"Love is posession". This line appeared in both movies I've seen so far from the 8th Cinemanila International Film Festival last Saturday in Greenbelt 1.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is a Korean film that is set in a placid lake in the middle of a verdant valley. Nestled in the lake is the floating home of a monk and a kid, the latter is the monk's student. The film explores the relationship of the two main characters (both nameless), particularly how the child learned life's harsh lessons. One of these is about love as a manifestation of possession, a thing that he learned when he fell in love with one of the patients of the monk, with tragic consequences.
The dialogue is very sparse in the film, almost totally silent in a meditative sense. Music is also intermittent. Again, I would talk about a setting that becomes a prominent "character" of the film. With the help of breathtaking cinematography, the viewer is taken into the lives of the monk and the kid through the shifting of the seasons, hence the title. This film is a total must-see.
Following the screening of the aforementioned film, I watched Perhaps Love, which is touted as China's Moulin Rouge. It is supposedly the country's first musical in decade but I would not really call it a musical in contrast to most musical's I've seen. It's more of a movie that happens to have singing parts.
It is actually a movie within a movie, a facet of the film that I'm so tired to explain right now. Well, it's a love triangle starring Takashi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers), Xun Zhou (The Banquet, Balzac and the Chinese Seamstress), and Andy Lau. The musical parts I really find contrite and even intrusive. I like the non-musical parts better and had the film fleshed out that aspect they could've come up with a solid story. In fact, I was captivated with the non-musical parts of the film but would only be disappointed when the characters opened their mouths to sing. Nonetheless, Takashi Kaneshiro and Xun Zhuo were excellent.
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Ok, let me talk about my weekend.
Friday evening (that's part of the weekend already, is it?) I had dinner with Allyson the Diva at Chocolate Kiss in UP Diliman. In that dinner, we figured that success is entirely about packaging and nothing else. Go figure what that means because I'm still trying to do just that my self.
Saturday was Cinemanila day at Greenbelt 1. Evening I was with Maricel, my kababayan from Surigao, to Temple, along with a few of her friends. It was ok.
Sunday, I was again fixed on my futon reading. This time it was Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. It is a hilarious read that borders on the gross and even criminal (child abandonment, phedophilia). It's a pretty easy book to read but ultimately forgettable. I heard that they made a movie of this, starring Anette Benning and Gwyneth Paltrow.
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Photo credits:
(1) Affiches Cinema
(2) www.bzcn.com.cn
(3) Amazon.ca
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