This was our first movie for the 2005 film festival, and a midnight movie at the Egyptian theater at that.
This movie is a collection of three shorter films by three directors:
- Dumplings, by Fruit Chan (Hong Kong)
- Cut, by Park Chan-Wook (South Korea)
- Box, by Takeshi Miike (Japan)
The three movies differ quite a bit from each other, both in theme and in style, so it's worth discussing each one separately.
Dumplings is an exploration of the idea of unattainable, perpetual youth. A former actress is aging, and is seeking some modern Fountain of Youth. She visits a woman in her home, who prepares some special dumplings for her. After about 3 minutes into the movie, you understand the ingredients of these dumplings are not normal. After about 5 more minutes, you realize that this dumpling chef is a purveyor of cannibalism.
The actress returns to the woman for ever-increasing dosages of dumplings. When the actress asks for the most potent dumpling the cook has, things get out of hand.
The interesting thing about Dumplings is that it creates shock and surprise out of relatively normal themes: the fear of aging and the length people run to subvert it. If you remove the tension created by the music, the camera work, and the actors, the topic at hand is not completely out of this world. Sure, you don't find many people eating their own kind in urban areas across the world, but they do some pretty wacky things to make themselves look younger, not all of which are any less strange than this.
Cut is pure, rising tension, on the lines of an movie with an overreaching premise that the main characters need to do or avoid. Cut involves a director of a horror film who, after returning to his home from shooting a scene involving a vampire, is knocked unconscious by an intruder. When he awakes, he finds he's in a movie set with his wife, a child, and a distraught film extra who's been in several of the director's films. The director is harnessed with an elastic band that limits how far he can move. His wife is tied up with piano wire stretching from an unseen ceiling, and her fingers are glued to a piano. The child is bound and gagged to a sofa. The film extra wishes to punish the director as a way of punishing his projected failures in life. He challenges the director to commit an act of evil to save his wife.
Most of the movie therefore hinges on the director's internal plight, his wife's physical plight, and the child's innocent involvement in this constructed game of the disturbed extra. Things end less predictably than you might think (with only a bit of foreshadowing), but the visual imagery of the torture, both physical and psychological, is fairly intense and carry throughout the film.
After these two somewhat gory films, I was expecting a similarly bloody offering from Miike, director of the very violent Audition. Not so; Box is an exploration into a personal, painful past. A recluse of a woman, who is an author, has perpetual nightmares about her death involving plastic, a man, snow, and a box. Between this line, you see unfold a personal history of this woman and her sister as carnival performers. The two performed a dance/acrobatic show involving contorting themselves into two boxes. They were mentored by a man who appeared to take preference in the sister over the main character. Then, an accident occurs.
Box is the most visually interesting and slow-to-reveal movies of the three. It's much more cerebral than the other two. Rather than trying to scare you, it tries to put you into the mind and body of the main author character. And it succeeds; at the end of the movie, you're not frightened. Rather, as the last scene fades to black and the closing credits appear, you realize you feel quite sad.
Overall rating: 7.5/10.0
Details
Runtime: 118m
Countries: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea
Languages: Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin
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