Day 3

PRO:

At the End of Daybreak (Ho Yuhang)

mixed:

Melody for a Street Organ (Kira Muratova)

Only in a Muratova film do characters lie peacefully while screaming, grieve while hiccuping, console with peculiar hollowness. Ostensibly about two ghostlike, chubby kids struggling to find their father, her latest brims with a fetish for loud personalities and the deeply nasty irony that scarcely shows itself yet seems omnipresent. While this is not per se an engaging film, Muratova has a rich, indefatiguable sense of counterpoint: despicable gluttony and exuberant joy of gambling in the same shot; the film takes care to distinguish that a homeless woman’s singing is well-liked and her stench despised. And yet this is all reductive: Muratova’s purely musical direction of actors demands to be experienced, exhausting as it is.

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)

con:

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

I walked out 15 minutes early to get to the Ho Yuhang, although Haneke’s latest contains just a few actively bad moments: the doctor scolding his wife, for example, feels like Bergman at his worst, a painful display of cruelty revealing nothing about character. Mostly it’s solemn—sometimes to good effect, when sadism is downplayed—but I don’t think Haneke’s aversion to humor does him any favors. Stilted attempts to show social awkwardness show the director’s clumsy hand with actors, with arbitrary pauses in conversation standing in for rhythm and nuance.

W/O:

All Fall Down (Philip Hoffman)

Hoffman’s home movie-cum-video essay demands its audience’s acceptance of its author’s twisted ethics early on, aligning us with himself against the Man early on by appropriating his own footage after missing out on royalties. I couldn’t take it, and hurried out after about 20 minutes, following the second title displaying the amount of money for which Hoffman just compensated himself by putting his own images onscreen. The guy’s like a disgruntled Jonas Mekas; can't wait for the sequel, As I Was Moving Ahead, I Occasionally Encountered Investors Who Totally Ripped Me Off.