Day One, Friday, August 24th

Back again this year with 20 films to see, a few with my friend Cinemoo, who will guest review some films that all three of us are seeing.

Férfiakt (Men in the Nude). Director: Károly Esztergályos. Hungary (2006) 94 min, Hungarian with English subtitles.
www.imdb.com/title/tt0830896/
Tibor, a heterosexual writer in middle-age angst, on the rocks with his actress wife, gets ‘marked’ by Zsolt, a 19 year old street hustler. Out of ennui, more than anything, he decides to indulge Zsolt and himself with an affair, not realizing just how much of a liar and a thief the boy is. Gay sex is not unknown to Tibor, who had a brief youthful affair with an older, famous writer, and it’s the old story of youthful beauty reawakening feelings of lust mistaken as love. Unfortunately for Tibor, he thinks he’s in control and can manage the relationship as a tryst with a female prostitute, to his literary advantage, but Zsolt is toying with him, on levels that go deeper than the writer’s willing to acknowledge. And his wife, starved for affection, preoccupied with her fading looks and declining career, thinks that it’s a young lady that has her husband's affections, and flirts with Zsolt, who’s been introduced to her as a young writer Tibor’s mentoring. Everything starts to unravel… If anything, the film’s a parable on mid-life ennui and the dangers therein – where not even a writer’s ego is strong enough to rein in the last wild testosterone-fueled flailing against the inevitable slide towards entropy and death. Darkly filmed in Budapest and environs. I felt ambivalent about this film, but in discussion with Jonathan afterwards, he remarked that, ironically, a statement made by Tibor’s publisher in the film about him writing a story about the tryst also applies to the movie as well. A story about a middle-aged writer having a little dalliance with a female prostitute, well, it’s been done to death. But a story where the writer has an affair with a “boy” and comes out as gay, well, that would be a splash. A self-indulgent exercise that actually references itself to Thomas Mann’s A Death in Venice, except that the “boy” would be the embodiment of Dionysus, in that he is the god of unreason and passion, for both Tibor and his wife.

Dong Sun (Bamboo Shoots). Director: Jian Yi (this is his first feature film). China (2007) 105 min, Chinese with English subtitles.
Shot entirely with amateur actors, what on the outset appears as a comedy inconceivably permitted by the Chinese government is in fact, as the director prefaced in his introductory speech, a tragicomedy or comic tragedy, of people just trying to make a living and survive in the reality of China today. Old Yang is a poor farmer from a small village near where Mao was born. When the box of bamboo shoots sent to the township as a New Year gift contains a condom mistakenly thought to be a “preservative” (so much for an euphemism!), he is sent to retrieve it before anyone notices. His voyage as the naïve observer is long and fraught with peril, as he encounters China’s many problems along the way – overpopulation, pollution, corruption among elected officials, the police, and the populace at large, and adulterated food and products. While the film does show a very gritty, greedy and dirty side to life in China, it never openly criticizes the Communist leadership even indirectly – indeed, it’s people’s greed in the township, county, and city levels (all successively larger) that is to blame, and when it’s officials, they’re shown to be corrupt and are obviously nowhere near the required ideal. Old Yang still wears the Mao style old jacket, and seems to symbolize the old, pure example of the heroic, uncomplaining, hard-working peasant. He appears blameless himself, since it is his wife, and not him, that pressures his daughter into considering taking employment in town as a prostitute, as opposed to making much less money merely massaging feet. And he even teaches the city dwellers how to have a proper “democratic” election (a secret ballot with one candidate). Even the villagers are not spared from making bad decisions, as he mentions that they would sometimes cut the rice wine with pesticides. Some of Cinemoo’s acquaintances, a couple who spent three years in China, said that the dirt, squalor, and pollution in the film are quite representative of what’s really there, but took pains to say that it’s still a beautiful place to visit. That said, this film is quite topical, given the concerns over imports from China. Know what you're eating, and what you're eating it out of?