Tag: conversation

Grass

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Black and white. The weather is pleasant. In a Seoul backstreet a young woman stops to admire flowers and other vegetation in plant pots, just as the camera will do at the film’s close. Inside a cafe where the owner (who we never see) plays recordings of classical music, she sits and chats to a young man. In the corner, a woman (Kim Min-hee) is typing at her laptop. In the cafe, as people come and stay or go, she muses about them and writes. But when asked, she denies that she’s a writer. It’s a sort of diary. For herself, not for anyone else to read.

A number of the customers are actors or writers – one guy used to work for a theatre troupe but had a bust up with the guy who ran it and quit. He’s now reduced to asking people if they have somewhere he could live. Another guy has written a couple of screenplays, but swears that his first love is really acting and that, in time, acting is something he’ll get back to doing.

One way or another, a lot of the conversations get on to the subject of personal relationships and it’s pretty obvious there are some huge chasms between male and female. This applies whether its the woman at the start who admits to a man she’s going on holidiy, not with someone he knows, and therefore (as he works out) with someone he doesn’t. Or whether it’s the very much in love couple who chat with the laptop PC lady from the corner about how they’re thinking about getting married, At which Kim Min-hee suggests there are all manner of difficulties with this if the couple don’t really know each other beforehand – and that they need to be thoroughly honest with one another if the marriage is not going to fail.

There’s a break to these sequences in the middle where one woman goes up and down the stairs, getting fast and faster, as she tries to clear her head and make up her mind about something.

The film is pleasant and enjoyable enough to watch, made with a great deal of improvisation, but in the end this is one of Hong Sangsoo’s slightest works. You might get a great deal from it. Or you might not and wonder instead why you didn’t spend your time hanging out at a cafe listening to people and watching the world go by for yourself.

Grass plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Tuesday, November 5th, 21.00, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Tuesday, November 19th, 20.45, FilmHouse, Edinburgh – book here.

Wednesday, November 20th, 18.00, Watershed, Bristol – book here.

Sunday, November 24th, 17.30, Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow – book here.

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: