Perplexing arthouse films in Cinema One Originals

After QCinema International Film Festival, there was just a sort of one-week "break" and now comes another film event, Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival (Nov. 9-17 at Trinoma, SM Megamall, Glorietta and Resorts World cinemas) which, just like the former, has included in its selection since last year a number of foreign-language films. Most of this selection from world cinema are arthouse favorites, have initially rounded prestigious film festivals abroad and are even award-winners. This year's selection includes new works from the likes of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Roy Andersson, Yorgos Lanthimos, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hong Sang-soo. Two of the remarkable films that I saw were: Lanthimos' "The Lobster" (Ireland, 2015) and Andersson's "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" (Sweden, 2014). 

It's curious to think how "The Lobster" is bookended by scenes wherein we are left hanging for an answer. The film begins with a scene showing a seemingly-distraught woman driving and then shortly, she stops, gets out of the car and immediately shoots to death a donkey. We have no idea what this scene is all about. On the other hand, the film ends with a scene in which the now-blind Short-Sighted Woman (played by Rachel Weisz) waits inside a restaurant for David (played by Colin Farrell) to come back, who was previously shown about to do something that would prove his "love" for the woman. We just don't know if the two will ever get to be together again. The two baffling scenes fittingly describe a film wherein it's hard to find an answer as to why it has become the kind of world that it portrays. We see that in the film's unspecified dystopian future, a person's worth is defined by how he/she is able to find a life-partner and to maintain such a relationship for as long as it lasts. And if one is unable to do so, then one is meted the appropriate "punishment" (albeit still given a chance for a specified period of time). Yet, we just don't know how it has come to be so. It simply constitutes the very essence of absurdity which, in the film's world, is what has began to be defined as "normal". 

It's like humanity is already on the brink of being obliterated, of having its existence ceased that it has become necessary to sound off the alarm to implement all desperate measures to ensure its survival, a scenario that can also be gleaned in Alfonso Cuarón's thought-provoking "Children of Men". Even the film's title reflects the essential irrationality of its dystopian philosophy: it's David's "animal of choice" in case he fails to find (another) partner within the despotic and omniscient hotel's prescribed 45-day timeframe and yet we never get to see the actual animal itself. This, however, doesn't entail that David has been successful in finding a new partner, in being able to enter into a new relationship. Perhaps, his actual transformation into the titular crustacean has just been "delayed". In the film's surrealist dystopia, there's no room left for choice in being single as it inevitably seals one's tragic fate and, consequently, being in a relationship becomes an obligation, a necessary solution to abet the punishment. It now comes to the fore the idea that one's essence as a human being is measured in relation to the existence of a "significant other" in your life. It's like the world has turned into a one large "Noah's Ark", in that to be able to survive an impending doomsday one being must be in "conjunction" with another. 

Lanthimos' camera and Thimios Bakatakis' cinematography are poised in such a way that a character appears to be in a perpetual state of isolation, even when with another person, or that he/she seems to be engulfed by his/her surroundings, thereby totally obliterating his/her individuality. It's a unique and meaningful camerawork that somehow reminds me of Pawel Pawlikowski's, Lukasz Zal's and Ryszard Lenczewski's work in the Oscar-winning "Ida". And of course, coming from the guy who made "Dogtooth", there are some scenes that will make us feel queasy, though they shouldn't in any way distract us from the film's cautionary story and the marvelous acting ensemble, most especially Farrell, whose hangdog face suits his lonely and doomed character to perfection and whom I haven't seen acting morbidly like this (not even in the unfairly-maligned season two of HBO's "True Detective".) 

Likewise, "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" is also about humanity, being the film rounding up Andersson's "trilogy on being a human being", which includes "Songs from the Second Floor" and "You, the Living". This one is even more confounding than "The Lobster", as it doesn't have any unifying plot or story to speak of, being comprised mainly of vignettes (as do the director's previous films), each of which could almost stand on its own. And in all of the vignettes, Andersson's camera remains as fixed as ever from a long shot, turning the entire set-up into a tableau, as all things absurd, surreal, dream-like, droll, fantastic and non sequitur parade onscreen. These are supposed to be reflections on the irrational and the strange in human existence, but I wouldn't blame anyone who would just completely scratch his head at every turn. The scenes just defy explanation or reason. And more likely than not, they are really intended that way. 

There are two door-to-door salesmen (named Jonathan and Sam and as if coming straight out of a Kafka novel) who appear more than once in the film, but as if their existence were really meant for the purpose of providing a unifying whole to the film. Perhaps, they are the "representations" of the abstract and the indecipherable in our way of thinking and behaving. Making matters probably more perplexing is if we learn that Andersson mentioned at the film's premiere in Venice (where it won the grand prize) that it was inspired by Vittorio de Sica's neo-realist masterpiece "The Bicycle Thieves". That's something curious to think about, considering how the two films differ greatly in form and mood. To be sure, the inspiration goes beyond Andersson having two "main" working-men characters in the film. It would be less surprising though if the filmmaker also brought up Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" or any Robert Bresson masterpiece as his inspiration for the film, if we look into the strangely statue-like acting method of the characters, complete with a make-up that resembles a pantomime. This is yet another exemplification of the theory that actors are mere embodiments of ideas, which springs from the classical Greek philosophy of a form is nothing without an idea or, conversely, an idea can't be something without a form. 

And does the titular bird actually show up in the film? Yes, it does, at the film's opening vignette. Though perhaps what's more important to ask is why is the film titled that way at all. I won't attempt to answer the question here, but instead will mention the scene where the title was referred to. In what looks like a program in a school for children with Down's Syndrome, a teacher (or so I think) calls up one of the children onstage who's about to recite a poem. He then asks the child (a girl) what the poem is about, to which the latter replies that it's about a pigeon that sat on a branch reflecting about the fact that it is without any money. The girl wasn't really able to recite the poem, as the teacher just kept on asking her about the piece. Cynical as this may sound, but perhaps that particular scene suggests that we human beings are living our existence for nothing at all, that this is a life defined by futility, vagueness and defeatism, closer to a Schopenhauerian philosophy. Or probably, that's how actually the pigeon "views" our existence.

Next: "Rams" and "The Assassin"

Yorgos Lanthimos' "The Lobster" (above) and Roy Andersson's "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" (below): Two perplexing films about human existence