62nd LONDON FILM FESTIVAL (10th-21st October 2018) DAY 1
Every day (from October 10th to October 21st) I will be selecting the London Film Festival choices you have a chance to get tickets for and the movies you are unlikely to see in London very soon unless you go to see them at the Festival. Here is the LFF's main website for the general information you need. Don't worry if some of the recommended films are sold out by the time you read this as there are always some tickets on offer which go on sale 30 minutes before each screening. Here is all the information you need about the best way to get tickets.
'Asako I & II' also screens at BFI Southbank on October 11th. Full details here.
Mubi review:
A Shigeo GochÅ photography exhibit titled “Self and Others” offers the starting point for a brief romance between Asako (Erika Karata) and Baku Torii (Masahiro Higashide) in her hometown of Osaka, before he disappears without a trace; two years later, Asako meets a sake salesman, Ryohei, who looks exactly like Baku. As in his sprawling, but finely tuned Happy Hour, Hamaguchi demonstrates a pop-inflected sensibility, and an attention to relationships and narrative developments that wouldn’t be out of place in an urban TV melodrama, which may account for why Asako I & II feels so thrillingly open. Like Karata’s unexpected performance, the film is opaque in ways both confounding and thrilling, as if internalizing one character’s advice not to over-interpret. Equally adept with subtle, naturalistic sketches (a visit to a seafood festival in a far-flung town) and well-timed bursts of emotion (an offered hand and a rising auto-tuned anthem to stop your heart), Hamaguchi observes as Asako navigates her relationships across an elliptical seven or so years. “Asako, you haven't changed at all,” a friend tells her, a statement that renders the notion of constancy in a threatening light. (In that regard, the film obliquely recalls Kim Ki-duk’s more scabrously-toned, high-concept Time.) A cutting betrayal and jarring reversal occasion a ravishing image: of Asako’s visage flashing in and out of inky blackness to melancholy, electric shades of blue. Innocence and experience, constancy and change are the twin poles of every relationship: Will this person be there when I wake up? Will they be the same? The resounding final shot—a conclusion rooted in a re-marriage template—looks squarely into an uncertain future.
Lawrence Garcia
Here (and above) is an extract.
No comments:
Post a Comment