New York Film Festival Update #2:
East by Northeast
A look at Woman on the Beach and Paprika.
By Aaron Hillis
Posted October 2nd, 2006, 3 P.M. EST
Asian cinema is faring well at the fest, represented by momentous imports from China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Iran, and the Philippines; the continent's eastern subregion alone has produced two of the most exhilarating premieres thus far. With his fourth feature in a row screened at the NYFF, South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo (Woman Is the Future of Man, Turning Gate) has justly developed a cult reputation on the New York film scene as a perceptive explorer of emotionally stunted male psyches and how they relate to women. Hong's latest and most charmingly accessible drama, Woman on the Beach, is replete with his trademark stylings: narrative diptychs (here, just as self-reflexive but more structurally lax than last year's Tale of Cinema), episodes of revelatory drunkenness, and character-exposing subtexts within run-of-the-mill dialogue. In the first of two parallel love triangles, an opportunistic and barely suave filmmaker named Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) drags his overcompensatingly passive friend Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo) along for a beach-resort vacation, where he plans to quietly finish his next script. The beautiful Moon-sook (Ko Hyun-Joung) accompanies Chang-wook as his would-be mistress, but she's hardly discreet about her affections toward the flirtatious director. The two secretly break into a nearby hotel room for a lusty tryst; the next morning, he avoids eye contact and they depart awkwardly. Days later, Joong-rae revisits the beachside and meets a woman named Sun-hee (Song Sun-mi) — in his mind, a dead ringer for Moon-sook — who agrees to let him interview her for screenplay fodder, which leads to sex and especially messy circumstances when the other woman returns. Thorny tensions become comic calamities in Hong's first film to focus on (or at least, fully flesh out) its female characters, who in his earlier work were mere catalysts to said themes of underdeveloped masculinity. Beach's profoundly rewarding waves roll over us with an elliptical, stimulating rhythm that's more honest about self-destructive obsessions, betrayals, and hypocrises than even a first-person confessional like Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict.
Paprika
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From across the Sea of Japan comes Satoshi Kon's Paprika, a somewhat unusual choice for Lincoln Center's sophisticates as it occupies a genre oft reserved for the geekiest of fanboys, the anime. Smart, electrifying, and proudly unhinged, this Japanimated gem definitely belongs in the fold, and might even win over a few older art-house patrons with its very adult, transhumanist premise of interactive dream therapy run amok. (What, too heady for a cartoon?) It's the near future, and a female psychotherapist is employing a new prototype device that allows doctors to enter their patients' subconscious minds. Not only can nightmares be surveyed from the inside by these "dream detectives," they can then be visually recorded, edited, and played back on what looks like Final Cut Pro. (I smell an Apple tie-in!) But when one of the units is stolen and a research assistant disappears, the threat of misuse spurns on a quest for the who and why by a homicide detective and the shrink's titular alter ego, alive only as a ghost in the virtual shell. While they search for neo-noirish clues and try to wrap their heads around how people unhooked from the machine are being manipulated, the film's moment-by-moment visual ingenunity becomes richer and stranger, proffering ideas of repression (quite typical in Japanese film culture) and sinister subversions of the country's fixation on candy-colored cuteness (including a devilish spoof on "hentai," the pornographic form of anime). The mystery villain feels it is his duty to rectify "technology that has lost its philosophy" by controlling individual fever dreams and projecting them into mass delusions, which then escape from the collective unconscious into the streets of this postcyberpunk reality. Hypnotized parades of people, plus anthropomorphized cars, geisha dolls, radios, robots, drum-banging toads, iceboxes — and yes, even the kitchen sink — begin rioting through the downtown districts, spouting non sequiturs like "the 24-bit eggplant will be analyzed" and the protest chant "the happy and mundane world will vent their anger." Even the obese inventor of the device is swallowed and merged with a Godzilla-sized toy mecha, a deliberate symbiosis of the biological and psychiatric. Confused? Just sit back and absorb, but don't strain yourself trying to work through the impossible logic systems and shifting identities (such as my favorite stumper: how is it feasible for Paprika to have first met the detective in the real world?), each reinventing themselves every other minute with a meta-movie conceit that recurs in Kon's similar puzzlers Millennium Actress and Perfect Blue. Paprika ain't no kiddie 'toon, even if its thumpin' techno-pop and bubble-gum thrills have the same splashy palette as an episode of Pokémon or Dragon Ball Z.
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