Wednesday, May 20, 2015

TWO FINE THOUGHTFUL FILMS (FOREIGN)


When I opened Netflix last night, I almost croaked.  EVERY choice they offered me -- supposedly according to my algorithm -- was a kid cartoon!  There is no way on Netflix to block the categories you really dislike.  For me that means loud, bright, violent cartoons with no plot.  I went to do something else and when I came back, that array was gone.  I suppose it was an effort to please kids just starting their summer vacation.  So American.

I don’t want to stamp out cartoons.  I just don’t want them on my screen.  But even with this “choice” feature that’s supposed to be helpful, it’s not easy to find grownup films worth watching.  Here are the two most recent that I recommend.  Both are about death in roundabout ways but both in terms of family.  


One is “The Boys Are Back,” which is a sort of Clive Owens version of a Cary Grant shtick: the man whose life includes NO kids, who then acquires kids.  This time it’s an Aussie film.  Clive is a sports reporter who has been married twice, producing one kid per wife.  He’s emotionally tone-deaf and not quite grown up himself.  The older son is sixteen and lives with the first wife, remarried, living in England.  The younger one is about eight.  It is his mother who dies suddenly.  Then the older one’s mother sends her boy to Clive, because he is full of rebellion and demands it.  The older boy has no idea what he’s getting into.

George MacKay

Clive’s theory is that it’s a mistake to impose a lot of rules and get everyone caught up in rebukes and resentments.  As a potential girl friend says (before she departs), he drinks too much and lives like a pig.  Somehow this means water balloon fights, a lot of pizza and unwashed security plush animals.  The grannie and others are scandalized by the constant minor risks until the “biggie” comes along that scares even Clive.

Nicholas McAnulty

This is a lot of fun but hard on the house in the film.  George MacKay is the older boy, Nicholas McAnulty is the younger one.  It’s McAnulty at the core of the plot and he is miraculous, completely convincing.  Anyway, it’s a good plot.  Lots of gorgeous vistas of coastal Australia.  The point, of course, is for males of all ages to come out where they can be seen and loved.  Aussies recognize this problem but are not icky about it, which is the tendency of Californians.
Simon Carr and sons and dogs.


Simon Carr, who lived this story and then wrote a book about it that became this film, wrote this explanatory article.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1195866/I-want-die-Mummy-A-new-film-tells-story-father-sons-faced-ultimate-loss.html

A quote: Children need a routine and constant attention, and a certain level of intrusion into their emotional life. 

“They need to be kept clean and ordered, and tended in the way that mothers generally, stereotypically do. Isn't that what children need?

“My answer to that is simple. It's yes. Did that happen with my boys? That answer is also simple. 
  
“It's no.”
The movie "boys"

Carr has been described as “the most vicious sketch writer working in Britain today."  He writes for the English newspaper, “The Independent,” usually about Parliament, but his personal obsession is football, called soccer in the US.  He was a speech writer for the prime minister of New Zealand from 1992 to 1994. His working principle is "Indignation keeps us young."  He is Conservative.  Politically.  He tweets @simonacarr among other locations.



This says "poetry."

The other film is called simply “Poetry.”  It’s a South Korea story that changed my mental image of that country.  The central character is a grandmother, only sixty but beginning to develop something like Alzheimer’s.  She is stuck with her daughter’s big selfish lump of a son plunked in her tiny apartment where he sulks and sleeps.  Loving him is a major project.

Yoon Jeong-hee is the actress, delicately stylish with her hats, a crocheted fascinator, an assortment of jackets and skirts with chiffon overlays.  She steps out in her neat shoes as though she came from a musical family living in Paris -- which she does.  She retired from a film career that began in the Sixties but has returned for this tour d’force. The part of Yang Mi-ja was written specifically for her.


In the story she earns a bit of money from being a “maid” for a crude old man with stroke damage.  This includes bathing him.  The driving dilemma of the film is from the grandson committing a crime bad enough that to preserve him she must get money out of the old man.  The parentheses of the story is suicide by drowning.  When is it bad enough to just give up?

But the substance of the tale is Mi-ja wondering what poetry really is.  She takes a class, joins a poetry society, and is confronted with both delicate beauty, as we think of poetry, and the raw eroticism of life force in the person of a boisterous and crude poet.  All through the film, trotting along with her little notebook so as to record clues and observations, she is writing poetry or at least poetic images and ideas, but she doesn’t realize that.  She thinks “poetry” is something special removed from ordinary life, which can be very hard.

The actress as a young woman.

Lee Chang-dong, the writer and director, has produced many short stories and scripts, coming to directing later.   

Here’s a quote from http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2008mayjune/dong.html  The title of the article is “A Rough Transcendence: The Films of Lee Chang-dong.”  What is remarkable about Lee Chang-dong’s films is their ability to be both intelligent and emotionally affecting while only skirting the kind of melodrama so prevalent in Korean cinema. Much has been made of Lee as a sort of latter-day Bresson, but for all that his films take up questions of suffering and redemption, they remain rooted in the here-and-now of contemporary Korea.”


Long ago I read something about the different attitude in northern Asia towards suicide, which is a common outcome in stories of romantic but forbidden love.  But Mi-Ja is not in love with another person.  Rather she is in love with simple existence and perhaps that will be enough to keep her alive.  If she can bear it.


Lee Chang-dong

Bottom line:   If you're a grown-up who can read quickly (sub-titles) and want to watch serious films about real human issues, look at the foreign films.  Netflix does include them, but you have to search a bit, even for the English language ones.  Both of these stream on Netflix.

No comments: