Vive L'amour

I used the final day of Tsai Ming-liang's retrospective on Mubi to watch Vive L'Amour (愛情萬歲, Àiqíng wànsuì translated to Long live love).

I confess that before that, I struggled a bit to watch Stray dogs (郊遊, jiāoyóu translated to Excursion), which was a bit too slow for the state I was in; I also find harder to watch films like it in a setting that's not a cinema. I decided to pick a different one and went for Vive L'Amour: while the style was very similar (long shots, silence and not much dialogue) I was much more engaged with it. Given that these two are much more recent than Rebels of the neon God, I reckon this is closer to the defining style of Tsai Ming-liang.

In a nutshell, I'd say the film is about love, sex, loneliness and depression in a contemporary setting (1990's in Taipei). I found it funny, moving, sad, sombre and joyful all at once. It's hard to describe masterpieces like these and make them justice, one can discuss at length and seemingly never conclude; one just has to experience them.

My week's films

I watched First Reformed (2017) by Paul Schrader (starring Ethan Hawke and Amanda Seyfried) on Saturday and it left me thinking about it for the rest of the weekend.

The film slowly burns just to finally explode in the final scene. Ethan Hawke masterfully plays Reverend Ernst Toller, a protestant pastor struggling with several personal issues like the death of his son and alcoholism, his thoughts being captured in a handwritten journal which he plans on keeping for a year and to destroy it after a year. He then meets Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a pregnant attendant to church, who asks for his help in counselling her husband, a troubled man who is not wanting to keep their child. Then many issues start coming into play and we slowly see Toller free-falling, with Mary being perhaps his only source of comfort with whom he develops a strong non-sexual emotional connection.

I found the whole film enjoyable, and despite it being a bit sombre, it has some beautiful scenes (namely the floating one), although there are some cliched depictions and so on (probs would not make happy a fair chunk of religious people). Then I found the final scene absolutely marvellous, I think it is somewhat up to interpretation, but if you understand how troubled the mind of Toller is, you might have a different perspective on it; in brief, I think he does go ahead with the drano, with the last seconds unfolding only in his head, until...

Then, just yesterday, I found out about a streaming of some of Tsai Ming-liang's films on Mubi. Naturally I'm currently interested in finding out more about Taiwanese cinema; I now recognise, for example the names Edward Yang or Hou Hsiao-hsien, also the film A Sun (陽光普照) Chung Mong-hong, streaming on Netflix, is highly recommendable. I first heard about Tsai Ming-liang from this beautiful video on Fandor:

The streaming of the films is part of UNAM's 11th international film festival (FICUNAM) based here in Mexico. Unfortunately, the streaming of Ming-liang's films, specifically, only lasted from the 18th to the 24th of March.

Anyhow, I had the chance to watch Rebels of the neon God, in Chinese "青少年哪吒" (Qīngshàonián Nézhā) literally meaning Teenage Nezha; from Wikipedia:

The Taiwanese title refers to Nezha, a powerful child god in Chinese classical mythology who was born into a human family. Nezha is impulsive and disobedient. He tries to kill his father, but is brought under control when a Taoist immortal (Nezha's spiritual mentor) gives the father a miniature pagoda that enables him to control his rebellious son.

Many things can be said about the film. The only bad thing about it really is that it doesn't seem to be readily available online: films like these are nowadays at least available for rent, but apparently not this one or other Tsai Ming-liang's films. Hopefully during my time in Taiwan I'll be able to find these and other cornerstone Taiwanese films more easily in stores or otherwise.

Macario

For many Mexican generations preceding mine, Macario is a well-known film from the so-called Golden age of Mexican cinema. For me, it was for a long time just another old film of the kind that my grandparents would watch. Then as I started getting deeper into cinema per-se, I knew this was a basic title I should watch, and now I admit I'm slightly ashamed to have seen it after so long in my life. Before saying anything else, I must reaffirm Macario is one of the true gems of Mexican cinema, a masterpiece that should be an essential for any self-declared cinephile, independently of their nationality.

I've often seen Macario being described as a "supernatural" film and for some reason this puts me off badly. Others, I've seen it described as a "macabre fairy tale". What you should know is that the film deals with the two basic elements of life/death and poverty/wealth in a style reminiscing of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, with several cultural and social undertones and criticism. I only later found out it is actually based on a German folk tale (literally described as a fairy tale) called Godfather Death, which was adapted by a mysterious author known as Ben Traven, of German origin, to a Mexican colonial era context.

I'll just give away the basic premise, which I think is enough to entice one to see it.

Macario is a Mexican peasant in colonial Mexico (think of between 1600 and 1800) with several kids and a wife, who despite working hard in the mountains carrying logs, can barely afford to feed his family and himself. Looking at the wealthy, and specifically when he sees some roast turkeys being made, he makes a vow to have a whole turkey for himself or starve to death. In a sequence of heart-touching scenes, his wife steals a turkey and selflessly gives it to him; he runs away and as he prepares to eat it, he meets first the Devil, then God and finally Death (in the form of a peasant), who ask for him to share the turkey with them.

Ignacio López Tarso, currently 96, and Pina Pellicer, who despite achieving stardom, committed suicide at 30.

Macario decides to share the turkey with Death and not the Devil or God, by the following reasoning: first, the Devil just wanted to trick him, why would he trade the turkey for gold or shiny things (they would chop off his hands for thinking he's a thief anyway) if the didn't even share it with his family? Then, while regretting not sharing with God, he reasons God is the owner of absolutely everything, so why would he need anything from Macario? But finally, with Death he says, "when you showed up, I thought I wouldn't even get a chance to eat... when you show up there is no time for anything else... I figured if I gave some to you at least I'd get a chance to eat too". This is just marvellous and beautifully executed by Ignacio López Tarso, who plays Macario. Everything unfolds after this when Death offers to reward Macario and elements such as greed, inequality, religion, racism, classism, and then again death, become evident.

On the penultimate scene, Macario is found at Death's cavern (shot at the beautiful Grutas de Cacahuamilpa), which is filled up with candles representing people's life (the wax and length of the candle standing for the lifespan of the given person). When Macario spots his candle and realises how short it is, he begs Death to save it, and seeing his refusal, he decides to take it and run away with it. The final scene then goes back to the day Macario first talked to Death.

Overall, this is a fantastic and beautiful piece of cinema capturing diverse cultural, social and life elements, some of which are inherently timeless inescapable aspects of life, others which still permeate society today, and a few which make Mexican culture absolutely unique.

The VVitch

I've been wanting to watch The VVitch (2015) by Robert Eggers for a while; turns out that while it's not available for streaming in Australia (at least in the major streaming services), it is so in Mexico (and actually I find the Mexican Netflix catalogue to be in general way better than the one in Australia). I actually watched The Lighthouse (2019) first, his second big film, at a cinema in Melbourne right after it was released. I was extremely impressed with it and thought about it for a while; I've seen people label it (and The VVitch as well) as horror and, although for sure it has some elements that take it on that side, I feel like it falls on a category of its own.

Anyhow, I first heard about The VVitch from Robert Pattinson & Willem Dafoe in this interview. If you hadn't heard about it, you're surely wondering about the "VV" thing, as obviously "VVitch" is read as "Witch": the film is set on seventeenth-century New England, and supposedly this simply comes from a pamphlet from back in that day and the fact that then printing houses would use two V characters instead of a W, as that would save the need for the W typeface. In a nutshell, I'd say the film is a psychologycal-terror-thriller that interweaves the historical setting of the 1600's in New England with the popular tales carrying supernatural (involving witches, obviously) elements related to the religious fanaticism that was widespread back then. Robert Eggers has now a fame of doing his research and giving films a unique touch, historically accurate in quite many aspects while evidently creating a world of its own; when I saw The Lighthouse I was impressed with the dialogues, specially those by Willem Dafoe, and this similarly happens with The VVitch, where historically accurate rather means accurate according to the tales from that time (I'd recommend looking up the little references some of the scenes or the whole film make - the ones involving the baby, the goat, the Caleb kid, the raven, etc).

This one's definitely one to watch and one I'll be keeping as my favourite films.