Reviews

This is an incredibly humane film. After but 15 minutes into the film, you already feel like you've known the characters for a long time. You know what they feel, you know how they feel, and, more importantly, they feel so real. You just forget you are watching a movie. There are so many films that, no matter how much I love them (the Lord of the Rings, Sin City, Star Wars), no matter how much I empathise with their characters, well, I still know it's a film I'm watching. Not with this film. I kept feeling like I was in the Yunnan mountains walking by the characters, or like I was peeping through one of those ornate wooden windows and eavesdropping on their conversation. Judge Feng, the main character, is an old, humane judge, settling small disputes in the forlorn minority hamlets of the Yunnan mountains. Although he's there as the representative of an autocracy, he's incredibly Solomonic in his rulings, and greatly liked by the inhabitants of the mountain hamlets. Characters don't talk much, but you understand a lot. The best scene is when the judge and her aide talk whilst she's turning her back to him and washing a shirt. 'Your whole life can be summed up the time it takes to wash a shirt,' they say. Well, indeed so.

A great film about man's fate. Probably one of the best I've ever seen. Highly recommended.

Great science-fiction cum thriller Korean comedy which actually ends up as a bitter social satire of South Korea's recent history. The film starts as the hero, a deranged beekeeper, kidnaps the wealthy CEO of a chemical conglomerate because the former believes that the latter is an evil alien. Then there a two stories unfolding in parallel: the criminal investigation by the Seoul police, and the confrontation between the kidnapped CEO and his abductor. During the time of the abduction, we slowly realise that the CEO and the deranged beekeeper have known each other for a while, and that the most wicked is not the one we thought... When the police finally find the CEO and his kidnapper, all hell breaks loose — the ending was the one part of the film I liked least. The film is still a must see. Very recommended.

Spain, 1944. It is the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In the Pyrenees, an arrogant Nationalist officer (Capt. Vidal, a frightening Sergi Lòpez), who has established his headquarters in a remote hamlet in the forest, is ruthlessly tracking down the last remnants of the Republican forces, who are hiding in the mountains. His pregnant wife and her daughter from her previous marriage arrive at the hamlet to live with him but are kept there in near-seclusion by the insensitive officer. The girl, Ofelia, escapes the cruelty of the Civil War and of her dour stepfather through an imaginary world filled with fairies. The entrance to her fantastical world is a stone labyrinth guarded by an ambiguous faun pretending to be her servant /hence the title of the film/. Throughout the film, Capt. Vidal reveals his penchant for criminal behaviour whilst we are left wondering whether Ofelia's fantastical world is imaginary or real. El Laberinto del Fauno's major success lies in intertwining the harsh, unglamorous reality of the Spanish Civil War with Ofelia's fantasies, even more so than in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures. For me, this is really El Laberinto del Fauno's major breakthrough. Where, for instance, the Harry Potter or the Narnia stories could be set in any time, any location, El Laberinto del Fauno is inextricably linked with the terror wrought by Franco's fascist regime. Also, Ofelia's fate is much more traumatic than Harry Potter's or than Tolkien's Hobbits' because the most horrid monster of the film, in the end, is not the faun or the Pale Man, but Capt. Vidal. And, alas, it has been proved many times in history that the vilest monsters have always been human beings. Highly recommended (but not for children!).

Just saw the movie, it's actually pretty good. The trailers'd left me an impression of either yet another Dujardin one-man-show-turned-film (à la _Brice de Nice_) or an expensive, stupid French comedy. Surprisingly, it's neither. Secret agent OSS 117 is stupid, but at least he sort of knows it, whereas I've always found that James Bond was stupid but acted like a smart arse. Dialogue is witty with a lot of tongue-in-cheek humour that one would expect from a British rather than a French movie. The women and the music are beautiful. A refreshing trip into the past, when the bad guys were ex-Nazis or Soviet brutes, cars were shiny, and France had colonies!

The story is set during World War One in south eastern France. A family, despite being notorious for being less-than-hospitable with strangers, hides a mysterious mute deserter in the cellar. Is he French or German, they wonder. At the same time as they hide the man from the gendarmes, they also --apparently-- try to hide some terrible family secret by pretending than an abandoned hamlet in the mountain --Malatèrra-- is cursed and should not be visited. There are several intertwined plots: the mysterious stranger, the investigation by the authorities in this rural community, the family secrets; all set against the harsh reality of life in an area depleted of its adult male population.

Contrary to the usual portrayal of such times and places in French films (in which everybody speaks Parisian French and wears designer clothes), the characters here speak mostly Occitan and wear unkempt clothes. Also, contrary to the usual French (and British) clichés about Provence, the village is cold and sometimes dark.

A refreshing alternative to the clichéd films about Provence, the story is sometimes overly sombre though. A whodunit coupled with a very true portrayal of what rural life must have been like in the Provençal Alps one hundred years ago make up for all the cheesy films about Provence usually made by French directors. Definitely worth watching -- except if you're a fan of Peter Mayle ;-)