Day Nine at the FFM: Saturday, September 2, 2006

Two feature films today.

Red Whale & White Snake. Yoshiko Senbon. Japan. 102 mins. In Japanese with English subtitles. Sort of a Japanese Joy Luck Club…made by a 78 year old self-described “rookie” director who’s made television dramas since the early 1950’s. Since her retirement from TV in 1999, she became an independent filmmaker. Five generations of Japanese women happen to meet in an old house in Tateyama. The grandmother, slowly losing her memory, is being taken by her youngest granddaughter from Tokyo to live with her son and daughter-in-law. The detour takes her to her childhood home, where she struggles to remember a promise made to a military officer friend of hers during the war. The granddaughter, a university graduate with ambitions of being a music producer, has her own issues with a boyfriend. The current owner of the old house wants to rip it down, as it reminds her too much of her husband who left her. Her barely pubescent daughter also has memories of her dad. And then there’s the previous tenant, the stock in trade comic character, a middle-aged alcoholic who hustles vitamin and engery supplements at inflated prices, who's on the lam from her customers, and her husband. Everyone wants to remember their past and have someone remember us, and the only way we have to do so is to tell stories, as the director told us before the screening. In a quiet way, everyone’s story gets told, and every story has a positive outlook (more or less). We liked it a lot more than the previous film (Midnight Sun), simply because it didn’t try to force your sympathy under emotional torture. Although, there’s still the clichéd musical score announcing poignant moments that seems to inhabit most Japanese films, albeit in this case, it was acoustical guitar, not violins (or worse, synthesizer). Also, the story developed quickly enough (with five main characters) that the 102 minutes went by at a nice clip. Nice country scenery in the southern part of Japan.

Qué tan Lejos (How Much Further?). Tania Hermida. Ecuador. 92 mins. In Spanish with English subtitles. Ms. Hermida’s first feature length film is a quirky, comedic take on learning that what’s in front of you doesn’t always match up with what your expectations, whether it’s a country, a boyfriend, or one’s life. A gentle road movie about two twenty-something women searching for an Ecuador and a life that isn’t really there. Esperanza is a tourist from Barcelona looking for a postcard reality, and is confronted with in-your-face ripoff taxi drivers, national strikes, and generally, everything but what she expected. Tristeza is a cynical university student on a mission to prevent her supposed boyfriend from marrying a village girl in his hometown of Cuenca. But the trip from Quito to Cuenca turns out to have more than its share of diversions and characters, and both women start to see beyond their initial assumptions. Tristeza starts out being the cocky, snide local, laughing at all of Esperanza’s dumb tourist ideas and problems, but soon enough, her cynicism are exposed for what they truly are – insecurity about where her life is going, and who it is going to be with. Jesus ends up coming along for the ride, and helps out with some straight from the hip talk well – he’s bringing his grandmother’s ashes home to Cuenca. As the director said, the film is not your usual Latin-American film about drugs or social violence.