FILM COMMENT SELECTS: Flash Point, J'entends Plus la Guitare and A Wonderful World Reviews

As promised, here is my final post on this year's Film Comment Selects program. The Film Society at Lincoln Center offered up a very mixed bag with no really excellent title to recommend it but enough terrific consolation titles to sate anyone. The program succeeds where it counts and offered up titles time shouldn't have forgotten (I'm looking at you, Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven). FCS remains a terrific primer for the year to come: I am more excited than ever to see Xavier Gens' Frontière(s), Grant Gee's Joy Division and Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Banishment. Despite some questionable taste (Reflections of Evil; 'nuf said), its been another good year. Without further ado, here are my last batch of reviewlets, Wilson Yip's Flash Point, Philippe Garrel's J'entends Plus la Guitare and Luis Estrada's A Wonderful World. FCS continues until the 28th at the Walter Reade theater (70 Lincoln Center Plaza).

Flash Point (2007) Dir: Wilson Yip

Glancing at this year’s FCS line-up, it’s impossible to ignore the absence of all but one representative of the exotic, imaginary critical creation that is “Asian cinema.” The only other title that comes close is Chen Shi-zheng’s Dark Matter, but considering that it’s very much an American production, including stars like Aidan Quinn and Meryl Streep, one is forced to stick with the loneliest number. Last year’s program featured several exciting new titles like Mamoru Oshii’s Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters and Johnny To’s Exiled. This year FCS fans set their lonely sights on Wilson Yip’s Flash Point for hope. Even if I were to get serious, narrow my focus and criticize the program for not promoting other noteworthy Hong Kong films like To’s Mad Detective, Soi Cheang’s Shamo or either of Pang Ho-cheung’s offerings from last year (Exodus and Trivial Matters), Flash Point comes up as a lame duck on its own merits. Yip’s films of late (SPL, Dragon Tiger Gate) were never anything more than spruced-up B-pictures with a lot of glitz, unoriginal but satisfying stock plots and carefully constructed, though overlong, fight scenes. In other words, Yip’s films are dumb, sparkly fun but only in spurts.

Star and action choreographer Donnie Yen rejoins Yip in pretty much the same role where he left off in SPL. Yen plays Detective Ma, a reckless renegade cop that watches as his fellow officer Wilson (Louis Koo) lays his life and his girlfriend’s on the line to shut down a group of Vietnamese hoods. If you need more help visualizing Yen as Ma, think Steven Seagal with a lot more moves, just as much eyebrow-arching but not nearly enough affably bad dialogue. When Wilson is effectively taken out of the fight not once but several times, Ma loses his temper and takes his righteous anger to the Vietnamese gang’s door. This gets him fired up for his final fight with Tony (Collin Chou) the gang’s champion, which to its credit, is a carefully choreographed climax.

Flash Point leaves a lot to be desire in the brains department and doesn’t quite make up for it when it counts most, or when Yen’s beating the baddies up real good. Yen never had the personality of Jackie Chan or even Jet Li and while he definitely can move, there’s only so many times I can watch the man take out the trash. With an austerity that doesn’t suit the genre, he makes his way through scenes with little joy and even less charisma. The bulk of Flash Point’s problems as a vehicle for Yen aren’t however due to his unwieldy stock character but because they just don’t seem to bring anything new to him to make him worth watching. Even with a dash of history thrown in with the film’s 1997 Hong Kong pre-independence setting, the film just sits there and refuses to really jump anytime except for the flawed but fine finale. Yip’s films don’t need to be smart to be enjoyable—Dragon Tiger Gate is a classic example of the formulaic stuff that action fans’ wet dreams are made of—but considering that they’ve never had the brains to be anything more than guilty pleasures, its hard not to wish they were. At best, Flash Point is an entrée to Yip’s films but outside of that, it’s nothing worth highlighting, let alone remembering.

J’entends Plus la Guitare (1991) Dir: Philippe Garrel

Philippe Garrel’s J’entends Plus la Guitare is a must-see for fans of the Velvet Underground’s Nico and anyone interested in compulsively watchable, self-indulgent autobiography. Garrel draws on his decade-long, on-and-off relationship with the notoriously unapproachable starlet with mixed results, laconically unfolding a narrative of intellectual posturing eventually overshadowed by its historical roots. While it’s a lost cause to second-guess Garrel’s intentions, it’s impossible to watch the film and not speculate. His characters make several pauses where they clearly aren’t themselves acting in the moment but rather have become foils that allow Garrel to look back on his past with an impenetrable gaze. Garrel’s otherwise unimpeachably thoughtful portrait of reckless lovers is a mirror that infrequently tells a story.

Gerard (Benoît Régent) and Marianne (Johanna ter Steege) were lovers but whether that means anything to them at the time is debatable. Martin (Yann Collette), Gerard’s wingman and confidante, declares that love is nothing more than an outdated notion cultivated in stories, one whose shelf life will soon expire. While Gerard argues with Martin about the decadent nature of such a stance, his actions speak louder than his protests. His connection to Marianne is undeniable but this declaration of distance is essential to understanding the feigned aloofness that dogs Gerard’s actions. Like any emotionally unavailable intellectual, nothing says ‘suffocating’ more loudly than labels and hence they’re the first things to be abolished from one’s vocabulary. Emotions rule and talking about it earnestly drools, a romantic approach tempered by Garrel’s characteristic long takes and beautifully squalid backdrops. Silence pervades pivotal scenes and the narrative coasts along a series of encounters that highlight the best and worst in their relationships.

What exactly that means in a story where the characters are articulating sentiments that are first Garrel’s and then theirs is beyond me. Garrel carefully imposes an artful if not consistently truthful revisionist logic onto Gerard and Marianne’s personalities to create the illusion of a bracingly hyper-real reconstruction of youth. Regret and longing pervade Gerard’s story, but it’s clearly not always him doing the regretting. When Marianne introduces Gerard to cocaine, he stares at her like he was watching his world go up in flames. Talk about youth without youth. Thanks to its pensive nature, J'entends Plus la Guitare undoubtedly appreciates with each viewing, but whether one can love imaginary wounds that much is doubtful.

A Wonderful World (2006) Dir: Luis Estrada

In its description on the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s website, Luis Estrada’s A Wonderful World is said to have “a vibe that’s sort of Latino Coen Bros.,” a seemingly supercilious value judgment which isn’t half wrong. If you take The Hudsucker Proxy, mash it together with the humor of the Coens’ recent comedies and mix in an overwhelming amount of political commentary on the state of Mexico today, you’ll get A Wonderful World. Don’t get me wrong, I like all of those elements too much for that to be an insult but the queasy mix of old-fashioned screwball comedy with satire that aspires to be the next Virdiana doesn’t exactly make it the easiest movie to recommend. The only way to really enjoy the film would be to either undercut the film’s relevance or its entertainment value, either way effectively crippling the film as a complete work of art.

Damián Alcázar stars as Juan Perez, a bum that winds up the talk of the town when he accidentally winds up on the ledge of the World Financial Center building in Mexico City. While thoughts of suicide were the farthest thing from his mind, Juan finds himself at the center of a controversy that he remains willfully oblivious of throughout the film. In the process, he becomes a poster-child for the discontent of the working class and a threat to the aspiring Economic Minister’s (Antonio Serrano) bid for the Nobel Prize and leadership of the World Bank. Being a fairy tale, Perez’s story is completely and totally out of his hands, allowing him to sheepishly shrug his shoulder and reply to his detractors, “If you want me to say yes, then yes. If you want me to say no, no.” Being used is just par for the course so long as he gets his hand-out because in this Wonderful World, the deceptively reassuring façade money provides at least seems sturdy enough to satisfy the average Juan.

The film steps into Buñuel territory in its portrayal of inter and intraclass warfare as the old rich reject the new who in turn reject the poor. Estrada clearly relishes being able to see the Minister institute a policy as naïve as the complete withdrawal of funds for the poor and winding up winning a Nobel prize for it. His zeal for blending the obscenely obvious skewering of political opinions with a deceptively formulaic narrative gives the end of Perez’s story an effective little wink as he twists the knife a little more. The bleek plight of the unwashed masses never looked so swell.