MAMI Film Festival - Day 4

Here's a run-through of the films of Day 4:

Shadow

Taking the term "black and white" quite literally, director Zhang Yimou returns to familiar ground with a period action-drama in which everything on screen is either white or black or grey and all of it is beautiful. The tale of a "shadow", a lookalike of the commander of the army of Pei who is asked to live as his double to prevent him from any assassinations, the story has a few loopholes and it's at the same time too simplistic and too convoluted to incorporate the various twists.

The writing during the film's dramatic moments, however, is wonderfully tight and effective. Yimou's direction is assured and restrained at the right times, someone who knows what he's doing and that he's doing it well. The action is beautifully conceived, choreographed and executed (if a little over the top at times) and there's beautiful use of slo-mo just the right number of times (compared to wayyyy too much usage of it in another MAMI action film, Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota).

Overall, a solid entertainer with great performances, good drama, great action and wonderfully pleasing to the eye.

Burning

A slow-burn thriller that explores dark human nature and toxic masculinity at a metaphorical level, Lee Chang-dong's is a rewarding watch for the attentive viewers. The tale of a clueless young man who gets in deep way over his head, it charts the path of destruction that men leave in their wake wherever they go through their sense of entitlement and their savior complex.

The performances are very very good. The fantastic music builds the atmosphere just as much as the acting and the pacing does. The whole film itself might not have the staying power in your mind months later but there are a few individual memorable sequences like the naked dancing and the climax, that make the film worth watching.

The Image Book

Jean Luc Godard's newest showcase of rapid cuts and archived footage begins with a shot of a lady about to have her eyeball sliced off. It's the instantly recognizable shot from Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's cult short film Un Chien Andalou, which is infamous for being a film that was made to be indecipherable to audiences. If that isn't an indication (or a declaration) of what to expect from The Image Book, I don't know what is.

I can only assume that the point Godard tries to make here is that in today's messed up world, the people need to continue having faith and expectations for better times. I think. There's no way to tell. The film is more incoherent than an alcoholic who has just discovered drugs. On the positive side, it's still better than his previous headache-inducing 3D film Goodbye to Language. Small mercies.

Pity

A cold-blooded Greek tragedy in the vein of Yorgos Lanthimos's classics, Pity is a wonderfully-paced tale of a man who is so desperate for the pity of his fellow human beings, he could go to any lengths to get it. Filmed in mostly static, deep focus wide and close ups, the naturalistic look of the film (the interiors look very much like an actual house people would live in) contrasts with the unnatural behaviour of our protagonist or even the flat monotonous way in which everyone in the world of this film speaks to create a sense of uneasiness.

It's then an even more impressive feat for director Babis Makridis and his co-writer Efthymis Filippou (co-writer on many Lanthimos films) that they manage to mix this uneasiness with deadpan humor that has you laughing uncomfortably throughout the runtime. The performances are all uniformly great, especially Yannis Drakopolous, who looks so unthreatening that it's impossible not to feel pity for him wanting pity.