Michael Wells VS The NYAFF Round Four! Dasepo Naughty Girls! The Show Must Go On! Trouble Makers! I'm A Cyborg But That's Okay!

But for the most part, this is like an ‘80s-era John Hughes movie with an overlay of musical camp and a moderate… well, naughtiness that wouldn’t raise many eyebrows in a TV network standards department today. The themes and motifs are much the same as in many other teen movies: romance across class boundaries; embarassing parents and embarassing children; the in crowd and the out crowd; nostalgia for a vanishing childhood; demon-possessed principals. Its basic message when all is said and done is the old “be yourself,” although it also does promote the community value of not being a virgin. I find it impossible to give it any particularly strong praise, and equally impossible to dislike it.

The followup was much more substantial: “The Show Must Go On” (South Korea, 2007), with director Han Jae-rim in attendance for an audience Q&A. A recitation of the premise risks eye-rolling mutterings about “The Sopranos”: a low-key comedy-drama about a stolid, middle-class, mid-level gangster boss dealing with marital, parental, financial and career problems and an increasing discomfort with his chosen profession and its effect on his family. But if the cinema can produce a zillion cool, indestructible gangsters, can’t it have room for a few more who are ordinary schmos?

Especially when the schmo in question is played by unlikely superstar Song Kang-ho, a rumpled, roundfaced guy who could invest a reading of the McDonald’s Value Meal menu with hangdog charm and half-concealed pathos. Han says he created the story with Song in mind, and it shows in every frame the actor is in, which is almost all of them. He’s a perfect vehicle for the movie’s wry, self-deprecating humor and understated sorrow, but his physicality is also convincing in the couple of really frightening scenes of violence and danger that erupt through the quotidian surface.

This might be one of the most effectively deromanticized versions ever of mob life, a subject notoriously hard not to glamourize. Han, though, sees the movie as a comment on – or questioning of – the father-husband role in modern Korea and the attendant crushing pressures of being a provider and authority figure. But he doesn’t have to belabor the point, as it emerges naturally from an entertaining and moving film – and one so absorbing I had to stop myself from talking to the screen and urging the characters to make the right decisions at crucial points. “The Show Must Go On” stands with Patrick Tam’s “After This Our Exile” – another story of compromised fatherhood - among the two best entries I’ve seen at the NYAFF this year.

I also wanted to stand up and yell advice at the characters at certain points in Cao Baoping’s “Trouble Makers” (China, 2006), but it was a less gratifying experience in this case. It’s a fine piece of work for a while, a casually rude, seriocomic portrait of community and corruption with a vivid and pungent sense of contemporary Chinese village life, including more passionate and varied use of the epithet “dog fucker” than I’m likely to hear for quite a while. Wu Gang is uncomfortably real in the would-be-heroic role of the local Party Secretary whose sniveling, bowing and scraping style hides a side that’s craftier and more daring, but maybe not enough to pull off his current ambition: bringing down the mayor and his three brothers who lord it over the village as, essentially, gangsters with official positions.

When Wu and his collaborators launch their dubious plan, the movie starts spinning its wheels as things go nowhere fast. This is no doubt intentional, at least in part – Cao isn’t making a feel-good underdog story, but a sardonic parable about the human foibles that allow corruption and tyranny to continue even when “everyone knows” about it. But he requires his characters to behave so stupidly and run in circles so pointlessly in order to drive his point home that I stopped chuckling and started squirming well before the end. Oh, yeah, the end – yet another (apparently, to my eyes) government-mandated cop-out that seriously compromises what came before, although Cao does what he must with some degree of grace when the time comes.

Now, for a feel-good movie, we have to turn to Park Chan-wook. Really.

This has apparently horrified a substantial portion of the fans the director made over the last few years with his scaldingly brutal and bleak “Revenge Trilogy” of baroque thrillers. But judging from the reactions of sell-out crowds to “I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK” (South Korea, 2006), I may be talking about this fest’s Audience Award winner. As if to defiantly advertise his versatility, Park has made a pastel-hued romantic comedy - albeit one set in a mental institution and featuring a few vivid hallucinations of violence and a plot point involving the attempt to set off a nuclear explosion.

I can see why some people have reacted so strongly against its story of a self-destructive young woman, committed after coming to believe that she is part robot and can communicate with all manner of electrical devices, and her tentative love with an only relatively less disturbed young man (played energetically by Korean pop music superstar Rain). Park’s vision of the profoundly mentally ill as an endless source of adorable whackiness can be awfully uncomfortable and arguably condescending - although on reflection I suppose it’s no more potentially offensive than the more common onscreen portrayal of the mentally ill as dangerously violent man-beasts or criminal geniuses. And his hyperactively showoffy filmmaking probably only further alienates those already inclined against the story.

But, wow, does he have a lot to show off. The director’s orchestration of colors, editing rhythms, the movement of the camera and the performers, is comparable to Busby Berkeley, the ‘30s father of the Hollywood musical, at his peak. It’s almost worth seeing the movie just for the most exhilarating opening credits sequence in years. The elaborate shots with layered, contrasting and complementing movements of actors in the foreground and background will inspire plenty of use of the freeze-frame, rewind and slo-mo buttons when the DVD is out. It never quite stopped nagging me that he uses this staggering skill here in the service of twee hypercuteness, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy much of it. And I’d never lie to you.

By Michael Wells