Coming Up: Take Out

My friend Charles Jang's movie, Take Out, is finally coming to theaters. It was a highlight of SFIAAFF 2004 and is well overdue. Shot on location on digital video, Take Out is a fast-moving, electric experience, and though it's all about one day on a repetitious job -- Chinese food delivery -- it never lags. There's danger around every corner for delivery man Ming Ding (Jang), a recent immigrant from China, whose refuge is the camaraderie of his struggling coworkers. The performances are excellent and the direction by newcomers Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou carries on New York's tradition of "street style" filmmaking.

Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008

I was saddened tonight to read of the death of Sydney Pollack. He was a good director and a really fine actor and always seemed like a decent guy. His movies, such as Tootsie and Out of Africa, were middlebrow without being lazy or cynical. The last Pollack film I saw, the DVD of the complicated thriller The Interpreter, came with a "deleted scene" that would have given away too much of the story at that point in the movie. It seemed to be there for people who'd watched the whole movie and hadn't been able to figure out what happened. I thought that was a very kind thing to do.

Quick take: The Flight of the Red Balloon

It would have been nice to see Albert Lamorisse's 1956 The Red Balloon again before seeing Hou Hsiao-Hsien's 2007 tribute, but it didn't work out. Things have changed in Paris, and the world, since the original. Yet despite being very modern in terms of dealing with divorce, globalization, video, cellphones, and so on, The Flight of the Red Balloon has a reassuringly grounded quality. It essentially revolves entirely around home and family life, and though there is trauma in this family, the story isn't built around disruption. There's no plot at all, in a conventional sense, and the action is very naturalistic, as if we'd just stumbled upon this family and the neighbors and visitors surrounding it. There are some impressively long takes in which happy, sad, and ambiguous action plays out among a handful of characters in a small space with no break in our experience. In that sense, it's like an Ozu film transplanted to Paris and the postmodern age, much as Cafe Lumiere revisited Ozu's Tokyo Story in the title city. Domestic (and some professional) life plays out at a sane, realistic pace, with looming dangers no greater than those in any average life. The action, like the home of Suzanne (wonderfully played by Juliette Binoche), her son Simon (Simon Iteanu), and his nanny Song (Fang Song), seems lived-in. The balloon itself has a relatively small role, though once again what's remarkable about it is that it seems to have a mind of its own. I think one of the points of this film is that each human, too -- even the director -- has a mind of his or her own and all of us live in our own worlds. But even without deep analysis, I found this initially sluggish film quite enjoyable as an experience.

Quick take: Once

Is there anything else like it? An unconventional love story with songs, integral to the plot, that proceed from beginning to end before our eyes and ears. Partly with montage, but often in real time, with the camera on the musicians as they play, live. Real musicians, that is. A feature-length film that probably has more minutes of music than of dialog. Oh, and the music is great, the story stays focused on music, and the emotions feel real (they sort of are, apparently) even though the acting isn't always stellar. Only 86 minutes, but it feels ... longer? shorter? ... well, different in length. If there's anything else like this, let me know.

Review: Flower in the Pocket

It's good to see a truly independent film once in a while. In the U.S., the term has come to encompass a whole industry of movies that just didn't happen to be made by the brand-name part of a studio. There's nothing wrong with them as films, but they usually lack the feeling of freedom and improvisation that comes from a work that was hard to get made.

Flower in the Pocket, a charming comedy by Malaysian director Liew Seng Tat, is suffused with those qualities from beginning to end. Of the limited information about it on IMDB, we're lucky enough to get an estimate of its budget, about $47,000, and it shows. But the artistry rises up out of it rather than being thrown in as another effect.

The film spends most of its time with two grade-school brothers in Kuala Lumpur who do poorly in class, wander the streets after school, and come home to an empty house. Their father works late every night and doesn't return until after they're asleep.

On the surface, the setup of kids fending for themselves is reminiscent of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's Nobody Knows. It's a nerve-wracking scenario, and plenty does go wrong. But the boys are so cute and funny, and their relationship so realistically tender, that the movie is strangely adorable and frightening at the same time. And there's a sense of whimsy and play, for the filmmaker as well as the characters, that suggests everything will be all right in the end -- probably.

Tat weaves a complex world for the boys, full of surprises, drawing on the mixed cultures of Malaysia as well as sheer inspiration. A mischievous Malay friend of the boys has a doting, guiding mother, and at one point we glimpse the challenging home life of one of their teachers. There's a fascinating mix of languages, and play with languages. The comedy is often quietly surreal in the vein of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Even cinematographer Albert Hue's framing is odd and fresh. In a few shots, characters enter the frame from totally unexpected angles.

Gradually, the film's focus shifts to the boys' father, who's single for no given reason and has shut himself off from the world. In this aspect, Flower is like The World of Apu, the final chapter in Satyajit Ray's classic Apu Trilogy, in which Apu struggles to find his place in the world as a man and a father. Both are naturalistic, and there's some of the same kind of gently symbolic dialog, though in this case with a humorous flavor. Apu is formal, shot on black-and white film, and a guaranteed tearjerker. Flower in the Pocket, shot on digital video, cares no less about its characters but digs into the reality of everyday life in a way that suits the present day, with a postmodern wink.