Film Fest Two

The low-key Japanese film Love Life begins in medias res, with Taiko and Jiri, a young middle-class couple, preparing for a surprise birthday party. In one early scene  Taiko shouts across the courtyard to an older woman; it turns out her in-laws live in the same apartment complex. Out in the street she consults with a group of people from the office where Jiri works about the festivities. One of them she's never met before, and she asks Jiri why he never mentions her in conversation. He brushes off the question with a shrug. 

Their young son, Kieta, has just won another Othello tournament, and they're using that as a cover for the birthday event, for which Jiri's father will be the focus of attention. Unfortunately, the old man arrives in a huff. There are hints and illusions as to the source of the tension underlying this ostensibly light-hearted gathering, but it takes us a while to put the pieces together. Kieta is Taiko's son from a previous marriage. Jiri was engaged to the woman in the street until he met Taiko; a newcomer to the office invited her to the party by mistake. And Jiri's parents are growing impatient to have a second grandchild--one of their own lineage.

I wouldn't be giving away so many pieces of the plot, except these are only a few of the complications Taiko and Juri face before the film gets rolling. It's riddled with politeness, disappointment, humor, and tragedy, unexpected turns and astute reflections about the past. It's a rich and satisfying  melange, which also includes some balloons, a stray cat, and two nuns singing karaoke.

The Eight Mountains takes us to the Alps north of Turin, Italy, where an urban couple and their son Pietro spend summers in a largely deserted village—the population has dropped to fourteen. Pietro forms a friendship with Bruno, the only child who lives there, though the two could hardly be more different. Bruno is robust; Pietro tends to get altitude sickness. Bruno has the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who knows his realm—the mountains—and has little interest in anything else. Pietro has no idea who he wants to become, though he comes to detest his father's driven way of life, exemplified by a tireless mountain-climbing enthusiasm. With the passage of time, while Bruno is laying bricks with his dad, Pietro cuts ties with his parents and carves out a bohemian path that seems to be going nowhere, though it leads him eventually to Nepal.

The film follows the lives of the two men, both heavily bearded now, as they revive their friendship in adulthood. Pietro struggles to come to grips with the fact that Bruno had spent a lot of time with his father during the years he was away. He helps Bruno restore a mountain chalet, brings his friends up from the city, and Bruno eventually marries one of them.

The mountain scenery is good, though the film was shot in a squarish format that restricts the views. But it's an odd and incomprehensible vibe at times, and the English-language folk songs on the soundtrack add to the disquieting effect. Which is another way of say that 8 Mountains doesn't fit a conventional story-telling mold. And I guess that's good. 

Max Roach: the Drum Also Waltzes follows the pattern of many jazz biopics, with black-and-white stills of Manhattan after dark (horns honking in the background or ice clinking in a glass), great music from the bebop era, detours into the world of heroin and other drugs, and interviews with the artist himself, the musicians he played with, and his wives and kids. It's always fun. Perhaps a film about an eminent drummer might not be quite as much fun, because drumming isn't all that interesting to most of us, in and of itself. On the other hand, Roach's story is enlivened by his efforts during the civil rights era to elevate that pressing issue in the public consciousness. The taped interview with the director that followed the film also added to the event.

 

One might suspect from the title that Greener Pastures is a film about agriculture. Not so. Although the focus here is on four Midwestern family farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota that are failing for one reason or another, during the course of the ninety-minute film we learn absolutely nothing about what the reasons are. The farmers themselves make a few offhand references to NAFTA, "factory farms," and tariffs making it difficult to sell powdered milk to China, but the filmmakers offer us no specific information about such things. The entire film is devoted to lackluster scenes in which the farmers stroll through the milking barn, drive their corn-harvesting machinery, or play military video-games in the basement to relax while complaining about tough market conditions and how much they love their cows. Bernie Sanders makes a brief appearance, of course.

Of the four farmers involved, one is leaving the farm to set up a business to counsel other farmers who, like him, have attempted or contemplated suicide. That's a worthy endeavor. Another is a practicing alcoholic who often finishes off a six-pack of beer before lunch. A third farmer seems to be hanging on largely due to his wife's cake-decorating business until he gives in and sells the mineral rights to his acreage, which will net him $150,000 per month. "I can tell, people in town sort of resent me now. They think I'm rich," he says. "But that don't bother me."

I like farm films, but we're far removed here from the world of Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry, or the well-financed, thoughtfully managed California organic farm we see in The Biggest Little Farm. Farming can be a tough business, I know, and the little guy without a competitive edge is likely to lose out. But it's the same in every business. I read in the Star-Tribune a few weeks ago that the average net profit of a Minnesota farm last year was $179,000. That doesn't seem too bad to me. The income of dairy farmers dropped by 25 percent, however. 

Someone ought to make a movie helping us to understand why. 

Korean director Hong Sangsoo's filmography must number more than thirty works by now. His films tend to be fresh, rambling, and seemingly uncalculated, as if movie-making were a relaxed poetic endeavor rather than a leviathan corporate undertaking.

 His latest, Walk Up, is a black-and-white bagatelle involving a famous film director, Byung-soo,  who escorts his daughter Jeongsu to meet Byung's former friend Ms. Kim, a sometime interior designer, at the small apartment building she owns. Jeongsu is interested in interior design, and Byong thinks she might learn sometime and overcome her shyness by chatting with Ms. Kim. Ms. Kim gives her guests a tour of the building: a woman runs a restaurant on the second floor and a reclusive painter lives on the third.

A series of casual conversations ensue with plenty of drinking and an ever-changing cast of participants.  At one point Byung is called away to meet with a film producer and Jeongsu and Ms. Kim carry on a halting conversation not only about interior design, but at greater length about what it's like to be the daughter of a famous film director. Jeongsu goes outside to smoke a cigarette and strikes up a conversation with the boy who works in the building, and he fills her in on Ms. Kim's quirks of character. Hours pass, Byung hasn't returned, and Ms. Kim sends Jeongsu off to the corner store to buy another bottle of wine.

Things begin to get strange when we witness a repeat of the building tour, and Ms. Kim and Byung join Sunhee, the woman running the second-floor restaurant, for an afternoon of giggly wine-soaked conversation. Ms. Kim eventually heads down to her basement apartment to get some whisky and never returns, while Byung and Sunhee carry on a rambling conversation about his films, which she tells him she especially enjoys while drinking.

Time passes. The situation has changed, perhaps more than once; it's hard to tell. Another extended scene takes place on the terrace of the top-floor apartment. It seems Byung has moved into the artist's apartment with Sunhee. He's ill. She's going out to visit a friend who's getting married. He falls asleep on the bed. And so on.

The pieces of Walk Up don't really add up, though the ending is tidy. It were as if Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut had collaborated on an Asian remake of Run, Lola, Run. Some viewers will find the result self-indulgent. Others will be intrigued enough to see it again. An L.A. Times critic remarked, “Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward."