Catching up on Park Chan-wook.




Following hallmarks of a neo-noir - somewhat hapless detective taken with a mysterious potential femme fatale, as the plot frequently flirts with temptation and moral compromise - the film's appeal is in subverting much of these tropes throughout, keeping the audience on their toes as to what is actually going on, and ultimately offering something more emotional and philosophical (if not a little melodramatic).  Holding everything firmly in suspense is Park Chan-wook's superb framing, dreamlike editing, hypnotically seductive filmmaking, as well as the excellent leads, Tang Wei and Park Hae-il.

8.5/10




Park Chan-wook's satirical aesthetic isn't nearly as evocative as his more seductive aesthetic, but when his dark comedy is so chaotic and incoherent in contingency as this, it becomes as irresistibly electric.  A class-critique in the mold of Parasite, but whereas that film was fueled by the tension between the affluent elite and the working class, No Other Choice is focused directly on the middle class, and finding no less tension there as this management-level protagonist finds himself equally squeezed and exploited, driven to moral extremes and very poor judgment, all just to maintain his stable sense of social and comfortable stasis in a corporately enforced rat race.  What normal people have to sacrifice so that the wealthy can continue to grow.  It can't be helped.

8/10

I think I loved Decision to Leave, especially after an ex of mine explained the motivations of the female characters actions at the end of the movie to me.

The Secret Agent has become this year's international award-season darling, and quite deservingly so.  "A time of great mischief", set in 1977 during Brazil's (US aided) military dictatorship, the rife corruption is deftly depicted right from its first scene, where a dead man outside a gas station is drawing dogs with its stench while the police ignore the corpse because they're too busy soliciting bribes from random passerbys.  Over the film's 160 minute runtime, there's never a lack of such striking images, a combination of local Carnival flavor, rich cinematography which emulates its '70s era (hopefully we're near the end of the 'desaturation' era - a plague on the past 20 years of cinema), and a long deep bench of equally colorful characters.  There isn't a weak supporting role here, but just a sampling of excellent faces includes Tania Maria, Carloe Francisco, Roberio Diogenes, Roney Villela, Kaoni Venancio.  And Udo Kier in his final role.  Lead actor Walter Moura has already won about a dozen acting awards - including at Cannes, NY Film Critics and the Golden Globe - as the man with a mysterious past seeking underground refuge in his hometown of Recife, while the writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho (also a Cannes winner) deserves praise for balancing between the occasionally brutal and bizarre but never being less than believable.  (Even the fake news story about the "hairy leg" rampage turns out to be true - a concocted cover-up of the police's anti-gay crackdowns.)

Although I wouldn't consider this as substantial criticism, I do have a curiosity over the film's title and its marketing as a "political thriller".  There's definitely a lot of politics, and plenty of thrills, involved, but not so much cat-and-mouse intrigue as a document of suffocating corruption.  But when the document happens to be as thoroughly satisfying as this film is, this is a minor quibble at best.

9/10

Speaking of the Brazilian city of Recife, Kleber Mendonca Filho had previously made a documentary dedicated to the city - also his hometown - called Pictures of Ghosts, which focuses on its reputation for movie houses, including the one which features centrally in Secret Agent (Jaws and The Omen provide significant backdrop in the film), and reflecting Filho's own youth attending these houses and developing his own love of cinema which is so evident in Secret Agent (only his third full-length narrative film).




Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind, which is also set in the '70s and emulates that New Hollywood era of filmmaking, presents an art heist conceit but comes out more like a comedy of incompetence.  In the latter sense, the film is darkly funny, but the fact is that the scheme's unraveling is fairly predictable.  I assume that was Reichardt's intent, because her focus is not on the heist, per se, but on how incredibly short-sighted - down right dumb, if you ask me - this ironically fashioned "mastermind" turns out to be at just about every twist and turn.  Again, as a dark comedy about watching this guy shrivel through such an obviously unwinnable situation is quite amusing, and Reichardt's steady pace and handsome period detail help tremendously, but ultimately this character (played by Josh O'Connor) simply doesn't invite much sympathy or anything else worth investing in him, and the joke of this "individualist" who so weakly flaunts what he considers the norms of the system, or whatever he or Reichardt think he's doing, starts to sour long before his final pathetic scene of trying to rationalize it.  The jazz score gets a bit redundant by that point as well.  There's an awful lot in the film to like, however (it is very funny actually), but nothing very enlightening, if that was what Reichardt was going for.

8/10