Original title: Keul-le-eo-ui Ka-me-la · Hong Sang-soo · South Korea · 2017 · Script: Hong Sang-soo · Performers: Isabelle Hupert, Kim Min-hee, Shahira Fahmy, Jung Jin-Yeong…
Original title: The lion died tonight · Nobuhiro Suwa · Francia · 2017 · Script: Nobuhiro Thief · Performers: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Pauline Etienne, Arthur Harari…
Perhaps one of the most widespread topics in the dissemination of cinema is found in that image of the critic as an individual on the hunt for the strange., the obtuse, in front of a general public whose tastes it neither understands nor makes an effort to understand. But this image is not strictly correct.. What happens most of the time is that, in front of an audience that understands cinema (I'm generalizing) as mere entertainment without pretensions, the critic's vision is somewhat broader, covering proposals that go beyond the four or five titles that cover the attention of the most popular media and dissemination platforms. So, Its relationship with what is understood as “strange” is not as intentional as it is usually perceived., but the simple result (many times) involuntary permanent contact with other forms and models of filmmaking, just different. It's there, in that search, when the commentator comes across proposals that arouse your attention, opening your perception to different ways of narrating, which is the same as referring to the different ways of understanding the possibilities that the tools of cinema offer creators.. It is in that diversity where the curious critic gets lost with pleasure., letting yourself be carried away by what is different, surprising, an art that, like any other, depends on human inventiveness. Opening the doors of emotion and sensations to that diversity is the mission and greatest delight of the commentator.. Well then, All this stuff comes from two of the premieres that this week's billboard reveals to us. Two films that have some elements in common, although approached from different aesthetic perspectives.
The brief line of argument on which it is based Claire's camera, latest production by South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, introduces us to Manhee, a young production assistant who, in full celebration of the Cannes festival, is faced with a complicated situation. Let them throw, who says he has lost the trust he had in her, has decided to fire her. Manhee feels devastated. However, He will soon find solace in Claire's company., a high school teacher walking around taking pictures with a Polaroid camera. While, A rude film director tries to solve his sentimental and creative problems by drowning them in drink..
Filmed during the Cannes festival of the year 2016, the latest production by the director of Before yes, not now, shows signs of an economy of media that pushes us towards a cinema of resistance, impulsive, an outburst without artifice, which could be said influenced by the forms of documentary, but it goes much further. If Hong Sang-soo's cinema already showed signs of an interest in cleansing itself of all cinematographic artifice, facilitated, in this case, for the urgency and almost clandestinity with which he has carried out his new project, here it reaches levels of even more estimable resource purification. Only with your camera and tripod, hardly any lighting elements, Sang-soo gives us that pure look of a cinema that seeks to rescue the essence of things. an essence, that of life, built based on moments, without beginning or end, extracts from a constantly flowing continuum that contain, however, what we are. and what are we?, the reader of this chronicle will ask. Well we are disappointments, funny lies or big lies, contradictions, chance encounters that suddenly appear like a life jacket in the middle of the ocean. Definitely, souls that seek to rebuild themselves after each setback that that same life hits them with.
The Korean director's camera seems to discreetly intrude in the middle of some events, but without intervening, without highlighting anything, letting the characters realize their afflictions. In the account of these events, there is no room for fractioning the image, (the assembly is almost non-existent, as well as camera movements), and what happens does not even respond to an apparently linear temporal order. Thus, The film works almost as a memory of something that has happened and, in memory, the before and after are mixed without responding to logic, Only the impression we have when the experience is over counts.. And it is reasonable that it be so. being artifice, because all art is construction, the film seeks to find, like all of Hong Sang-soo's cinema, new ways of producing meaning, trying to bring them closer to the future of that life that tries to recreate, and there, in good logic, background and form are strongly assembled.
Definitely, One of the greatest strengths of this feature film is found in the construction of characters that exude that life that we are discussing and for which the help of a cast that takes the pulse of the project with a deceptive naturalness is essential.. Of Manhee's apparent fragility, going through that curious innocence of Claire, or the impertinent meanness of a man, the film director, who needs to get drunk to, the time has come, get rid of a lover he's already tired of. It would be interesting to ask what is autobiographical about this film.. Clarie records images of all of them with her instant camera. According to his theory, These images have the power to transform whoever they portray.. And although the theory seems extravagant to us, It seems to contain some truth. Us, as spectators, we are letting ourselves be seduced by this world (the world of cinema) of which we feel, as claire, somewhat foreign and, however, participants, like a casual tourist (I think Claire's image, your wardrobe, It is not a coincidence in this case). After all, a dinner festival, like a movie, takes us into a state of strange exceptionality of ordinary life. The same thing happens when we enter the room. The lights turn on and we look, and when looking, we transform, even if it's just a little. And it is true that, after seeing Claire's camera we will no longer be the same as before. something has changed. An experience, that of this simple movie, from which it will be difficult for us to escape both aesthetically and emotionally. One might wonder what we can expect next..
Between the latest from Hong Sang-soo and the recent proposal from the Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa, The lion sleeps tonight, there are, we said at the beginning, some notable differences, yes ok, in essence, we can find some similarities. One of the latter is found in the schematic and somewhat disjointed plot on which the script of this work is based.. Here we will meet Jean, a famous film actor whom we find in the middle of a shoot. The apparent illness of her co-star leaves her a few days free, which she uses to look for an old friend who lives in the area.. At last, Jean finds her friend's house, but it is empty. From here, A journey begins between reality and dream in which Jean will physically meet an old love, deceased some time ago. While all this is happening, a group of children try to do, with your help, a movie.
Just like what happened in Sang-soo's case, In his latest film, Nobuhiro Suwa offers us something more than a simple story. At death's door (in fiction and perhaps, in life itself), Jean relives a youthful love for a few days. and there, between conversations that recall some events from the past, between words and gestures of delivery, Jean tries to recover the purity of those lost feelings. With this film Nobuhiro Suwa makes a heartfelt declaration of principles in favor of innocence, of those pure moments that once elevated our lives. And there is nothing more innocent, in terms of purity, that childhood. In principle, these two elements, Jean's story and that of the children, They don't seem very connected to each other., although if we look closely we will immediately see what the relationship is. As time goes by, the cinema, as in life itself, has been losing a certain original naivety, that purity that Jean seems to demand. It will be in the eyes of those children when making their film, where the art of cinema recovers that corrupted honesty. That is the look that Nobuhiro Suwa tries to recover, for himself and his viewers.
In this review that makes that look there is no, in this case, unbreakable rules. There, Nobuhiro Suwa's cinema is similar to that of Hong Sang-soo, although the formal proposal is somewhat different. Although, as we said before, everything is construction, where Sang-soo seeks a kind of realistic approach, Suwa surrenders voluntarily and ruthlessly to artifice. Where the Korean's camera was a discreet witness to the events, Suwa does not give up any resources, from lighting to plane movements, or the use of dialogues that do not shy away from resorting to any grandiose pretension, almost literary, poetic (although Sang-soo also appeals to that dimension, relies on the resource of the presence of a book, For example). If art is pretense, we said above, why give up any chance? In the artist's head, everything is acceptable, Therein lies that much-desired freedom.. So, the Japanese director appeals to disrupt conventions, driving as you please, as the Korean also did, the elements of time. before and after, present and past.
Y, as in the previous case, here the unquestionable collaboration and complicity of the casting is essential. The presence of an already aged Jean is no coincidence- Pierre Léaud in the cast. Truffaut's old alter ego offers himself to the game of mirrors between reality and fantasy that the Japanese director subjects him to. His presence is already, in itself, an endorsement of that creative freedom that the old new wave and to which this film appears as a debtor. Nobuhiro Suwa puts his camera very close to his protagonist, the one that absorbs like a sponge, not just his gesture, sino, More important, his look. In the two black pearls of Léaud's eyes, the author finds that innocent look, primal, what are you looking for. The lion materializes as that which we have all once possessed. symbolic image of that lost innocence. GERARDO LEON
