Sunday, January 30, 2011

A Master class in Minimalism



Taphephobia (from Greek taphos, meaning grave; and phobos, meaning fear) is the medical term for the fear of being buried alive. Those of us who have read the master of macabre Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado or the self-explanatory The Premature Burial would have had a second-hand experience of this terrifying situation. But in Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ single-character, single-setting, tour de force, Buried (2010), for Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), the prospect of being buried alive is not a crooked literary concept, but almost a cruel certainty.

One day in October 2006, Paul wakes up in complete darkness. All he could remember was that he, alongside his other truck-driver friends—all of who work for Crestin, Roland, and Thomas (CRT), an American company—were ambushed while delivering kitchen supplies. While Paul was fortunate enough to escape the gunfire—to which most of his companions succumbed to—after he regains consciousness, he finds his current situation anything but lucky.


Paul finds himself gagged and bound inside a wooden coffin, just large enough to accommodate enough oxygen to keep him alive, with absolutely no clue of who put him there, and why—a predicament reminiscent of Oh Dae-su in Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece Oldboy.  While Dae-su had been imprisoned by unknown assailants in a room for 15-long years with only a television as his link to the outside world, Conroy finds that his kidnappers had left him behind a Blackberry, a Zippo, a pen, a flask, his medicines, a torch, his wallet (emptied), and a satchel.

After he realises that his cries for help are falling into deaf ears, Paul, with the help of his Blackberry, tries to figure out a way to wriggle out of his nightmarish situation. As any American would do in a similar situation, his first call is to 911. But since he is in a different country, he finds little help from that source. So, he calls the FBI next. And thus begins his earnest quest to get outside help, any help.

In the meantime, someone calls him and tells him in broken English that he has till 9pm to arrange for $5 million as ransom. With the phone’s battery, and the oxygen inside the coffin running out as fast as his own life, the stakes just got higher for Paul. After all, he is only a truck driver. Even though he had, somehow, conveyed his ‘situation’ to the US Department of State, and to his own company, what were the chances they would find him, when he, himself, has not even the foggiest idea of where exactly in Iraq he has been buried underground?

An individual trapped in an apparent hopeless situation is an age-old trope in cinema. However, what elevates Buried from others belonging to the same genre is the treatment. For the entire 95-minutes’ running time, the camera does not emerge, even for a second, on to the surface, thereby making us, the viewer, very much a part of Paul’s claustrophobic existence. Reminiscent of Kubrick’s experimentation with only natural light in Barry Lyndon (1975), the only source of light in the film are the ones that Paul uses—a blue mobile screen, the yellow flame of the Zippo and the torch, and the eerie green of glow torches.

Just like the letterings of the opening credits that break apart and bubble up, and the geometric lines that obstinately move down to form the first letters of the various crew members, Paul’s efforts at emerging out of the wooden casket seem to be bogged down by forces way beyond his control.

Like any other human being in his place, Paul undergoes an entire gamut of expressions—fear, anger, panic, frustration, hope, and despair. As an individual who has a history of anxiety attacks, Paul knows that his biggest ally and his biggest enemy are one and the same—himself. He gathers his wits, just when things appear to be hopeless, and tries to make the best of the meagre resources at his disposal.

Let’s face it, we have seen drivers emerging out of similar no-way-out scenarios unscathed (here’s looking at you, Jason Statham), but Paul is no superhero (ironically, though in his next film Ryan Reynolds will play a superhero, the Green Lantern). So, as he waits for the head of the Hostage Working Group (HWG) in Iraq to locate him by tracking his cell connection, he takes resort to his survival instinct to stay alive till the rescuers arrive. But, things are about to get worse for Paul.

Cortés’, who alongside directing, has also edited this edge-of-the-seat thriller, while staying true to a Hollywood-set template has steered clear of clichés. For instance, there are no villains of the piece. The film does not take sides. We learn from the head of the HWG that in a country torn apart by war, kidnapping is the ‘only functioning business’. (There is a wonderful tête-à-tête between the captive and the captor, when the latter exclaims: ‘You terrified? So, I am a terrorist?’)

What makes Paul’s experience equally harrowing for us, the viewer, is the fact that just like him, we only get to hear the people he speaks with over the phone. Just like him, we have to take their words at face value. Just like him, we do not get to see what the FBI or the HWG are doing to get Paul out.

A solo character, single-setting film is a unique challenge. No wonder then, such films have been few and far between—the few examples include Daniel Bourla’s astonishing The Noah (1975), Robert Altman’s seminal Secret Honor (1984), the recent Sam Rockwell starrer Moon (2009), and this year’s Oscar-nominated 127 hours by Danny Boyle.

What makes Buried by the 37-year old Cortés out-of-the-box is that he decided to film it in-the-box—in its entirety.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

A Mother, Murder, and Memories

In a pivotal moment in Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong’s recent film, the superb Madeo (2009), a police officer, while referring to the forensic team collecting evidence at a murder scene, tells his colleague “Cops these days…CSI and all that TV!”

While serials like the aforementioned CSI and its various spin-offs focus on the science behind solving terrible crimes, it is films like Madeo (Mother) that, in contrast, have at their heart the dynamics of the individuals involved therein—the victim, the accused, and their friends and family.

The eponymous Mother (she is not mentioned by her name throughout the film’s 128-minute duration), played impeccably by Hye-ja Kim, lives a forlorn life in a town in the outskirts of Seoul with her intellectually challenged son Yoon Do-joon. She tries to make both ends meet by selling herbs and medicines and by providing acupuncture sessions to the neighbours, though she does not have a valid licence to ply that particular trade.

Mother treats Do-joon as a child, helping him eat, asking him to tuck in his shirt, and advising him not to mix with his friend Jin-tae, who she considers as ‘bad seed’. Knowing that they have ‘only got each other’, she shares an exceptionally strong bond with her son, who besides lacking in intellectual capacity also has problems remembering things. A harmless and gullible guy, who is as innocent of the nitty-gritty of life as he is of the man-woman equation, the only time Do-joon reacts violently is when anyone calls him a ‘retard’.

The occasional visit to the neighbourhood police station—where the guards and the higher officials are all known to Mother from their childhood—when her son gets involved in minor scuffles, takes a turn for the worst when Do-joon is taken into custody by officer Je-mun as the prime suspect in the murder of a young girl Moon Ah-jung. Knowing fully well that her son cannot ‘even harm a water-bug’, Mother starts running from pillar to post—trying to bribe Je-mun with camphor ginseng (‘which helped you when you were a child’) and getting hold of the most well-known public defender of the area, the karaoke-loving Gong Suk-ho, to prove her son’s innocence. But when she finds herself shunned by the police, who have an incriminating piece of evidence at their disposal that links Do-joon directly to the crime; and betrayed by the lawyer, who suggests sending Do-joon away to a mental asylum for four years, Mother takes it upon herself to acquit her son. She starts collecting evidence, distributing pamphlets proclaiming her son’s innocence, and starts talking to kids who knew Moon Ah-jung, who, she finds during her investigations was quite opposite to her own son—being a girl who grew up far beyond her chronological age. In her quest, she finds two allies—a neigbour who runs a photo studio and Jin-tae, Do-joon’s friend.

Her efforts at trying to make Do-joon remember the incidents of the fateful night face a curious resistance. In trying to remember, Do-joon inadvertently unlocks various suppressed memories that rather than helping mother find a ray of hope, makes her come face to face with incidents in her and Do-joon’s lives that she never thought he would recollect.

In the same manner, as Mother proceeds in her search for truth, dark secrets of the small town—a town that had not seen a murder in years—start rising to the surface, till we reach a dénouement that throws both Mother and we, the viewer, off-balance.

Joon-ho Bong, alongside Chan-wook Park (of Oldboy and Thirst fame), belongs to an exciting generation of Korean directors, who have ushered in a new era of filmmaking. Bong made quite a splash in Hollywood with his 2006 creature feature Gwoemul (The Host). However, the film with which one can draw parallels with his most-recent work is his film of 2003, Salinui chueok (Memories of murder). In that film, two police officers, one from a small town and the other from the city try to solve a series of grisly killings in the South Korean province of Gyunggi. In both the films, the peace and quite of a small town are ruptured by violent crime. In both cases, a mentally-challenged individual is accused of the misdeed. In both instances, though the cases were apparently solved, one character was found to be carrying the burden of truth for the rest of their lives.

In the course of Madeo, Mother asserts twice that she, and only she, knows of an acupuncture technique that when applied to ‘the meridian point’ can ‘loosen the knots in the heart and clear all horrible memories from the mind’. In the climax of the film, which harks back to the conclusion of Oldboy, Mother found out that the same acupuncture needles that she claims can have such a therapeutic effect, can also be the harbinger of unimaginable pain.