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A Director’s Choices in Two “Good” Movies (Part 1)
As a filmmaker, I’m always looking for visually interesting, unique, and above all efficient ways to present a scene. This leads me to take long walks around town, taking naps, consuming beer and espresso, and cooking — anything to create a “visual buzz”, which usually comes to me in the moments after exhaustion, grogginess, or an actual buzz go away.
I also watch a lot of movies, as many as I can get my hands on. This week that led me to Hsiao-hsien Hou. He’s internationally known, but his name isn’t Spielberg or Scorsese, Coen, Boyle or Tarantino. He’s from Asia, but he isn’t as popular as Wong Kar-Wai or John Woo. Here’s a picture of him in classic director pose.
There might not be a filmmaker alive whose style so polarizes critics and cinephiles on one hand and your average sophisticated moviegoer on the other. Many prominent film critics consider HHH to be the greatest living filmmaker. But audiences, for the most part, consider his films to be akin to Taiwanese water torture. HHH’s films — featuring oblique narratives, long takes, rambling dialogue — are bold, experimental, and innovative. They are also rather distant — literally: the viewer is, often through a series of long deep-focus shots, alienated from the characters and their lives. That’s not to say his films can’t be enjoyed. But enjoying them is a sensual and intellectual experience — not an emotional one. The average scene in an HHH film consists of a single shot of uninterrupted (beautiful) nothing. This can be exceptionally boring if you’re expecting the film to engage you. But that’s sort of the point. HHH’s films are designed to challenge the audience.
Let’s examine a scene from Goodbye South, Goodbye. Kao, a disillusioned small-time gangster, tries to go straight by investing in a restaurant. But when his gang “brother” Flat Head gets into money trouble with some corrupt politicians, Kao is pulled back in to save him.
We’ve seen this scene a million times: gangsters going after someone who owes them money. HHH decides to start his in a car wash.
That’s Kao on the left, looking ahead, thinking to himself, “How did I get into this mess?” He says nothing throughout the scene. Flat Head (not pictured) is his passenger, and while we watch the car getting washed and Kao’s reactions, Flat Head makes a phone call, trying to find a man named Orange. The shot doesn’t move or cut away, leaving us only to watch Kao as he is slowly, helplessly dragged back into the drama he’d hoped to escape.
The next couple shots are POV shots through the windshield as we hear Flat Head give directions to the location.
Then comes the meat of the sequence. HHH shoots this elaborate scene in just three shots.
First, the car pulls in. Flat Head jumps out and enters the store. Not finding Orange inside, he tells Kao that he’s going to make another call. As we watch him making that call, we hear Kao receiving a call on his phone. It’s one of Kao’s gangster friends, and Kao tells him their location.
At this point the camera changes angles, and we watch, uninterrupted, as Kao finishes his conversation, hangs up the phone, exits the car, walks to the store to say one line (“Hsi got things set up”) and return to the car.
Then the camera angle changes, one more time — to inside the store, where we see, as Flat Head talks on the phone, a car pulling in, gangsters filing out, one of them attacking Kao, and the others taking Flat Head.
The challenges in shooting a scene like this are twofold: staging the scene and execution. The staging has to be right for the film, and the execution (obviously) has to be right for the audience. Since one mistake from cast, crew or otherwise can ruin an entire take, most directors would opt to shoot this scene in multiple setups (and most producers would prefer they do it that way).
HHH isn’t doing it this way to show off his technical prowess. The long take shots give us a feeling of suspense and foreboding, a drama created naturally as we participate in the moment — seeing the movie the same way the director, the actors, and the cinematographer do. This takes a lot of coordination and confidence to pull off well. Goodbye South, Goodbye isn’t a good movie all the way through, but watching the film I got the sense that HHH was determined in his choices. In that scene he nailed it. The only other filmmaker I can think of who consistently shoots this way is Paul Thomas Anderson (there’s a long, but interesting take on his approach to a scene in There Will Be Blood here.)
Good Men, Good Women is another film by HHH, about a young actress sleepwalking through life as she plays the role of a 1940′s anti-Japanese guerilla. But I’ll be talking about that movie next week, and perhaps some other things.
Comments
Nice article. His style reminds me of Takeshi Kitano, only it sounds like HHH uses even less cuts/angles. Shame that the whole film isn’t a hit with you. I haven’t seen it, but it sounds kind of interesting. I think the shot in the car wash is perfect as long as you can see the character’s eyes and expression, really get into his head and see what he’s thinking.
Right on with the Kitano comment. I think I’ve only seen a couple of his films, but I thought of him when I watched this one. If you like Kitano then you should definitely check out HHH.
[...] from last week’s post on Hsiao-hsien [...]
“Many prominent film critics consider HHH to be the greatest living filmmaker.”
seriously?! I have serious doubts.
I agree with Novachord about the car wash scene. I wonder how much the audience is actually empathizing with his dilemma by this point though if the film is told in a such a removed, cold, calculating manner before that shot? I have a feeling his stye might hurt rather than help him in certain situations..
Just like Wong Kar Wai’s films. It’s hit or miss sometimes. Look at how bad his Blueberry nights movie was. Crikey.
HHH vs. Wong Kar-wai is an interesting comparison. They’re similar in their management of time, though to different ends. I kind of liked My Blueberry Nights. Maybe because I didn’t have to pay to watch it, but it’s a road movie, and there was a lot of pie in it. It’s the kind of movie that if it was on television, I’d watch.
The praise HHH enjoys from critics is pretty rare. Check out their response to his last film, The Flight of the Red Balloon. (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/flight_of_the_red_balloon/?critic=creamcrop) It’s not unanimously good, but you can see “one of the world’s greatest filmmakers” and “one of the great artists in the medium” among the mentions. Amy Taubin and J. Hoberman are great fans too — “Figure of the decade” and “the world’s greatest working narrative moviemaker”, they both said respectively, though that was back in 1999.
It’s hard to describe the response I felt watching Kao in the car wash scene. You are stuck with him in that scene, just as he is stuck dealing with Flat Head’s mess, but the feeling I had wasn’t empathy. It was indifference, then dread — realizing that Kao’s Sisyphean struggle would continue. There is a great lack of hope taken from HHH’s style.