skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Silentium is a Latin word for 'shut up'. It is also the title of an Austrian film by Wolfgang Murnberger based on a detective novel by Wolf Haas. It revolves around a grumpy private detective stumbling into the mysterious case of a man found dead on a rooftop in the beautiful city of Salzburg. As he keeps on searching for the truth behind the death, his life is increasingly in danger.
Even though what I just wrote in the previous paragraph seems pretty banal and commonplace in an average detective story, Silentium is somehow fresh in its gothic feel and odd characters. Simon Brennder, the detective, looks more like a homeless person than a detective as his life spirals out of control. Salzburg is also transformed into a city of at once carnivalesque and mysterious atmosphere.
It turns out that the death involves a Catholic school in which there are only 33 male students. The recruitment of Filipino maids of course rouses Brenner's suspicion as he tries to unravel the whole mystery. Of course, his search leads to a series of deaths which, albeit gory as it were, are somehow made light by the general humorous tone of the film.
Of course, I don't think I need to reveal the culprit, as the viewer could probably have guessed who is behind all this after watching it for a while. In fact, the director even shows the faces of the murderers at the beginning of the film. What is more important, I believe, is Brenner's reasoning and picking up trails, coupled with his eccentric personality. In one point, he is even compared to Jesus as he is portrayed as wearing a crown of thorns. This just makes me think: in what sense is Brenner a matyr? Does he sacrifice his life and safety in order to search for a truth no one wants in the same way that Jesus preaches what nobody nowadays wants to hear? Maybe Brenner's ethics is out of place in the world where we are becoming more desentisised to evils and moral corruption.
This is sad.
Another film that uses Paris as a crucial setting, 2 Days in Paris is about love, relationships, and cultural conflict. Two main characters, Jack and Marion, are in love, but the film shows that somehow love is not enough.
What is interesting in this film are national stereotypes that are somehow inflated to the level of intentional absurdity. Marion is French: she is portrayed as temperamental, 'allegedly' promiscuous, and sophisticated. Jack is an cynical American hypochondriac. However, these stereotypes are not there only to reinforce the difference in characterisation; they become the cause of misunderstanding, expectation, and of course self-realisation. What I like about this film is that Julie Delpy does not only parody these stereotypes, but she also portrays how we still use them in our attempt to understand or make sense of things and people around us.
Even though at times I got exhausted listening to their constant bickering and never-ending dialogues, 2 Days in Paris is beautiful. It shows how Jack and Marion, despite their stereotypical differences, wish to learn and transcend the stereotypical boundaries as deep down they hope that love can somehow conquer this difference. The ending, which for some may seem unrealistic, reflects something about life: that a split second can make or break a relationship. Somehow days or months of rationalising about make-up or break-up may not be important anymore in that split second when one wishes to stop or carry on. In that split second, perhaps indescribable instinct or faith in love counts.
A quirky film, The Royal Tenenbaums is about family bonding, distinguished by its rich characterisation. The Tenenbaums are a family of geniuses; however, this doesn't mean they are happy. We see the parents divorced and living apart and we also see their children growing up to be an unhappy and insecure bunch of thirty-somethings.
However, despite the bleak plot, it is a feel-good film showcasing the attempt by the father, Royal Tenenbaum, to make amends and to pull his family back together. His sons and daughter do not look at his return with innocent expectations; however, soon enough they realise that somehow being a family one cannot expect perfection. Forgiveness is important as it enables lives to go on, not stuck with guilt and memories of bad experience.
Enough with the gist of the film. Sadly and unexpectedly, I don't empathise much with the film, finding it a bit too pretentious as it tries so hard to be quirky and eccentric. It may be better as a novel, not as a film. I don't know why I feel this way. Let me give you some possible reasons. You may choose one.
(A) I get bored of this overused style of contemporary weirdness and eccentricity to portray the postmodern sense of humanity.
(B) With this cynical style of representation, I just don't expect cheesy happy ending with Royal Tenenbaums dying happily with his sons, daughter, and grandchildren understanding him. In other words, I just don't expect this kind of film to 'teach' in such a didactic manner.
(C) I have a dysfunctional family so I just don't believe in family bonding.
(D) I have a male menopause.
Paretas Hutanggura is probably most remembered from his collection of short stories The Witch in the Building (แม่มดบนตึก). Some of the stories remain a must-read for those interested in contemporary Thai Literature, as Paretas is one of the most sarcastic authors around who does give an accurate picture of consumer culture.
In Rush Out, he continues in the same vein of sarcastic parody, tackling the film industry through the characterisation of two characters, a traditional minor royal and a PhD upstart who just finishes her study abroad. If the former prefers everything to be traditional, the latter simply thinks that tradition is anything but dead and society should be more frank in dealing with violence and the corruption of the public mind. The two are asked to be in the same panel for the Pirate Award, which is given to the best scriptwriter, whose script will be made into the film. So what we see is the contrast of the two extremes, one traditional and the other radical and transgressive.
Such a contrast, in fact, is what exists in Thai society and is deepening. We have people who still preach about the evils of globalisation and the glorious days in the past. At the same time, we have newer generations of people who think that these opinions are simply a myth and that these older people are deluding themselves to be something they have never been from the start.
Paretas, of course, doesn't offer any solution to this crack in our social structure, but he does revel in portraying the contrast in the Rabelaisian manner, as if he realised that there's no way out, just a cynical look at the whole scenario of absurdity. For me, this novel is special, as it is the first time I feel that I need to read quickly. It's not made for careful perusal. Perhaps the style itself reflects our faster pace of life, where we are not supposed to stop and think. Because if we do so, existential absurdity is what we are going to feel.
824 is a (not quite) new novel by Jane Vejjajiva, who did stir the Thai literary circles with her debut The Happiness of Kati. However, in my humble opinion, this work is far better than her former, which already won her the SEA Write award. Well, my compliments don't logically mean that she'll automatically get the Nobel Prize for Literature, but at least it does show that her expertise doesn't only lie in the portrayal of the upper-middle class.
The strange title does have a meaning: Jane tries to depict the lives of 8 beings (seven people and one dog) within 24 hours. They all live down the same alley and even though they don't know each other, their lives somehow are related. Doesn't this sound a bit too familiar? If you think this is something truly new, I'd recommend you to read MR Kukrit Pramoj's Many Lives and, of course, its prototype -- Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which was first published as far back as 1927. However, different from these two novels, which end with death, 824 ends with hope.
The characters do vary as the author attempts to cast a wide net to capture creatures from all walks of life, from various gender and class dimensions. Therefore, we have a good-intentioned transvestite, a drunkard, an old man who despite his age tries to take care of an old lady with whom he fell in love long time ago, and a Frenchman who is head over heels in love with Bangkok. All in all, 824 has all the material to create a soi melodrama, in which all characters have challenges to overcome, past to forget, present to live, and future to look forward to.
Even though some elements are a bit cheesy, like the love story between the two old people and the transvestite's secret admiration for a younger man who accepts him for who he really is, we can't deny that the author remains a strong strategist who plans and plots (in all meaning of the word) everything carefully, so much so that every life seems to miraculously intertwined that there's no space for "reality" to happen. In other words, the all-too-well plotted plot has no loose ends, thus reiterating its status as fiction rather than reflecting life.
Somehow, I find this perfection a bit too oppressive, as we all know that life is not like that. Life has, as it were, loose ends and dead ends. If The Happiness of Kati is the ideal portrayal of the upper-middle-class girl who learns to cope with the death of her mother, 824 is likewise idealistic in its depiction of cosmic ordering of the lives of seven people and one dog, an order so monstrous that it can only be created by a human who yearns for meaning in such a meaningless world.
