• _Beyond the Lights_; _Purple Butterfly_; _The Wasted Times_

    From septimus3 NA@21:1/5 to All on Sun Nov 1 19:17:56 2020
    I read that there is a Cleopetra remake in the works. Why isn't Gugu Mbatha-Raw cast in that role? I just saw her stunning turn as a pop
    diva in _Beyond the Lights_. Her character Noni is imperious, sphinx-like, capable of an intoxicating mix of arrogance, innocence, and vulgarity.
    The entire first half of the film seems to take place in a purple haze
    both regal and decadent. As the film goes on she becomes humanized --
    in no small part thanks to the policeman Kaz (Nate Parker) who saves
    her from jumping off the balcony. She takes out her purple hair
    extension, refuses to bare her skin on stage, and the violet mist
    (filter) also dissipates. Nate Parker is excellent as the principled
    cop who aspires to politics. The director is Gina Prince-Bythewood,
    widely praised for her _Love and Basketball_. That seems like a film I
    should watch soon.

    I have always liked Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays Jessica Chastain's
    anti-gun lobby sidekick Esme Manhcharian in _Miss Sloane_ and is the
    titular biracial period protagonist in _Belle_. She is the lone highlight
    in the weak scifi outing _Fast Color_, as a dropout with hidden superpowers
    in an apocalypic future. But in _Beyond the Lights_, and in the British
    TV film _Fallout_, she gets to show off her range beyond the archetypal well-brought-up good girl. Can't wait to see what her next project might be.

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    The purple haze is never lifted in Lou Ye's _Purple Butterfly_, a _La Ronde_ with orgies of revenge rather than love. In China, around 1933, Cynthia
    (Zhang Ziyi) joins the Resistance after her student-activist brother is
    killed by Japanese agents. She distances herself from Japanese attache
    Itami (Toru Nakamura, who looks Takuya Kimura's double in _2046_); he goes
    back to his homeland, only to return to Shanghai years later. During a mission at the train station, Cynthia accidentally kills Tang Yiling (Li Bingbing), Szeto (Li Yiu)'s girlfriend. Caught and tortured by the Japanese, he plots revenge on Itami. Cynthia is instructed by the leader of her cell
    Xie Ming to sleep with Itami again while the Resistance targets the Japanese ambassador. Suspicous of her but infatuated, Itami lets his ambassador boss
    be killed but ambushes Xie Ming's squad afterwards. This way, he hopes to
    get Cynthia to leave for Japan with him. At an opulent party for the rich
    and the turncoats, he makes the pitch. But Szeto shows up and the last
    three of our protaganists are riddled with bullets.

    This amazingly convoluted story is enacted with barely a word being spoken
    in the film. Lou Ye propels the narrative with crystalline clarity using
    only camera movement, noirish atmospheric lighting, and close-ups of the actors' faces. Zhang Ziyi is particularly superb in the conflicted role.
    I will always remember Lou Ye for his _Summer Palace_, a bold, poetic
    rendering of the Tiananmen massacre and its aftermath -- the definitive film for an entire generation. But I seem to have forgotten that he may have made the second greatest film to have come out of the People's Republic of China as well.

    (His latest, _Saturday Fiction_, seems to be a return to the spy genre. It stars the great Gong Li and Pascal Gregory.)

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    I rewatched _Purple Butterfly_ because of _The Wasted Times_, also starring Zhang Ziyi as someone whose life is upended by the Japanese invasion of China. I can't believe the good review this thing received. The film opens with well-dressed gangsters talking, staring at the camera, stone-faced, sometimes killing/executing one of their own. The director obviously learned from the wrong people and is drunk on these gangster power trips. This goes on for at least 30 minutes. Even Martin Scorsese manages to give his actresses some screen time and dialogue! Zhang Ziyi barely registers in the film. (Didn't this director learn on the first day of film school that cinema is about the grace, intelligence, and integrity of women?) After that there is rape, virtual slavery, more murder ... Every single Chinese drama about WWII I've seen is deeply ambiguous -- but this film borders on the ridiculous. The camera work consists of almost exclusively static long takes, like the
    director didn't get the memo that such rigid formalism is obsolete.

    These days, however, Chinese films about WWII seem to be straight-forward jingoistic propaganda. So maybe this isn't the worst film about the Japanese occupation anymore.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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