BURNING (B+) - A slow, lovely meditation on yearning. Farm-boy Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) pines for Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeon), who has gone off to Seoul, the big city, and, after sleeping with her once, he agrees to watch her cat while she takes a trip to Africa. When Hae-mi returns, she has Ben (Steven Yeun) on her arm, a slick playboy-type with a fancy apartment. The three hang out together, most memorably back at Jong-su's farm, where Hae-mi entertains the troops with a topless dance to a Miles Davis song at twilight.
But when Hae-mi disappears, Jong-su grows suspicious of Ben. But it's not clear which one of the men is the sane one and which one is the paranoid one. Chang-dong Lee, who wrote and directed the equally quiet and compelling "Poetry" in 2010, returns with a true slow burn of a tale. This laconic mind-game (a surprisingly perky 148 minutes) crescendos with a violent ending, and whether or not you feel tricked by the filmmaker, you almost certainly will be drawn in by the performances and the gorgeous look of the scenery.
DARK RIVER (A-minus) - Clio Barnard ("The Selfish Giant," "The Arbor") adapts this brutal, grueling slog of a story about a damage woman named Alice (Ruth Wilson), who, after the death of her father, returns to her rural northern England village for the first time in 15 years vowing to claim the tenancy to the rundown family farm she believes is rightfully hers. But she is stymied at every step by her drunken, hirsute brother, Joe (Mark Stanley), and haunted at every turn by visions of the father (Sean Bean in flashbacks) who molested her when she was a girl. (The only knock on the film is Barnard's horror-story over-use of those incessant glimpses of the past.)
Barnard knows how to tap into the grit and grime of life in North Yorkshire, and Wilson and Stanley wallow in it, surrounded less by the loveliness of nature than by the blood and guts of the rats, rabbits and sheep they live among. The siblings do battle as Alice, a sheep-shearer by trade, strives to fix up the grounds to appease the banksters while Joe resists change. Things get ugly, and it all builds to a horrific -- yet oddly cathartic -- tragedy, though with a coda that reveals the true beauty of the environment these two scarred souls were raised in. The film is bleak and devastating at times but absolutely compelling.
No comments:
Post a Comment