February 24-March 2, 2005

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Dziga and His Brothers (Mon., Feb. 28, 7 p.m., $10, Gershman Y, Broad and Pine sts., 215-545-4400) A household name under his pseudonym Dziga Vertov, Bialystok-born David Kaufman was one third of a cinematic triumvirate that included brothers Mikhail (né Moisey) and Boris, whose parallel but rarely overlapping stories make up Yevgeni Tsymbal's mildly fascinating documentary. Mikhail was Vertov's cinematographer, not to mention the protagonist of The Man With a Movie Camera, until the brothers' aesthetic quarrels led him to strike out on his own; the too-brief fragments of his rarely seen films indicate a lyrical naturalism entirely at odds with Vertov's self-reflexive documentary. Baby Boris made his way to Paris, shooting all of Jean Vigo's movies, then to America, where he became a darling of Hollywood liberals like Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet, winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront. Though Tsymbal too seldom links the brothers' stories or, conversely, explains their lifelong estrangements, he does note that Vertov was reduced to churning out Stalinist newsreels at the same time Boris was assuaging anti-Communists by swearing he had no living Russian relatives — one more betrayal to add to Waterfront's long list.

Dziga and His Brothers touches on a rich subject, but only just barely: Evidently made for Russian television, the careless, cheap-looking film only skims the surface. How did the marriage of a rabbi's daughter and a used-book seller produce three children whose names grace some of the cinema's greatest achievements? No answer, or even speculation, here. Hopefully, the post-screening lecture by Vertov biographer John MacKay will fill in some of the blanks.

Oasis ($24.95 DVD) It's hard to imagine the raves for Lee Chang-dong's oddball romance would have flowed quite so freely had the film been made in the U.S. instead of South Korea; somehow I doubt the cinemarati would have been quite so eager to crown an American film about a love affair between a mildly retarded man and a severely palsied woman. That doesn't a priori disqualify Lee's movie, but it reveals how often viewers use the language barrier as a security blanket, permitting themselves to succumb to fantasies they'd never swallow in their mother tongue. Oasis doles out the sentiment sparingly, balancing it with clear, cruel realism: The first time Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu) makes his way into the apartment where Gong-ju (Moon So-ri) has been left by her Dickensian relatives, he shows his attraction by attempting to rape her, a scene whose sheer wrongness sets your head spinning. As troubling, if less difficult to watch, are the fantasy sequences where Gong-ju appears as a happy, perfectly mobile teenage girl. They make the point that inside her contorted body is a heart that can love like any other, but inevitably, they make the return to her real state feel like a kind of death; by linking her emotional fullness to physical normalcy, the sequences subtly reinforce the prejudice they mean to dispel. Were she fortunate enough to have performed her role in English, Moon So-ri would long since have had an Oscar on her mantelpiece. But like the performances the Academy so often recognizes, hers is a technical tour de force that stems from a flawed premise.

Still, Moon's talents are undeniable, as evidenced by her literally and metaphorically naked turn in 2003's A Good Lawyer's Wife. That film will be shown on video as part of the University of Pennsylvania's East Asian Studies film series, as will Lee and Moon's first collaboration, Peppermint Candy, often cited as a favorite of the Korean New Wave. Dates are March 29 and 15, respectively. More information at http://ccat. sas.upenn.edu/ceas/events.html.

Infernal Affairs ($29.99 DVD) Although its Chinese title invokes the Buddhist concept of "continuous hell," this 2002 Hong Kong policier better demonstrates the principle "What goes around, comes around." Tangibly inspired by Michael Mann's Heat, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's twisty thriller stars Tony Leung and Andy Lau (no relation) as an undercover cop and a gangster sent to infiltrate the police force, each of whom is subsequently assigned to find the traitor in the ranks — i.e., himself. Should that sound confusing, there's every indication it's supposed to: The film begins with a whiplash 10-minute prologue from which only helpfully embellished subtitles can extricate the by-now addled viewer. Though their house is built on cop-movie cliches, Lau and Mak deploy an arsenal of visual tricks to illustrate the terms of psychic warfare, most notably at the movie's climax, where a stuttering elevator door attempts to shut out one man's reflection and reduce the troubling dualism to a manageable unity. Closing the circle, the twice-sequelized movie is scheduled for an American remake in 2006; it's hard to decide whether to be more depressed about the fact that Martin Scorsese has succumbed to the Asian-remake cliche or that Infernal Affairs demonstrates the expressionistic intensity so lacking in Scorsese's recent bloat-bags.

Misc. Picks: God forbid we should have to pick a favorite Evil Dead movie, but it's fair to say that Evil Dead 2's gory slapstick is as close to the essence of Sam Raimi as you can get without chopping him into bits. (Fri., 9 p.m., Broadway Theater, Pitman, N.J.). Phoenixville's Colonial revives John Ford's troublesome but masterful The Searchers (Sun., 2 p.m.). The Chestnut Hill Film Group spends an evening with the fetching Dominique Sanda in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Tue., 7:30, Chestnut Hill Free Library).