009-1: THE END OF THE BEGINNING (2013)

 

The U.S. isn't the only place where moviemakers have polished up comic-book heroes for new cinematic life. In Japan, Toei released Koichi Sakamoto's update of a character created in the 1960s by manga legend Shotaro Ishinomori to commemorate Ishinomori's 75th birthday. 009-1 seems to have been a "mature audiences" conceptual spinoff of Ishinomori's better-known Cyborg 009 series. Maybe he had a lucky number.009-1 became a live-action TV show and an anime series in the 21st century. Sakamoto's film is an even more "mature audiences" take on the concept, though one of its more hair-raising elements, the machine guns built into the title-character's cybernetic boobs, apparently was there from the beginning. While Hollywood often tries to legitimize comic-book subject matter by making it "serious" to a sometimes-oppressive extent, Japan apparently upgrades similar material for adult audiences by making it kinkier.

 

Ishinomori imagined a bipolar world divided between East and West in which "J-country" is a neutral zone in which agents for both sides operate. Mylene Hoffman (Mayuko Iwasa) is Agent 009-1, investigating a human-trafficking ring. We see she's a cool customer early on; when the trafficking kingpin arbitrarily kills a niteclub waiter for serving an improperly-cooked steak, 009, disguised as a dancer, is the only girl still dancing afte the gunshot while the others cower on the stage floor. That gets the bad guy's attention. He takes her off for sex, arousing his moll's jealousy, after which 009 kills him, arousing the moll's lust for revenge. While routing the traffickers, 009 rescues a young man, Chris (Minehiro Kinomoto), who hums a tune that stirs long-buried memories in Mylene. She flashes back to childhood, when the tune was a lullaby hummed by her mother, whose face she can't remember, to Mylene and her brother. 009 falls in love with Chris, apparently not guessing what audiences ought to have figured out immediately, but there's other stuff going on they won't have guessed.

 

Above: Mylene dances with herself

Below: Busted.

The bad guys are after 009-1's mentor and maker, Dr. Klein (Aya Sugimoto). After 009 rescues the doctor, a seemingly superpowered female fighter, possibly another cyborg, appears to reclaim her, routing Mylene and everything else in her path. Botching her assignment in her distracted state gets 009 in trouble with her bosses, but she resolves to rescue Klein again and learn more about her past. She won't like what she learns.

 

009-1 gets a mechanical tongue bath, or do robots identify people by taste?

Suffice it to say that Mylene is in for some jarring revelations until nearly everything she thought she knew is proven wrong. Worst of all is the revelation of Chris's true identity and his true agenda. How bad is it? Let me assure you that building an incestuous lesbian robot is only the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Klein is determined not to be outdone, however. She distinguishes herself among modern mad scientists with her theory that cyborgs stacked with superweapons will be surpassed by undead mutants (in Japanese, "undead mutants"). The film distinguishes itself among modern mad movies by theorizing that Mylene, a cyborg, can telepathically read the minds of undead mutants. Their thoughts run along the lines of "please kill me," which would seem to prove Dr. Klein wrong, along with 009-1's ability to beat them all single-handedly. This is a film in which undead mutants are only preliminary adversaries, for there remains an uncomfortable reckoning with Mylene's dismal excuse for a family, with an exploding helicopter thrown in in case that gets dull....

 

On this evidence, the Japanese feel no need to legitimize comic-book stories by throwing money at them. End of the Beginning has the production values of a CW genre show, or slightly less. With most of the film's imagination spent on its icky plot, the action is unimaginatively staged and set mostly in the drab warehouse world of the B picture. CGI blood flows aplenty while a CGI helicopter is added to a background in order to explode on contact with a flying combatant, after which the filmmakers seem to forget that there should still be a burning hulk in some scenes. For all its theoretical transgressiveness, the picture proves strangely reticent about showing 009-1's deadliest weapons from the front.  End of the Beginning really does only two things successfully. It often fills the screen with attractive women, and that lullaby is one hell of an earwig. I watched this film a week ago and it's still looping through my brain. At the very least, this picture is a memorable experience. Whether you'll enjoy the memories is up to you.

THE MAFIA KILLS ONLY IN SUMMER (La mafia uccide solo d'estate, 2013)

It's good to see that the Italians can still come up with wacky verbose titles to their movies. This time we have to assume that the title sounds funny on purpose, since Pierfrancesco Diliberto's film is a comedy. As "Pif," Diliberto is a popular TV personality in Italy, apparently a satirical news reporter of the sort we see on cable TV in the U.S. His first movie as writer, director and star is a satire of Italian crime and politics from the 1970s into the 1990s, as well as a kind of romantic-comedy bildungsroman that equates coming of age with coming to terms with truth. Pif takes a potentially treacherous path juxtaposing comedy and real-life tragedy, as if Forrest Gump had been witness to the political assassinations of the American Sixties, and he manages to pull it off with style.

La mafia uccide tells the story of Arturo (played by several actors, finally by Pif himself), whose life has been shaped since conception by proximity to crime. Pif means this literally. As Arturo's parents consummate their marriage, a St. Valentines-style massacre -- with hitmen disguised as cops -- is being staged nearby. As a CGI cartoon demonstrates, nearly all the father's sperm are frightened away from the mother's egg by the gunfire, but one little sperm, the slowest of all, carries on to fertilize the egg that will become Arturo. Throughout, Arturo will be something of a slow learner, but when he finally speaks his first word, it's the most dangerous one possible in Palermo.

Arturo grows up in a land where everyone evades the truth. Mafia killings happen all the time, it seems, but are always blamed on disputes over women. In this environment of awkward evasiveness, Arturo becomes an awkward child with a strange fixation on Giulio Andreotti, the longtime leader of the Christian Democratic Party. Between this film and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, an outsider can conclude that Andreotti was Italy's Nixon, a figure defined as much by his physical and emotional awkwardness as by his ethical shadiness. It's hard to tell whether Pif is riffing on the real Andreotti or on Tony Servillo's Andreotti in Il Divo by having Arturo dress up as Andreotti and mimic his peculiar mincing, hands-folded shuffle for a costume party. The boy looks a little like a vampire with Andreotti's pointed ears and wins the costume contest, albeit by mistake; the judges thought he was the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Arturo seems to empathize with Andreotti's awkwardness, starting with a TV appearance in which the premier describes making a marriage proposal in a cemetery. The rest of the film will trace Arturo's very gradual disillusionment with a man who did much, it seems, to keep Italy in denial about the Mafia. Andreotti was a cold character, apparently. When other politicians flocked to the funeral of a Mafia victim, he told reporters, "I prefer to go to baptisms."

Illusion.

Diliberto establishes a pattern and sticks to it, keeping Arturo (and his lifelong beloved, Flora) at the edge of violent history. Arturo aspires to be a journalist and wins a reporter-for-a-day contest for one of the city newspapers; the award ceremony is interrupted by news of the latest killing. In his new role, the boy will sneak into a government compound to interview an important police official, challenging him with Andreotti's assertion that the real crime problem is anywhere but Sicily. Arturo will be one of the last people to see him alive. Later, Flora (Ginevra Antona as a girl) has to leave the country with her father on short notice, while Arturo scrawls a love note on the sidewalk in front of her apartment building. We see her finish packing her clothes and dragging her suitcase out of her old room; seconds later her window shatters from a car bomb. Later still, the adult Arturo, making ends meet as pianist to a Franco-Italian talk show host, is passed by motorcyclists while riding in a car with his employer, whom the bikers recognize as a celebrity. The camera follows the motorcycle as it turns onto another street so the bikers can kill a politician. Again, it's a delicate balancing act in terms of tone, but the comedy is actually funny and the history is appropriately horrific.

 

Reality. 

As the mafia wars escalate with the rise of a particularly nasty boss, Toto Rinna, Arturo can no longer believe Andreotti's evasions and denials. In turn, he has to disillusion Flora (Cristiana Capotondi as an adult), who has become a naive Christian Democrat operative handling a particularly unpromising candidate. Arturo gets involved in the campaign but proves incompetent as a partisan stooge. He nearly blows his latest chance to score with Flora by criticizing the anti-crime speech she's written for the candidate. He's never said anything like this before, he says bluntly, so why should he start now. Yet for all the candidate's weakness he's still unacceptable to the mafia; he's the man the motorcyclists kill. There are still more killings to go before mass revulsion spills becomes mass action that finally unites hero and heroine for good. Diliberto closes the show on a note of earned poignance. Arturo is going to raise his own son differently from how he was raised. We see him taking the boy on a tour of all the memorials to the people murdered -- characters he's met and others in the background -- by the mafia, and we end with a collage of news clippings honoring Italy's anti-crime martyrs. Pif's mix of comedy and grim history might seem insensitive to overly sensitive audiences in the U.S., but his success on his first try as a cinematic satirist has me looking forward to whatever he may do next.

GOLD (2013)

We've actually seen quite a few German westerns, so the novelty of Thomas Arslan's film is that it's a German northwestern, an exploration of the Klondike rather than a Karl May-inspired romp among the noble savages. Gold (the English word is the official German title) has inspired many comparisons with one of the best American westerns of the still-young century, Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff. In part that's because Gold, too, has a female protagonist, but it may also be because some viewers ask, "Is that it?" at the end. Gold is no more about reaching one's destination than Meek's Cutoff was, but it's both more picturesque, within its budgetary limitations, and somewhat more existential than the American film. The poster art you see here has whitened the landscape through which the characters ride to better match the lingering popular imagination of the Klondike, but in the movie itself browns and greens prevail and the action takes place in warmer weather than we're used to seeing in this particular subgenre. If the absence of winter disappoints you you can always wait for The Hateful Eight, but Arslan and cinematographer Patrick Orth do nicely by their British Columbia locations, emphasizing wilderness rather than winter. There's no effort, as in Meek's Cutoff, to obscure the epic sweep of the landscape, but as in the Reichardt film a little band of increasingly desperate people of increasingly questionable competence subordinate the landscape to a human scale.

 

By the 1890s adventurers like Emily can reach the frontier's edge by train.

From there, things look more generically western, albeit further north.

 

Arslan follows a small group of German immigrants who've gathered for an expedition to the gold fields organized by Wilhelm Laser (Peter Kurth), an irrepressibly European figure who inspires little confidence, though his hired man Carl Boehmer (Marko Mandic) is more acclimated and more promising. A latecomer to the group is, unexpectedly, a single woman, Emily Meyer (Nina Hoss). More than the others, she seems to be going for the sake of going, more the classic western loner than any of the others. Boehmer, however, is another western archetype, the man with a past. Evocative of John Wayne in Stagecoach, he's a justified killer who has unfinished business, whether he likes it or not, with his enemies.
 

Things fall apart fairly rapidly once it becomes clear that Laser is a con man. Compared to other characters he gets off easy, if only because Emily rescues him from a sunrise lynching. Others drop out or die. One man (Lars Rudolph) most likely does both; driven mad by the horrors he sees, he strips naked and runs off alone. By that point, with Laser gone and another self-appointed leader done in by blundering into a bear trap, only Emily and Boehmer are left. Through luck more than anything else they end up in an outpost of civilization, only to find Boehmer's reckoning waiting for him.

Emily arrives alone and departs alone. Does she go on out of greed, for the sake of another, or is her urge to press on much different than the mania that sent her onetime partner running naked into the deep woods? For a film called Gold, this film isn't really about greed once the scheming Laser is out of it. A stubborn restlessness is the prevailing spirit, a determination to go one's own way, often against good advice, for the satisfaction of having chosen it oneself. The party seems doomed to self-destruction. They're the sort who are warned against doing something stupid and almost immediately walk into disaster. Boehmer seems more competent and thoughtful, and Emily less aggressively reckless, than the rest, but their mere presence in this misguided band seems to signal that something's wrong with them, too. Nina Hoss plays Emily with a disquieting stoicism that barely hints at deeper motives for her relentless quest. When she takes leave of us, her perseverance can be seen with equal fairness as heroic or foolhardy, or as both in equal measure. To writer-director Arslan's credit, he recognizes in Emily an enigma that can't be reduced to the neatness of a romantic character arc or resolved in violent catharsis. That may leave Gold's ending as unsatisfying to some as the in medias res finish of Meek's Cutoff. But by disdaining conventional dramatics both films may leave us truer portraits of the pioneers and fortune seekers that populated a continent.

THE LIBERATOR (Libertador, 2013)

Alberto Alvero's biopic may not be the first film about Simon Bolivar, but it may be the first Bolivarian Bolivar movie. This aspiring epic in many ways reflects the viewpoint of the "Bolivarian Revolution" that has dominated Venezuela since the advent of Hugo Chavez, who may well have seen himself as a modern-day Bolivar but didn't live to see this film. Aimed at the global market, Liberator was written by Timothy J. Sexton, a co-writer of Children of Men and otherwise a mostly political filmmaker, and is performed partly in English to accommodate guest American Danny Huston and the actors playing Bolivar's Irish brigade. Its major asset, indisputably, is Edgar Ramirez in the title role. Ramirez exploded on the global film scene as the star terrorist of Olivier Assayas's epic miniseries Carlos, but had not done anything on a similar scale until this picture, for which he gets an Executive Producer credit. His charisma is necessary to carry us through a film that often seems, at just under two hours, like a digest (or perhaps digestible) version of a necessarily more detailed and complex life story. Experts can debate the picture's historical accuracy; I was fascinated by its alternate vision of revolution, in often stark contrast to Bolivar's own American model.

In typical modern fashion, the movie opens in medias res, showing the mature Bolivar as an embattled revolutionary racing to escape a conspiratorial trap. It then takes us back to his beginnings as just another son of South American wealth taking the Grand Tour of Europe and bringing home a bride who proves too vulnerable to his homeland's harsh environment. Broken in spirit by her early death, he returns to Europe and lives a wastrel's life until an old teacher reminds him of the need to liberate the continent from Spanish rule. Simon puts himself at the service of a General Miranda, but finds his tactics too conservative. Relegated to a backwater, he finally finds something worth fighting for passionately when someone steals his boots. He chases the culprit to a swampland shanty, where an abject mother begs him to spare her boy's life. Bolivar seems to notice poverty in all its wretchedness for the first time. As a plantation owner he had seen slavery but had considered it none of his business when another planter treated slaves badly. Now he realizes that if the revolution is to be worth anything it must be for the good of the poor. The scene may remind American viewers that their own revolution is never portrayed this way, and for good reason. Our revolution was all about middle-class aspirations frustrated by imperial trade policy, and the revolutions in Latin America were probably similarly motivated to a great extent, but the added imperative to improve the lives of poor people whose poverty is blamed directly on oppression, and who this film's Bolivar believes should get something from the revolution, makes for a very different history and a very different sort of film.

From this point forward, Bolivar is pitted constantly against ostensible allies who are ultimately only out for themselves, or whose interests are purely parochial. They resist his vision of a united continent liberated by people's war. Liberator credits Bolivar's victories to the leader's vision and the people's will. It shows a ragtag army of all races and both sexes, including foreign friends like the anti-colonial Irishmen, on a long march through the Andes, explicitly compared to Hannibal in the Alps but also implicitly comparable to Mao in China, culminating in a human-wave attack, with our hero in the lead, that proves successful against the odds. Alvero shifts from godlike views of the armies from directly above to close-up mayhem as Bolivar's host forces the Spaniards onto a bridge and the battle becomes a kind of rugby scrum with bayonets.

 

Bolivar makes the professional soldiers uncomfortable,

and feels most at home at the head of an inclusive people's army

Triumph turns to tragedy as Bolivar's allies mostly reject his vision of a united continent. The way he and his opponents talk past each other is telling. They fear that his united republic will give too much power to one man, namely Bolivar, and protest that they didn't fight the King of Spain only to have a dictator take over. Bolivar never bothers to refute the dictator charge. What matters to him is that the revolution and the republic are for the people, and that vested interests and local powers have no place in the new order. It appears to be an irreconcilable clash of priorities, and the Liberator's morale briefly falters before his most loyal friends urge him to stand firm and preserve his vision of union by force if necessary. In a historically questionable climax, the film implies that Bolivar was murdered by his enemies, thus thwarting the people's destiny of unity and republican equality for generations to come. But it hints that the torch will be carried on when Bolivar, before his final betrayal, meets a poor young fisherman who happens to share his name.

If Carlos the Jackal was a classic Scorsesean antihero, Ramirez's Simon Bolivar is a classic epic hero, and the actor delivers the charismatic bombast necessary for the role. Alvero and Sexton would have us see Bolivar as an epic lover as well, often draping their hero with glamorous if not gratuitous female nudity; we rarely see that sort of thing in American Revolution films, either. Maybe it comes with the territory. If it sometimes seems like a vanity project for Ramirez, that's probably because no other character in the film is developed extensively. We get to know them enough to know whether they're for or against the Liberator, or we know them until they turn against him. That tends to make Bolivar's debates with his various antagonists rather one-sided. While the film is willing to show Bolivar in moments of weakness or self-doubt, it refuses to consider that he may want too much power, and it takes for granted that those who oppose him are selfish, greedy, and indifferent to the poor. The failure of his vision is in no way his fault in this version of his story. As a film this version is interesting to the extent that its story is novel to audiences, and the filmmaking is effective without being really visionary. As history, it will be most successful if it inspires or provokes us to find out more about Bolivar on our own. As it happens, I have a biography on the shelf that I intend to pull out now, so on that level The Liberator is a success. If it wanted to be all you needed to know, or all someone wanted you to know about Simon Bolivar, that's another story.

IDA (2013)

Ida premiered last year in Poland but will most likely be a front-runner for this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. It hit the art houses highly touted and has the Holocaust factor in its favor, but Pawel Pawlikowski's picture is more about 20th century Poland as a whole than it is specifically about the slaughter of Polish Jews. Deracination in a broader sense is the film's major subject as it addresses not just genocide but the incursions on Polish national consciousness by Communism and western culture. The title character (her name's pronounced "Ee-da," not "Eye-da") is Poland in microcosm. She's a novie nun in the 1960s who's advised to meet her one surviving relative before taking her vows. She meets a disreputable seeming character -- the lady and a gentleman caller are dressing after sex when Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) arrives. After a brusque introduction, Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) rushes to work, and it's a surprise to learn that she's a judge. She has a bigger surprise for Ida: the devout Catholic girl is really Jewish, rescued in infancy from her parents' fate and raised in the majority faith. This revelation sets up a road movie as Ida and Wanda roll through the countryside to find where their relatives are buried, For Wanda the trip revives a remembered traumatic past and accelerates her personal decline. For Ida it puts her whole sense of self in question, but making Wanda a model for modern secular womanhood proves unsatisfactory in some vague way.

Wanda confronts Ida with her Jewishness but that isn't Wanda's primary identity, either. Her judgeship represents a career on the skids; a decade earlier she was a state prosecutor, presumably conducting political purge trials, and she's still willing to use her office as a threat to uncooperative people. Ida, however, presumably sees Wanda as not so much Jewish or Communist as modern and secular. The climactic scenes come when Ida resolves literally to walk in Wanda's shoes and consummate an attraction to a progressive jazz musician. Ida's unburdened by Wanda's issues (guilt, alcoholism, etc.), but like Wanda, if less dramatically, she seems to opt out of modern life.

Ida chronicles a futile quest for authenticity. A reactionary reading of it might see her reversion to habit -- clothing, that is -- as a decision in favor of the Church as her true home, but the ambiguity of her Catholic identity is the starting point of the entire picture. If you accept that there's something essentially false about her faith -- so long as she didn't have a choice to embrace first her Jewish heritage and then Christianity -- you face the bleak conclusion that there is no "authentic" Polish identity anymore, or anymore than any nation could claim to have by the mid-20th century. In that context it makes more sense to see more ambiguity in the ending. Dressed in her habit again after her tryst, Ida walks briskly foward as the camera retreats. You might assume you know where she's going because of what she's wearing, but I think it's important that we don't see her destination, that the film leaves her still moving.

Pawlikowski, who has worked primarily in English, evokes the film's period with a rigorous monochrome style many viewers find reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman. He works with a pre-widescreen squarish frame in which Ida is often a small figure at the bottom or in a corner. He also employs a kind of retro-modernism in the jazzier scenes amid midcentury decor. In short, the director makes it as obvious as possible that his is an arthouse film, but he and his cinematographers make their pretentiousness often quite impressive. He gets the desired guilelessness from his amateur lead actress, while Agata Kulesza easily dominates the picture whenever Wanda's on screen. Ida is the sort of picture that will be more admired than enjoyed, but in its ambition and execution it does deserve some admiration.

METRO MANILA (2013)

Given its Anglo-Filipino pedigree, a certain generic feel to Metro Manila is probably inevitable. British director and co-writer Sean Ellis certainly gives the picture plenty of local Philippine color as his family of protagonists travels from the terraced rice paddies of the hill country to the squalor and tumult of the capital city. But the story that happens in Manila could happen in a lot of places.

Metro Manila initially seems too bad to be true. Oscar (Jake Macapagal) takes his family to the big city to earn money after their buyer back home cuts his price on rice. The Ramirez family come across like the sort of guileless yokels you'd see arriving in the big city in movies from 100 years ago. On their first day Oscar blows their wad paying the first month's rent to some guy who doesn't even own the building. Oscar has a knack for finding work that doesn't pay. One day's work ends with him getting a sandwich for his trouble and getting left behind to find his way home on foot. To help make ends meet and raise money so their eldest daughter can see a dentist, Oscar's wife Mai (Althea Vega) has to go to work as a bar girl. That means letting patrons grope her, or worse, so long as they keep buying drinks. It looks like things can only get worse.

 

The country and the city

Then Oscar gets a lucky break. He applies for work as a security guard and one of the guards, Ong (John Arcilla) recognizes Oscar as an Army veteran by a tattoo. The military experience surprised me since I'd think it would have left Oscar a more worldly-wise person, but in any event it helps him land a more steady job. Better still, Ong helps Oscar find a decent apartment, since the security company normally won't hire people from the shantytown where the Ramirezes were squatting. Finding a place for Oscar is easy, since it's a place Ong uses for trysts with his mistress. Now things look too good to be true, and of course they are.

 

Jake Macapagal (left) flinches as John Arcilla fires;

below, Althea Vega is Girl No. 40 (center)

Ong has to want something, doesn't he? In flashbacks, we've learned that he lost a partner during an attempted robbery. The security company transports money in strongboxes that can only be opened with specific keys; otherwise an ink spray will destroy the money inside. It turns out that Ong has kept the strongbox from that incident while reporting it stolen. The key is kept in a special locker in an area of headquarters where drivers like Ong and Oscar don't have access -- unless they're being debriefed after a robbery. Ong's plan is to stage a robbery so that he as the senior partner will have to be debriefed. He expects Oscar to sneak in and steal the needed key from the locker. Oscar understandably balks at the idea until Ong reminds him of everything he's done for him and informs him that the strongbox is in Oscar's new apartment, which Ong rented in Oscar's name in the first place just so he could frame Oscar if the rookie doesn't cooperate.

The best thing about Metro Manila is an element of randomness that emerges when Ong's master plan falls apart almost instantly, leaving Oscar holding the box without any likely access to the locker, since now he has to do the debriefing after the debacle. The worst thing about Metro Mania arguably is how Oscar, otherwise shown as a consistent sap, suddenly proves a tactical mastermind by managing to secure the key and save his family from shame and worse -- by this point Mai is being warned that she can only keep her bar job if she recruits her 9 year old daughter for the amusement of "special" customers. While Oscar pays a high price, his ability to outmaneuver and outwit everyone finally is a little too good to be true. Ellis eats his cake and has it, too, striking a bleak note -- the key to Oscar's success is that he doesn't base his ultimate plan on the "dream" of surviving -- while giving the family an implausible if bittersweet win. Still, in choosing Manila for his setting Ellis makes an admirable stab at social realism, grounding his story at a level of poverty we hardly see in American film, that arguably hardly exists in America. The actors come across well, at least as far as I can tell from listening to their Tagalog dialogue, with Arcilla as Ong clearly the best in class. While Metro Manila is essentially a cliche in exotic dress, its relatively unflinching look at poverty and corruption and its overall craftsmanship still make it worth a look from us.

AGE OF UPRISING: THE LEGEND OF MICHAEL KOHLHAAS (2013)

Don't blame director Arnaud des Pallieres for the video-gamey title of the American release of his film. It was just plain Michael Kohlhaas to him, just as it was to Volker Schlondorff back in 1969. Both films adapt the legend of a minor German rebel as it had been canonized by the novelist Heinrich von Kleist 200 years ago. Schlondorff's film (here's my review) was a product of its time, a blend of New German Cinema and late-Hollywood risk-taking in the "history of cruelty" mode popular back then. Retelling the story now could easily have become an excuse to tart up the action with modern effects, but Pallieres resists that temptation. Instead, he films the story's violence with a cold objectivity and an absence of choreography that are bound to disappoint people expecting something "cool" from that awful American title. Yet there is, I suspect, a strong American influence over this new Kohlhaas film, and if I'm right it's a very good influence.

They killed his wife and hurt his horses; now Michael Kohlhaas will fight!

You can read my review of the 1969 film for more detail on the Kohlhaas story, but to sum it up, our hero (now played by Mads Mikkelsen, succeeding David Warner) has had his rights and his horses violated, and his wife has been killed while protesting on his behalf, so he starts a private war against the local baron who wronged him, and the war threatens to escalate into a full-scale political rising. Michael Kohlhaas remains apolitical, however. He'll lay down his arms and send home the small army that has rallied around him if only the baron will personally restore Michael's two black horses to full health and their former beauty.

In the most noteworthy story switch from the 1969 film, Kohlhaas negotiates not with a male potentate (nor with Martin Luther) but with a female ruler, a young princess (Roxane Duran) whose guileless if not stupid appearance hides a calculating and treacherous, yet on some level still honorable character. She must destroy Kohlhaas to restore order and set an example, but she makes sure that he gets what he'd asked for all along before he dies. In place of Luther the 2013 film gives us an anonymous Theologian (Denis Lavant) who chides Kohlhaas for his violent self-indulgence. Unimpressed by Kohlhaas's execution of one of his own men for looting, the Theologian challenges our hero's assumed right to rebel and his presumption of taking justice for himself when God alone, ultimately can judge. While the 1969 Kohlhaas is a kind of figurehead for an all-out rebellion reflecting the mood of 1969, the 2013 model is more intimate, arguably more morally serious, and it seems to owe many of its distinguishing qualities to Clint Eastwood.

I think it was the emphasis on horses that clicked things together for me. While the figure of Coalhouse Walker Jr. in the novel and film Ragtime are the most obvious American version of the Kohlhaas legend, Eastwood's Unforgiven, written by David Webb Peoples, is arguably a reflection of the Kohlhaas theme. In Unforgiven, horses are proposed by the local marshal as suitable compensation to a pimp for the disfiguring of one of his whores, and one of the cowboys held responsible for the disfigurement tries to offer the horses directly to the prostitute as a gesture of personal repentance. In this case, the whores as a group refuse the gesture and demand revenge instead, offering a bounty to whoever will kill the cowboys. Peoples (if not Eastwood) may have understood this as an ironic variation on Kohlhaas: the one gesture Kohlhaas would have accepted as a peace offering is spurned by the whores of Big Whiskey. But while the influence of the Kohlhaas legend on Unforgiven is purely speculative, the visual influence of Unforgiven on Arnaud des Pallieres seems hard to deny. The unromanticized violence: check. The bleak landscape: check. The resemblance is closest when Kohlhaas and his young daughter watch his men ride down upon and massacre a wagon train. We see the action from the Kohlhaases' perspective, at a great distance that refuses us any visceral thrill from the killing. As father and daughter watch, she asks him why he's fighting. For his horses? For his wife and her mother? Michael has no answer. Meanwhile, his faithful minion Cesar (David Bennent), who had earlier survived an attack from the baron's dogs, breaks from the attack and rides back up to Kohlhaas's position, only to fall dying to the ground. It's strongly reminiscent of the great "We've all got it coming" scene in Unforgiven, when William Munny and the Schofield Kid talk about killing on a hilltop as one of the whores slowly rides their way with terrible news.  Eastwood is a popular and honored director but doesn't seem to have inspired many stylistic followers, but Michael Kohlhaas hints that there's at least one out there.

With his squinty slits of eyes Mads Mikkelsen is more a Robert Mitchum than a Clint Eastwood but his own enigmatic charisma is essential for portraying a character who may well be an enigma to himself, a man who can't acknowledge and may not even recognize his deepest motives. He's a powerful figure who bends yet never quite breaks under the weight of conscience and the pressure of religion and custom. As Kohlhaas's daughter, Melusine Mayance proves herself a formidable child actor by holding her own with Mikkelsen. As the Princess, Roxane Duran isn't on screen much but she brings an almost eerie presence to the picture, dressed in plain black, that makes it plausible that people might have trembled before royalty. If the look of the film as well as its themes bring Eastwood to mind, Jeanne Lapoirie's cinematography has much to do with that. If "Age of Uprising" makes you think of a video game, Lapoirie's imagery is just about the opposite of that. I can't stress enough how stupid that American title sounds to me, but I'm happy to report that few films recently have been as superior to their titles, if you accept Age of Uprising as its title, as this one is.

JOURNEY TO THE WEST: CONQUERING THE DEMONS (2013)

If nothing is real, then everything is permitted. Thus reads the sutra of Buddhist comedy, as written by the sage Stephen Chow. His best-known text is Kung Fu Hustle, the global sensation of a decade ago. Journey to the West is only his second film as a director since then; Chow wasted some time developing a cross-cultural team-up with Seth Rogen, The Green Hornet, but the stars' styles apparently differed too strongly. One can presume that Chow's Hornet, which he would have directed and played Kato in, would have been a more fantastical film than the actual Rogen vehicle. Journey reminds us that nothing is too outlandish for Chow if it might be funny or simply amazing. It's his prequel, if not a full reboot, of China's great comic epic, showing how the monk Sanzang (Wen Zhang) put his team of reformed demons together. Chow, who gets a "Written, Directed and Produced by" credit while acknowledging several collaborators, shapes the material to Kung Fu Hustle's zero-to-hero-by-the-grace-of-Buddha formula. More so than Hustle, Journey will strike Americans as an uncomfortable blend of slapstick, sentimentality and death. But if the central message of Buddhism isn't exactly "life and death are a big joke," that's still close enough for Stephen Chow.

Chow keeps us off balance for the opening reels; viewers unfamiliar with his source material will be especially uncertain of who the actual protagonist is. A river village is menaced by a monster that attacks and devours a small girl's father. A demon hunter arrives to subdue the monster; throwing explosives into the river, he brings up a giant ray and declares victory. But a new arrival, Sanzang, warns that the ray is just an animal and the real demon is still in the water. He's proven right in the middle of the villagers' everyone-into-the-river celebration. With the aid of some brave souls and a very fat woman, Sanzang manages to get the demon stranded on land, on which it turns into a person. He then attempts to exorcise the evil spirit by singing from his demon-subduing textbook, the 300 Nursery Rhymes. The demon-man is merely confused by the performance until he's grabbed by yet another interloper and brusquely stuffed into an imprisoning sack. This newcomer is the forceful, tomboyish Miss Duan (Shu Qi), whom the villagers now acclaim as the real demon hunter while Sanzang, crestfallen, retreats to his home city to consult with his homeless master.

Demon hunting brings Sanzang and Duan to the same destination, a restaurant of the damned where the specialty is roast pig and the secret ingredient is PEOPLE!!! Together -- but Duan does most of the work with her incredible bracelet -- they defeat but fail to capture the master chef K.L. Hog, whose immobile smiley face hides the visage of a swine. Since a pig-demon is one of the companions in the Journey proper, we know we haven't seen the last of Mr. Hog.

Meanwhile, Duan develops an unlikely crush on Sanzang, given her contempt for his skills and his dedication to celibacy. She sets traps to make him prove his own love for her, but is woefully unskilled in the art of seduction; the only dance she knows is a set of fighting poses. Fortunately, she has a kid sister on her traveling support team who tries to teach her the softer ways. When that looks hopeless Sis resorts to the Obedience Charm, which will allow her to control Duan's movements for the crucial seduction. In a scene like something out of a Bob Hope or Danny Kaye picture, the charm ends up on Sanzang's back unbeknownst to Sis, who goes through the motions of seduction while a shirtless Sanzang is visited by two of Duan's male minions.  Fortunately, K.L. Hog, now in the form of a giant boar, attacks before things get too ugly.

 

Sanzang and Duan's gang are bailed out by three more rival demon hunters, and now we're given to understand that they're all superior to Duan. Hog is still on the loose, however, and Sanzang can only learn how to stop him from the famous Monkey King Sung Wukong (Huang Bo). Now in human form, Sung has spent the last 500 years imprisoned by Buddha for being an asshole. He tries repeatedly to trick Sanzang into removing the wards that confine him to his cave; in the meantime, with help from Duan, they capture Hog and stuff him in a magic bag. Since we cant call a movie Journey to the West without having the Monkey King run amok, Sanzang finally falls for one of his tricks and frees the demon. However, the other three demon hunters are right on the spot, each eager to smack down the rather runty ape-man. They all end up dead. Then Monkey King tears out all of Sanzang's copious hair, leaving him shorn like a true monk, before Duan steps in to rescue her beloved. Monkey King kills her, but not before she elicits the long-desired admission of love from Sanzang. Happily, his hair had nothing do with her attraction to him.

Comedy is different in China. Stephen Chow has just killed off his picture's love interest. Granted, in the actual Journey the monk has no love interest so you have to explain her absence, but still! But let me backtrack a little to further illustrate the different comic sensibility at play here. Back in the river village, you'll recall, a little girl was left fatherless. Chow has paid some attention to her, initially in a macabre way: her father had been playing in the water, pretending to scare her but making her cry until he surfaced to reassure her. She continues giggling while the monster actually attacks and kills her father. In an American movie that little girl might grow up to become an avenging demon-hunter in her own right. In Stephen Chow's movie the little girl is killed by the monster in the next attack, after a lot of slapstick effort to rescue her from the demon's clutches. Then her mother goes into the water to fight the demon -- and she gets killed. I don't think that Chow finds all this funny, but he clearly doesn't think that it's out of place in a comedy, either -- and that sets him apart from American movie comedy, despite all the influence generations of the stuff obviously has had on him. Going back to the present, he's killed the romantic lead. I expect that from a sword-and-sorcery picture where she might come back as an avenging valkyrie, but Chow has a different epiphany in mind.

Throughout the story, Duan has vented her contempt for Sanzang's reliance on the 300 Nursery Rhymes, at one point tearing his precious tome into shreds. Later, she contritely returns the book to him, explaining that she had taken three days to reassemble it, but warning that, since "I don't read so well" it might not really be intact. After her death, the grieving Sanzang turns to her re-edited 300 Nursery Rhymes. By a miracle, the barely-literate Duan had reassembled the book into the Buddha Sutra that had subdued the Monkey King 500 years earlier. Reciting from the sutra, Sanzang becomes invulnerable to the Monkey's attacks. Better still, he summons Buddha himself. In a climax that amplifies the hero's enlightened re-entry from space in Kung Fu Hustle, Buddha appears like a starchild off-planet to lay the smack down on Sung Wukong, who thinks he can win because he's wrecked a mountain in the Buddha's shape. Sung transforms into a giant gorilla to grapple with his old enemy, but you haven't seen a Buddha Palm until you see it here. It keeps coming and coming until you realize that Monkey King isn't even equal to a cell of the Enlightened One. Whatever you may think of his religion, this Buddha kicks ass without even trying. All through the picture we've encountered warriors and demons, each tougher or more powerful than the last, but they're all nothing compared to Buddha. I don't know how seriously Stephen Chow actually takes Buddhism in real life, but his two martial-arts fantasies certainly do proselytize for Buddha quite forcefully. And for what it's worth, Buddhism reconciles Sanzang both to losing the love of his life and to his mission to come, though it may be a concession to modern sensibilities that the hero has to experience romantic love, however briefly, before he can renounce it.

To American eyes it may seem as if tragedy and comedy clash too often in Journey to the West, but it's arguably wrong to call it tragedy when people simply are killed, or even when characters in whom we've been invited to invest emotional interest are killed. If we call it a moment of pathos when Duan dies we come closer to an older tradition of American comedy, but even then the silent clowns would never let their idolized females die for pathos' sake. There is pathos, I suppose, when Sanzang sees a shimmering golden vision of Duan at the end of the picture, but overall Chow's attitude toward killing characters is like Chuck Jones killing Bugs Bunny in What's Opera, Doc? What did you expect, given the subject matter? The truth is, Journey to the West is more like cartoons than anything else. Astounding violence co-exists with utter clownishness, from the fat woman landing on a plank to send the river demon flying through the air to the squeaky-toy sound effect when the heroes punch out K.L. Hog's minions to the giant Monty Python foot of one of the demon hunters. Cartoons and comedy movies come from a burlesque tradition that allowed trauma to be exaggerated into comedy on the common recognition that none of it is real. It may not be exaggerating too much to suggest that Buddhism's recognition of the transience of all things and the distance it establishes from emotional attachment help explain the affinity of Asian martial-arts cinema for American slapstick comedy, as exemplified by Jackie Chan and, on a more philosophical level, by Stephen Chow. Still, none of this makes Journey to the West a great or even very good film. The character of Duan, while played to the hilt by Shu Qi, never really coheres, and the chemistry Chow insists on between her and Sanzang isn't really there, and some of the demon hunters have no real personality beyond their gimmicks. Despite its weaknesses in characterization and plotting, Chow's Journey is still a wildly imaginative spectacle that has the virtue, increasingly rare in American spectacle, of really looking and feeling different from everything else. For all its faults, vive la difference!