This weekend, I found myself diving once again into the world of Asian Cinema. On Saturday, I went to see Aditya Assarat's 'Wonderful Town', a love story set in a small town near Phuket that was devastated by the Tsunami. Ton (Supphasit Kansen) is an architect who's come to the village to oversee the construction of a holiday resort on a beach nearby. He meets Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn, pictured above) who works at the hotel where he's staying and the two begin to fall in love. Yet some of the locals don't take kindly to his presence in their town and things take a turn for the worse.
This is Assarat's first feature-length and he's managed to produce a fascinating debut, even wining the top prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival. The simple story allows for the backdrop of the Tsunami to take precedence; although it's only actually mentioned a couple of times, you can see its lasting impact throughout the whole film, from the delapidated remains of the beach hotels to the desolate roads of the town. The relationship between Ton and Na blossoms, with idyllic bike rides down and picnics on green fields, complete with longing looks that say more than words could ever describe. If this all sounds rather like cliché-ridden romanticism (and it does), it's underscored by a constant and ominous sense of foreboding which is then confirmed by the end of the film. Many may be surprised at the ending, left confused by it; I have my own theories about what it's supposed to mean, but I wouldn't to spoil it now, would I? At the end of it all, it's a promising start for Assarat. While his leading characters' romanticism may seem a bit too idealistic, his "unqualified success", as one reviewer put it, is in his depiction of the character of the town itself, someone with a haunted past and whose future remains uncertain.
On Sunday I went to see another of Kihachi Okamoto's films, 'The Human Bullet', spurred on by my enjoyment of watching 'The Last Gunfight'. However, apart from the reference to guns in both titles, the two films share very little in common. Unlike the traditional gangster story in 'The Last Gunfight', albeit with many visual and narrative quirks that make up the Okamoto touch, 'The Human Bullet' is an anti-war satire about a WWII soldier who finds himself chosen for a kamikaze mission to destroy a US battleship.
Minori Terada stars as the protagonist, simply named "The Guy", and delivers a stunning performance of a man lost at sea with own thoughts, waiting for the moment when his military purpose will fulfill itself, slowly losing his grip on reality. Through a flashback, we begin with the Guy's life in the army and how he comes to receive this mission, demonstrating the insane logic that can exist in this institution and the false idealism that wars can be fought on. Okamoto's satirical edge is also very different to what I had expected; unlike a film like 'Dr. Strangelove' (which is the first film that came to mind once I heard the words anti-war satire), where the satirical black humour pervades throughout, in 'The Human Bullet' the comedy ebbs and flows, sometimes surreal, sometimes slapstick, sometimes very dark. Towards the end, the film begins to assume a different tone as the comedy slowly slips into something quite horrific; the manner in which Okamoto achieves this transformation in tone feels very organic and natural, making the film's climax all the more terrifying.
As I'd mentioned in my other post, it's unfortunate that Okamoto's films are not easily available on DVD. Considering his impact on many directors worldwide, what's even more bizarre (and also tragic) is that of the 39 films that Okamoto did make, some of them remain completely unknown outside of Japan. Seems to me that a trip to the National Film Centre Tokyo is in order...
