Film | yalpertem

Coma (2022) | Notes

I guess I’ve seen the first screening of this film in Berlinale. I just noticed that it doesn’t even have a movie poster as of this moment. After some time, it was the first film where I attended a Q/A session with the director and the actors. My first non-open-air-cinema Berlinale experience after the compensation screenings in 2021.

It tells the story of a teenage girl during the pandemic spending her time at home while watching a YouTube influencer (Patricia Coma) videos, doing video calls and Zoom discussions about serial killers with her close friends, dreaming of some sitcom plays with her dolls and spending the nights in a forest in her dreams/nightmares where she re-encounters people from her virtual daily life. Her story is covered with a prologue of experimental lockdown short by Bonello and an epilogue from some found-footage about the climate crisis, both subtitled with a letter by Bonello to her daughter underlining the hopes about a better future.

The whole film felt like a series of random and inspirational decisions taken by the director in terms of the plot-building. I can’t say that I got a cohesive understanding but the state of mind and the need for the instantaneous intervention to the pandemic effect was transmitted well enough. As an intrigued viewer, YouTube, amateur celebrities, niche messenger communities deserve more attention in cinema and literature in my opinion.

The vast imaginary realm that Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) brings to the film was immersive. Replicating this kind of action with an intermediary device (such as transposing a YouTuber to a film character) is mostly a hard thing to do but when it’s succeeded, it pays off. The favorite scene of mine was during the Zoom call that the protagonist makes with her friends while Patricia was watching them in the movie theater. At first, it may look like a cheap alienation tactic but it worked quite well in this scene while the Zoomers were having a disturbingly violent conversation that invites the audience as a spectator to a private chat.

Don’t Look Up (2021) | Notes

A professor and a Ph.D. student discover a comet that will hit the earth in a couple of months. They try to transmit this information to the officials who can initiate action at this scale. However, their attempts in talking to the media or the president of the U.S. don’t end up with concrete action. Their message is lost inside the social media frenzy, political and business interests, the avoidance and the rejection of truth, etc. When the president decides that it’s the right time to tackle the issue, they team up in a project to do some propaganda about “saving the world” and to deflect the comet. But at the very moment, the Apple/SpaceX CEO intervenes and changes the plans since his team finds some very valuable minerals inside the comet. The passion for profit takes precedence over saving the world.

In terms of its overt messages, it is a critical movie. In terms of its screenplay, storytelling, and puns, pretty mediocre. Its success can be found in transforming the mainstream media and communication critique to superficial characters and dialogues. That is also its defeat. If it’s only a dinner of family and close friends that you can put against the whole extravagance you observed, it means you’re unable to build any counter-discourse against it. Cate Blanchett does her best for underlining what these patterns do to one’s own self, but it doesn’t suffice in the end. I felt sorry for Meryl Streep while watching her struggling with the terrible dialogues written for her part.

Moving On (2019) | Notes

Moving On (2019) is the first film on Yoon Dan-bi, a quietly told generation-spanning family drama. The story is mundanely straightforward: the grandfather’s health deteriorates with age and he needs support from the family. His divorced son Byeong-ki moves in with his two children: Okju, the adolescent sister who tries to adapt to this new house while she is getting interested in herself and the outer world, and the younger brother Dongju who is a small kid pursuing love, attention, and fun. The detached house quickly becomes a playground for the kids while hosting the longings of the family members. A good example was the leitmotif of the sister’s bedroom that has a nice mosquito net becoming an object of desire for the younger brother. The brother was only able to get inside in the dawn of grandfather’s death.

In an era when more families have to band closer together for economic survival, Moving On is a hopeful, realistic, and relevant story well worth telling. [1]

I don’t know why but I find this story remarkably familiar. Maybe, in the alternative cinema of Turkey we’re a bit accustomed to representations of families in confined spaces dealing with the themes such as growing up stories, films investigating boredom of childhood or daily domestic affairs, the dodgy descents trying to sell their parents’ houses or petty and cute crimes such as stealing from the parents etc. On the other hand, it’s not a national thing, of course, the themes like growing up or old, generational relations, lonely parents, death, moving to a new place are umbrella topics that minimalist cinema likes to delve into without the need of or interest in heavy storytelling. There is no point in comparison but I thought of The Father (2020) while watching this film. How different these films are in terms of their perspectives in total domination of the audience vs. keeping the story really low-key to open up more space for them. I respect both approaches but the “good” ones in either approach manifest themselves in a glance. Moving On was not at that level for me.

A finely polished gem of a film, this modest indie may not have the panache of Parasite but its every bit as good at exploring the effects of poverty within Korean society, often in ways that will feel close to home for viewers all around the world. [2]

Once I was a fan of South Korean cinema during the rise of Kim Ki-duk or Yeopgijeogin geunyeo years, but hardly remember the films I’ve been watching back then. Lately, I haven’t been watching much, only a couple together with Sang-soo Hong’s oeuvre. When thinking about the popular ones, aside from their cinematic achievements, one of the common denominators of Burning (2018), Parasite (2019), and Squid Game (2021) was the determinacy and the role of the class in the stories. Similar to many other countries, South Korea also looks like, at least in its popular representations, it is in a deep economical gap and crisis.

The father and the absence of his wife, as much as the sister’s situation seem to state how relationships, and the overall concept of family has failed during the previous generation, as the endless pursuit for financial success, and the occasional failure to do so, has destroyed it completely. [3]

The personal memorable moments from the film,

During a morning in which the father is reading something and Dongju is sleeping in the room, the father pranks the kid by waking him up for school even though it’s summer vacation. Such a delicate scene it was. It’s also not random, later on, it becomes apparent that the founder of the prank was actually the grandfather. Family bonding here.
The father makes his living via selling fake sneakers, “they are produced in the same factory”. Okju finds an idea of entrepreneurship here: stealing shoes from the van and selling them to stranger teenagers. She tries to accumulate money via these trades to have eye surgery. Her effort end up in the custody but she puts away life experience instead of money.
Okju hanging out the underwear laundry with her mother, what a symbolic but earthly scene it was.
As displayed in the featured image of the post, Dongju has two great dance scenes, one during his sister’s birthday one after the funeral.
Coming back home, passing next to an ambulance, hearing the sirens, and not noticing anything unusual.

I saw the film in 5. Visionär Film Festival Berlin together with My Mexican Bretzel. It’s funny to see that two films I watched are awarded. I can relate to the animal oracle Paul The Octopus now. The jury had given Moving On the Best Feature Film (Ex Aequo) award with the following remarks:

For its powerful simplicity in storytelling and uniting generations together in a not so assuming way, the Jury decided to award Moving On by YOON Dan-bi. With the filmmakers trust in us as an audience, we were able to feel like this family, this situation could be one of our own, creating a level of empathy that is a feat for a first-time filmmaker. [4]

Links

[1] https://www.thegate.ca/film/045943/moving-on-reel-asian-2020-review/
[2] https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/moving-on-2019-film-review-by-jennie-kermode
[3] https://www.hancinema.net/hancinema-film-review-moving-on-136505.html
[4] https://www.visionaerfilmfestival.com/news/5-visionar-film-festival-berlin-awards/

My Mexican Bretzel (2019) | Notes

A perfect bulk of personal recordings that span around twenty years and several countries meet with a creative and devoted filmmaker. My Mexican Bretzel is a found-footage montage by Nuria Giménez who finds about 50 rolls of raw film in the basement and comes up with an idea to make a feature film out of it. The 8/16 mm films are mostly shot by her grandfather Léon where the secret protagonist is a silent grandmother Vivian who talks to us by subtitles instead of a voiceover. She travels with Léon for years and writes sincere and satirical notes to her diary. As we travel in the mid 20th century, we are also witnessing the inner voice, longings, and observations of Vivian that create a tension with the visuals every once in a while.

Vivian and Léon travel from Europe to North America, starting from the postwar years until the 60s. Giménez writes a fictional story on top of the films that dramatize the life of Vivian via her diaries. The narrative creates a sense of realism at first, but as the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that the visuals are authentic but the rest -story, sound effects, or quotes- is fiction or extra-diegetic.

I liked the film since I felt that it defined and achieved some interesting goals. Building a coherent and impressive story from a set of memory records is the first. It was also a meticulous craft to delve into this several-hour archive and come up with a traceable story without perishing in the personal and familial retrospective. It’s apparent the the filmmaker is not particularly interested in found-footage and trying to make an essay-film out of it, it’s just a coincidence that she found the material and came up with an artistic narrative creation with it that is not largely aimed at in the found-footage filmmaking domain. In the Q/A section, the filmmaker sincerely told that it took around eight years for her to finish the film which also gave me an idea about the duration giving a perspective about keeping aloof from the material.

Maybe one last thing that deserves appraisal about the film is the actual cinematography of the raw footage. For certain, the way the filmmaker brought these segments together adds the actual value to the sequences but many of the pieces by themselves were already shot so beautifully, almost by a puppeteer who foresaw the rise of personal filmmaking in the 21st century. The shots cover a pristine and voyeuristic gaze on the texture of the cities, landscapes, and nature. From the energetic surf scenes to fragile walks on the ice or inspections of the shop windows, I think the unthought cameraman also contributed a lot to it.

Phoenix (2014) | Notes

Phoenix tells the story of Nelly who is freed from Auschwitz. As a demolished survivor with wounds on her face, she goes out of the hospital after an aesthetic surgery with bandages and starts looking for his husband. The loss and the recovery of identity after the camp start with the physical transformation. She is a singer, sadly we can only hear her singing towards the end. Her husband is a pianist. There’s a catch though about the whole capturing event. Did he run away and leave her? Both she and we are not sure. Nelly takes her time to find him and to find out.

She strolls in the dark ruined streets, tries bar-crawling in order to find him. Meanwhile, the woman who is helping her to run away is planning to migrate to Israel, she tries to persuade her too about the exodus. Unlike Nelly, who is still unable to process the horror, Lene is full of resentment about how the history unfolds after the camps, particularly about how Jews forgive all the perpetrators. The focus of Phoenix reminded me of the book I’ve read in Turkish which was also referenced a lot in the other texts, but I couldn’t find an exact English translation online, maybe the essays are translated and published in a different structure, as in At the Mind’s Limits. Jean Améry’s essay collection “Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne” was dealing with the survivors’, particularly intellectuals’, existence after the camps. It’s a hard and heavy topic for me to write about in a film-note-blog-post, so I’d better switch back to the film. It seems like, erstwhile, Améry launched the final scene.

“Für […] mich heißt Jude sein die Tragödie von gestern in sich lasten spüren. Ich trage auf meinem linken Unterarm die Auschwitz-Nummer; die liest sich kürzer als der Pentateuch oder der Talmud und gibt doch gründlicher Auskunft.”

If we go back to Nelly, after a short pursuit, she encounters her husband in a bar called Phoenix -reborn with a red dress- but he does not recognize her. Instead, he offers her a deal to act as if she is her wife to possess her inheritance. The second tier of the drama begins here. As Nelly is drawn together to her husband as a role-playing stranger, some archetypical narratives unfold. Johnny teaches her how to walk, what to wear, how to greet her friends after the comeback. She yields. Despite the despair, she values the joy of re-encountering with the loved one. It feels like a repetition of the first encounter with the lover.

The theme of the man forming the woman towards a desired object/subject traces back to Pygmalion and its variations. Vertigo, the film noirs, and the Frankenstein story can be counted as side-references. The director mentions the Frankenstein relation in one of his interviews, but I honestly don’t buy it, I don’t think there is enough ground for the convergence to that story, a hidden attic does not give enough material. Nina Hoss walking in the night like a vampire was another conceptualization by Petzold about the vampire stories which I didn’t really think of while watching the film. Another, maybe the last remark from the director was the actress Nina Hoss’ comments about him -as a director- following a similar path like the protagonist when it comes to director shaping the actress. Petzold is well known for his films with female protagonists but the distance between him and a woman filmmaker also lay on a great deal about the gaze and the intimacy of the director, storytelling, and the acting.

In many of Petzold’s films, I encounter a couple of scenes that I admire. In this one, the finale was exquisite with Nelly unexpectedly singing a song that proves her identity and epitomizes the whole ambivalence in the film.