Be With Me

Eric Khoo's Be With Me falls into a rich tradition of films depicting themes of love and loneliness using parallel narratives, such as Wong Kar-wai's Chung King Express and, more recently, Hou Hsou Hsien's Three Times, a portmanteau film that follows three sets of lovers played by the same actors in three different periods (there is also the Hong Kong Film 20 30 40, about love at the three stages of a woman's life). Be With Me features four damaged characters, whose stories run parallel and overlap, but a its centre is the true story of Theresa Chan, an inspiring lady who, despite being deaf and blind, has lived a life fuller than most. Khoo was inspired to write the script after meeting Theresa and reading her autobiography, having for a long while attempted to make a film about hope. Watching Be With Me it is easy to feel grateful that Hollywood didn't get to the story first and give it the biopic treatment; turning it into a glib, self important 'inspirational' story driven by star performances and a majestic score (see Iris or A beautiful Mind). Be With Me is, happily, resolutely low key and gains an incredible emotional change simply from having Theresa play herself within a cast of first time actors.

The film opens with an old man cooking a meal with consumate skill, packing it and carrying it on the bus to a hospital ward, where he spoon feeds his ailing wife. This wordless opening sequence is incredible for its emotionally disarming quality. This is in no small part due to the astonishing use of close ups of the man's deeply expressive yet ultimately ordinary face, the grainy delicacy of the shots perfectly accenuated by the Panasonic Varicam. These shots immediately evoke the sense of vulnerability with which Khoo invests his characters. Eventually the man brings his wife home and cooks for her there, but it is only when his son joins them that we are informed that his mother is dead, and we have been witnessing the man's grief visualised as a ghost. Although it is becoming a cliche (not to mention a simplification) to note how Asian cultures have a closer link to the spirit world, it's true that an increasing number of films are using this device, including Pan-ek Ratuarang's Last Life in the Universe, Stanley Kwan's Rouge, and Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance Trilogy. The old man finds his life has a purpose again when his son, who is helping Theresa to write her biography, persuades him to cook meals for her and the film ends with them encountering one another for the first time (another film that uses cooking to bring people together is Ang Lee's brilliant Eat, Drink, Man, Woman).

The film's other characters are less fortunate. An insecure, overweight security guard, who is bullied by his brother, admires a beautiful executive who works in his building to the point of obsession, watching her through security cameras. He attempts to make contact by writing a love letter but he is frustrated by his inability to express his emotions. Although not deaf or blind, the film reminds us that there are other ways that human beings can become alienated from society. It is the forth narrative that is the weakest, and sadly detracts from the accomplishments of the rest of the film. A lesbian relationship between two school girls, and the rejection that leads one to attempt suicide, is treated in a tone that often boarders on kitsch and jars with the emotional subtlety of the central story. Although Khoo may be commenting on the superficiality of the girl's emotion, and the tragic lightness of her decision to end her life in counterpoint to Theresa Chan's perseverance, the fact that she survives by crushing the security guard, who is on the way to deliver his letter, is an irony too far and seems conspicuously out of place.

Although frustratingly uneven in this sense, Be With Me is a film that breaks new ground in terms of using images to convey emotion. Very few words are spoken in the film; instead Theresa Chan narrates her story in a series of subtitles that play over silent images (although this device is perhaps overused) and the two girls communicate via text messages rather than through speech (which may be the source of their failing relationship). Various forms of communication (letters, mobiles, braile) and a corresponding lack of human contact becomes the theme that connects and disconnects the atomised characters. Eric Khoo shows that he is almost as good as Tsai Ming-liang at exploring alienation in the contemporary metropolis, a theme that is becoming more prevalent in Asian cinema, including the sixth generation of Chinese directors (Jia Zhang-ke's Unknown Pleasures and Lou Ye's Suzhou River being good examples. The fact that it was shot in just 16 days is amazing.

Yasuzo Masumura

DVD releases of Red Angel (1966) and Blind Beast (1969) by Yasuzo masumura.

A figure head of the Japanese New Wave, of whom Nagisa Oshima wrote 'a powerful, irresistible force has arrived in Japanese cinema', Yasuzo Masumuru worked prolifically in the 60s, making features at a rate of four a year exclusively for Daiei studios until it went bankrupt in the early seventies. Perhaps it is partly his status as a studio director and partly his generic eclecticism that have caused him to be neglected by the critical attention that was being paid to Japanese cinema at the time, framed as it was by the dominant discourse of the auteur theory. Although he was criticised for his commercial allegiance by his fellow directors, it is hard to imagine a more extreme and volatile personality working within the studio system. Indeed his influence on contemporary figures such as Takashi Miike and Park Chan-Wook seems striking, no doubt going someway towards justifying the recent revival of his work, first as a retrospective, courtesy of the Japan Foundation, and now these two DVD releases from the emerging label to watch Yume Pictures.

Whilst his interest in the convergence of sex and violence links him to his contemporaries Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) and Imamura (Vengeance is Mine), Masumura's ability to explore transgressive themes, whilst still working with accepted narrative conventions and maintaining a dramatic arc and mode of characterisation that is able to produce a deep emotional reaction, is his alone. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Red Angel (1966), which is arguably his masterpiece. A stunning anti-war film that follows Nurse Sukura Nishi (played by the stunning Wakao Ayako, a Masumura regular) through the hellish environs of the field hospitals of the Sino-Japanese war, Red Angel is absolutely relentless in its portrayals of the horrors of war. In fact it may be one of the most graphically unsettling films from the sixties, and at times it seems incredible that the operating scenes are not gleened from real war footage such is their visceral authenticity. However the incredible scope cinematography soon puts a stop to such thoughts.

Sent to the front line after being raped by a patient, Nishi meets the morphine addicted Dr Okabe, who has become a master at amputating limbs – whether they need to be or not – and has grown deeply embittered at the futility of war and the brutality of humanity. Ashida Shinsuke’s performance as the doctor is brilliantly subtle, and hints at the former idealism of a doctor beneath the hardened, war weary exterior. Imagine the philanthropic protagonist of Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1965), made only a year before, thrown into the battle field where his job is not to save lives so much as to create cripples and you come close to Okabe’s position. In his character the dehumanising effect of war is only too palpable and he views his dependency upon morphine as a placebo not dissimilar from patriotism; a lie that he tells to himself to avoid madness. However his addiction has had the side effect of making him impotent, and so he is at once traumatised and emasculated.

After her former rapist, Sakamoto, appears gut-shot in the ward Nishi agrees to spend the night with Okabe in return for a precious blood transfusion, because she is afraid he will die believing her to have taken her revenge. Although not the best start to their relationship Nishi and Okabe become drawn to one another. Nishi becomes determined to break his habit and restore his manhood so that there love can be consummated, and she succeeds, but only as the Chinese armies begin their invasion of the camp.

The film balances itself between Masumura's usual cynicism and a surprisingly deep humanism, just as the characters struggle to maintain values such as love in the face of war. During a brief spell away from Okabe, Nishi cares for a man who has had both arms amputated by her beloved doctor. These sequences, in which Nishi helps the pathetic soldier to masturbate and then takes him to a hotel and gives herself to him, and by doing so discovers something of herself and her femininity, epitomise the film’s attempt to show the persistence of love in horror, managing to be deeply moving in spite of the situation. In contrast Blind Beast, about a Blind Sculptor who kidnaps a photographic model with the help of his mother in order to pioneer the 'art of touch', is a more pessimistic report on human nature. The Sadean ending plumbs the depths of depravity in a way that anticipates Oshima's deliciously perverted In the Realm of the Senses (1970).

A Full review of Red Angel and Blind Beast is forthcoming on www.firecracker-magazine.com, a site devoted to Asian film, which comes highly recommended.

Kekexili Mountain Patrol

Kekexili Mountain Patrol by Lu Chuan provides a perfect opening gambit to this blog. Epic, innovative, beautifully meditative and complex; it epitomises some of the reasons why Asian cinema is so exciting, modifying genres and forms to its own narrative ends to create something fresh and utterly compelling. The fact that it has been produced in part by Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia demonstrates that Hollywood has also started taking notice of the talent emerging from the east. The fact that Columbia is owned by Sony indicates that it has perhaps realised this a little too late.

The film follows Beijing journalist Ga Yu to the remotest region of Tibet, where the self styled vigilante Ri Tai and his rag-tag group of soldiers have formed an anti-poaching unit to defend the endangered white antelope in the Kekexili wilderness. There is nothing Hollywood likes more than an inspiring true story, and Kekexili is certainly that, yet this is a film that is firmly beyond Hollywood's imaginative scope. For one thing it tells its story with an incredible visual economy that is worthy of Sergeo Leone's westerns, and makes equally good use of the stunning landscapes in which the rough-hewn, long-coated figures encounter one another. Within minutes of the film starting we witness the poachers capturing and executing one of the mountain patrol, as an antelope is skinned in the background, with barely a word spoken.

The film is unremittedly brutal, depicting the harshness of life with a lightness that Hollywood would struggle to justify with its glib morality. In one scene a group of poachers, one old man and his sons, more victims of circumstances and poverty than criminals, are left to die in the hostile landscape because the patrol are running short of provisions. When one of his own trucks breaks down Ri Tai even leaves behind some of his own men rather than turn back; his single-minded desire to capture the poachers reminiscent of Ahab's obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, and doesn't end much better. Even so there is a moral complexity at work in the film that prevents it from the kind of didacticism that the environmental subject matter could produce, and the camera often registers the shock etched on Ga Yu's face at Ri Tai's ruthless methods. Short of men, money and guns Ri Tai even submits to selling some of the antelope pelts they have confiscated, thus feeding the very industry he is trying to stamp out.

Despite its harshness Kekexili is also deeply meditative, the violence being tempered by the stillness of the sublime landscapes and the stoicism of the characters, both of which depend more upon Taoism than any generic factors (this is after all an 'Eastern' rather than a 'Western'). These elements are taken to an extreme in the scene in which one man, alone and changing his tyre, is silently and arbitrarily swallowed up by quicksand. Both in its brutal visual economy and its measured moments of stillness, this is a film that triumphs cinematically. Its longshots dwarf the human characters against a hostile landscape, which becomes a character itself coming alive in dust storms and strange rumblings that punctuate the narrative. Aside from Leone's Weterns these shots recall Kurosawa's come-back Dersu Uzala, a poetic study of man's struggle with the harsh Siberian environment.