Surreal
Life
by
Howard Schumann
Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is a robust looking old man
who loves to tell stories. In fact, he has been telling tall tales for
a long time to his children, inflating events in his own life to mythic
proportions. When Bloom's journalist son Will (Billy Crudup) returns
to his parent's house on hearing that his father is dying of cancer,
he is determined to separate fact from fiction and get to know the father
who was never around when he was growing up.
Based
on a semi-autobiographical novel by Daniel Wallace and adapted for the
screen by John August, Big Fish, the latest film from
Tim Burton, is a beautiful looking work that has its engines going full
blast, but never seems to achieve lift-off. I am drawn to films that
have a surreal vision of an alternate reality, but Big Fish force-feeds
it to us rather than subtly evoking a sense of magic.
The story is told in flashback as Will and his pregnant
French wife Josephine (Marion Cotillard) recall the stories his father
had told him all his life. 
We
first see young Edward (Ewan McGregor) as a sports hero and science
fair winner in Ashton, Alabama; then, after leaving Ashton with a gentle
giant named Karl, encountering the inhabitants of a wondrous town called
Spectre, where everyone walks around barefoot and is full of joy. Although
vowing to return one day to Spectre, Edward moves on and agrees to work
for a circus manager (Danny De Vito) in return for information about
Sandra (Alison Lohman), a girl he has fallen in love with. Eventually
he finds her at Auburn University and, in one of the best scenes in
the film, courts her with 10,000 daffodils to prove his love. After
Edward is drafted to fight in the Korean War, he rescues conjoined twin
entertainers, Ping and Jing, and brings them home to work in the circus.
At this point, it just continues from one off-the-wall scene to another
until its grand, Fellini-esque final sequence.
Unfortunately,
despite some high expectations, I was unmoved by the ending. I did not
find anything lovable about Bloom, and I don't feel that the theme of
father-son reconciliation was handled convincingly. While the picture
has some fine performances and outstanding special effects, it did not
instill in me any true sense of wonder or authentic emotion. Sadly,
Big Fish is dead in the water.
In
some films, the dividing line between subjective and objective reality
is very tenuous. In Satoshi Kon's poetic Japanese animé film Millennium
Actress, it is almost non-existent. When the Ginei studio is
about to be razed, filmmaker Genya Tachibana decides to make a documentary
about the studio and its greatest star, legendary actress Fujiwara Chiyoko,
who disappeared from public life more than thirty years ago. After finding
an old key that belonged to the aging actress, he travels to her secluded
mountain retreat with his assistant Kyogi Ida to interview her for the
documentary. When Genya gives her the key, it unlocks a stream of memories
that transports us (along with the cameraman and interviewer) to a different
reality that allows us to relive one thousand years of Japanese history
using the medium of cinema.
As
she tells her story, Chiyoko recounts her birth at the time of the great
Kanto earthquake of 1923 and how she was discovered as a child actress
despite her mother's objection that she was too timid. She reveals how
a strange young painter, a political outcast whose name she never discovered,
gave her a key and then disappeared, telling her that the key is "the
most important thing there is." Chiyoko's dream of reuniting with her
lover keeps her alive and becomes what her life is about.
Unfolding
more as emotion and mood than narrative, the story takes us on a surreal
journey through a series of films within films in which Chiyoko attempts
to find her lost love -- playing a princess, a ninja, a geisha, and
even an astronaut. In the process, we witness a seamless tableau of
Japan's history: the medieval period in the 15th and 16th centuries,
the era when the Shogunate was in power, the Meiji period when the Emperor
was restored, the Showa period before World War II, and the post-war
occupation and recovery.
The
line between the events of Chiyoko's real life and scenes from her films
is blurred, and the film is difficult to follow on first viewing. To
complicate matters even further, the interviewer, Genya, is cast in
many roles in which he becomes almost a comic figure as Chiyoko's rescuer.
Though the movie is often puzzling, the search to recapture the defining
moment in Chiyoko's life strikes a universal chord, and we identify
with her desperate quest. Though I found the ending somewhat unsatisfying,
Millennium Actress is a complex and beautiful film, and Susumu
Hirasawa's hypnotic musical score adds to the blend of warmth, emotional
power, and magical realism. Kon sees life as a big romantic movie full
of melodrama, humor, and longing, and seems to be saying that while
there is often confusion between who we really are and the shifting
roles we play in life, what remains constant is our longing for love.
In
Wong Kar-wai's 1991 film Days of Being Wild, Yuddy (Leslie
Cheung), a charming drifter, captures the attention of store attendant
Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung) by asking her to look at his watch. When she
sees that it says one minute before 3:00 P.M. on April 16, 1960, he
tells her that she will never forget the moment and will dream about
him that night. The next time they meet, the moment becomes two, then
one hour, then weeks and months, but Yuddy is like the mythical bird
with no legs that just flies and flies and never lands. Abandoned by
his real mother and brought up by a wealthy alcoholic courtesan named
Rebecca (Rebecca Pan), he does not know where he came from or where
he is going. He treats women with little respect, discarding them when
they no longer serve his purpose. When one woman asks him if he loves
her, he tells her that during his life he will be friends with many,
many women but won't know whom he truly loves until the end.
Days
of Being Wild unfolds like a dream with color filters, unusual shadows,
and the sights and sounds of Hong Kong's rainy nights and sweltering
summers. Based on the director's memories from his childhood, and admiration
for the style of Argentinean novelist Manuel Puig, the film is a series
of episodes involving six people who touch each other's lives. After
his short-lived relationship with Su, Yuddy meets a cabaret dancer who
calls herself Mimi (Carina Lau) but their relationship fares no better,
and she is left to suffer the consequences of their breakup. Meanwhile,
Su meets Tide (Andy Lau), a gentle policeman with whom she is able to
confide, until he suddenly leaves Hong Kong to become a sailor. Each
character seeks a sense of identity and fulfillment. After Rebecca tells
Yuddy of her plans to move to America with her boyfriend, she finally
lets him know who and where his real mother is. After Yuddy goes to
the Philippines to try to find his mother, the lives of the main protagonists
come together in a powerful conclusion.
Days
of Being Wild may sound like a soap opera, but the film reaches
a much higher artistic level. Supported by outstanding performances
by Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, and Jacky Cheung as Yuddy's only friend
Zeb, it is a tone poem about longing and one's search for identity.
We care about the characters, even though they don't seem to care about
themselves. Like many of us, they pine for the things that might have
been, the word that was never said, and the love that remains elusive.
A commercial failure but an artistic triumph, Days of Being Wild
is a moody, atmospheric film that, with its background of popular music,
in this case 1950s rumba and cha-cha, forecasts the director's later
In the Mood For Love. As a beautifully realized example of alienated
people desperately seeking their place in the world, it stands securely
on its own.
©2004 Howard Schumann
CineScene
