Phon (Maiyatan Techaparn) has interesting cravings in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MEKONG HOTEL
MEKONG HOTEL (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)
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At the end of the closing credits of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel, a disclaimer reads, “All characters appearing in this work are actual persons. Any resemblance to other real beings, living or dead, is not coincidental.” As with so many of the Palme d’Or-winning director’s films, Mekong Hotel walks the fine line between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality. The slight work, a meditative tone poem that runs fifty-seven minutes, was shot at the Sam Oar Guesthouse and Resort in Nong Khai in northeast Thailand, near the Friendship Bridge that links Thailand and Laos. Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours, Syndromes and a Century) plays himself in the film, a director auditioning a guitarist (real-life musician and composer Chai Bhatana), whose playing serves as the musical score for the elegiac tale. (Assistant director Chatchai Suban also makes a cameo.) Meanwhile, an otherworldly narrative is taking place, between Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), a banana plantation owner whose dog was just eaten, and Phon (Maiyatan Techaparn), a young woman who lives next door with her mother, Jen (Jenjira Pongpas), a Pob ghost who has a hankering for entrails. (The relationship between the mother and daughter was inspired by one of Weerasethakul’s unrealized projects, Ecstasy Garden.) The slow, contemplative mood never changes as the characters discuss love, a coming flood, refugees, spirits, and jet skiing, often in abstract ways. Weerasethakul wrote, directed, produced, edited, and photographed the film, which features beautiful cinematography, the camera never moving as the characters walk in and out of the frame and the lovely views of the Mekong River linger. Unfortunately, the sum of the intriguing parts don’t make for a cohesive whole; Weerasethakul has been justly celebrated for his short films and full-length works, but Mekong Hotel falls somewhere in between, lost in a kind of no-man’s land. Still, there’s much to admire about this film, especially for the auteur’s longtime fans. Mekong Hotel is having its theatrical premiere at the IFC Center from March 4 to 10 in the series “Mysterious Splendors: The Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul,” running alongside his latest film, Cemetery of Splendor.
In Colliding Dreams, cowriters, directors, and producers Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky take a unique and compelling angle in their exploration of the relationship between Jews and Palestinians in what became the State of Israel in 1948. Not only do they show that Zionism means different things to different people, but they also make it clear that when the British “gave” Palestine to the Jews, it was not theirs to give in the first place, and it just so happened that someone else was already living there. “Now, this is a very important point which I would like to make. People don’t usually make it,” explains Kobi Sharett, the director of the Moshe Sharett Heritage Society, which preserves the legacy of his father, the second prime minister of Israel. “And I learned it from my father. He said, in all cases where you have under the pressure of the influence of war, when whole populations change places, move outside, it is always a rule that the minority is leaving and the majority is staying. They are not feeling secure in the place. The case of Palestine is the only one where the majority fled, not the minority. This is why the problem of the refugees is still with us to this very day.” Using archival footage and new interviews, Dorman and Oren Rudavsky trace the history of Zionism and the search for a Jewish state from the 1880s to the present, speaking with a wide range of Jewish and Palestinian historians, professors, authors, politicians, and journalists as well as everyday people on the street. Everyone interviewed lives in the country; they include Hebrew University professors Avishai Margalit, Moshe Halbertal, and Ruth Gavison, PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi, Mossowa Center director Jafar Farah, and peace activists A. B. Yehoshua, Mordecai Bar On, Motti Lerner, Orly Noy, Yuli Tamir, and Saman Khoury. One critical element that becomes obvious early on is how far we are from any kind of consensus; everyone has different views on whether there should be a one-state or two-state solution, what should be done with the settlements in the West Bank, just what Zionism really is, and who has the ultimate right to the land. Khalil Shikaki, the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, remembers thinking, upon seeing Israeli soldiers in contested territory, “We wanted to say, ‘Go home.’ And you should see the debate that went down between us. People would ask, ‘Where’s home?’” 
Daniel Day-Lewis gives a spectacular, Oscar-winning performance as an independent oil man in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Day-Lewis, in remarkable voice, absolutely embodies Daniel Plainview, a determined, desperate man digging for black gold in turn-of-the-century California. His first strike comes at a heavy price as he loses one of his men in a tragic accident, so he adopts the worker’s infant son, raising H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his own. The growth of his company leads him to Little Boston, a small town that has oil just seeping out of its pores. But after not allowing Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), the charismatic preacher who runs the local Church of the Third Revelation, to say a prayer over the community’s first derrick, Plainview begins his descent into hell. Using Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! as a starting point (and employing echoes of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in addition to the obvious reference, George Stevens’s classic 1956 oil flick Giant), writer-director Anderson (Boogie Nights, The Master) has created a thrilling epic about greed, power, and corruption as well as jealousy, murder, and, above all, family, where oil gushes out of the ground with fire and brimstone. Robert Elswit’s beautiful, Oscar-winning cinematography is so gritty and realistic, audiences will be reaching for their faces to wipe the oil and blood off. The piercing, classically based score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, builds to a mind-blowing crescendo by the end of the film — which concludes with a controversial finale. Shot in the same location — Marfa, Texas — where Giant was set, There Will Be Blood is an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of one man’s soul. There Will Be Blood is being shown March 5 & 6 at the rather ungodly hour of eleven in the morning as part of the Nitehawk Cinema series “Country Brunchin’” and “Nitehawk Brunch Screenings” and will be preceded by a live performance by New York duo 
Winner of both the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of the most popular, and most unusual, romantic love stories ever put on film. Oscar-nominated Anouk Aimée stars as Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis Duroc, two people who each has a child in a boarding school in Deauville. Anne, a former actress, and Jean-Louis, a successful racecar driver, seem to hit it off immediately, but they both have pasts that haunt them and threaten any kind of relationship. Shot in three weeks with a handheld camera by Lelouch, who earned nods for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Pierre Uytterhoeven), A Man and a Woman is a tour-de-force of filmmaking, going from the modern day to the past via a series of flashbacks that at first alternate between color and black-and-white, then shift hues in curious, indeterminate ways. Much of the film takes place in cars, either as Jean-Louis races around a track or the protagonists sit in his red Mustang convertible and talk about their lives, their hopes, their fears. The heat they generate is palpable, making their reluctance to just fall madly, deeply in love that much more heart-wrenching, all set to a memorable soundtrack by Francis Lai. Lelouch, Trintignant, and Aimée revisited the story in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, without the same impact and success. A recently restored print of the original will be shown on March 2 at 7:30 as part of the BAMcinématek series “BAMcinématek: Gallic 60s,” in honor of the film’s fiftieth anniversary. The two-day treat continues March 3 with Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.
You might think that the phrase “the French Touch,” which is part of the title of FIAF’s March-April edition of its CinéSalon series, refers to the unique style of such French auteurs as François Truffaut, Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Jean Cocteau, Éric Rohmer, and others whose films are often included in these Tuesday-night festivals. But the term actually describes a group of DJs and bands associated with electronic dance music, or EDM, in France. So it is rather appropriate for the series, “EDM Anthems: French Touch on Film,” to kick off with Daft Punk Unchained, a thumping documentary about the patron saints of that movement, the iconoclastic duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, better known as Daft Punk. Director Hervé Martin Delpierre, who cowrote the film with Marina Rozenman, had his work cut out for him, as he had to make the film without the participation of Daft Punk itself, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo, who have not shown their faces in public this century and rarely give interviews of any kind. But Delpierre gets just about everyone else who has ever worked with them to open up, allowing others to interpret the band’s musical evolution and cultural impact as he traces DP’s career from 1992, when they were in the somewhat more traditional bass-guitar-drum combo Darlin’, to the worldwide sensation of their 2013 album, Random Access Memories, as they melded American disco, German techno, and Manchester industrial into something wholly new. A special focus is placed on their mind-blowing show at Coachella in 2006, which single-handedly changed the future of EDM.