In the Works...

For those who might have worried that I was letting my work (here and elsewhere) fall by the wayside, fear not! Though it's true I have been pretty quiet over the past year or so, it's for a good reason: I've been busy working on a sizable new project about the great Left Bank filmmaker Alain Resnais! You can take a peek at a few pages from my research notebooks below, and in the meantime rest assured that I'm going to be working on putting out some fresh writing (here and elsewhere!) before too long!

Thank you everyone for your curiosity, interest, and patience - and happy viewing!

Films in a Decade (2010-2019)

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

On the one hand, I've generally grown far less inclined towards lists and rankings when it comes to highlighting films I've enjoyed, preferring instead to give them the more in-depth treatments they deserve. On the other hand, since a decade does only come around every once in a while, here is a gathering, in alphabetical order, of films I saw over the past decade that made a strong impression on me. And in a related note, I'm included in MUBI Notebook's critics poll of the images that defined the decade in cinema!

Thanks for reading, and happy new year!

Aqérat (We, the Dead) (Edmund Yeo, 2017)
Casting Blossoms to the Sky (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2012)
Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015)
Centro Histórico (Pedro Costa, Manoel de Oliveira, Víctor Erice, Aki Kaurismäki, 2013)
Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)
Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012)
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017)
Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira, 2012)
The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)
Halley (Sebastián Hofmann, 2012)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki, 2011)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)
In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)
It Felt Like Love (Eliza Hittman, 2013)
Life of Riley (Alain Resnais, 2014)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)
The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
Mekong Hotel (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)
Modern Love (Takuya Fukushima, 2018)
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)
The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017)
Our Homeland (Yonghi Yang, 2012)
The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones, 2014)
Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015)
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2018)
Postcard (Kaneto Shindo, 2010)
The Second Life of Thieves (Woo Ming Jin, 2014)
Ship of Theseus (Anand Gandhi, 2013)
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)
Starlet (Sean Baker, 2012)
Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2013)
Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015)
The Tiger Factory (Woo Ming Jin, 2010)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
Visages Villages (Agnès Varda and JR, 2017)
The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher, 2014)
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais, 2012)
Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)

Blondin Miguel in Le Havre

The Great Escape: Larisa Shepitko’s WINGS

Maya Bulgakova in Wings

The visions are brief, but when they come to her they offer something so sweet and pure that one might imagine them belonging to the world of daydreams and fantasy. But they come from reality - Nadezhda Petrukhina’s reality, as she lived it many years ago when she flew as a fighter pilot for Stalin’s air force. Through her eyes and memories, we are sent soaring high up, slicing between layers of clouds as the ground below, vast yet minuscule, tilts and turns. But these moments, sweet as they are, are also cruelly brief, allowing us just a few seconds of flight at a time before the present literally comes back into focus, returning us to the drab confines of Nadezhda’s current life as a civilian, teacher, and respected public servant. Over the course of Wings (1966), the first feature film she made after graduating from the All-Russian State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK), Larisa Shepitko follows her heroine through the quotidian labyrinth in which she now lives out her days, seeing to chores and duties with rigorous diligence. Nadezhda is surrounded by an eclectic gallery of faces - colleagues and students, assistants and acquaintances, housekeepers and merchants, nearly all of whom seeming to know her, looking to her with an instinctive sense of respect. It’s easy to see why: with her iron-firm demeanor and sharp, hawk-like features, she right away makes a striking impression as a woman not to be crossed. The great character actress Maya Bulgakova plays her beautifully, incorporating doubt, regret, anxiety about time and age, self-awareness, and a keen sense of humour beneath the surface devotion to protocol and responsibility. Nadezhda - many warmly call her Nadezhda Stepanovna - is so much more than the decorated war hero and exemplary citizen she appears to be, carrying with her the memories and experiences of another chapter in her life that still linger within her with haunting potency in the postwar present, commingling with her anxiety about where she now finds herself and where she is headed.

Of all the things that weigh upon Nadezhda Stepanovna regarding the place she has reached in her life, two in particular cast the longest shadows upon her sense of contentment. The first of them is the roguish student Vostriakov (Sergei Bystryakov), whose expressions of disdain towards the school, his annoying classmates, and authority figures curdle into a simmering hatred he directs squarely at Nadezhda, triggered once she disciplines and humiliates him for some rude horseplay early in the film. She later spots him in a crowded beer hall, smirking and drinking defiantly once he sees her, shortly before he runs away from school and home altogether, delivering an additional knot of gnawing guilt upon her conscience. There is also Nadezhda’s frayed relationship with her adult daughter Tanya (Zhanna Bolotova), who is so embarrassed by her mother that she avoids introducing her to her fiancé Igor (Vladimir Gorelov), prompting Nadezhda to pay a visit on her own initiative, leading to a cringingly awkward encounter. She is so tormented by Tanya’s icy attitude towards her that she in turn holds back from disclosing that she is not actually her biological mother.

Nadezhda thankfully has a loyal friend in Pasha (Panteleymon Krymov), a kind fellow teacher to whom she confides her doubts and worries. But that is not enough to keep her memories from trickling into the present-tense stream of babysitting, kitchen chores, student theatrical productions, proofreading, and other mundane responsibilities that now take up the bulk of her time and attention. It isn’t all drudgery and banality though: through instinct and expertise, Shepitko and her cinematographer Igor Slabnevich capture quotidian scenes of urban life that belong in the rich tradition of stark, monochrome, modernist images of postwar Europe found in the works of Left Bank filmmakers like Alain Resnais and Chris Marker and key contemporaneous directors like Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ermanno Olmi. One vivid passage finds Nadezhda out for a walk encountering a beguiling bounty of scenes: a platoon of firemen carrying out drill exercises in the street in their bulky uniforms; a man precariously doing handstands at the edge of a diving board high above choppy waters as a companion sits close by, watching; a crowd of people packed into a rickety streetcar all turning their heads at the same time to catch a glimpse of a dog outside. Nadezhda pays a visit to the beer hall where she previously spotted Vostriakov, now empty save for the proprietress Shura (Rimma Markova), with whom she shares a frank, friendly chat over beer and launches into a spirited burst of singing and dancing that is interrupted by a gathering of silent, curious men peering in through the windows at the two women.

Wings

Afterwards, while walking and carrying berries from a street vendor in her cupped hands, Nadezhda is caught in a sudden rain shower that sends everyone else running for shelter. But not her; as water droplets accumulate in her hair and clothes, she uses the opportunity to rinse the berries, then peer out at the emptying streets, her gaze (and Shepitko’s camera) drifting upwards, above streetcar wires and rooftops into the sky and the past, into her memories - once again shown from her point of view - of Mitya (Leonid Dyachkov), her former lover and fellow pilot during World War II. In a sequence that finds the pair exploring crumbling stone ruins, abandoned wells, and cracked ancient roads etched into the earth like gashes, these long-vanished scenes of the past crystalize in a series of freeze frames that seem to lock Mitya’s face and frail, shadow-like form into the firmament of memory (this passage, among the strongest in the film, easily fits alongside the similarly unforgettable past sequences in Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Marker’s La Jetée (1963)). The final images in the sequence tragically underline the loss of Mitya to the maws of death and history: the smoking, flame-strewn remains of his fighter; the ominous stone form of a cathedral looming in the distance.

While Larisa Shepitko’s gripping war film The Ascent (1977) is the one many today regard as her masterpiece, Wings is no less remarkable an achievement. It is a work of great power, beauty, and nuance, open and alive to the rhythms of everyday life and the past’s lingering hold on a busy, layered present. Among the film’s most impressive achievements are the ways it explores with sensitivity and depth the life, thoughts, and feelings of one woman; her previous experiences and present situation; the scope of her achievements’ continuing influence over other people’s impressions of her and her longing to be free of this burden, evident in her interactions with strangers and supportive friends; the demands of her profession and the friction it creates against her innermost regrets and desires; and her ever-constant passion: flight. By the end of the film, compelled to regain control of her story, Nadezhda makes another trip out to her old airfield, where, as always, she is greeted by her old flying comrades. Left alone for a moment, she manages to find an empty plane. She hops and crawls until she has climbed onto one of the wings, then lowers herself into the cockpit. Though quiet and still, she visibly savors the moment. Then the men come back and begin pushing the aircraft along the grass, laughing and cheering as they gain speed. Their light-hearted game is amusing and makes Nadezhda smile, but it is also sad in its pathetic imitation of true flight. But Nadezhda has had enough of imitations and memories: without warning and to everyone’s shock, the plane’s engine suddenly roars to life, its propeller whirring into motion. The men scatter away from the plane, which begins to direct itself towards a nearby runway. Others come running, but it’s no use: Nadezhda Stepanovna is finally ready to return to the bright white skies that have so often beckoned to her. Her disappointments and regrets can stay on the ground; the clouds await, and nothing can hold her back now.

Vectors of Desire: Lucrecia Martel's ZAMA

Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama

Look at him, the poor man. This poor, proud, ridiculous man. When we first see him, he is standing on a beach at the edge of the water in his boots, tricorn hat, and crimson uniform of the Spanish crown, a sword hanging from his belt in its sheath. A man whose appearance and stature suggest a figure of power, of authority and control. Leaving the beach, his attention is drawn to the sounds of a group of indigenous women bathing themselves in mud in the shallow waters. The man crawls to a spot above them where he tries to sneak a look at their nude bodies, but is almost immediately thwarted. “Voyeur! Voyeur!” they call, laughing at this clownish intruder. Embarrassed and exposed, he tries to flee, stopping only to thrash one of the women who chases after him. Thus, in the opening moments of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), the great Argentine filmmaker’s adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel and her first feature in nine years, the dynamics of power so familiar from previous, male-centric colonialist period pieces are challenged, sabotaged. The man, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, the Mexican actor perhaps best known for playing the womanizing Tomás Tomás in Alfonso Cuarón's Sólo con tu pareja (1991)) the main character of this story and a man ostensibly equipped with power and a roving, insatiable, infallible male gaze, is right away revealed to instead be weak and inept, openly called out for his impulses by those whose own gazes and voices shame and disarm him with comical ease. 

Zama is an Argentine-born subject of the Spanish Empire stationed in the riverside outpost of Asunción, Paraguay, in the late 18th century. Separated from a wife and children whom he hasn’t seen in years, he longs for a transfer that will finally take him away from the humid backwater. But time passes, no transfer arrives, and Zama finds himself sinking even deeper into a Kafkaesque stasis of bureaucracy, boredom, yearning, and desperation that pushes him beyond the limits of his endurance. The film, a brilliantly executed revisionist take on those familiar tales of imperial rule, adventure, and conquest in faraway, “untamed” lands, is perfectly in keeping with Martel’s previous three films, all of which favoring a lingering, non-linear approach to their unsettling studies of middle- and upper-class characters trapped in suffocating settings, entirely at the mercy of their own nervous energies. La ciénaga (2001), Martel’s extraordinary feature debut, is situated almost entirely on and around the grounds of a decrepit house, La Mandrágora, in which the loathsome, self-absorbed adults slowly rot away in an alcoholic stupor around a putrid swimming pool while their children, caught in the grip of simmering hormones and destructive impulses, go on sweaty excursions into town or roam the surrounding wilderness with rifles and machetes. Portents of death and injury abound: a dead rabbit on a kitchen counter, a water buffalo trapped in mud, the sight of children with missing eyes and bleeding cuts. There is the Buñuelian sense of primal instincts upsetting and overriding the surface-level social order of proper etiquette and acceptable behavior, of nature either reclaiming or lashing out against the toxic world of humans. In Martel’s cryptically constructed follow-up, The Holy Girl (2004), a hotel hosting a medical convention serves as a site of sexual tension and spiritual fervor when an act of abuse perversely motivates a young woman to pursue and bring about the salvation of the unsuspecting perpetrator. And in 2008’s The Headless Woman, the vain, middle-aged protagonist falls into a psychological maelstrom of guilt and denial after a hit-and-run incident in which she may or may not have struck a child. All three films are distinguished by their scathing indictments of the idle, entitled bourgeoisie; cutting critiques of patriarchal social orders and systems of power (women play significant roles in all of Martel’s films, occupying the central roles in her first three); and clear allegiance with typically marginalized characters such as servants, non-whites, and indigenous peoples, all of which are further pursued and explored in intriguing new ways in Zama.

Zama

Just as instrumental to Martel’s unique cinema is her emphasis on the crucial role sound plays in enriching and expanding upon the confining limitations of the image, inviting the larger, more mysterious world beyond the frame to assert itself in the viewer’s experience of the film through an array of surprising, challenging, and creative methods. She demonstrated her mastery of sound design and the tension between on- and off-screen space as early as La ciénaga with its dense sonic tapestry of metal chairs scraping against stone, tinkling glasses and bottles, ringing telephones that go unanswered, rumbling thunder, gunshots, the shouts and shrieks of overexcited children. That film’s sophisticated command of the visual and aural properties of cinema, clever editing, and vivid sensuality amount to a work as rigorous, precise, tactile, and durable as Robert Bresson’s L’argent (1983) or Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999). As with Bresson, Martel’s devotion to uncovering the potential of sound is absolute, with each film serving as a testing ground for fresh techniques and concepts that bring the world of each film to life as an accumulation of physical details. For her, each new project starts first and foremost with a sound concept around which the rest of the film takes shape. For Zama, one of her first decisions was to use a Shepard tone - a series of gradually ascending or descending scales - in association with instances of further delay or disappointment for Zama, creating the impression of not only free-falling, as Martel specifically intended, but of an increasingly slippery hold on reality and rational thought, as if the very ground underneath the poor functionary’s feet was melting and sliding away. This sensation of feverish wooziness is further underscored by the inspired use of calypso music, conjuring a comically skewed, dreamily lackadaisical feel to Zama’s trials and tribulations. Martel took a similarly creative, idiosyncratic approach to the actors’ spoken dialogue by borrowing the method Mexican soap operas from the 1970s used to reach a wide Latin American audience, blending together different accents - in Zama’s case, from Argentina and the Spanish-Portuguese hybrid language Portuñol - to create a more unusual variation of Spanish to suit the temporally and geographically removed colony setting (the indigenous languages of qom, pilagá, and mbyá guaraní are also spoken throughout the film). To achieve the eerie pre-modern silence that would have prevailed there and then, untainted by noise pollution from cars and trucks, Martel often had to resort to dubbing her actors’ dialogue to bypass the difficulties of recording direct sound. She also made sure to incorporate the sounds of insects into interior scenes to emphasize the lack of a proper division between indoors and outdoors, as most windows at the time lacked glass, and sought out field recordings of insects, birds, and amphibians that gave off strange, mechanical sounds, “almost like malfunctioning radios.” All of these elements and many more contribute to an enthralling vision of the past quite unlike any other, off-kilter yet immersive, layered with just enough eccentricity to effectively illustrate the unsteady, tragicomic nature of Zama’s situation. Elaborating upon the opening sequence, Martel depicts the frustrated Argentine not as an authority figure who is seen, feared, obeyed, and respected, but rather as a measly, insignificant cog in a machine of empire and commerce, an increasingly diminished creature whose torments and desires seem to be open knowledge among the local population, further contributing to his overall ridiculousness. Despite being a married man and father, he pitifully pursues the local treasury minister’s flirtatious wife (Almodóvar regular Lola Dueñas) within the suffocating confines of her manor, but she only deflects his advances while his amused peers casually lob teasing remarks about Zama’s blatant lust directly to his face. Zama also has an illegitimate child with Emilia (María Etelvina Peredez), one of the native women who makes no disguise of her deep contempt for him. Meanwhile, his hopes for any sign of progress towards his coveted transfer become increasingly futile with each setback and delay, leaving him with little else to do but to just keep waiting - for word from the crown, for delayed ships bearing royal mail and overdue payments in their holds, for a sign of mercy or favor from one of the local governors, even for a message from his wife or children, whose prolonged silence carry much weight. 

Zama, while suffering from terrible loneliness, is far from alone in his private, inescapable purgatory, as Martel ingeniously surrounds him with a wide range of secondary characters mainly consisting of women, children, indigenous natives, and animals. Further elaborating upon the film's fascinatingly inverted power dynamics, she grants the various servant and slave characters surrounding the Spanish overseers their own special measures of presence, autonomy, and even power, prominently featuring them in numerous scenes in key areas of the frame, sometimes in brazenly colorful costumes, their eyes and passive expressions constantly leveling steady, assured looks of defiance and judgment at the petty, pompous intruders. In its own way, Zama is an even more insightful statement on resistance and revenge against institutional captivity and oppression than Django Unchained (2012); without shedding a single drop of blood, Martel's servants silently, undeniably prevail over their buffoonish "masters." A similar assessment can be drawn from the film's free indigenous characters, who navigate the dense jungle terrain with confidence and ease, for the most part possessing an attitude of indifference to the foreigners' cruelties and desperate, greed-driven fumblings, a position comparable to that shown by the many animals that freely inhabit and wander through the Spanish settlements. In one of the film's most memorable (and instantly meme-able) scenes, a llama bobs into and out of the frame as the straight-faced Zama receives yet another blow of bad news from a governor, hilariously underlining his ever-plummeting irrelevance as only a llama can. 
 

Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama

Martel portrays Zama as a man trapped and tormented by the vector of desire, to borrow the filmmaker's phrasing, that he has constructed for himself, the allure of his transfer lying in wait for him at the end of an ambiguous timeline has constantly has to adjust and expand with each fresh setback - practically ad infinitum, after a certain point. His obedience and eagerness to please his Spanish overseers all go unrecognized or are overridden by the succession of matters that keep arising, demanding his attention: the sudden death of a visiting merchant (Carlos Defeo) and the subsequent burial arrangements that must be made, the hilarious discovery that one of Zama's own men (Nahuel Cano) has been secretly writing a book on the crown's time and want Zama to be his first reader, a property inventory that forces Zama to relocate to a rotting, possibly haunted hut. But the roots of Zama's perpetual torment extend not to the greater forces of circumstance or rotten luck that keep throwing up obstacles between him and his goal, but within him, to the very core of his identity. At one point, Zama's deputy Ventura (Juan Minujín) bluntly tells him, "You're talking to a man astonished by the number of Americans who want to pass for Spaniards instead of being what they are," thus openly addressing both the mission Martel has firmly pursued since La ciénaga to provide a fuller and more accurate representation of Argentine national identity comprised of lower-class, native-born, and indigenous groups rather than those with European backgrounds and sentiments and Zama's misguided attempts to bury his own Argentine origins and curry favor from his Spanish-born colleagues and superiors - a goal doomed from the very start. In one last attempt to please the distant, never-seen king of a faraway country not even his own, a weary, bearded Zama volunteers for a mission to find and kill the elusive bandit known as Vicuña Porto whose violent antics have been wreaking havoc with local trade. This perilous adventure, shot in the wilderness of Argentina's Chaco region, takes up the final third of Zama, in which Martel deftly steers clear of the typical trippy descent into madness so familiar from films like Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). Not to say that Zama doesn't make a swerve into the strange, the uncertain, and the existential as Zama and his men experience a disorienting, transformative passage of revelation, captivity, mistrust, betrayal, and greed before arriving in a neutral zone of sand, water, and purest green, reduced to what they were all along: mere men, only now far beyond the trappings of power, class, rank, or wealth. It is here where Zama finally, quite literally learns to let go, freeing himself of all aspirations and pursuits except the one that matters the most: simply, to live and be content, regardless of his place in the world. All there is is the present, and real, lasting happiness is attainable, but only outside the constraints of any vector.

Between Sea and Sky: Woo Ming Jin's Cinema

Foo Fei Ling and Ernest Chong Shun Yuan in Woman on Fire Looks for Water

The setting sun has turned the sky into a gentle inferno the color of molten gold. Below, the jungle and the river are calm and still. A boat smoothly glides across the water's surface, its slender red hull spreading ripples that distort the glassy reflection of fire and clouds. Over the hushed murmur of birds, the boat's motor softly put-puts at a steady, soothing rhythm, pushing it onwards into the fast-approaching evening.

Tranquil moments like these are like a balm for the long days of hard work leading up to them. In Woo Ming Jin's Woman on Fire Looks for Water (2009), the intoxicating natural splendor that surrounds and penetrates the coastal Malaysian village of Sekinchan, one and a half hours and a world away from Kuala Lumpur in Selangor state, is rendered just as vividly as the various tasks making up the fish farming operations by which the town's inhabitants make their humble livings. Through Wan Chun Hung's sumptuous cinematography, a thick layer of heat and humidity seems to permeate everything, a soft, orange-tinted haze coloring the lush jungle vegetation, the muddy riverbanks, the winding dirt roads, and the wooden huts in which heaps of shimmering gossamer fishing nets, cone-shaped fish traps, and boat hulls and components in various state of repair are kept, even spilling into living spaces. Here, life is dictated by work, the work defined by the demands and yields of the river and the sea, the processes of gathering up the fish that dwell in their murky depths. Woo's film dutifully portrays the gory toil that goes on here with an attentive, unflinching eye. Countless fish are pulled up from their vessels in nets and gathered in heaps, the camera lingering on the creatures' shiny scales, their staring eyes, their slick gills and fins and tendrils. Thick, heavy blades wielded by silent workers deftly slice the fish open, cutting away the guts and useless bits with impressive precision. What remains is then cleaned, packed with salt, and neatly spread out on nets and wooden boards to dry. The natural ubiquity of death is further emphasized elsewhere throughout the film: a pile of slain goat carcasses arranged into a bonfire; the rotting remains of a snake as they are swept away by splashes of water; the shock of a close-up on a frog's head getting severed by a pair of scissors, its eyes bulging grotesquely.

Throughout this sequence of vivid imagery integrating labor, gore, and decay into an ever-constant, ever-present cycle - all by way of a pungent, sensual earthiness that brings us up-close to the mud, sweat, and blood - ailing fisherman Ah Kau (Chung Kok Keong) prepares himself for his own impending demise. He visits old acquaintances and, most poignantly, Ai Ling (Mak Foong), the woman whom he nearly married many years ago. By deciding not to, he ended up making the biggest mistake of his life, leaving him with decades of burning regret and a box of old ticket stubs and photographs that he passes along to Ai Ling - a melancholy token of lost time, lost chances. At the same time, his son Ah Fei (Ernest Chong Shun Yuan) carefully considers his prospects for his own future. He makes a living selling frogs out of the cage fastened to his motorbike, but is told by Lili (Foo Fei Ling), his own heart's desire, hat he must find a more financially reliable profession if he truly wants to marry her. There seem to be few routes open to the poor fisherman's son until one day when he rescues the wife (Teo Mooi Cho) of a cockle factory owner, Mr. Lee (Chia Chen Tek), whose affluence is made clear enough by his spotless silver car. He introduces Ah Fei to his daughter Su Lin (Jerrica Lai) and shows him the facilities where his workers gather and process the hard-shelled cockles they bring in from nearby stretches of shallow river. The prospect of a new house and a top position at the factory suddenly opens up to Ah Fei - but only if he commits to marrying Su Lin.

Ernest Chong Shun Yuan and Foo Fei Ling in Woman on Fire Looks for Water

This fresh temptation puts Ah Fei in danger of making the same mistake that led his father down the wrong path in his life, threatening to pull him away from true love and the woman he truly longs for in favor of a more comfortable existence in this remote corner of Malaysia. At times, the young man's ties to his father and their way of life seem too daunting and inescapable, driven home literally in the scene in which Ah Fei struggles to pull a boat onto shore, sinking in mud up to his hips as he pants and tugs on the stubborn cord, heaps of netting gathered around him.But in his time alone with Lili in the jungles and springs of Ulu Yam and on the dirt roads leading to and from the fish farm, Ah Fei's future seems open and malleable, a path beyond the stagnation, rot, and disappointment that haunts the older characters clear and in sight. Even though there is no easy way forward, there is still hope for these young people - if they make the right choices while there is still time.

Woo Ming Jin was among a handful of promising young Malaysian filmmakers who emerged in the early 2000s with their first works. Also including James Lee, Amir Muhammad, Liew Seng Tat, Tan Chui Mui, Ho Yuhang, and the late Yasmin Ahmad, this group has since come to be known collectively as the New Malaysian Cinema, their films screened in festivals around the globe and reaching viewers via online modes of distribution, introducing the various nuances and layers of Malaysian culture to a wide international audience.. Along with his friend and frequent collaborator Edmund Yeo, Woo has emerged as one of the most significant artists at the forefront of his country's national cinema, alternating between commercial works like the romantic comedy Salon (2005) and the surprise box office hit KL Zombi (2013) and more festival-geared films such as his feature debut Monday Morning Glory (2005), which premiered in San Francisco and played in the Berlinale, and The Elephant and the Sea (2007). Woman on Fire Looks for Water came about after Woo was inspired by Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (2007) to make a film that had a more personal, intimate feel than his previous works. He achieved his goal, creating a hushed, mesmerizing mood through the magic of Hung's camerawork, Yeo's editing, and Isabel Yam's low-key score. Weaving together tropical reverie, vérité-style attentiveness to the work of fishing, and the timeless themes of desire and tragedy into a masterful balance between the transience of life and the soft, beating reality of it, Woman on Fire is, indeed, captivating cinema.

Berg Lee in The Elephant and the Sea

Made two years previous, The Elephant and the Sea, shot in different locations in and around Sekinchan, is something else altogether. More cold and closed-in than the sun-dappled Woman on Fire, it is a haunting film about haunted characters - two, specifically, wo men who never meet, but weather equally bracing brushes with death and disease. One of them, Ah Ngau (Chung), loses his wife to a mysterious illness that sweeps through the area, forcing him to stay in a spartan shelter facility along with others who have been similarly affected by the outbreak. Shut up in a small room where they all sleep on simple cots, Ah Ngau keeping his wfe's ashes close to him in a cheap tin container, they are given some money by the government and boxes of worthless junk presented as charitable donations from the public. Once he is finally released, Ah Ngau returns to his riverside home, where he takes to sleeping outside under the afternoon sun, and begins to frequent a nearby brothel. The other, younger man, Yun Ding (Berg Lee), runs scams with his "big brother" Ah Long (Cheong Wai Loon) by placing wooden boards embedded with sharp nails across country roads, then later driving up to their victims' vehicles to replace their flat tires - for a price, of course. Ah Long also suddenly succumbs to the unexplained disease, leaving Yun Ding alone to fend for himself, which he manages through a string of odd jobs and dubious projects: by working a brief stint as a driver for some local toughs; by selling a few cameras, phones, and other bits of junk; by finding and selling a dead lizard, inspiring him to set up a trap to catch a Malayan sun bear, which would fetch him a far greater price; and, most amusingly, by repeatedly playing the lottery using numbers that supposedly appear on the sides of a prized fish he finds in a shop and keeps revisiting.

For some seasoned viewers, The Elephant and the Sea will bear a fairly strong resemblance to films by Tsai Ming-Liang like The River (1997) and What Time is it There? (2001). Like his fellow countryman - Tsai was born in Malaysia, but was educated and has made most of his films in Taiwan - Woo here turns an unflinching eye towards the basic needs and drives of the human body - to eat, to move, to rest, to fuck - and its disquieting sensitivity to ailments and environmental conditions. Lee's mostly silent presence throughout the film, remarkably similar to that of Lee Kang-Sheng in his regular collaborations with Tsai, is mostly defined by body language - gestures and behavior that evoke the childlike simplicity, suggested innocence, and inquisitive mannerisms of mime. In another Tsai-like development, a faint mark appears on Yun Ding's nose, sending him to a man who tells him to wear an amulet that will apparently absorb all of his negative energy and remove the blemish - a quaint spiritual remedy that sharply contrasts with - and seems totally ineffective against - the film's hard, physical world of fallible bodies, crude transactions of money and sex, and very little else for the characters to cling to and live off of. This is a film about scarcity and loss in which both the sluggish, depressed Ah Ngau and the dogged, inscrutable Yun Ding come through their respective trials with renewed appetites for life, fellowship, and affection, just barely regaining control of the base animal urges that drive them in their daily quests for survival and comfort. As in Woman on Fire, humans come across as simply another component of the harsh natural world of life and death that dictates the jungle's beckoning depths and the sodden, mud-choked riverbanks.

Monday Morning Glory and The Elephant and the Sea were the first films Woo made under the banner of Greenlight Pictures, the production company he launched in 2004 that has since served as home base for his and Yeo's many fruitful film collaborations. The Elephant and the Sea received financial assistance from the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Hubert Bals Fund (as did Woman on Fire and a number of Woo's later projects), was given the Special Jury Prize at the Torino International Film Festival, and appeared on Tony Rayns' list of his favorite films of 2007 for Film Comment alongside Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, Lee Chang-Dong's Secret Sunshine, and David Fincher's Zodiac. Three short years later - just one after Woman on Fire - Woo's most riveting portrayal of survival and endurance to date premiered in the 2010 Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight program. The Tiger Factory tells, through a Dardennesian closeness to its heroine that barely relents its tight focus over its brisk 84 minutes, the story of Ping Ping (Fooi Mun Lai), a young woman determined to get to Japan to make a new life for herself. She works two jobs, in a restaurant as a server and dishwasher under a tyrannical manager, and in a pig farm where she assists in feeding and inseminating the filthy creatures amid the deafening din of their grunts and cries. However, she is also involved in another, far more insidious operation: she offers up her own body for impregnation, carrying and delivering babies who are then sold to outside parties through her aunt, the cold-blooded Madame Tien (Pearlly Chua).As she braves the moral and medical dangers of this scheme on top of her additional hardships, Ping just can't ever seem to get ahead in achieving her goals. The film opens with her most recent delivery resulting in a stillborn child (or so she is told), leaving her short on the amount she needs. A visit to Piu (Bok Lai Loh), the human trafficker who can arrange her passage to Japan, yields not an inch of sympathy for her predicament. "Tell you what, why don't you come back when you have the money," he simply tells her. Desperate and short on options, Ping goes back to her "Auntie Tien" to offer herself up for another pregnancy. This leads to her regularly meeting with Kang (Rum Nun Chung), a Burmese immigrant with a family of his own, to make her pregnant. A subdued sort of friendship grows between them until information comes to light that forces Ping to seriously reevaluate her trust in Tien as well as what she is or isn't willing to do to escape her grim situation.

Fooi Mun Lai and Rum Nun Chung in The Tiger Factory

Ping shares a room with Mei (Susan Lee Fong Zhi), a young woman her age who also works at the pig farm and also has her sights set on Japan. Edmund Yeo tells her story in his companion short Inhalation (2010), which overlaps with the events of The Tiger Factory, adding another angle to both films' examinations of the factors motivating Malaysians - specifically those of ethnic backgrounds of other countries such as China and India whose "outsider" status means they aren't treated with as much fairness or tolerance as their native-born compatriots - to move abroad for better opportunities and quality of life. Indeed, Ping and Mei find themselves in a world even more harsh and treacherous than the one seen in The Elephant and the Sea, this one arranged as a brutal economic food chain in which ruthless, wicked figures of control and power exploit the weak and vulnerable ones beneath them - be they migrant workers like Kang or the young, desperate ones like Ping and Mei - without so much as a flinch, driving some to the most tragic depths of risk, danger, and determination to somehow break free. Some may look at Ping and her actions and react with shock or disgust, but Woo's film demands a more sympathetic consideration of her case, factoring in the fear, survival instincts, and warranted measures of pain, trauma, and grief that influence her dubious choices, complicating any simplistic reading of her character. With her present in nearly every scene, Fooi Mun Lai's performance is an understated feat of quiet courage and willpower, matched by Pearlly Chua (who made such a strong impression in Tsai Ming-Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006)) as the icily calculating, utterly remorseless Madame Tien, a screen villain as chilling and memorable as they come.

The Tiger Factory paints a frightening picture in which the stuff of life itself - pig semen, sex, women's bodies, newborn babies - is reduced to crude market goods, ensnaring the participants in a cruel, rigged game of sacrifice and moral compromise. The hard-edged aesthetic Woo applied to his and Yeo's screenplay is amply supported by Yeo and Kenny Chua's crisp editing, making the finished film one of Woo's most kinetic and captivating works. But even after recognizing the great strengths of the films examined here thus far, it is 2014's The Second Life of Thieves that stands as perhaps Woo's finest achievement to date, revealing a fresh threshold of liberty and confidence in his filmmaking, summoned to service a personal story that demanded his utmost care. Woo was inspired by his uncle, a private man who mostly kept to himself in the time Woo knew him during his youth in the town of Ipoh. Years later, it came to light that his uncle had in fact been living as a closeted gay man, keeping his true self hidden behind an arranged marriage, struggling with alcoholism, alienation, and the guise of straightness before AIDS eventually claimed his life while he was still just in his 50s. Strangely enough, this story closely resembled that of Chung Kok Keong, Woo's lead actor from The Elephant and the Sea and Woman on Fire who, like his uncle, was forced to live in the closet for much of his life. He too took a wife, with whom he had a daughter, and had to play straight roles throughout his acting career. Given this difficult history, it must have come as a shock of surprise and relief to Chung when Woo approached him with the role that would finally allow him to openly channel the full breadth of his experiences and identity onscreen. He did it justice, delivering a strong, emotionally rich performance that both anchors The Second Life of Thieves and drives it forwards in its painful reckoning with buried secrets, hidden truths, and flames of passion long extinguished by tragedy and time. The film opens with Chung's character, village chief Tan, learning of his wife's sudden disappearance with his best friend Lai. He teams up with Sandy (MayJune Tan), Lai's daughter, to investigate the strange case, prompting her to tell him of the illicit affair her father (Berg Lee) pursued with Tan's wife (Emily Lim) thirty years ago. This passage, told in a captivating extended flashback, soon turns to Tan's side of the story, in which, as a young man (JY Teng), he and Lai began their own forbidden romance in the lush groves and on the shell-strewn beaches of Selangor - a romance even more surely doomed than that between Lai and Mrs. Tan thanks to the suffocating poison of social stigma and the fear of discovery that surrounds the two men even in their most intimate moments together, the impossibility of their situation setting in as a lingering pain they must learn to endure for the rest of their lives.

Chung Kok Keong in The Second Life of Thieves

Woo shaped nine months' worth of footage into several different versions before arriving at a final cut that finds Tan and Sandy sifting through the rubble of the past in a blue-tinted, sharply framed present, with certain cuts and compositions inscribed with the stinging sureness of a surgeon's blade or razor wire (in addition to his co-writing and -producing duties, Yeo's editing is in fine form here, as is the vivid cinematography by Kong Pahurak). Cast in a noticeably warmer color palette, the past sequences hinge upon Berg Lee's smoldering portrayal of the vain, brooding Lai, whose polished shoes and print-patterned shirts are as jarringly out of place in Woo's fish farms and riverside piers as his dreams of literary fame and shipwrecked fortune, which supplant his responsibilities to his wife (Hana Wong), infant daughter, and the family fishing and grocery businesses he stands to inherit as surely as his extramarital affairs. The tantalizing, pulpy allure the character of Lai and Lee's seductive presence bring to The Second Life of Thieves along with the steamy sheen of melodrama that adorns its tangled tales of love and despair make up some of Woo's most pleasurable flourishes, all of it spiked with the bittersweet notes of Wong Woan Foong's moving piano score. Elsewhere, from decade-spanning jump cuts and clever in-camera transitions to the elegant, poetic prose of its voiceover narration and dialogue, the film is layered with a clear appreciation for the various forms and powers of storytelling, reinforced by the abundance of separate side stories that surround the central thread. Early on, Tan is called in to investigate a worker's death after he was pressured by his unsympathetic boss to descend to the place where he was drowned by tidal waters, soon leading the village chief to another body, that of a Burmese migrant who fled religious violence in her home country only to discover conditions in Malaysia weren't that much better for her. Both cases join the pointed studies of minorities facing mistreatment and inequality that Woo and Yeo pursue in The Tiger Factory, Inhalation, and Yeo's second feature, Aqérat (We, the Dead) (2017). The same topic is addressed from an alternative angle in Sandy's account to Tan of her disappointing experiences as an expat in London that led to her getting deported back to Malaysia (Sandy also appears in a scene in Yeo's 2014 debut feature River of Exploding Durians, an inspired bit of complementary worldbuilding similar to the role Yeo's Inhalation plays in relation to Woo's The Tiger Factory). And every so often, the film cuts back to an outdoor stage where elderly folk and children watch two actors (Steve Yap and Joanna Chan Yein Sime) give impassioned performances, his character describing his insatiable bloodlust and the redemptive miracle of his child's birth while she, in the role of yet another migrant worker, tearfully begs the audience with her dying breaths to remember her story and pass it on to others. Among all these narrative threads, some patterns become clear: some people will always be susceptible to the temptations of greed and lust, tragedy and suffering are inevitable forces in the flow of life, and the acts of telling one's story and having it heard can at least provide, in place of proper justice, indescribable measures of relief to those who have suffered in loneliness and silence.

JY Teng and Berg Lee in The Second Life of Thieves

Other aspects of the film are altogether more cryptic. For example, what is one to make of the mysterious young woman named Fern (Heen Sasithorn) who appears to Sandy in a dream as her attentive caretaker who helps her recover from a paralyzing illness? Fern also happens to be the name of the central character played by Sajee Apiwong in Girl in Water, the 2011 short film Woo co-directed with Danish filmmaker Jeppe Rønde that is set in familiar locations: dense forests, simple huts, tranquil riverbanks, the sea. These are places where people stake their futures on hard work and dreams of future happiness, torn between traditions and regrets forged in the past and the burning fires of desire and ambition that may yet clear a fresh path to something more - that is, if they don't first bring about destruction and tragedy. Either way, the ever-present constants of sea, river, and sky bear witness to everything, the muddy banks and swaying leaves betraying nary a trace of history as scenes of heartache and bloodshed are enacted on their timeless stage settings of water and earth. These scenes make up the cornerstones of Woo Ming Jin's cinema, giving us an essential chronicle of rural Malaysia with the scope, vitality, and raw, universal emotions of timeless myth.

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•  Woman on Fire Looks for Water and The Tiger Factory are available on a region-free DVD set from Objectifs.

•  The Second Life of Thieves is available to watch online via FilmDoo.

•  The following films by Woo Ming Jin are available to watch online:

 It's Possible Your Heart Cannot Be Broken (2005)

Catching the Sea (2005)

Teacher's Pet/Days of the Turquoise Sky (2008) 

 Girl in Water (co-directed by Jeppe Rønde) (2011)