2007 in Review: The 21st Century / Uncle To / Free Women

Frame from Flight of the Red Balloon (2007)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien, a filmmaker from the 20th century, has become, like David Lynch, a filmmaker of the 21st century at a time when so many 21st century filmmakers still make 20th century films with 20th century ideas. He's 60, but old people are always putting the young to shame. It's what they do best.
In Flight of the Red Balloon, he floats around 2007 with his camera and his microphone and turns the concrete into the vague and the vague into the concrete. Like People on Sunday, it's a memoir of the present: proof that cinema is greater than poetry. It is only as nostalgic for Albert Lamorisse's film as the present is for the past; an impossible gulf separate the two, and yet the latter is always inescapable, present in the form of places, memories, connotations. In the 21st century, we are always reminded that there has been so much history as now.

The main characters pose for a picture in Exiled (2006; released in the States in 2007)

Fred Camper is braver than most of us. He dared to write about Johnnie To in terms we secretly wanted to use. In the language we wanted to apply: not in misleading Peckinpah and Leone comparisons, but in sacred words reserved for Grandpas Ford and Hawks, for classical cinema.
Exiled is the marriage of To, the pulp dramatist and comedian, and To, the poet of gangs and personal histories. Sympathetic critics compare the film to a late western, but only because westerns and film noir are the only genres to no longer carry a stigma--they've become sacred cannon. Others meekly say the movies is "more than an action flick," as if a work in that genre is incapable of greatness by default--to be good, it has to be similar to something else.
Exiled is certainly an action film, nothing more, and that is more than enough. It's a gun operetta, with choice solos by Anthony Wong's austerely jowled face, one of the most beautiful in modern cinema.
An actioner is as much about shootouts as a western is about horses and Indians or a film noir is about criminals. Most reviewers need new glasses; they mistake a ricocheting bullet for nihilism. Do they still mix up musical numbers with escapism?

A promotional still for Death Proof (2007)

Why is Jackie Brown Quentin Tarantino's most lasting film? Because it's his least ironic. It's the work of a lover, not an expert. Of a friend, not a taxonomist. Most importantly, it's a movie by someone who believes in the exploitation film, not someone trying to sell their knowledge of the genre. Coincidentally, it's one of his least popular and commercially successful projects.
The extended cut of Death Proof, shown abroad and available on DVD in the US, will last, too. It treats the world of genre movies and general business of commercial filmmaking unironically. It emulates rather than imitates. It has a secret ambition: to move beyond Kill Bill's brand of Jack Hill "sexy feminism." Liberation through transgression: Tarantino's sexual fetishes are no longer suggested, but are instead lingered on; the abrupt, violent conclusion doesn't bring closure--it creates possibilities. Death Proof's free women are in the imagination of a free man.

The Deaf Photographer

The world must be more ambiguous for the deaf—at least for Tony Leung’s character, the deaf photographer in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s City of Sadness. It was reportedly the first contemporary Taiwanese production to be shot entirely with direct sound, and so much of our experience of the film is colored by the sounds that accompany its often still compositions. One scene springs to mind specifically—Leung waiting in a prison cell while his friends are executed. We, like Leung, can only see the interior of the prison cell, and we hear the terrifying sound of gunshots in the distance. As the take continues, we realize Leung’s character cannot hear the gunshots—but that makes the prison cell no less terrifying for him. He doesn’t have even the slightest clue as to his fate, and, in effect, neither do we. Later, at his own wedding, he has to take cues from the bride in order to correctly participate in the ceremony—for a brief moment, he glances at her bowing before he knows to bow, and someone has to touch him on the shoulder before he knows to kneel.

The bootleg DVD of the film inadvertently replicates this sensation by failing to subtitle the various inter titles and letters used in the film—therefore creating an effect of disorientation similar to the one Leung’s character must be experiencing, somehow left out on key texts that help make sense of the world. Before starting conversations, which he is forced to write on paper (and which I, therefore, cannot understand), he stares at people, trying to make sense of what their world must be like based on the few clues their facial expressions give away. I end up feeling the same way, having to guess from character's reserved reactions as to what secrets his writing might have contained.