NYAFF, Part 3: Breathless

The two highlights of the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival (so far), have been Yang Ik-June's feel-bad domestic violence yarn Breathless (2009) and Lee Kyeong-Mi's obsessive farce Crush and Blush (2008) [more on the latter later]. Both are disturbing psychological freak-outs from South Korea, with the former opting for tragedy, the latter comedy.

Breathless is very nearly a one-man show. Yang Ik-June wrote it, stars in it, and co-directed the film with Lee Hwan. According to the NYAFF programmers, he sold his house and maxed out his credit cards to get this outrageously vulgar film made. It's nothing if not a passion project. The language is what immediately registers (and I can only imagine the difficulties for the translator), a peppery melange of "cunts", "bitches", and "motherfuckers". They're used as punctuations, terms of endearment, and imminent threats. Yang is the primary linguist here as Song-Hoon, a morose shakedown artist working for a fatherly moon-faced loan shark.

Song-Hoon's violence emerges immediately in the opening scene, as he and his team of thugs break up a student protest. His rage is uncontrollable, as he ends up debilitating anything in his way, even his fellow baton-wielding brothers. He is a savage, and early on Yang plays these bestial traits for laughs, pivoting his uncouth attitude around the uncomprehending locals around him. The uneasy tone is established early on, as he saunters down an alleyway, and spits over his shoulder. The spittle lands on a high-school girl, Yeon-Hee (a devilish Kim Gol-Bi), who tuns out to be just as nihilistic as he is. They exchange blows, and a tentative truce is built up for the rest of the film's running time.

As their backstories are filled in (abusive and deceased parents, intense emotional scarring), the tone tints darker and darker. The plot follows a fairly traditional arc, as Sang-Hoon seeks closure for his bereft youth and attempts to master his rage to fit into (however uncomfortably) the wider society. These are beats hit by every rebellious teen film ever made, but Breathless enlivens them with its mordant wit, fearless performances, and the ragged intensity of its HD compositions.

The final screening of Breathless takes place today, July 2nd, at 2PM at the IFC Center.

NYAFF, Part 2: Tactical Unit: Comrades in Arms (2009)

Law Wing-Cheong has paid his dues at Milkyway Image. Working as an assistant director and editor since 1995, he was the AD on Running Out of Time, The Mission, and PTU, among others. Milkway seems to work on the habits of the old studio system, where one apprenticed in technical positions before rising to the director's chair. Law has gotten his feet wet on a few sequels, with his first gig on Running Out of Time 2, up to his two sequels to PTU: Tactical Unit: The Code (2008, for TV), and Tactical Unit: Comrades in Arms (2009, theatrical). The latter film recently screened at the NYAFF, and was another example of Milkyway's well-oiled genre machinery (also see Tativille's take on their Eye in the Sky).

All the characters from Johnnie To's original return, including Simon Yam's ramrod straight cop Sam, his careerist competitor May (Maggie Siu), and the lazy, demoted curmudgeon, Fat Lo (Milkyway axiom Lam Suet). Sam's unit is competing with May's unit for promotion, and this not-so-friendly rivalry starts the film off on a Keystone Kops vibe. Filmed with slapstick vigor, the two teams chase down a petty thief, down opposite sides of the street, eventually combining into a morass of tangling feet, dangling handcuffs, and bruised morale. May's boys win out, and eventually are bumped upstairs.

The day before the promotions are to take place, though, a major bank heist takes place, and the perps disappear into a forest. Thus the two bickering units are forced to work together to take them down. This is where the main body of the film begins, and Law shows a distinctly light touch in this darkly scripted tale. His deft use of cross-cutting shows the various bumblings of the teams, as they all variously get lost in the bowels of the night, not unlike an old dark house comedy-horror film like The Cat and the Canary (1927).

As funny as it is, Law doesn't skimp on tension, wrapping things up with a tightly choreographed shootout in a quaint rural church. Esssentially it has everything one could desire in a quick and dirty crime film. Definitely worth seeking out, especially if you're a fan of PTU.

There are no more screenings, but it's readily available on HK DVD at the usual vendors (YesAsia, HKFlix, etc.)

New York Asian Film Festival, Part I: Written By (2009) and The Longest Nite (1998)

As integral to summer in NYC as panicked Mets fans proposing ridiculous trades on WFAN (Jon Niese for Matt Holliday, maybe?), the New York Asian Film Festival is quickly becoming the most entertaining film series in the city. It has the plums to program genre actioners along with the art films that tend to solely populate regional surveys here. The breadth of the NYAFF is its great strength, as was evidenced early on.

The opening night film was Wai Ka-Fai's Written By (2009), a narratively dense family drama. Ka-Fai has been Johnnie To's right hand man for over a decade at Milkyway Productions, writing, directing, producing, and polishing the eccentric company's output. He's known mostly for his co-writing and co-directing duties with To on Fulltime Killer (2001), Running on Karma (2003), and Mad Detective (2007), but he's also helmed idiosyncratic projects of his own, including the 2006 comedy The Shopaholics. His latest solo jaunt is an ambitious but strangely flat exercise in experimental narrative. It's structured like a Russian Doll, stories within stories within stories.

Lau Ching-Wan (a Wai regular since their TVB days) plays a lawyer who dies in a car accident, leaving his daughter Melody blind and his wife and son devastated. Trying to rekindle happy memories, Melody starts writing a story where her father survived (although also blinded) while the rest of the family died. The film then follows this second story, as Lau and his Filipino maid aimlessly putter about their large home. Lonely and desperate, this invented Lau starts to write his own story, a more fantastical tale where the ghosts of his family return to aid him through his depression. These story layers remain discrete until the final act, when characters begin crossing between stories and tragedies beget tragedies.

For all of its conceptual complexity, Written By never takes off dramatically. The characters are ciphers, thinly drawn receptacles of grief that serve as pawns in Wai's narrative game-playing, not unlike Charlie Kaufman's embalmed Synecdoche, New York. As Wai draws his deterministic web, Melody flails without a discernible inner life. Her attempt to exorcize her memories through her imagination is a potent device, but it stagnates on the screen. Wai never finds a consistent style to visualize her plight, and his use of subpar special effects lends the piece a Saturday morning cartoon insubstantiality. It ends up a tantalizing disappointment.

There was no lack of inspired Wai, though, for there was also a rare screening of 1998's The Longest Nite, a rescue job he performed with Johnnie To. Credited director Patrick Yau was fired after he had completed five scenes, and the duo built an entirely new story around this feeble skeleton. It turned out to be a punishingly dark yakuza tale, as Tony Leung and Lau Ching-Wan's mobsters tumble into an abyss of violence and swapped identities.

The film is literally dark, using very little artificial light and framing the bald, glowering Lau as a black angel of the apocalypse. Leung, a twitchy crooked cop, is soon framed-up for a fall, and his only way out is to assume Lau's identity. Only one can survive, so they devour each other for the use of it, in a mirror-smashing finale redolent of Welles' Lady from Shanghai. In the Q&A that followed (available online), Wai admits this final battle was hatched on the spot, as they needed 10 minutes to fill and had little money. So they rented an empty warehouse, shaved Leung's head, and had them beat the shit out of each other. It's a miraculous bit of improvisation, and the film is a testament to Wai and To's adaptive creativity.

More to come...