Tag: Vietnamese

Drowsy City (Thanh Pho Ngu Gat)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TAALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

This is a spectacularly dirty movie. It’s unlike anything else you have seen before. The creative sentience is entirely palpable. There’s plenty of clucking, cackling, plucking and ruffling feathers. And it isn’t just chickens that suffer. Human beings are subjected to the very same type of abuse as our edible friends.

The plot is deceptively simple. Tao works at as a chicken slaughterer in the heart of a bustling city, presumably either Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh. His relationship to the birds is ambiguous and dysfunctional. They are his closest companions, but he’s also prepared to butcher them in the most horrific ways at any given minute. One day, he peeks on three gangsters dwelling in an abandoned building with a prostitute. He gets discovered, and the three criminals turn him into some sort of jester and slave. He’s forced to emulate chickens in order to entertain them, He also has to feed them. But Tao has a cunning plan, and soon tables could be turned. The hunter could get captured by the game.

Drowsy City is guaranteed to ruffle feathers amongst animals lovers. The butchering of chickens is extremely graphic. They are boiled alive, defeathered and beheaded in front of our very eyes. When talking about Weekend (1967), French provocateur Jean-Luc Godard said that he opted to show a real pig being killed simply simply because it was acceptable to show animals being murdered in cinema (unlike human beings). Dung Luong Dinh is clearly aware of this contradiction, and uses this controversial device to his advantage.

But it isn’t just animals who suffer. The Vietnamese director mercilessly exposes the frailties and vulnerabilities of us human beings. Chickens are merely a proxy. We too get burned by boiling water. We too can get killed by a slaughtering knife. We don’t even have feathers to protect us. Our skin is directly exposed. In the titular drowsy city, both chickens and human being are caged, trapped and tethered. These creatures understand the inevitability of death. Our relationship to each other isn’t more humane than our bond to birds. We are prepared to humiliate, torture and kill each other.

Water is a recurring theme. It is is fluid and ambiguous. It washes away the blood and the feathers on the ground, but it also serves to boil and to drown. Tao takes pleasure in a sitting in a tiny tub filled with water, or to lie down outside allowing a tropical storm to pour over him and soak his clothes. It’s a purification ritual. He’s preparing himself for something much bigger.

Aesthetically, this is fascinating endeavour. Camera angles are slanted, buildings derelict, cracked walls dirty with mould and faded paint, the floor covered with blood. Extremely high drone shots remind us of our anonymity and urban solitude. The city is teeming with action, and yet we are blithely oblivious to what our neighbours are up to. Our indifference towards our fellow human beings isn’t dissimilar to our bond to the chicken on our dinner plate. Everyone is prey.

Drowsy City just saw its world premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It’s showing in Competition.

Downsizing

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This being a Hollywood movie, you may find yourself worrying you’re at the right film when it starts off with a Norwegian scientist in a lab. No matter: it soon goes through momentous discovery to big international conference where one Norwegian scientist takes to the stage and opens up a box to reveal another of his colleagues – who has been ‘downsized’ and is now a mere five inches tall. It’s the solution to too many people living on planet Earth with its finite and inadequate resources.

Cut to people watching this on TV in public spaces, among them occupational therapist Paul Safranek (that American everyman Matt Damon). He and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are currently experiencing budgetary problems and over the next few weeks and months they discover couples that they know who have ‘downsized’ and think it’s the best decision they ever made.

So the couple take a visit to Leisureland, a miniature resort where ‘downsized’ people live after the non-reversible procedure. They learn that if a full-sized person becomes downsized, the financial assets of an average income would turn from just about enough to get by to a millionaire’s income. They’re hooked, the paperwork is signed, the process undergone.

On the other side of the process, it all seems too good to be true, although Paul isn’t really sure if he fits. He is even less sure he likes his constantly partying, Serbian upstairs neighbour Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz) and his business partner Konrad (Udo Kier). And as Paul watches the TV news he learns there are global issues with the process too: people in repressive regimes are being downsized against their will, such as Vietnamese activist Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau). Who one day turns up as the head cleaning lady in charge of a small posse of cleaning ladies tidying up Dusan’s flat after one of his parties.

If this seemed initially like a utopian existence, Leisureland turns out to suffer from all the financial inequalities that beset other human societies: there are haves and have-nots. Tran takes Paul to her home in the hope that he can administer medicine to her seriously ill flat-mate – on a bus through a vast tunnel to outside the Leisureland complex where the poor live in substandard, run down blocks of flats. The narrative has stranger things to deliver still, as Dusan takes Konrad and the other two to visit the original downsized Norwegian colony…

Sadly, however, while downsizing is a visionary film brimming with radical concepts it’s equally an infuriating narrative exercise where potentially rich ideas, themes or characters suddenly appear only to disappear shortly afterwards before they can be fully explored. So for instance, the ill neighbour for whom Paul supplies inappropriate tablets which Tran gets her to ingest one week is gone when he visits the next week. What happened? “Oh, she died”, says Tran matter-of-factly. No shock, no grief, patently unbelievable. Something similar happens towards the end of the film when Paul, in an episode with the Norwegian scientists’ colony worthy of When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), has to decide whether or not to accompany the departing colony members into a huge Brave New World deep underground.

Were it not for such serial errors of judgement, this could easily been the film of the year. It’s still worth seeing, though, despite its faults.

Downsizing is out in the UK on Wednesday, January 24th. Watch the film trailer below: