Volver

Pedro Almodovar's latest film, Volver, features Penelope Cruz as a strong, determined woman coping in defiance of her circumstances. The Spanish verb 'volver' translates as 'to return', and what returns here is a cycle of male abuse and female retaliation passed from one generation to the next.

I wonder if it was really necessary for the events to be so completely circular. We already accept Cruz's character as empowered and resilient without the slightly cliched final revelation. Chinatown presented a similar plot point in a much more dramatic manner.

If not as profound as the devastating Talk To Her, Volver is still a moving portrait of female bonding, with a genuine sense of community spirit replacing the sexual comedy of much of Almodovar's earlier work.

The Beautiful Washing Machine

James Lee's film The Beautiful Washing Machine is hypnotic and intriguing, though I'm not sure whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts or the plot holes are so deep as to be inescapable.

Lee's style is very Tsai Ming-Liang: empty interiors, uncommunicative characters, and slow/no camera movement. Clearly, major themes are consumer emptiness and urban isolation, as the film returns repeatedly to featureless supermarkets and antiseptic office cubicles. It's a Malaysian film, set in Kuala Lumpur, though its bland modernist settings have no identifying characteristics (to me, they somehow evoke Singapore). The use of DV cameras adds to the film's intentionally artificial, homogenised atmosphere, though it also results in murky photography, often making faces difficult to identify.

The film begins as an office drone, Teoh, buys a washing machine. He takes it home, though it only works intermittently. Then, one night, he finds a mute, submissive young women sitting next to the machine. Her appearance is not explained, and he hardly seems surprised to see her. She becomes his live-in maid, and he even pimps her out to strangers, one of whom later stabs him to death.

When Teoh is killed, the mysterious women is taken in by a middle-aged man, again as a maid, though she is then raped by his son-in-law. The woman is destined to be exploited and abused by the men to whom she attaches herself.

The woman, who never speaks and remains nameless, is perhaps a symbol of female oppression and submission, though if this is Lee's intention it hardly makes for a profound subtext. More interesting is the possibility that the woman is some kind of literal extension/creation of the washing machine (as the same machine is inexplicably seen in the middle-aged man's house).

Love & Death

Love & Death is one of Woody Allen's "early, funny" films (the ones his fans prefer in the introspective fantasy Stardust Memories). Allen's films are often stereotyped as contemporary New York stories, though Love & Death couldn't be more different: it's set in Russia during the Napoleonic invasion.

Allen plays Boris, a pacifist forcibly dispatched to the front line. His trademark existential angst is present, in endless debates on theology and moral philosophy. Much of the comedy comes from Allen's anachronisms - he mishears "takes lovers" as 'takes uppers', for example. The film works as a parody of Russian literature and cinema, notably a quick montage of lethargic lion statues in an echo of Battleship Potemkin.

The Love of the title is represented by Diane Keaton, and her and Allen's scenes together are a joy to watch. I've always thought she was much warmer and more emotional than Allen's later partner/co-star Mia Farrow.

Death is personified by the Grim Reaper himself, in an extended reference to The Seventh Seal culminating in a 'dance of death' at the end of the film. In Bergman's film, the Reaper has a rather refined voice, though Allen's Reaper has a much deeper intonation, a characteristic later borrowed by Monty Python for the booming Reaper in The Meaning Of Life. In a further Bergman reference, Allen frames intersecting female faces in a recollection of Persona.

Imagine The Sky

Kathmandu photography gallery is currently showing an exhibition by Kraisak Choonhavan titled Imagine The Sky (from 3rd February to 28th March).

Kraisak was a senator in the Thaksin government, and these images represent his frustration at the red tape which prevented him from generating any real changes. They were a private, stress-relieving Photoshop experiment until Kathmandu suggesting exhibiting them publicly.

Bangkok, like any city, is full of advertising billboards. Kraisak has used Photoshop to digitally remove some of this clutter and present idyllic images of an advertising-free Bangkok cityscape. He juxtaposes 'before' (real) and 'after' (Photoshopped) photographs, and the contrast is startling.

If you look up close at the 'after' images, imperfections in the digital manipulation are revealed, though the immediate effect is highly impressive. (Like Pop Art, these works should be seen from a reasonable distance, generating a sudden impact.)

Chao Samran

Last night, we had a short holiday at Chao Samran, a beach on the east coast 300km south of Bangkok in Petchaburi province.

We stayed at a "boutique resort" called Chez Nous, located right on the seafront. Our room was directly in front of their lovely pool, which was itself directly in front of the beach.

The whole area was extremely quiet, probably because we were there on a weeknight. We did see one other couple arrive, though it essentially felt like we were the sole guests, as no-one else ever used the pool or even the beach. Lovely!

We're going back again in April for Songkran (Thai new year), although it'll surely be much busier then (and our seaview room is fully booked, unfortunately).

Curse Of The Golden Flower

Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou's latest film, Curse Of The Golden Flower, is the most expensive production in the history of the Chinese film industry. The budget, reportedly $45,000,000 ($10,000,000 more than the previous Chinese record-breaker, The Promise - though less than half the cost of Titanic), was spent on recreating the opulence of 10th century China. Every surface of the imperial palace shimmers with iridescent decorations. The splendor of the film's production design is matched by the gravitas of its superb cast, led by Chow Yun-Fat and Gong Li, two superstars of Asian cinema.

Emperor Ping is slowly poisoning his consort Phoenix, the Empress, whom he married not for love but for power (as she is the previous Emperor's daughter). The Empress seeks solace in the arms of her stepson Wan, the Crown Prince, and plots to avenge her husband's cruelty. She confides in Wan's brother, Prince Jai, who promises to lead an army of 10,000 soldiers in a coup against the Emperor.

Exactly why the Emperor is poisoning his consort's medication is never made clear; we can infer that it is a punishment for her (almost) incestuous infidelity. Though the Empress is aware of the poisoning, she is unable to stop it, as her medication is administered with clockwork regularity and scrutinised meticulously. We may marvel at the formal precision of decadent, ritualised palace life, though the stifling constraints of protocol are also self-evident.

The plotting and counter-plotting within the palace walls are Shakespearean in their machinations and repercussions, while the ensuing battle (between troops loyal to the Empress, led by Prince Yai, versus those of the Emperor) is operatic in its scale. In these senses, the film is close to Ran, Akira Kurosawa's samurai interpretation of King Lear.

The Emperor is portrayed as a power-crazed, cruel, and heartless man, though his consort's character is rather more complex. Restrained and symbolically imprisoned by her imperial position, she is a sympathetic character. However, her affair with her stepson and her relish at a devastating revelation she orchestrates suggest that she is not completely innocent herself. Their youngest son, Prince Yu, demonstrates a selfish ambition beneath his placid exterior, and eldest son Prince Wan's actions are ruled by his loins rather than his head. In contrast, the principled middle son, Prince Yai, is the film's hero.

The outcomes of the Emperor's and Empress's actions culminate in bloodshed on both an epic and intimate scale. Yet, despite a series of personal tragedies, the dynasty does not unravel, and imperial power is unassailable - as, for instance, when the blood from the battle is (literally and metaphorically) swept under the carpet.

Despite a sword-fighting scene and the aforementioned battle sequence, this is not a martial-arts film in the same vein as Zhang Yimou's earlier mega-budget ('dapian') Wuxia productions Hero or House Of Flying Daggers. It marks a reunion between the director and his muse, Gong Li: she starred in several of his early films, and they had a long-lasting affair, though they separated personally and professionally in 1995.

Spartacus in high-definition

Spartacus is the second Kubrick film to be released on HD-DVD, after Full Metal Jacket. The good news is that, unlike Full Metal Jacket, the HD-DVD version preserves the film's original aspect ratio (2.21:1). The HD-DVD 5.1 soundtrack is also reasonably faithful to the original, as theatrical prints had six-channel sound (again, unlike Full Metal Jacket, transferred from mono to 5.1). There are no extras on the disc at all - surprising given the plethora on Criterion's DVD, especially considering Criterion subsequently licensed their extras to Universal for DVD.