Quotes of the Day

This week and next, thousands of movie lovers are flocking to their midsummer mecca on New York City’s Lower East Side. The New York Asian Film Festival, berthed at Anthology Film Archives, is unspooling 27 feature films (and two shorts) from Japan, India, Korea, Thailand and Malaysia. The partisan audiences may locate no masterpieces there, but they will be reminded that attending foreign films need not be a solemn duty. It can be an enthralling pleasure.

Foreign films. Remember them? Graybeards dissolve in a puddle of fond memories as they recall the days, a few decades back, when movies in French, Swedish, Japanese, Italian and a half-dozen other languages set the medium’s standard for excellence. To be cinematically literate — "cinemate," to borrow a term Time proposed in a 1963 cover story heralding the first New York Film Festival — one had to be able to discuss the hidden narrative meanings and formal innovations of pictures like The Seventh Seal and Last Year at Marienbad. Foreign films had snob appeal and sex appeal. Or they did until American movies, over a few years in the 60s, discovered daring. Audiences were titillated and relieved. They could still feel superior but no longer had to read subtitles.

In the last 15 or 20 years, the few foreign-language films that have made any noise at the U.S. box office were not daring at all. Cinema Paradiso, Like Water for Chocolate, The Postman and their ilk gave viewers the warm fuzzies. They owed more to traditional Hollywood romantic dramas than to the trailblazing experiments of Bergman, Godard and Antonioni. As for the foreign films that critics championed, these tended to be minimalist to the point of inertia: static-camera portraits of glum people doing not very much at all.

Only in East Asia, far from the multiplexes and tastemakers, was there a truly vigorous popular cinema. Hong Kong directors, actors and stunt coordinators were showing how movies could be both wildly vigorous and eye-poppingly artful. The admirers of these films had to search out their treasures in specialty video stores and, for the pure experience, in ratty theaters dotting the Chinatowns of major cities. But that was part of the Hong Kong thrill. Seeing an in-his-prime Jackie Chan action film on Canal Street — where the locals chatted and noshed through the movie, and you always propped your feet on the seat in front of you, to keep the rats from breaking your concentration on the martial marvels on the screen — had the furtive kick of buying reefers from a zoot-suited dude on 125th Street.

Among these fanciers were the young men who would form the collective known as Subway Cinema. Back around the turn of the millennium, they were just five guys with a dream. They loved Hong Kong action movies and wanted to see more, and share them, especially as the theaters that showed them were shuttering. The last Chinatown movie house in Manhattan, the Music Palace Theatre, went out of business in June 2000. Not only did the U.S. venues for Hong Kong cinema close down; so, pretty much, did Hong Kong cinema. Fewer movies are made in the Special Administration Region, certainly far fewer good ones.

So, like David Chute and other sophisticated fanciers of Hong Kong films, the collective migrated from one old colony of the British Empire to another: India, which produces upwards of a thousand movies a year, and which has a vibrant movie vocabulary every bit exotic as, if less transgressive than, Hong Kong’s. They foraged through other Asian film industries, not as colonizers but explorers, and found colorful native trinkets in countries that rarely saw their films released in stateside theaters. The result of their treks was what they now call the New York Asian Film Festival, or NYAFF — which sounds like an Edward G. Robinson negative but is still more respectable than the festival’s original name: Asian Films Are Go!, or AFAG.

The signature films of Subway’s early festivals were spectacularly lurid: Herman Yau’sThe Untold Story from Hong Kong, Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q from Japan. This was the midnight-movie aesthetic run amok, a hazing at the coolest frat house on campus. Inevitably, as they grew older and threw their net wider, the Subway programmers acquired a more mature taste. Should I say, "I’m sorry to say"? Maybe. I miss the regularity of the shock value in their early selections. The last few Asian Film Festivals have been more like real film festivals, with selections that have won best-picture prizes in their home countries, or are meant to stoke an audience’s warmer emotions. Nice movies, which U.S. filmgoers already have enough of, thanks.

Still and all, the Subway Cinema lads haven’t lost their eyes. Even their conventional choices display pinwheeling formal expertise. Simply by being shown on a New York movie screen, these films underline the cinematic stodginess of most American films. Compared to a movie like the Korean Duelist or the Japanese Cromartie High School, the Hollywood product looks pretty paltry.

Actually, my favorite films at this year’s NYAFF were in a sidebar event devoted to the career of Bollywood director-producer Ram Gopal Verma, culminating in the world premiere of his new movie, Shiva. Those films deserve a column of their own, which, Bollywood fans, I’ll get to next month.

I hope you can get to Anthology to soak up the atmosphere of the NYAFF. And if not, go to Subway’s website to savor the blurb-writing skills of Grady Hendrix, the savviest young writer on film I know, east or west. One little pity: there’s not a Hong Kong film in this year’s bundle. But there are plenty worth considering. Let’s check out a few of them.

Cromartie High School, the first of five Japanese NYAFF movies I saw, is director Yudai Yamaguchi’s take on a teen delinquent genre that goes back at least to the 1955 Blackboard Jungle. The setting: a high school with such a rotten history that it has been destroyed (and rebuilt) six times. Seven may be the charm, since one of the students is a decent kid: our hero, Kamiyama (dishy Takamasa Suga). In the first reel, he writes a letter home: "Oh, mom I’m a bit confused. Everyone looks like a yakuza." That’s not quite fair to the rain-gutter coalition on view at CHS. There’s gorilla sitting at one classroom desk, and a prancing tough guy called the Queen (Freddie Mercury with Toshiro Mifune’s menace), and a cigarette-puffing robot in a pink shirt. The entire group sends up fumes like an Iraqi oil factory, and when Kamiyama presses them to renounce smoking, they protest: "Our lips would be lonely… And our fingers too." You’ll find no girls in Cromartie, but plenty of aliens. In a way, the movie is a throwback to the hip, infantile tastes of Subway’s youthful days. Bless it, and them.

Linda, Linda, Linda is another high-school drama, 180 degrees from Cromartie. Similar to, but not nearly so engaging as, the Disney TV-movie hit High School Musical, this one is an earnest, virtually all-girl story about a quartet who hope to win their year-end talent competition with a rendition of the Blue Hearts’ 80s hit song that is this movie’s title. The proceedings, under Nobuhiro Yamashita’s sluggish direction, are predictable and hardly worth noting — except for that song, simple and simply irresistible, which neither meditation nor surgery has been able to remove from my head since I saw the movie last year at the Toronto Film Festival. Everybody: "Linda, Linda! Linda Linda Lin-da-ah-ah!"

Always, directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is the prize-winner; it copped the Best Picture award at last year’s Japanese version of the Oscars. It’s set in Tokyo in the 1930s, and for a while made me nostalgic for a period I didn’t live through in a country I’ve never visited. But as 2hrs.13mins. of clichés piled up — the adorable orphan, the Santa Claus, the self-doubting artist, the tearful partings and tearier reunions — I decided I was better off where I was.

Funky Forest — The First Contact is an example of that bizarre, and to me impenetrable, oxymoron: Japanese comedy. Watching this two-and-a-half-hour selection of sketches from a kids’ TV show, I felt like a scientist monitoring extraterrestrial signals. What do they mean to the people they’re made for? And is anyone, anywhere, laughing? I think I understand the premise of the sketch about the high-school girl at a tennis lesson who gets a bloodsucker stuck to her arm. It gradually emerges, and we see it’s a small homunculus named Yamada (as in "Ya mada’s so ugly, she looks like a bloodsucker"). But the bit about a girl asked by a guy in a yellow fur suit to pull on his umbilical cord… on that one I was with the girl, who says, "Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest." The prankster and his two cohorts shrugs off her bafflement by explaining, "Some days people laugh, some days they don’t. Today’s skit was adult-oriented."

Shinobi is a Romeo-and-Juliet martial-arts film, much influenced by the Chinese hits Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. But the emphasis here is on spooky visual effects. One black-clad warrior has inky tentacles slithering out of his long sleeves, with stringy hair to match. Magic makes the forest’s leaves swarm like hornets around an adversary. Worms swarm in the blood of a chest wound. Our heroine cries tears of blood, and in one battle our hero kills 26 ninjas, the carnage backlit by a CGIgantic moon. I saw the movie without subtitles, but that didn’t seem to matter. Sorcery knows no language.

Art of the Devil 2, from Thailand, is a horror movie so gruesome that two of the three DVD machines I tried to play it on rejected it; they simply refused to host this splatter-fest of mutilation. A fisherman catches a strange creature and gets a hook under his skin. Seeking medical help from a voodoo mistress, he screams in agony as fish hooks emerge from his body: his hands, chest, eyes! More elaborate mayhem ensues, involving a chic-looking teacher and her careless students. (What Cromartie High School does for boys, and Linda, Linda, Linda for girls, this one does, in suppurating spades, for teachers.) I confess I didn’t see it all of Devil 2 — not from squeamishness, but because the disk provided to me had the name of the production company printed in large letters across the image.

Gangster, from Malaysian director Badi Hj. Azmi, is a standard exercise in macho auto-eroticism, but with extra horsepower. Malaysian punks race their souped-up cars on the public highways of the country’s capital — sort of The Fast and the Kuala Lumpurious. But it also interweaves three stories, making it a Crash with lots more fender-benders, and all in 79 zippy minutes. There’s also a scene in which a kidnapper rapes a sweet Muslim wife while her child’s in the room. No fatwas, please.

Magicians, from South Korea’s Song Il-gon, is a 95-min. film, shifting from past to present, interior to outdoors, and achieved in one continuous take. (Or did I spot a cheating black spot at 48 minutes?) The story is about love, male bonding, regret and pop music, but the camera stunt is the main reason to stick around. And if you want a feature-length movie done in one exhilaratingly elaborate take, get Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark.

Duelist, also known as Detective, is South Korean director Lee Myung-se’s first film since his international hit Nowhere to Hide. It was an expensive flop at home, and I think I can see why. But it has a ravishing physical beauty well worth attending to.

The movie is about Namsoon (Ha Ji-won), a woman detective on the tail of a preternatural rogue whom she falls in a kind of love with but is destined to battle at the end. This sweet-faced sleuth both uses her cuteness and fights against it. Facing down one tough guy, she poses the rhetorical question: "Want a taste of a bitch who’s really lost her mind?" Surrounded by a cast of overactors (who provide way too much burly comic relief for my taste), Namsoon anchors a movie that straddles genres. Think of a Raymond Chandler yarn reimagined by Zhang Yimou and shot by — well, like nobody but Lee.

A filmmaker can do two cool things with genre conventions: honor them or subvert them. He can praise or bury them. Duelist tries both. It is simultaneously an evocation and an interment of the martial arts film. Lee’s cunning management of crowds and his spectacular use of camera and setting lend to this live-action film the aesthetics of anime. At times the film stops in wonder at its own devices. Which is a shame, since Duelist is so smart and pretty, it doesn’t to tell us how much it admires itself. The movie’s preening is demeaning.

But to say that is to sell the film short. Duelist’s hyper-romantic impulses and lush symphonic music, plus the backlighting, the stately swordplay, the fat snowflakes, not to mention more slo-mo shots than in a Wong Kar-wai retrospective — all these effects heroicize the enterprise, making it something to gaze upon but not enter into. Indeed, one doesn’t watch Duelist so much as window-shop for fabulous cinematic fashions. Its art direction and lovely mannequins take film style to the outré limits.

Not every movie has to lure viewers into the child’s make-believe of storytelling; it can be an object apart from, and above, the typical narrative-movie experience. That is one of the lessons of an exemplary showcase like the NYAFF. So three, four, five cheers for a festival that celebrates the foreignness — the bizarre, excessive, utterly other-ness — of foreign films.

• RICHARD CORLISS
• The fifth New York Asian Film Festival celebrates cinematic excess from Tokyo to Bangkok and beyond