Editorial Staff
Colin Moore digs into a bowl of Asian film goodies
The opening shot in Lee Chang Dong’s “Milyang” (“Secret Sunshine”) is as effective as any in the film, a blue sky still and muffled from its view inside a parked car. Actually, a car broken down. Mother and son are having one of those days, but a repairman is soon on his way. A less jittery CSI roaming camera provides the quality that we now equate with reality on film. The kid waits with mom as kids do, whiney and restless one minute, lovable the next. Aside from a protesting engine, the world and the sky overhead seem just about right. And then they’re not.
Jeon Do-yeon won the Best Actress Award at Cannes 2007 for her performance as Shin-ae, a single mother who returns to the hometown of her deceased husband only to lose her child in a kidnap/ransom plot. Song Kang-ho (“Memories of Murder,” “The Host”) plays Jong-chan, the kind-hearted mechanic who tries to provide what comfort he can afterward. If the lost son isn’t her secret sunshine, then maybe he is. One question is why? His friendship isn’t enough to cure her though, nor is he a Horse Whisperer for distraught mothers. But the relationship that forms is a rarity in film in how touching two characters that keep each other at arms length can be. They share a sorrow that attracts them to one another, and with that, even words aren’t necessary. “21 Grams”‘s Penn and Watts gives a shaky analogy, but with physical contact.
What if you lost a child? How would you cope? The film addresses these questions while offering the one solution that might actually exist: no easy answer. Instead the film allows Shin-ae to experiment with as many roads to wholeness as there might actually be, from evangelical Christianity to comfort sex to hallucinations. None give her peace of mind. It’s an impressive performance, the more believable alternative to Jodie Foster in “The Brave One.” In that film, Foster turns vigilante after her fiance is beaten to death. There’s no question she’s brave, popping pimps and gang-bangers on the streets of New York. The roles that earned her Oscars in “The Accused” and the one about the sleepy sheep proved she could wear tough and vulnerable on the same face, and at the same time. But “The Brave One” stretches N.Y. into more of a seedy fantasy than perhaps it really is. Even before she goes looking for scum, she runs into more by chance than anyone in reality rightly would. Granted, she hangs about in the places mostly likely to give her urban movie trouble: corner stores, subways, and parks at dusk. Shin-ae though reacts to a single horrible incident and spends the rest of the film reacting to it again and again. It’s draining to watch her unravel. As for Foster’s latest, the story is less interesting than the story that it resembles,”Taxi Driver,” the film that endeared her to the almost assassin, John Hinckley Jr. If the “The Brave One” inspires any sequel on his part, he’ll have to dress up as Foster in order to impress himself. A safer bet anyhow.
As much as you can judge things you’ve never experienced as realistic or not then, why not continue with “Howl’s Moving Castle,” another in a series of colorful Miyazaki animes. The trains passing by spew out black clouds polluted enough to block the sun, and Sophie’s view. It doesn’t phase her. As a Miyazaki heroine (although here, adapted from the Diana Wynne Jones’ novel), she shares the characteristic strength of the girls found in “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away.” She also shares the dichotomy. Sophie is young enough to gain access to a world of magic and impossibility, but struggling to find the confidence to make decisions that matter. She’s not secure in her appearance, and carries it as a crutch. As always, Miyazaki’s complicated fantasy supplies the situations that allow these young insecurities to be tested, and win. Beats puberty.
Literal lead zepplin battleships and Jedi-like speeders patrol the skies above a picturesque German Alpine-like city, the kind of beauty that makes bombing all the more fowl. You could almost imagine a green valley spitting a bomb back out of inappropriateness. Sophie cuts through the back streets on her way to visit her sister when she’s stopped by a pair of soldiers. And as movie soldiers not presently in battle do, they accost young girls or protect them. These would be the former. She’s rescued by Howl, a tall blonde wizard, blue-eyed, chivalrous and fitted like a Swedish Elvis. They exchange pleasantries before a crew of gellatin blobmen (called…Blobmen) begin chasing them through the stone alleys. They’ve been sent by the Witch of the Waste, a taller, multiple chinned version of “Spirited Away”‘s Yubaba. She wants Howl’s heart.
Out of spite, the Witch confronts Sophie in the hat shop and casts a spell that adds 70 years to her life. The rest of the story boils down to her attempt to reverse the spell. She just has to enter Howl’s world to do it. The castle is a living character in itself. Picture a Guggenheim proportioned wood burning stove melted to a 50 car pile-up on mechanical chicken legs. Granny Sophie gains access with the help of a bouncing scarecrow on a stick.
But getting into this world is a spring breeze compared to understanding this man who runs it. Better to call his home “Howl’s Sprained Neurosis.” As a boy he was a promising magician’s apprentice to Madame Suliman, the all too confident sorceress of the king presently at war. But Howl’s days as a student were numbered. When he swallows the glowing remnants of a shooting star, a pyrotechnic creature emerges from his stomach complete with his heart in its belly. Calcifer is born, a talking piece of fire that powers the castle’s movements, and to a degree even Howl himself. But now his heart is too distant to serve him emotionally. Thus, Howl remains a scared and vulnerable boy in a man’s body, well-meaning but without true courage. It’s partly the reason why the castle is moving at all. It ka-thumps through the country side to keep Howl away from whatever he needs to avoid, including his obligations to Suliman, and the war. Sophie eventually gives him the courage he needs to grow up. As an old woman with nothing to lose, she seems to find it. Too confusing for a “cartoon”? Not really. In the end it’s a love thing, all you need to remember when you ask yourself why it doesn’t play like “The Incredibles.”
– COLIN MOORE
