The New Eastern Standard

(2 of 2)

Cromartie High School, the first of five Japanese NYAFF movies I saw, is director Yudai Yamaguchi’s take on a teen delinquent genre that goes back at least to the 1955 Blackboard Jungle. The setting: a high school with such a rotten history that it has been destroyed (and rebuilt) six times. Seven may be the charm, since one of the students is a decent kid: our hero, Kamiyama (dishy Takamasa Suga). In the first reel, he writes a letter home: "Oh, mom I’m a bit confused. Everyone looks like a yakuza." That’s not quite fair to the rain-gutter coalition on view at CHS. There’s gorilla sitting at one classroom desk, and a prancing tough guy called the Queen (Freddie Mercury with Toshiro Mifune’s menace), and a cigarette-puffing robot in a pink shirt. The entire group sends up fumes like an Iraqi oil factory, and when Kamiyama presses them to renounce smoking, they protest: "Our lips would be lonely… And our fingers too." You’ll find no girls in Cromartie, but plenty of aliens. In a way, the movie is a throwback to the hip, infantile tastes of Subway’s youthful days. Bless it, and them.

Linda, Linda, Linda is another high-school drama, 180 degrees from Cromartie. Similar to, but not nearly so engaging as, the Disney TV-movie hit High School Musical, this one is an earnest, virtually all-girl story about a quartet who hope to win their year-end talent competition with a rendition of the Blue Hearts’ 80s hit song that is this movie’s title. The proceedings, under Nobuhiro Yamashita’s sluggish direction, are predictable and hardly worth noting — except for that song, simple and simply irresistible, which neither meditation nor surgery has been able to remove from my head since I saw the movie last year at the Toronto Film Festival. Everybody: "Linda, Linda! Linda Linda Lin-da-ah-ah!"

Always, directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is the prize-winner; it copped the Best Picture award at last year’s Japanese version of the Oscars. It’s set in Tokyo in the 1930s, and for a while made me nostalgic for a period I didn’t live through in a country I’ve never visited. But as 2hrs.13mins. of clichés piled up — the adorable orphan, the Santa Claus, the self-doubting artist, the tearful partings and tearier reunions — I decided I was better off where I was.

Funky Forest — The First Contact is an example of that bizarre, and to me impenetrable, oxymoron: Japanese comedy. Watching this two-and-a-half-hour selection of sketches from a kids’ TV show, I felt like a scientist monitoring extraterrestrial signals. What do they mean to the people they’re made for? And is anyone, anywhere, laughing? I think I understand the premise of the sketch about the high-school girl at a tennis lesson who gets a bloodsucker stuck to her arm. It gradually emerges, and we see it’s a small homunculus named Yamada (as in "Ya mada’s so ugly, she looks like a bloodsucker"). But the bit about a girl asked by a guy in a yellow fur suit to pull on his umbilical cord… on that one I was with the girl, who says, "Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest." The prankster and his two cohorts shrugs off her bafflement by explaining, "Some days people laugh, some days they don’t. Today’s skit was adult-oriented."

Shinobi is a Romeo-and-Juliet martial-arts film, much influenced by the Chinese hits Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. But the emphasis here is on spooky visual effects. One black-clad warrior has inky tentacles slithering out of his long sleeves, with stringy hair to match. Magic makes the forest’s leaves swarm like hornets around an adversary. Worms swarm in the blood of a chest wound. Our heroine cries tears of blood, and in one battle our hero kills 26 ninjas, the carnage backlit by a CGIgantic moon. I saw the movie without subtitles, but that didn’t seem to matter. Sorcery knows no language.

Art of the Devil 2, from Thailand, is a horror movie so gruesome that two of the three DVD machines I tried to play it on rejected it; they simply refused to host this splatter-fest of mutilation. A fisherman catches a strange creature and gets a hook under his skin. Seeking medical help from a voodoo mistress, he screams in agony as fish hooks emerge from his body: his hands, chest, eyes! More elaborate mayhem ensues, involving a chic-looking teacher and her careless students. (What Cromartie High School does for boys, and Linda, Linda, Linda for girls, this one does, in suppurating spades, for teachers.) I confess I didn’t see it all of Devil 2 — not from squeamishness, but because the disk provided to me had the name of the production company printed in large letters across the image.

Gangster, from Malaysian director Badi Hj. Azmi, is a standard exercise in macho auto-eroticism, but with extra horsepower. Malaysian punks race their souped-up cars on the public highways of the country’s capital — sort of The Fast and the Kuala Lumpurious. But it also interweaves three stories, making it a Crash with lots more fender-benders, and all in 79 zippy minutes. There’s also a scene in which a kidnapper rapes a sweet Muslim wife while her child’s in the room. No fatwas, please.

Magicians, from South Korea’s Song Il-gon, is a 95-min. film, shifting from past to present, interior to outdoors, and achieved in one continuous take. (Or did I spot a cheating black spot at 48 minutes?) The story is about love, male bonding, regret and pop music, but the camera stunt is the main reason to stick around. And if you want a feature-length movie done in one exhilaratingly elaborate take, get Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark.

Duelist, also known as Detective, is South Korean director Lee Myung-se’s first film since his international hit Nowhere to Hide. It was an expensive flop at home, and I think I can see why. But it has a ravishing physical beauty well worth attending to.

The movie is about Namsoon (Ha Ji-won), a woman detective on the tail of a preternatural rogue whom she falls in a kind of love with but is destined to battle at the end. This sweet-faced sleuth both uses her cuteness and fights against it. Facing down one tough guy, she poses the rhetorical question: "Want a taste of a bitch who’s really lost her mind?" Surrounded by a cast of overactors (who provide way too much burly comic relief for my taste), Namsoon anchors a movie that straddles genres. Think of a Raymond Chandler yarn reimagined by Zhang Yimou and shot by — well, like nobody but Lee.

A filmmaker can do two cool things with genre conventions: honor them or subvert them. He can praise or bury them. Duelist tries both. It is simultaneously an evocation and an interment of the martial arts film. Lee’s cunning management of crowds and his spectacular use of camera and setting lend to this live-action film the aesthetics of anime. At times the film stops in wonder at its own devices. Which is a shame, since Duelist is so smart and pretty, it doesn’t to tell us how much it admires itself. The movie’s preening is demeaning.

But to say that is to sell the film short. Duelist’s hyper-romantic impulses and lush symphonic music, plus the backlighting, the stately swordplay, the fat snowflakes, not to mention more slo-mo shots than in a Wong Kar-wai retrospective — all these effects heroicize the enterprise, making it something to gaze upon but not enter into. Indeed, one doesn’t watch Duelist so much as window-shop for fabulous cinematic fashions. Its art direction and lovely mannequins take film style to the outré limits.

Not every movie has to lure viewers into the child’s make-believe of storytelling; it can be an object apart from, and above, the typical narrative-movie experience. That is one of the lessons of an exemplary showcase like the NYAFF. So three, four, five cheers for a festival that celebrates the foreignness — the bizarre, excessive, utterly other-ness — of foreign films.