quiet trickster

I wasn’t going to do this, was I? (The “It’s not going to be No Country for Old Men is it? If they’d gotten that, they’d be shouting it from the rooftops. And it’s more likely to be Seraphim Falls than 3:10 to Yuma. How about that Clooney one they were trailing with Bourne? It does have Tilda Swinton in, after all. Maybe it’ll be Planet Horror…”) I wasn’t going to torture myself pointlessly with all the good films it won’t be, or the shite films it might be.

But I did, and it’s just as well I didn’t think of The Kingdom…

It’s a glossy star-strewn political thriller from actor turned director Peter Berg, filmed with the same gritty, faux-verité style as films like Syriana, but with politics far more to the right (or simply a liberal-baiting sensibility…), that charts the aftermath of a massive attack on the American ex-pat community in Saudi Arabia.

It’s undoubtedly a punchy film, but what starts as something pitched as a criticism of US double standards w.r.t. Saudi Arabia, as outlined in its striking title sequence, quickly descends into first an unthinking prejudice, as F.B.I. investigators show the Saudis how to do their jobs (not simply a criticism that Saudis might be reluctant to see their compatriots implicated in a suicide bombing of American ex-pats, but an assumption that the Saudis wouldn’t know evidence if it blew up in their face), and then finally into a more-or-less Rambo-esque “Gunfight at El Al Corral”, as the Feds descend on the bad guys’ hideout after one of their number is kidnapped.

I’d have to look into Berg’s politics to know whether the film is sincere in it’s “We could win the war on terror, if only…” sentiments, but his feature debut, Very Bad Things, was a largely unpleasant, shamelessly controversy baiting black comedy.

There are things to like about the film - Jamie Foxx, in the lead, hears about the bombing while talking to his son’s class - though of course, he doesn’t stare blankly at “My Pet Goat” for the next five minutes, instead striding off manfully to do enterprising F.B.I. things. There’s a sparky interplay between the four Feds - Chris Cooper as good as ever, Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner neither better nor worse than you’d expect, Jamie Foxx doing much the same thing as in Jarhead or Miami Vice (basically Denzel Washington without the charm and a fraction of the sense of danger)

The film’s real casting strength is the sympathetic turn from Ashraf Barhom as the film’s “Good Saudi” - the police officer assigned to babysit the Americans (I can see a long career for him, playing sympathetic Middle Easterners confounded in helping Americans before dying tragically…) Like Alexander Siddig’s (yes, off Star Trek: DS9) turn in Syriana, it’s likely he’ll be missed by any spotlight shone on the film.

It is curious to see so conservative a film made in a style so associated with liberal Hollywood - it makes the film harder to dismiss than if it had been made by as disposable a film-maker as, say, Michael Bay, whom it emulates in volume if nothing else. It’s a little disturbing to fin the myth of American supremacy abroad so thoroughly entrenched, and I’m not sure if I’d worry more if it was sincere, or if it was merely cashing in on sympathy for that world view.

It’s just enough ficiotn, perhaps, to escape the kind of solid critique it needs, hiding neo-con wish-fulfilmnt in a solid, ‘non-judgemental’ political thriller.

A truly lovely, beautiful, absurd, funny film - with one of the few truly original title sequences I’ve seen in years, not to mention truly original concepts, with execution to match. It does seem to be the case that Korean film - or at least, that which reaches us, which one assumes is the best stuff (if not, then I’m moving to Korea) - manages a level of visual beauty, conceptual complexity and emotional depth that Hollywood should beg on bended knees to be able to achieve.

One of the highlights of last year’s festival, for me, was The Host - I’m a Cyborg masters a similar combination of High SF, low comedy and emotional depth (I’ve used ‘emotional depth’ already, haven’t I? Sorry)

It takes a level of audacity yo couch the story of a young women’s pschotic breakdown and eventual redemption (and not cure) in such broad terms. I can only imagine with horror how Hollywood would approach it (I suspect Robin Williams would be involved in some way… [shudders])

The film’s central character is a young woman who believes that she is a cyborg - tipping over the edge after her ailing grandmother is taken away to a nursing home (the grandmother believes she is a mouse, and eats only radishes). The girl’s mother, already frustrated by her mother, has the girl institutionalised after she attempts to ‘recharge’ herself by cutting her wrists and wiring herself to a plug point.

In the asylum, she refuses to communicate except to machines (the lights above her bed, a vending machine). She catches the eye of a fellow patient, a young man with anti-social, kleptomanic tendencies - he has the ability to steal the essence of his fellow patients (ping-pong prowess, chronic apologeticness) and eventually the girl, convinced that her purpose is to kill all the doctors so she can rescue her grandmother, asks him to take her sympathy, because it is preventing her from doing so.

Having taken her empathy, the young man is, of course, infused with sympathy for the girl, growing more concerned for her as she stops eating, convinced that she will get the sustenance she needs from lighting batteries.

The patients’ delusions are beautifully realised, whether the early sequence in which a woman pushes the catatonic heroine around the hospital, outlining patients’ maladies, only to be revealed as a chronic fantasist, or the way the patients all reinforce each other’s delusions (particularly in believing that the hero can steal their abilities), to the grander, fully realised sequences where the heroine believes she is killing all the hospital’s staff, shooting bullets from her fingers. There’s a particularly beautiful sequence where the girl, being given electroshock treatment, believes she’s being ‘recharged’ in a gleaming white laboratory.

That the film manages to carry off any of this is pretty miraculous. One of the reasons, I think, is that for all it’s flamboyant fantasies, it never offers up a simple cure - instead going for a form of acceptance (hence “but that’s OK”). The delusion that the boy can steal the girl’s sympathy leads him to help her start eating again by convincing her that he’s constructed a ‘rice-megatron’ that converts food into electrical energy, and pretending to insert in into her back - but the story’s coda implies that neither is entirely free of delusion.

To be honest, it’s kind of futile to attempt to describe the film - better just to seek it out yourself when it gets a wider release - which it’s surely likely to get - as the director, Chan-wook Park, said when introducing the film, it’s not nearly as violent as his earlier films - he described it as a ’sweet desert’ for anyone who’s seen his ‘Vengeance’ trilogy.