SF International Asian American Film Festival's revelatory cultural leaps

By Johnny Ray Huston

One heartening development at this year’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival is the presence of some excellent feature films that cross national boundaries in a manner that reveals the increased flexibility of the word “international.” By that I don’t mean “global,” a word that often connotes corporate interests which add 100 shades of blandness to every culture they touch. Rather, I mean movies that travel through different countries, sometimes observing one culture through the eyes of an outsider, sometimes closely watching an outsider within a culture. These traits can be found in a pair of standout films — “The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief” and “In Between Days” — that aren’t even part of the 25th SFIAAF’s International Showcase, a realm that boasts some superb features that more closely fit the standard definition of an “international” film.

Jake Clennell’s documentary “The Great Happiness Space” arrives at the SFIAAF at perhaps the tail end of festival journeys that have already brought it to SF once last year for DocFest. Frankly, Clennell’s movie can’t have enough playdates in this city, even if it gets a theatrical run with no cut-off. It’s a revelatory documentary that presents a world of love and money that even Rainer Werner Fassbinder couldn’t have imagined in his coldest dreams.

Part of the revelation in NY- and London-based Anglo director Clennell’s documentary stems from its ostensible subject, host bars, where women pay coiffed young men for the non-sexual but liquored-up pleasure of their company. Here is a phenomenon that few of the film’s non-Japanese viewers have probably encountered. Clennell’s past experience in fashion and music video realms means that he has an eye for the abundance of style — masculine and feminine — that’s eventually revealed to be a sort of war uniform in this realm. If “Great Happiness Space” were simply about the modern male geisha twist that exists within host bars, it would be unique, but Clennell organizes the film’s subject matter into a storyline that’s also a lacerating critique of romantic and sexual codes in Japan and beyond. His film’s structure packs a series of punches.

At the beginning, “Great Happiness Space” introduces Issei, who runs Café Rakkyo, a host bar in Osaka. Styled to the nines in neo-glam parrot hairdo and Prada-thin suit clothes, Issei is talked about in terms of adoration by his female clientele — in some cases, the praise moves even beyond the realm of pop star idol worship in both its fervency and its facets. One soon discovers that Issei and his pack of host boys earn outrageous amounts of money in one night — sometimes up to $5,000 — for feeding champagne romantic wishes to their largely young female clientele. What’s not to love about this easy money?

Well, for a start, the work has wrought severe psychological and physical damage on Issei, who trusts no one and who admits his liver is completely “fucked” from endless nights of alcohol intake. But before Clennell even gets into the darker aspects of Issei’s existence, he unveils the mystery behind his coterie. It turns out that the women who visit Café Rakkyo are overwhelmingly sex workers, using the money they earn from their jobs to in turn pay for faked emotional or romantic support. One particular client of Issei’s even takes to using Clennell’s film as another portal to try and reach into his psyche and challenge his own chilly boundaries about work. When their particular dance is revealed, Clennell trains his camera on scenes that Fassbinder would wish that he’d written. (Likewise, comparisons between host bar culture and therapy or psychoanalysis could yield a book.)

So Yong Kim’s “In Between Days” is a USA/Canada/South Korea co-production, and in this case, the countries cited, particularly South Korea and Canada, lend dramatic friction, not just financial currency, to the actual content. Though it won attention at last year’s Sundance fest, “In Between Days” is closer in spirit and in style to a film that played the SF International Asian American Film Fest a few years go — Gina Kim’s “Invisible Light” — than it is to most of the processed work that emerges from Sundance labs. Set first in California and then in South Korea, “Invisible Light” was a work of female portraiture so intimate and lonely that it brought Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman” to mind. “In Between Days” hugs its protagonist Aimie (Jiseon Kim) perhaps even more tightly, but her story, while equally stark in terms of presentation, is presented at a faster pace, at least in terms of edits.

Supposed college student Aimie lives with her miserable divorced mother (whom she keeps on the periphery of her consciousness even as they share extremely cramped housing block quarters) in a wintry Toronto that might as well be South Korea, though of course it’s woefully far from it. Early in the film a viewer witnesses and shares her disinterest in an English class that she soon drops. In fact, when she does speak, she primarily speaks Korean, with the exception of a few key scenes that reveal aspects of her alienation from her surroundings and her more anglicized peers. Powerless in many ways, Aimie can, not surprisingly, also be cruel to those she loves on a whim. But Kim’s treatment of Aimie is never less than warm — the film’s handheld camerawork is there in extreme close-up to capture Aimie’s waking-up moments, her hood-clad walks on a chilly overpass that eventually becomes a landmark, and the many tiny expressions of confusion that define her encounters with best friend and semi-crush object Tran (Taegu Andy Kang).

Most of all, Kim bears witness to moments in which Aimie sees the course of her life changing — instances when she peeks around a street corner or through the sliver of a too-rapidly closing door. “In Between Days” doesn’t explicate its drama, and in that sense it bears very little resemblance to current American “indie” drama — to its extreme benefit. In fact, the movie is closer to a North American extension of some of the great recent character-driven movies by female directors in South Korea, such as Park Chan-Ok’s “Jealousy is My Middle Name.” Since Gina Kim has moved on from the defiantly static and virtually dialogue-free “Invisible Light” to make “Never Forever” (which has yet to screen in the Bay Area) with “Departed” actress Vera Farmiga, it will be interesting to see where So Yong Kim travels next in relation to North American and South Korean commercial cinema.

The International Showcase at this year’s SFIAFF includes a number of acclaimed films, including Johnnie To’s “Exiled” and Cheng Yu-Chieh’s “Do Over,” both of which will receive a US premiere at the fest. The fest’s International Showcase also features “Ghosts,” Nick Broomfield’s first venture outside of documentary into drama — a film that is a less successful, though at times quite powerful, example of the kind of international filmmaking I’ve explored above. (Aided considerably by Mark Wolf and Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography, which has an eye for nature in all its beauty and fury, it travels from China to England to tell the story of Chinese workers who drowned while cockle picking for meager wages at England’s Morecambe Bay.)

Two definite highlights of this year’s International Showcase are Ryuichi Hiroki’s “It’s Only Talk” and Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul’s “Syndromes and a Century.” Both Weerasethakul and his latest movie have some dates in SF in the very near future, so I’ll reduce all discussion of “Syndromes” to the simple assertion that it vies for the best film yet by the most unique director making dramatic features today. But “It’s Only Talk” deserves further positive scrutiny (more than I currently have time to give), because it’s yet another great movie by a male director who might even trump the likes of Joe in terms of empathetic and subtle female portraiture.

Well-known as a director of pink films, Hiroki won deserved major praise for the 2003 road movie “Vibrator” (introducing “Vibrator” to North American audiences in Vancouver, Tony Rayns declared it the best Japanese movie of that year), which played the 2005 SF International Film Festival. He’s currently quite prolific — he had two films at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, including a documentary. Between those efforts and “Vibrator,” he made 2005’s “It’s Only Talk,” a movie that, like “Vibrator,” follows the life and love impulses of a female outsider.

In this case, it’s Yuko (Shinobu Terashima), a manic-depressive who moves to the small town of Kamata, where, in her words, quoted to her by one of the men in her messy life, there “is no trace of chic.” Yuko has encounters with a reserved pervert and other charmers. She frequents public baths while keeping a towel over tattoos she deems markers of a misspent youth. As she has quasi-romantic relationships with a few men from her childhood, the film slowly reveals the depth of her troubles – she’s taking a stomach full of psych meds every day and often washing them down with alcohol.

In the hands of an American director, this subject matter and storyline would be the inspiration for a tortured and bleak mise en scene, music overtly coded as “sad,” and doubtlessly some lame moralism. For Hiroki, it’s another opportunity to inventively present the colorful beauty and quirky details – a Godzilla made of tires, anyone? — of banal small town Japan, its roads and even its horse tracks, while pledging sincere allegiance to a character who is so real you’ll wish you knew her.

Besides rotten familial luck, Yuko’s hard times doubtlessly have something to do with how little she fits — and cares to fit — within societal norms regarding female behavior. No doubt about it, she has all the symptoms of a manic-depressive, but in cultural terms she’s weird precisely because she expresses herself. At times she’s downright hilarious, as when bluntly telling a suitor “No, I’m just unattainable.” When Hiroki rewards her with a sunny morning in the latter stages of the movie, it’s cinema at its richest — capturing one of the most intense everyday experiences that you can have in life. But don’t count on a happy ending — instead, count on a memorable one. This is one all-too-rare director who thinks too highly of his anti-heroine, and an audience that cares about her, to resort to sentimentality.

03.15.2007