film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Ray Lobo

  • Carving The Divine: Review

    Carving The Divine: Review

    CARVING THE DIVINE:  BUDDHIST SCULPTORS OF JAPAN:  REVIEW

    The documentary genre is as varied a genre as they come.  Some documentaries are poetic, some are politically activist in their aims, some are personal, some are universal in scope.  What all documentaries have in common, however, is that they try to inform.  There is a documentary subset that takes viewers into a niche specialization and shines an illuminating light on said specialization.  Director Yujiro Seki’s Carving the Divine can be placed in that subcategory as it does a fine job illuminating a world many of us knew very little about. 

    Carving the Divine opens with a brief discussion on the difference between Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism.  That is the widest its scope ever gets.  The rest of the film brings us inside the world of skilled Buddhist wood sculptors–Busshi, as they are known.  Busshi guilds are composed of grand masters, masters, and apprentices forming a clearly defined hierarchy.  There is a rigid formality in relations between master and apprentice.  Masters are tough on apprentices and justify their harsh discipline in the name of greater and greater precision.  An apprenticeship lasts a minimum of three years.  Many newbie Busshi drop out.  New Busshi dare not question or go against their masters.  As one apprentice puts it, “If my master told me a crow is white, then I would have to learn that a crow is white.”  Carving the Divine is to wood sculpting what Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash is to jazz drumming.  Perfection requires strict discipline.  

    Seki does well in focusing his camera on the hands of the sculptors as they shape blocks of wood into intricate Buddhist deities.  Granted, apprentices are under intense pressure and sometimes verbally abused by masters; but there is a sort of tranquil Zen-like quality in seeing the hands of sculptors shaving wood from blocks.  There is also a great dichotomy created by Seki when presenting the grandmaster Saito.  There is the mythical grandmaster and the real grandmaster.  The legends revolving around Saito are rich.  There are rumors that the grandmaster does not own a TV because it would take away from his focus.  There are also rumors that he sleeps little and carves in the middle of the night.  When we finally meet Saito, it is at his birthday party with the masters and apprentices of the guild gathered around him.  The grandmaster offers gentle critiques of the apprentices’ work and even grants one apprentice his seal of approval.  We vicariously feel the joy the apprentice feels when his piece gets the grandmaster’s approval.

    There are some great insights gained by viewing Carving the Divine.  We are reminded that craftmanship—especially in this case, a craftmanship that has developed over nearly 1,400 years—can never be matched by mass production in terms of design quality.  We are also reminded of the importance of discipline in an artist’s development.  Perhaps the master Busshi know better than anyone else that discipline is required not only in creating a statue but also an artist.  In our hyper get famous quick, get as many followers on social media as you can, and celebrity without substance era; we sometimes forget that true artists spend many years sculpting themselves through that most unsexy of all concepts—discipline.    

    Raindance is screening this film on 2 November at Genesis Cinema (https://raindance.org/festival-programme/carving-the-divine-buddhist-sculptors-of-japan/)

  • Surge: Review

    Surge: Review

    Director Aneil Karia’s Surge is a character study of a man unravelling.  Joseph (Ben Whishaw) lives an atomized existence.   He works as a security screener at the airport.  Everyday he pats down travelers, opens their baggage, and even makes some suspicious individuals undress in what has become in our societies an all too commonplace exercise in degradation.  Joseph has a detached relationship with his coworkers.  He does not engage in workplace small talk.  He comes home to a lonely flat, sits in front of the telly, and eats a frozen meal. 

    There are many irritants orbiting around Joseph’s life.  His parents are eccentric, and not eccentric in a good way.  They are eccentric in a dysfunctional way.  At the entrance to the building where he lives, a man revs his motorcycle’s engine—an annoyance to say the least when what you crave is a quiet flat after a long day of work.  And, to make matters worse, a cash machine eats his card. 

    We see signs of Joseph’s unravelling.  He exhibits unusual behaviors.  But when the total unravelling finally happens, it happens quickly.  Joseph falls into an abyss that leads to deranged behavior at work, on the tube, and even leads him to rob several banks.  It should be noted that Ben Whishaw’s performance is outstanding.  He inhabits the character’s manic intensity, his frenzied pace, his odd behaviors.  Whishaw puts on a fake manic smile as he feverishly walks the streets.  It seems like a deranged smile that is half fake customer service smile and half grimace. 

    It must be said, however, that Whishaw’s performance is not enough to save Surge.  Early on one gets the feeling that Karia’s film will deal with a character shaped by contemporary neoliberal society—isolated; emotionally flat; void of wonder; void of alternative choices; caught up in a job and a society that is essentially a control society of security checkpoints, cameras, and cops.  But, as the film progresses, the suddenness and severity of Joseph’s odd behavior seems to have an internal cause. 

    In which case, if that is what Karia is attempting to capture in Surge, then one wonders—what is the point?  Surge does not raise further questions for the viewer, it does not intrigue, it feels like a straight-ahead story about a man who is suffering from a mental health collapse.  If there were more varied reasons for Joseph’s collapse other than a subjective psychopathology, then it was never made clear to the viewer.  If you’re looking for more layers, Surge will not give them to you.

  • The Story Of Looking: The BRWC Review

    The Story Of Looking: The BRWC Review

    Life offers us an abundance of paradoxes.  Director Mark Cousins reads a Twitter post in his documentary The Story of Looking that presents us with such a paradox:  Why is it that we tend to close our eyes when kissing while violent scenes are often willingly taken in with eyes wide open?  Cousins (The Story of Film) presents one of the most personal and profound meditations on looking ever captured on film.  Some things are obscured by obviousness–we often take for granted the role of vision, looking, and the gaze when it comes to what is perhaps one of the most visually complex languages of any medium—film language.  

    Cousins films himself the day before having to undergo eye surgery.  His anxiety over the surgery is relayed to us in the intimacy of his bedroom as he recounts the role of the visual in film and the visuals that orbit around his remembrance of things past.  The images Cousins narrates over are stunning.  He captures a coal power station the moment it is demolished.  It is striking that an edifice that powered an economy for decades was there one moment, and then disappears in a cloud of black smoke—Marx’s quote of everything being solid melting into air literarily represented. 

    And it is this notion of the impermanence versus the permanence of the visual which Cousins makes the viewer reflect on.  He asks:  Is seeing someone or something once enough to form a real recollection or do we form a false memory of that someone or something?  He then turns to a photo he took with an old phone of a grandparent inside of a casket.  The impermanence of human life is permanently held electronically inside of a phone.  The Story of Looking is filmmaking without artifice, without gimmickry; filmmaking capable of demonstrating to us that life still contains wonder.  It is this wonder with life’s visuals that reminds me of another filmmaker consumed by color, light, and memory—Terrence Malick.  Cousins’ documentaries are Malick-esque.  

    Cousins draws from a wide array of sources.  The use of color in Vertigo, the scene of an eye being sliced in Un Chien Andalou, Tarkovsky’s tendency to focus his camera on the gaze of animals.  He references painting—the technique of sfumato in Renaissance paintings.  He references performance art—Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present.  He even references our contemporary obsession with selfies and the persistent critique we engage in when assessing our faces and bodies.  Cousins reminds us that there is nothing new in these obsessions.  He remembers comparing his body to Robert Deniro’s in the famous scene in Taxi Driver wherein a shirtless young Deniro talks to his reflection in the mirror. 

    Sure, Cousins channels the film’s narrative with these references, but his open-ended approach to the questions and mysteries revolving around looking prompt the viewer to contemplate the role of looking in other artists and thinkers.  After watching The Story of Looking, I spent the rest of the day thinking about Joyce and Borges’ visual disabilities in connection to their writing.  I thought about Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Red, White, and Blue trilogy.  I thought about Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Foucault’s notion of the gaze.  And of course, my thoughts ended up in the same place they always do when thinking about arresting visuals—Stanley Kubrick.  

    Cousins opens The Story of Looking with an old clip of Ray Charles being interviewed by Dick Cavett.  Cavett asks Ray Charles if the sudden restoration of his eyesight would be a blessing he would accept.  Ray Charles says he would accept such a blessing for one day but would decline the functioning of his eyesight for the rest of his life.  Ray Charles then makes a statement both puzzling and profound.  He says he feels sorry for those capable of seeing.  Those capable of seeing have to witness the everyday atrocities presented to their eyes by the world.  Cousins presents us with footage of a man outside his window looking down from a precipice.  Cousins is captivated by the man on the precipice.  The possibility exists that he may jump down to his death. 

    That is the thing with vision, we are compelled by both the beautiful and the brutal—Ray Charles was onto something.  But it is the beautiful that keeps us sane.  During this time of Covid lockdowns, some of my most enjoyable moments have involved going on picnics with my wife.  Our plan always involves laying out on the grass and reading.  Things rarely, as they say, go according to plans.  Most of the time we just stare up at the sky, mesmerized by its blueness, pointing out to each other the shapes we imagine seeing in the puffy clouds.  Some of the most wonderous visuals are the ones we ignore in our rushed existence.     

  • The Doll: Review

    The Doll: Review

    The short documentary The Doll, by director Elahe Esmaili, allows us a peek into the phenomenon of teenage marriages in Iran.  The Doll proves once again that when it comes to Iran, complexities abound.  Asel is fourteen and in the ninth grade.  Her father works as a wedding photographer.  Her father is approached by another man who tells him that his son, a university student, is interested in taking a bride.  Arrangements are made and both men agree that their offspring would make a good match.  

    Asel seems enthused about this older university student.  She is excited about marriage and her accelerated path to adulthood.  But there is an obvious unsettling feel about the whole thing.  It is disclosed that Asel played with dolls just two years before all the marriage talk.  This is a girl that is still excited by someone gifting her gummi bears and Nutella.  Some family members express concern over a father “giving” a fourteen-year-old up for marriage while others think that fourteen is an appropriate age if the bride is “mature.”  It is revealed that Asel’s parents divorced.  Asel’s mother left and her father was left to raise Asel.  Verbal and physical fights were witnessed by Asel.  Her father now has a fiancée and some in the family suspect that his plan to marry Asel off is motivated by a desire to get her out of the house so he can restart his life.  Asel’s father even floats the idea of staging a double wedding with his daughter.  The viewer begins feeling that there is a sordid sublayer underneath the entire marriage conversation.  Esmaili does a very good job in slowly dripping the details of Asel’s family dynamic.  

    The social dichotomies exposed by The Doll keep the viewer engaged.  The disagreements between family members as to the appropriate marriage age, the rate of divorces in what is still a quite religious society, and the different perspectives on how a wife should act are all fascinating.  Exemplary of this dichotomy is Asel’s father.  He and Asel’s mother divorced—a very modern legal procedure–but he makes statements such as: “I was forced to beat my wife,” and “I am an enlightened traditionalist.”  This notion of an “enlightened traditionalist” perfectly captures the paradoxes of contemporary Iran.  At one point, Asel’s father declares that he is quite a modern fellow in that he would allow his wife to work outside the home.  

    If there is one complaint about The Doll, it is that it devotes too much time to family members engaging in a circular argument as to whether Asel should or should not be allowed to marry.  The back-and-forth become a bit tedious.  But aside from that, Esmaili’s short documentary gives us a wonderful glimpse into Iran’s dynamics and tensions.  Us in the West should be eternally thankful to Iranian filmmakers like Esmaili for bringing to our screens Iran’s multifaceted society.  

    @thedolldoc

    @jumpingibex

    https://thedolldoc.com

  • Paper Tiger: Review

    Paper Tiger: Review

    Whenever a phenomenon becomes common in society, there is sure to be a subgenre of film that develops alongside it.  School mass shootings have been explored in such works as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant or, even more effectively, in Lynne Ramsay’s chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin, which features a phenomenal performance by Tilda Swinton.  Director Paul Kowalski’s Paper Tiger is a far cry from Ramsay’s film.  Not only is Paper Tiger a difficult watch in terms of subject matter, but it is also a difficult watch in terms of execution.  

    Paper Tiger centers around a secondary schooler who goes by the name of Edward Murrow (Alan Trong).  His birth name is Dawei, but since it is often mispronounced by his American teachers, he lives a double life—in school he is Edward, at home he is called Dawei by his mother.  His Chinese American mother (Lydia Look) is stern and tries to motivate Dawei to get top marks.  Top marks are the last thing on Dawei’s mind.  He is bullied at school for being a loner, has difficulty talking to Caucasian girls with the same ease that some of his male Asian peers seem capable of, has mental health issues that include hallucinations, cannot relate to his mother; and, as if that were not enough, he has not gotten over his father’s death.  After school, Dawei spends his days in his room, playing a virtual reality shooter game.  The game and his revenge fantasies set Dawei on a dark path—planning a school shooting.  

    When Paper Tiger focuses on Dawei’s experiences as the child of immigrant parents, the film is captivating.  This push and pull between your family’s culture and the customs of the country you are schooled in, is tapped into effectively and insightfully by Paper Tiger.  Scenes wherein Dawei’s mother’s first reaction, after hearing of a school shooter on television, is to blame the parents of the shooter for the laxed way in which they likely brought up their child; or scenes in which there is a tension between Dawei’s mother and his aunt regarding the effectiveness of Western psychiatric medications versus traditional Chinese medicine are perceptive and ring true for those of us who are the children of immigrant parents.  These scenes, however, are not enough to save the film.

    The acting in Paper Tiger is as disappointing as the script.  Scenes that are supposed to capture Dawei’s mental health issues are not believable.  His mother has a constant scowl on her face.  Her role is allowed no nuance, no break from perpetual suffering.  Even Paper Tiger’s one strength—scenes that capture the immigrant experience—is ruined by a ridiculous scene involving a Chinese holy man performing a kind of exorcism on Dawei.  

    There are important topics orbiting around Paper Tiger.  A film dealing with the mental health of children and how mothers, especially immigrant mothers, desperately attempt to find solutions for their children in the face of numerous obstacles is a film worth making, a story worth telling; but it is a story worth telling with the right execution.  The right script with the right performance—again, Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin would be the prime example—is required when dealing with such hefty topics.  Paper Tiger just stagnates in a pool of dour misery.