After a three-hour bullet train ride from Seoul, we made it in time to catch the closing film in the 12th Busan International Film Festival in the southern Korean port city, the Japanese animé feature Evangelion 1.0: You are (Not) Alone by Hideaki Anno, Masayuki and Kazuya Tsurumaki.
Evangelion was a fairly popular TV animé series in the mid-1990s, a hit for teenagers then when analog was the order of the day. Now the makers of the hit animation have translated their creation into the big screen with all the cutting-edge digital technology at their disposal, and the result as seen at the seaside Cinematheque Theater is a film with dazzling special effects and visuals, probably representing the genre’s state of the art from the country that pioneered anime.
Those who were raised on Dragon Ball Z and One Piece will delight in Evangelion 1.0, although the target audience of this latest upgrade should probably be nearing adulthood with lots of violent fight scenes and sexual innuendoes. As it turns out, it’s not only Evangelion that got a makeover, but also the movie Appleseed, now subtitled Ex Machina in its latest reloaded version.
According to program notes, Evangelion is the first in a planned trilogy of the animé, with the protagonist, 14-year-old boy Shinji, designated by his father to pilot the robot Evangelion to do battle with the evil Angel, who threatens the earth’s inhabitants.
The grating sounds of the battle scenes can have a numbing, drowsy effect in the long run, given relief only by interludes with Shinji’s sexy mentor and colleague girl-woman. Shinji’s love-hate relationship with his dad, of course, has to be resolved eventually, and a new character is introduced at the end as a possible anti-hero, before the inevitable “To be continued” flashes on screen and an upbeat Japanese rock song plays as the credits roll.
Tsurumaki, the only one of the directors present at the post-screening press conference, spoke amid flashing cameras that he, too, was at a loss why Evangelion was chosen as closing film but nonetheless felt honored. Festival director Kim Dong-ho said that the closing film suggested possible new directions for the Busan film fest, which prides itself as being the hub of Asian independent cinema.
Evangelion 1.0’s screening at Cinematheque was the animé’s international premier after it was first shown in Japan in September 2007.
Later in the evening at the SFunz Mall’s Megabox, we were able to watch the third part of Malaysian director James Lee’s post-romantic trilogy, Waiting for Love, featuring three diverse unmarried couples — one Malay and the other of Chinese ancestry — on the threshold of either falling out of love or landing on a plateau of mature companionship.
The camera remains still in one part of the room as the couples dialogue on their respective domestic dramas, while a classical piano piece whose title escapes me suffuses the proceedings with just the right balance of melancholy and ennui.
The first couple has them undergoing what might be called tampuhan blues, with the Malay man quizzing the Chinese woman on a letter to her from another man, which he had accidentally found while cleaning the apartment. The man also wonders why the letter is so valuable to her and why she still refuses to get married to him. They work towards a kind of rapprochement only to fall short of any actual lovemaking.
The second couple has a sickly bum of a Chinese man clowning around for his Malay woman who has just got a promotion. Both are heavy smokers and alas, also unmarried. When the woman threatens to abandon him if they don’t get married, the man reasons that their situation is all right for now, a delicate ground to be tread by consenting adults. Again the love act is abbreviated because the man has to pee.
Third episode has a whooping cough-afflicted Malay woman with her heavily smoking Chinaman, and their conversation revolves around why she doesn’t go to a doctor for a checkup. A panel drawing of a sitting Caucasian man serves as a backdrop for their exchange, even as the man tries to humor the woman out of her malaise. The scene ends with man’s arm over woman’s shoulder, still together, however unmarried, because “things would change” if they were wed, even though much has indeed changed.
For the last full-show at Megabox, it was a French documentary for us, actress Sandrine Bonnaire’s family chronicle on her autistic younger sister, Her Name is Sabine.
While it may be easy for autobiography to stray into self-indulgence, the actress Bonnaire takes care to keep the emotions in check, investing in the film much warmth and humor and even persistence in spirit, as seen in the counterpoint footage of the autistic Sabine, who is a year younger than the director, before and after confinement in a mental institution. The contrast is startling to say the least, with a pre-mental Sabine slim and somewhat self-conscious of her one false front tooth, set against her post-institution, overweight, drooling and shaking figure, but no less keen to big sister’s proddings.
The docu is a veritable treatise on the state of mental health care in France, and how even in the late 20th century autism can be misdiagnosed as some malignancy and so derail any possible coping or recovery.
The sequence where Sandrine makes Sabine watch footage of their trip to New York where they ride on the Concorde is unforgettable, with the autistic kid sister weeping in joy at her pre-mental ward self hamming for the camera: a kind of reverse bathos. No longer madness, but film as therapy.
Sabine’s story is told alongside others who have the same psychological discrepancy, and the gaggle of the emotionally marginalized makes for bittersweet viewing in the lambent French countryside. Such beauty and madness and lyric fortitude can be glimpsed in this documentary, which is as personal and surprisingly detached as they come.
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The trip to Busan was sponsored by the Korea Foundation for International Culture Exchange.