A few short reviews to catch up.

The Square – Reuben Ostlund – Sweden

A laugh-out-loud satire of the modern art world. Acerbic and outrageous. A deserved winner of this years Palme D’or. The curator for a huge museum in Stockholm is pickpocketed in the days leading up to a huge exhibition. His mission to recover his lost items distracts from his work and his world begins to crumble. There are plenty of sequences that feel funny and dangerous at the same time. Claes Bang, who plays Christian the curator is suave and confident, but the world he lives and works in is so convoluted and hypocritical. The scene in the photo above is a real adventure, but my favourite sequence comes earlier, when Christian and an employee devise a scheme to get his phone back. Driving to a low-income neighbourhood where the phone was traced to, they play a track by Justice to hype themselves up. The boys trying to be men energy calls back to Ostlund’s last film Force Majeure. This is a real treat of a film and I have much more to say about it. I will revisit it with a longer review later this year.

Anarchist From the Colony – Lee Joon-Ik – Korea

A historical dramedy about Park Yeol, a Korean activist in Imperial Japan and his partner, Fumiko Kaneko, a Japanese born Korean who helped Park to bring attention to the massacre of Koreans after the Kanto earthquake of 1923. This is a slow film that isn’t helped by it’s strange, light-hearted first act. By the time you get to the meat of the story, the film has already presented itself as a broad Korean comedy, down to the crammed in love story. Lee Joon-Ik earns some of this back by the end with some sentimental speeches and conversations. Lee Je-Hoon is electric in the lead role and really fun to watch. His counterpart, Choi Hee-Seo is not my cup of tea. Mugging and gesturing in a way you only see in historical Korean dramas. Not a bad movie, but with a mostly Korean cast speaking mostly in Japanese (I know because I could understand what they were saying without subtitles. Native speakers are way too fast for me) and some cloying nationalistic sequences at the end, I’m left feeling like Anarchist From the Colony plays a lot better on home shores than it does over here.

Okja – Bong Joon-Ho – Korea/USA

Recently released on Netflix, I went to see Okja a second time in the hopes of seeing Director Bong in person. Alas, his broken ankle kept him in Korea and we had to make do with a Skype Q&A. The Q&A focused mostly on the role of CG in the film. Particularly the techniques used to help connect the film’s star Ahn Seo-Hyun to her animated counterpart Okja. We are left with a touching story about family. A young girl does extraordinary things to save her best friend. A lesser filmmaker would be distracted by his creation. He would spend all too much time showing off and would lose sight of his story. Bong Joon-Ho is a humanist filmmaker and tells his stories through the characters, not the set pieces. There are some fantastic chase sequences and destructive action scenes, but the really important effects focus on intimate moments. Touch. An embrace. There are some false line-readings that I assume come from translation problems, but Bong’s deft use of slapstick and dark comedy mix perfectly with the exciting and sentimental scenes that are expected in a film like this. Bong Joon-Ho is a filmmaker with impressive momentum. The most successful of his contemporaries to make a film in English. For a director that relies on genre, his films are consistently fantastic and affecting. He asked us to consider his films up to now to be his “Early work” and I fully trust that we have decades of growth and more near-perfect films ahead.

Tomorrow I will be seeing two films in the evening. Expect a review for Zvygintsev’s Loveless by Monday.