I must confess that as soon as a festival ends, I lose roughtly 75% of my motivation to write about it, even though there are plenty of films I really enjoyed but didn’t have time to cover during the fest. But I don’t want these to get away without any mention, so here’s one last post of LA Film Festival capsule reviews. This pretty well finishes out everything I saw; I do plan to get a full review for Miranda July’s The Future up sometime this week, so I didn’t include it here. As you’ll notice by the ratings throughout the coverage, I really did enjoy almost everything I saw at the festival. My overall top films remain Drive, The Innkeepers, The Dynamiter and Winnie the Pooh, with The Guard, The Bad Intentions, Haunters, Kawasaki’s Rose, Familiar Ground, The Future and Love Crime right behind.
Love Crime
(4/5)
2010 France. Director: Alain Corneau. Starring: Ludivine Sagnier, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patrick Mille, Guillaume Marquet. 104 min.
Love Crime turned out to be the final film of French director Alain Corneau, who died shortly after completing it. He’s known for his crime thrillers, and this fits right into the mold. Kristin Scott Thomas is Christine, an ice-cold executive of an international firm who seems to be grooming up-and-coming exec Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier), partnering with her on various business deals and pitches to clients. They’re an excellent business team, closing multiple deals together with aplomb. They also have kind of a complicated personal relationship that Christine calls “love” – it certainly has a sexual aspect to it, though both women also date men…the same man, actually. Turns out Isabelle is potentially even better at her job than Christine, and soon they’re vying professionally and on cool terms personally. The crime plot that follows is twisty and will keep you guessing, even though you know exactly what happened – it’s Hitchcockian, really, in its ability to tell you who did it up front and still keep suspense very high. Both actresses are great; my only real complaint is that it’s shot rather flat and uninterestingly. Once the plot really got going it wasn’t an issue, but early on when relationships were still being set up, the bland photography and composition was a little distracting. Releasing in the US on September 2, from Sundance Selects.
The Yellow Sea
(3.5/5)
2010 South Korea. Writer/Director: Hong-jin Na. Starring: Yun-seok Kim, Jung-woo Ha, Seong-ha Cho, Chul-min Lee. 157 min.
The Yellow Sea opens by explaining Yanbian, an area within China that has a large number of displaced Koreans, and the plight of Ku-Nam, a Chinese-Korean man whose mixed heritage marginalizes him with both Chinese and Koreans. Facing financial trouble and worrying about his wife, who was supposed to send money back from her job in South Korea and has not, Ku-Nam accepts a job from the local crime boss to carry out an assassination over in South Korea, which requires a dangerous and illegal crossing over the Yellow Sea. But predictably, stuff goes wrong, and he ends up being chased by the police, the mob leaders (who he thinks ordered the hit but apparently did not and are upset it happened), and the middleman who smuggled him across the Sea. Then all these groups of people get into it with each other. I honestly had to look up a bit of the plot to recount it here, because I was zoning in and out a bit during the exposition and setup (festival tiredness, not the film’s fault). But once the film gets going, it’s pretty incredible, and I certainly didn’t zone out during any of the adrenaline-pumping, almost non-stop chases and knife fights (no guns) till the breathless end. The most amazing thing is the chases (both on-foot and car) are shot really close and edited quickly, but somehow they managed not to be incoherent the way most American action scenes are – I felt the visceral rush of Ku-Nam narrowly missing being hit or caught, or cars slamming into each other behind him, but I never felt disoriented. I want to watch it again just to try to analyze how they achieved that effect. No US distribution.
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