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The 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival | Guardian Unlimited
The Happiness of Idiots, the Dreamlife of Angels: The 23rd Hong Kong International Film Festival Part I: Happy Idiots 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. ....................................................................................................................................... |