The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival starts tonight and runs through March 21, 2010 at various Bay Area locations (See Jonathan Kiefer’s overview). When faced with the massive amount of films to choose from, including a huge range of genres, from Animation to Documentary, Family-friendly to Sci Fi, I decided to take a close look at four of the festival’s 29 narrative features.
Writer-director Kit Hui’s feature debut, Fog, is a fine, subdued film about a man who has lost his memory, and therefore his past and identity. The best thing about the movie is that it’s not a remake of Memento, nor is its approach akin to a melodramatic soap opera. Instead, there’s a refreshing amount of disorientation that we share with the main character, Wai, and a surprising lack of information as to what caused his memory to disappear. The emphasis, rather, is on the protagonist’s mental fuzziness: what was Wai like before, and what will he become now that he’s been given a clean slate? There are moving passages between Wai and people from his past. The pace, at times, halts and stalls, but you quickly figure out that this is Wai’s pace in the world, as he slowly rebuilds his consciousness, one moment at a time.
Make Yourself at Home
Make Yourself at Home is set in a gorgeous suburb of upstate New York. The basic plot sounds promising: Sookhy, a Korean woman moves to the U.S. for an arranged marriage with a Korean American lawyer. How will she adjust to her new life and culture, and a demanding mother-in-law? Sounds like an interesting premise, yes? Unfortunately, this film, whose alternate title is Fetish, suffers from an undercooked sense of menace that reads as a sullen and unintended pretentiousness. Uprooted and entirely misplaced in her new home and country, Sookhy suddenly has no morals or conscience to guide her behavior. There is a back story about her ancestry that has something to do with shamanism, but this explanation detracts even further from her inability to make practical decisions. Instead, she becomes enmeshed with an overprivileged couple, neighbors from up the street who spend endless hours undressed in their swimming pool, which is filled with as much ennui as chlorinated water. The director clearly believed that the beauty of the lead actress, Song Hye-Kyo, would carry this aimless, plodding film. It doesn’t.
The People I’ve Slept With