At the Business Today conference, the first keynote speaker, a c-level exec from Universal Studios, said the best movie of the year would be Slumdog Millionaire, and he wasn’t just talking his book – it wasn’t even their movie. I had heard about the film a while back when there was a free screening in New York, but the tickets disappeared quickly and I hadn’t found the time or the company to go to AMC with. Until today. And yes, it is the best movie, in a long, long while.

But he was wrong when he called it a Bollywood film; it is not. Nor is it Hollywood. When I bought my tickets at the AMC machine, I was scratching my head trying to figure out what could possibly be the reason that the film was rated R, which is really the kiss of death for an independent film since that means no mass market. A Hollywood executive would have made every cut in production to ensure a PG-13. But the film doesn’t pull any punches, there is torture, slavery, religious violence, and prostitution depicted… brutal, but that’s just the reality. There was a different kind of censorship though:

On one occasion, Mr. Colson recalled, the Indian authorities took umbrage at a scene in the script in which a suspect is tortured by a police commissioner during interrogation. The Indian authorities told Mr. Colson to take out the police commissioner. No police officer above the rank of inspector should be shown administering torture, they said. The makers of “Slumdog Millionaire” obeyed.

This kind of censorship would never fly in Hollywood. I hope. I wonder how the film will pass India’s censorship, especially now. One of the central themes of the film is religious violence. Never mind the other bits about prostitution and child abuse and things that UNICEF and the like will frown upon; In the film, the inspector oversees the torture, but pulls him out when there will be evidence, and “some international” will make a fuss.

But is it a Bollywood film? The director and screenwriter aren’t. Most of post-production is UK based. The author of the novel the script is adapted from, Vikas Swarup, writes that “Mumbai is not my city… I have never lived there for any length of time.”

He auditioned one young Indian actor after another. Many of them were capable, but they all looked buffed out, Mr. Boyle recalled, because they were all grooming for roles in Indian cinema. In the end Mr. Boyle went with an actor his teenager daughter recommended: Dev Patel, from the British television series “Skins.”

It is an Indian film, to be sure. The child actors – the real stars of the show – are amateurs, and all the talent is local. But I don’t think it is something Bollywood would have produced, something their market wouldn’t support and their talent isn’t called upon to provide. Just like how Kung Fu Panda is culturally Chinese but impossible for their industry to have produced. Hollywood couldn’t have made it either. Which is sad since it is otherwise quite possibly the most mainstream kind of movie, a happy-ending rags-to-riches wish-fulfillment fantasy romance. It isn’t some artsy festival film that makes no sense and ends tragically.

If you see it, wait for the credits to watch the classic musical dance number. Some tidbits from sticking around to the end of the credits: The opera performed in front of the Taj is Orphée et Eurydice, which I thought was rather appropriate for the film (unlike Tosca in Bond which could have been, well, any other opera and still fine) at least Jamal’s quest to find his lost love Latika is analogous to Orpheus’ journey into the underworld.

The romance between Jay and Xiaoyu (Kwai Lunmei) in ‘Secret/不能说的秘密’ is so perfect… it really is a simple love straight out of Jay’s 简单爱, or pretty much any of his early songs. And this MV by SY-sempai is set to my favorite piece from the OST. But my heart goes out to Qingyi’s (Alice Tseng) disappointment, and the sorrow behind her forced smile – it must be so painful to pine from afar, but even more so to keep that longing… secret (LOL).

Prof. Kim is a Kluge fellow (or I might say, a fellow Kluge perhaps?) at the Library of Congress, and she stated that her presentation was to dispel the stereotype of Kim Jong-il as a madman obsessed with film. She noted that attempting to use psychiatry in understanding foreign policy might not be appropriate in this case. Her argument was that North Korean films function as 1) an efficient political tool, 2) a form of social education, and 3) have evolved dramatically (yes, literally) since the 80s.

Films are efficient political tools for the DPRK because of 1) their easy reproduction and distribution, especially compared to other means of conveying messages to the people. A traveling opera troupe is expensive and cannot penetrate society to the same scale. Films are also 2) a novel medium of communication, since most North Koreans are from the rural countryside and had not been exposed much to movies. More importantly, films are 3) a highly controlled art form, where every film process includes scripting, planning, rehearsals, shooting, editing, to make a final cut for distribution. Other performance art forms have more space for improvisation and are less controllable. Finally, films are generally 4) collective in production and consumption patterns. Since DV cameras and video editing software isn’t widely available in the DPRK, most films will require significant resources to produce.

Prof. Kim noted that because of the above reasons, film was well-established as a political tool in North Korea before Kim Jong-il came to power. The DPRK is the first hereditary socialist country, but prior to the succession it was unclear whether Kim Il-sung would pick his son to take his place, and Kim Jong-il had to prove himself. After seeing how Stalin and Mao’s legacies were treated, the great leader was concerned about his own legacy, and film was one way to immortalize that. Prof. Kim then introduced “Star of Choson” (1980-87), a drama series about the early life of the great leader. Apparently even the actor playing the great leader was revered as a dignitary, that somehow the respect for the subject being played was so great that it was transmitted to the player.

She then played a short clip from the great leader’s state funeral (1994). Everyone was wailing and crying, beating their chests. Even the announcer narrating the video sounded like she was about to burst into tears anytime. Prof Kim argued that this may be partly due to Korean cultural norms on public rituals of lamentation. She suggested that the film may have been to generate buy-in by documenting the mass mourning of the great leader. The next clip was Kim Jong-il’s visit to Russia to meet with Putin in 2001. She asked us to look carefully at his shoes, which were high heeled and added at least two inches to his height. Interestingly, the Russia visit clip was narrated in English, suggesting it was for an international audience. This was just before the nuclear crisis erupted, and DPRK was increasingly isolated internationally, thus the film might be to reaffirm his political activity in world affairs.

Moving on to films as a socializing and educational tool, Prof Kim argued that like any propaganda, films were used to create enemies for society to focus on. She screened a clip from an animated short “Lazy Pig” (1969), which was very Orwellian. It was set in a farmhouse, where the animals are debating about who should be chosen to be served on the Master’s banquet table. Dog was brave and guarded the farm from evil fox, Horse bears heavy loads for the Master, Ox ploughs the fields, but Pig is lazy and only eats tofu and naps, so he has to be sacrificed for the good of the farm. Then the moral of the story is narrated: if you are lazy and selfish, you too will end up on the banquet table. Even animals work diligently for the revolution!

The next two clips were “Choi Hak-sin family” (1966) and “Flower girl” (1972), which present American and Japanese imperialists respectively as evil. In both, women and children were presented as vulnerable victims, since family life is so important in Korea. Choi Hak-sin family actually had a white guy playing the American imperialist GI, I wonder where they found him? Or was he from the Soviet bloc? I have no idea, should’ve asked her about that. Flower girl was less interesting: after the little girl is blinded by the Japanese colonial mistress, her oppa swears revenge and burns down the house, but is caught by the kempetai police and separated from his family forever. Prof Kim notes that these early propaganda films were bland and boring – they were so bad I was laughing – so Kim Jong-il “invited” a filmmaking couple from the South to improve DPRK film standards. I thought her expression when she said “invited” was just so perfect. It was as if you could see the quotation marks floating in the air.

And improve them they did. She screened a clip from “Runaway” (1984), which featured a train blown up by guerillas, except that it wasn’t done by special effects (which would have been obvious in that era of film) but by blowing up a real, functional locomotive. Apparently the dear leader spared no expense for his action movies, even though DPRK transportation infrastructure probably needed that train a lot more than the film.

Prof Kim then screened a clip from their first romantic film, “love, love, my love” (1984), which was a musical based on the Chunhyangga folk story (I like the modern adaptation a lot better). Apparently it was a huge hit and tickets were scalped for exorbitant prices in the black market. I didn’t think it was that great, it was pretty much just a girl in hanbok singing and dancing. The next clip was from “Hong Gil-dong” (1986), which drew a lot from old Hong Kong kungfu movie techniques. The hero was some kind of wandering swordsman flying through the forest killing Japanese ninjas and defeating their pirate boss to save the abducted princess, who he then elopes with, presumably to the North.

The last film she talked about was “Schoolgirl’s Diary” (2006), which unfortunately wasn’t screened at all since we can probably get it on DVD (isn’t video piracy a major export?). Apparently it sold 8 million tickets, which means 1 in every 3 people in the DPRK have seen it, but then again population statistics aren’t too clear. The film’s significance is a bit hard to decipher. It is about an ordinary schoolgirl who is unhappy that her parents are too busy to be with her. Her parents are both scientists working on a project that isn’t explicitly described. Presumably the message is that the revolution is more important than being with your family. This was released two months before the nuclear tests were announced, and Prof Kim suggests that it was to prepare the nation to cheerlead the nuclear policy, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.

I didn’t stay for the Q&A because the talk had taken over an hour with all the clips played, and rushed back to the office. Fortunately there was still a roast beef salad left, and I managed to have lunch. Prof Kim’s talk was pretty interesting and I will probably go for her next one tomorrow on “For the eyes of the Dear Leader: Fashion and body politics in North Korean Visual Arts”. This time I will not bring my suit jacket. I will also be meeting Curtis from NK economy watch tomorrow since I have to go to GMU in the evening for a Koch program workshop.

Yesterday I went to see the NYC premiere of Journey from the Fall with one of my surrogate-mothers on campus and other members of the Vietnamese Students Association, and after the film ended I knew that the long list of film festival awards was well justified. The film tells the story of one family’s journey from the fall of Saigon in 1975. When we were in the ImaginAsian cinema I was looking at the table of posters outside the theatre when I noticed several boxes of tissues available – It’s not possible to watch the film without crying a river. Perhaps seeing it was therapeutic for me since I’ve been holding back tears for a while now. Here are some thoughts on the film.

At first I was puzzled by the complex storytelling technique the filmmaker employed, but then it all made sense. Journey from the Fall has a non-linear narrative that jumps between from the protagonist’s suffering in the Communist “re-education” camps and the escape of his family to the “new economic zone” (i.e. America), yet also jumps forward and back chronologically. The narrative is united by the extended metaphor of the legend of Le Loi, reinterpreted in the film to parallel the protagonist’s sacrifice to allow his family to escape their past. The legend is told to the audience through a grandmother’s story and children’s drawings while the soft chords of a solo acoustic guitar express the sometimes overwhelming sorrow the film seeks to evoke.

The protagonist was an officer in the nationalist army that stayed behind after the fall of Saigon to resist the Communists, and was captured and taken to a “re-education” camp in the jungle, full of back-breaking construction and agriculture labor and land mines. I was amused to see the red banner above the entrance to the camp read “nothing is more precious than freedom” (of the ancients and the moderns, perhaps?), while a statue of the great leader stands silent while an absurd-looking party official delivers a sermon and the camp commissar smokes his bourgeois pipe. And then we segue to the incredible journey of his family with the boat people to Orange County, California, and the new life they find there.

After the film we had a little discussion about it outside the theatre. What struck me was how much their personal experiences verified the story. One of the VSA girls said that her older brother was actually born on the boat they escaped on, so they knew exactly when their family had fled the country. We compared the film with the previous Vietnamese film we saw (on campus), the Story of Pao, about a Hmong tribe girl’s search for her mother – none of them thought very much of that one. We wondered about reason for the difference, because both are ‘authentic’ yet one is far more real. Perhaps the answer is that the Vietnamese government supported the Story of Pao, while Journey from the Fall was (obviously) funded entirely privately from the Vietnamese diaspora community. Films like these speak so strongly against the enemies of freedom, far more eloquently and effectively than the pro-liberty documentaries of the Moving Picture Institute. I wonder if the libertarian movement really understands how to fight the culture war, when the best movies in the cause are not reactionary responses to the Michael Moore-style pseudo-documentaries of the radical left, but universal and timeless appeals to freedom and liberty. This had that universality and timelessness, yet was so much more powerful because it was closer to our world: events that take place only thirty years ago, with friends that still remember.

We were a relatively large group, and I suppose all Asian people look alike in the eyes of the locals. After dinner, an old white woman came up and pointedly asked us, “Are you all from the same country?” as if to imply something. I walked away though I wanted to say yes, we are. And that country is America.

Update: Vote for the film!

Firstly, Bamako is something of a hybrid of three movies. The first is a court case, with the World Bank, IMF and other international agencies on trial, accused of doing wrong to the African people through globalization. In the film, the defence and prosecution cross-examine witnesses, all locals from Bamako. The second is a domestic drama, about Mele, a bar singer, and her husband Chaka, who is unemployed and seeking work, and a seemingly unrelated tangent about a stolen gun. The third is a slice-of-life view into everyday life in Mali, with scenes of weddings, funerals, muslim prayers, christian sermons etc. All of these are brought together in a unity of place, the courtyard where the trial is held. As such, the challenge it presents to us is how to interpret these disparate pieces into a single film. The slice-of-life goes well with the trial, one dictates while the other quietly convinces. Yet the other component is problematic. Are we supposed to consider the domestic problems between Mele and Chaka to be a dramatization of the issues raised about globalization, or an effect of globalization, or something else entirely?

I hated the trial component. Not because it was unfair, but because it was just so explicit, with several of the witnesses (local authors, academics, civil society) and the lawyers going on extended monologues about the evils of debt repayment, anti-immigration, privatization etc. There was, of course, nothing substantial in the defence. I wondered how anyone from the World Bank could sit through that and not feel unfairly treated, which perhaps is to the detriment of the film’s cause if its intent is to convince rather than to condemn. There is even this strange film-within-a-film, a faux-Western “Death in Timbuktu” set in an African town, where a group of American and European cowboys ride their horses, go around talking about ‘faster efficiency’, and then start randomly shooting at women and children without provocation, while Danny Glover snipes at them with his rifle. Even Michael Moore and ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is more subtle than that.

No, I hated the trial because it talked too much and thus said little. The very best scene in the trial section was the silent witness, who came up to the stand, stated his name and background, and then said nothing, as if no words could express all that he had experienced. The next best was the witness, whose entirely testimony was chanted without subtitles. Just raw emotion. There was this terrible irony in the presentation of the African children’s reactions to watching the faux-Western on television, that expressed far more about mass-media issues, complicity issues, than its not-so-subtle finger pointing at the West. All of these subtle points said far more than the witness monologues on ’structural adjustment’… and perhaps should have been the larger part of the film. Instead, it chose to assume a hybrid of documentary and lecture, that is far less convincing. I can imagine the pro-market faction leaning closer to letting Atlas shrug upon watching it.

The film truly shined in the slice-of-life observations of the Bamako community. Quiet scenes of sleeping under mosquito-nets, and the constant flies and insects buzzing across the camera. Women working in traditional labor-intensive industries like cloth dyeing and cotton-spinning, while their children wear t-shirts with brand-name logos (nike, kappa), and even a Batistuta soccer jersey. Unemployed men sitting around drinking tea and bored by the proceeds of the trial. Morning prayers contrasted with Christian hand-waving hallelujahs. There is an authenticity to it that challenges the viewer to try to understand why each scene is included, what the filmmaker means.

Yet I still struggle to understand what the meaning of the domestic drama is. Why does Chaka shoot himself? Why does Mele cry in the middle of her song? Why the scenes of Chaka learning Hebrew via cassette, and his story about wanting to get a job at the Israeli embassy? Perhaps one interpretation would consider the scene of Mele’s dancing with other bar customers wearing suits, with the camera focused on her sadness, as a personification of a greater prostitution of the country’s resources, and Chaka’s suicide as the only option left to his society – which seems to me too pessimistic to be the filmmaker’s real intent.

Verdict: did I enjoy the film? Yes and no. There were really three films, and we cannot help but respond differently to each. It will not be Hotel Rwanda, Invisible Children or Blood Diamond though.

Spoiler warning.

I think that while one could appreciate 夜宴 without having experienced Hamlet (whether written, on stage, or in one of the film adaptations), my study of it for s-paper literature contributed much to my appreciation of the nuances in how they chose to adapt Hamlet here.

The fight scenes are surreal, and not just in the usual martial arts way of flying around – they are choreographed as dances. Enemies appear out of nowhere, flying out of the trees or leaping out of the water. All the soldiers are masked (masking one’s emotions is an important theme) and look alike. There are these wonderful scenes in the film, like how there is no overt supernatural appearance of King Hamlet like in the play. Instead, we get this poignant scene where Hamlet (Daniel Wu) approaches his father’s armor, and the helmet’s faceplate streams tears. There’s another scene where the soldiers sent to kill Hamlet return empty-handed and commit suicide on the bridge to the city, one of the scenes illustrating Claudius’ (Ge You) brutality (though in other scenes he garners more sympathy). My favorite bit is when Hamlet asks the apocathary about the poison that killed his father, and asks if there is anything more poisonous. The apocathary replies there is, 人心 (Man’s heart). The problem is that the scenes seem somewhat disconnected, and so the film takes a lot more effort to make sense of as a whole. Seems like the big budget films think they can get away with poor writing if the cinematography looks like the Lord of the Rings… And to be honest it looks like the market will allow them to. I guess we won’t be getting any more like Infernal Affairs.

The biggest difference is that there isn’t any sense of resolution to 夜宴 – I felt that Gertrude’s (Zhang Ziyi) death by an unseen assassin, which ends the film, leaves the audience wondering what happened – indeed that is what I heard people in the lecture theater ask as we left. Neither do we get a full appreciation of the motives of the characters (Hamlet, Laertes and Ophelia seem one-dimensional). If it had ended with Hamlet’s death, much like in the original play, I think it would have been a better film… but I think they rewrote the script to favor Zhang Ziyi. I hear that it was originally meant to be a much older actress, but since it was Zhang Ziyi, they rewrote the part so that Gertrude is Hamlet’s stepmother and love interest, which interestingly enough aligns well with the subtle Oedipal tensions in the play.

No doubt this film will be a topic of discussion for my Literature Humanities class when we cover Hamlet and all of my comparative advantages come into play.

It’s just the trailer but I’m already a little disappointed. Hagu-chan is supposed to be so much cuter, they should’ve got her seiyuu to act. And the scene about seeing for the first time the precise moment that someone falls in love seems a little less poignant than I thought it should be. It’s my favorite part so they had better get it right. I’m also not sure how well it would work as a film when there is so much less time to develop the characters – the slow-paced anime series had absolutely no plot and each episode was just a slice of their lives.