Yeojaneun namjaui miraeda - (Woman is the future of man)

Director: Sang-soo Hong

Somehow this film ended up on top of my queue and I was kind of surprised to see Martin Scorcese's two minute introductory clip for this film in the DVD. I am not a big fan of Martin Scorsese. I consider his movies a stopover in one's journey in the cinema to the exciting territories of Tarkovskys, Antonionis and Kar-Wais of the world. He hangs onto characters and as Ted Goransson so sharply pointed out, latches his camera-eye to character's coat tails. This makes him more of a movie murderer of so many cinematic possibilities than a real movie director. You get kicked around with a Taxi Driver or be made to hang out with a wannabe gangster who is trying awkwardly to keep his cool when his partner shoots the waiter. For sure, there are some great films which are popular too like the great character essay in Raging Bull or the Catholic guilt-fest in Mean Streets and infact two of his unknown films: Afterhours and We don't live here anymore are so off the track, the regular Marty track, that they seem to exist in a vacuum. So, his auteur-ship came in front of the camera and introduced this film, I was pleasantly surprised and at the same time it unnerved me to see him making grand statements about this film. As usual, he went straight to what he thought best about this film which was in his opinion those great "characters" but then he said it was like peeling an orange (a metaphor he borrowed from someone) and finding layers of reality underneath.

The film plunges us in a simple situation of two friends meeting up after a long time and catching up on a few beers and shots of Korean rice liquor. There are flashbacks interspersed in-between the scene that neatly complements the dialogue: the half-spoken word-truths, the gestures and the uneasiness of two old friends trying to seek out connections and old memories. This is Rohmer territory but it is framed in a different way. That is where the film has a major problem. It relies on the secrets these three friends (film has only three characters: a girl who had been involved with two friends at different points in the past) hold back from each other and memories that they share to create a drama. Naturally, Martin Scorsese was raving about it: Characters' shared reality charged with smart dialogue that carried the secrets of the past and viewer as God in the know of everything. But, it looked like watching a play than a movie. It didn't take me anywhere viscerally, it kept a safe distance from exploring the emotional flux in between the characters, lest we, as viewers, get burnt. The result is a film which is boring and a little ridiculous.

Last night

So, last night I made an exception to my self-imposed ban on going to the bar that kicked me out because a friend of mine came to visit from South Carolina and I didn't want to bore him with all the crap of what, when, why. On the side, I ran into two Russian and an Irish grad student at the bar. New things that I found out:

1 - Pushkin Square in Moscow is a great spot to rendezvous with your dates.
2 - Dubh in Irish is pronounced as Dove which means Black.
3 - Russians have three names: first, middle and last. The middle name is father's name that ends with 'vich'. For example, Mikhail's son will bear the second name as Mikhailivich.
4 - Pushkin was half black because his folks came from South Africa. He had curly hair, supposedly a dead giveaway of having mixed blood in Russia.
5 - Bodolov is a good contemporary russian novelist.
6 - Russia routinely has ups and downs every hundred years or so.
7 - Irish have a particular name for their language which I forgot.
8 - 'Langer' is penis in Russian (or was it Celtic?) where in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu it's the food that's cooked in the Temple or Gurdwara's kitchen.
9 - Absurdistan could be an alternate name for Russia although I thought it suited Pakistan better. I am definitely going to read the book within next six months.
10 - A Russian is well-entitled at the bar to order a son of James when he actually wants a shot of Jameson. That shot made me throw up in the kitchen sink later that night.

A beautiful excerpt from Spengler's "Cherry blossoms, the beautiful and the good"

"It is a common observation that a sense of the natural, or the spontaneous, uniquely characterizes Japanese art: the unpredictable patterns of ash glaze in ceramics, the freedom of calligraphy, the impressionistic representation in painting, the allusiveness of poetry. Nature is cruel as well as generous, but always beautiful, and this balance and tension pervades the Japanese esthetics that Professor Fujiwara associates with samurai ethics. If nature is as cruel as it is spontaneous, then men also may be spontaneously cruel.

The comparison may seem peculiar, but the Japanese in a way resemble the Jews in their passion to bring something of the eternal into every detail of everyday life. As Franz Rosenzweig put it, the myriad laws regulating Jewish prayer, diet, marital relations, and so forth all stem from a single motive, to import eternity into daily life. As Fujiwara avers, that is what the Japanese do by making every aspect of life into a work of art. But the contrast is as sharp as the parallel. Jewish food generally is unappetizing as well as visually unappealing, as opposed to Japan's magnificent national cuisine; Jewish manners are brusque, while Japan has made an art form of courtesy; and no aspect of Jewish religious life is concerned with visual beauty in any way at all. "

Asia Times
Spengler