analysis devised in Good Men, Good Women [1995] a further step towards rigidity and formal pastiche’.  Even if Robson is right that this is not his best, I found, as a newcomer to Hou’s work, that the structure of Three Times provided a helpful, not too demanding introduction to it.

    For the same reason, I was grateful to see, as a curtain-raiser to Three Times, La Belle Epoque (Huangjin zhi Xian), Hou’s six-minute contribution to the 2011 Taiwanese anthology film, 10+10.  In La Belle Epoque, a mother (Mei Fang) passes a series of family heirlooms to her daughter (Shu Qi again), briefly explaining the provenance of each object.  The lighting of the two women’s faces and their handling of the heirlooms are beautiful.  The film begins and ends with shots of a huge tree; the mother, the daughter and other family members gather under the shadow of the tree, which is much older than any of them, for a concluding group photograph.  The image obviously but eloquently confirms the theme – the passing from one generation to the next.  Around two minutes of the film are given over to a black-and-white interlude:  a family – a man, a woman, a girl and a boy – are shown in transit, carrying suitcases; then we see the making of a ring, one of the heirlooms that the mother passed to her daughter.  Perhaps I misunderstood Hou’s intentions but this interlude seemed to me superfluous.

    The key location in ‘A Time for Love’ is a snooker hall.   With the Platters’ ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ playing on the soundtrack, it was hard – seeing the film when I did – to clear my head of 45 Years and the time sequence of ‘A Time for Love’ is disorienting too, at least until you realise the order of scenes  isn’t chronological.  The central relationship is between Chen (Chang Chen), a young man starting national military service, and May (Shu Qi), one of the snooker-hall hostesses – young women who keep the tables in order and play snooker or billiards with the clientele.  Hou’s minute observation of the doors and tables of the snooker-hall is both boring and absorbing (and there’s synergy between the two feelings).  His camera is mesmerised in its contemplation of the shape of the bodies of May and other hostesses as they bend over a snooker table to clean it or to play a shot.  When Chen, on leave from military service, pays another visit to the hall, he discovers that May has left her job there and Kaohsiung.  The film develops a more urgent dynamic in its description of his persistent efforts to track her down.  When he finally succeeds, the romantic payoff is limited but affecting precisely because it’s limited:  the couple share a meal in a noodle bar and an umbrella in pouring rain, as they wait for the bus that will take Chen back to his military base.  At the very end of the piece, they hold hands under the umbrella.   Hou scores the story with, as well as the Platters, the gorgeous, slurpy ‘Rain and Tears’ by Aphrodite’s Child.

    The viewer of ‘A Time for Freedom’ will be helped by knowledge of the political history and cultural traditions of Taiwan (I had neither) but the narrative of this second film is relatively straightforward.   Mr Chang (Chang Chen), a political activist, visits May (Shu Qi), a courtesan, on his regular visits to Daitotei.  May tells Chang about one of the other courtesans, who is pregnant; Chang shows, in his generosity towards this other woman, a compassion surprising both in view of his professed moral code and to May.  She herself is left trapped in her life as a courtesan, when Chang departs for China during the Wuchang Uprising in the last months of 1911.   The rhythm of the storytelling and Hou’s attention to light and textures are beguiling but ‘A Time for Freedom’ is marred by an irritating stylistic device.   Hou uses intertitles instead of the actors’ voices – for no better reason, that I could see, than that his tale is set in the silent-movie era.  The only exception to the rule of silence is May’s wailing a song:  we don’t understand the lyric but can guess it’s unhappy.  This arrangement struck me as sonically the worst of both worlds.

    The almost relentless noise and movement of Taipei in 2005 at the start of ‘A Time for Youth’ supplies a startling contrast to what’s gone immediately before.  In this story, Shu Qi’s Jing is a rock singer and Chang Chen’s Chen her photographer boyfriend.  When the couple go to bed together, the moment brings with it a strong sense of release from the pent-up feelings generated by the first two stories, in which the viewer doesn’t see the sexual consequences of the protagonists’ interactions.  Halfway through ‘A Time for Youth’, Jing is revealed to be bisexual and the focus switches to her relationship with a young woman called Micky (Lee Pei-hsuan).   The latter, who stays at home while Jing is with Chen or performing in clubs or working in the studio, is much the largest supporting role in any of the three stories; because we’ve become so used by this stage to concentrating on Shu Qi and Chang Chen – and because they’re both so impressive (he especially) – the character of Micky feels like an intruder.   Jing is nearly blind in one eye and suffers from epilepsy.   I guess that Hou is questioning in this film the value of the personal and sexual freedom that Jing enjoys compared with her female counterparts in 1911 and 1966:  the depiction of Jing’s world suggests a destabilising way of life, a fracturing of identity.   I’m not sure if it’s symbolic that Jing is nearly blind in one eye and epileptic.  As a light-sensitive migraine sufferer, I couldn’t help thinking that, for someone with her physical problems, Jing was ill-advised to spend as much time as she did in places with such challenging lighting.

    Although ‘A Time for Freedom’ is crucial as part of the changes in sexual mores that Hou explores in Three Times, it doesn’t fit into the comparative structure as fully as the other two stories.  The contrasts and resonances between the 1966 and 2005 episodes are clear enough:  the shift from writing letters to sending texts (May and Chen in ‘A Time for Love’ might never have lost touch if they’d had mobile phones); Chang Chen’s character riding a bicycle in 1966 and a blaring motorbike four decades later (although this is partly so that Shu Qi can ride with him in the later story).  I wouldn’t, though, have picked up on the state-of-Taiwan messages of the first two stories without the help of Nick James’s Sight & Sound piece which the BFI used (along with one by Tony Rayns, from the same August 2006 issue of S&S) as its programme note for Three Times.   According to James, ‘A Time for Love’ includes ‘hints that Taiwan in the 1960s was an island at the crossroads, torn between duty and pleasure’; the courtesan May’s fate, in ‘A Time for Freedom‘, ‘echoes the abandonment of Taiwan by the mainland republicans who overthrew China’s Qing dynasty’.  All in all, I got more out of Three Times than I deserved.  I decided to try the film after seeing the trailer, simply because I liked the look that Chang Chen gave Shu Qi when their characters were eating noodles and the insistent sound of that damned Aphrodite’s Child song.

    3 October 2015

     

  • Beasts of No Nation

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Cary Joji Fukunaga (2015)

    Since his excellent Jane Eyre, Cary Fukunaga has made the widely acclaimed True Detective for HBO but Beasts of No Nation is his first cinema film in four years.   I found it an exasperating movie – too real for much of the time, eventually not real enough.  Fukunaga’s screenplay, adapted from a 2005 novel of the same name by the Nigerian writer Uzodinma Iweala, tells a coming-of-age story of a remarkably savage kind.  A civil war being fought in an unnamed West African country destabilises the life of the principal character, Agu, a pre-adolescent boy.  His mother, sister and younger brother leave the village where the family lives, in the hope of finding the capital city a place of greater safety.  Agu stays behind with his father, grandfather and elder brother, all three of whom are then shot dead by the national army.  Agu flees and hides in the bush, where he’s discovered and threatened by a band of rebels – members of what’s known as the Native Defence Force.  Agu is coerced into joining this group as a boy soldier.  He is taught to kill, and kill again.

    Most members of the rebel force are boys or youths but its leader, referred to simply as the Commandant, is an older man, played by Idris Elba (who was forty-one when the film shoot began).  Until Elba appears, Beasts of No Nation has the quality of dramatised documentary, not least because of the boy who plays Agu, Abraham Attah.  (His date of birth is shown as ‘2000/2001’ on Wikipedia; there’s no year given on IMDB.)  Attah brings to the film familiar pluses and minuses of the newcomer to screen acting.  His face, previously unknown to us, is freshly expressive; but it’s hard to make out what he’s saying.   Both the face and the furry voice enhance Agu’s realness but Attah’s inaudibility is frustrating too.  As the brutal warlord, Idris Elba gives dramatic shape to the action and a committed, compelling performance but he’s also physically outstanding, in a more problematic way.  Although Elba has West African parents, his skin colour is different from that of the other rebels and his heavily muscled physique contrasts too emphatically, even allowing for his character’s greater age, with the wiriness of the Commandant’s soldiers.

    Cary Fukunaga begins his film with a telling image.  Agu and another boy in his village are trying to get some money by selling a television frame that has no screen.  In showing the boys looking through the empty frame, Fukunaga seems to suggest to viewers of Beasts of No Nation that we may be used to seeing and experiencing African kids only through a television screen but will now be made to look at them differently, and more directly.  He certainly forces us to do that in the extended sequences of fighting and bloodshed that follow, and which account for a large part of the film’s 137 minutes.  Complaining that the violence is excessive runs the risk, of course, of accusations that you want to look away from the political reality that underlies Agu’s story.  But would Fukunaga dilute his telling of that story if he engaged the audience’s attention over rather less screen time and through rather fewer violent set pieces?  According to Wikipedia, he had been working on this project for several years by the time principal photography began in Ghana in mid-2014.  You respect Fukunaga’s effort but there were times when I wondered if he was too concerned with putting on the screen proof of his mastery of the complex logistics of the production.

    There are fine things in the film – for example, Fukunaga’s descriptions of the indoctrination of the boy soldiers, and of the startling proximity of childhood toys and games to weapons and warfare.  Dan Romer’s score doesn’t register strongly but Beasts of No Nation is often visually impressive.  Fukunaga, who did his own cinematography, avoids facile contrasts between the beauty of the landscape and the horror of human behaviour within it.  There are startling images of mingled blood and rain.  Yet because the violence involving the opposing forces in the civil war becomes almost the default setting of the narrative, its effect is numbing.   The confusion and ensuing violence of an episode in which the Commandant and some of his men/boys, including Agu, visit a brothel are more dynamic and shocking, because of the different context in which they occur.   There’s a similar impact, for the same reason, in an earlier sequence in a house that the rebel soldiers enter:  Agu sees a woman there whom he initially imagines is the mother from whom he’s been separated.

    The uncompromising mood of Beasts of No Nation shifts sharply in its closing stages.  The Commandant’s forces, out of food and ammunition and suffering from various diseases and injuries, abandon their leader and surrender to a UN patrol.  The boys are placed in a UN sanctuary for child soldiers, where they receive medical care and counselling.  In a climactic speech, Agu tells his counsellor that he’s done terrible things and knows he’ll be rightly considered ‘a beast’ but that he was once part of a good, loving family.  This final monologue is emotionally effective – not least because we’ve never forgotten how Agu started the film.  (The monologue is also mostly audible.)  But does Cary Fukunaga mean us to think that the other participants in the civil war whom we’ve watched are also victims of circumstance?  It’s to Idris Elba’s credit that, in his last scene, he shows the Commandant as a comprehensively defeated figure but is this man – a ruthless soldier and military careerist who also sexually abuses his boy soldiers – deserving of our sympathy too?  Or is the Commandant a dramatically useful baddie who gets the comeuppance he deserves?   The film ends with Agu joining other boys at the sanctuary to swim and play in the ocean.  We’re relieved, of course, that Agu has survived and may have the prospect of a better life ahead.  This closing sequence struck me less as a credible outcome for a child in Agu’s situation than as the concluding ray of hope required in a movie with the box-office ambitions of Beasts of No Nation.

    15 October 2015

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