Tag: school

House Of Hummingbird (Beol-Sae)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seoul, South Korea, 1994. Less than 10 years since South Korea has become a democracy. The year of the Winter Olympics, the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the Seongsu Bridge collapse. The latter incident will leave its mark on some of the characters here.

Teenager Eun-hee’s mum and dad (Jung In-gi and Lee Seung-yeon) run a small food store, sourcing “only the finest ingredients”. On occasion, they deliver to other suppliers and the whole family is roped in to make sure the orders are prepped and sent out on time. They are fiercely proud parents who want only the best for their kids. The best, as they understand it, is doing well in the school and university system, presumably with the idea of getting a well paid job afterwards.

This message is reinforced by her school. A male teacher has the girls chant, ” I will go to / Seoul National University / instead of karaoke”. He also gets his class to nominate the top two delinquents among them, defined as those who smoke or date instead of studying. Eun-hee is the top nominee. Or, as two of her classmates with a clear sense of privilege put it when talking about her, “dumb girls like that don’t make it to college and they become our maids”

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Her brother Dae-hoon (Son Sang-yeon) is achieving good grades at school and looks set to go to university. He has a nasty side too: he periodically bullies and hits Eun-hee, making her home life a misery. Her sister Soo-hee (Park Soo-yeon) is out a lot and looks less devoted to academic work, on one occasion hiding in a cupboard to avoid their father.

Eun-hee herself (Park Ji-hoo) is an outsider who doesn’t really fit in at school. She likes to draw and wants to b a comic artist.

She has a boyfriend of sorts, schoolboy Kim Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo) who she tentatively gets to kiss her who is later dragged from her presence by his overbearing mother. A later same-sex romance with the shy Bae Yu-ri (Seol Hye-in) comes to nothing.

A lump under one ear will later cause her to be hospitalised.

Her parents send her to the local Chinese cram school, but that doesn’t motivate her academically until her teacher is replaced by university student Miss Kim Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), first seen smoking a cool cigarette on the school stairwell, who gets both Eun-hee and Calvin Klein clothing-obsessed fellow student Jeon Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun) to talk about themselves and their interests, the only person in the film to do so.

When the two students go shoplifting and get caught, Ji-suk reveals Eun-hee’s father’s name to the understandably incensed owner. It is Miss Young-ji to whom Eun-hee talks about the crime and in whom she subsequently confides, the one person in the film who brings her out of herself and gives her good advice, e.g. to stick up for herself when her brother beats her. Consequently, they become friends. And Eun-hee becomes vaguely aware, through titles on Miss Young-ji’s classroom bookshelf, of politics and such schools of thought as feminism.

It’s a bleak period picture of an emerging democracy where almost everyone seems to be focused on career at the expense of relationships or family. At the same time, though, it’s highly affecting as a sympathetic portrait of a teenage girl’s life which also exhibits an optimistic undercurrent in the character of a teacher who goes against the grain and shows a genuine interest in her pupils.

House Of Hummingbird plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:

Adolescents (Adolescentes)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Charting the lives of two girls from thirteen to eighteen, Adolescentes is an immersive documentary depicting the vicissitudes of youth. Five years in the making, filmed twenty-four days a year and composed from 500 hours of rushes, it has the flow of a fine naturalist drama, standing nicely alongside Young Solitude (Claire Simon, 2018) and Belinda (Marie Dumora, 2017) as yet another brilliant French documentary about the complexity of growing older.

On first glance Emma and Anaïs seem like very different girls. Emma comes from an affluent background, loves to sing songs from musicals and appears very driven, while Anais is from a poorer background, gets distracted easily and finds it hard to concentrate in class. Right from the start, we learn that education is the main priority, both girls told by their teachers that the way they act in school could easily shape their whole life.

In a traditional feature, the differences between the two girls and their respective outcomes would be more pronounced, but director Sébastian Lifshitz has something much subtler in mind. In real life people cannot be put into boxes, meaning that A rarely leads to B or even C. In keeping with this thesis, little is played for dramatic effect, purposefully stopping the viewer from ever making concrete predictions about these girl’s fates. Omission is constantly used, significant events often only seen before and after and huge swathes of time often passing within the cut of a frame; the audience only learning afterwards that the summer has finished or the school is finally over.

Adolescentes

Artificially skipping the so-called most essential moments of each girl’s life makes the film a fascinating, unpredictable watch, yet this mix of objectivity and narrative slipperiness can make it feel like something of an academic exercise. This is especially true when philosophy and literature classes — whether it’s the concept of Skepticism or the story of Emma Bovary — act as a kind of Greek chorus on the action, underscoring its major themes in a way that can feel quite forced. It’s easy to think a lot watching this movie; it’s much harder to feel anything significant.

Things turn more emotive when the personal meets the political, these girls lives often brutally interrupted by key moments in recent French history, from the Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks to the election of Emmanuel Macron. While these moments could easily have come off as glib, Lifshitz seems to find more to say than André Téchiné in the recent, misguided Farewell to The Night (2019) about the destabilising effects of terrorism upon a nation; a moment of unreality that puts the grand and noble project of education under existential threat. One moment in particular, when Anaïs seems to have changed her political persuasion in the blink of an eye, confronts simplistic political diagnoses head on, showing how the French character is far more complicated than anyone could imagine.

What’s highly notable is the sheer amount of conversation; ranging from the banal (getting the right grades to move up in school) to the profound (how life seems to imperceptibly change without you even knowing it). Whether it’s chatting with each other, arguing with their parents, or listening to the words of their teachers, people talk and talk and talk, never at a loss for things to say. In fact they are so composed and at times so eloquent, one could be fooled into thinking they are watching a scripted drama. Complemented by intuitive editing, the film finds a way to accrue these moments into something both profound and mystifying: asking what defines a person while boldly skipping any definitive answers. The question it seems, is to keep asking.

Adolescents showed at the Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival. Out on Curzon Home Cinema and MyFrenchFilmFestival from Friday, January 15th. On Mubi on Saturday, July 9th

An Elephant Sitting Still (Da Xiang Xi De Er Zuo)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Clocking in at just under four hours, An Elephant Sitting Still isn’t something you’re going to watch unless you’re prepared for a long-haul viewing. However it’s worth it. Hu Bo’s unremittingly bleak world might not be somewhere you’d want to live, but it’s most definitely worth a visit. That said, he only made the one feature length film before committing suicide. You can’t help but wonder whether the vision he presents here bore any relation to his state of mind leading up to that tragedy.

The morning after Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu) has slept with his best friend’s estranged wife, his best friend turns up at the apartment, sees Yu and throws himself out of the window. In a nearby flat, a couple try to talk their ageing parent Wang Jin (Liu Congxi) into entering a nursing home as they have scarcely enough room for themselves and their small daughter.

Meanwhile, 16 year old Wei Bu (Peng Yuchang) gets caught up in a row over the alleged theft of a phone by his friend Li Kai ( Ling Zhenghui) from school bully Yu Shuai (Zhang Xiaolong). In an argument Wei accidentally pushes the latter down a flight of stairs putting him into a critical condition. Now Shen’s elder brother Cheng is after him. Elsewhere, Wei’s horrified classmate Huang Ling (Wang Yuwen) finds herself and her lover, the school’s vice principal, the subject of a viral video which threatens to ruin both their lives.

All the characters’ pointless existences threaten to close down around them. As the fortunes of Yu, Wei, Huang and Wang take a turn for the worse in the course of a single day and night, dragging them into their intersecting metaphysical cul-de-sacs, the film follows each of the characters in a compelling series of single takes around their rundown daytime Chinese town which recalls the nighttime one in Have A Nice Day (Liu Jian, 2017). There’s a similar sense of hopelessness to that film, although its much briefer running length makes you wonder if Hu could have tried harder to say what he wanted to here in a shorter amount of time.

That said, Hu’s four-hour film is brilliantly paced and furnishes him the time he needs to explore his characters’ lives at some length. However, the ending just… well, ends, making you wonder if he could have ended the whole thing earlier or simply cut some scenes out to get the length down. (This writer is not sure whether or not that could have been done without ruining the film. But, maybe…?)

The title derives from a story, trotted out at the start, about a legendary elephant in Manzhouli Zoo who sits around all day without moving. Both Wei and Huang resolve to visit the beast – pretty much the nearest either of them get to any sort of motivation to do anything with their lives – while Wang also wants to visit Manzhouli for different reasons.

In the end, this is bleak and gruelling stuff – but well worth putting aside four hours of your time to watch.

An Elephant Sitting Still is out in the UK on Friday, December 14th, and then on VoD on Monday, December 24th. Watch the film trailer below:

Edhel

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Although her father was killed in a riding accident, Edhel (Gaia Forte) is training hard for an upcoming show jumping competition. Tensions are frayed at home where her mother (Roberta Mattei) constantly tells her off for wearing her hoodie over her head round the house. School is even worse. She won’t take the hood down and expose her head for anyone – and her classmates hate her for it.

Things change with the arrival of a new boy in the classroom who is far more friendly towards her. Around him she starts to come out of her shell. This is an amazing, really thoughtful film about people who are different. It has a lot to say about not only bullying and the cruelty of children towards their peers but also what goes on inside the head of the person being bullied.

Its narrative walks a very clever tightrope between its heroine having a physical deformity beneath the hood in the form of distinctive, pointy ears and the fairly preposterous idea that she might in fact be an elf. There are connections you can make to support the idea, but the style of shooting never goes beyond suggesting the possibility.

Silvano, a caretaker at the school who is also a sword and sorcery fantasy obsessive given to hanging out at the local comics store, is certainly convinced and becomes concerned for her. He thinks she needs to return to “her people”. His obsession gets him into trouble with his employers. And when Edhel vanishes for part of the final reel, it’s very tempting to agree with Silvano. But perhaps there’s another explanation.

However, the trailer boasts no such subtlety and screams at us, she’s an elf, she’s an elf, she’s an elf! No possible room for doubt, no ambiguity and – to all intents and purposes, not the film I saw. It’s a terrible trailer because it completely misrepresents the feel of the film and what it’s actually about. Although we’ve published it below, you’re better off watching the opening five minutes instead which provides a much clearer idea of the film (the clip is below the trailer – no subtitles, it’s in the original Italian, but you’l get the idea).

If you want to see how to promote a film like this, look no further than Border (Ali Agasse, 2018). That has some pretty clever surprises hidden in the twists and turns of its narrative (although no one in that film is an elf, in case you were wondering), but the clever trailer understands the game the film is playing and gives away nothing it shouldn’t. It’s a shame whoever did the trailer for Border couldn’t do the one for Edhel too. Both are subtle films which need the correct marketing to succeed and are likely to fail in cinemas without it.

Edhel played in the Schlingel International Film Festival. Watch the uninspiring subtitled trailer for the film below – or below that, watch the first five minutes instead for a more accurate idea of the film (in Italian without subtitles, sorry):

Pony And Birdboy (Puluboi Ja Ponin Leffa)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seven-year-old Mai (Jenni Lausi) frequently wears a mouth mask resembling that of a pony and doesn’t like her given name, preferring to be called Pony. On the verge of going to school for the first time, she is taken by her mother on an expedition to buy things she’ll need. Seeing a colourful dancer and a high pressure salesman at a market, she conjures an imaginary friend Birdboy (Aapo Puusti).

She is however anxious about attending school, not least because the headmaster is one of the neighbours in her block of flats, Teppo (Seppo Halttunen), who seems something of a killjoy. Horse masks, for instance, aren’t allowed at the school.

Birdboy moves into the estate’s dumpster into which people are always throwing items they no longer want even though they’re in perfectly good condition. Pony often finds items to play with in there; indeed, there are enough discarded furnishings and household items for Birdboy to be able to build a home.

Whatever Pony and Birdboy put into the dumpster, Teppo surreptitiously retrieves when they’re not around. On the one hand he’s always telling Pony off for playing there, on the other he appears to have a hidden agenda all of his own.

Despite clearly being aimed at preschool kids, this constantly inventive Finnish movie is wonderfully and joyously subversive, with an eye-popping colour palette to boot. It’s an exemplary essay in the conflict between the right side of the brain – all the wacky creative stuff – and the left side – the logical, controlling one that imposes an order and structure on things.

Pony has an irrepressible sense of play but desperately needs to impose some sort of order upon it. The anarchic Birdboy stands in the way of this. In Aapo Puusti’s extraordinary and memorable performance, he actually moves his mouth, face and body just like a bird, centering a seemingly preposterous character who we completely buy.

Her highly supportive parents want Pony to grow and develop, but absolutely stick by her at the same time. And in something of a coup, Teppo turns out to be cultivating a strange hobby in his garage which, when Pony eventually persuades him to embrace it, transforms his controlling left side nature into something altogether more right sided and creative, turning him into a happier individual altogether.

This being a Finnish language film aimed at a very young audience, it would need to be dubbed to play to children who speak different languages which would probably destroy its character, so it’s unlikely to be seen abroad except in countries where foreign language dubbing is common practice such as Germany. That’ll probably stop it reaching the UK, which is a pity because it’s one of the most creative and subversive movies aimed at a preschool audience that I’ve ever seen.

Pony And Birdboy played in the Schlingel International Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

The Escape

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tara (Gemma Arterton, also executive producer) is married to Mark (Dominic Cooper) with two small kids Teddy and Florrie (real-life siblings Teddy and Florrie Pender). He has a secure job and they’re living somewhere in a housing development in Gravesend, Kent. Her life consists of responding to his sexual advances, which no longer satisfy her the way they once did, getting him to work and the kids to school in the mornings, keeping the house tidy during the day and playing with the kids after school. She has her own car but doesn’t get out much except to do the household shopping. If her life ever possessed any significant meaning, it’s long lost in the humdrum of a housewife and mother’s everyday married routine.

Something needs to change, and judging by a pre-title scene where Arterton wakes up alone in a house with framed art prints on the wall and walks alone to a park, it’s about to do so. The first hour after that charts the gradually worsening situation of her relationship with her husband and kids, punctuated by a trip up to London and the purchase from the Southbank’s second hand book market of The Lady And The Unicorn, a tome about six medieval tapestries which hang in Paris and represent the five familiar senses and an unfamiliar sixth one which represents something like our moral judgement. Which is what the film is about: taking stock of one’s life and making any necessary changes if and where it seems less than satisfactory.

The remainder sees Arterton take off to Paris, visit the museum with the tapestries and get picked up for a one-night stand in her hotel room by charming French photographer Philippe (Jalil Lespert). She tells lies to redefine her identity, saying she works for a London commercial company and she’s not involved with anyone. When it turns out he has a wife and kids, she tells him what he did was wrong and turfs him out, which seems a little bit two faced to say the least given she’s done much the same to him. After that, will she be able to go back to her husband? The pre-credits scene, which also closes the film, suggests not.

The whole is light on dialogue and heavy on improvisation, especially in the family scenes with the two kids, with writer-director Savage opting for a fluid, handheld camera approach to capture the potential of open-ended performances. He’s helped by his decision to use a small crew which allows for great versatility in shooting. If it sometimes feels like not that much happens in its 105-minute running length, there’s an intensity to events as they unfold in the moment on the screen.

Long after viewing, most of the domestic scenes fade but the memories of the trip to Paris and the one-night stand remain, as will Cooper’s hurling her tapestry book across the kitchen in a moment of rage and Arterton’s losing her composure and swearing at her kids. The highly effective music by Anthony John and Alexandra Harwood cleverly adds a sense of longing in the domestic senses and a feeling of satisfaction when Arterton finally gets away. Ultimately, it’s a clever little film which, through a mixture of script prep, strong casting and improv, achieves its aims. So, worth seeing.

The Escape is out in the UK on Friday, August 3rd. It’s available on VoD from Monday, December 3rd.