NYAFF 2011: Critic's Notebook
by Steve Dollar 
No moviegoing experience in America can top the
New York Asian Film Festival. Behind its rather placid and matter-of-fact name, it is a multiple-personality-disordered cyborg ninja assassin that shoots lightning bolts out of its rotating nipples as it kickboxes to pixel dust the suffocating walls of cinematic conformity. Then it has sex with everybody. Okay, not exactly. Although last year, when the decade-old fest made its debut at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's august Walter Reade Theater, the Japanese action babe (and former pornographic video star) Asami revealed in an audience Q&A that she had enjoyed 1,000 sex partners, but that none of them were animals. She, like everyone else onstage, including the festival organizers, was wearing a
fundoshi?the diaper-like garment favored by sumo wrestlers. It was as if a half-century of high-minded genuflection at the celluloid pantheon just got thrown out of a 77th floor window. Have you ever seen Martin Scorsese parade around half-naked through the aisles in a punch-drunk conga line? I think not.
That mandate for?how to put it??audience engagement has been with the festival since its humble origins in 2002. And, remarkably, NYAFF's maverick spirit not only survived the move uptown, the summer marathon kicks off again today with one of its strongest lineups ever.
There's more of a retrospective tone this year, which seems appropriate for the decade mark. Hong Kong's Tsui Hark, one of the architects of the Chinese New Wave that began in the 1980s, is a guest of honor, screening his latest?the visually stunning return-to-form
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame?and greeting fans at ?greatest-hits? revivals of gravity-defying Wu Xia epics, including the game-changing
Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and the samurai masterpiece
The Blade (1995). Yet, of equally strong intesest is the mortal combat in South Korean director Ryoo Seung-Wan's contemporary and ruthlessly earthbound thrillers, which highlight an impressive survey of recent South Korean films.
Ryoo's 2010
The Unjust finds the director of
City of Violence (also screening) tempering his flair for full-tilt boogie in a tense, sinew-snapping war of wills that, in classic noir fashion, pits one incredibly screwed up character against a blatantly evil and self-interested antagonist. The conflict escalates, with endless collateral damage, amid a complex backdrop of deadly ambition, murder and lies. The deeply flawed, putative hero cop Capt. Choi (Hwang Jung-min) becomes a target for the slick, puppet-master prosecutor Joo Yang (Ryoo Seung-bum), after he acts on orders to find a fall guy to arrest for a series of schoolgirl killings. The tangled overlay of institutional moral rot, organized crime influence and triple-crossed deceptions illustrates a culture of corruption that infects anyone who comes into contact with it. There's enough detail crammed into two hours to drive a mini-series, or justify multiple viewings to stay on top of everything. But Ryoo's relentless, steamroller pace shows no compassion. His urban anatomy of low-life scum and high-powered rogues playing mind games while the innocent die may be chilly and despairing, but every five minutes something so brutal and shocking happens that you forget all that existential brooding and gasp for air. And as you recalibrate, the camera pulls back to an omniscent perspective, isolating individuals lost in a psychic limbo, their guts eating them alive.
Even so, the film is almost a humanist anthem compared to Jang Cheol-soo's
Bedevilled. This female revenge freakout is likely the harshest piece of work screening this year. Actress Ji Sung-won plays a woman whose return from the big city to the remote island of her birth precipitates an epic bloodletting when her long-abused childhood friend (Seo Young-hee) finally snaps and her nostalgic vacation becomes a hayseed apocalypse. Elements of everything from
Thelma and Louise to
Deliverance to
I Spit on Your Grave have been noted, and when the violence gets going, it's as visceral and fucked-up as anything ever produced by Korean cinema (not known for pussyfooting when a hammer or a hatchet is handy). If the extended set-up, which lays on the degradation, doesn't snuff your life-affirming spirit, the climactic assaults will really screw with your head. Love it or hate it, though, the film represents an amazing commitment from Seo, who won a slew of best actress awards for her feverishly demented performance, stoked by the film's tone of aggravated realism.
The fantastic also intrudes into daily life.
Haunters is a bizarro-world hero flick in which an ordinary dude takes on a psychotic mutant with laser-beam eyes that turn people into hapless robot tools of his will. It's the directorial debut of Kim Min-Suk (screenwriter of
The Good, The Bad and the Weird), and makes for a genuinely thrilling comic book adventure?the kind of popcorn movie that's a trademark of the fest. So, too, are gleeful adult entertainments like
Foxy Festival, in which hapless robot tools come in very handy for its female principals. In director's Lee Hae-Young ensemble sex comedy, the gals just want to get their groove on. A schoolgirl has an age-inappropriate crush on a shaggy (and perhaps virginal) street vendor, who prefers the comfort of a sex doll. Her teacher has a sexually unsatisfying relationship with a cop whose macho posturing is deflated when he discovers her vibrator. And her mother, a sedate seamstress, accidentally unleashes an inner desire to become a dominatrix after an unexpected encounter with the owner of a neighboring hardware store, who has a puppy-boy fetish. The frisky, absurdist tone is the sort you might more readily expect from a Japanese film (see the manic, candy-colored
Milocrorze: A Love Story, among a sprawling assortment those, featured in the festival and its kissing cousin, Japan Cuts, the annual survey of new Japanese film hosted by Japan Society). And, indeed, it goes to certain places a galaxy distant from a Jennifer Aniston rom-com, such as a scene where a heartsick housewife lovingly traces a finger across a skidmark in her lover's underwear while weeping in the laundry room. It's a cute, pervy trifle, but a refreshing reminder that it's not all psychosis and bloody hammers. And, as ever with the New York Asian Film Festival, there's a happy ending.
[The New York Asian Film Festival runs through July 14 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Japan Society. More info here, here and here.] 
Posted by ahillis at July 1, 2011 2:08 PM
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