Fantastic Fest 2010

I missed Ji-woon Kim's excellent Korean-made The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a colorful and kinetic homage to spaghetti Westerns, at Fantastic Fest a couple of years back and was forced to catch it later in its limited art house release when it rolled through Denver. Pretty impressive stuff, and Kim showed enormous flair and style. So, when I was sat down for the first Secret Screening of the 2010 incarnation of Fantastic Fest and found out that they were screening Kim's new flick I Saw the Devil, I was quite pleased. Alas, that feeling did not last long.

As most genre fans know by now, the Koreans really dig their vengeance movies, and the more brutal whup-assery there is, the better. I don't know a whole lot about their national psyche, but I can for damn sure say that I'm gonna be very careful never to offend anyone from Seoul, lest I end up on the wrong end of a hammer beat-down. Kim capitalizes here on this fetish for revenge, and ups the ante by playing it out in a reciprocal cycle, where the good guy gets his vengeance on the bad guy, who then gets his back on the good guy in turn, who is left with no choice but to come back for an escalated level of pain-dealing, and so forth, until ultimately there is scarcely any difference between hero and villain.

Min-sik Choi is a psycho killer who opens the film by kidnapping a woman and hacking her to pieces at his leisure in his secret lair, because that's what he does. Unfortunately for him, she was the girlfriend of Byung-hun Lee, a secret service agent who manages to track down the murderer fairly quickly. But Lee's grief-driven lust for vengeance cannot possibly be satisfied with a mere arrest of the criminal--he has to make Choi suffer first. Hence, he manages to surreptitiously tag Choi with a tracking device, so he can release him back into the wild, and then crash down upon him repeatedly with maximum force, unleashing a world of hurt. Naturally, though, Choi eventually figures out how he's being found again and again, and who it is that's hunting him, and contrives to turn the tables. And then, as is inevitable, the hunter becomes the hunted.

Technically, this is a competently executed movie and the lead performances are solid. However, when Choi resumes his killing spree roughly five minutes after Lee initially tags him and lets him flee, the viewer's sympathy for the alleged protagonist is quickly challenged. Especially since the lawman soon realizes what's going on, but doesn't put an end to his plan, even after he has to intervene again and narrowly save a female victim from being raped and murdered by Choi.

Indeed, horrific violence against women is a major theme of this movie. Just about all of the victims are female, and where the males usually are dispatched rapidly, the women are subjected to lingering terror, torture, and degradation. Certainly, horror and suspense movies are notorious for how often the female characters are brutalized, but Kim definitely lets the camera linger for a long time on their suffering here, and they can barely be considered characters--they're mere vehicles for disturbing voyeuristic impulses. While there's a perfunctory effort to show that at least three of them get away, as soon as they run off the edge of the screen the movie completely loses interest in them. Their getaways are the equivalent of watching the bad guys from COBRA parachute to safety right after the righteous G.I. Joes blast their jets to smithereens--you get to enjoy your guilty pleasure of watching exciting violence while being assured that gee, no one was killed, so it's all good.

Ultimately, the movie relentlessly pursues its theme of "To hunt the psycho, you must become a psycho" to a predictable end, one in which the hero's final justice brings no satisfaction to anyone, and actually ends up scarring innocent bystanders. I have nothing against bleak endings per se, but the motifs explored in I Saw the Devil are really nothing new, and the only thing it really has to offer is bone-snapping levels of naturalistic violence, Korean-style. Oh, and the lesson that the country is strangely awash in serial killers. Perhaps it's no wonder that so many people there are wandering around, seeking revenge.

I've come to accept that some of the films that sneak into Fantastic Fest under the cloak of a Secret Screening have only the most nebulous connections to the genre world. I mean, last year's "The Brothers Bloom", despite its merits, of which there were a handful, doesn't really feature zombies, kung-fu fighting, aliens, psycho killers, giant Japanese robots, Korean gangsters, or any of the other things we've come to expect in the typical Fest flick. But at least it was a madcap caper, and there's some precedent for those to be shown here.

I have no explanation for why "A Serious Man" was selected, unless (and I am most reluctant to entertain this theory) the programmers, in a moment of weakness, succumbed to the increasing Hollywood attention being directed their way and simply scheduled it just to bag another claim to a big premiere. I would hate to see the Secret Screenings degenerate to that level, where some studio looking for a little bit of hipster buzz manages to cram some mainstream schlock into our beloved gathering.

I'm not saying that "A Serious Man" is schlock, although had it been, it would've proved more entertaining. No, this movie is well-made and features solid performances (particularly on the part of the dude who played Sy Abelman), but it is apparently about Big Ideas, and those themes are presented in a completely aimless way. The movie keeps promising that it is about something, and clearly intends to provoke thought, but it turns into an endless waiting game where things are suggested but never developed or completed.

Clearly, the Coen Brothers want to replay the tale of Job here. The protagonist, of a sudden, is beset on all sides: his bid for tenure is being threatened by an anonymous source making serious allegations about his character, his wife asks for a divorce, his unemployed brother is leaching off him, his neighbor is slowly taking over his backyard, and one of his students is trying to extort a passing grade out of him. Obviously, if he had a herd of cattle, it would be contracting hoof-and-mouth disease, just to complete the Jobian parallel.

Desperate, he seeks advice from rabbis and legal aid from lawyers. But the first two rabbis he consults prove to be no solace, and his lawyer can only promise that he's in for a tough time. There is a revered and aged senior rabbi in town, but he refuses to see our hero. And just as a senior partner at the law firm is about to deliver a cunning plan to help fight the neighbor's property grab, he drops dead without ever saying a word. (I have to guess that these two senior citizens are stand-ins for God: the rabbi, who is reputed to be a fount of wisdom, makes himself unavailable, and the veteran lawyer never delivers his insight to our beleagured protagonist. Thus the Job stand-in remains essentially alone and must be reliant only upon his own faith and resources.)

The story of Job is really one of the most bizarre tales in the Bible. It's one of the few times we see God in non-smiting action, and what is he doing? Cheerily chatting up Satan and making a bet with him about how a random sucker will react when his world falls apart. God is keenly interested in making a point to Satan, but rather less so when it comes to dealing with Job himself. When Job finally cracks, God pimp-slaps him nine ways to next Sunday in one of my favorite passages, which basically boils down to "Yo, when I was, you know, designing and building Earth and the birds and volcanoes and rain and hedgehogs and peanut butter and what-not, I surely don't recall you hanging around, offering advice. Were you there? Are you God? No? Then how about taking this giant cup of STFU?" Which may have been the first documented case of being told both "You'll understand when you're older" and "Because I said so."

There are a lot of dimensions to the rendition of the woes of Job and a hell of a lot to consider, but there are few straight-forward conclusions. There's no nice and succinct message to be kind to others or to give money to the poor or to honor your elders. You could maybe take away that this corporeal existence is meant to be one that both blows and makes no sense, except there's that little coda where God, as a kind of after-thought, gives Job a bigger ranch, a larger herd, more money, and a totally cooler family. Which in our times just seems a bit creepy on His part: "Hey, Job, I killed your wife, but here's a replacement for her--and as a bonus, she's really smokin'." Ultimately, I sometimes wonder if the whole story is one giant Zen koan.

So, not really the best source material in terms of coming to any sort of tidy, logical, and meaningful resolution, happy or otherwise. And the end that the Coen Brothers ultimately thrust upon us, after a great deal of plotless rambling, is pretty abrupt and very much in the spirit of "Life sucks and then you die." This may be a particularly Jewish conclusion. Not being Jewish myself, I can't say with any certainty, but this is unabashedly an extremely Jewish film, so I may completely be missing some major cultural nuances that would help inform my viewing.

There's also a prologue to the movie which involves a dybbuk, and that part is excellent. And completely unrelated to everything else, except to indicate that no one can actually know anything in this world, and however you choose to act, you're probably wrong and will end up just screwing yourself. So, on second thought, it may have *everything* to do with the remainder of the film.

"A Serious Man" did succeed in making me think, but mainly about how the Coen Brothers have about a .200 batting average, which is barely tolerable for a Golden Glove shortstop, but not so good for major filmmakers. This is a complete misfire and in its amorphous and interminable rambling doesn't even hit the smirking level of "I don't know--what do *you* think it means?" To be avoided by any except those of a Germanic nihilitic bent.

I would venture to say it was the Year of the Zombie at the 2009 incarnation of Fantastic Fest. I saw three zombie-themed movies myself, and that did not include headliners "Zombieland" and "Survival of the Dead". Besides the profusion of epics devoted to shambling brain-eaters, chop-socky actioners abounded: I saw three movies that would best be tagged to the martial arts genre, and three or four others had kung-fu escapades as essential parts of their plots. (Yes, I realize the martial arts world is rich and complex and is filled with hundreds of disciplines, schools, and styles, including judo, karate, capoeira, muay thai, taekwondo, savate, and so on, but I use kung-fu here as a shorthand. Primarily because while my nerdness is strong, I don't want to take it to the level of the martial arts geek who can knowledgeably discourse on assorted open-hand versus closed-fist attack modes, the virtues of knee strikes versus grappling, and whether Jackie Chan could defeat Jet Li.) (Besides, personally my martial arts hero is longtime Captain America foe Batroc the Leaper.)

Perhaps because so many movies were swimming in the same pools, as it were, I found that the ones that most impressed me were those that offered up something that was new to me, or that zigged when I zagged and then circled around to sucker-punch me in the kidneys (with a closed-fist blow, after which they swept my legs). And so it is that the Danish "Terribly Happy" has lodged itself in my brain for several days now.

Comparisons to various Coen Brothers films, and particularly "Fargo", have been made, and these are apt (although the actual Coen Brothers movie shown at the Fest this year, "A Serious Man", was godawfully bad and infuriating in its interminable plotlessness). You have an isolated small town with its own rules and ways, suspicious of and hostile to outsiders. You have a bunch of oddball locals and strange incidents that are barely hinted at. And you have a flawed POV character (I certainly wouldn't say "hero" or even "protagonist") who has his own secrets and who isn't entirely on the side of law and order, despite being a police officer. Because in this case, he's a disgraced cop sent to be the one-man police force in a backwoods town in the middle of nowhere, serving penance and laying low until he might get called back to the big leagues in Copenhagen. He quickly finds that the town doesn't really want him and that it has its own code of behavior and ways of enforcement, the most extreme of which is to escort the miscreant on a one-way walk to the local bog.

The pace is measured and deliberate without being somnambulent, and the isolation of the wide-open muddy wastes and brooding skies is very well-captured. Characterization is subtle and developed through suggestion and nuance rather than delivered through broad strokes hammered over the viewer's head. Almost no one is what they seem at first glance, nor is anyone "good" or "bad". They simply just are. And this is true of the lead character as well, especially in the conclusion of the second act, when there is a most unexpected development that changes up the whole thrust of the story.

This twist is nicely and naturally delivered, and the ensuing consequences are intriguingly played out. It all leads up to a conclusion that mainstream Hollywood would be loath to embrace, which just makes this movie all the better in my estimation.

After last year's "The Substitute" and "Just Another Love Story", I've got to say that the Danes are developing a nice sideline in oddball little movies. True, they lack zombies and have few martial arts duels-to-the-death, but they have a lasting and offbeat charm, and for that have been among the better offerings over the last couple of years. I look forward to the 2010 Fest to see if Denmark can keep up this winning streak.