Berlinale 2010, Day 4 (Crowded Short 21st Century)

Today shall be forever remembered as the day where I finally stop saying this. Fitting the date I watched depressing movies. Unconciously, like totally. And stuff. Also, the Delphi is apparently not the only cinema with the wacky Berlinale-bear stand-ins. Today in the Cubix the dancing museum guard was doing his dance in a white room only furnished with a mattress and a wall full of Billy shelves with books and movies on them. <3

Kenta to Jun to Kayo-chan no Kuni (A Crowd of Three, ???????????????)
Japan 2009, Omori Tatsushi, 131?

Jun and Kenta grew up in the same orphanage and are like brothers. Now, they work at a demolition company and get mistreated and insulted by their drug-dealing foreman. One night they meet Kayo-chan, a somewhat slow, not really pretty girl, who would do it with anyone, as she just wants to feel loved. Shortly after, Kenta decides to get revenge on the foreman and then go to Hokkaido to visit his big brother in prison. Jun joins him and they take Kayo-chan with them on this dysfunctional group’s trip north.

Aaaah, Japanese movies about losers, I love them. Sakura Ando, main evil bitch from Ai no mukidashi is quite versatile, this time she played the stupid, “ugly” girl with the incredibly annoying voice. <3 Also, we have our staple minimalistic soundtrack, comprised mostly of the main theme, a slow, kind of sad, emotional e-guitar solo, did I already mention I’m a sucker for minimalist, single-instrument soundtracks? <3 There is really not much to say about the movie other than that it greatly succeeded in showing how broken the three main characters are and how hostile the whole environment is, it sucked me in, personally. So even though the boys do some terrible things on their way you sometimes really feel like they had no other choice in life than to become this way. Actually it made me feel quite depressed, out of empathy.
Interestingly, the director was asked why they went north, if they had the decision to either go north or south. Apart from the obvious reason in the script (the prison being in the north) which logically had to be made after the writing decision on which way to go, the director said that in Japanese movies this is the direction you take to search for yourself, that the (compared to the rest of Japan) vast, rugged landscape of Hokkaido emanates this feel to Japanese people.

From here on, five short films, from the Berlinale Shorts II collection:

Paradise Later
Austria/Germany 2009, Ascan Breuer, 13′
The camera rides on a boat through a Jakarta slum river awfully polluted and filled with waste. The narrator reads out a manager’s report to his shareholders, actually slightly altered lines from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”

While the middle part was kind of dragging, the end had a nice punchline: (Narrator, while the picture shows laughing kids and other people waving to the camera:) “What earthly reason is there for these people to have any scruples towards us? Why haven’t they risen up against us yet?” after that, fade to black and the caption: Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

Derby
Romania 2010, Paul Negoescu, 15′

Boyfriend comes over. Father hears daughter moaning silently in her room. Dinner. Turns out boyfriend is a big fan of the one football club he shouldn’t be fan of…

Delightful little family picture. An easygoing mother, a horribly jealous father trying to provoke the boyfriend, the annoyed daughter, aaaah! Also, the fridge was obviously stuffed with western brand products. Commentary on modern Romania?

Pama (A perm, ??)
Republic of Korea 2009, Lee Ran-hee, 19′

A young Vietnamese girl comes to Korea after being “bought” as a middle-aged plumber’s bride. The first thing her mother-in-law gets her is a perm. Of course she is evil and treats the poor girl, who can’t speak any Korean, like an object in one moment and like an unwanted child she has to waste money on, in the other.

The depressing, hostile atmosphere of the hair salon and all the people who make the classic mistake that their language will miraculously become comprehensible if they shout, was very well captured. The director says that she met several women with such backgrounds and took the story of one of them for the film and she stressed that this was far from the worst ones she’s heard…
Side note: OMG, they showed KBS World Talkshow in the film, I know that show. XD (It is quite fitting, because it’s a show where a group of non-Korean women meets different Korean celebrities every week. Then they play games and talk about stuff.)

Suhak Siheom (Math Test ?? ??)
Republic of Korea 2009, Jung Yu-mi, 2′

During the last minutes of a math test the little girl inside Yu-jin’s inflated head decides to trash the formulas and let the dog loose instead.

Delightful little animation piece with a punchline.

El Segundo Amanecer de la Ceguera (The Second Awakening of Blindness)
Peru 2009, Mauricio Franco Tosso, 10′

A middle-aged couple. He can’t sleep. She can’t stop thinking. He leaves. She cries.

This sounded more interesting than it actually was, as it was just boring couple talk about his infidelity and ensuing emo sex after that. The interesting thing was the 3:4 aspect ratio (common on mobile phones), in which it was shot. The director actually did not want to show it in cinemas and just have it for download to watch on mobiles instead, but got talked out of it. (By his girlfriend, obviously…)

Sadly, I could not watch the last short, as I had to run to the next cinema.

Neo-wa na-eui i-shib-il segi (Our fantastic 21st Century, ?? ?? 21??)
Republic of Korea 2009, someone, 83′

Soo-young is in her mid-twenties and wants to become a fashion designer but for that she’s supposed to get a liposuction, which she can’t afford. So while she badly needs the money her boyfriend just takes off with all of her savings. Shortly after she is finally caught rigging prices at the department store she works in and turns to Jae-beom, a loan shark for help and from there, things go further downhill…

This was the second Korean director in a row to state that the Korean premiere had notably less audience than here at the Berlinale… Stylistically it was nothing too impressive, more a solid job of typical „artsy“ Asian direction (the long-shots-variety, not the fast-cuts-variety) we’ve come to be accustomed to. Which is a compliment to the director, as it was his first full-length work and we know that so many things can and do go wrong with this style of movie. What it lacked was more of a justification why Soo-young was doing those unlawful things. I understand the reason, it just wasn’t really enough for me, it lacked a bit of pressure onto her to do something like that, so while I was, in general, sympathetic of her as a character I didn’t find the price rigging to be justified, especially because it could have meant trouble for her quite amiable boss, but that just may be the capitalist lawyer pig in me. What I did understand however, was the last of the morally questionable things she did. At that point there really was no reason not to do it.

It is a very interesting aspect of all those Asian movies about losers that the directors and actors perceive all the things these characters do as maybe not completely normal, but absolutely still in the range of acceptable reactions to the pressure and hostility they face, while most western viewers (judging from the questions) see them as extreme or exaggerated. Also, they were asking about the stoic, seemingly emotionless “reactions” of the characters. After that I really do wonder why this kind of movie is actually popular around here, as most people seem to neither understand the reactions nor recognize the feelings the characters have and actually do express, although much too subtle for most. But I always was and still am a nutcase for everything foreign, so I really can’t blame anyone!