I cannot live without my soul

Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of the famous Emily Bronte ‘love story’ has its fair share of detractors, but whether you like her Wuthering Heights or hate it, you haven’t seen it done like this before. After the psycho-sexual anguish of her unsettling debut Red Road and the age-inappropriate and class-based relationship drama Fish Tank (one of my favourite films of 2010), Arnold seems the perfect person to tell the classic story of annihilated romantic love. I doubt that this is an adaptation that purists would enjoy.

This is the story of Catherine Earnshaw and her soul mate Heathcliff (played as children by Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave, and as adults by Kaya Scodelario and James Howson), and how Heathcliff’s passion for Cathy is a major irruptive force in the rural English setting. Heathcliff was brought home by Cathy’s father, and he is raised as one of the children in some ways, and as a domestic/farm worker in others. Cathy’s brother Hindley (Lee Shaw) is especially antagonistic towards this new addition, who struggles with English and whose vocabulary destabilises the superficial peace of Wuthering Heights. Here we have two changes Arnold introduces into the famous story: restrained, forceful dialogue occasionally including profanities, and making Heathcliff a dark skinned foreigner who is out of place not only in the Heights, but in rural England.

Making Heathcliff black could be a cosmetic change at the best of times, but Arnold regularly uses his blackness to emphasise how he doesn’t belong in Cathy’s world. If Wuthering Heights is about a man who is driven by an uncontainable passion for a single woman, making him dark skinned establishes the character as even more of an outcast, a sinner. Heathcliff is the one shown in regular contact with animals, and is shown to have a certain capacity for what one may call sanctioned violence: cutting the throat of a goat to let it drown in its blood, or snapping the spine of a rabbit. (The film’s representations of Heathcliff’s violent interaction with animals are very discomforting; sensitive viewers, be warned.)

Arnold’s vision of Wuthering Heights is one of persistent basic drives and urges that are repeatedly frustrated. As children, Cathy and Heathcliff are assumed to be doing improper things with one another, but as we never see any of these allegations made manifest, it’s clear that while ‘everyone knows’ what’s not-yet-but-almost happening between them, young physical love has not yet arrived in full. Arnold shows the children moving around one another in the dark, damp farmhouse, or outside enjoying the lushness of the grass, or rolling in the mud. While very little sexual happens on screen, every frame is loaded with intent. The first part of the film is about the child years, whereas the second part deals with the fates of the adult Catherine and Heathcliff; in Arnold’s imagery, an already tragic (and to many familiar) story becomes devastating.    

The force of the film owes much not only to the actors inhabiting the characters, but to Arnold’s aesthetic: shot on 16mm film and exhibited in the director’s approved 4:3 ratio, Wuthering Heights achieves a sense of heightened intimacy that affectively amplifies the events on screen. I have seen the film described as “difficult”, even “painful”, but daring cinemagoers will find their bravery matched by Arnold’s visualisation.

Don't bring a gun to a knife fight

Desperate times call for desperate measures and dire consequences when strapped-for-cash cab driver Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo), a resident of Yanji City, accepts a murder contract to pay off his debts. The arrangement, orchestrated by local gangster Myun-ga (Kim Yun-seok), seems simple: Gu-nam is to travel to Korea (where his wife disappeared to a year earlier, and from whom he hasn’t heard since) and kill a businessman. Gu-nam has 10 days to commit the murder, and to provide his employer with proof in the form of the businessman’s severed thumb. Deep in financial debt aggravated by his Mah-jong losing streak, Gu-nam has no choice but to agree to the deal. While he signs up for the killing, his own agenda is, of course, to locate and reunite with his wife. He clings to the idea of a loyal wife even though he is haunted by his own imagining of her infidelity, while his own mother tells him that his wife is most certainly prostituting herself in Korea. 

To be sure, The Yellow Sea is all about illusions, about people making decisions on what they think they know while entering, in fact, some sort of existential and violent freefall. One such illusion is indeed the one of loyalty; The Yellow Sea sets up the basic premise described above, and then complicates everything by throwing in (not entirely unexpectedly) a series of betrayals. The film plays with the familiar but fertile idea of a man caught up in something much larger than himself, struggling to retain a semblance of control as best laid plans are overturned and the world comes apart around him. 

Director Na Hong-jin, who gained fame with his nail biter The Chaser and who also wrote the screenplay for this film, has as much an eye for visuals as fellow countryman Kim Ji-woon, although Hong-jin does not stylise and saturate his images to the point of draining them of colour. He has a knack for pacing, and The Yellow Sea (the title is the name of the final chapter in the film) is two and a half hours of accomplished suspense drama, even if the film overstays its welcome. After so much bloodshed and destruction (which I’ll get to soon), it’s a pity that the film seems to lose direction as the ends draws nearer. There are symbolic reasons for what Na Hong-jin does to Gu-nam, but they’re rather anticlimactic in a film so explicitly plot driven. 

I mentioned bloodshed. Once the violence starts, it appears regularly with bursts of energy and arterial spray. The characters in the film favour knives and other hand-to-hand weapons, which mean much close combat (though nothing as breathtaking as in Oldboy, even though a scene in The Yellow Sea is obviously inspired by that masterpiece’s hallway fight scene) and litres of blood. Faces are covered in it, bodies are floating in it, and Na Hong-jin revels in all of it. The film seems to struggle with whether it’s aiming for a certain realism or not, because while much of the film would affirm that it does, there’s an occasional glee to the violence that suggests it’s not. In that sense, the film is never as disturbing as, say, I Saw the Devil. 

Where The Chaser is a lean, contained thriller with an evil villain and a shady cop protagonist – the film exemplifies the type of genre film Hollywood does not excel at making anymore - The Yellow Sea is hard-boiled, more epic in scope, more convoluted and without a hero in sight.

Dad, Meet Human nature

Attenberg, a delightfully frustrating father-and-daughter love story comes by way of Greece, from the minds of the people that gave us one of my favourite movies from last year, Dogtooth. Now if you read the first sentence carefully, alarm bells may well have gone off: yes, this is a father-and-daughter love story, but not in a psychoanalytic, deeply incestuous kind of way (as if Ian McEwan had written it). Rather, Attenberg is very playful – the characters like to play (the two lead female characters perform regular dance routines on the pavement); the film plays with the viewer (who has no idea what to expect from what they’re viewing – no instant gratification here!); the film plays with itself (what is shown or not shown; lingering shots of factories...). 

Yet Attenberg is a film to take seriously, for within all of this playfulness, Greece is falling apart, and her subjects want to know: did you not see this coming? How are we to survive? The relationship between Marina (Ariane Labed) and her father (Vangelis Mourikis), slowly dying from cancer, is sensitively handled. One scene has the father looking down at their town from a height, from where he speaks to Marina about Greece and her being. The two spend much time together watching television on a bed (now, now, none of that). Here the film obtains its title: Attenberg is a playful mispronunciation of “Attenborough”, as in sir David Attenborough the esteemed British scientist. It’s one thing to see these characters watch a documentary on animal behaviour; it’s something else to see them imitate this behaviour.

Such are the idiosyncrasies of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film, which seems to be set in the town where Dogtooth’s patriarch runs a factory, thus inhabiting the same slightly otherworldly reality as George Lanthimos’s film. Lanthimos, by the way, co-stars as a man who may become Marina’s first real lover, if one discounts the lessons provided by her friend (Evangelia Randou), who involves Marina in some lesbian moments that cannot be called 'lesbian' because a framework of 'lesbianism' cannot be applied to the film. 

Attenberg is consistently eccentric but there’s something missing, preventing the film from being Dogtooth’s equal. It might be that while Dogtooth sucked you into its world with its particular rules and regulations, Attenberg gives you a lot of themes and quirkiness from the get go, creating too much distance between viewer and film. A certain sensitive playfulness gets you some way, but Attenberg is too ‘unbound’, too decentred, to be anything more than a delightfully frustrating companion piece to Dogtooth.

By our powers combined

The Avengers is a record-breaking superhero movie event, the culmination of years of Marvel strategy and prequels. Iron Man 1 & 2, Thor, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk… this is what it comes down to: one film to bring them all and in consumer culture bind them. No wonder that New York Times film critic AO Scott called the film “Disney’s ATM”, much to the chagrin of Samuel L. Jackson who in response called for Scott to lose his job. Yes, that’s the same Jackson who made Snakes on a Plane. 

Besides being a studio accountant’s fantasy, The Avengers tells a ridiculous story rather well. “Ridiculous” is not part and parcel of comic book adaptations. Consider the gravitas of Watchmen, the turmoil of The Dark Knight. But the story here is ridiculous, although handled ably by writer-director Joss Whedon, who now has filmdom at his feet after years of television work (did I miss a Nathan Fillion cameo?) 

In essence, The Avengers is an alien invasion story. There’s a portal, a powerful item, some domination-hungry alien beings (their exact motivations are muddy). Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) half brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is tasked with bringing these aliens to earth through a portal, but the Avengers are there to make sure this doesn’t happen. Besides Thor (blonde, has a hammer), there’s “billionaire philanthropist” Tony Stark as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr, who is wisely not allowed to make this Iron Man 3); fellow scientist Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), who turns into Hulk when angered; Captain America (Chris Evans), who admits he’s out of place in this new world; Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), who deserves her own movie based on the back story potential and entertaining first appearance this film grants her; and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), possibly the world’s greatest crossbow marksman. 

Keeping them all together (which isn’t easy, given the sizable egos of some, the righteousness of others) is Nick Fury, head of SHIELD, and trusty advisor Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg). It is to the film’s credit that none of the characters seem redundant, not even tagalong Hawkeye who could easily have been a well cast extra. Whedon keeps his players in balance while placing much of the weight of the film on Iron Man and Captain America, sparking considerable tension between capitalist-militant America and romanticised Old America of the World Wars, when the United States was a clean shaven, optimistic soldier. So far, so standard operating superhero procedure, but Whedon has a secret weapon: Hulk. 

In a few scenes, Hulk becomes the character that neither Ang Lee’s psychodynamic The Hulk not Louis Leterrier’s Incredible Hulk were able to present. Mild mannered, slightly ruffled Ruffalo gives the best interpretation of the barely contained monster to date, and it’s now wonder that much has been written on the glory of the Hulk scenes in The Avengers (Film Crit Hulk and other contributors at Badass Digest have contributed to this discussion significantly, and I will not repeat their comments here). Hulk has some of the best scenes in the film – see his brief discussion with Loki - and is one of the most sympathetic characters overall, even if Banner’s final emotional revelation should come as no surprise. 

The film’s three-act structure is out of balance. The opening scene, an attack on a SHIELD research centre, is underwhelming and looks like something out of the television series Stargate, while the finale is 45 minutes long and looks like the love child of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Independence Day. It includes one of those self-sacrifice scenes everyone knows is going to work out fine for the hero in question since Marvel’s future income depends on it, and not because of any narrative reason. That scene plays out in familiar fashion to boot, with Whedon not risking something more adventurous and avoiding possibly alienating his audience. 

Back to the ridiculous story. Anyone, any sentient species that would like to invade earth for whatever reason, have only to write an iPhone app to do the job – this whole entering-from-the-skies-above-angle is truly odd and outdated. Loki is known for his sharp mind (and, may I add, he too has a great line for Black Widow that should make attentive listeners gasp at how Whedon got away with it), yet his master plan is an all out military attack on New York. Nothing about it speaks to the villain’s intellectual abilities.

The Avengers succeeds at defining and differentiating between its characters, and that finale sure is spectacular despite (because of?) its sense of familiarity. Some plot holes mar the film (so what does a villain do when his supposed captors literally fight each other for him – does he watch them fight with glee? Does he consider an escape plan? Does he do nothing?) It’s two and a half hours of proven box office appeal but it’s a far cry from Gotham City’s storm und chaos. 

Clever dialogue, standard story, good looking people, some strong 9/11 imagery: Whedon gives the fans what they want, but it’s Nolan who has shown how such expectations are to be succeeded and subverted. Some men may want to see the world burn, but Whedon just wants to play paintball in it.