The Bacchus Lady
(directed by E J-yong)
She seems innocent
enough, the old lady sitting in a doctor's office at the start of The
Bacchus Lady, but the pointedly named So-young (Youn Yuh-jung) has an
unconventional trade, which has led to her embarrassing medical
complaint. “The fucker. I should have made him wear a condom,”
she complains as the doctor confirms her fear of gonorrhoea. The Bacchus
Lady initially looks set to take a comic approach to its subject
matter, finding awkward laughs in the incongruity of a 65 year-old
prostitute, who subsequently finds herself being forced to take care
of a young child, but writer-director E J-yong has more serious
things on his mind. “South Korea has the 11th biggest economy in
the world but the highest senior poverty rate among OECD countries,”
a journalist tells So-young early in the film, and the plight of
Korea's elderly citizens is a theme that is explored with piercing
insight here. The hundreds of women who patrol Seoul's Jongno Park
making eyes at the men who wander by are a sad emblem of a society
that fails to take care of its ageing population, and in many ways
So-young is an outcast, just like the transgender cabaret singer (An
A-zu) and the one-legged artist (Yoon Kye-sang) with whom she forms a
kind of makeshift family.
This might be a film
concerned with tackling a social issue, but E J-yong does so through
character and incident rather than making his film a polemic. He
takes a non-judgemental approach to his characters; most notably,
when So-young is asked to perform one last service for the elderly
men she has been in service to her entire adult life. The tonal
shifts that occur during the course of The Bacchus Lady might have
been whiplash-inducing in less confident hands, but the film's balance
of sharp humour and piercing emotional depth is a high-wire act that
never falters. Much of this is down to the astonishing central
performance from Youn Yuh-jung, who frequently communicates her
character's internal turmoil, her memories and regrets, without even
saying a word, as in one the film's most resonant moments, when
So-young stands on a street corner at night and watches a stooped old
woman pushing a cart full of trash past her, her gaze speaking
volumes about their respective positions in life. “Don't call me
Granny. My vagina is still young,” she snaps at one man early in
the film, but that combative vitality seeps out of her over the
course of the narrative, being replaced by a weariness as the weight
of her actions and a lifetime of hardship catches up with her. It's a
performance that allows us to feel like we know this selfless,
unfortunate character, and invites us to form a bond with her that
makes the starkness of the film's final scenes so devastating.
A Woman's Life
(directed by Stéphane Brizé)
A Woman's Life is the
new film from Stéphane Brizé, a French director whose impressive
but unassuming films had largely flown under the radar until Vincent
Lindon's performance in The Measure of a Man earned him the Best
Actor award at Cannes in 2015. Brizé's latest film is an adaptation
of Guy de Maupassant's first novel Une vie, and as the book covers
almost three decades in the life of its central character, Brizé
and his frequent co-writer Florence Vignon have taken an elliptical
approach to telling the story. The film is constructed of short, disconnected scenes that give us a brief glimpse of how Jeanne (Judith
Chemla) lives, with the early scenes in particular – such as Jeanne
tending the garden with her father (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) or being
bathed by the family's maid (Nina Meurisse) possessing a touching
intimacy. These ellipses can also carry a powerful emotional charge.
When Jeanne catches her husband (Swann Arlaud) in bed with another
women, the moment is skipped over by Brizé's editor Anne Klotz –
we just see the buildup as she opens the bedroom door and then cut
straight to her running from her husband is dismay at his betrayal.
Likewise, a harsh cut to the ultimate consequences of his serial
infidelity is chilling.
Antoine Héberlé's
handheld camerawork can be aggravating with its jerky misframing, but
he also uses the Academy ratio to find some striking compositions,
and at its best, A Woman's Life is nimble and perceptive. There's a
lovely moment later in the film when Jeanne discovers her late
mother's secret stash of love letters, opening a window on a whole
life that she never knew existed, but these moments grow more scarce
as Brizé's deft touch seems to desert him in the film's second half.
Jeanne faces a catalogue of misfortune, from family bereavement to
the financial strain of supporting her feckless son, and a bleak
torpor settles on the film as the fleeting joys of previous years
become a distant memory. Jeanne's whole world often seems to be
crumbling around her, as she sits in her once-grand home, now hearing
the rainwater dribble in through the cracks in the roof and shivering
against the cold. The funereal pacing of this section of this film
eventually takes its toll, though, and while Chemla works hard in the
lead role, the script doesn't afford her much in the way of
development or the means to express an inner life, which makes it hard to
stick with her as she stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the dire state of her
affairs. It's easy to see what Brizé was aiming for with A Woman's
Life, but the one-note nature of the film's storytelling makes it
feel too often like a dreary slog.
Ma' Rosa (directed by
Brillante Mendoza)
Jaclyn Jose was the
surprise winner of the Best Actress award at Cannes for her turn in
the latest film from Brillante Mendoza, and she's certainly the
Ma' Rosa's trump card, giving a fierce and affecting performance as the
matriarch trying to hold her drug-dealing family together under
immense police pressure. Rosa and her husband Nestor (Julio Diaz) run
a small grocery store in a poor district of Manila, but their real
income lies in the distribution of crystal meth, which leads to them
both being detained in the police station overnight after a raid.
They try to plea their way out of their predicament, but the police
are after a bigger score, and it soon becomes clear that a specific
amount of money will satisfy the cops, and they don't care where it
comes from. Mendoza flips the script here by making the drug dealers
the sympathetic protagonists against a corrupt police force and, it
is implied, a corrupt society.
Mendoza and his
screenwriter Troy Espiritu set the film up efficiently and skilfully.
The raid on the family's store has a terrifying immediacy, captured
by the director's handheld digital cameras, and while the film is
often ugly to look at, it does at its best evoke the dangerous
vibrancy of rainswept Manila streets at night. The threat is tangible
inside the police station too, where the officers are laid-back and
jovial until the time comes to intimidate Rosa and her husband, or
the supplier whom they are forced to give up. But the air goes out of
the picture when the focus shifts away from Rosa, which is a
surprising move – despite the acting plaudits she received in Cannes, she's
offscreen for a large chunk of Ma' Rosa. Instead, the story is picked
up by her children, who are forced to try and raise the cash required
to free their parents by any means possible. They sell their
possessions and one sells his body, but the limited performances of
the younger actors and the lack of context Mendoza provides (is this
the first time he's had sex for cash? He doesn't seem particularly
perturbed by the idea) ensures this section of the film lacks tension
and direction. Only towards the very end, when Rosa drives the
narrative once more, does Ma' Rosa spark again. The final close-up of
her sweat-drenched face – tired, anxious, defiant – makes you
wish Mendoza had trusted it more.
Zoology (directed by
Ivan Tverdovskiy)
A tall tale about a
long tail, Zoology is an offbeat fable about the way our differences
define us, and the way people treat those who refuse to conform,
particularly potent message in contemporary Russia. At the start of
Ivan Tverdovskiy's film, Natasha (Natalya Pavlenkova) is unpopular
and unhappy, cruelly mocked – both in and out of earshot – by her
colleagues at the zoo for being a dowdy, introverted middle-aged
woman with no prospects. Everything swiftly and
inexplicably changes for Natasha when she collapses at work and
complains of a pain in her lower back. The next day she visits her
doctor, and he seems remarkably unflappable in the face of the fleshy
tail that has suddenly materialised at the base of her spine, sending
her for an x-ray where she forms an unlikely bond with a hunky
radiologist (Dmitri Groshev). Soon the erstwhile wallflower is
getting a new haircut, wearing fashionable clothes, drinking, dancing
and being emboldened rather than oppressed by the secret that she has
hidden under her skirt.
It's fun to see Natasha
come out of her shell, particularly as Pavlenkova is such a delightful screen presence, her face bearing an impish grin as she overhears the town
gossips spreading rumours about a cursed woman in the vicinity, but
it doesn't take long for the tide to turn. Her boss rounds on her for
the way she now dresses and acts at work, her accidental revelation
of her appendage at a club causes mass panic, and we suspect her new
boyfriend's attraction may be a case of fetishisation rather than
love. That final point is made in a startling scene towards the end
of the film, but at other times Tverdovskiy seems uncertain of where
he wants to take his unusual premise. The film touches on notions of
religion and new age mysticism in sequences that are funny but don't
have much evident purpose, and ultimately the meaning of it all feels
frustratingly out of reach, with a sense of inevitability hovering
over the film's climactic image.
