Change Your Image
valerie-clarke
Reviews
Dancing at Lughnasa (1998)
You Don't Have To Be Irish ...
... to enjoy this film. I had five Italian aunts and the insights into their sisterly relations appear to me spot on. So often in relationship stories, each character is a paragon of one virtue. Not true in "Dancing in Lughnasa" where the women are not prototypical but rather complex and totally unself-conscious individuals.
As one of the finest actors of her time, to her credit, Meryl Streep doesn't overpower the excellent ensemble cast. Even the men players, who are figuratively essential but literally superfluous to the survivl of this family, are presented as whole people. They are neither villains or heroes; just men. Go figure!
In a film that depends on the actors' considerable restraint in exposing the internal and external dramas of the plot, there are two wonderful moments of abandon near the end: the essential dances of life ... the dance of faith, hope and charity and the dance of decadenced, despair, and destruction.
An overall enjoyable entertainment, the film fails only in not giving the audience a better understanding of the implacable, irreversible outside forces in the world working against the family. This is film after all where we expect to be shown as well as told.
Zhifu (2003)
Realism Becomes China!
A few years ago, the NY Public Library ran an underground Chinese language film series. Most of the films were produced on video; many were crudely shot and edited. But the entre' into places in mainland China, Taiwan and Tibet proved worth the time spent with these rough-edged videos. "Uniform" reminded me of this series, looking more grown up and much better funded.
The film is about the necessity of taking on an alternate persona in order to survive in the new "free market" China. The action takes place in an anonymous provincial town in northern China. Admittedly slow at times, the leisurely pace nevertheless allows the eye to appreciate the many exquisitely composed frames. There's flash and substance in each composed scene and veracity in the wide, set-up shots,including passersby noticing the camera.
The protagonists (a man; a woman) are both young and scraping to make the next meal. The man's background is intuited as we see how his family lives. He is employed as a low status textile worker, an occupation usually given to women. From this, without knowing anything about Chinese culture, we can understand why he chooses a macho profession to impersonate; one where you are given immediate respect by the uniform you wear. You don't wonder why he does what he does or how he does it. On the other hand, the woman's background is pointedly opaque. Does anyone care to know the how's and why's of people who ply the oldest profession in the world?
There's minimal dialogue. With the added immediacy of video, the writer/director twists the plot in the real streets of China -- not the tourist images of Beijing or Shanghai. These twists rest on a number of juxtapositions: gender, societal, cultural and economic. And, the film is not without humor, much of it visual. For instance, is Superman a universally known action figure? In one scene when the man is literally changing his life while he changes his clothes, one can't help think of Superman if he lived in a town without phone booths.
The visuals are both striking and absorbing. Like words in a great novel,both the beginning and ending images in "Uniform" pique the interest and invite our participation in creating our own semblance of the events. Too bad this film, mostly because of its pacing, will be relegated to the art house and the museum film roster.
Rosselini invented "neo-realism" in Rome at the end of WWII when Italy and its film industry were devastated and production money was scarce. He took his actors and camera and ideas into the street and showed the world that singular time in that particular place in the form of popular entertainment.
"Uniform" accomplishes this in contemporary China. Like the films I saw at the library, I felt privileged to be invited in, only this time with a cleaner eye and a sharper ear.