Big Time (2005)

Minggu, 12 April 2009

Big Time (2005)

Big Time (Mario Cornejo, 2005)

Danny (Winston Elizalde) and Jonas (Nor Domingo) are petty crooks whose idea of going big-time is kidnapping the only daughter of a middle-class couple for a ransom price of 50,000 pesos, which is roughly a thousand American dollars. Before even fully realizing that their kidnapping plan is not very different from the dozen little felonies they have committed through the years (the most memorable of which is their dog-napping escapade, foiled by the mutt's incessant barking), they are involuntarily pushed into shady affairs far larger than what they have imagined. Melody (Joanne Miller), the duo's target whose recurring daydreams involve her ambitions of being a famous celebrity, turns out to be the girlfriend of Wilson (Jamie Wilson), the underachieving son of mob boss Don Manolo (Michael De Mesa). Wilson sees the awkward situation as an opportunity to double-cross his father by staging his own kidnapping, using Danny, Jonas, and his starry eyed girlfriend as props in his attempt to raise enough capital to fund his proposed illegal drugs business.

Mario Cornejo's Big Time, written by Cornejo with Monster Jimenez, is easy to enjoy, blanketing its genre affiliations with its extraordinary grasp of pop culture. The film's vocabulary, composed of references to mass culture, both past and present, is used to communicate its effective brand of humor, dark yet wildly efficient, and the aptly limited scope of emotions that it utilizes (Danny thinks that Melody looks like popular actress Kristine Hermosa; and in one scene, subtly declares affection to Melody by choosing Hermosa over another celebrity in an impromptu preferences game). In truth, Big Time is deliriously morbid in its processes and notwithstanding its reliance on fantabulous narrative twists and turns, penultimately realist in its philosophies. Its narrative, despite the distractions provided for by the screenplay's reliable internal wit, actually zeroes in on a pressing social issue that is supposed to be meant to be taken seriously, but the filmmakers decide to enunciate using genre conventions and black humor.

Cornejo and Jimenez, in pitting two small-time crooks with the complications of big time criminality, reflects on the absurd situation of Philippine society, where the gap between rich and poor is undeniable in its extent, where it is not only social status or financial capability that separate them but also their needs, wants, and cultures. In Big Time, Danny and Jonas' sudden involvement in Wilson's scheme awakens them into a realization of their insignificance in the larger world, that their felonies are trivial if compared to the convolutions of organized crime, and that because of their pitiful place in the criminal world, they become nothing more than voiceless subordinates in Wilson's strategies. Even Melody's ambition of achieving stardom, an ambition that both humorously and poignantly consumes her very existence, is negligible in the midst of Wilson's immediate plans of siphoning money from his father through the sham kidnap-for-ransom ploy he concocted. The idle time conversations are written (and the pop references are selected; Wilson prefers to refer to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy, while Danny limits his references to local entertainment) and staged to flesh out the cultural ignorance and lack of sophistication or finesse inflicted by Danny and Jonas' small time status.

Big Time, with all its overt silliness and glaring implausibility, is tons of fun. It takes cognizance of the overwhelmingly real injustice that attaches to Filipino society without employing shock tactics or drowning its artistry with revolts or laments. Instead, it dwells on the absurdity of the societal situation of big dreams, quick fixes and unfathomable repercussions. The film reaches its bloody climax outside the abandoned Film Center of the Philippines (an artifact of a building that was created to serve as nucleus of the country's film industry, but has then been converted into a haven for amorous lovers, drug addicts, and ghost searchers; the setting of the final showdown in the Film Center can be read either as a criticism against the expensive government rendered useless both by Marcos-era lavishness and negligence, or simply put, or a slogan against a dying, if not totally dead, Philippine cinema as represented by the building, only to be given life by the sudden influx of new work by young filmmakers), where double-crossings, broken promises, and revelations erupt into a survivor-less bloodbath.

The film provides no real resolution for its pitiful small-time protagonists and no satisfying comeuppance for its shady big-time villains. Except for Jonas, whose reward is survival and whose punishment is insignificance in a sea populated by small-time persons like him and dominated by only a few. In the end, he works as a janitor and like the rest of the country, struggles to survive as one of the nameless and faceless in the streets of Manila. There is bittersweet comfort for a man to know his place and be satisfied, lest he plunges himself once again in a world that is too complicated and too big for his severely wounded ambitions.

Can This Be Love (2005)

Minggu, 03 Agustus 2008

Can This Be Love (2005)

Can This Be Love (Jose Javier Reyes, 2005)

Ryan (Hero Angeles) is a nursing student who dreams of working abroad. To make ends meet and earn enough for tuition and his daily expenses, he starts working for Roger (Tirso Cruz III), owner of a stall that accepts typing and printing jobs. Daisy (Sandara Park), an exchange student from Korea who is studying English in Manila, submits her draft essay to Roger. Roger assigns the essay to Ryan for him to correct, type, and print. The essay, about how Daisy feels about the Philippines and Filipinos in general, irks Ryan enough to start his seemingly endless tirade against Koreans studying English in the Philippines. Through some twist of fate, Daisy turns out to be the same person Ryan is buying a second-hand cellphone from, and the same person who he has been exchanging sweet text messages with. The initial shock of knowing that the person you were falling for represents everything you hate mellows into romance.

The narrative of Jose Javier Reyes' Can This Be Love is undoubtedly a result of the exigencies of casting rather than of Reyes' sheer ingenuity. Angeles and Park were the winners of a local talent search television show. The two were matched to form a love team, the best and most cost-efficient way to market up and rising talents. To mine on the love team's sudden spike in popularity, a movie that featured them had to be produced. Perhaps Angeles and Park's love team's unique selling point is that it crosses pertinent racial and cultural boundaries, since Angeles is Filipino and Park is Korean. The Philippines, at least for the past decade or so, has become the destination for Koreans who would want to learn English. Due to this increase in the population of Koreans in the Philippines, the purely-Filipino society has been inflicted an expected change: with Korean establishments gradually dotting the city landscape and Koreans mingling in crowds becoming more and more a norm. In such a case, Angeles and Park's love team is an inevitable response to this societal change. It perhaps represents a subconscious fantasy of homogenizing the natives with the newcomers.

Reyes' movie mines predominantly on this fantasy. It is structurally and thematically formulaic, working on traditional tropes of love overcoming all hindrances, only this time, there are added elements of racial prejudice and cultural differences. The narrative follows a predictable arc, beginning with supposed incompatibility and ending in fairy tale bliss. I was hoping for the material to be handled with a little bit more intelligence. After all, Reyes has succinctly laid down his setting: of a city where racial discomfort between Filipinos and Koreans that goes both ways. Perhaps, I was, at the very least, waiting for a more convincing explanation how Ryan got past his vocalized prejudices to fall for Daisy, or how Daisy got past her adherence to tradition to get the resolve to stick with Ryan, instead of being merely force-fed the fantasy.

Reyes directs the way he wrote his screenplay, all style without much substance. Thus, we are given a film with littered MTV-like sequences that display the two lovers snuggling in slow motion, and time-trapped pieces of dialogue that sneaked into the screenplay in obvious deference to then current fads. I guess I am asking too much from a film that is a product of a studio that thrives on public ignorance. Can This Be Love is primarily crafted as escapist mechanism for those who feed on corny love stories. It is a film that exists as merely plebeian entertainment, although it is placed in a milieu that is pregnant with far more intelligent and interesting possibilities.

The Great Yokai War (2005)

Jumat, 16 November 2007

The Great Yokai War (2005)

The Great Yokai War (Takashi Miike, 2005)
Japanese Title: Yôkai daisensô

The plot of Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War is generic: scrawny and frequently bullied little boy finds the courage to battle it out with an apocalyptic force thus saving the world. The little boy is Tadashi (girly boy Ryunosuke Kamiki), a Tokyo-bred kid who is spirited away to his mom's provincial village after his parents' divorce. In one village festival, he gets chosen to be the kirin rider, supposedly the nominal keeper of the peace. The apocalyptic force is Kato (Etsushi Tokokawa) and his dastardly plan is to merge the discarded junk of the city (these metallic trash is said to have a negative energy supposedly out of being thrown away and forgotten) with the so-called yokai or traditional spirits, creating metal monsters that would wreak havoc wherever they go.

Miike obviously has a bigger budget (not nearly as big as the normal budget of a Hollywood flick, though) than usual to play with as The Great Yokai War is mostly a string of spectacles tied together by a flimsy and random plot. The problem is that the film is seldom spectacular. The metal monsters are obviously CGI creations; the yokai are a mixture of puppets, animatronics, or actors in heavy make-up and prosthetics. The computer generated effects aren't very impressive. The puppetry and the make-up, on the other hand, are quite charming in all their cheesy glory. The turtle-like yokai, for example, wears a green-hued rubber suit. His face is made up to include the beak-like choppers of a tortoise, and his extremities bear similar modifications. The rest of the yokai are all delightful creations including a one-eyed, one-legged umbrella, a walking wall, a long-necked woman, and several others. Visually, it's a mixed bag; the CGI doesn't merge well with the prosthetics and the puppetry. Oftentimes, you'd wish Miike had just stuck with traditional effects, had trusted his zany sensibilities, and had given us something that doesn't look half-baked as this.

The themes are unsubtly laid down. It's basically a tale of good versus evil. The good guys are the traditional spirits led to defend their existence by the unlikely hero who is himself a victim of divorce and bullying. The bad guys are the mechanical hybrids, produced from smoke belching factories using depletable resources: yokai tortured and collected by Kato's henchmachines and one yokai desperately in love with the evil mastermind named Agi (Chiaki Kuriyama of Kill Bill fame). Modernity and the unnecessary wastage that it produces are the causes of the impending apocalypse; they are the underlying evils that we are warned against as opposed to the giddy and often amusing antics of the yokai (who are too busy partying to actually wage a war against impending doom). There's also an anti-war message in the end from what seems to be a yokai leader, uncomfortably as an afterthought.

Hayao Miyazaki is a clear inspiration with his works that appropriate the same theme and style (like Nausicaa and the Valley of the Winds (1984), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2005)). In one scene, Tadashi rides a mysterious bus (reminiscent of Mei and Satsuki's ride on the Cat Bus in My Neighbor Totoro (1988)) where after breezing through a tunnel (brings to mind Chihiro's entry to the spirit world in Spirited Away), the yokai (mostly the creepy-looking ones) start appearing outside the bus windows. Unlike the famous Japanese animator however, you don't feel any real passion or sincerity. Miike is after all a mere hired gun (reminiscent although in this case, he surprisingly shares screenwriter credits), a director with enough international reputation and a bit of talent to bring about a picture bizarre enough to arouse interests worldwide (especially to the many Miike fans) and still be commercially viable domestically (mostly to the children and those who made Miyazaki's Spirited Away a box office hit).

What he lacks in passion and sincerity, he makes up with irreverence, half-hearted and careful though. There are scenes that border being sexually provocative like when the river nymph rescues Tadashi from drowning, we are given a close-up of the kid's hand subtly caressing the nymph's thigh, or when Agi suddenly removes her top (and this is promoted as a children's film), or when Tadashi starts wearing his armor in a bizarre montage (a startling butt crack makes an appearance, totally unwarranted). Miike is quite good when he puts his heart in his work (like in Audition (1999), the film that established Miike as a relentless director of torture porn, or Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (2006), a homoerotic and far more successful reworking of Lars von Trier's production experiment in Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005)). Sadly, Miike dons mercenary clothes with The Great Yokai War, and the result is far less fruitful than it aims to be.

The Descent (2005)

Minggu, 15 Juli 2007

The Descent (2005)

The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)

The initial fascination with underground rocks and dangers starts wearing off when at its thirty-minute mark, the only thing that's happened is a cave-in and a close encounter with an endless pit. Brit-director Neil Marshall makes most of his setting. His film is barely lit and succumbs to the horror film-temptation of using jarring movements to elicit a sense of confused dread. It doesn't work as the mixture of dim lighting and woozy camera movements causes visual nausea and incomprehension.

Standard items of horror chick-stupidity are in blatant display. The all-female cave exploring team includes an immature punk chick whose disregard for underground safety would cause her fatal harm. The rest seem indistinguishable from each other, especially since they are all covered with rockclimbing gear and the like; you often wonder why Marshall had to divulge useless information and trivia about the characters in its initial stages (including a life-altering trauma that supposedly fuels the main character to action, but really doesn't). It's quite obvious that these women are all cannon fodder to his pale and hungry cave-dwelling cretin.

The Descent can be read as a feminist text; the only problem there is that Marshall's portrayal of women are so facile, so superficial that despite not having a single male character in the film (if you count out the husband and several of the male monsters), it still feels overtly patriarchal. There's a sense that all these female rock climbers were given male brains. All their motivations are distinctly macho: to discover a cave and have it named for themselves --- even that act of entering the cave and witnessing for the first time its beauty is a metaphorical de-flowering.

Marshall completes the image of devirginization. He makes the invasion inherently painful and bloody; complete with a gooey pool of red blood, upon which the main character (Shauna Macdonald) reappears from completely changed into a Lara Croft-type cave raider (it's that proverbial rite of passage). Armed with determination charged by knowledge of her husband's infidelity and a will to live, she storms against the cave-dwelling, carnivorous apes to wreak violence and vengeance in an action-hero swagger. All sense of her femininity is thrown out in exchange for that vengeful, and very male-oriented dominance, that inherent need to rise above as superior.

That moment when they are stuck in the cave and the group's leader (Natalie Mendoza) reveals that the cave system is a new one and assumes responsibility, the film starts oozing extreme levels of testosterone with each of the more dominant females struggling for that top position; and when even pushed further by the threat of death, survival starts coinciding with those internal politics, jealousies and other emotions. The Descent is not a horror film that is distinctly female in its sensibilities. It is that illusion of novelty that Marshall delivers to you but truth be told, The Descent is just any other horror film out there --- there's probably a bit of sexual politics simmering underneath its faux-estrogen filled characters, but it's still quite bluntly a vastly underlit gore-fest.

Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong (2005)

Sabtu, 09 Juni 2007

Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong (2005)

Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong (Mes de Guzman, 2005)
English Title: The Road to Kalimugtong

The pre-credit sequence shows the geographic route and the mundane daily routine of two children to the elementary school located in the barrio of Kalimugtong. Their day starts with a freshly-heated pot of coffee (the staple breakfast for the people of Benguet in Northern Philippines), which is followed by an arduous trek through the forest, the farms, past a rocky stream, until they stop to change into their school clothes. Intermittent sounds of rebel gunfire are heard through the trees. They arrive safely and just in time for the chiming of the school bell. The kids are greeted by their teacher who initiates their morning lesson.

The physical road to the barrio of Kalimugtong is already arduous and seemingly unfair for the frail bodies and the juvenile minds of the youngsters. However, director Mes de Guzman is far more interested in that metaphorical road to Kalimugtong --- the one that involves the troubles and conflicts of the kids and the people surrounding them. In that sense, the metaphorical road lacks the constancy and the predictability of the kids' daily trek to school. The lessons they learn in their passage feels far more important than the academic nuggets of knowledge learned in school.

Made with a meager budget and with a small crew, Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong (The Road to Kalimugtong) succeeds because of the inherent sincerity in its creation. There are few false notes in the film, but these are mostly negligible. There's very little dramatization, but the two actors (Analyn Bangsil and Rhenuel Ordono) succeed in carrying the film through their natural charm and innocence. The elder non-professional actors do not fare as well but are still very competent given their very limited roles. It is when De Guzman strays from the realism that the film reveals its flaws. It is when the actors opt to act and perform that the film falls a notch lower in believability.

But that's mere nitpicking as the film, as a whole, is quite good. While it doesn't have the subtle mechanics of Jeffrey Jeturian's Kubrador (The Bet Collector, 2006) or Brillante Mendoza's Manoro (The Teacher, 2006), Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong succeeds in detailing the blatant ills of the Philippines' educational system and its surrounding issues on poverty without too overt in its advocacy. The film is narrated and is shown through the point of view of the children and as such, the presentation of the issues are filtered by their inherent naivety and innocence, making the exercise a lot more palatable and doubly poignant.

The incapacity of the public school teachers is dealt with compassion as the children's teacher is seen as a second mother rather than the culprit for the children's mal-education (the teacher is shown to have failed the teacher's board exams thrice, and despite that, is being allowed to teach the kids). The kids' eldest brother's pilfering of a few vegetables in the market is softened by the idea that in the point of view of the kids, such pilfering spells out survival. The kid's other brother's chronic lying is treated with humor rather than as a narrative arc for melodramatics. It is quite good that de Guzman belittles these character faults in the purview of the bigger issue of society's faults. In the end, de Guzman succeeds in transforming these film characters into real human beings: breathing, working, and dreaming in an impoverished community.

Ang Daan Patungong Kalimugtong is an exposé of a portion of Philippine society that seldom gets reasonable attention. It doesn't degrade itself by pointing fingers at people but instead spells out the aches and burdens of survival without sacrificing the familial bonds that have remained intact notwithstanding the poverty dealt upon them. It is a heartfelt film, alarming enough to inflict awareness of the virtues that survive the difficulty of traversing the road to the depicted characters' respective Kalimugtongs.

Tuli (2005)

Jumat, 06 April 2007

Tuli (2005)

Tuli (Auraeus Solito, 2005)
English Title: Circumcision

After the introduction of Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, 2005) to appreciative crowds during the 1st Cinamalaya Film Festival, director Auraeus Solito would release Tuli (Circumcision), his first time working under a studio (Viva Films, under its digital filmmaking branch), a mere few months after in competition in the Cinemanila Film Festival. The film would win the top prize, but would be banned from public consumption by the mercurial local censors board. While Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros is wowing critics and audiences worldwide, Tuli is left unseen, underappreciated, and almost forgotten. Released locally on DVD (which brandishes the infamous censoring and its lesbian love angle as advertising come-on's), Tuli would later on follow the footsteps of its fabulous elder brother. The film has since been screened in Sundance, Berlin (where it won the NETPAC prize), and other festival cities.

It's completely different from Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros. It is situated in an unnamed forest village wherein a mixture of Catholicism and native mysticism is still strong. It withdraws from the urban realism of Manila slums, and instead develops a folkloric touch to the narrative. It's also less colorful, due to the fact that first, Solito chose to shoot the film in an old sepia look which further enunciates the timelessness or the removal from modernist reality, and second, there's a lot less humor --- no Maxie and friends sashaying in beauty pageant costumes.
Tuli has a marvelous opening: the village circumciser (Bembol Roco) prepares a group of kids to their circumcision rituals. He asks these kids to jump into the stream, supposedly to soften their foreskins. Solito captures these innocent kids like botticelli angels floating underwater; with special loving attention to their manhoods --- presumably the last they'll see them in that particular state. The circumciser, with the help of his daughter, one by one, circumcises each kid. The ritual is interesting: he asks for their names, makes them chew on guava leaves before hitting the foreskin with a handmade instrument, then forces them to spit the mixture of saliva and guava leaves on the fresh wounds.

The film proceeds years after, Daisy (Desiree del Valle), the circumciser's daugher, has grown up to be a beautiful lady. The same group of kids who got circumcized during the film's opening have become men; one (Luis Alandy) dutifully serenades Daisy nightly (giving the circumciser the idea of marrying the two) while another (Ping Medina) impregnates local lass Botchok (Vanna Garcia) before leaving her permanently. Nanding (Carlo Aquino), the grandson of the local shaman, is the only man in town who is uncircumcized --- causing him to be the point of jokes of his peers. In that village of traditional customs and patriarchal norms, Daisy seeks to rebel, first from her father's daily fits of drunken anger, and lastly from that village's own state of hypocritical contentedness.

The screenplay, written by Jimmy Flores (Solito' batchmate during his Mowelfund days), won first prize in a local screenwriting contest. It is considerably complex with its detailed implications of relationships within the village (the circumciser being forcedly married thus have very little or no love for his daughter; the close-knitedness links of each family). Yet, I cannot grasp any psychological maturity among the characters. Some of the characters inhabit a deluded state (for instance Nanding, whose goals in achieving his grandfather's agimat seems to be a mere afterthought rather than an actual plotpoint), with reasonings of questionable integrity (Botchok suddenly comes up with the idea of having a baby to ease Daisy's mother's sufferings). The screenplay's complexity is its downfall; it addresses too many issues that much needed humor, or even essential sprinkles of possibly humanity, are foregone.

While Flores struggles to balance his tale, Solito lends a helping hand in adding credibility to such. Solito's style inflicts a hint of mysticism to the familiar melodramatic ordeals. Instead of mere nipa huts and traditional passion plays, he adds interestingly placed mosquito nettings (to make the light pass through with a lot more sensual flair) or zealously crafted materials (observe the backgrounds, or even the costumes) that would presumably be unavailable to any typical villae. In Solito's eyes, Flores' village is no ordinary village --- it is that imaginary village of sexual aches that try to rebel in a very traditional Filipino context of what should and what should not be.

The film's plot flutters like a forgettable excuse to tell Solito's story --- of confrontation to tradition, and of the many possibilities of love within any cultural context. It is with that mindset that I see Tuli as a worthy successor to Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros' accolades. Although largely different in style, in mood, and in setting, there's that undeniable link that connects the two films together.

L' Enfer (2005)

Sabtu, 31 Maret 2007

L' Enfer (2005)

L' Enfer (Danis Tanovic, 2005)
English Title: Hell

Krzysztof Kieslowski's premature death gave us a treasure trove of great films (Decalogue (1989), Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, 1993; White, 1994; Red, 1995), The Double Life of Veronique (1991), etc.), including three unfinished screenplays (co-written with his long-time collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz) that forms a trilogy inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Trilogy. Heaven (2002), the first part of the trilogy, is directed by German helmer Tom Tykwer and is set in Italy, wherein a disgruntled woman accidentally kills innocent victims and later on escapes with a sympathizer and achieves a symbolic redemption in the end. The second part of the trilogy L' Enfer (Hell) is directed by Bosnian director Danis Tanovic, whose No Man's Land (2001) won him plenty of accolades worldwide, and is set in France wherein three sisters struggle with their disparate lives after a traumatic event during their childhood.

Much like what Kieslowski and Piesiewicz did with Decalogue and Three Colors Trilogy (wherein they stripped the ten commandments of their religious connotation, and the three colors of the French flag and their respective ideals of their political meanings), the three levels of the afterlife are removed of any of their Catholic dimensions, and what remains are basic human concepts that encapsulate these states in a completely human and worldly experience. In Heaven, it is redemption; a complete escape from the troubles that plague earthly life (that final scene in the film is both fantastical and yet completely understandable). L' Enfer, on the other hand, dictates a scenario of inescapable strife --- wherein strings of coincidences (or much more poetically, because of their destiny to have unfortunate lives) keep the three sisters from achieving a semblance of happiness.

It's more infernal than the typical descriptions of hell; while the French communes seem normal, actually sunny and pleasant at times, there is an unbearable sense of claustrophobia that traps these characters. The eldest sister Celine (Karin Viard) takes care of their physically incapacitated mom, suffers through a routine of taking the train from her apartment to the convalescent home (not to mention her self-imposed duty to fetch the daily papers and bread for her elderly neighbor), that when a handsome stalker Sebastian (Guillaume Canet) suddenly starts to hound through that routine, she fantasizes a romantic escape. In her masochistic sense of duty, she literally sleeps through opportunities for coincidences that might lead to her metaphorical redemption --- that same train conductor who lovingly observes her sleeping through the train ride.

Sophie (Emmanuelle Béart) gets obsessed with her husband's infidelity. She carefully follows her husband through his sexual escapades with a beautiful model; literally, consumes herself with the idea of punishing herself (and in a way, her two minor children) because of her husband's cheating. Their eventual separation connotes freedom from the inescapable repercussions of an unhappy married life; yet the reality of the matter is that, like her apartment that has been stripped off its beautiful decors and interiors, she has become empty and falsely complete.

The youngest sister Anne (Marie Gillain) is madly in love with her married professor (Jacques Perrin); she allows herself to be emotionally maltreated, be left unreciprocated with her immense romantic longings, with that fantastic idea that the professor would leave his family to be with her, taking in the idea that their getaway in Acropolis is as permanent a symbol of love as that of marriage and family. She symbolically releases herself through such longing, but in the end, that release is a mere facade, an unguaranteed repression, that will inevitably explode when the cruel tricks of fate seek to expose her true emotions.

It's a complex web of unhappy lives that Kieslowski and Piesiewicz paint; three separately told experiences that are devoid of any sense of redemption, thrown in a pit by fate and circumstance, enunciated by myth and literature as expressed through the Greek tragedy of Medea. While Heaven, the redemption may be conceived as cheaply constructed and maybe too easily realized, in L' Enfer, it's a doom that can be described as permanent and ravaging. The film dictates instances of possible escape (when the train conductor tries to announce her love by giving a gift to Celine, or the sisters' eventual reconnection), but again, fate and an unmistakable sense of human cruelty and emotional torture, get swayed in the equation that would make happiness elusive, or even impossible.

It's quite amazing how L' Enfer feels very much like a film directed by Kieslowski. The hues, the music motif, even little signature touches (the old lady trying to throw a bottle in a trach receptacle or that bee trying to escape from drowning), the overall atmosphere --- all these are Kieslowski-an in spirit. It felt like a departure for Tanovic (whose sense of satire made No Man's Land a rather involving political statement) who opens himself to be possessed by the great director's aesthetic and philosophical traits. And while the film is mostly melodramatic at times, there are quiet touches of black humor that surface throughout; the film is actually as interesting and as amusing as the bee struggling to get out of the liquid. But while the bee frees itself and flies to safety, the characters in this piece won't die and won't get freed --- they wriggle and strugglingly swim in a life-long emotional, mental, and philosophical emptiness as punishments inherited from a society rules over by an irrational god, or no god at all.