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The Happiness of Idiots, the Dreamlife of Angels:

The 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival
by Noel Vera (Originally appeared in Businessworld and used with permission.)

Part I: Happy Idiots
1999's 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival was a decidedly mixed bag. No one country had a monopoly on good films, no one country had a bumper crop of bad films - and this at a time when the Asian economy is at its lowest ebb. Just to give you an idea, Hong Kong film production fell from a hundred and forty plus pictures a year to just over eighty last year - a drop of about forty-three percent. Filipino film production fared better with an estimated annual production of one hundred and thirty pictures - not bad, but once we made two hundred and forty a year. It didn't help matters that Hollywood has flooded Hong Kong and Philippine markets with gigantic hits like Titanic and Independence Day; nowadays, Leonardo DiCaprio is considered God, Chow Yun-Fat is an aspiring divinity, and Fernando Poe Jr. is strictly a third-class idol, worshipped in the more obscure local backwaters. The rest of the world, it may be safe to assume, is pretty much in the same situation.

Still, despite the economic crisis, despite the production drop, and despite Hollywood's seemingly unstoppable cinematic onslaught, good films continued to be made; this year's HKIFF was a chance to sample a few.

Fred Kelemen's Frost should qualify as comatose - it moves slowly, and it goes on and on for an impossible two hundred minutes. The story is simple enough to follow, even without subtitles: a woman (Anna Schmidt) is beaten by her husband or lover. She leaves him, taking her son with her, and walks through vast wintry landscapes, ending up in a city where she takes up prostitution to support herself and her child. One reason why I dislike comatose films so much-- not because they're so hard to follow, but because they give you so little reason to want to try. You never felt that the wife in Maborosi loved her husband, or even missed him (you never felt that she was much of anything herself). None of the characters in The Power of Kangwon Province or The Day the Pig Fell Down the Well seemed to have anything at stake, or show any interest at what little is at stake. People in The Small Town are overtly emotional, but they never make an effort to resolve the issues, or at least change their attitude towards said issues-- they just talk about them, endlessly.

Frost is different. Schmidt and her son suffer, and the grindingly slow pace serves to emphasize their suffering. Kelemen shows a stubborn, freakish discipline in drawing out his narrative; it's clear that the film's slow pace and long shots are dictated by necessity, and not by some arbitrary sense of aesthetics on the director's part. At one point the camera following mother and son pans ahead, taking in the hugely empty horizon little by little until it comes back to them. Only then do you realize just how much more frozen land they have to walk through; just how much more emptiness they have to endure.
In one sharp scene, Schmidt gives a customer a handjob while her son sips a drink. The child accidentally drops his straw, spots what's happening under the table, and walks away. Schmidt rises to follow, but the customer forces her to sit down and continue masturbating him. When he finishes, he leaves her at the table. The camera lingers on Schmidt--not, you feel, because the director was feeling especially self-indulgent or sadistic, but because he wants to record the listlessness on her face, the sense she has of literally not having any strength left to deal with this latest humiliation. He wants to record the minutest details of a human soul that has felt so much pain it's beyond feeling the pain--only an immense, enveloping numbness. It's a great film, I think--the first of several I'll talk about in the nextinstallment.

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Text: Noel Vera | Friday April 2, 1999