The Curse of Frankenstein | Terence Fisher, 1957

The Curse of Frankenstein | Terence Fisher, 1957
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp | Rembrandt van Rijn, 1632

Dr. Victor Frankenstein contemplates the murder of a renowned intellectual in Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein. He has invited this man, a man with no living relatives, to harvest his brain for an experiment, and this murder will be the biggest step into moral depravity in the name of his creation. His plan is simple: lure the man to the top of the staircase in order to view the painting that hangs above it, then, once he is enraptured in the painting, push him through the banister to his death and make the whole thing look like a terrible accident.

The painting is Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, one of the Flemish artist's most celebrated works. The painting depicts several doctors surrounding a corpse as a man, presumably Tulp, teaches them about the tendons and muscles in the human arm. However, none of the doctors are looking at the body, and are instead staring at the pages of a large book just beyond it. The corpse also appears to have two right hands, a refraction of the human form rendered invisible to these doctors by their own studiousness. A murder is committed beneath this painting in the name of science by a man perilously blind to the reality of his creation, choosing instead to focus on the theoretical. It’s easy to become monstrous when you ignore humanity.

London Film Festival 2018 | Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

LFF 2018 | #3

“Sometimes I burn down greenhouses”. Five words that ignite Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, his first film in eight years, and set in motion a hazy, obsessive descent into chaos and paranoia. Based on a short story by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami and transplanted from Japan to the South Korean border city of Paju, Burning treads a similar if not identical path to the original text: Jong-su’s blossoming but casual relationship with Hae-mi, a pantomime student, is interrupted by the continued presence of the enigmatic Ben who, superficially at least, is her new lover. Soon after Ben tells Jong-su that he burns down greenhouses in his spare time, Hae-mi disappears without a trace. There are, of course, differences between Lee’s film and Murakami’s story besides the geographical switch. Jong-su is, here, a young graduate working odd jobs in the city while writing a novel in his spare time, whereas the equivalent character in the original text was a married, thirty-one year old author who becomes enthralled by Hae-mi but doesn’t have a history with her, as he does in the adaptation. In the story, her new boyfriend is younger than the narrator, but in Burning, the ages are reversed. Lee and co-writer Oh Jung-mi have also expanded Murakami’s text far beyond its original conclusion, keeping the elusive mystery at its heart in tact while digging a little further, opening new avenues that the short story carefully hinted at but never set out to explore — which is not to say Burning is any more conclusive or any less eerie than its source.

The most important of these changes is the switch to focus solely on young people. The dynamic of a married older man becoming jealous of a younger man’s imposition into a non-existent relationship with a young woman is not especially fertile ground, and Lee wisely avoids this in favour of grounding the conflict firmly in the rage felt by young people in Korea today, in the midst of a surge in youth unemployment. Jong-su has an education but no future prospects, taking on physical labour to earn a living: first making deliveries in the city, then caretaking his absent father’s ailing farm in the nearby countryside, where the sounds of North Korean propaganda broadcasts can be heard across the border. He meets Hae-mi, a girl he knew at school but doesn’t recognise anymore, herself estranged from her family due to credit card debts, and the two embark upon a fleeting romance. He gives her a pink digital watch that he wins in a raffle. They have sex in her tiny apartment, a room only ever illuminated briefly when the sunlight bounces fortuitously off a tower that looms large through the window. She goes on a trip to Africa and asks him to feed her cat until she returns. He does, but when she returns, she does so with Ben, a mysteriously moneyed man and the only Korean she met in Africa, only slightly older than the two of them but evidently more financially successful. He has a huge apartment in a plush building in the middle of the city, and he drives a charcoal-grey Porsche 911 Carrera. Ben’s sudden entrance, and his usurping of a fledgeling relationship, sparks a simmering jealousy within Jong-su, compounded by Hae-mi’s insistence on keeping both men in her life. And, so, the trio spend odd, protracted time together. They eat, drink, go to clubs, smoke. Jong-su compares Ben to Jay Gatsby and asks Hae-mi how much older he is than him, while Ben doesn’t say very much at all. He has everything Jong-su could ever want, but he doesn’t seem to do anything to earn it: when asked, Ben describes his work as “play”. But sometimes he burns down greenhouses. Roughly one every two months, he tells Jong-su, and he’s planning on burning down another one nearby.

Lee Chang-dong, a novelist before he turned to filmmaking, has an impressive track-record as a weaver of ambitious, intricately detailed and socially conscious narrative cinema. In Green Fish, his first film, an ex-soldier is lured into the criminal underworld by the prospect of earning enough money to do right by his family, displaced by the rampant development of their hometown. Peppermint Candy shows the life of a man in reverse, beginning with his suicide and tracking how his life has been destroyed in parallel with terrible events in the recent history of South Korea. In Oasis, Lee explores a taboo relationship between a mentally disabled man and a woman with cerebral palsy, while in Secret Sunshine, a single mother turns to religion after suffering unspeakable trauma, only to find the man who ruined her life has done the same. Poetry, his last film, follows an elderly woman trying to find meaning in the world around her by writing poetry, even as she’s forced into a morally repugnant cover-up to keep her grandson and his friends out of prison. Burning is more of the same. By positioning Jong-su and Ben, two men who exist at opposite ends of a generation that has long-since peaked, one a beneficiary of its early days, the other a victim of its decline, against each other, Lee makes literal the tension between the poor and the wealthy, and the resentment caused by a failure of the Korean government to create enough jobs for its young people over the duration of two administrations. Starting in 2012, former President Park Geun-hye was elected on a platform of steering the country towards a “creative economy”, encouraging entrepreneurship and job development in creative and innovation sectors. However, by 2014, youth unemployment rates were beginning to rise, and have been trending upwards ever since. Following Park’s impeachment for abuse of power, for which she is serving 24 years in prison, in 2016, President Moon Jae-in was elected on, again, a platform of job creation, and has introduced a higher base minimum wage with the intent of increasing economic growth by providing Koreans with a higher base income. However, this increase has put financial pressure on small businesses, forcing them to cut staff or shut down entirely, and has further lowered the number of available jobs.

Within this political and economic turbulence, it’s no wonder that Jong-su is immediately resentful of the comfortably and flashily wealthy Ben, and when Hae-mi suddenly vanishes this resentment develops into an all-consuming obsession: does Ben know more than he’s saying? Jong-su checks all the greenhouses in the area and none have been burned down. He instigates supposedly chance encounters with Ben to press him for answers. He visits Hae-mi’s family, and searches for clues in Ben’s apartment. He waits outside and closely tails Ben’s Porsche in a beaten-up pick-up truck, a vehicle totally at odds with the city traffic, borrowed from his father’s farm, following him aimlessly around town on the off-chance that he’s going to incriminate himself. These silent, brutally tense scenes, oscillating between shots of traffic seen through windscreens and close-ups of Jong-su’s tired but laser-focused eyes, are clearly inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another tale of transformative obsession. Like James Stewart in Vertigo, Jong-su has no idea what he’s getting himself into, and it’s hard to imagine that Ben doesn’t know he’s being followed. Lee, like Murakami, never clarifies details such as this, instead letting the ambiguities linger like a fog to ratchet up a dangerous tension — one that renders a knock on a car window one of the most terrifying moments in recent cinema.

As his quest for answers delivers nothing but frustration and dead ends, these ambiguities begin to look like facts to Jong-su. All the pieces fit together, but never conclusively. Every thread he pulls can be explained rationally. He buys into the idea that Ben could be responsible for Hae-mi’s disappearance with no proof. All he has is his anger towards a man who has everything he could ever want, and five words that have haunted him since he heard them: “Sometimes I burn down greenhouses.” It’s this resentment, established early on in the financial and romantic disparity between the two men, that drives Burning towards its conclusion. Lee creates tension from a place of random inequality, and the seething rage that stems from it within Jong-su. Hard workers don’t thrive in Burning’s Korea, playboys do, and it’s this idea that poisons Jong-su’s judgment, leaving him haunted by the ghost of a metaphor that might not even be metaphorical. He has so much faith in himself, in his rightness, that he has nowhere to go when he runs out of ideas. In this sense, Burning is a devastatingly sad film about a generation too young to benefit from the past and too old to benefit from the future, left to rot in limbo in the present. “Every morning, I still run past those five barns. Not one of them has yet burned down. Nor do I hear of any barn fires. Come December, the birds strafe overhead. And I keep on getting older.” Murakami’s story feels sparse and empty. Burning feels like an abyss.

London Film Festival 2018 | Asako I & II; Monrovia, Indiana

LFF 2018 | #2 

Foundations. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II opens with an exaggerated love-at-first-sight encounter across a pile of firecrackers and spirals further into falsehoods from there. A romance between Asako, an outwardly quiet student, and Baku, a handsome slacker in sandals, blossoms quickly before Baku disappears without warning, leaving her broken-hearted. Years pass, and Asako meets Ryohei, a salaryman in Tokyo and the physical doppelganger of Baku, though the two men’s personalities are nothing alike. At first Asako resists the reignition, or confirmation, of her attraction, but, following a major earthquake that tests the infrastructure of Tokyo, the two reunite in a city that holds firm and they start to build a life there. Is Ryohei a perfection of Baku, in that he looks the same but remains a constant and reliable presence in her life, or is he a reduction, a mannequin with the same face but none of the vibrancy and mystery that drew her to him in the first place? Hamaguchi cultivates this unplaceable indecisiveness by framing Asako as a blank slate. She’s constantly in thought but rarely expressive, and Hamaguchi ensures that it’s easy to misjudge or misinterpret where her heart truly lies. Her mind is always elsewhere. She’s never quite passive but never active, either. She doesn’t drive, and relies on Ryohei to drive her to places outside of the city, and she always seems to blend into the background. During dinner parties, she stands behind the counter that separates the living room from the kitchen in her apartment as her friends and lover sit and talk at a table in front of it; she’s never out of the conversation, but she never feels like a part of it. She’s perpetually torn, between love and loneliness, the past and the present, Baku and Ryohei, certainty and mystery — and that’s no way to live. But maybe, after all, we’re doomed to never escape the ghosts of our pasts, especially if we decide that we can’t see them.

It’s impossible to ignore the ghosts that haunt Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, a portrait of small rural town in the American midwest with its history firmly in the past. Kids are taught about the town’s most successful citizen, a high-school basketball star from the 1920s whose name still ordains the school gymnasium; a man is awarded a fifty year service certificate by his masonic lodge in a stumbling ceremony conducted by similarly elderly men; a priest delivers an impassioned funeral service for a lifelong resident of the town; population growth is discussed and debated by the town council. Wiseman takes these brief fragments of his time in Monrovia and stitches them together to create an impression of the town as it exists to him, in this moment. And what he witnesses here is the gradual dismantling of a way of life that doesn’t fit into the idea of what the modern world should be. In perhaps the most telling scene, farmers gather in a cavernous, mostly empty barn for an auction. The auctioneer frenetically calls bids on a combine harvester with a starting price of $100,000 as the farmers in the room silently watch on. Farming is debilitatingly expensive, yet it’s the foundation of Monrovia’s floundering economy. Meanwhile, a property development company representative aggressively pitches a new housing project to the council as a means to boost the town’s population, while one resident’s complaints that the fire hydrant near his home is not fit for purpose fall on deaf ears. There can be no progress without the means to handle it but the council go after it anyway, thoughtlessly sold on the financial benefits more people will bring. Wiseman’s patient editing allows the cumulation of these images to develop into something truly apocalyptic. All the old heroes are dead. There’s no life in Monrovia anymore, but the future looks even bleaker; Wiseman’s camera lingers in a graveyard. Soon, there will be no roots left in this town, only the ghosts of lives that nobody can remember.

London Film Festival 2018 | Happy as Lazzaro, The Chambermaid

LFF 2018 | #1

“This month, too, the debt increases.” The smell of money lingers throughout Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro. A community of labourers: men, women, children alike; spend their days tending to the land of a tobacco farm in an undisturbed corner of the Italian countryside. As sharecroppers, an outlawed practice that they believe to be the norm, they are not paid, instead given a share of the crop to trade with; as long as the workers remain financially indebted to their landlord, they can be exploited and forced to work the land. Among these farmers is Lazzaro, a wide-eyed, kind-hearted and serene young man whose good nature is easily and regularly taken advantage of. He makes the landlord’s son a cup of coffee and the two seem to become friends, but, when asked why he stopped working to do so, Lazzaro enthusiastically replies: “you ordered me to.” Rohrwacher’s film lives within this dynamic between oppressed and oppressor. The power of money corrupts every relationship the isolated community has with the outside world, and when their lives are suddenly upended, these farmers are thrown into a poisonous modern society and forced to adapt to its rules. Time passes: a new currency, a new season; but the rich still exploit the poor. Lazzaro sees unemployed men and women, most with their families, most of them migrant workers, walk to a secluded industrial site in the dead of morning to bid against each other for a day’s work; out of desperation, the people willing to work for the lowest rate get the job. By placing the ever-youthful Lazzaro at the heart of two communities struggling to survive, both a bucolic farm corrupted by capitalism and a city ravaged and consumed by it, Rohrwacher connects a scandal of the past with the myriad atrocities occurring in plain sight today; Lazzaro, the ageless observer, echoes a history that never went away. Life goes on.

A similar, if not entirely comparable figure illuminates Lila Avilés’ The Chambermaid, which follows a 24 year old single mother, Eve, as she works long days cleaning the rooms of a luxury hotel in Mexico City. A determined and efficient woman, Eve is hoping for a promotion that would allow her both more money and more time with her young son, who she barely sees — but she’s not the only person who wants the job. Avilés takes a directly observational approach to documenting Eve’s work, choosing long takes and fixed wide-shots to emphasise the care she takes over her duties, and the time she spends doing so. The rooms she cleans, designed for transience, become a second home to her, or at least the ghost of a home: all off-whites and dull-greys, with the occasional painting on the wall doing little to add colour. The large windows of each room offer a panoramic view of a city skyline behind glass, always outside, always distant. Her uniform is charcoal grey, and she wears a hairnet on duty; no evidence of her presence can be left in these rooms. She’s cagey and distant from her fellow workers, as they all seem to be to each other, and every conversation she has boils down to some kind of transaction. Hotel guests curtly demand more towels or toiletries, while colleagues militaristically bark information over walkie-talkies (“copy that”) or make small talk before asking for help with a shift; one colleague’s initial kindness towards Eve is ultimately revealed as a sales pitch for moisturiser and tupperware. Avilés’ camera never leaves the hotel, and while this 42-floored hotel is too big to ever feel claustrophobic, it’s hard to shake the idea that there are more important things going on elsewhere. As such, Avilés’ focus on the micro, one woman’s means to an end, creates an impression of the macro. Fleeting moments reveal the ways in which people take necessary shortcuts to reach their goals, and Eve’s day-to-day struggles show how easy it is to be rendered invisible in a hierarchy built on pitting workers against one another.