French Film Festival 2013 - Michael Kohlhaas

Last weekend I watched "Michael Kohlhaas", which is based on an 1811 novella written by German author Heinrich von Kleist about a true event that had taken place in 16th century Germany.

The story is about a horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas who, while passing a border, had two of his newly purchased horses unjustly taken from him as a road toll by an overbearing lord, at a time when road tolls had already been banned by law. Those two horses were worked mercilessly till they bled, and one of his loyal servants was also beaten up badly by the lord's men. When his attempts to seek justice through court proceedings repeatedly failed, his wife decided to take his case to the reigning princess but she was brutally murdered in the process at the behest of the powerful lord. Driven to blinding rage, Kohlhaas formed an army out of his servants, was forced to take his young daughter along for the ride, and attacked the castle of the lord, killing many of his men. The lord's escape into a convent did not stop him. He incited peasants to rise up in rebellion against the aristocracy. His action enraged the princess, who at first seemed forgiving and generous towards him, but who subsequently ordered his arrest and execution by beheading. To show him magnanimity, the princess ordered the judge to award him, before his execution, the justice that he had been seeking, that is, to return two healthy horses to him, to grant him compensation for bodily injuries that his servant had suffered and compensation for his own loss, and to sentence the culpable lord to two-year imprisonment.

Although the story is somewhat straightforward, the film is still quite enthralling with the gripping atmosphere created by skillful cinematography of the vast windswept and barren wilderness, accompanied by a somber sound design (with flies buzzing, wind howling and horse hoof thumping) that highlights the unforgiving countryside, plus the dark charm of the wronged hero role played by Mads Mikkelsen.

In the midst of Kohlhaas' acts of vengeance, there is a short dialogue between an old clergy and him in which the former tried to dissuade the latter from further committing acts of violence on account of faith in God, but failed, as the latter insisted on seeing justice done. The conversation has an unmistakable premonitory ring to it.

Few rational beings would risk their own lives unless they feel totally trapped with no way out. The tragic element of the story is that Kohlhaas' vindictive action resulted in creating even more victims (his own daughter being one as she was becoming an orphan), even if he finally got the justice that he had sought, for which ironically he had to pay with his own life. But then, in those days of the "ancien regime", when the royalties held all legislative, administrative and judiciary powers, what options did an aggrieved commoner have other than rise up and rebel?

French Film Festival 2013 - Hiroshima, Mon Amour

It's that time of the year again - the French Film Festival kicked off last Wednesday and will last until December 12. For the past four years, I've been one loyal fan of the festival. At the 2011 festival, I was most disappointed for being too late to get a ticket for the musical "Beloved" starring Catherine Deneuve. Luckily this year I've already booked one for her 1967 film "Beauty of the Day".

The day before yesterday I watched the 1959 film "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" in black and white, which is named a Cannes Classics at the 2013 Cannes International Film Festival. The scriptwriter, Marguerite Duras, who had her first venture in the world of cinema with this film, was nominated for an Oscar.

The story is about a French actress doing filming work in Hiroshima, where she meets a married Japanese man and falls in love with him. The timeline is about ten years after the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima. At the end of the three-day affair, the actress decides to leave her lover. The couple struggle with the pain of imminent separation. The camera oscillates between the past, with images of the aftermath of the bombing, and the present, with images of the lovers' day-to-day activities together with the actress's recollection of a tormenting end to a love affair with a German soldier at Nevers, France, during World War II, when he was killed.

I'm glad that I had stumbled upon a book about Marguerite Duras earlier in the week and was given to understand a little her unique literary style, which centers on the coexistence of past and present, memory and oblivion, love and death, which elements are readily identifiable in the film. In this film, she also departed from the conventional literary model by being sparse with descriptive details and shifting from single-voice narration to dialogue. The lack of descriptive details is intended to invoke in the audience the power of imagination. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, a male and a female voice converse with each other in the background, with the female trying to remember horrific scenes of the bombing and the male trying to negate her, representing a conflict between memory and oblivion. For the rest of the film, the protagonist's pain of memory and the pain of her inability to forget coexists with her lover's unrelenting effort to make her forget her past so that he could have a future with her.

Ten years after the bombing, Hiroshima is already back to normal life with a bright future. At the time of the lovers' encounter, the actress had also left Nevers to begin a new life in Paris. Towards the end of the film, the actress says to the Japanese man: "You're Hiroshima", and the Japanese man says to her "You're Nevers". After all, it is just a matter of forgetting and letting go of pain.

This film won the International Film Critics Award and the Film Writers Award. It also shared the Prix Melies with Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows". In 1960 it won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film.

A Good Movie for Parents - "Firelight"

Recently I watched a 1997 movie on YouTube called “Firelight” starring Sophie Marceau and Stephen Dillane. The film was written and directed by William Nicholson. I was very touched by the movie and would like to share it with those who haven’t watched it.

Briefly, the story is about a woman who agrees to bear the child of an English landowner in exchange for money to pay her father’s debts. When the child is born, the woman gives up the right to her as agreed. Seven years later, the woman is hired as a governess to a child on a remote Sussex estate, whose father is the anonymous landowner…….

What impresses me most about the film is the part about how the mother is determined to teach her child to behave so she can be loved by people other than her doting father. I’m sure there’s something here to be learned by young parents in Hong Kong or elsewhere.

Firelight Part 1

Firelight Part 2

Firelight Part 3

Firelight Part 4

Firelight Part 5

Firelight Part 6

Firelight Part 7

Firelight Part 8

Firelight Part 9

 

“It's a kind of magic. Firelight makes time stand still. When you put out the lamps and sit in the firelight's glow there aren't any rules any more. You can do what you want, say what you want, be what you want, and when the lamps are lit again, time starts again, and everything you said or did is forgotten. More than forgotten -  it never happened.”

An Original Film Musical - "Les Parapluies de Cherbourg"

While many of the most memorable film musicals were adaptations from stage productions, one shining original film opera (in which all dialogues were sung) that I can think of is “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg”. This was a hugely successful 1964 French film musical that had a subsequent English-language stage adaptation in 1979 and a more recent one in 2011.

Here’s the link to the poignant love theme song in “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg” (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”):-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Unnx5eLbk&list=FLlMBDFYTe8MGL_Z6TJc6LOg

The film won the Palme d’Or award at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. It catapulted Catherine Deneuve to stardom and brought world fame to Michel Legrand’s music.

It is a heart wrenching love story in which two Cherbourg lovers (Genevieve and Guy) were separated by Guy being drafted into military service for the Algerian War. The fateful separation was accentuated by the irony that Genevieve’s pregnancy - a result of lovemaking just prior to Guy’s departure – caused their eventual permanent breakup, as it led to Genevieve’s mother insisting (for practical reasons) that she should marry a wealthy businessman in Guy’s absence. Upon Guy’s return from the war, he felt heart-broken for a while and then married another girl who had always been in love with him, and later had a son with her. In the last episode, Genevieve showed up in a Mercedes with her (and Guy’s) daughter at the gas station which Guy had bought with an inheritance from his aunt. Genevieve got out of the car to go inside the station to chat with Guy. When Genevieve asked Guy whether he wished to meet “their” daughter, he declined. The two parted wistfully, their emotions in check.

The story calls to mind a Mandarin song by a Taiwanese singer about the remote possibility of a past love being rekindled “有多少愛可以從來?” (“What are the chances of a rekindling of past love?”)

Here’s the link to the song:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2HWkg2L6U&list=FLlMBDFYTe8MGL_Z6TJc6LOg

Some of you may know that there’s a Cantonese version of this song rendered by Faye Wong “愛與痛的邊緣” (although the Cantonese lyrics tell a story of unrequited love):-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgudX_bMSv8&list=FLlMBDFYTe8MGL_Z6TJc6LOg