From the Cinematheque members email:

Your overwhelming response to 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS has given us the courage to program more Film Festival Favorites - artistic and critically-acclaimed films that seldom get a very wide commercial release. We will screen more such films throughout our next season (beginning in September), but next week - before our annual summer Vietnamese festival begins - we are pleased to present seven outstanding, thought-provoking movies which have been collecting awards at film festivals around the world. These films come from countries as diverse as Spain, France, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Argentina and Lebanon.

Please note that Hanoi CInematheque is closed this weekend. You may make reservations for next week’s screenings by e-mail (be sure to include your membership number), or by phone after 12:00 noon on Monday.

Thank you for your support and for your donations!

SCHEDULE

JULY

21 Monday
19:00 XXY
21:00 SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY

22 Tuesday
19:00 SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY
21:00 XXY

23 Wednesday
19:00 LADY CHATTERLEY

24 Thursday
19:00 CARAMEL
21:00 SECRET SUNSHINE

25 Friday
19:00 CARAMEL
21:00 SECRET SUNSHINE

26 Saturday
17:00 THE ORPHANAGE
19:00 LADY CHATTERLEY

27 Sunday
19:00 OPERA JAWA
21:00 THE ORPHANAGE

FILM NOTES
XXY
Argentina, 2007 Directed by Lucia Puenzo 91 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

WINNER Critics Week Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2008
WINNER Golden Athena Award for Best Film ? Athens Int?l Film Festival
WINNER New Director?s Award ? Edinburgh Int?l Film Festival (opening night film)
WINNER Cinema Critics Prize ? Festival Nouveau Cinema Montreal
OFFICIAL ARGENTINE ENTRY for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards

For just about everybody, adolescence means having to confront a number of choices and life decisions, but rarely any as monumental as the one facing 15 year-old Alex, who was born an ‘intersex’ child, with both male and female genitals.

As Alex begins to explore her sexuality, her mother invites friends from Buenos Aires to come for a visit at their house on the gorgeous Uruguayan shore, along with their 16-year-old son �lvaro. Alex is immediately attracted to the young man, which adds yet another level of complexity to her personal search for identity, and forces both families to face their worst fears. As rumors begin to spread, the town’s fascination with Alex becomes dangerous.

Review by STEPHEN HOLDEN, New York Times
Published: May 2, 2008

How must the world appear to someone who has been treated as an exotic clinical specimen from birth? The moody, surreal XXY explores the world of Alex (In�s Efron), an intersex teenager - born with both male and female sex organs - navigating the treacherous emotional and hormonal rapids of uncertain gender.

The movie, directed by the Argentine filmmaker Luc�a Puenzo and based on Sergio Bizzio’s short story ‘Cinismo’, is not a clinical case study, though months of research went into its creation. It is a somber, brooding study of Alex and her parents as they face the painful crossroads when adulthood looms. To help their child feel as normal as possible, Alex’s parents have fled Argentina to a remote seaside enclave in Uruguay, where her protective father, Kraken (Ricardo Dar�n), works as a marine biologist.

But even here, curious teenagers from the fishing village recognize that Alex is different and react with predictable cruelty. There is a near-rape scene in which several boys drag her into the dunes and pull off her pants to inspect her anatomy.

This overly schematic movie pointedly compares Alex to the marine life under Kraken’s scrutiny: sea turtles, a giant squid and especially clownfish, which exhibit behavior known as sequential hermaphroditism, when the male changes sex and becomes female.

Alex, with the aid of hormonal therapy, has been living as a girl. But with the onset of adolescence, her sexuality has begun to bloom, and for reasons she never explains and perhaps couldn’t put into words, she has recently stopped taking the drugs. Her deepest impulse is to be simply who s/he is.

Although she has developed breasts and has a girl’s voice, we eventually discover that she has a penis. Her masculinization may not yet be visible in facial hair and other signs, but her male aggression has already landed her in trouble. As the story begins, she has overreacted to the curiosity of a close male friend about her sexuality and has broken his nose.

Under increasing pressure from her parents to make a final decision about whether to live as a boy or a girl, she is furiously reluctant to choose. And Ms. Efron’s thrashing performance conveys Alex’s complicated mixture of ambivalence and defiance.

Visiting from Buenos Aires are a plastic surgeon, Ramiro (Germ�n Palacios); his wife, Erika (Carolina Peleritti); and their skinny, buck-toothed 15-year-old son, Alvaro (Mart�n Piroyansky). The rapidly intensifying relationship between Alex and Alvaro, who is sexually curious is the movie’s dramatic crux. Will they make love? If so, how? How will they feel afterward?

Their nervous flirtation culminates in a remarkable sex scene that is as confusing to the audience as it is to the characters, who enjoy it despite their anxiety afterward. That scene, and everything leading up to it, evoke a hyperaware sexual limbo in which you scrutinize the masculine and feminine components in the movie’s other characters and recognize the degree to which everyone has both.

XXY never seems pruriently exploitative. It sustains an unsettling mood of ambiguity that lingers long after the final credits.

A delicate, emotionally potent Argentine drama - Manohla Dargis, New York Times

One of the year?s most impressive debuts - Andrew O?Hehir, Salon

An exquisitely tendered emotional experience - Andrew Sarris, New York Observer

Review by Cath Clarke, The Guardian (London)
May 9, 2008

It takes a little while, in Argentinean director Luc�a Puenzo’s knotty and challenging debut, to work out that teenage Alex is anything other than your average tomboy. Actually, she is “intersexed” - what they used to call hermaphrodite, born with both sexual organs but raised as a girl. Now, she seems more boy than girl, to put it crudely, though In�s Efron as Alex makes the dilemma anything but clear-cut. She looks a bit like the young Hilary Swank in BOYS DON’T CRY, all rangy limbs and jutty angles, and gives a terrifically subtle performance: at times coy, at others confrontational, sometimes downright sexually aggressive. Puenzo’s real achievement, however, is to make her film less about Alex’s gender than about families and unspoken anxieties. Unexpected and wonderfully thoughtful.

SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY
Thailand, 2007 Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul 105 minutes
Thai with English subtitles

OFFICIAL SELECTION Venice Film Festival, 2007
WINNER Golden Athena Award for Best Film ? Athens Int?l Film Festival
WINNER Asian Film Awards, Best Editing (Nominated for Best Director)
OFFICIAL THAI ENTRY for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards

From review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London):

The melancholy coincidence of Bergman and Antonioni dying within days of each other has had some film writers brooding darkly about the alleged decline of cinema as a serious art form and a supposed paucity of true masters on whose work we can rely.

Perhaps the best antidote to the gloom is the appearance of films like this one. Profoundly mysterious, erotic, funny, gentle, playful, utterly distinctive, it is the work of the Thai director and installation-artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who now has a claim to be approaching the league of Kiarostami and Haneke, one of modern cinema’s great practitioners.

It’s a film that requires an openness of mind and heart for its music to be heard - although I do concede that the title is cumbersome and disconcerting - and it will reward this commitment of attention a hundredfold. I found it a transcendentally happy experience: inducing a joyous and calm kind of euphoria. As many people as practicable should go to see it, at least partly to increase the likelihood of someone being able to explain exactly what it is all about.

What is it all about? Like Weerasethakul’s previous features TROPICAL MALADY (2004) and BLISSFULLY YOURS (2001) - it takes as its starting point a tale of tangled human relationships, in this case the faltering love life of a demure young female doctor at a remote, upcountry Thai hospital. Then it takes off into alternative worlds, alternative realities, unrealities, surrealities. The same scenes are played again, in different settings, with different people. The Buddhist idea of reincarnation is being sported with. Weerasethakul’s camera, usually in one fixed position for a single take will suddenly drift back or to the side while one character fixes it with a serene unreadable gaze. Having gestured at the languour of romantic fulfilment and the discomfort and pain of its opposite, baffling images and sequences will unfold with the unsettling quality of a horror film.

Startlingly, Weerasethakul will reprise scenes we had already seen, now set apparently in a fancy modern city hospital. The manageable linear course of events is forever being bisected by unhurried exposition of related themes and images, as if Weerasethakul wishes to stop covering narrative ground in the normal way and take a conceptual soil sample. The final sequence takes place in a modern city that could be Bangkok, or perhaps it is a modern city under construction, the city of the future in which a male doctor’s lover - we see their extended, passionate kiss - dreams one day of living.

SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY is a poem on screen: a film of ideas and visual tropes that upends conventional narrative expectations, not out of a simple desire to disconcert but to break through the carapace of normality, to give us the knight’s-move away from reality that the Russian formalists said was the prerogative of art. Perhaps, with its freakiness and scariness in those hospital basement scenes, it is something that might have intrigued Kubrick. If you want a film as challenging and exhilarating as the most weird and wonderful exhibition at Tate Modern, if you are bored with all the usual boilerplate material coming out of Hollywood, or even if you’re not, then this is a film for you. Try it.

Review by A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

Ever since his films began to attract admiring attention from the international film festival crowd, the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has encouraged his tongue-tied Western fans to call him Joe. That friendly, disarming gesture reflects the sensibility behind the movies, which are at once stubbornly difficult - resistant to summary, at times even to understanding - and surprisingly warm and gentle. Unabashed art films that demand patience and close, quizzical attention, they are also generous, unpretentious and funny, posing thorny formal questions in a relaxed, democratic spirit.

It is possible to feel, watching his earlier movies, BLISSFULLY YOURS or TROPICAL MALADY, that you just don’t get, on a conscious, cerebral level, what Mr. Weerasethakul is trying to do. Yet at the same time you find yourself moved, even enchanted, by the beautiful, oblique stories unfolding before your eyes. It thus may or may not be helpful to know that the situations in his new film, SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, were suggested by events in the lives of the director’s parents before they became a couple. This information does not provide any clues about the plot, but it can help ground some of the film’s fugitive moods of nostalgia and romantic longing, the feelings that attend a child’s contemplation of the endless mystery of his own origins.

Like TROPICAL MALADY, a lush, brooding mix of eroticism, fantasy and nature-worship set on the edge of the jungle, Syndromes and a Century is split in two. The first half takes place at a quiet rural hospital, while the second unfolds at a much larger and more modern urban medical complex. How the parts fit together is something of a puzzle. Each begins with the same conversation, an interview of a military doctor conducted by one of his new colleagues. In the first segment, we follow the interviewer, Dr. Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul), a busy young woman with a kind but businesslike demeanor, through a series of recollections and encounters, at the center of which is a subdued almost-romance with an ?orchid expert? named Noom (Sophon Pukanok).

At the same time, a dentist befriends one of his patients, a Buddhist monk who confesses that his real dream is to be a D.J. But to refer to either of these threads as a fully formed plot would be to misrepresent Mr. Weerasethakul’s approach to the material. It is more concerned with the unspoken implications of conversations than with what is said, and it is devoted to the sensual elegance of visual compositions rather than to their dramatic or expository content. The beauty of the film is an aspect partly of its patient attention to faces, tress, landscapes and architectures, and partly of the subtle precision of the camera movements.

As the second part follows the jug-eared, sad-faced Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram) through his work day, patterns and motifs suggest themselves. SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, like its curious title, has the logic of a dream, a piece of music or perhaps a John Ashbery poem. Its coherence is evident; it is too lovely and lucid to be frustrating or dull. But it takes place just on the other side of conscious apprehension. (This makes the recent demand for cuts by Thai censors seem especially odd, since, at least to an outsider, there seems to be nothing politically or sexually provocative in the film. In any case, Mr. Weerasethakul has refused to make the changes and has issued a statement condemning the censorship.)

The first time I saw SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY I reached a point when an overall design seemed to be coming into view, but the final series of images, which include steam pipes in a hospital basement and an open-air aerobics class, pulled the rug out from under my developing interpretation. On subsequent viewings, I’ve come to appreciate both the clarity and the mystery of this film, which welcomes you into a world of simplicity and strangeness.

LADY CHATTERLEY
France, 2006 Directed by Pascale Ferran 161 minutes
French with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

WINNER 5 C�sar Awards (France’s Oscars) for Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design
WINNER Best Actress (Marina Hands), Tribeca Film Festival

Intelligent, deeply moving and exquisitely photographed, LADY CHATTERLEY brings D.H. Lawrence?s most celebrated literary work to the screen in a way that feels fresh, vital and modern.

Robbed of intimacy by her blueblood husband’s war injuries, Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands) longs for the emotional fulfillment and physical passion that her marriage lacks. When she espies the gamekeeper Parkin (Jean-Louis Coullo’ch) unselfconsciously bathing, stripped to the waist amidst the beauty of nature, she experiences a sexual awakening unlike anything she has ever dared to desire. Though separated by the boundaries of social convention, rough-hewn Parkin and high-bred Lady Chatterley unite in a love that is simultaneously innocent and erotic, a spiritual connection that transcends personal inhibitions and class prejudices.

Review by Philip French, The Observer (London):

In early November 1960, a jury at the Old Bailey trial of the long-proscribed ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ decided that DH Lawrence’s novel was not obscene. A few days later, John F Kennedy was elected President of the United States. The conjunction of the two events created a widespread feeling that a major, liberating change was in the air. What, for better or worse, we now speak of as the Sixties probably started that week. Philip Larkin thought so when he later wrote:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.’

After all the seismic shifts in manners and mores over the 80 years since Lawrence wrote the book and especially the 47 since it became freely available to the public, the novel has clearly lost much of its capacity to shock, but has it become merely a period piece? This question is raised by Pascale Ferran’s LADY CHATTERLEY, which has gone down well in her native France, sweeping the board at last year’s Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscars. We are accustomed to English language films of French classics - several versions of Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Madame Bovary - but the French have rarely returned the compliment.

Still, this is the third version by a French director (Danielle Darrieux played Lady C in the staid 1955 one, Sylvia Kristel was Connie in the soft-core 1981 treatment) and after you have accustomed yourself to British characters speaking French in the English countryside, it is a serious, unprurient and absorbing experience.

Lawrence wrote three considerably different versions of the book, though the story remains essentially the same study of class, power, sexual liberation and the oppressive nature of industrial society and 20th-century life.
Ferran has chosen to work from Lawrence’s second version, called ‘Lady Chatterley et l’homme des bois’ in France, and ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’ in English.

The movie carefully establishes Parkin’s relationship to the seasons and the soil, as contrasted with the harsh, debasing work of the colliers employed by Sir Clifford and the empty emotional and spiritual life of Constance as she supervises household tasks and does a little petit-point. As in two other key works of the 1920s, Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the film shows us Clifford’s impotence as both a real affliction and a symbolic wound and a reflection of the times.

The most eloquent sequences about the master-servant relationship come from the great scene in the novel where Clifford cannot control his new motorised wheelchair and is reluctantly forced to rely on Parkin’s help.

The six explicit sex scenes (what the prosecuting counsel in the 1960 Old Bailey trial referred to as ’bouts’) are carefully differentiated to become an essential part of the narrative development. First, there is the fulfillment of desire, then the achievement of mutual orgasm and the couple’s first tender night together. Finally, there’s the scene where they dance naked in the rain and decorate each other with flowers and laurel crowns, establishing a pagan world or creating a private Eden in which they are briefly the prelapsarian Adam and Eve.

There was a revealing exchange between the Old Bailey judge and the literary scholar Graham Hough. ‘It took them a long time before they did love one another, didn’t it?’ said the judge. ‘Yes. It often does, my lord,’ replied Hough.

There are certain oddities in the film. One is the use of intertitles to explain the progress of events, another is the intrusive use a couple of times of a female voiceover. A third is the treatment of Constance’s Cote d’Azur holiday with her father and sister as a home movie with flickering film and whirring projector. But this is an attractive, involving film with an excellent performance from Hands as the sensible woman standing between two men incapable of transcending conventional notions of power and male domination. Coulloc’h does well with the difficult role of Parkin, the working man alienated from his own class.

From review by A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

It is easy to forget just how modern Lawrence was, and remains. Even books that were daring in their day have a way of becoming respectable with the passage of time, as they are folded into the educational curriculum and the other machinery of middlebrow culture. Ms. Ferran restores Lawrence to the present partly by placing his themes in the service of her own sensibility.

Lawrence’s quasimystical notions about sex and nature have been revised and to some degree refined. His eros of dirt and sweat and animal impulses - less pronounced in the version Ms. Ferran chose than in its better-known successor - are replaced by the sensuality of sunshine, wildflowers and fresh air.

Which is not to suggest that there is anything soft or overly pretty about LADY CHATTERLEY, which is candid, unsentimental and, in spite of a nearly three-hour running time, remarkably brisk. Lawrence was one of the first writers to insist that sexuality was a powerful, transformative realm of experience that deserved to be considered on its own terms, outside of traditional moral and religious considerations. His three versions of ‘Lady Chatterley’ (Ms. Ferran’s source is the second) push this view beyond what seemed, to Lawrence and several generations of British censors, to be the limits of acceptable discourse.

Of course what once seemed transgressive is by now old news. But if novels and movies about sex have lost their salutary shock value, many of Lawrence’s essential insights about human nature remain true. What Ms. Ferran shows, with exemplary clarity and subtlety, is the way sexual attraction, and the connection it creates, alter both Constance’s and Parkin’s perceptions of themselves, each other and the world around them.

This is not an easy change to convey, in part because the lovers lack words to explain what is happening to them. But the actors’ faces and bodies prove to be impressively eloquent, as is Julien Hirsch’s verdant, summery cinematography. The film’s sex scenes (there are six in all) chart the progress of desire from curiosity to intimacy and convey how sexual chemistry can turn into love.

The first time Parkin and Lady Chatterley make love, it is in haste, fully clothed, on the floor of Parkin’s cottage. Afterward the camera lingers on Ms. Hands’s face - her loveliness is more sweet than smoldering - as if pausing to interpret the enigmatic smile that plays over her features. It is a look of pleasure certainly (though not exactly of sexual rapture, given how quick and clumsy Parkin was), but also of surprise, apprehension and insight. Something unexpected has happened to Constance, and she appears intrigued by the prospect of figuring out what it was. And of doing it again.

Ms. Hands, still in the early stages of her film career, has a beguiling mixture of poise and naturalness. Her Lady Chatterley is both decorous and straightforward, a woman whose easy friendliness helps to bridge the differences of background and status between her and Parkin. Class, at least as much a preoccupation for Lawrence as sex, figures less prominently in this film than it might have. This is partly because the actors, speaking French while pretending to be English, don’t have the accents that would mark their place in the British social hierarchy.

But the contrast between Parkin and Lady Chatterley is not just a matter of privilege, and Mr. Coulloch and Ms. Hands complicate the stereotypes to which their characters might be vulnerable. He is timid and kind as well as rough, and she seems to be as comfortable in the woods as in her drawing room.

In stripping LADY CHATTERLEY of some of its mystique, Ms. Ferran has rediscovered both the novel?s originality and the source of its durable appeal, which is not salaciousness but candor. She has made a love story that stands on its own, a film whose imaginative freedom perfectly matches the liberation experienced by its heroine.

CARAMEL
Lebanon, 2007 Directed by Nadine Labaki 95 minutes
Arabic and French, with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

OFFICIAL LEBANESE ENTRY for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards

In Beirut, five women meet regularly in a beauty salon, a colorful and sensual microcosm of the city where several generations come into contact, talk and confide in each other. Layale loves Rabih, but Rabih is married. Nisrine is Muslim and her forthcoming marriage poses a problem; she is no longer a virgin. Rima is tormented by her attraction to women and especially to a lovely client with long hair. Jamale is refusing to grow old. Rose has sacrificed her life to take care of her elderly sister. In the salon, their intimate and liberated conversations revolve around men, sex and motherhood, between haircuts and sugar waxing with caramel.

The quartet are excellent company and it’s good to see a movie from Lebanon in which people aren’t dodging shells every couple of minutes. Writer-director Nadine Labaki dedicates her picture ‘To my Beirut’ and there are a few sharp scenes and some potholes in the roads to temper the general feel-good atmosphere.

From review by Andrew O?Hehir, Salon.com:

From the first moments of Lebanese writer-director Nadine Labaki’s CARAMEL, you know what you’re in for. There’s a pop-Arab soundtrack that bridges traditional and contemporary music, a whimsical montage of different women working their way through the streets of Beirut, and a seriocomic encounter between the beautiful heroine and the handsome fellow who’s clearly smitten with her (a fact she hasn’t yet noticed).
There’s no doubt that Nadine Labaki gets extra credit for making a film in an Arab country that casually depicts friendship between Muslims and Christians, never mentions violence or political strife, and in its own gentle fashion sidles up against social issues that remain sensitive in that part of the world. CARAMEL is an ode to female bonding — a celebration of female sensuality and a series of interlocking love stories, and it positively revels in the conventions of those genres. It’s a reassuring and delicious film.

SECRET SUNSHINE
South Korea, 2007 Directed by Chang-dong Lee 142 minutes
Korean with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

WINNER Best Actress (Do-yeon Jeon), Cannes Film Festival, 2007
WINNER Asian Film Awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress
OFFICIAL KOREAN ENTRY for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards

Review by Jason Anderson, The EYE Weekly:

The best film at this year’s Cannes Festival - where it won a best actress prize for lead Jeon Do-yeon - this South Korean drama conveys an astonishing and highly tumultuous range of emotions. It tells the story of one woman’s reaction to a terrible tragedy that takes place after she and her son move to her late husband’s hometown. As he did in 2002’s superb OASIS, writer-director Lee Chang-dong steers the material far away from melodrama - the developments are unpredictable and the reactions all too human. Valuable comic relief is supplied by THE HOST’s Song Kang-ho, cast against type as the woman’s indefatigable suitor.

OPERA JAWA
Indonesia, 2007 Directed by Garin Nugroho 120 minutes
Indonesian with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

WINNER Silver Screen Award (Grand Prize), Singapore International Film Festival
WINNER Asian Film Awards, Best Composer

One of 2007’s most remarkable films, this Javanese epic from Indonesia’s leading director combines superb gamelan music, sensuous dance, sumptuous set and costume design, and seven artists’ installations to create a new kind of musical, as exhilaratingly fresh as THE RED SHOES or THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG.
Set against a backdrop of religious and political turmoil, the story - updated from southeast Asia’s classic The Ramayana - OPERA JAWA concerns the violent emotions aroused when potter’s wife Sinta attracts the unwelcome attentions of Ludiro, a ruthless and powerful merchant.

Director Garin Nugroho blends traditional and modern elements throughout, producing a mythically tiemless parable of female desire in conflict with male inadequacy and greed, and a powerful requiem for lives wrecked by poverty, intolerance and bloodshed.

The fabulous imagery and Rahayu Supanggah’s gorgeous music make for a thrilling celebration of multicultural riches - wholly in keeping with the New Crowned Hope film project, to which this is perhaps the sexiest and most startling contribution.

Garin Nugroho says that for him it is “not only a film, but a library”, meaning that it is a valuable historical record of Javanese culture, both ancient and modern. It is Garin’s fourteenth film, and he is probably the best-known film director of Indonesia.

It is a re-telling of a section of the Ramayana Story, (The Abduction of Sinta) - the same story that you can see performed at Prambanan, Yogyakarta. In the film it is told through traditional Javanese dance, song and Gamelan music, composed by musician Rahayu Supanggah, of Surakarta, Java. It’s an opera, and has no spoken dialog. It also features a singing storyteller, Slamet Gundono, who helps to move the story along. And there is a quartet of men in a roadside food stall talking (in song) about political and social matters, who also serve that purpose.

The dances include the sacred Bedoyo, performed by nine female dancers which depicts the encounter of Senopati, with Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, the Queen of the South Sea. Tradition says that if you watch very carefully you can sometimes see a tenth dancer, when the Queen herself joins the dancers.

OPERA JAWA uses spectacular sets of art installations, designed by some of Indonesia’s leading contemporary artists, Agus Suwage, Nindityo Adipurnomo, S.Teddy D, Hendro Suseno, Titarubi, Sunaryo, and Entang Wiharso.

The story has been translated to a setting around 1997/98 as the nation of Indonesia arose in popular demonstration against the Suharto dictatorship after the financial crisis.

Sinta is now Siti, and Rama is now Setyo, a couple who earn their living as potters. However in the past they have both been performers in the Ramayana Ballet. It is customary that when a Javanese female dancer marries, she retires from performing, out of respect to her husband.

The fiery Ludiro represents Rahwana, the abductor. He too once danced with them in the role of Rahwana, and has always desired the lovely Siti. Now he pulls out all stops to seduce her. Meantime her husband’s fortunes are sinking and so are his spirits, as he loses his money, his business fails, and he realizes that he’s losing his wife’s heart as well.

No wonder Siti is tempted by the exciting, dangerous Ludiro, since he’s wealthy and powerful and her husband is moping and seems to be at the end of his tether. The confident Ludiro insults her, caressing her face with his foot and flicking his endless lengths of red cloth in her face, yet still she is fascinated. Eko Supriyanto (Ludiro) is one hell of a dancer, and steals the show with his dance scene in the abattoir, several sequences featuring the stunning art installations, and dancing on the table in the food stall).

Eventually Setyo has nothing left to lose, and joins the angry demonstrators leading troops of his own, mounted on a symbolic stallion emblazoned “Viva la Muerte”. The troops are angrily chanting about being tired of being taken for granted, treated like oxen under the dictatorship which had prevailed for so long.

The costumes and locations are stunning, and the re-telling of this tale uses many metaphors taken from ancient Javanese tradition. Siti represents the earth itself, as she is fought over, and torn by the conflicts of men. She sings, ” I am the earth, tilled by the plow, I am replete with blessings. I, Siti, am praised. In me grow flowers and crops.”

In Java the Kraton’s traditions endure and provide emotional/spiritual security in a rapidly changing world. While all the political turmoil outside unfolds, in the ancient Sultan’s Palace stillness is maintained, the singers chant, in rhythm with a beating heart - “When comes the time of fallow earth, of death and dust and barren land, Just as it was for Rama and Sinta, who no longer recognized their world, what remains is fidelity. Praises and prayers, woven with life. And yet one may as well wait for stones to float on water. Only God is almighty.”

At the real Ramayana performance at Prambanan, Yogyakarta, there is a happy ending, with Rahwana killed and the lovers reunited, Sinta’s purity proved. However, here Siti’s final ‘test of fidelity’ is a fatal revenge and Setyo sings, as he is led away, “In my heart lies justice. You are the setting of a dispute, an object without boundaries, Oh heart, heart, scream, speak”. Rice sprouts in the sand on the beach where Siti’s blood was spilled, confirming her status as a symbol of the fecundity of the earth.

The final scene shows a Labuhan procession on the beach south of Yogyakarta, as is still seen twice a year, when the Sultan and the people give thanks and elaborate offerings to Ratu Kidul, the Queen of the South Sea, guardian of the city.

Funding to make this gorgeous film came as part of The Vienna Mozart Year 2006, the 250th anniversary of Mozart, who was Austrian. Part of this massive celebration was The New Crowned Hope Festival, and the artistic director Peter Sellars decided to commission entirely new works from contemporary international artists, in the fields of music, theater, dance, architecture, visual arts and film. All that was required was to use Mozart’s themes as both inspiration and a springboard.

OPERA JAWA is like nothing you’ve ever seen on screen before - a tremendous visual feast. Garin Nugroho has indeed created a valuable document of Javanese traditional story, music and dance and blended it with modern Indonesia’s period of social reform, and with her contemporary arts, in a wonderful way. It’s a must-see movie for art and music, and film lovers and if you know and love Yogyakarta, you will lose yourself in it and never want to come out.

Review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London):

Here is the week’s exotic jewel: an intricate oddity that is hugely admired in many quarters and which I certainly found engaging, if unvarying. It is a gamelan musical by the Indonesian film-maker Garin Nugroho, based on the story The Abduction of Sinta from the Hindu text The Ramayana. A potter, Setio (Martinus Miroto) has a wife, Siti (Artika Sari Devi), with whom the butcher Ludiro (Eko Supriyanto) is violently in love: a fateful intrigue develops.

There are vast numbers of extras, bewildering and gorgeous settings, sumptuous choreography. It is rich and strange, and though the latter might be slightly in excess of the former, the strangeness in itself is diverting. I remembered what Kenneth Tynan said about Godot: go and see it, and the worst that can happen is that you will see an oddity, a four-leaf clover. But it could yet be a wonderful experience.

From Review by Nathan Lee, The Village Voice (New York):

I just love it when this happens: Barely two weeks into 2008 and here comes OPERA JAWA, a surrealist Indonesian folkloric/funkadelic musical?slash?avant-garde pop-and-lock revolutionary romance?slash?Hindu song-and-dance-installation art extravaganza. It would be unseemly, so soon, to big-up OPERA JAWA as one of the best films of 2008, so to keep things circumspect, let’s just call it a nonpareil Ramayana boogie-down gong drum, with a tembang gamelan xylophone huzzah and super-tight moves on the wayang orang tip. You feel me?

THE ORPHANAGE
Spain, 2007 Directed by J.A. Bayona 105 minutes
Spanish with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

WINNER 7 Goya Awards (Spain?s Oscars), including Best Screenplay and Best New Director
WINNER 7 Barcelona Film Awards, including Best Film, Best Cinematography, Best New Director, Best Actress
WINNER Golden Reel Award from Motion Picture Sound Editors, USA. Best Sound Editing and Effects in a Foreign Film
NOMINATED Chicago Film Critics Award, best Foreign Language Film

A woman brings her family back to her childhood home, where she opens an orphanage for handicapped children. Before long, her son starts to communicate with an invisible, sinister new friend.

From review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London):

A sinuous modern twist is applied to the classic ghost story form by screenwriter Sergio S�nchez and director Juan Antonio Bayona. Their chiller, set in contemporary Spain, is involving and disturbing, and revives the genre’s great theme: our profound yet unacknowledged fear of children. We are afraid of their vulnerability, which is our vulnerability, and the mysterious otherness of their private, mental worlds.

The Orphanage has been brought to the screen by its executive producer and tutelary deity, Guillermo del Toro, and Del Toro’s own films are obviously an important influence, although on the strength of this, Bayona deserves to be considered a film-maker with real stature; his film is comparable to Alejandro Amen�bar’s excellent ghost story THE OTHERS, and THE ORPHANAGE is frankly at least as interesting and powerful as Del Toro’s extravagantly praised PAN’S LABYRINTH. The spirits of Alfred Hitchcock and Saul Bass are present in the cleverly designed credit sequence, showing mouldy old wallpaper being ripped from the wall. Stabs of pure Hitchcock recur throughout.?

“Seeing is not believing,” says Geraldine Chaplin’s Aurora, “it is the other way around.” First we must believe, and then we will see what it is we long for. The Orphanage is a disturbing, and yet intelligent and compassionate dramatisation of loss and bereavement: in some ways, it is a wish-fulfilment fantasy, a way of following the departed into the void so that they can be made to live again, and that the intolerable enigma of their death can be solved.

From review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

Now here is an excellent example of why it is more frightening to await something than to experience it. THE ORPHANAGE has every opportunity to descend into routine shock and horror, or even into the pits with the slasher pictures, but it only pulls the trigger a couple of times. The rest is all waiting, anticipating, dreading. We need the genuine jolt that comes about midway, to let us see what the movie is capable of. The rest is fear.

Hitchcock was very wise about this. In his book-length conversation with Truffaut, he used a famous example to explain the difference between surprise and suspense. If people are seated at a table and a bomb explodes, that is surprise. If they are seated at a table, and you know there’s a bomb under the table attached to a ticking clock, but they continue to play cards — that’s suspense. There’s a bomb under “The Orphanage” for excruciating stretches of time.

That makes the film into a superior ghost story, if indeed there are ghosts in it. I am not sure: They may instead be the experience or illusion of ghosts in the mind of the heroine, and since we see through her eyes, we see what she sees and are no more capable than she is of being certain. That means when she walks down a dark staircase, or into an unlit corridor or a gloomy room, we’re tense and fearful, whether we’re experiencing a haunted house or a haunted mind. And when she follows her son into a pitch-black cave, her flashlight shows only a thread of light through unlimited menace.

The film, a Spanish production directed by Juan Antonio Bayona and produced by Guillermo del Toro, is deliberately aimed at viewers with developed attention spans. It lingers to create atmosphere, a sense of place, a sympathy with the characters, instead of rushing into cheap thrills. Photographed by Oscar Faura, it has an uncanny way of re-creating that feeling we get when we’re in a familiar building at an unfamiliar time, and we’re not quite sure what to say if we’re found there, and we might have just heard something, and why did the lights go out?

You may be capable of walking into any basement on earth, but if you go down the stairs into the darkened basement of the house you grew up in, do you still … feel something?

HANOI CINEMATHEQUE
Hanoi’s unique ‘art-house cinema’, is a members-only film society.

Memberships are available at the box office for only 100,000VND per year.

Members receive regular emails with detailed schedules and reviews of the films.

Tickets to the films are by donation.

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