Choi and his loyal ox face the twilight of their years together in OLD PARTNER (Photo courtesy of Schcalo Media Group)
OLD PARTNER (Lee Chung-ryoul, 2008)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 30 – January 5
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
“Woe is me . . . Life is miserable,” complains seventy-six-year-old Lee Sam-soon as her husband, seventy-nine-year-old Choi Won-kyun, lets her go on about her hunched-over body, lack of teeth, and overall ill health. All Choi cares about is his beloved loyal ox, who has been with him for nearly thirty years. South Korean filmmaker Lee Chung-ryoul documents the final year of the loving, sometimes harsh relationship between Choi and his ox in the deeply heartwarming and thoroughly heartbreaking OLD PARTNER. As science and technology pass him by, Choi continues to farm his fields with his aging and ailing ox, who is turning forty, somewhat of a miracle as the life span of the breed is generally between twelve and twenty-four years. Choi refuses to spray insecticides, preferring to jeopardize his crop rather than his animal. And he often leaves his constantly chattering wife to work the fields alone as he goes off to find fresh fodder to feed the ox, whose own aches and pains echo those of Choi. Even Choi and Lee’s nine children, none of whom have any interest in the farm, want their father to get rid of the ox, but he merely ignores them, responding only to the ox’s bell and not his family’s questions and concerns. Named Best Documentary at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, OLD PARTNER is a warm, tender, beautiful little film about life and death and relationships, with a strong emotional resonance that will stay with you for a long time.
Carol Reed’s thriller is quite simply the most entertaining film we have ever seen, twi-ny’s absolute all-time fave. Set in divided post-WWII Vienna amid a thriving black market, THE THIRD MAN is heavy in atmosphere, untrustworthy characters, and sly humor, with a marvelous zither score by Anton Karas. Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an American writer of Western paperbacks who has come to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but he seems to have shown up a little late. While trying to find out what happened to Harry, Martins falls for Harry’s lover, Anna (Alida Valli); is told to get out of town by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard); meets a stream of Harry’s more interesting, mysterious friends, including Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer); and is talked into giving a lecture to a literary club by old Mr. Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). SPOILER: The shot in which Lime is first revealed, standing in a doorway, a cat brushing by his feet, his tongue firmly in cheek as he lets go a miraculous, knowing smile, is one of the greatest single shots in the history of cinema. Film Forum is screening a new 35mm print of THE THIRD MAN in honor of the film’s sixtieth anniversary.
In 1974, Orson Welles released F FOR FAKE, a playful documentary about art forgers in which the iconoclastic director often showed up on-screen, tongue in cheek, leading viewers through a tantalizing tale that might or might not actually be true. Controversial filmmaker and painter Peter Greenaway (THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT; THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE, AND HER LOVER) continues his own cinematic foray into the art world with REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE, a follow-up to his 2007 film, NIGHTWATCHING, which took viewers behind the scenes of the creation of Rembrandt’s 1624 masterpiece “The Night Watch.” (Greeenaway has also completed projects about Veronese’s “The Wedding at Cana” and Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” with Picasso, Seurat, Monet, and others on deck.) Like Welles, Greenaway appears throughout REMBRANDT’S J’ACCUSE, his white-haired head seen in a small box near the center-bottom of the screen as he lays out his theory about how “The Night Watch” is actually an elaborately detailed drama about a real murder that took place at the time, with Rembrandt pointing out the killer. Through extreme close-ups of the painting and re-creations of scenes involving such characters as Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia Uylenburgh (Eva Birthistle), the servants Geertje Dirks (Jodhi May) and Hendrickje Stoffels (Emily Holmes), and Rembrandt himself (Martin Freeman), Greenaway goes over every aspect of the canvas as if he is a forensics expert, dividing the film into thirty-five sections, or clues, that all support his thesis. Along the way, he comments on art history and Dutch society, creating a surprisingly thrilling film that works on several levels. But most of all, it is a lot of fun — no matter how much of it might be true.
