So we want films that challenge, engage, but don't waste the engagement on a trifle gasp. It's easy to unsettle, a murder or rape; the real challenge is what next? How do you open us up? This one's a great example, but you'll have to wait for the last scene.
A few things are first established before the crucial crime. A hit- and- run introduces random agency in a world where violence can swoop down from nowhere and wreck lives. The altercation with the broken car mirror is for us to understand that the savant boy is an unreliable narrator, susceptible to stories. And his relationship with the mother is portrayed to teeter between the merely awkward and the unacceptable, so that we first have to struggle with our own selves before we can empathize with either.
And then it becomes about us. How we are susceptible to stories, unreliable narrators of what we witness. How empathy is a matter of inheriting a story as though it was our own child in it, going on faith. Do we believe the guileless boy as his mother does? Do we trust that he remembers when he does? Our own visual testimony?
It is about us having to struggle to empathize. About us, having empathized, being uncertain of the judgement. This is a hard earned empathy, not Spielberg's mushy one where cute lost boys face obvious evil, evil here being the inability to even know about it.
— it's really vital to realize that the boy's original impression of the crucial scene is his own 'real' subsequent memory of it, the event having been reconfigured into view in just the way we first see it. It confuses because that is what he recalls having happened, he's not lying.
— the important discovery of the victim's cell phone leads to a story that trickles to the mother through three levels of narrators, the victim inside a (stoned) boy's memory being told to a third person. The phone itself is full of pictures of men, each one potentially the culprit.
— later in the film there is a reconstruction of the original scene of the murder, as the savant finally remembers a man in the house, and this man is later found and gives his own testimony. This is so good it's worthy of the photo reconstruction scene in Bladerunner.
— this recalling is marvelously framed through windows and unclean glass. At its most pure, the film is this glimpse through hazy glass at a troubled boy trying to remember, it's about moving walls around to create that space where something horrible happened.
— the film begins with an image of the mother, at that point simply she's just a middle-aged woman to us, inexplicably dancing in a field. In the end we know at what point in the story this takes place but the gesture remains wonderfully ambiguous.
Which brings me to the last scene. The whole film is meant to appeal to a broad audience, though it presents by no means simple and uncomplicated truths. But the last scene is one of the most striking I have seen.
Great cinema begins where drama and metaphor end, it's hard to describe what that next step is, in short we'd say transcendent. The context of narrative is always illusory, it is the opportunity for us to be aware in a certain sense. This is why it doesn't matter what's the answer to the mystery in Blowup, or why the hayloft barn ablaze in Zerkalo is not encountered as the result of any logical causation.
In the last scene we have that step beyond causation into ambiguous air. The mother has been sent off in a bus with other middle-aged people. She prickles her knee with her acupuncturist's needle, hitting that spot "that eases the heart". See what happens in the film. What is the urge that lifts everyone from their seat?
There's a lot of great Asian cinema I'm being exposed to lately, and that scene is the third most captivating in an Asian film of the decade I've seen, all three involving physical activity of some sort as transcendence, two of them dancing. Find my second favorite in Sharasojyu.
A few things are first established before the crucial crime. A hit- and- run introduces random agency in a world where violence can swoop down from nowhere and wreck lives. The altercation with the broken car mirror is for us to understand that the savant boy is an unreliable narrator, susceptible to stories. And his relationship with the mother is portrayed to teeter between the merely awkward and the unacceptable, so that we first have to struggle with our own selves before we can empathize with either.
And then it becomes about us. How we are susceptible to stories, unreliable narrators of what we witness. How empathy is a matter of inheriting a story as though it was our own child in it, going on faith. Do we believe the guileless boy as his mother does? Do we trust that he remembers when he does? Our own visual testimony?
It is about us having to struggle to empathize. About us, having empathized, being uncertain of the judgement. This is a hard earned empathy, not Spielberg's mushy one where cute lost boys face obvious evil, evil here being the inability to even know about it.
— it's really vital to realize that the boy's original impression of the crucial scene is his own 'real' subsequent memory of it, the event having been reconfigured into view in just the way we first see it. It confuses because that is what he recalls having happened, he's not lying.
— the important discovery of the victim's cell phone leads to a story that trickles to the mother through three levels of narrators, the victim inside a (stoned) boy's memory being told to a third person. The phone itself is full of pictures of men, each one potentially the culprit.
— later in the film there is a reconstruction of the original scene of the murder, as the savant finally remembers a man in the house, and this man is later found and gives his own testimony. This is so good it's worthy of the photo reconstruction scene in Bladerunner.
— this recalling is marvelously framed through windows and unclean glass. At its most pure, the film is this glimpse through hazy glass at a troubled boy trying to remember, it's about moving walls around to create that space where something horrible happened.
— the film begins with an image of the mother, at that point simply she's just a middle-aged woman to us, inexplicably dancing in a field. In the end we know at what point in the story this takes place but the gesture remains wonderfully ambiguous.
Which brings me to the last scene. The whole film is meant to appeal to a broad audience, though it presents by no means simple and uncomplicated truths. But the last scene is one of the most striking I have seen.
Great cinema begins where drama and metaphor end, it's hard to describe what that next step is, in short we'd say transcendent. The context of narrative is always illusory, it is the opportunity for us to be aware in a certain sense. This is why it doesn't matter what's the answer to the mystery in Blowup, or why the hayloft barn ablaze in Zerkalo is not encountered as the result of any logical causation.
In the last scene we have that step beyond causation into ambiguous air. The mother has been sent off in a bus with other middle-aged people. She prickles her knee with her acupuncturist's needle, hitting that spot "that eases the heart". See what happens in the film. What is the urge that lifts everyone from their seat?
There's a lot of great Asian cinema I'm being exposed to lately, and that scene is the third most captivating in an Asian film of the decade I've seen, all three involving physical activity of some sort as transcendence, two of them dancing. Find my second favorite in Sharasojyu.