Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/19/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, September 19, 2020

Revenge (Yermek Shinarbayev, 1989)

Cast: Aleksandr Pan, Valentina Te, Kasim Zhakibayev, Lyubov Germanova, Oleg Li, Juozas Budraitis, Zinaida Em, Maksim Munzuk, Yerik Zholzhaksynov, Nikolai Tacheyev. Screenplay: Anatoli Kim, based on his novel. Cinematography: Sergei Kosmanev. Production design: Yelena Yelitseyeva. Film editing: Polina Shtain. Music: Vladislav Shut.

Rhapsodic, enigmatic, brutal, poetic, probing, obscure ... I could go on assembling adjectives to describe Yermek Shinarbayev's Revenge. It may just suffice to say that it was a film made in Kazakhstan as the Soviet Union was crumbling around it, and that it's an attempt to bridge civilizations: The dialogue is in Russian, while the story deals with Koreans. The director is Kazakh, the screenwriter a Russian citizen with Korean ancestry. The story deals with the attempt to avenge the murder of a little girl by her half-crazed teacher, and it spans several decades in the 20th century -- not to mention that it's preceded by a prologue set in 17th-century Korea. But it's not as head-spinning as that sounds: Though there are mysterious, even magical characters involved in its plot, that plot is relatively traditional, a matter of crime and retribution. Those versed in the history of the Korean diaspora into Russia may have an edge on those of us who aren't, but the impact of the story, or perhaps stories -- the film is divided into seven "tales" plus the prologue -- is strong even if you let the eccentricity of the way they're told just wash over you.