Tag: restaurant

Suna (Suna Kahevahel)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In a hotel room, sitting on two beds at right angles to each other, she says to him: “you won’t be too controlling, right? I don’t want anybody interfering with my life.” Then he sets out his own stall. “I’ll eat whatever you cook me,” he says. “When necessary, I’ll take a bath immediately.” You get the impression that that might not happen all that often.

Played by Turkish singing star Nurcan Eren, Suna craves the security of a relationship without any of the male domination that so often accompanies it. The man she has chosen, Veysel (Tarik Pabuccuoglu), has recently become a widower and wants a companion and partner in life. Not only that, he seems to want someone very like his former wife. He seems a kind, gentle man.

So they have an Imam wedding, a discreet Muslim ceremony with the local Imam present, which joins them in the eyes of Allah but may not have quite the same legal force as a regular marriage in Turkish society. For instance, if he dies, there’s no automatic legal provision that she gets the house.

With the help of the Veysel’s son Erol (Erol Babaoglu), Suna moves in to his house which is situated in a small, rural village. Veysel takes great delight in showing her his pair of caged budgies, which clearly mean a great deal to him.

She has worked as a cleaner and sets about cleaning up his house, which hasn’t been done for three years. A neighbour invites her to the local woman’s meeting, where you go along with a bit of money which Veysel, when asked, is happy to supply. But in the event, she goes out for a walk along the beach instead.

She enjoys walking outside, and on another occasion, when Erol is bringing the couple back from a shopping trip, she insists on being dropped off at the same place as Veysel and walking home alone. Walking home, a man hassles her, but fortunately another man comes to her rescue and sees him off. Her rescuer’s name is Can (Firat Tanış) , and they hit it off.

She seems to have more in common with Can than she does with Veysel, and often drops round to visit and chat with him. It turns out that he is a film critic, and in their conversation it emerges that she played parts as an extra in movies in Germany. She also visits a local restaurant bar, and one night stays there for sex with the owner, who, it turns out, has violent tendencies and likes inflicting pain on women during sex. It’s not clear whether Suna enjoys this, but given that she never goes back to the restaurant, one imagines not. She invents a cover story about being mugged on the way home from the women’s meeting earlier in the day to explain bruises on her face and neck.

As an independent, older woman in a deeply conservative society, Suna is in a difficult position: it doesn’t look like things are going to end well.

Fairly early on, a static image fills the cinema screen, a tapestry hanging on the wall with a picture of a peacock. On the soundtrack can be heard Veysel;s grunts and groans as he has sex with Suna. ‘With’ might be the wrong word: ‘to’ might be more accurate because we hear no noise emanating from her, the obvious assumption being that she is simply lying back as he takes his pleasure with no regard for hers. Aside from a shorter rerun of this scene, the other similar scene here is at the restaurant bar, where silhouettes of a rock band on a section of wall are shown while we hear the restaurant owner’s aural expressions of sexual enjoyment alongside Suna’s cries of discomfort and pain.

The sex scenes in this film are one of its great pleasures, although not in the way you might expect. All truly great directors reinvent the language of cinema and mould it to their own ends. Director Sezgin here has reinvented the cinematic grammar of the sex scene. It’s long worried me that actors and actresses (and more often than not, it seems to have been actresses, presumably because at least until recently, the vast majority of directors have been heterosexual men) have been required to expose their private parts to the camera and simulate coitus for it (and in rare cases, engage in actual coitus). I’m not being prudish about this, and I’m absolutely not talking about people’s personal behaviour outside of filming cinema, or morality, or anything like that – each to their own – but requiring actresses or actors to shoot sex scenes is, at least arguably, problematic. You shouldn’t be required to exposed yourself on the screen in that way, in my opinion.

Here, however, Sezgin has found an alternative way of portraying sex on camera without making any of those visual demands on her cast which works a treat (there’s a short clip of it in the trailer below, but when you watch the film, which unfolds at a very deliberate and measured pace, it has a greater impact than the little excerpt shown there). You could certainly argue that she’s borrowing heavily from the language of radio; sound, after all, is a significant component of cinema; I’d like to think that Orson Welles, in his Mercury Theatre on the Air days, would have been proud of her.

Also impressive is the portrayal of a film critic. I’ve seen this done in films before, but I’ve never seen a director get it right. On this occasion, however, I didn’t spot any gaffes, completely believed the character I saw on the screen and was delighted to have seen the film. (It’s not the primary reason I liked the film, and I realise this element is more likely to appeal to film critics than anyone else, but nevertheless, this element is a real pleasure.) The film is dedicated to the late Turkish film critic Cüneyt Cebenoyan.

I should add that personally, as a non-Turkish speaker unfamiliar with either the language or Turkish names, I didn’t immediately cotton on that the director was a woman – although looking at the movie’s subject matter about the plight of women of a very specific age in a very specific culture the fact of her gender would have been a reasonable guess. On one level I don’t care – it’s about whether a director is competent, has a vision and can realise it on the screen. If people can tick those boxes, I’m all for it – and if they happen to be women, then fine. Sezgin, in this film, ticks those boxes.

Given that half the humans on the planet are women, and that a good number of the rest of us humans are men who find women fascinating, the story ought to be of interest to a great many people. And it is so beautifully told, and the film so rigorously constructed and shot (on a minimal amount of resources, I might add) that it deserves to be widely seen. I can’t claim much knowledge of Turkish cinema, but Sezgin’s film reminded me of the poetic realism of the likes of English director Terence Davies (notably The Terence Davies Trilogy, 1983) and The Bill Douglas Trilogy (My Childhood, 1972; My Ain Folk, 1973; My Way Home, 1978, all directed by Scotland’s Bill Douglas).

There’s a similarity in the way these visual narratives are constructed via a series of small incidents to build up a compelling picture of the ordinary life of a character. Clearly Sezgin is a woman while these other two are men, so on some level her film is going to be very different from theirs. Yet, like these films by Davies and Douglas, Suna is a masterpiece.

Suna premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

About Us But Not About Us

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

[dropca[]A[/dropcap]n older man meets a younger man in a restaurant. Both are gay. The older man, Eric (Romnick Sarmenta), has recently lost his longtime partner Marcus (who we never see… well, not exactly) while the younger man Lance (Elijah Canlas) knew Marcus as his writing tutor, both elder men working as professors at the English language faculty of the university at which Lance is a student.

As the narrative plays out in real time, it moves through a number of difficult areas. Lance was having problems at home; specifically, being beaten by his stepfather, so Eric intervened by letting Lance stay at his place, bringing upon the pair rumours that they were lovers (although everything in the restaurant conversation suggests those rumours to be unfounded). It later transpires that Lance has written his first novel. When Lance presents the manuscript to Eric, Eric accuses Lance of plagiarism after reading the first few pages when Lance walks offscreen for a minute or two to take a toilet break.

Director Lana deploys a variety of theatrical and cinematic tricks in order to make the piece work. He has thought a lot about where to place the camera, and what each specific shot contributes to the whole. He deploys some bravura cinematic tricks. A clever combination of blocking, camera positioning and Lance cleaning his spectacles lenses allows Lance to temporarily transform into Marcus; a similar setup allows Eric talking to Lance to transform into Marcus talking to Lance, all acheived without lap dissolves, traditional flashback techniques, different actors or prosthetics makeup.

Whereas Hitchcock undertook Rope (1948) as a kind of stunt, which still delivered as a thriller, About Us But Not About Us doesn’t have any such genre trappings. It’s fundamentally a film about two people talking over a meal in a restaurant, something Hitch would have decried as “photographs of people talking”. To be fair, it does contain some bravura cinematic tricks, but somehow those look like trickery rather than enhancing the tale of the characters and making the audience feel for their plight. I, for one, didn’t really care about what the characters were going through. Unlike Rope, the film lacks Hitch’s understanding of the psychology of audiences.

Although no masks are worn, the pair are only allowed a 90 minutes because of the restaurant’s post-COVID policies and characters make references to the pandemic throughout. That’s not the subject of the film per se, but it’s good that it at least acknowledges the pandemic in passing when so many movies seem to want to pretend it never happened, that it’s business as usual. Whatever my other opinions of the film, this, at least, is something in its favour.

About Us But Not About Us premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

This opens with a shot of a painting depicting a pig, a fire, an orgasmically ecstatic, scantily clad woman and more, elements which play a part in what follows.

In a smart, up-market apartment, a beautiful young prostitute (Wang Yun-zhi) meditates. Then she services her clients (shown to a soft-core degree of explicit detail). She gets the job done, but the men she services don’t seem to understand that sex is about two people, not just one person (them), so she endures it as a not especially enjoyable job rather than takes pleasure in it. She has a little grille in her door so she can see who’s there before she opens it.

Meanwhile, a young man (Yusuke Fukichi) rides a scooter through the streets, arrives at the building in the pouring rain, walks along the corridor. He’s delivering food to her apartment. His job done, he returns to his home. Home is a loose term; he’s technically homeless: he occupies a room in an abandoned section of a building with no fixtures and fittings, a basic, concrete shell. Some of the window panes are missing and the polythene sheeting covering them is attached, but torn in a few places and blowing uselessly in the high wind. He sleeps in a makeshift bed made from cardboard boxes.

The above two sequences are intercut, so that the footage constantly moves from one life to the other. The festival catalogue compared this to the films of both Wong Kar-wai and Kim Ki-duk. The former you could make a case for, but where Wong’s international crossover success Chungking Express (1994) revitalised cinema in both Hong Kong and beyond, the same can’t be said of the current film: its subject matter feels like we’ve seen it before. Both films, it’s true, deal with urban lives bumping in to one another, but Wong’s film was a game changer in a way that Wang’s current one is not. The Kim Ki-duk comparison is more apt, so we’ll return to that in due course.

In true, clichéd, tart-with-a-heart fashion, the whore opens her door and her heart to the delivery boy. They have sex and she enjoys it, the first time we’ve seen her take such enjoyment. During and after coitus, he is smitten with what can only be described as grief, first silently and then sobbing out loud. In a long, static and post-coital shot, she first (to my inevitably male gaze) tenderly touches and holds his hand, then enfolds him in her arms. (It would be interesting to see what a female writer would have made of this film: likely as not, she would have come down on it like a ton of bricks.)

As he’s leaving, they negotiate a deal down to 15 from 20 takeaways as the price for the evening. So he comes back, merely to deliver food, another 15 times. (This too recalls Chungking Express, with its narrative of stockpiling out-of-date cans of tinned fruit day by day only to later binge eat them all in one go.) Then, one day he comes back to find a real estate agent showing a well-heeled couple round the cleared apartment.

Before that though, on the back of the first night, the delivery boy takes the prostitute out for a romantic evening at a restaurant and they both have a really good time, with no attached obligation for coitus. He confesses to her his dream of starting his own food stall, and when he’s subsequently got it going, she comes down to visit him. On a later occasion still, she discovers that she is pregnant. And vanishes from the narrative.

Meanwhile, the delivery boy has been slowly finding the occasional piece of furniture for his makeshift home, transporting a cupboard from a building’s rubbish deposit point on his bike then up the stairs by hand to where he’s living. Here he runs into a lady Filipino resident (Jan Hui-ling) who appears to have a bona fide apartment in which she stores goods as if it were a small warehouse and has a fridge packed full with large, solid cuts of meat.

She takes pity on him, rescuing a blanket and taking it up to his place. After the young prostitute disappears from his life, this older woman comes and lies beside him, caressing his side tenderly, but he’s not interested and does not reciprocate.

Instead she must make do with the sleazy, local building superintendent (Jason King Jiah-wen) constantly coming on to her and soon forcing himself on her. It’s unclear to what extent this is consensual and to what extent she enjoys it – somewhere between the two. Some script ideas there (and you can write a script in pictures and or sounds, no-one’s suggesting it has to be dialogue) in need of clarity. Judging by Nina Wu (Midi Z, 2019), Taiwan has been as affected by the #metoo movement as much as anywhere else, so there’s really no excuse for such woolly portrayals of female sexuality.

This is as good a moment as any to invoke the spirit of the late Kim Ki-duk, the bad boy of Korean cinema whose final film Call Of God (2022) is also in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and who often plays around with notions like this. However, I would argue Kim does so as a deliberate provocateur who has thought things through and, however unpalatable others might find his conclusions, run with them.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort goes on to further episodes after the prostitute has vanished, in which the delivery boy works at a chicken farm and one night has a crash which leaves him half-blinded and covered with burn scars. The prostitute, meanwhile, comes back into her own strand of the narrative as a mother (now played by Ivy Yin Shin), with one terrific scene where she has sex with a client (Cres Chuang), doing everything for him while he does nothing for her, while she rocks her baby’s hammock style cradle with her foot, a scene and an image worthy of Kim Ki-duk. In another tremendous scene towards the end she discovers the former delivery boy, now scarred with burns, confined to a wheelchair and reduced to selling food from a tray and she buys him a meal from a stall to feed him, her young daughter also at the table, like an archetypal nuclear family. In an echo of earlier, she caresses his forehead and he, now barely able to see, breaks down in grief.

The film may have its shortcomings, however the deft way it juggles the lives of its various protagonists makes it worth a look. A handful of scenes are quite outstanding.

In The Morning Of La Petite Mort premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Extreme Job (Geukhanjikeob)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Radio voices. “Target in position.” “Unit 2 on roof.” Four criminals in a dimly lit apartment playing Mahjong. A knock at the window. A raid. But embarrassed lady cop Jang (f) (Lee Hanee) and her male boss Captain Ko (Ryu Seung-yong) can’t operate their window cleaning slings. The cliched, action packed raid by SWAT in which the criminals are swiftly arrested is visualised by the villain, but the actual police operation is a series of hilarious bungles, the criminals only “caught” when one of them is hit by a coach and the others are stopped by the resulting multiple car crash pile up. In a brutal debriefing with their chief, Captain Ko loses his position to young rising star Captain Choi, who’s just successfully caught a major criminal gang.

In order to save their reputation, Ko’s unit set up surveillance on the gang’s apartment where Hong and his men are awaiting the return of big boss Mubae (Shin Ha-kyun). There being a Chicken restaurant opposite, the cops take it over as a cover to watch the criminals’ premises. It turns out that one of their number Ma (Jin Sun-kyu) has an incredible family recipe for Suwon Rib Marinate Chicken which is an immediate success and overnight turns their fast food joint cover into a hugely profitable business. The team discover the joys of running a food emporium except for Young-ho (Lee Dong-hwai) who finds the others are becoming to busy too fulfil their police duties and back him up when needed.

Other memorable characters include merciless, ruthless and highly effective, female fighter Sun-hee (Jang Jin-hee) who uses a knife to put Hong on crutches on a whim from Mubae and rival gang leader Ted Chang (Oh Jung-se) who threaten to atart a turf war with Mubae.

Starting off as a lightweight caper, this is one of those movies that effortlessly shifts genre throughout, from caper to violent actioner to comedy to food porn and back again innumerable times. It’s aided no end by a clever soundtrack by a composer who understands the effect different pieces of music have on the audience, from the opening pizzicato caper strings to the closing titles which sounds like a spaghetti Western. Somewhere in the middle, a wounded character who may die is briefly underscored by the cantopop song from Asian mega-hit gangster outing A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, producer Tsui Hark, 1986).

As if this wasn’t already a huge crowd-pleaser, for the climactic fight sequence it reveals that Ko’s five man team are, for example, a Chinese national Judo champion (Ma), an Asian Muay Thai champion named Jang Bak after Ong Bak (Jang) while he himself has the nickname ‘Zombie’ because he’s sustained 12 stab wounds and just doesn’t die. These and other attributes are pressed into service with Ko taking bullet after bullet in pursuit of Mubae. This South Korean gem is proof positive, if it were needed, that even for the kind of entertaining movies on which it prides itself, Hollywood really isn’t the only game in town.

Extreme Job plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Thursday, November 6th, 20.35, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Wednesday, November 20th, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Saturday, November 23rd, 15.30, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham – book here.

Watch the film trailer below: