MAY 2002 FILMS

JALLA! JALLA!
(Josef Fares, 2000)

PLATFORM
(Jia Zhang Ke, 2000)

Easy to respect but not wholly embraceable as Jia's admirable aesthetic insistence sometimes neglects the characters he's following. Scenes are detailed, naturalistic portraits with a few appreciating to great value in my mind: the lovers' stone walled conversations, a lone girl in a dark office dancing to the radio. As capitalism and globalization slowly diffuse through to the interior of China uncomfortable hybrids result such as a party-endorsed socialist sloganeering pop band (also seen in Fruit Chan's DURIAN DURIAN). Through all the changes the individual desires of the members of Jia's theatre troupe surface to take air. But there's a sad inevitability to all that wanting, that even with the changes little satisfaction is to be had, and at the tail end of it all perhaps they're even more unsure of themselves, that by getting off Mao's train they have lost what they left behind. [B]

REPLAY (La Répétition)
(Catherine Corsini, 2000)

My inner lesbian was giddy at the prospect of Emmanuelle Béart finally melting Quebecois ice queen Pascale Bussières's frosty beauty but that enthusiasm was quickly blunted from the start by REPLAY's clumsiness.

REPLAY is the poor woman's version of WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY, but with Harriet as a needy, self-immolating woman (Bussières) who drops everything after a chance encounter with her former high school best friend-turned-stage actress (Béart) - feminists could probably have a bit of fun comparing the two films. Corsini plays it straight with no surprises: there's no humour and the lesbian angle gets shafted as the need to live through her friend drifts the film's psychology into SINGLE WHITE FEMALE territory. Except for some daring stagework as seen during the on-screen plays, there's this lingering feeling you've seen this all before. Both actresses make the material watchable but one never really connects. [C]