A Mysterious Weapon at the Hong Kong Film Archive (Film review)

A place where I've watched many an old (Hong Kong) movie! ;b

A Mysterious Weapon (Hong Kong, 1969)

- Ling Yun (aka Ling Wan), director

- Starring: Suet Nei, Paul Chun Pui, Shek Kin, Kenneth Tsang

Long before I got the tickets for the 2019 Hong Kong International Film Festival went on sale (or, actually, before this year's film fest program had been announced), I had already got my ticket for the screening at the Hong Kong Film Archive that I went to midway through my HKIFF-ing.  A Mysterious Weapon isn't the kind of movie that I can envision the HKIFF's programmers screening at the fest any time soon -- and is so obscure that it doesn't appear to have merited an IMDB entry.  Nonetheless, I did think that it would be worth some one and a half hours of my time.  And quite a few others evidently agreed since, as it so happened, it attracted an audience that was larger than those at many of the HKIFF screenings I attended this year.

A historical martial arts movie from 1969, A Mysterious Weapon stars Suet Nei as a kung fu expert whose specialty weapon is her "iron hair", which she wields like a whip against attempted rapists as well as opponents she goes up against over the course of doing such as rescuing men and women alike.  Going to the aid of a handsome fellow (Paul Chun Pui) being pursued by a bunch of other, weapon-brandishing men one day, she discovers that he's her sworn brother and learns the story of how he has been falsely accused of attacking his boss as well as seducing the older man's daughter under false pretences.    

Although it's pretty quickly obvious to A Mysterious Weapon's audience who the villain of the piece is (not least because he's played by Shek Kin, an actor almost invariably accused as the bad guy in movies in which he appeared, including Enter the Dragon), it's less so to many of the characters in the film, including the "young master" (Kenneth Tsang) who is the heir apparent of the man now feared to be on his death bed.  One reason for this is that the old patriarch was attacked with a cicada-shaped dart that is the trademark weapon of the character played by Paul Chun Pui -- and, incidentally, also the titular mysterious weapon of the film (rather than, as I had thought earlier, Suet Nei's character's "iron hair").

With individuals having cicada-shaped darts and "iron hair" as their weapons of choice, it never was going to be easy to look upon A Mysterious Weapon as a serious martial arts movie -- and, if truth be told, I couldn't label it a very good film.  The fact of the matter too is that it wasn't made with the biggest of budgets.  In addition, I sometimes get the feeling that the film was made in such a hurry that its makers ended up overlooking -- and hoping its audience wouldn't notice -- such as the appearance of a trigonometric station on one side of an outdoor scene shot in the Hong Kong countryside!

At the same time though, I do think it's an entertaining offering with some nifty creative touches in such as its plotting and costume details.  I also have to admit to thoroughly enjoying seeing a movie featuring a formidable fighting female character.  For those who didn't know, the preponderance of "kick ass women" in Hong Kong cinema was one of the things that led me to become a Hong Kong movie fan(atic); and I continue to find it pretty amazing and cool that there were so many of them in Hong Kong films as old as this now five decade old work!

My rating for this film (based on large part on its entertainment value): 7.0

Debutant director Bai Xue's The Crossing compares favorably with John Woo's same-titled movies (Film review)

The director of this film (in the green shirt) and some cast members

(along with a HKIFF staffer) at a fest post-screening Q&A

 

The Crossing (Mainland China-Hong Kong, 2018)

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Young Cinema Competition (Chinese Language) program

- Bai Xue, director and co-scriptwriter (with Lin Meiju)

- Starring: Huang Yao, Sunny Sun, Carmen Tong (aka Carmen Soup), Elena Kong

 

On the morning that I was scheduled to attend a HKIFF screening of this first feature film from Beijing Film Academy graduate Bai Xue, a London-based Finnish friend posted on Facebook that she had seen it in a cinema in the British capital.  That, more than The Crossing being executive produced by Tian Zhuangzhuang (who had been Bai's professor at the film academy), and more than this cross-border drama having won Best Film and Best Actress awards at the Pingyao International Film Festival, got me realizing that it's actually far more than your standard Chinese indie movie by a fledgling filmmaker.

With a protagonist who lives in Shenzhen but attends secondary school by day in Hong Kong, The Crossing shines a light on the thousands of children who cross the Mainland China-Hong Kong border twice daily every single school day.  With her Cantonese-speaking father (Liu Kai Chi) in Hong Kong and her Putonghua-speaking mother (Ni Hongjie) in Shenzhen (and presumably divorced from each other), bilingual 16-year-old Peipei (Huang Yao) could be said to have a foot in two worlds.  She also has both a Hong Kong identity card and Shenzhen residency, which makes it have the perfect paper credentials to be a mule smuggling sought-after smartphones and more across from Hong Kong over to Shenzhen.

 

Seeking to come by extra cash to finance a Japanese winter holiday with her poor little rich girl Hong Konger friend Jo (credited in the film as Carmen Soup!), she is introduced to a smuggling operation that Jo's noodle seller boyfriend Hao (Sunny Sun) is involved in that's run by a formidable woman (Elena Kong) who Peipei starts looking up to in a way that she can't do so with her rather pathetic gambling addict mother.  But even while this criminal subplot does take up quite a bit of screentime, it's also pretty obvious that The Crossing also is intent on examining the phenomenon and psychology of folks like Peipei, who are citizens of the People's Republic of China but seem to have few social ties there, not least because they have spent more of their waking hours south of the Mainland China-Hong Kong border, yet still can't and don't fully feel like they belong or entirely fit in Hong Kong either.

 

Director Bai Xue says that she only learnt about kids being used to transport illegal merchandise from Hong Kong to Shenzhen (an occurence that also crops up in Jevons Au's Distinction) three years ago.  Upon investigating this phenomenon, she became interested in the larger question of these cross-boundary children.  Fluent in Cantonese and Putonghua herself, and raised in Shenzhen from age six, it's obvious from this film that she very much empathizes and sympathizes with this group of young people and their lot.

 

While it is not a documentary, there are many details in -- and aspects to -- The Crossing that come across as very real and authentic; sometimes to the detriment of one being entertained by the movie.  By this, I mean that I didn't only find myself feeling sad for Peipei but also the actual human beings out there who lead lives like hers.  At the same time, I totally am bowled over by the strength of Bai Xue's research work, and also by her impressive helming of a movie that compares very favorably with another Chinese language film entitled The Crossing (that one directed by John Woo), and puts that 2015 work's subpar sequel --- also directed by John Woo -- to shame.

 

My rating for this film: 8.0  

Two 1940s Chinese films at the 2019 Hong Kong International Film Festival (Film reviews)

The 2019 HKIFF features a four film 

Li Lihua retrospective showcase 

Barber Takes a Wife (China, 1947)

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Li Lihua: Four Treasures Restored program

- Huang Zuolin, director

- Starring: Shi Hui, Li Lihua

Before what was touted as the Asian premiere of the restored version of this cinematic offering that was released in Chinese cinemas two years before the 1949 Communist Revolution, film critic/scholar Law Kar "treated" the audience to a 20 minute talk.  You'd think that since Barber Takes a Wife is part of the HKIFF's Li Lihua retrospective program, he'd say quite a bit about its lead actress.  Instead, he actually only mentioned her in one sentence; talking much more about the company behind the film (whose founder's descendants have had a hand in the movie's recent restoration) and other bits of trivia, such as the film's portrayal of barbers having caused a strike by barbers in Shanghai, where it's set!

Fortunately, this Wenhua Film Company production does actually feature Li Lihua quite a bit more -- even though its main character is indeed a barber who does the kinds of things that aren't exactly exemplary but do lead to funny developments that make this now 72-year-old comedy an entertaining watch still in 2019.  Handsome, charming and super popular, and known to many by his call number at the hairdressing salon where he works, "Number Seven" (Shi Hui) is asked to take part in what amounts a con job by a customer whose business could do with a large cash infusion.   

After the barber lets on in a conversation that he'd like to make more money than his barbering job can get him, the businessman tells him about a newspaper ad placed by a Chinese heiress, just returned from the US, for a husband.  With the help of the businessman, Number Seven fakes an identity as a wealthy company director, with an economics degree from Oxford University to boot, and goes off to court the lady in question (Li Lihua) -- little realizing that she, too, has faked her identity and, in fact, neither is an heiress nor has ever set foot outside of China.  Oh, and she is a widow with a young child too!

There's no two ways about it: many of the actions of Barber Takes a Wife's main characters are morally questionable.  Given the economically uncertain and troubled times though in which the people portrayed in the film lived though -- one which such high inflation that a meal for four people at a fancy restaurant could cost over 150,000 Yuan! -- their attempts to acquire wealth can be somewhat understandable, even if not laudable.  In addition, the characters played by the movie's charismatic leads are so charming that many of their actions actually end up making one smile, if not outright laugh -- and making it so that audience members can't begrudge them a happy ending against the odds!

My rating for this film: 7.5 

Bright Day (China, 1948)

- Part of the HKIFF's Li Lihua: Four Treasures Restored program

- Cao Yu, director and scriptwriter

- Starring: Shi Hui, Li Lihua

One year after playing the leads in Barber Takes a Wife, Shi Hui and Li Lihua appeared together in another Wenhua Film Company production.  Rather than play a pair of would-be lovers this time around though, they are cast as an uncle and his niece whom he and his wife have raised since she was five years old (presumably after the death of her biological parents, who are never mentioned in the movie)!  And at the helm of Bright Day is the legendary playwright, Cao Yu, whose sole foray into the world of cinema this was.

Considered a milestone of post-Second World War Chinese cinema, the film centers on a kind lawyer who can't help but interfere into the affairs of less fortunate folk, even if this involves pitting himself against powerful folks and outright thugs.  While this drama is pretty earnest, its hero is an easily likeable man with a frequent twinkle in his eye along with edible goodies to dispense to orphaned children and the like who helps to make sure that things aren't all dark and depressing -- even after his good friend, the director of an orphanage, is blackmailed into selling the orphanage and putting his charges along with himself in dire straits.

Set in China just one year before Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang regime were driven out by the Communists to Taiwan, Bright Day is another film where economic troubles looms large in people's lives.  Rather than accept that this means that the line between right and wrong inevitably gets blurred in such times, however, Cao Yu has made his stance clear: that is, that there recognizably is a difference between good and bad; and good can as well as should prevail and even triumph always, though it it's true enough that it can take quite a bit of an effort and long journey to accomplish it.    

Something else that is of little doubt is that Bright Day belongs to Shi Hui, an actor whose cinematic output I hope to be able to see much more now that I've been charmed by him on two consecutive evenings of HKIFF screenings.  And while Li Lihua is on screen for far less time than in most of the films I've seen her in (starting from The Fate of Lee Khan one evening in a New York City arthouse theater more than two decades ago), she does leave an impression playing a character is far more girly and conventional than the ones which made her a legend.

My rating for this film: 7.5   

Two English-language offerings at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (Film reviews)

The image many HKIFF attendees see on screen 

while they wait for the movie to begin

If Beale Street Could Talk (USA, 2018)

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Cinephile Paradise progam

- Barry Jenkins, director and scriptwriter

- Starring: Kiki Layne, Stephen James, Regina King

Director-scriptwriter Barry Jenkins entered into the consciousness of many cinephiles the world over in 2016 with his multiple Oscar winner, Moonlight.  I watched and liked that atmospheric coming-of-age tale of a young, black, gay man growing up in Miami -- not least because of its visual resemblances to more than one Wong Kar Wai movie that I love -- but I actually care more for this follow up offering.

Based on a 1974 novel by James Baldwin (another work of whom's Raul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro was adapted from),  If Beale Street Could Talk revolves around Clementine "Tish" Rivers (Kiki Layne), a young woman seeking -- with the support of her family, including her mother, Sharon (Regina King) -- to clear the name of her sculptor lover, Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt (Stephen James), after he is framed for the rape of another woman (Emily Rios).  A sad socio-political meditation cum lament on what it is to be black in white dominated America as well as a touching period romantic drama largely set in 1970s New York, the film is both emotionally moving and intellectually resonant.

With African American characters at its center and an African American auteur at its helm, it's easy to see why this movie could be characterized as meant for African American audiences.  At the same time though, my own sense is that there's much in it that individuals of other ethnicities can relate to (we are all human, after all).  Also, I'm not sure if it was intentional or just a reflection of real life that, in this film, there can be found characters of more than one ethnicity -- and it's worth noting that it's neither the case that only African Americans are the good guys and gals in this movie, nor that all African Americans in the offering are good people.

On an acting note: Although Regina King it was who was the film's sole honoree at this year's Academy Awards, If Beale Street Could Talk's heart and soul are its young leads.  To my mind, the performances of Kiki Layne and Stephen James overshadows all the others.  And, if truth be told, after seeing this movie, I also am inclined to conclude that Michelle Yeoh was robbed -- because her Crazy Rich Asians' character actually had a more important role to play in that film, and her portrayal of Eleanor Young also was more memorable as far as I'm concerned.

My rating for this film: 8.0 

Peterloo (UK, 2018)

- From the HKIFF's The Masters program 

- Mike Leigh, director and scriptwriter

- Starring: Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, Neil Bell, Pearce Quigley, Tim McInnerney, etc.

Receiving its world premiere (at last year's Venice International Film Festival) shortly after the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre that is its subject, Mike Leigh's historical epic begins on the battlefields of Waterloo with a bugler (Pearce Quigley) clearly battle-shocked amidst the carnage taking place around him.  In between that action scene and those of the massacre at Manchester's St Peter's Field that history tells us would occur four years later, there is much talk -- some of it fiery, much of it empty, and lots of it involving bombastic-sounding multi-syllabic words meant to impress more than actually mean something.

A 154-minute-long film with what can appear to be a cast of thousands, Peterloo is a far less intimate work than those I tend to associate with its director-scriptwriter and think are is his best products.  For one thing, it feels considerably more drawn-out than it should have been.  My sense too is that the veteran filmmaker struggled to emotionally connect with the audience even while he did manage to successfully weave together multiple sub-plots and -conversations that all boil down to a major show of terrible social inequality in 19th century England.  

It doesn't help matters either that so few of the characters in Peterloo are sympathetic or admirable.  To be sure, it makes sense that many an upper class individual -- from the clownish Prince Regent (Tim McInnerney) to self-important key ministers to callous local magistrates -- would come across as horribly despicable.  But it's also the case that only one of the oppresssed working class characters -- the mother (Maxine Peake) of the young bugler who featured in the first scene -- and the attention-seeking political reformers appeared to have the kind of mind that got me thinking that she was thinking in a mature way and speaking reason for much of the time.

Interestingly, rather than the climactic scene at St Peter's Field (which was filmed in too prosaic a way to feel visceral and induce serious shock), it's other, smaller, arguably more trivial ones in this offering that have more impact.  More specifically, I found the scene involving a women's political meeting to be the most insightful and telling with regards to overall proceedings.  In addition, there's a calm-before-the-storm scene involving three fiddlers making music on the moors that served as a valuable reminder that life is a precious thing, which is why the loss -- and taking away -- of it is no small matter.

My rating for the film: 6.5   

Two good-looking films whose storytelling was not as on point as I would have liked (Film reviews)

The Louis Koo Cinema is one of this year's HKIFF venues 

--  and yes, I watched a category III film there ;b

Jinpa (Mainland China, 2018)

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Cinephile Paradise program

- Pema Tseden, director and scriptwriter

- Starring: Jinpa, Genden Phuntsok, Sonam Wangmo

"If I had known that the film was produced by Wong Kar Wai, I would not have wanted to watch it." Those were my first words to a friend at the end of the HKIFF screening of this Tibetan language offering from director-scriptwriter Pema Tseden that we both attended.  It's not that I hate the Hong Kong auteur's films.  (Indeed, his Ashes of Time is one of my favorite films of all time.)  But there are certain things I associate with Wong Kar Wai that just don't seem compatible with the kind of work I had expected Jinpa to be when reading its plot synopsis.  

And so it proved.  What's more, this slow-moving drama that initially looked like it was going to be an intriguing road movie about a colorful long-distance truck driver character named Jinpa (portrayed by an actor-poet named Jinpa) -- before ending with the kind of dream sequence that I found to be  exasperatingly ambiguous -- also has certain quirks that one associates with Wong Kar Wai and can feel annoyingly old after a while (such as the playing of one song too many times over the course of a movie and a man with a tendency to wear sunglasses pretty much all of the time, including even when he's indoors).

Set on the Kekixili Plateau (which I first set eyes on in Lu Chuan's moving 2004 drama, Kekixili: Mountain Patrol), Jinpa is visually dominated by Jinpa and the stunningly rugged landscape which he travels through for a good part of the film.  As far as plots go, the movie shows its sunglasses-wearing protagonist having a day in which he accidentally runs over and kill a sheep, then gives a ride to a less fortunate-looking man, who also turns out to be named Jinpa (Genden Phuntsok) and -- more dramatically -- announces that he's on the trail of his father's murderer, whom he intends to kill with the large knife he wears on him. 
     

Although truck driver Jinpa looks like the kind of tough guy who wouldn't be all that affected by the accidental killing of an animal or the confessions of a would-be killer, it turns out otherwise because, the film seems to suggest, Tibetans tend to be unduly affected by religion and superstition.  In turn, this ties into something else I found rather disquieting about this particular offering: that its producers appear to want to go out to stress how exotic the people and culture as well as landscape is.  And in so doing, I saw less of the featured characters' general humanity and more of the kind of idiosyncrasies that render their ways unfathomably "Other" to the rest of us.

My rating for this film: 5.5           

G Affairs (Hong Kong, 2018)

- Part of the HKIFF's Hong Kong Panorama 2018-19 program

- Lee Cheuk Pan, director

- Starring: Hanna Chan, Lam Sen, Kyle Li, Huang Lu, Chapman To

In one of those strange coincidences, I happened to watch two films with the same sound editor pair (of Tu Duu Chih and Wu Shu Yao) within a day of each other at the HKIFF.  What's more, both Jinpa and G Affairs happen to also be cinematic works in which one single piece of music gets played again and again over the course of their running time.  

In the case of debutant director Lee Cheuk Pan's technically well-crafted drama-mystery, it's Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suite Number 1 in G Major -- one of many elements associated with the letter "G" that are cleverly woven into the aptly named G Affairs.  The sort of movie whose makers very much come across as liking to shock and push all sorts of psychological buttons, it begins with a severed human head rolling into a room where a couple are having sex and a third individual is playing the afore-mentioned classical music piece.  

Relying on a non-linear narrative to keep things interesting and more complicated than they actually were (or needed to be), a multi-stranded story consequently unfolds involving three elite school classmates who form unlikely friendships with one another despite having very different personalities and extra-curricular pursuits.  Precociously mature in certain ways, Yu Ting (Hanna Chan) was already super unpopular at school before it's revealed that she's the daughter of a majorly unscrupulous cop (Chapman To) who got involved with a Mainland Chinese prostitute (Huang Lu) even before Yu Ting's mother died of cancer.  

In a series of coincidences, the cop requisitions the apartment of Yu Ting's cello-playing classmate Tai (Lam Sen) for his use and -- unbeknownst to, and separately of, the former -- the prostitute rents an apartment next door to service her clients.  As unlikely as it may seem, these disparate individuals end up having a part to play in the incident involving the severed head that the police appear to investigate.  So too does Don (Kyle Li), a classmate of Yu Ting and Tai whose Asperger's condition belies his intellectual genius and an uncommon talent for computer work.  

Although much is made of them early on, the severed head and police investigations that followed its appearance actually are but red herrings for a movie whose ambitious helmer-scriptwriter liberally sprinkles with socio-political critiques and generally tries to do way more than should be the case.  On a positive note: it's commendable to see someone with so many interesting ideas burst onto the Hong Kong cinema scene.  Let's just hope that all the critical praise (and multiple Hong Kong Film Awards nominations) his first film has received won't go to the helmer's head; this not least since I do think his ideas and works would benefit from a more modest, pared down and streamed line approach.

My rating for the film: 6.5

A Canadian documentary about humanity's wrongdoings and a Japanese drama infused with warm humanity (Film reviews)

Entertainment Expo/Hong Kong International Film Festival 

time in "Asia's World City"

 

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch (Canada, 2018)

- From the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Reality Bites program

- Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier, co-directors

- Alicia Vikander, narrator

 

Back in 2006, Jennifer Baichwal made a documentary film about master photograhper Edward Burtynsky travelling the world to observe and record the changes in landscapes that were the result of industrial work and manufacturing.  Seven years after Manufacturing Landscapes, Baichwal and Burtynsky co-directed Watermark, a visually astounding cinematic effort showing how water shapes humanity.  

For their latest documentary offering (which was shot on a wide range of locations in six out of the Earth's seven continents), Baichwal and Burtynsky are joined at the helm by Nicholas de Pencier, who also served as ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch's cinematographer, producer and co-executive producer (with Burtynsky among others).  And I think the addition of a third director underlines this latest film's increased ambition as well as ensured a greater complexity and intellectual depth to its treatment of its subject: the indelible marks that modern humans have left on the face of a 4.5 billion-year-old planet despite having been around for just around 10,000 years or so.

 

Many of the ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch's visuals are truly stunning and spectacular.  Some look like they came out of a science fiction movie (I think this particularly of the scenes with the excavators at the open pit coal mine in Hambach, Germany.)  Quite a few are aesthetically beautiful even while being intellectually disturbing (such as the results of potash mining in Russia).  But there also are absolutely heart-breaking images of a veritable hell on earth (notably the Dandora landfill in Kenya that's Africa's largest garbage dump which poor people and large wild birds spend time in trying to find things value amidst all the trash).      

 

The emotional impact of all these arresting visuals is undoubtedly strengthened when viewing them on a big screen, like I was able to.  But the intellectual messages of the film should be devastatingly clear even if you watched it on such as a small screen mounted on the seat of a plane: namely, that humans have done terrible things to our planet and it's high time we cared more for the Earth and, also, the dignity as well as fates of its inhabitants.

My rating for this film: 8.5

 

Our Departures (Japan, 2018)

- From the HKIFF's Fantastic Beats program 

- Yasujiro Yoshida, director and scriptwriter

- Starring: Kasumi Arimura, Ryusei Kiyama, Jun Kunimura 

 

Made 10 years after the similarly named Departures (which went on to win the 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar), Our Departures is yet another Japanese movie about two people who move from the big city to more bucolic environs far away from Tokyo.  And like with many of his namesake Yasuijiro Ozu's films, Yasujiro Yoshida's latest offering possesses a mix of gentle humor and warm humanity that will give one a feeling that, even while life can never be all peaches and cream, there still actually is much that's right with a world in which people care for others.

 

After the death of a beloved family member, Akira Okuzuno (Kasumi Arimura) and Shunya Okuzuno (Ryusei Kiyama) journey from Tokyo to the Kagoshima home of Setsuo Okuzono (Jun Kunimura).  Setsuo is the 59-year-old widower father of Akira's late husband and Shunya's late father -- and while 25-year-old Akira and primary school age Shunya appear like mother and son, they actually aren't biological related (and Shunya's mother died shortly after giving birth to him).  

 

All this means that the trio make for an unconventional family unit after Akira and Shunya move into Setsuo's home.  Also unconventional is Akira's decision to become a train driver and conductor, like Setsuo, in order to please train-mad Shunya -- who, his grandfather is surprised to realize, inherited his love of trains from his father even though the father (Munetaka Aoki) had opted to become an illustrator rather than follow in Setsuo's footsteps and, because of certain life choices, had become enstranged years previously from the stern-looking patriarch.

 

Despite all this, it's also true enough that much of Our Departures doesn't depart that much from the many a convention established for heartwarming Japanese family dramas. At the same time though, every little twist and turn it makes seems just right and its director cum scriptwriter truly was able to move me in ways that made me come out of the screening of the film feeling thoroughly satisfied.  And while you don't have to be a train geek to enjoy the movie, I reckon your pleasure will be exponentially increased if you are a fan of the single or double carriage local trains that still are to be found plying routes in Japan along with the fast and sleek shinkansen. :) 

My rating for this film: 9.0

"The Sisters Brothers" and "The Trial" at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (Film reviews)

Taking advantage of my not going to a HKIFF screening this evening

-- judging from there being zero sell-out screenings listed for today, 

like the majority of other Hong Kongers! ;(

The Sisters Brothers (France-Romania-USA-Spain, 2018)
- From the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Gala Presentation program

- Jacques Audiard, director and co-scriptwriter (along with Thomas Bidegain)

- Starring: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed

As the end credits rolled at the Hong Kong International Film Festival screening of The Sisters Brothers that I attended, a significant percentage of the audience streamed out of the theater inspite a Q&A with this offering's director having been announced earlier that evening -- and I was among those who chose to do so.  This is not on account of my not having liked the film though.  Rather, it's because I felt like the work was so well made as to have zero loose ends and, consequently, anything I needed any explanations for and/or about!  (Also, the screening had already started later than scheduled as a result of "VIP"s giving speeches that film geeks like myself hadn't really cared for.)

He may hail from the other side of "the pond" and made few, if any, movies that would get people thinking that he'd be eminently suited to helm a film set in the wild, wild West of 19th century U.S.A. -- but Jacques Audiard (whose Deephan, Rust and Bones, and A Prophet I had previously viewed) looks to have taken like a duck to water to a cinematic genre hitherto best left to Hollywood filmmakers; one whose titular characters are a couple of notorious guns for hire (particularly, it seems, by a character known as The Commodore essayed by Rutger Hauer).

John C. Reilly may be the least famous and handsome of the offering's quartet of main stars but his character is the moral anchor of this film; this even though Eli Sisters and his more charismatic -- but also more emotionally unstable -- brother Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) kill people for a living, and sometimes torture folks to extract the required information too.  A good part of The Sisters Brothers involves them being assigned to get hold of -- with the help of a private detective by the name of John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) -- and torture, if needed, a gold prospector named Hermitt Kerman Warm (Riz Ahmed) with a secret formula in his head and utopian dreams besides.   

The usual elements one associates with classic Westerns -- including hardened frontier men and hard-ridden horses, frontier boom towns with their bars serving whisky and full of prostitutes, and miles and miles of territory that's both scenic and rugged -- can be found in The Sisters Brothers.  So too are a dramatically involving story that explains how essentially good men can go down bad roads, a morality tale in which greed gets punished, and emotionally compelling tales of fraternity between biologically unrelated men as well as actual brothers.  

Those who tastes run towards the more conventional may find The Sisters Brothers too quirky for their tastes.  For my part, I love that this revisionist Western often plays with and defies conventions even while tipping its hat to many of the genre's tropes -- and infuses its story and main characters with a rare humanity that makes them sympathetic and even ones you might wish to root for against the odds.  

My rating for this film: 8.5 

The Trial (The Netherlands, 2018)
- From the HKIFF's Masters & Auteurs program

- Sergey Loznitsa, director

 
Born in what's now Belarus when the USSR still existed, Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has drawn on Soviet-era Russian archival footage to make a number of films.  For his latest documentary work, he found and made use of unique footage of an 11-day Stalin-era show trial that was shot from beginning to end with sound.  

Editing the footage of the so-called 1930 Industry Party Trial down to approximately down to the length of a regular feature film, Loznitsa sought to give his offering's audience "a chance to spend two hours in the USSR in 1930"; withholding any commentary on his part until very close to the end (and even then, this just involves providing details in a stark manner of the fates of the key men involved in this show trial that actually was far more show than trial).  I guess he felt that what he sought to show would be able to stand on its own and prove revealing, even revelatory, to its audience. 

Especially for those who aren't particularly well versed in the workings of the Soviet Union circa 1930, The Trial presents lots of surprises as well as arcane details that actually can perplex far more than inform.  For one thing, it seemed strange that there was a trial held at all since everyone of the eight accused men -- all of them trained engineers and/or university professors -- readily pleaded guilty in court to what they had been charged with: sabotaging Soviet industrial development and plotting against the country's government.  And this even though, it is made pretty clear soon enough, the state prosecutor -- and the people, represented by nightly mobs, assembled even during snowy conditions -- were demanding that every one of the men -- who ranged in age from 39 to 66 years -- be given the death penalty.

The fact that the overall tone of the proceedings was bureaucratic rather than emotional, never mind histrionic, in nature also wasn't something I entirely expected; again, because we were after all dealing with life or death situations.  In retrospect though, I guess it was this way since the accused, the prosecutors and the appointed court officials  -- were all putting a show for the assembled audience of in the iconic Column Hall in Moscow that had a seating capacity of over a thousand. 

On a not unrelated note: throughout much of the exhaustive -- if not exhausting -- proceedings, there are signs that all is not as they seemed.  Some of these signs are so obvious that they could prompt laughter in other circumstances.  The tragedy though is that what is captured in The Trial, however farcical, actually had grave consequences and turned out to be the precursor for a number of show trials staged in the years thereafter.

My rating for the film: 6.0