06.04.06
SIFF 2006, days 9 and 10
The Nightly Song of the Travellers
Iran/France/Turkey
An aging Turkish tailor, just released from an Iranian jail, sets off with a 12-year-old companion in search of his Anatolian home only to find the village has vanished without a trace. The quest gives an evocative glimpse of an age-old world filled with traditions, faith and history.
Sometimes you just have to take a movie on its own terms. Symbolic, opaque, and existentialist, this would likely drive most people crazy in short order. (And judging by the silly questions and irritated accusations thrown at the director after the screening, it apparently did.) I decided to just accept it for what it was–which is a largely plotless ramble through the landscape of eastern Turkey, near its borders with Armenia, Iraq, and Iran–and enjoy the scenery and draw my own conclusions. It’s nice to look at and calming and an interesting experiment in viewer interpretation. (It was also a pleasant little game to see how many Turkish words I remember. Not very many, it turns out.)
The Five Venoms
Hong Kong, 1978
An eager martial arts apprentice must fulfill his dying master’s final wish and track down his five most lethal students, each armed with a separate, animal-inspired fighting method. Kicking ensues. Responsible for defining a genre, director Chang’s 1978 classic is a lush, colorful chop-sockie masterwork. Toad Style!
All hail the Shaw Brothers. I’m still viewing and learning about the older Hong Kong martial-arts films, and it’s really interesting to see how dramatic a shift in production values there was in the mid to late 1980s. This one is very definitely a marker on the way to the lusher, better-produced films I fell in love with, but it also has the cheap, silly aspects that everyone associates with “classic” kung fu films: fakey sets, cheap and inauthentic costuming and makeup, grotesque overacting. None of that takes away from the fundamental pleasure of it, however, and the kung fu–while a little slower than would become true later–is definitely worthy of awe. And how nice to see Phillip Kwok (who I know best as “Mad Dog” in Hard Boiled, where he is awesome) in a starring role. I had a lot of fun at this, and so did The Husband, who fell into my evil trap in agreeing to see this and is now going to be subjected to a barrage of my favorite more recent martial arts and wuxia movies.
The Prince Contemplating His Soul
Tunisia
A tapestry of brilliant imagery and Sufi music unfolds as a blind old sage and his spirited granddaughter wind their way to a rumored gathering of dervishes. Are the travelers they meet along the way real or just manifestations of ancient legends and fables?
This is a really beautiful film, both visually and in story and emotion. The relationship between the old man and his granddaughter feels very true, and each tale folded into their journey has its own special feeling. It also uses music and images together wonderfully; a great deal of the emotion I took away from it came from that aspect.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how any of the stories in the film end. The print of the film was detained by Customs, so the distributor sent SIFF a DVD of it; sadly, the DVD is damaged, and started stuttering and freezing a little over halfway through. The staff stopped it and tried to get it fixed three times, and nothing worked, so they just ended the screening.