Movies into Film

Face to Face: A Flower Horn fish and Berg Lee (Photo: Greenlight Pictures)

Originally published in the May 26, 2007 issue of Northwest Asian Weekly.

THE ELEPHANT AND THE SEA

Gorgeously shot in Kuala Selangor on Malaysia’s west coast, this contemplative drama from writer-director Woo Ming Jin juxtaposes the serene beauty of lush green forests (luxuriantly heavy with humidity) against the dire poverty of the surrounding village. It’s a place where the river meets the sea, and the water imagery reaches a near-intoxicating potency, especially in glimpses of a ruined pier whose remains suggest a shipwreck.

Berg Lee is superb as Ding. A tall and angelically impassive youth with a slight frame, he resembles a manga action figure in some shots, his vaguely mullet-ish feathery hair coating his neck like down. Yet he’s essentially powerless, drifting through dead-end jobs, hocking every item he can find to sustain existence.

Woo utilizes sound design instead of music: The dripping of a faucet, the shuffle of shoes on cement, and the rushing roar of a waterfall are as expressive as the film’s off-kilter dialogue. When a “lottery fish” catches Ding’s eye in an aquarium store, the salesgirl swoons, “You will either see the numbers on his body, or they will come to you in a dream.” That dream is the movie itself. – NPT

Photo by Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of Mongrel Media

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky tours Asian dumping grounds that teem with Western waste: He sifts through the rubble of dismantled computers shipped East for low-paid laborers to recycle and canvases landscapes ruined by factory pollution in particularly picturesque ways. Burtynsky also observes displaced residents along the Yangtze River who’ve been “paid per brick to take their cities apart,” just before rising waters from Three Gorges Dam flood the remains. There’s a fleeting shot of a little boy, perhaps aged 6; the look of fear, incomprehension, and devastation in his eyes is unmistakable. It isn’t merely a home that’s being destroyed, which would be bad enough, it’s an entire childhood, an entire world.

While such footage has historical value, Burtynsky and director Jennifer Baichwal make a critical error in refusing to take a moral stance on the atrocities they record. The photographer’s declared neutrality might seem genuine if he were giving his art away for free, yet an unframed Burtynsky can fetch as high as $16,000, according to the artist’s representative at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco. Baichwal and her subject think it’s enough merely to “present” beautified suffering for high-end consumers. I say that neither can differentiate between reportage and exhibitionism. – NPT

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