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Los Angeles Film Festival 2013: Drug War, Purgatorio, House with a Turret, & More

Prolific Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To performs a border crossing with Drug War.

Los Angeles Film Festival 2013: Drug War, Purgatorio, House with a Turret, & When I Saw You
Photo: Los Angeles Film Festival

Prolific Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To performs a border crossing with Drug War, his first cops-and-criminals film shot and set in mainland China, and in some ways the filmmaker is stretching his legs with all that extra space at his disposal. We follow police captain Zhang Lei (Sun Honglei) as he teams up with repentant drug manufacturer Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) to dismantle Choi’s former syndicate and take down his associates, and the film feels perpetually in transit as they’re on the chase, moving from city to city, on the road and via train. Overall, the shift doesn’t mark a radical departure for To. There’s definitely a different relationship to space and the urban environment, a changing-up of textures and details, but it all feels like a familiar overarching trajectory.

For example, the fact that the film ends in a slaughterhouse of a shootout is hardly the stuff of spoilers, though much of the first half is rather bloodless, almost sedate, as Zhang and his team track down leads and put together pieces of the puzzle, procedural-style. It’s more about surveillance and analysis and interrogation than gun battles, and instead To sharply mines the tension of potential flashpoints of violence that never quite get there. In those situations Zhang feels like an archetypal supercop, with an unremittingly loyal and deferential team and the ability to cow anyone he speaks to through sheer force of will. He’s chasing adversaries that may be 10 steps ahead, but he’s got a long stride and a sixth sense.

That relentless-lawman persona is justified in a centerpiece sequence where the cops intervene in a potential deal between criminal factions by playing both sides—that is, Zhang pretends to be each side to the other in a con game that barely holds together, with a ratcheting escalation that culminates in ultimatums and images that remain just on the good side of the line between iconic and cliché. Sun Honglei nails it here in the cycling between different personae, and in putting on a show that everything is copacetic when it’s actually a hair away from a bloodbath.

At the same time, there’s a way in which the protagonist feels a bit too shiny from over-polishing, which would perhaps go unnoticed except it’s coupled with an almost labored insistence on the resolve and righteousness of the Chinese police and justice system, in which evildoers are inevitably punished and the law will prevail. It’s not something that can be easily read as either political compromise or critique, and To’s world here is sufficiently stylized enough to distance itself from such concerns. Yet it might also serve as a marker for the trajectory of an increasingly intertwined Hong Kong and mainland cinema, even in a deftly constructed ballet of bullets such as this.

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And with Purgatorio, we take a trip to another border-crossing: the politically and emotionally charged U.S.-Mexico frontier. Mexican director Rodrigo Reyes’s essayistic documentary features shots of a drug addict injecting heroin and a survey of the fresh corpse of a murder victim, but amid those brutalities and others it contains a singularly arresting image that managed to elicit an even greater shock from the audience. Their gasps and winces were audible. In the shot, we watch in close-up as an animal control worker euthanizes a tiny dog inside a cage, and the camera holds on the animal as it slowly dies.

Even knowing that image is featured in the film is probably enough to drive a number of prospective viewers away. I once heard from a screenwriting expert that you can’t kill children and you can’t kill dogs. Well, you can, but whatever your movie’s about, it suddenly becomes about that instead. Reyes’s film is about “A Journey into the Heart of the Border,” and the inclusion of that dying dog is a thematic gambit trading on the hope that its symbolic resonance evokes some of the pain and despair at that heart. However, in that moment the visceral shock seems to outweigh everything else.

While that instance is the most extreme, Reyes structures his documentary around those kinds of sliding semantic shifts, of transitions in which dead bodies give way to industrial detritus and the fishermen of polluted canals segue to a funeral dirge for casualties in the war on drugs. The film, although it positions itself in dialogue with contemporary debates about the border, eschews a clearly delineated historical narrative; we flit through time and space in dislocated, tangential ways. There are interview subjects, but they gel with Reyes’s narrative less as individuals and more as emblems—striking as they might be, such as a man who cleans up litter along the border to remove any possible migratory trail markers. He stumbles into saying, “Some people hunt deer or elk, but hunting an individual…is an even greater thrill.”

The imagery that the film deploys is striking, especially in the way that it constructs la frontera as a postlapsarian space, where idyllic apolitical nature has been obliterated and replaced by a pulsing psychic wound. The borderlands are depicted as wastes in which both oppressive government authority and anarchic violence suffuse the landscape, and that perhaps the fears and anxieties that so energized the narratives of the western haven’t disappeared, but simply crystallized and mutated along a dividing line.

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The most striking display of this comes in scenes which take place along a section of border fence. It’s far from impermeable, and as a physical barrier it doesn’t seem that difficult to climb over; in fact, we see someone do exactly that. But through Reyes’s lens, the fence imposes more strongly than its height would indicate: in the way that the prison-like bars stretch upward while giving a glimpse of the other side, and in the way they serve as the backdrop for a testimonial of forlorn hope. That image, perhaps, hints at the trauma underlining that scene of animal euthanasia. It’s not just the death on display, but it also airs out in the theater that we were perhaps already primed to think of dogs in cages.


There’s an impenetrable grayness to Eva Neymann’s House with a Turret, and that’s not merely a facile way of pointing out that this Ukrainian film, set during World War II, is in black and white. We trail a young boy (Dmitriy Kobetskoy) trailing his sickly mother (Yekaterina Golubeva) as she’s deposited in a small town hospital for treatment; the film progresses at a Soviet crawl, capturing the boy’s difficulties in navigating bureaucracy along with navigating an unfamiliar town. The pacing and despondent atmospherics evoke a sense of realist socialism (as opposed to socialist realism) while at the same time having at its fringes the subtle sense of hallucinatory historical playacting, which seems about right for an adaptation of a story by Fridrikh Gorenshtein, the screenwriter of Solaris.

The space between those two tendencies proves to be the source of the film’s emotional and intellectual tension. Amid the gorgeously framed compositions (one nighttime shot meditates on the quality of snow cascading through lamplight), we get a feel for the visceral splashing of clumped mud and the brittleness of dried fish. The cast of characters strewn across the boy’s path speak to us not through their dialogue, but through the lines etched on their faces, their weary and mechanical movements, and their haunted, distant stares.

Yet it’s through those stares that Neymann plays with the flow of her narrative; we’re lashed into point-of-view shots that aren’t necessarily signaled as such, and as these characters stare at us, their gazes have a shimmering accusatory quality as they push up against the screen. They’re not really breaking the fourth wall so much as chipping away at it, bit by bit. Those shots lend the film an uncanny quality that never really dissipates throughout all the boy’s brief encounters: his run-in with the cryptic ramblings of a batty crone, for example, or with the shouts of a young girl with a tea set, lost in a world of play. Though the two characters are separated by decades in age, through Neymann’s lens they seem to share an unspoken affinity.

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This uncanny quality creeps into the way the film shifts between day and night, between light and shadow, between motion and stasis. It’s not so much that the film enters into a dream world, or that the unrelenting oppressive weight of this moment of Soviet history is ever lifted; it’s more that the feverish, trembling pall of sickness that hangs over the boy’s mother leaches out into her son’s point of view, and therefore into ours. The way this is sustained throughout the length of the film produces an enervating experience, but it perhaps reflects some small fragment of what it’s like to be stranded and searching for a way back home.


Hailing from Palestine, Annemarie Jacir’s When I Saw You can be seen as a kindred spirit to House with a Turret in its contemplation of a migratory mother and son under the specters of war, or to Purgatorio in its investigation of the psychic traumas etched by borders and paths of exile. But When I Saw You is considerably lighter than either of those films; it’s a childhood fantasia interwoven with the experience of refugees and paramilitary revolutionaries.

Set in Jordan in the critical year of 1967, the film follows two Palestinian refugees, Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa) and his mother, Ghaydaa (Ruba Blal), as they attempt to adjust to their new surroundings. Tarek is a youth in distress, in the model of The 400 Blows: gifted with numbers but illiterate, harried by an unsympathetic schoolteacher and the other children, and yearning for an absent father that he believes is waiting for him on the other side of the border. When that yearning reaches a breaking point, Tarek absconds from the refugee camp and ends up falling in with a band of fedayee resistance fighters in training; they’re preparing to do a little border-crossing of their own.

Tarek’s youthful point of view, and the nostalgic gauze it lends the whole endeavor, is key to making the admittedly fractious political context of the story accessible. In his first acting role, Asfa proves to be a sympathetic protagonist, inquisitive and endearing; the way that the fedayeen adopt Tarek as a kind of mascot is a triangulating method for the audience to empathize with these characters. Focalized through Tarek’s idealistic naïveté, scenes of the fighters crawling under barbed wire and firing Kalashnikovs are overshadowed by soulful musical laments around the campfire and shared meals; they serve as Tarek’s surrogate family. In that space, war and violence become abstract and are only barely visible, hovering at the edges and spoken of in whispers. The film lingers in these utopian moments, yet is utterly aware that, like the threshold between childhood and adulthood, this display of revolutionary zeal is on the cusp of a fall from innocence.

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And because of that, the film ends up a narrative of suspended possibilities. Its denouement may feel like a cheat, but is perhaps one of the few ways one can justifiably end a story like this. These characters may end when the credits roll, but the people they represent do not; they’re part of the flow of history, with its unresolved strife and prickly dilemmas. Many aspects of the film faithfully feel of their time (the ’60s mod fashion of young Jordanians that Tarek encounters, for example), and the rhetoric of Marx and Mao dispensed by the fedayeen feels positively quaint now. But then there are things that resonate and feel utterly contemporary to our moment, like Blal’s portrayal of Ghaydaa: a mother displaced from her home by war, struggling for survival and worrying about the world her son will inherit. In that depiction, the film hints at the uncomfortable truth that time perhaps doesn’t heal all wounds, but instead leaves some to fester.

The Los Angeles Film Festival runs from June 16—26.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Oscar Moralde

Oscar Moralde's writing can be found in Well Played Journal, Latin American Perspectives, Media Fields Journal, and the Criterion Collection.

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