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Klondike (Ukraine-Turkey, 2022)
- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Young Cinema Competition (World) program
- Maryna Er Gorbach, director, scriptwriter and editor
- Starring: Oksana Cherkashyna, Serhi Shadrin, Oleh Shevchuk
There was a Q&A with Klondike's director, scriptwriter and editor, Maryna Er Gorbach, after the screening of the film I attended. If not for it being close to midnight at that point (and my not going to get home after well after midnight that evening as a result), I would have stayed and tried to get in a few questions such as: What's the meaning of the film's title? (Since this Ukrainian-Turkish co-production doesn't take place anywhere near any Klondike I know -- all of which are located in North America); and what's the point for including the real life crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in the picture besides locating the proceedings in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014? (This since I could totally envision this film's story working fine without it.)
I'd also have liked to have known if Gorbach had envisioned Klondike to be a straight drama or very dark, absurdist comedy. If it was the latter, this would better explain the often strange behavior and perspectives of the film's main characters -- a 7-month pregnant countrywoman named Irka (played by Oksana Cherkashyna) who can seem far more obsessed with the state of a baby stroller or sofa than her and her loved ones' physical welfare and safety, and her husband Tolik (portrayed by the late Serhi Shadrin), whose fixation for getting his car back from a separatist friend again seems to surpass his own physical safety and well-being.
The thing though is that there were hardly any laughs to be heard throughout the screening I attended. Maybe other viewers half a planet away from the world depicted in Klondike found the film's characters and story hard to read too. Or maybe we were correct in that it meant to be a dramatic work -- in which case what unfolds in the film is absolutely chilling to behold: namely, residents of a wartorn part of the world who look to have become numbed by violence and try to continue living regular, ordinary lives but absolutely can't because what is happening to their country and world is so very tragic and terrible.
Even before MH 17 got blown up in the sky above them (by, it is implied, comrades of the friend who "borrowed" Tolik's car that fateful day), Irka and Tolik already saw the front wall of their house destroyed by a stray mortar. Yet, as in the following days, they continue doing such as preparing food, eating, sleeping and watching TV in their house despite the gaping large hole that exists in it. Though they try to think otherwise, you just know that this can't go on forever though. Even so, the last sections of Klondike really offer up a number of shocks that left this (re)viewer further unpleasantly shaken by, and uneasy about, it all.
My rating for this film: 6.0
Love Letter (Japan, 1953)
- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Portraits of Women -- A Tribute to Tanaka Kinuyo program
- Kinuyo Tanaka, director
- Starring: Masayuki Mori, Juzo Dozan, Jukichi Uno, Yoshiko Kuga
Eleven years ago, I viewed a much loved Japanese film entitled Love Letter (in English) at the 2011 Hong Kong International Film Festival. Like that Shunji Iwai work, Kinuyo Tanaka's decades older Love Letter also hails from Japan but it's quite different in tone and subject matter (though it's true enough that both of these films do feature actual physical love letters!).
The first directorial effort of only the second filmmaker in Japanese cinematic history was originally released in 1953 but its story takes place three years earlier, in a Japan that's recovering from World War II but with people who bear psychological scars from the war and early post-occupation years. Navy veteran and former prisoner of war Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori) now lives in Tokyo with his younger brother, Hiroshi (Juzo Dozan) -- the latter of whom one gets the impression was too young to be enlisted into any of the branches of the military and thus was spared going to war, resulting in his having a sunnier and more optimistic as well as energetic demeanor and personality than his elder brother.
Finding it harder than the entrepeneurial-minded Hiroshi to find a job and get on with his life, Reikichi does perk up some after a chance encounter with a former naval academy classmate. Having parlayed the English language translation skills he acquired at the academy (along with knowledge of the French language) into an unconventional business, Naoto (Jukichi Uno) enlists Reikichi to help him... write English language love letters for Japanese women whose lovers have returned home to the West (but still, after some pleading and cajoling by way of those epistles, provide some financial aid to them)!
Naoto also tells Reikichi that, when doing this, he finds himself becoming more sympathetic to the lot of his clients but it's clear that Reikichi continues to look at them as fallen, sinful women even while turning out to be pretty good at writing love letters for them all the same. Even when his childhood sweetheart (Yoshiko Kuga) turns out to be one of these women, Reikichi is intent on remaining on his moral high horse; and only begins to get to thinking again after Naoto reads him the kind of lecture which Japanese people are often accused of not doing. Frankly, it's a real doozy -- and perhaps more than any other dialogue, reminds the viewer that Love Letter's script is by the great Keisuke Kinoshita!
My rating for this film: 7.5
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