Three … Extremes
To celebrate Halloween, saw Three … Extremes this weekend. It consists of three short horror films by three Asian directors (Fruit Chan, Chanwook Park, and Takashi Miike) in one package.
The first of the three is Fruit Chan’s Dumplings. An aging HK actress finds that her husband is losing interest in her. To restore her former beauty, the actress goes to see Aunt Mei — a mainland immigrant whose homemade dumplings are reputed to make womens’ skin as smooth and taut as in their youth. And then, several meals later, the actress discovers Aunt Mei’s special ingredient. At first she is repulsed, but her desire for beauty triumph over her morals and squeamishness. She wants Aunt Mei to prepare some extra-powerful dumplings to accelerate the treatment… In fact, the actress is prepared to go to quite extreme measures to restore her complexion. Very funny, also perverse and disgusting but in a good way. You will never look at dumplings (or at Aunt Mei’s special ingredient) the same way again.
The second was Park’s Cut. The film starts with a young film director working on a vampire flick. It seems that he is a man who has everything — wealth, fame, an expensive car, an enormous house, a beautiful pianist wife. And then a psychopath captures the director, the wife, and a random girl the psychopath picked up on the street. The madman is chopping off the wife’s piano fingers, one every five minutes. He promises to stop the cutting if the husband murders the girl. The film has excellent cinematography, great acting, all sorts of arthouse features. It is an exquisite psychological portrayal of a man whose world comes crashing down in something like 20 minutes — a sort-of modern-day Job. That being said, I found the film completely unwatchable, and almost wanted to leave the theater. Generally, I do not mind violent movies. I like Miike; I like Tarantino (with the exception of Reservoir Dogs). However, I cannot tolerate ultraviolence — sadistic violence for the pure sake of giving the victim pain, especially when a brilliant director is filming the victim. I can’t watch Clockwork Orange and much of Reservoir Dogs. I can’t watch Cut. I recognize that it is a beautiful, well-made film — but it is not for me.
And the third was Miike’s Box. Unlike the others, this is very abstract, very arty, mostly consisting of dream sequences and flashbacks. There is almost no blood. The story (as far as I can make out) is about Kyoko, a novelist. When she was a child, Kyoko performed as a gymnast in a circus show with her twin sister Shoko; the highlight of the show was the two little girls fitting themselves into two small boxes. But there was a bit of sibling rivalry, and Shoko ended up very unpleasantly dead. Now, she (along with Shoko and Kyoko’s creepy boss (or stepfather?)) haunts Kyoko’s dreams. Oh, and there is a very strong (but tastefully portrayed) hint of pedophilia — can’t make a movie nowadays without adding something disturbing to it. Altough it is the most abstract, I would say that Box is the only film out of the three that will genuinely give me nightmares.