Round Five MatchupM/Other (Suwa Nobuhiro, 1999)
Won over Dang Bireley and the Young Gangsters (verdict by edgar00) (expanded verdict by edgar00)Won over The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (verdict by worm@work)Won over A Petal (verdict by Bondo)Won over A Brighter Summer Day (verdict by Teproc)Having previously considered Suwa's
2/Duo for
resurrection, I had a fair idea what to expect from
M/Other, in terms of style and pacing. Where I messed up was trying to watch a movie like this — full of understated long takes — in the middle of a film noir marathon. The contrast proved to be too jarring. After a series of 75-minute films with highly stylized cinematography, crisp scenes, and orchestral scores,
M/Other's two and a half hours of minimalism seemed so empty and inefficient by comparison, sometimes painfully so.
When my mind wandered during the screening, I found myself comparing Suwa's film to Andy Warhol's
Empire. I've never scene the latter or even read up on it that much, but I'm guessing one way to view it is an exaggeration of the realistic aesthetic — purity of representation, unadulterated by edits, camera movement, etc. But is it art? Or, at least, more artful than security camera footage? (This could have been a topic of discussion among characters in Östlund's
The Square.)
M/Other posed to me the same sort of questions on a smaller scale, specifically the question of whether the film's impressive realism was achieved at the expense of artfulness — a trade-off between character authenticity and narrative efficiency — as often seems to be the case with these sorts of semi-improvised character studies.
My other point of comparison during
M/Other was Robert Redford's
Ordinary People, a very different kind of movie about characters with bottled up feelings that they're unable to articulate. Mainly, I just wanted Judd Hirsch to show up and prod the main characters in
M/Other into speaking their minds, even if it necessitated more conventional storytelling. As with
2/Duo, the "emotionally inarticulate" couple frustrated me past the point of engagement. Watching people who actively refuse to articulate what they're thinking is distinctly anti-dramatic. And then, in the scenes when they do finally release their feelings in dramatic fashion, it often feels arbitrary and not fully rooted in the characters as previously defined.
All that aside, I should clarify that I do in fact appreciate Suwa's style and admire the effort here (though not quite as much as in the less unwieldy
2/Duo). Among other things, he elicits a fantastic performance from Watanabe Makiko. She's especially good — effortlessly natural — in the two scenes with her college friend, and after that I resented the story for not letting her smile more often. Miura Tomokazu is good as well, though he has the more thankless role, with his character largely just being an oblivious dick, however good-natured and well-intentioned.
I also find intriguing the occasional use of screeching strings on the soundtrack and the harsh fade outs, which are reminiscent of a projectionist's being late in switching reels. Taken together, they imbue this personal drama with the atmosphere of a horror movie, as if Shun's mother was eventually going to appear and terrorize Aki. I'm glad the story didn't go that direction, but those hints of preternatural tension still left me wanting more stylistic intervention of that sort — which brings me back to the idea that maybe the film as a whole is a bit under-realized. (I should really prioritize watching
Jeanne Dielman to see if and how Akerman dramatizes the mundane for two hundred minutes.)
M/Other would make a very interesting double-feature with
Moving, providing two very different takes, both stylistically and thematic, on the invisible ripple effects that parents' lives have on their children and vice-versa.
Pickpocket (Jia Zhangke, 1997)
Won over The Quiet Family (verdict by duder)Won over The King of Masks (verdict by MartinTeller)Won over Down the Drain (verdict by BlueVoid)Won over Wing Chun (verdict by PeacefulAnarchy)The small city of Fenyang is a noisy place — too noisy, perhaps, for the sound technology Jia had at his disposal at the time of filming
Pickpocket. Ambient noises dominate the soundtrack throughout the movie, as part of its excellent evocation of time and place, but that soundscape is actively unpleasant to listen to, due to those technological limitations. If you've ever been woken up by the sounds of someone putting away dishes for two hours straight, you've pretty much heard this movie's audio track. Making matters worse is the fact that my copy of the film generally didn't see fit to translate the various voices blaring from the street or from the many television and radios, reducing even the human voice to unintelligible noise.
The film's visuals are equally grubby, but again it's in a way that feels very true to this setting. Fenyang is a city in transition, and Jia captures that well in all its noisy grubbiness. My favorite shot in the film is when title character Xiao Wu visits a public bath — a place associated with catharsis and cleansing — and there's a urinal next to the baths that about as dirty as a urinal can be. That one image, with all its internal contradictions, pretty much sums up the entire film, which struggles with a romantic attachment to an ugly past in the face of an uncertain future.
Pickpocket is less successful as as character study. The protagonist — an intermittently pathetic, not quite likable, lowlife pickpocket named Xiao Wu — lacks depth, remaining literally and figuratively faceless behind his over-sized glasses. The storytelling often feels improvised to ill effect, a collection of interesting but unshaped moments. I half-jokingly described the film as two hours of sitting in a noisy restaurant listening to a friend scroll through Facebook and complain that everyone he knows is getting married while, at an adjacent table, a group of old men complain about the changing times.
Jia's film is better than my ungenerous analogy implies, but at its core it's still a very typical amateur, low budget, indie character study from the 1990s, full of good ideas and promise of better things to come but not fully satisfying in its own right.
Verdict: I'm glad this bracket contains four other verdicts for each of these films (with at least one more to come) because I feel I've done a poor job of capturing their essence. It seems hardest to write about films that teeter on that line between like and dislike, arousing neither love nor hate, and that's the case here. I likely would have advanced both films through their matchups in the first three rounds (
Dang Bireley is the one opponent I haven't seen) but would have gone the other way in round four, choosing
A Brighter Summer Day over
M/Other and
Wing Chun over
Pickpocket. This fifth round is a trickier proposition, and I'm rather glad that my vote for
M/Other is not the deciding one.
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