Salon Of Moving Images

三明的老婆是花钱从四川买来的，两人结婚生子后，公安将三明老婆拯救出来，遣返回四川。但在这几年，两人已有了感情，三明决定来四川寻找老婆。

一位35岁左右的妇女来四川是为找老公，老公多年前离开家乡来四川做生意，在找寻老公的过程中，她决定和老公离婚。

一个山西汉子(由贾樟柯的表弟扮演)到四川寻找跑掉的媳妇。他的媳妇是买来的，生下孩子后，被救回了四川。另一个山西女人( 赵涛扮演) 到四川寻找打工多年，失去音信的丈夫。结果，前者那段不合法的婚姻，只好作罢。而后者那段合法的婚姻，在女人找到丈夫，看到他的第一眼时，却被舍弃了。

煤矿工人韩三明从汾阳来到奉节，寻找他十六年未见的前妻。两人在长江边相会，彼此相望，决定复婚。

女护士沈红从太原来到奉节，寻找她两年未归的丈夫，他们在三峡大坝前相拥相抱，一只舞后黯然分手，决定离婚。

老县城已经淹没，新县城还未盖好，一些该拿起的要拿起，一些该舍弃的要舍弃。

山西的一个普通煤矿工人，16年前买回了一个四川媳妇，媳妇刚怀孕，就被公安局解救回去了。16年天各一方之后，煤矿工人去三峡地区寻找他的女儿，而因三峡工程的缘故，前妻家所在的县城早已被淹没在水底，前妻的家人对他也不怎么友善，几次三番折腾之后，他终于见到了前妻，两人决定结婚。另外一个寻找的故事，结局没那么皆大欢喜，赵涛演的护士虽然找到了自己的丈夫，但心知感情不再，终于还是黯然分手。

End Credits

Director: Ismaël Ferroukhi Writer: Ismaël Ferroukhi Stars: Nicolas Cazalé, Mohamed Majd, Jacky Nercessian, Gina Ognianova, Kamel Belgahsi, Atik Mohammed

Genre: Drama Length: 108 minutes Cinema: 14 October 2005

Review--ZZ

 

Executive Producer: Michio Suzuki
Producer: Kim Ki-duk
Screenplay: Kim Ki-duk
Cinematographer: Sung Jong-moo
Editor: Kim Ki-duk
Production Designer: Choi Keun-woo
Sound: Jeung Hyun-soo
Music: Noh Hyung-woo
Principal Cast: Sung Hyun-ah, Ha Jung-woo, Park Ji-yun

Prolific author and enfant terrible of Korean cinema Kim Ki-duk plumbs the depths of obsessive love in Time. Kim plays with the craze for plastic surgery that has invaded our lives, as magazines and television shows such as "Extreme Makeover" have streamed together into a nightmare of eternal youth and beauty. Kim's unpredictable genius takes a fashionable issue to extremes in order to probe the dark, jealous core of a relationship gone wrong.

Attractive Seh-hee (Park Ji-yun) is having problems with her boyfriend, Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo). After two years, their love has entered a period of weariness. Though faithful to his fiancée, Ji-woo eyes other women and, in bed, seems to get excited only at the thought of making love to other partners. Seh-hee can't cope with the mounting jealousy tainting her life and decides to dramatically change her look - to become a new woman, with whom her boyfriend can again fall in love.

She enters a plastic-surgery clinic and then vanishes for six months - long enough for the scars to heal - leaving Ji-woo hurt and confused by her disappearance. Resurfacing as the new waitress at the coffee shop Ji-woo frequents, Seh-hee - now calling herself See-hee (Sung Hyun-ah) - tries to seduce him. But between them stands the spectre of Ji-woo's lost girlfriend, with whom he is still very much in love. Jealousy once again creeps into the shaky existence Seh-hee has artificially crafted.

A clean style guides the circular syntax of this extreme tale of love. Set mostly in coffee shops and bars, where the intimacy of a lovers' discourse is shared by curious clients, Time is steeped in a quiet, disturbing violence that censors feelings and mutilates the soul through body surgery. As if trapped within a meandering, irrational mind, the script follows a complex rhythm that mirrors the obsessive tone of the film and displays once again Kim's talent for transforming high-concept ideas into incandescent cinema.

- Giovanna Fulvi

Kim Ki-duk was born in the North Kyongsang province of South Korea and studied art in Paris. He worked as a screenwriter before making his feature directorial debut with The Crocodile (96). His films include Wild Animals (97), Birdcage Inn (98), Real Fiction (00), The Coast Guard (02) and Samaritan Girl (04), which received the Silver Bear for best director at the Berlin International Film Festival.

ARCH: 439 Wukang Rd. (near Huaihai Zhong Rd.) 

 

Review--ZZ

"Life has no plot, no real conclusion"
(Jim Jarmusch)

Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991) is a trans-global taxicab comedy which strings together five different vignettes in five different cities, each observing in acerbic and penetrating detail the singular relationship between passenger and driver as they speed towards their destination.

Juxtaposition is the crucial structuring device in the film as Jarmusch records one moment in one night in five locations Los Angeles, New York, Rome, Paris and Helsinki. In each of the cities the narrative unfolds in a taxi; this both captures the transitory condition of urban experience - unpredictable encounters and journeys - and foregrounds what is usually regarded as insignificant detail, the everyday is central to this film. In interview, Jarmusch emphasizes this point:

"So in a way the content of this film is made up of things that would usually be taken out. It's similar to what I like about Stranger than Paradise or Down by Law, the moments between what we think of as significant"
(Interview with Peter Keogh - 'Home and Away' Sight and Sound 2(4) 1991: 9)

Enterprisingly cast throughout, the quintet's opening L.A. story features Winona Ryder as an indomitable, single-minded cabbie deeply unimpressed by high-powered Hollywood agent Gena Rowlands, while Armin Mueller-Stahl tackles a lighter role as an amiable East German immigrant cabbie being given a lesson in Brooklyn street wisdom by Spike Lee veteran Giancarlo Esposito in the New York segment. The Paris section show-cases Beatrice Dalle as a blind girl who "opens the eyes" of prejudiced driver Isaach de Bankole ( who first appeared in Claire Denis post-colonial study Chocolat); Rome is represented by Roberto Benigni and the kind of scabrous cabbie's tales which give his priestly fare (Paolo Bonacelli) a heart attack; and we end the evening in Helsinki - where else? - with a drunken cab-full of Aki Kaurismaki regulars making hilarious efforts to escalate the dramatics of each other's tragedy-laced chronicles of Scandinavian gloom.

The basic connection is the relationship between driver and passenger that each story explores, though the segments are also linked in other, less obvious, ways. As with the best short stories, the segments are less about plot - very little actually happens - than they are about character, dialogue, and mood. Jarmusch is adroit in controlling these elements, and clearly has an intuitive rapport with his cast - who bring the proceedings to three-dimensional life, mining the script for humour and coaxing social and political overtones from Jarmusch's sparse dialogue. All this is perfectly complemented by Jarmusch's moody evocation of the five night-shrouded urban settings.

Jarmusch is not interested in making each section into a definite "short-story" with that obvious configuration. There are no conclusions. The concentration is on character and the relationships that unfold, in the Los Angeles piece, between a tattooed, gum-chewing, chain-smoking young driver and an elegant executive who wants to cast her in a movie. "I've got my life all mapped out," says Corky (Winona Ryder), who hopes to eventually qualify as a mechanic. "There must be lotsa girls who want to be in the movies. Not me." The film doesn't pass judgement, it simply reports an opinion.

To accentuate the characterization of the urban environment as "other", it appears that Jarmusch reproduces and proliferates images of outsiders/immigrants/women as in-excess of the city these are then focused to detail the narrative's otherness. For example the narrative fluidity of the film rotates upon endless loops as one immigrant driver melts into another and as Rosie Perez mutates into Beatrice Dalle. No one has a secure, safe place in Jarmusch's city - and there is no desire or nostalgia for such a place - there is no sense of ownership of the cityscape, hence the concentration on immigrant identity and women. Night on Earth is an offbeat, original examination of concepts of home, belonging, solitude and strangeness. As in previous films Jarmusch continues his structural approach to narrative by replaying essentially the same story in different locations. Once again, his intuitive feeling of cultural difference and his operating outside of the "us" and "them" dichotomy is reflected by a narrative construction that emphasizes simultaneity and the notion that there is no single experience or perspective. The abstract quality of Night on Earth becomes apparent as the recurring framework is animated by new details and nuances. What energizes the film is the tension and myriad associations evoked in the continuous sequence of repeating slightly varied narratives.

Although shot in high-tone colour like its Memphis-set predecessor Mystery Train, Night on Earth's audacious Tom Wait's soundtrack and energetic "mugging" courtesy of maestro Benigni ensure that echoes of writer-director-producer Jarmusch's deftly understated and distinctively monochrome early works resonate throughout. Here the diligently positioned static shots and chunks of black screen may be absent, but as Jarmusch's formal approach diversifies, his powers of human insight have appreciably widened in scope. Part fairy-tale, part-noir mood-piece, Night on Earth both celebrates and derives comedy from its characters' eccentricities. If humour plays a greater part in counteracting the tendency towards style than in earlier films, Jarmusch nonetheless remains true to an experimental aesthetic, with innovative editing, stories deprived of conventional climatic action, and moody or hyper-animated mannerisms that continually undercut "realism". Jarmusch's films are constructed from scenes that are usually neglected in conventional narrative structure. He has explained in interview: "Say a guy breaks up with his girl over the phone and he decides to go to see her and we cut from him leaving his apartment to him entering hers." That's missing the essential elements according to Jarmusch. He wants to show the man on the way to her apartment, show "how he was feeling, what he did and how he got there." (Interview with Geoff Andrew - Guardian Mon. November 15 1999)

Jarmusch focuses on miniature, transitory exchanges between eccentric characters to comment on themes such as stardom and "reality" in Hollywood, the cultural density of the New York population, preconceptions regarding disability, and morality. In its complete arc the film balances between serious contentions in its juxtaposition of a polymorphic arrangement of the elements of reality and the mental dynamic one perceives as an undercurrent, and light-heartedness, as it elides from one intriguing detail to the next.

As always, in Night on Earth, it is the unpredictable and individualistic characters, the mundane yet bizarrely striking situations, that differentiate a Jarmusch film - as well as the soundtrack, constantly beautifully restrained and effective. There is Jarmusch's customary unconventional absurdity apparent in the New York instalment, yet the poignant comment on cultural blinkeredness in the Paris piece and the extraordinary way in which the closing Finnish drama both acknowledges Kaurismaki's individualistic style and achieves a deadpan, funny and simultaneously deeply emotive atmosphere, make Night on Earth Jarmusch's most intelligent, sensitive and complete film.

Jarmusch's films share a visionary, insightful quality, while maintaining an understated honesty and lightness. Jarmusch's attitude to narrative comes across as defiantly non-dramatic and non-explanatory. Although a student with Nicholas Ray whose work principally espouses direct, explicit and literal dramaturgy, Jarmusch's aesthetic is oblique, vague and full of hard-to-decode allusions. However, he displays concentrated insight as the idiosyncratic illustrator of credible characters who are usually relegated to the margins of mainstream movies, and a film-maker of refreshingly hybrid movies that resist conventional categorisation. His visual sense is superb, his control of atmosphere strong, and greater recognition has not compromised his highly individual style.

"I consider myself a minor poet who writes fairly small poems. I'd rather make a movie about a guy walking his dog than about the emperor of China."
(Jim Jarmusch)

 

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Lisanne Falk