Spank's LFF Diary, Thursday 10/10/2024
Spank's LFF Diary, Saturday 12/10/2024

Spank's LFF Diary, Friday 11/10/2024

Reviewed today: Abiding Nowhere, The Cats Of Gokogu Shrine, Sofa So Good.

Abiding Nowhere3.45pm: Abiding Nowhere [trailer]

I’ll tell you something that annoys me in movies – when they get someone to walk very slowly from one side of the frame to the other, and they call that a narrative. It’s a bit niche, I know, but it’s something I see quite a lot of whenever I dip my toe into the experimental end of the LFF programme. Bruno Dumont does it. Tsai Ming-liang does it even more.

But exceptions prove the rule. See my review of Beautiful 2012, a pan-Asian portmanteau film that included a short by Tsai Ming-liang called Walker, in which a monk walked very slowly around Hong Kong for twenty minutes. For me, the contrast of the slowness of the monk against the high speed of the city made it fascinating to watch. Twelve years later, I discover that Tsai has turned this basic concept into a ten film franchise, and Abiding Nowhere is the latest episode.

The unique factor in this one is the location, which is Washington DC. Apart from that, it’s just what you’d expect: Tsai sets up a static camera in front of various city landmarks, and a red robed monk (Lee Kang-sheng) walks in front of them at a speed of approximately 2-3 steps per minute. Interwoven with this are the small adventures of a younger, non-monk character (Anong Houngheuangsy ) in the same city: visiting the Smithsonian Asian art gallery (by pure coincidence, one of the key financers of this film), cooking noodles, and generally showing interest in the city in a way that the other guy doesn’t.

Watch a film like this for a while, and your mind wanders. Here are three directions mine wandered in. 1: The Belated Birthday Girl and I have been doing tai chi for the last eight years, and our teacher sets a regular exercise in which we need to move as slowly as possible: we’ve picked up some useful tips here. 2: This would be a terrific way to make your holiday videos more interesting, so I’m currently looking to see if anyone can sell me a red robe in The BBG’s size. 3: It’s surprising how little the people the monk encounters want to interact with him. At one point as he crosses the concourse of a railway station, you can see a security guard start to approach him and then quickly decide against it. The funniest sequence shows the monk on a downtown pavement causing an obstruction to other pedestrians, as the film suddenly turns into a Buddhist version of Jackass.

For me the money shot comes quite early on, as the monk passes in front of the Washington Monument, and we see a couple of tourists trying to take sneaky photos of him as he goes. But you know their photos will never be as magnificently framed as Tsai’s own shot, with the reflecting pool stretching out across the bottom of the screen and off into the distance, and the Monument dead centre. For all my complaints about Tsai's approach to storytelling, he's never shot a bad frame in his life, and this looks ravishing throughout: and the non-monk sequences act nicely as a contrast to the more meditative parts, leaving you genuinely wanting more after 80 minutes. I was expecting certain things from Abiding Nowhere, but not for it to be so incredibly engaging.

Sofa, So Good6.15pm: Sofa, So Good [trailer]

Cousins Jake (Joseph Jeffries) and Red (Yahel Pack) share a house in Dayton, Ohio with the absolute bare minimum of furniture, and come to the decision that they need a couch. They visit someone on the other side of town who can sell them one cheap, only to discover that their ride has let them down and they’ll have to carry it home themselves. It’s a journey fraught with peril. They already know about Sadist Lord (Desmond Gilmore) and his gang, who think that the human race has been made soft by its love of comfort, and use this as a reason to destroy every sofa they see. But they’re not the only problem.

I warmed to Sofa, So Good a bit more after its post-screening Q&A. It's basically a family home movie, which three brothers (Kyle, Eli and Cole Thiele) made with their mates and people from the Dayton music scene in fits and starts during the pandemic. It’s shot in black and white, which helps visually tie together scenes that were filmed several months apart, but also gives it a degree of cool that makes people compare it with the likes of Jim Jarmusch.

I just wish it was funnier. The tone and pacing are all over the place: bits of agreeably dumb comedy are interspersed with slow arty flourishes that almost run at the same speed as Abiding Nowhere. (There are definitely some scenes here where the two guys and the sofa enter screen left, and exit screen right some time later.) It gives the film as a whole a stop-start feel that makes it frustrating to watch. A good example of the problem here is one gag that’s positioned and set up like it should be a massive audience laugh, but thanks to clumsy editing and sound it plays here to complete silence. The result resembles nothing so much as a short film that’s been massively overextended to feature length, and when its actual length is a mere 69 minutes, that’s not good. There’s enough intriguing quirk on offer here to indicate the Thiele brothers are going to be worth looking out for in the future, but sadly not right now.

The Cats Of Gokogu Shrine8.30pm: The Cats Of Gokogu Shrine [trailer]

Here's a useful tip for those of you reading these reviews during the festival. It's true, nearly everything’s sold out at the moment: but if you go onto the LFF site at 10am each day, that's when they release any spare tickets they have for shows that day. That’s how we got tickets for this film at around 10.15 this morning, even though it sold out within minutes during day one of the member booking period. (I assume people just really like cats.)

You might balk at the initial title announcing this as Observational Film #10, but thankfully Kazuhiro Soda isn't that po-faced a director: his opening shot is of a cat picking a fight with his boom microphone (see illustration). Soda and his wife have an apartment in Ushimado, a Japanese town famous for being the home of a Shinto shrine which has been overrun with cats for years. Initially, it seems like there’s not much of a story to tell, other than that of the young people who look after the cats, and their attempts to keep the population down by getting them 'fixed'. But over time, we start hearing more from older people – the volunteers looking after the shrine itself, the fishermen who are a target for the cats, and the local residents ankle deep in cat shit – and they’re less keen on the situation.

In his intro, Soda explains the 'ten commandments' that he works to when he's making documentaries. They're what you'd expect from someone who's made a series of self-proclaimed Observational Films: they're all about shooting in the moment, doing no preparation beforehand, and not deciding what the theme of your film is until the editing stage. It's a very similar approach to that used by LFF regular Frederick Wiseman, except Soda does a bit more interaction with his subjects, chatting to them while he's behind the camera shooting their usual work. His theory is that it's a film about the community as well as the cats, and he's part of that community, so he should be in the film too.

You suspect that Soda's original idea was to focus largely on the cats, and feline fans will have plenty of fun with the scenes of them running around the shrine and scrapping with each other for fish. A film that was just that for two hours could be sort of unbearable, so the increasing focus on the humans around the cats is very welcome. Towards the end there's a long sequence of a council meeting (very Fred Wiseman) which hints at the biggest irony in this story: surgery is doing its part to reduce the cat population to zero in a few years, but Japan’s aging workforce and low birthrate is threatening to do the same thing to the human volunteers. It's a lot more than I was expecting from a cuddly cat movie, and makes me curious to see Observational Films #1-9.

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