Tag: border

The Crossing (Guo Chun Tian)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Sixteen-year-old Peipei (Huang Yao) lives in Shenzhen, but goes to school in neighbouring Hong Kong. She has to cross the China-Hong Kong border on a daily basis, waved through by border officials with better things to do than stop, question or search schoolgirls. She lives in a cramped apartment. Her father is rarely there because he works the night shift at a shipping yard, where she sometimes visits him. Her gambling mother often invites friends over to play Mahjong.

The family of Peipei’s best friend from school Jo (Carmen Soup) are clearly much better off judging by their huge, modern house in Hong Kong, which contains a large fish tank housing a dogfish (amongst other things). Jo has plans for her and Peipei to go to Japan and Peipei is trying to work out how to make some money to pay for the trip. She finds minimum wage work in a restaurant after school hours.

One day, Peipei stumbles upon what Jo’s boyfriend Hao (Sunny Sun) does for money: he and fellow gang members smuggle iPhones across the border. As someone who goes back and forth across that border every weekday, Peipei realises she’s in the perfect position to exploit this. Her face seems to fit with the gang and she starts to make money, chaperoned by both Hao and his older generation boss Sister Hua (Elena Kong).

As its title indicates, this is a film about crossing lines. Both literal and metaphorical ones. In much the same way that Peipei is constantly going back and forth over the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border, she must also cross and sometimes return over a number of moral and spiritual borders: child-adult, schoolgirl-worker, traveller-smuggler, unarmed-armed, innocent-criminal, platonic-romantic.

Director Bai signals the more troublesome of these crossings via the device of a freeze frame and a short bass guitar riff to indicate that a line has been traversed and her heroine can never be the same again. Peipei is caught between her own humble background and the desire to be part of Jo’s more affluent one, finding herself in a criminal underworld that acts as a potential thoroughfare to link these other two worlds.

The plot takes some satisfying detours along the way. When Peipei accidentally drops one iPhone of a larger shipment onto railway tracks she then has to find a way of getting its broken screen repaired before delivering the complete batch to her designated gang contact. Later, after taking exception to seeing Jo’s family dogfish in captivity, she releases it into the waters of the harbour.

While Hong Kong has a strong tradition of fast-paced, generally male-dominated gangland action movies, The Crossing delivers something very different – essentially a character study about innocence, transgression and personal corruption centred around a female protagonist. After Huang’s deceptively simple portrayal of Peipei and her carefree friendship with Jo has initially drawn the viewer in, the performances of Sun as Hao and those playing his fellow gang members exert a similar pull on both the audience and Peipei herself. Elena Kong is particularly good as the seemingly easygoing and friendly lady boss who when it comes to the crunch can be extremely hard and ruthless protecting her business interests.

In short, this is an impressive coming of age tale with all the trappings of a teenage crime drama wrapped up in a compelling, slow-burner of a character study. Well worth seeing.

The Crossing was out in UK cinemas in March, 2019. It also played in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF), when this piece was originally written. It is streaming at the Chinese Cinema Season UK, taking place between February and May (2021)

Border (Gräns)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tina (Eva Melander) is a customs officer working at a Swedish port. She is very good at her job because she possesses the uncanny ability to detect when someone is trying to bring something they shouldn’t in to the country. Tina isn’t particularly good-looking – the unkind might call her ugly – and keeps herself pretty much to herself. She’s a misfit. Her woodlands home is a long drive from any town. She lives there in a cabin, which she herself owns, with Roland (Jörgen Thorsson) who breeds dogs for competitions. The couple get along but any sexual relationship seems to have pretty much stagnated. Her ageing, care home incarcerated “papa” (Sten Ljunggren), who she makes a point of visiting regularly, doesn’t like Roland much, believing the man to be taking advantage of his daughter’s essentially good nature.

Two people she is going to stop in two separate incidents as they come through the customs checkpoint at which she works are going to change her life.

The first is a well-heeled type in a hurry who seems irritated at having his bag searched. Sure enough, there’s nothing illegal in his bag. “Can I please go now,” he asks. Tina won’t let him, insisting he surrender his mobile. He’s not happy. She sniffs the mobile. Out comes the SIM. Before she or her colleague can stop him, he swallows the the tiny card. When they eventually get it out of him, it turns out to contain paedophile porn images. High-ranking police officer Agneta (Ann Petrén) has been after a particular paedophile ring for months, but can’t seem to get the evidence she needs to crack the case and make arrests. Tina’s abilities so impress Agneta that she enlists the former’s help on the case.

The second is a man with whom Tina feels an instant rapport. He would appear to be a loner and a lot like her in many other ways too. She later learns his name to be Vore (Eero Milonoff). When she first searches his bag, it turns out he’s carrying containers of live fishing bait. A bit odd, but nothing illegal. On a later occasion, however, convinced he’s concealing something, she has her colleague strip search the man. The colleague finds nothing – or rather, nothing actionable. It’s all a bit embarrassing. And a bit of a plot spoiler of which we won’t reveal the specifics here. As a relationship subsequently develops between Tina and Vore, she discovers things about him she hadn’t anticipated along with some unexpected truths about her own past and identity.

This is an extremely clever movie which starts off being about one thing – a Scandi-thriller about customs border officials and cops pursuing paedophile rings – but then switches so that it’s about something else entirely (whilst totally delivering the goods as a Scandi-thriller about customs border officials and cops pursuing paedophile rings). It then pulls a second switch on its unsuspecting audience. Which makes it a tough film to review because an accurate one-line description of the plot could ruin the whole experience for you. I guarantee that there will be reviews out there which will do exactly that and – worse – the film may enter into popular parlance as “that film about (but you’re not going to read exactly what it’s about here)”, so you’re advised to go and see the film as soon as you can knowing as little as possible about it. Before reading any other reviews. It has a UK distributor so should be released here in due course. (January 10th 2019 update: it’s out in the UK and Ireland on Friday, March 8th, 2019.)

To its credit, the international trailer below does an impressive job of truthfully representing the film without giving anything away (and, for that matter, so did the blurb about the film in the LFF programme). It says the film is a romance, which it is, showing lots of images of Tina and Vore. But it’s also so much more and the trailer drops hints as to some of that without actually giving anything away. One imagines director/co-writer Abbasi having fights with his producers to make sure the trailer didn’t contain certain elements or plot strands. There seem to be about 20 different producers, according to IMDb. Clearly those were fights worth fighting and winning. (Or perhaps everyone else involved didn’t have any different ideas as to how to sell the film – though somehow I doubt it.)

What we can safely say is that, aside from being an extremely clever script about one’s personal identity and place in the world, and about people who are, for one reason or another, different from the norm, this is a beautifully put together piece of work on a number of levels. For one thing, it takes a certain lack of ego on the part of an actor to play a character who looks a long way from Western notions of physical beauty and both leads Melander and Milonoff are to be congratulated for having the guts to take on these roles and play them under a ton of uncomplimentary makeup. And they both give superb performances. (Which is not to say that there aren’t also superb performances further down the cast too.) For another, the prosthetic makeup work itself is highly impressive.

There’s more to recommend the film: happily, the people who decided to make this Sweden’s contender for the Best Foreign Film thought so too. We at DMovies aren’t huge admirers of Oscar bait, but sometimes countries select films which we’re happy to get behind: this is one of those. So, make a note of the title, don’t read any further reviews or coverage of it and put Border on your must see list for when it comes out in the UK (it has no release date set at the time of writing). Dirtylicious? Absolutely!

Border plays in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival, where this piece was originally written, and also at the Cambridge Film Fest. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 8th, 2019. On Amazon Prime, DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, July 15th. Watch the excellent, spoiler-free film trailer below:

Extinction (Extinção)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Conversations. In Russian. At border checkpoints between countries in the former Soviet Union. And at places in between. Monuments, striking architecture. Much less arresting locations, too. Some of these conversations are accompanied by black and white footage. Very occasionally, someone’s lips move and you see and hear them speaking at the same time, but most of the time, you don’t. Other conversations are accompanied by blank, dark blue footage, nothing but the uniform colour on the screen (unless you count the white, English language subtitles), just people talking on the soundtrack. Monologues discussing various aspects of modern, Russian history and the ethnic diversity of the countries bordering it also appear on the soundtrack along with unsettling music ranging from avantgarde orchestral to drone.

Kolja comes from Transnistria, formerly part of the Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic (now a self-proclaimed republic, not recognised by any other countries). He has a passport, so he’s travelling, the interpreter on a film crew making a film about Russia and borders and ethnicity. It might be this film or it might be a film we never see. For much of the time we see him driving to or from Eastern Bloc border checkpoints or being questioned by officials in rooms about his nationality and loyalty. Although it clearly has its own identity, with which he identifies, Transnistria doesn’t appear to be recognised by any other country.

As Kolja crosses over and waits in between a seemingly endless series of borders between one country and another – actually five in number – the very idea of nationality, of separate nation states, seems to diminish in significance to the point of evaporation into thin air. Although when at one point he dismisses the suggestion that he might want to live in the EU, you can see him complying with the idea of borders inside his head. A citizen of nowhere? A citizen of somewhere?

In places shots are held for some considerable length of time, whether it’s the opening shot of Kolja’s face against a background of white walls in a waiting room somewhere as we hear him questioned at length by border official on the soundtrack or a passenger seat shot of him driving through nondescript territory.

Much of the time, nothing really happens. It’s a lot like the effect of 2001, watching someone perform mundane tasks or, more often here, wait around for officials to perform their functions so the people in question can move on. As I wrote of Kubrick’s SF outing on its recent reissue, there’s something quite hypnotic about the mundane. If anything, that effect is even stronger here – the vivid black and white images lend an almost dreamlike quality to the whole thing and there are no dramas to suddenly leap out of the humdrum.

It’s barely even a narrative, more like a very strange and empty yet somehow unforgettable surreality, memorable as much for the places in which events (don’t) occur as it is for the things people say and the ideas that float around within their words. At their most focused and extreme, the content of those words explore incidences of genocide under Stalin.

Anyone looking for cinematic equivalents might recognise the feeling of the languorous waking dream from Tarkovsky narratives (Ivan’s Childhood/1962, Stalker/1979) or the bleak architectural images and mom-synchronised voice over of early, pre-feature film Cronenberg (Stereo/1969, Crimes Of The Future/1970). But again, both these examples look positively action-packed by comparison with Extinction – a film which might, just might, be destined for cult status.

Nation states seemingly have mechanisms to exert control over people, but in the end that really doesn’t matter in vision of the female Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas: no matter how much states try to confine those who reside in or pass through them, people and their words, thoughts and consciousness potentially transcend all that.

Extinction is out in the UK on Friday, July 20th. Watch the film trailer below: