Afterschool

AFTERSCHOOL   ***

Antonio Campos

2008

IDEA:  While working on a film project at his private boarding school, a disturbed student happens to capture on camera two students dying of a drug overdose.

BLURB:  There’s something to be said for a film that executes and studiously maintains a methodical, cohesive formal scheme. In Afterschool, Campos and DP Jody Lee Lipes use wide, frequently static shots, unbalanced framing, and blocking that often obfuscates characters to convey a world of pervasive, screen-mediated and -distorted gazes. It is an aesthetic of detachment and acedia that enters into productive conversation with the amateur video footage shot by Robert (Ezra Miller). While the lensing of the film itself is stately and fastidious in comparison, its penchant for chopping figures off at the edges of the frame - as well as its uncanny mixture of vérité-like observation and affectedly simulated “reality” - establishes a congruity with the rougher, consumer-made digital videos it seems to contrast with. The effect, as tends to be the case with such meta-cinematic voyeuristic explorations, is an implication of the spectator’s own scopic drive in a media landscape where reality and representation blur. Is Afterschool, as its title might suggest, just another clichéd, facile, and reactionary diagnosis of the sociopathy of Internet-weaned youth? Is it, as its aesthetic would suggest, just another mannered, dourly self-regarding knockoff of Michael Haneke? Honestly, yes and yes. But Campos’ stylistic devices are still transfixing and expressive, and his sly contextualization of the film’s events within a Bush-era milieu of proliferating paranoia, government abuse, and publicized state violence gives potent layers to what might otherwise be a shallow new-media diatribe. Nobody will mistake it for subtle or nuanced, but Afterschool is a visually nifty directorial debut, and an aptly chilling sketch of a culture numbed to its own tragedies.

A Brighter Summer Day

A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY   ***

Edward Yang

1991

IDEA:  In early 1960s Taiwan, a student is caught in the middle of a turf war between two school gangs, one comprised of the kids of Mainland Chinese parents and the other of native Taiwanese. Meanwhile, his family members deal with their own social and political unrests under the country's military regime.

BLURB:  By now, Edward Yang’s four-hour opus is firmly cemented as one of the few true cornerstones of the Taiwanese New Wave. Across its lavish runtime, the film simultaneously evokes a primal, pivotal historical period of unsettled national character and, by virtue of its very existence, a (then) contemporary moment of economic and social efflorescence, albeit one fraught with its own share of political uncertainty. Merging a studied Eastern Asian cinema aesthetic with Hollywood-friendly idioms such as the youth picture and gangster drama, and allegorizing a sort of Taiwanese origin story within a meticulous, panoramic, and vividly tactile recreation of a time and place, Yang created something that would inevitably cast a formidable shadow on his and his compatriots’ subsequent explorations of life within the island nation. Yet, with full acknowledgment of the ambition and craft on display, perhaps it wouldn’t be erroneous to argue that the cultural significance and reputation of A Brighter Summer Day precede - and likely even eclipse - the film itself. For as intricately realized as it is on the levels of mise-en-scène and ensemble performance, the film is rather dramatically shapeless. A spectacular mid-narrative crescendo notwithstanding, Yang meanders fairly listlessly between scenes of domestic discontent and schoolyard angst, delivering individually impactful vignettes of disaffection, fraternity, and conflict that are not always ideally served by the baggy framework they float within. It’s as if the length of A Brighter Summer Day is intended to inform its scope and magnitude, rather than the other way around. Certainly, it’s fair to point out the faults of even the most venerable of cinematic leviathans; it would also be fair to excuse them in the face of such an admittedly expansive, historically resonant vision.

Stray Dogs

STRAY DOGS   ***

Tsai Ming-liang

2013

IDEA:  A man struggles to make a living while raising his kids in homelessness.

BLURB:  Even in a filmography filled with as much anomie and anguish as Tsai Ming-liang’s, Stray Dogs is particularly despondent. In disgorged takes of harsh digital beauty, the filmmaker wallows in the simmering emotional distress of his homeless protagonist (Lee Kang-sheng) and his desolate surroundings, which often appear in shadow like post-industrial ruins. By day the man stands at an intersection, whipped by rain and wind, as he advertises a new apartment complex he’ll never be able to afford; at night he joins his two children for rest in a makeshift shelter. Tsai’s themes are fully accounted for, perhaps more explicitly than ever: crises of urban habitation, alienation, frustrated desire, the degrading effects of capitalism. But in its unrelenting moroseness, the film comes discomfortingly close to trafficking in that dubious category known as “miserabilism.” If anything about Stray Dogs exists to combat the sense that it’s more interested in aestheticizing poverty than seriously commenting on it, it’s the film’s mannered strangeness, an otherworldly quality that allows it to transcend the trappings of social realism. Tsai has always made Taipei askew and vaguely hostile, but here it’s basically slow-motion apocalyptic, a sludgy, decrepit dystopia of interiors that look as though they’ve weathered both tsunamis and nuclear blasts. In such expressionistic excesses, Stray Dogs can sometimes feel needlessly indulgent or even self-parodic. But the feeling it leaves one with goes to the bone - a mix of unspoken sadness and wonder encapsulated in a 13-minute shot that suggests there will always be a bittersweet, even stupefying refuge in art.