THREE TIMES
Does anyone make more rapturously beautiful films than Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien? Maybe so, but you’d never believe it after seeing this ravishing new triumph about the melancholy play of time and memory. The action is broken into three different love stories, each set in a different era— a 1966 pool hall, a prosperous 1911 brothel, and rocking present-day Taipei— but starring the same lead actors, the impossibly glamorous Shu Qi and Chang Chen. While these stories deliberately echo his earlier works, Hou uses them to chart the transformation of Taiwanese life, love, and the relationship between men and women over the last hundred years. He captures all this with the poetic intensity that has come to define his work— an absolute mastery of space and rhythm and a humane tenderness that suffuses every frame.120 min. Taiwan, 2005.
PARADISE NOW
From Tel Aviv to London, Baghdad to New York, the suicide bomber has become one of the most appalling symbols of our age. Now Dutch-based Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad (Rana’s Wedding) brings us into the world of those who undertake those missions. Winner of several awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Paradise Now chronicles 48 hours in the lives of two young Palestinians recruited for a bombing in Tel Aviv. Best friends since youth, they are pleased they will die together as martyrs. After spending a last evening with their families— to whom they’re forbidden to say goodbye— they set off with the bomb units strapped to their bodies. But their plan goes awry; crossing into Israel they’re separated, and now each man is left alone with his conscience. Beautifully acted and sensitively written, Paradise Now is another impressive example of the emerging Palestinian cinema. Co-presented by the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. 90 min. Netherlands/Germany/France, 2005.
TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY
How do you film an unfilmable novel? In this case Laurence Sterne's "post-modern before there was even a modern" classic, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The British director Michael Winterbottom, who enjoys working without a net, has fashioned an improvisation that achieves something quite singular as it goes on its merry, digressive way: a serious and utterly hilarious movie that feels loose yet rigorous in its approach to the problem of adapting Sterne. The sparkling cast includes Gillian Anderson, Shirley Henderson, and Jeremy Northam as a Winterbottom-ish director. And at the center of this merry enterprise is the marvelous Steve Coogan, playing a hapless version of himself playing Shandy, whose verbal sparring matches with Rob Brydon are not to be missed. 91 min. UK, 2005.
GABRIELLE
Patrice Chéreau’s bold, theatrically stylized adaptation of Conrad’s short story “The Return” begins as a lavish turn-of-the-century period piece, with a dinner party thrown by a wealthy bourgeois couple (Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert) who appear to be a model of stability and propriety. When Huppert suddenly announces her intent to leave the marriage, the film takes an abrupt turn into more painful territory, becoming a wrenching confrontation during which layer after layer of psychological armor is dismantled and tossed aside, until we are left with only a man and a woman, and their two radically opposing visions of love and happiness. Chéreau, his actors, and his wonderful cinematographer Eric Gautier take their material to dizzying heights and terrifying depths, and achieve an emotional grandeur worthy of Strindberg or Bergman. Gabrielle is at once a visual feast and an emotional knockout. 86 min. France, 2005.
THE SUN
In the last days of August 1945, as the Japanese prepare to surrender to occupying American forces, Emperor Hirohito rummages around his palace, trying to make sense of the impending defeat and his own responsibility for it. In an unforgettably poignant performance by Issey Ogata, Hirohito is fully brought to life as an educated, ineffectual gentleman, aware of his fallibility but trapped by rituals of adoration behind the mask of divinity. Aleksandr Sokurov, (Mother and Son, NYFF ’97; Russian Ark, NYFF ‘02), brings his customary imagistic brilliance to this tour-de-force of historical reconstruction. As controversial for its interpretative conjectures as it is visually arresting, The Sun is a complex, important work by a major filmmaker. 110 min. Russia/Italy/France/Switzerland, 2005.
