Set in the late 18th century, this dazzling epic by Im Kwon-taek (Fly High Run Far) concerns the love between a prostitute’s daughter and the son of a provincial governor, who marry in secret but are then driven apart. Im is Korea’s most prestigious filmmaker (with about 100 features to his credit), and his stirring 2000 drama is both historically resonant and strikingly modern, remarkable for its deft and spellbinding narrative, its breathtaking color, and above all its traditional sung narration, which he periodically shows being performed with drum accompaniment before a contemporary audience. This is one of those masterpieces that would qualify as a musical if Hollywood propagandists hadn’t claimed the genre as their personal property. A must-see. 120 min. (JR) Read more
Actress and screenwriter Agnes Jaoui makes her directorial debut with this poignant 2000 comedy about the difficulties of getting beyond one’s own social circle. The film’s main triumph is Jean-Pierre Bacri’s wonderfully touching and delicately shaded performance as a married businessman living in a suburb of Rouen who becomes infatuated with his English tutor (Anne Alvaro), a stage actress turning 40 who lives in a world very different from his. Jaoui herself plays a waitress-barmaid who moonlights as a hash dealer and becomes involved with the businessman’s bodyguard. She’s quite sensitive as a director of actors, though the fact that she cites Woody Allen as a model shows how much she thinks as a writer-performer. The script, by her and Bacri, is one in a series of collaborations that includes Cedric Klapisch’s Un air de famille and Alain Resnais’ Same Old Song. In French with subtitles. 112 min. (JR) Read more
A fitfully employed videographer in Shanghai, who never appears on-screen, gets involved with a go-go dancer and then meets a motorcycle courier who’s convinced that the dancer is actually his girlfriend, who’s vanished mysteriously after jumping off a bridge. This moody Chinese independent (2000, 83 min.), the debut feature by Lou Ye, at first seems like a Wong Kar-wai remake of Vertigo, but in fact it’s something much stranger, drawing on not only Hitchcock and Chungking Express but also Hollywood noir and Hans Christian Andersen to create something relatively fresh from the confluencea postmodern fairy tale about romantic obsession. This is well worth checking out. (JR) Read more
