Thirds, Eighths, and Tenths

In the Age of DVD, we've grown accustomed to having our cinema broken up into chapter stops for quick recall (except for David Lynch, who refuses to have his recent works demarcated as such), so nothing should feel uncharacteristic about seeing so many of the fest's films already divided into parts of a whole. For Taiwan's world-renowned master Hou Hsiao-hsien, this translates into conceiving the same couple's love story Three Times in three different eras, with respective themes of love, freedom and youth. The first and most sublime segment takes place in 1966 Kaohsiung, as a soon-to-be-enlisted army boy (Chang Chen) meets a pool-house cutie (Shu Qi), and becomes quietly smitten after shooting a few games together. Whether it intentionally recalls Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild is uncertain, but its similarly sumptuous long-take linearity and use of classic Western pop songs (especially "Rain and Tears") is wondrously hypnotic and just about perfect. The film's middle portion is a silent melodrama set in a 1911 Dadaocheng brothel—about a tea plantation owner's son and a courtesan-turned-concubine—which is predictably gorgeous, but hardly matches the director's gold standard in the all-too-alike Flowers of Shanghai. Disappointingly, the last leg of the triptych is also a fractured, lesser imitation of a previous work (Millennium Mambo), in which Shu Qi plays an epileptic bisexual nightclub songstress (say that five times fast) in present-day Taipei. While its ideas of youth overdramatics and emotional miscommunication via technology aren't explored to their potential and the aesthetics recycled from the aforementioned film, the final highway tracking shot begs for attention from a U.S. distributor, as even minor Hou is infinitely better than any multiplex dreck.

Told in eight chapters, Manderlay is the second feather-ruffling installment of Lars von Trier's USA trilogy, which began with the rousingly abstract Dogville. Applying the same John Hurt narration and the unwalled Brechtian floorplan of chalk outlines to represent buildings and landscapes (used to much greater effect this time around), von Trier's latest is a wound-opening critique on America's slave-keeping past that deserves to be confronted. Flame-haired Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) replaces Nicole Kidman in the role of gangster's daughter Grace, who stumbles upon an active slave plantation while driving through the deep south in 1933. As slavery was abolished some seventy years earlier, the self-righteous Grace feels it her duty to intervene, seizing control of the crops from the former owner and giving freedom to everyone inside. But are the former slaves prepared for the trials and tribulations of freedom? Though he's often written off as a devil's advocate-playing prankster (which is not entirely untrue), von Trier's latest is his most streamlined and subversive provocation to date, brilliantly preying on liberal guilts and calling out historical taboos to ask equal-opportunity questions without taking sides. Be wary of any critic who attacks the filmmaker instead of addressing the film itself, as Manderlay's compellingly packaged thesis isn't easy to digest, but a mighty important one to address. Let's hope African-American social critics (are you listening, Spike?) take the bait and continue the conversation after the film is released early next year.

Virtually unknown on these shores, French filmmaker Jean-Paul Civeyrac sweeps Through the Forest in his romantic and moody 65-minute spook tale, which consists of only a prologue and nine subsequent scenes that are each shot in a single, unedited take. Naïve yet passionate Armelle (Camille Berthomier) wakes up by sunlight and sings a heartfelt melody in the nude to her sleeping lover Renaud (Aurélien Wiik), but is interrupted by the menacing darkness of a thunderstorm creeping outside the window. The rhythmic rain patter is a recurring ambient instrument used to underscore the equally haunting orchestrals and story throughout, as Armelle's sisters remind her in the next sequence that she's still coping with the recent motorcycle death of Renaud. Under each shot/scene lurks a comparable reveal to change perceptions of what was last seen—but though the film is still seeking a distributor—it would be unwise to reveal any more plot points, even if the lush experience of faces filling frames and rhyming imagery is more of a payoff than the somewhat undemanding twists. (One colleague dismissed the film as "Alan Resnais in The Twilight Zone," which seemed more to me like a selling point.) Deceivingly simple in its technical prowess and aspirations, Through the Forest's lingering philosophical eeriness may seem like Tarkovsky-lite to some, but it's undeniably an hour well-spent under the tutelage of an under-represented auteur.

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