NOVEMBER 9 — As someone who thinks of himself as a bit of a cinephile, watching films in the cinema is still the way to go, no matter how convenient it may be to stream films from the comforts of your own home.
And as a cinephile, there’s no greater satisfaction than to be able to watch the latest film from your favourite auteurs in a cinema in your home country.
I used to make trips to Singapore just to catch the latest films from some of my favourite directors, usually at the Singapore International Film Festival, which cherry picks some of the finest films from film festivals all across the globe.
With the exception of names like Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino and maybe Wes Anderson, whose films often grace Malaysian cinemas because their names are big enough to inspire confidence in local film distributors to bring in their latest films, it’s quite a rarity to be able to see auteur films (films directed by a director who has a distinctive style, personal vision and control over their work, thereby making him/her the ‘author’ of their films) in Malaysian cinemas, due the often very niche nature of the films.
However, if you’ve been paying attention, the past few weeks have seen quite a few auteur films quietly opening in local cinemas to very little fanfare.
Some of these are still playing in a few screens over here, so give these a go if you’re a fan of these auteurs.
No Other Choice
There must be something going on with capitalism in South Korea right now when we got not one, but two satires on capitalism from two of the nation’s leading auteurs this year.
Oscar winner Bong Joon-ho (of Parasite and Memories of Murder fame) delivered the first blow with his Hollywood flick Mickey 17 earlier this year and now Park Chan-wook (of Oldboy and Decision To Leave fame) chips in with his darkly funny latest film No Other Choice.
Korean star Lee Byung-hun has a ball playing against type as breadwinner You Man-su, who was ruthlessly laid off by his company (where he has worked for 25 years) and has a really tough time trying to get another job in the same field as a paper manufacturing specialist.
Man-su then slowly realises that, just as his former company has “no other choice” but to retrench him, he must make his prospective new employers feel that there is “no other choice” but to hire him, and to do so he must eliminate the other candidates, in the most literal sense.
The resulting film sits somewhere between a jet-black niche comedy and a crowd pleasing one, which makes No Other Choice not exactly one of Chan-wook’s best films, but a cracking good time nonetheless.
Siapa Dia
South-east Asian cinephiles should know who Garin Nugroho is, who is as important to Indonesian cinema as U-Wei Haji Saari is to Malaysian cinema.
With classics like Cinta Dalam Sepotong Roti, Daun Di Atas Bantal and Opera Jawa in his oeuvre, I will always look forward to anything new from him and Siapa Dia, a musical of sorts with Indonesian star Nicholas Saputra playing four characters across four eras in Indonesian history, is something I wouldn’t want to miss.
And to somehow be able to see this in a Malaysian cinema, is something that I did not expect at all!
Nicholas plays a star actor/director named Layar, who feels burnt out by the weight of expectations on him and decides to return to his hometown to find inspiration.
He finds it in an old suitcase which contains letters written by his father, grandfather, all the way up to his great, great grandfather.
From these letters he finds his family’s connections to various important moments in Indonesian history, from the colonial era all the way up to the New Order of the 1980s.
Garin has always had a theatrical side to his visuals, as can be witnessed in Opera Jawa, and there’s a lot of this in the musical sequences, but as someone who appreciates musicals, especially old ones from right after the silent movie era, Siapa Dia is a wonderful triumph.
The songs, mostly pop classics from each era, just bring up all sorts of memories and if you’re familiar with Indonesian history, the little references made in each era represented will probably make your blood boil.
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson is an auteur big enough to be able to command big budgets for his films, most probably thanks to his early success with films like Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood.
Lately, despite critical acclaim for films like The Master and Phantom Thread, some previously hardcore PTA fans probably felt that he’d lost his way a bit with his more meandering films like Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza, which I loved a lot actually.
Well, you won’t get that with his latest film, One Battle After Another, which is as close to an all-out action film that we’ll ever get from PTA.
The film focuses on Bob Ferguson (a wonderful Leonardo DiCaprio), a former revolutionary who’s now forced into hiding to raise his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) after her mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (a powerhouse performance from Teyana Taylor) leaves them.
Bob and Perfidia were members of a group called French 75, and after 16 years in hiding, the authorities, led by Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (an unbelievably absurd performance from Sean Penn) are hot on their tail, and they are now forced to undergo one battle after another in order to survive.
There is a lot to unpack in this one, with PTA clever enough not to even properly name the organisations involved in this one, but make us connect the dots to their real world equivalents ourselves, and because this is a fast paced three-hour ride of almost non-stop action, you’ll probably need to unpack all of this after watching the movie, or better still, during a second viewing.
An action film that’s also a cinematic masterpiece? Bring it on!
