A couple considers rekindling their romance in Hong Sang-soo’s NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Through June 19
718-777-6888
www.movingimage.us
The Museum of the Moving Image’s seventeen-day, eighteen-film retrospective of the work of South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo heads into its final weekend with his five latest works, as Hong continues his exploration of the creation of art and cinema itself. (The museum previously celebrated Hong’s oeuvre with a 2012 series that consisted of five films.) The festival, which began with such works as The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate, and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, concludes June 17-19 with In Another Country, Our Sunhi, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, HaHaHa, and Hill of Freedom.
IN ANOTHER COUNTRY (DA-REUN NA-RA-E-SUH) (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)
Friday, June 17, $12, 7:00
www.movingimage.us
Hong Sang-soo continues his fascinating exploration of cinematic narrative in In Another Country, although this one turns somewhat nasty and tiresome by the end. After being duped in a bad business deal by a family member, an older woman (Youn Yuh-jung) and her daughter, Wonju (Jung Yumi), move to the small seaside town of Mohjang, where the disenchanted Wonju decides to write a screenplay to deal with her frustration. Based on an actual experience she had, she writes three tales in which a French woman named Anne (each played by an English-speaking Isabelle Huppert) comes to the town for different reasons. In the first section, Anne is a prominent filmmaker invited by Korean director Jungsoo (Kwon Hye-hyo), who has a thing for her even though he is about to become a father with his very suspicious wife, Kumhee (Moon So-ri). In the second story, Anne, a woman married to a wealthy CEO, has come to Mohjang to continue her affair with a well-known director, Munsoo (Moon Sung-keun), who is careful that the two are not seen together in public. And in the final part, Anne, whose husband recently left her for a young Korean woman, has arrived in Mohjang with an older friend (Youn), seeking to rediscover herself. In all three stories, Anne searches for a lighthouse, as if that could shine a light on her future, and meets up with a goofy lifeguard (Yu Jun-sang) who offers the possibility of sex, but each Anne reacts in different ways to his advances. Dialogue and scenes repeat, with slight adjustments made based on the different versions of Anne, investigating character, identity, and desire both in film and in real life. Hong wrote the film specifically for Huppert, who is charming and delightful in the first two sections before turning ugly in the third as Anne suddenly becomes annoying, selfish, and irritating, the plot taking hard-to-believe twists that nearly undermine what has gone on before. As he has done in such previous films as Like You Know It All, The Day He Arrives, Tale of Cinema, and Oki’s Movie, Hong weaves together an intricate plot that is soon commenting on itself and coming together in unexpected, surreal ways, but he loses his usual taut narrative thread in the final, disappointing section.
A drunken night at a sake restaurant reveals some hard truths in another bittersweet Hong Sang-soo cinematic tale
NOBODY’S DAUGHTER HAEWON (NUGU-UI TTAL-DO ANIN HAEWON) (Hong Sang-soo, 2013)
Sunday, June 19, $12, 2:00
www.movingimage.us
In South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s bittersweet tale Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, nearly everyone who meets college student Haewon (Jeong Eun-chae) tells her that she’s “pretty,” from her mother (Kim Ja-ok), who has decided to pack up and move to Canada, to legendary star Jane Birkin (playing herself), whom she bumps into on the street, to a hot bookstore owner, to fellow students and teachers. Rather stuck up and direct on the outside but much more tender and lost on the inside, Haewon reaches out to a former lover, film professor Seongjun (Lee Sun-kyun), who is married with a baby. As they contemplate rekindling their affair, they wind up getting drunk on sake with a group of Seongjun’s students, who suspect the teacher-student romance and clearly do not like Haewon. Meanwhile, Haewon, who is reading Norbert Elias’s The Loneliness of the Dying, is intrigued by the flirtations of another film professor, Jungwon (Kim Eui-sung), who teaches in San Diego. From Seoul’s West Village to the historic Fort Namhan, Haewon tries to find her place in the world as writer-director Hong employs a chronological narrative that combines her dreams with reality over the course of a few weeks in springtime. Hong has explored similar terrain in previous films, but there’s just enough of an edge to Nobody’s Daughter Haewon to prevent it from feeling repetitive and more of the same. As always, Hong favors long establishing shots and a stationary camera that suddenly and awkwardly zooms in, instantly reminding viewers that they are watching a film. However, the scene in the restaurant goes on for several minutes with no cuts or camera movements, letting the acting and the dialogue tell the story without cinematic interference. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon also clocks in at a mere hour and a half, much shorter than most of his earlier work, which tends to go on way too long, but this one feels a little lighter in substance as well.
First it took a long time for French-Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) to convince Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami to let him adapt his 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood — Tran had been interested in turning the book into a movie ever since he first read it in 1994, but Murakami notoriously does not allow his novels to become films — and then, once the film was made and played at prestigious festivals in Venice, Toronto, and Dubai, still took more than a year to find a U.S. distributor. Norwegian Wood is a moving, faithful adaptation of Murakami’s elegiac novel about unrequited love, romantic communication, and death. After his best friend, Kizuki (Kengo Kora), commits suicide, Watanabe (Death Note’s Ken’ichi Matsuyama) and Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), who previously were part of an inseparable trio with Kizuki, go their separate ways. After a short time, they meet up accidentally in Tokyo, where Watanabe is attending university and Naoko is trying to get over her loss. But an event on her twentieth birthday causes Naoko to take off again, this time seeking professional help at a sanitarium. Watanabe can’t stop thinking about Naoko, jeopardizing a possible relationship with the aggressive, sexually open Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), who already has a boyfriend but is extremely interested in Watanabe. Meanwhile, Watanabe disapproves of how his friend Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama) continually cheats on his girlfriend, Hatsumi (Eriko Hatsune), who is devoted to him. With the student riots of the late 1960s swirling around them, Watanabe, Naoko, Midori, Nagasawa, Hatsumi, and Naoko’s roommate, Reiko (Reika Kirishima), take long, hard looks at what they want out of life and love, and they don’t always like what they find. Beautifully shot by Mark Lee Ping-Bing and featuring a subtle score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood), Norwegian Wood is a slow-paced, psychologically intense drama. Watanabe and Naoko are often shown walking amid vast natural landscapes of green forests and snow-covered mountains, but they are tied up tight within themselves, trapped in their own memories. The carefully composed sex scenes give depth and intelligence to the main characters without overplaying their emotions. The story itself might be relatively slight — it lacks the range of Murakami’s later books — but Tran has done a fine job bringing it to the screen. Norwegian Wood is screening at MoMA on June 17 and 29 at 7:30 in the series “Luminosity: The Art of Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing,” which runs June 16-30 and includes such other Lee-lensed treasures as Yang Chao’s Crosscurrent, Wang Tung’s Strawman, Tran’s The Vertical Ray of the Sun, and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Dust in the Wind, The Assassin, and The Puppetmaster. In addition, Lee will sit down with Department of Film associate curator La Frances Hui for 
“To me, this is a story about two parents who love their children, who love this particular child who is transgender, and who want the very best things in the world for her,” Michael Silverman of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund says at the beginning of Growing Up Coy, a poignant and timely documentary about one family’s public fight to allow one of their children to legally establish her gender identity. When she was eighteen months old, Coy Mathis, who was born male but was unhappy that way, began displaying distinct female tendencies, exhibiting extreme displeasure when treated as a boy. She began kindergarten in the conservative town of Fountain, Colorado, as male but soon chose to transition, identifying as female. “She started asking us, when are we going to take her to the doctor so that she can be a girl, and when are we going to get the doctors to cut her penis off,” her mother, Kathryn Mathis, says in the film. “That was when it became a problem, and we reassured her that we would do everything we could so that she would be happiest as an adult.” Coy was initially given permission to use the girls bathroom, but in first grade, in late 2012, the school changed its policy and she was denied access. Kathryn, a photographer, and her husband, former Marine and full-time student Jeremy, decided to fight back, engaging in a legal battle that they eventually brought to the press when the school administration refused to acknowledge Coy’s gender choice. Soon the Mathises, who have five children under the age of eight — Dakota, who is is autistic, Auri, and triplets Coy, Max, and Lily, who has cerebral palsy and quadriplegia — are being both celebrated and excoriated on social media, in newspaper columns, and by talking heads on television, but they are determined to do whatever it takes, even if it includes making Coy the poster child in a heated debate over a controversial issue that most people don’t fully understand. “She doesn’t want to have to explain who she is and talk about how she’s different,” Kathryn says. “She just wants to be.”
Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hisao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. One of his most elegant works, Flowers of Shanghai, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.
Janina Quint’s debut feature documentary, Germans & Jews, explores an intriguing premise: why so many Jews are moving to Germany, either returning to their homeland or living there for the first time. However, director and producer Quint, a non-Jewish German, and producer and executive producer Tal Recanati, an American-born Jew raised in the U.S. and Israel, reduce the film to random cocktail-party chatter; in fact, far too much of Germans & Jews takes place at a dinner party as second-generation Germans and Jews ramble on about guilt, responsibility, education, forgiveness, and how Germany has changed since WWII. The film would have benefited from more speakers like German-born American historian Dr. Fritz Stern and Thorsten Wagner, a Danish-German historian and grandson of a Nazi sympathizer, who are able to put the situation into fascinating perspective with a sincere intelligence. “I think it is true that most Germans now understand their past and the horror that they visited upon the world, but it’s a very hard thing,” Dr. Stern says. “And to find ways around to explain it is a natural human response.”