Category Archives: Book or movie review

A book or movie review.

Lust and Caution

Book or movie review

Ang Lee’s 2007 film, Lust, Caution, received attention for a number of reasons. The number of trophies it received internationally could have sated even the most ardent trophy collector’s appetite. It also received attention for its graphic, achingly realistic ten-minute sex scene between two main characters, which reportedly took over 100 hours to shoot. People praised the movie’s elegance and the performances. But one issue with the movie is that people defined it as an espionage thriller. But that marketing choice does not address one of the most fascinating aspects of the story: the “love” story.

Lust, Caution, based on a novella by Chinese author Eileen Chang, primarily takes place from 1938 to 1942 during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. From its trailer and synopsis, it appears to be a love story with gorgeous cinematography and period costumes, but it’s something much darker in the end. A young woman, Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), escapes from Shanghai to Hong Kong for safety and begins her studies at Lingnan University. There, she follows a classmate, Kuang Yu Min (Wang Leehom), into the resistance movement. Kuang, Wong Chia Chi, and a group of other students develop a plot to kill Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), the leader of the secret police of China’s puppet government propped up by the Japanese. When Mr. Yee moves to Shanghai, so does the operation. The plan is to have Wong Chia Chi pose as Mrs. Mai, seduce Mr. Yee, and have him in a position for the co-conspirators to kill him. Of course, complications arise when “Mrs. Mai” develops an emotional connection with Mr. Yee, and their twisted relationship may unravel the entire operation.

“Lust, Caution” was originally written by Eileen Chang, a prolific Chinese author. Chang’s work is marked by precise, evocative language and a deep-seated pessimism in regards to human relationships. The portraits of “love” in her works rarely feature grand romantic gestures and instead focus on people’s selfish, fickle natures and the sharp edges of emotional connections. Moreover, the world that she creates in her fiction is one that is irredeemably desolate with just enough flashes of goodness to keep despair alive when goodness does not win out.

This loyalty to the tone of the source material does this espionage thriller a world of good. Tony Leung Chiu-Wai skillfully portrays Mr. Yee’s hard, cold brutality towards Mrs. Mai. Remarkably, instead of leaving the viewer repulsed, his actions leave room for intrigue. For example, during a particularly rough sex scene between the two, despite the fact that his actions are violent and steely, by the end, the viewer gets to see just enough tenderness to understand that he is not a complete monster.

That’s because Chiu-Wai takes advantage of the small moments and actions to give his monstrous character some humanity. He doesn’t make Mr. Yee out to be an antihero; his actions make it very clear that this is a violent, self-serving man. Rather, Chiu-Wai maintains an aloofness while giving the viewer quick peeks at Mr. Yee’s humanity. This comes through the most in a scene at a jewelry shop where Mr. Yee gives Mrs. Mai a diamond ring. His tone remains flat and he doesn’t smile, but his eyes betray an affection that is so strong that one has to look away; the sudden intimacy is just that jarring.

On the other hand, a diamond ring and a doting look do not love make. In any case, it isn’t clear whether or not Mrs. Mai loves Mr. Yee. The murkiness between her role as a spy and her role as his lover constantly makes the viewer wonder who she is pretending to be, and sometimes, whether she is pretending at all. Tang Wei’s portrayal is rooted in Mrs. Mai’s portrayal in the book, and in the novella, Mrs. Mai’s character, whose perspective guides the book, is almost completely inscrutable. However, Tang Wei improves upon it by betraying slightly more emotion– enough to humanize her a bit more, but not the point where, by the movie’s end, we can say that we sincerely know her. It’s hard to even tell if Wong Chia Chi even gets lost in Mrs. Mai because we’ll never know where Wong Chia Chi begins and Mrs. Mai ends.

This question of whether we’re seeing Wong Chia Chi or Mrs. Mai is maintained by Tang Wei’s skillful performance. Like the world in Eileen Chang’s writing, the viewer gets to see just enough to remain intrigued and invested and too little to feel that they can begin to predict the character’s actions. When we see her interact with Mr. Yee, she remains cautious and affectionate and it’s difficult to tell whether it’s acting for the sake of the movement or the rather normal process of falling in love. Tang Wei gives us a character that is unknowable without being flat, and perhaps it’s because in a way, she gives us two characters who are inseparable.

That sense of the unknown in plain sight is a palpable source of tension in the film, even aesthetically. There are shadows, because what espionage thriller would be complete without them? But the movie is mostly composed of sharp details that end up creating more unease than outlines of figures in the dark. This is a period thriller composed of trench coats and stern faces, yet it’s also a relatively well-lit one that shows us banal, dull street scenes in quick cuts that leave the viewer’s heart racing. The camera work makes perfectly normal scenes and interactions feel disorienting and ominous.

Unlike conventional thrillers, the tension in Lust, Caution does not come from car chases. Its tension is rooted, in fact, more in the tradition of romantic movies. Its tension comes from the same “Will they or won’t they (kill each other)?” question that serves as the driving force of love stories. However, the movie invites another question as well, which is, “Is this love at all?”

Yuan Ming Yuan: a Monument to Nationalism

Book or movie review

“Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it…”

Jin Tiemu’s documentary Yuan Ming Yuan (2006) opens with this lyrical description of the titular Summer Palace, penned by Victor Hugo in the nineteenth century. The film illustrates the palace’s life and death, which parallels the destiny of Qing Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China. Located in the northwest of Beijing, Yuan Ming Yuan was the brainchild of three generations of emperors in the heyday of the Qing Empire. It is said to have been the apogee of Chinese architecture and landscape, encompassing not only architectural elements from all around China but also from the West. While a token of pride, Yuan Ming Yuan is also remembered as a symbol of humiliation in Chinese history. The palace was looted and destroyed by the Anglo-French Allied Forces in 1860, as the Qing Empire declined in the face of peasant uprisings and foreign invasion.

The film’s digital reconstruction of the Summer Palace is mind-blowing both in scale and in detail, and the reenactment of historical characters allows the viewer a vicarious experience of life inside the imperial palace. But as the Chinese saying goes, the documentary flowers but bears no fruit, hua er bu shi.  Despite its beautiful images, Yuan Ming Yuan does not encourage serious reflection on the past. Instead, it’s little more than a superficial portrayal of historical events that omits many important details and taps into anti-Western and China-resurgence mentalities.

To use Victor Hugo’s words, aesthetically Jin’s team did “build a dream” with the documentary, which took more than six years and a million dollars to make. Thirty-five minutes of the total running time is allotted to digital reconstruction of Yuan Ming Yuan’s landscape and architecture. Exquisite visual effects, such as the lustre of the famous bronze animal sculptures and the panorama of the entire complex of gardens and palaces at sunset, are indeed a feast for the eyes.

Digitally Reconstructed Palaces
Digitally Reconstructed Palaces

Even better, the film does not stop at Yuan Ming Yuan’s aesthetic splendor but provides a glimpse into the life of people who lived there, giving history a human quality. Part of the film is narrated by three European missionaries who work for the royal court and explore the palace with curiosity and admiration. They tell anecdotes of court life, which transform historical figures into lively individuals with whom the audience can empathize. For example, there is a mock town inside the palace where eunuchs play the roles of vendors, magistrates, craftsmen, and even thieves, so that the royal family can get a taste of an ordinary person’s life by visiting the mock market, bargaining with merchants, witnessing theft, and even participating in mock courts to interrogate thieves.

Unfortunately, this level of detail is not carried over when the film transitions to the decline of Yuan Ming Yuan in the hands of foreign invaders. The second part of the film sets up a dichotomy of innocent but close-minded Chinese with primitive weapons against evil-minded aggressive Western imperialists with advanced weapons. Without any in-depth analysis, the documentary is only a fancy repetition of my elementary school history lesson on Yuan Ming Yuan. It tells only a partial truth that aims to promote nationalistic sentiments among its audience, most of whom are Chinese.

Instead of anatomizing France’s and England’s imperialism and examining the root causes for the invasion, the film focuses on visualizing the Qing court’s lack of militarism and the calamity it suffers as a result. We hear the narrator lamenting about the absence of development in Chinese weapons and see repeated scenes of brutally wounded Chinese soldiers falling from their horses. In other words, Yuan Ming Yuan aims not to make the viewers understand why the tragedy took place but only to leave them gnashing their teeth in anger because foreign invaders destroyed this other-worldly beauty in China. The film plays into the larger trend of nationalistic narrative of history: China was bullied by Western powers because it was weak, and now it must reemerge as a strong power so as not to be bullied again.

The documentary also completely demonizes the English and French soldiers. From their first appearance, the soldiers all look vicious and frantic, walking with hunched backs and sinister smiles. Both the French and the English commanders look like your typical comic book villains, one with a poker-face, the other with an evil grin. Yes, in a way, they were demons for having destroyed such a treasure of human history. But at the same time, it should not be forgotten that they, too, were ordinary human beings who couldn’t resist the temptation of carrying off war trophies that later turned into a looting frenzy. It is simply unnecessary and dishonest to take all human qualities out of them for dramatic effects.

Comic Book Villain Lord Elgin
Comic Book Villain Lord Elgin

Worse, the film deliberately omits an important fact that contributed to the destruction of the palace: the Qing government kidnapped and tortured members of the Anglo-French Forces’ negotiation team. Twenty-one out of the thirty-nine kidnapped men died in prison, including Thomas Bowlby, a reporter of the Times of London and a close friend of the English commander Lord Elgin. Shocked by the death of his good friend and the other men and worried about his reputation if he were to do nothing to avenge their murder, Elgin ordered his men to destroy the palace as retribution against the Qing government, despite objections from the French side. The atrocity by the Qing court in no way justified Elgin’s ruthless decision, but, at least, he was certainly not the capricious and lunatic character in the documentary who decides to destroy the palace out of the blue and with unanimous support from the Anglo-French Forces.

Yuan Ming Yuan takes the easy path of presenting the tragedy as a tale of mindless savages from the West plundering Chinese civilization, when the real story was much more complicated. If the Summer Palace is going to be turned into a monument to anything, it should not be one to nationalism. Instead, memories of Yuan Ming Yuan should stand as a reminder of human beings’ capacity both to create extraordinary beauty with their wisdom and to destroy such beauty under the spell of morbid ideologies.

Navigating Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”

Book or movie review

There’s no author who occupies the same space in the literary universe that Haruki Murakami does. In every novel he writes Murakami constructs a fictional world that reflects his sympathy for humanity and his intricate imagination. Though his novels are uniquely challenging, readers keep returning to the bookstore for his latest creation. His works are so popular that this year Murakami was selected as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME.

What launched this novelist into the global consciousness was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his magnum opus. The book is a challenge: at times it seems to lead the reader on a wild chase through the unknown. It addresses the trauma of WWII in Japan and abroad, loss of self in the modern age and the blurred lines between reality and fantasy—a mixture that can make any story feel convoluted. Yet, the labyrinth of Murakami’s fiction—through dream-like sequences, painful recollections, always with the sound of the ominous wind-up bird in the background—will leave readers connected to a much wider story—the global narrative of pain—in ways that may surprise them.

Toru Okada has recently quit his comfortable job as a “professional gofer,” an overly qualified errand boy, at a law firm. With no clear purpose of what he wants to do with his life, Toru is content to stay home and read novels while his wife Kumiko works for a lifestyle magazine. Toru is the embodiment of passivity. Even after strange things begin to happen around him, it is not until Kumiko vanishes that he finally takes action.

Toru’s mundane routine is reflected in Murakami’s clear and simple style. The tone and words lull the reader into a daze like a small boat on a quiet ocean. Then out of nowhere Murakami inserts something surreal. Juxtaposed with his concise writing is a phantasmagoria of absurd happenings. Surprisingly, the magical effortlessly melds with the mundane as these absurd events force Toru and the reader out of this daze. While making a plate of spaghetti, Toru receives a strange phone call from a woman who challenges his concept of reality. Although events like this seem unconnected at first, they force Toru to encounter colorful characters that are bonded through the cry of an ominous wind-up bird, which only they can hear, and memories of violence and World War II. Toru’s job much like the reader’s is to listen to all these accounts of pain and discover how they relate to Kumiko’s disappearance.

Yet that goal does not even appear on the horizon for a good 200 pages. Instead the reader must push through flashbacks and found documents for the first part of the book before any narrative action takes place. The original Japanese version of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was serialized in the Shinchō literary magazine. Some of the chapters, including a scene where Chinese soldiers are beaten to death with baseball bats, were originally published as short stories in the New Yorker. The first chapter in Murakami’s anthology, The Elephant Vanishes is the origin of the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. These chapters can stand alone, reflecting Murakami’s ability as a short story writer, but together they seem fragmented and frustrate the reader.

Just when the reader is ready to give up on this book, Murakami seamlessly brings all of these disjointed babblings, visions, and testimonies together with the thread of pain. Juxtaposed are disclosures of rape, torture and manslaughter as his characters each reveal their own unique connection to trauma and war. Mamiya reveals his role in World War II as a mapmaker during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1937. Another character’s father was a vet in Manchuria at the same time and witnessed a particularly haunting episode of the novel, the messy massacre of zoo animals in Manchuria. The image of the Japanese military slaughtering innocent animals reminds the reader of the innocent lives lost to the unnecessary violence of war.

Murakami explores how trauma in postwar Japan connects a generation. A web of alienation underpins each character and passage, chronicling nightmares of agony. The use of letters, computer conversations, newspaper articles and recounted dreams blurs the line between fantasy and reality in the novel. By the last chapter the reader is unsure how much actually transpired in the novel or in the protagonist’s head. However, at the end of the novel, as in a carefully crafted symphony every anecdote and symbol comes together in an opus of great beauty.

Though Murakami gradually untangles the network of characters in his novel, he never abandons the surreal quality of his style. In Mamiya’s long account of his war experiences—including a man being skinned alive—an epiphany he has in which he’s bathed in a magical light at the bottom of a well stands out in sharp relief. After the light passes over him, Mamiya feels empty and isolated in his own body, a carcass without a soul. Murakami seems to be saying here that light is not just light but is divine, the light of the universe. Once it is gone, Mamiya is no longer in a state of grace. This feeling of separation from nature and reality pervades every character’s narrative. The residue of violence has carved out the human part of each character, leaving them incomplete and searching for purpose in the modern world. This search leads Toru into the dream world where he must find a way to save Kumiko, and everybody else. But who will save Toru from getting trapped in his own dream?

Fans of James Patterson won’t like Murakami. This isn’t a novel to read while waiting to catch a flight. There’s no instant gratification. This novel takes work to get through. It starts off at a slow pace and doesn’t try to rush to get to the end. It makes even the most loyal Murakami fan want to put the novel back on the shelf. Press on. Read further, because in the final chapters it becomes a page-turner. The book is a marathon. But 600 pages won’t seem so long once you make it to the finish line.

By Haruki Murakami

Translated by Jay Rubin

607 pp. Vintage International 1997

WARNING: Not for Realists

Book or movie review

Animated film Millennium Actress (2001) is at its heart a drama, following the life of a Japanese actress as she chases a man she meets in passing, falls in love with and sees only once more. In the hands of Satoshi Kon, a master director of animated films, this simple love-story turns into an adventure that takes you from present day to feudal Japan to the moon and blurs the fine line between reality and fiction. From setting to animation to storytelling, Millennium Actress is unconventional and fantastical as it explores the love that drives the actress through her life.

The film begins with two men, Genya, a documentary filmmaker, and Ida, his cameraman, traveling to interview the actress, Chiyoko Fujiwara, for a documentary on the story of her career and life. She starts to tell them the story of the painter she fell in love with as a girl and in what starts as a typical flashback, present day Genya and Ida appear to follow a young Chiyoko around. Kon smoothly inserts them into the scene, so smoothly that we don’t even notice the transition at first. And odd though it may seem when we think about it, the symbolism works perfectly. Not only do the two men represent us as we breach the barriers of time and privacy to witness Chiyoko’s life, but their presence comments on the absurdity that we expect, in documentary films such as theirs, to see such “original footage.”

Millennium Actress’s wonders don’t stop there: the film gets even better as Kon plays with the fluidity of the scene and setting. Unbeknownst to us, the flashback that we, Genya and Ida are watching has morphed into a scene from one of her dramas. As Ida so elegantly puts it, “When did this turn into a movie?!” The setting shifts fluidly between the present day, Chiyoko’s past and the movies she stars in, and we are never sure of how much of what we see is fact or fiction—and it doesn’t matter. It is Chiyoko’s desire to reunite with her painter that drives her through both her life and her movies, and the search for plain, realistic facts pales in comparison to the emotional journey she takes.

Kon risked bringing down the entire film with this constant changing of setting and deliberate obscuring of fact and fiction. The wide range of settings—from Chiyoko’s past to the present day interview (1920s Japan to 2000s) and all her different movies that span historical dramas to futuristic sci-fi—would be a lot to keep straight in a realistic film, let alone one that tells realism “Sayonara.” It could have been all too easy for us to get lost in the plethora of times and the gray area between reality and movie. There is an even greater risk of this happening with Western viewers since much of the distinction between settings is based on an instant visual recognition of period costumes, technology and architecture that we don’t have.

And while this narrative style can be challenging to follow at times, overall Kon and his team do an amazing job clarifying settings shifts. They use jumps cuts where the movement of a character stays the same between shots, but everything else—scenery, make-up, other characters, costumes—changes. Chiyoko may be a ninja running through a forest when she starts to fall, but it is a geisha in the pleasure quarters of Kyoto who hits the ground.  Thanks to Kon’s stunning design team, we might not know which era a costume and scenery is from, but we can certainly tell that it’s different from the previous one. Moreover, Kon and his team use Genya and Ida as on-screen spectators to reassure us that we’re not crazy, and yes that did just happen. See? Ida’s stunned too. Not only do these characters’ exclamations and comments guide us as we change rapidly from setting to setting, but they also inject some much needed humor and comic relief into the film as the tension in Chiyoko’s drama skyrockets.

The other factor that keeps us from losing track of the central story is the reappearance of supporting characters, in different costumes for different settings of course. Eiko Shimao, the former star who must now give up her place to the young and beautiful Chiyoko, reprises time and again the role of the older women Chiyoko must confront. There is also the wraith who condemns Chiyoko to burn in the flames of eternal love during a movie sequence and then haunts her through the rest of her real life. The twist at the end of Millennium Actress makes us think about the regrets we have in life as it finally explains the wraith’s words, “I hate you more than I can bear. I love you more than I can bear.” The characters and Chiyoko’s desire stand out in sharp relief against the backdrop of a ceaselessly changing set, holding the film together as a united whole.

That these characters reappear so often throughout the story of Chiyoko’s life means that like her, they must age, and I want to take a moment to recognize both the voice actors’ and the art designer’s stellar work in aging the characters. It is no small feat in anime to subtly change a character’s design as they age. The artist in charge of character design does a spectacular job of aging Chiyoko and others gradually, making Chiyoko at thirteen as different from twenty-five as from seventy, but still recognizable as herself. The mole under her left eye certainly helps to make her always identifiable, but considering how useful I find it, I won’t call it the easy way out. On top of that, three separate actresses voice Chiyoko, one for each time period of her life, to give her voice the authentic wide range of sound as her story unfolds.

Brilliant though I think this movie is, it is not for everyone. Aside from the challenge of keeping up with the various settings, the lack of definitive answers could drive some viewers nuts. We never do find out at what point Chiyoko’s story becomes a movie, and that only continues to hold true as the film progresses. Millennium Actress is not for the viewer who wants to put every detail into nice little boxes labelled “real” and “fictive.” For all those who aren’t realism prudes, though, I highly recommend this spectacular and unique film.

Pregnant Silences

Book or movie review

Every generation experiences some collective anxiety in its youth, wonders what will be permanent and who will remain by their side, fears loneliness and rejection. Two sisters, Delphine and Muriel Coulin, have captured this bittersweet sentiment brilliantly in their simple and beautiful film, 17 filles (2011). Both sisters had worked on films centered around femininity and the body prior to 17 filles, so when they encountered a news article about a large group of teenagers at an American high school who all got pregnant at once, they were inspired to create their own adaptation of the story. This story of young women’s desire to take charge of their own destinies, the Coulin sisters remark, is one that transcends time and culture.

Set in southern France, 17 filles follows Camille Fourier, a pretty and popular sixteen-year-old girl who gets pregnant, and decides to keep the baby after she convinces sixteen of her friends to get pregnant too. The film is bookended by offscreen narration telling the story of a great ladybug migration oddity that occurred the same year that the pregnancy scandal did. Together, the young women navigate the ups and downs of pregnancy together, all the while spinning idyllic dreams of living together and being a lifelong support system for one another.

The cinematography of 17 filles is dreamy, colorful, and intimate, embodying the sentiment of quixotic teenage aspiration that the Coulin sisters sought to convey. The opening scene is a series of close-ups of a line of undressed girls, setting the cinematographic tone for the film. It feels organic, it’s naturally lit, and there’s no background music. Yet none of this comes across as drab in the least—little details intrigue us with their rawness.

17 filles grapples with themes you might not expect from a movie centered around the actions of teenage girls—togetherness versus solitude, the fleeting nature of time, strong women supporting one another. Though teenage dramas are typically reserved for frivolity, the Coulin sisters have allowed the complexities of youth and womanhood to occupy space with the gravity they deserve.

The group of pregnant teenagers becomes a heated topic of debate among community members, and even on the local news. The adults are troubled because, legally, they cannot intervene. After several riotous school board meetings, the school nurse is directed to have a threatening meeting with Camille, the student whose pregnancy incited the controversy. The nurse questions her motives for starting this trend, asking if perhaps it’s a means of rebellion, or maybe a subconscious reaction to the local economic crisis that had shaped the lives of this generation from an early age. Camille argues that doing the same as her parents have done won’t get her generation anywhere, and that their parents have failed to lead meaningful lives. She spiritedly defends the actions of herself and her friends, exclaiming, “We’re right to try something else!”

Although the film deals with some heavy subject matter, the cinematographic style is clean and evocative, characterized by a minimalism that reveals just enough visual information to thread the plot together. For instance, after Camille’s best friend, Clementine, is kicked out of her house for being pregnant, her friends furnish an abandoned trailer for her to stay in. We see a shot of a severe winter rainstorm ravaging the outside of the trailer, we see a shot of a frightened Clem cowering inside, we see Clem’s phone in her hand and hear her voice say, “Mom?” Then, we see a pair of headlights coming down the dirt road through the rain and wind. This is followed by a shot of Clem lying on a red couch, presumably in her parents’ house. These five simple shots simply and artfully illustrate Clem’s reconciliation with her parents. The entire story of the film is told in the same fashion, which lends it visual intrigue and a beautiful sparseness.

The lack of a soundtrack, too, is compellingly minimalistic—as well as classically French. Most shots and interactions between characters are backed by poignant and provocative silence. The silence plays on the themes of solitude and youthful loneliness that stitch the film together. Silence is a bold choice in the overwhelmingly sensory world of contemporary cinema. The modern moviegoer is bombarded by aggressive advertisements, bright colors, and fast-paced action, all tied together by a immensely loud soundtrack—silence is simply not seen as an option by filmmakers today. The Coulin sisters, however, have chosen to trust their audience to appreciate the silence, to pay attention to quiet simplicity amidst the maelstrom of visual and aural stimulation pulling us every which way.

17 filles also literally brings us closer to the characters with extremely close-up shots, a frequent feature in the film. There are also many long-shots of each pregnant character sitting around her own domestic space, alone in quiet contemplation. Though we are not privy to their introspection, these shots give the characters depth. We know they’re thinking deeply about the issues at play in the film; these characters are more than the shallow teenage girls they initially appear to be.

At the end of the film, the story of the ladybugs continues as the narrator explains that no such strange event ever occurred again, that all returned to normalcy following that year. We are finally able to connect the strange tale of the ladybugs to that of the seventeen pregnant girls, and this detail deepens the narrative of the film as a whole, tying the story of the seventeen girls into a larger cycle of nature.

17 filles is a brilliant and artistic exploration of the complexities of youth, a subject frequently glossed over. With their evocative cinematographic style and bold filmic choices, the Coulin sisters have created a masterful work of art.