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Before, Now & Then – AFI Fest 2022

In Before, Now & Then, Nana finds security in a second marriage to a wealthy old man, having lost her family to the war in West Java. However, she cannot escape the dreams and trauma of her past, or the expectations of her new family and becomes a ghostly figure until she meets one of her husband’s mistresses. Together they can escape and find their own freedom.

Stylistically, Before, Now & Then feels heavily influenced by Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Whilst the colors are more muted, the dreamy pacing and slowed down scenes between Nana and her second husband feel just like the slow romantic scenes between the two protagonists in In the Mood for Love. These scenes in both films are designed to convey uncertainty. In In the Mood for Love the uncertainty is romantic – we don’t know if the two characters will keep seeing each other. In Before, Now & Then, the uncertainty is melancholic. Similarly, we don’t know if the two characters will be together for much longer, however given that the two characters have been together for a while, it feels as if their relationship is dying instead of burning brightly.

The uncertainty of Nana’s relationship is symbolic of the state of the country. Just like the current Indonesian regime, she knows what she’s getting from her stable marriage to an older husband. Whilst it has confined her mostly to the house – and the back of the house at that, as she rarely shows her face publicly – she knows that she will be taken care of. However, there is no love in their relationship. The new freedom she gains with her husband’s mistress, in contrast, is exciting. It fills her with hope that things could be different and more free.

Whilst we have the hindsight to know that the political change happening in the background of Before, Now & Then wasn’t a positive one, the film captures the uncertainty of the times well with it’s dreaminess.

Head to our AFI Fest 2022 Hub for more reviews from AFI Fest 2022.

Trenque Lauquen – AFI Fest 2022

If you’re ready to sit down for a few hours to indulge yourself in some cosy, trivial Argentine mysteries, meet the latest film from El Pampero Cine, Trenque Lauquen.

Trenque Lauquen comes from Laura Citarella, one of the members of El Pampero Cine, a group of filmmakers which also includes Mariano Llinas (La Flor, Extraordinary Stories), Agustin Mendilaharzu, and Alejo Moguilansky. Each of the members of the collective usually pop up in the credits of each other films under different roles, making each of the collective’s films feel like a team effort. They each also use the same actors, so if you’ve seen another of their films before, you’re likely to see a familiar face in this one.

Trenque Lauquen, like it’s El Pampero Cine predecessors, isn’t a light commitment. It’s just over 4 hours long, split roughly equally into two sections which are both tied together by Laura’s character. The entire film takes place in Trenque Lauquen, a city on the far west border of Buenos Aires province near La Pampa. It looks like a pretty unremarkable city, with nothing to really distinguish it from anywhere else in Argentina. However the blandness is all part of the film’s construct. As with the majority of films from the El Pampero Cine collective, Trenque Lauquen uses the mundane as a foundation for it’s engrossing mysteries.

Put best by Magu Fernandez Richeri for La Lista:

El Pampero’s films are, at their core, fairly simple. There aren’t any extraordinary premises, but they also work as tiny odysseys. Characters embark on fantastical adventures where the mundane is re-signified as something strange, new, and magical. The strangeness with which Pampero approaches the world is inherently transformational. Any and all minutiae represents a good excuse for them to tell a story as if we as the audience were kids listening in rapt attention, trying to keep us from seeing the world in its drab normality, allowing us to perceive things differently and hatch crazy schemes.

Trenque Lauquen, like La Flor and Extraordinary Stories, feels like indulgent storytelling. It’s as if the filmmakers of El Pampero Cine have been challenging each other to come up with new quirky mysteries to keep audiences interested for longer periods of time. They haven’t seemed to hit their limits yet as each of their last few films have kept audiences interested just to see where the mysteries lead us. Each of their films is like following a maze or river cruise full of pleasant surprises. Plus the pacing and characters are conducive to our immersion in the mystery; they’re both always patient and never rushed. They create the relaxed environment to let the mystery lead us along. Serious things happen in these films, but because of the tone, it never feels real-world serious. This is why these films are indulgent storytelling – they’re there to simply entertain and nothing more, and they do this better than anyone else in the industry.

Head to our AFI Fest 2022 Hub for more reviews from AFI Fest 2022.

Deleter (Philippines) – Social Media Musings Fail to Muster Maliciousness

By Sebastian Torrelio

Mikhail Red is at this point a public figure in the scope of Filipino cinema against the world. His latest, Deleter—sub-technological mystery horror and 2022 Metro Manila Film Festival Best Picture-winner—follows no tighter premise than the act of a haunted house’s outreach transformed into an office building’s Wi-Fi signal. Lyra (Nadine Lustre) works an outsourced job as a content moderator for a Facebook-esque website, constantly spending her few remaining sane hours wide-eyed against a computer screen, either passing or deleting through the gore, obscenities and disturbed cell phone clips that everyday citizens pick up, for innocent or malicious intention in equal.

Their task is to “handle data … not people,” as Lyra explains away for her friend Aileen (Louise delos Reyes), the only character of concrete stakes in the film. It makes sense – drag a role into the dark mentally, and the steps to embed them in darkness physically become smaller in turn.

The first act of Red’s modern thriller doesn’t seem to entirely know what to do with Lyra’s occupation anyhow, letting the scanned-through Internet play on its own tempo almost too seamlessly with the randomness of delight the Internet actually triggers. Most of her job, pre-dramatics, plays from a third-person angle as confusing, if not unintentionally humorous.

Not that Lyra’s view of social media is self-seriousness taken astray, more so that Red’s frame seems consistently imperfect, a beck and call to keep the digital world’s barrier into our own stable & threatening, but without the camerawork to persistently keep a hypnotized audience on the cusp of realism. Unlike recent postmodern breakthroughs, namely Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to World’s Fair, Deleter finds no rooted connection through the wiring, a sustained vibe of unrevealed horrors cut off by doldrums of meaningless white-collar task-mastering.

When the film’s final act is settled on its tracks veering toward the goalposts, the threatening aura of Red’s attempted sophisticated edge has whittled down a blunt stub. The last 30 minutes of Deleter, a repercussion of traumatic happenings that have surrounded Lyra’s life in the days prior, scurries into an oblique darkness – characters floating around the office building’s hallways to the willingness of intermittent red security lighting, every shot performed for set-placing without allowing the actors any presence within their own space. If actors are not given the occupied space to connect, life cut short via aerial camera becomes errant, death then in turn whimsical.

Seen at Cinemark Carson and XD

Someday or One Day – Tragedy Strikes Love in a Puzzling Story

By Sebastian Torrelio

More so than the mystery of where Huang Yu-Xuan (Ko Chia-Yen) and Wang Quan-Sheng (Hsu Kuang-Han) have gone—where their spirits have bounded off too, whom takes the place of which body and how they return—is the mystery of how Someday or One Day, an adaptation of the hit Taiwanese television drama, went so terribly south. Primary director of the original Tien Jen Huang returns here to create a baffling story of dualities reflected against identical-looking dualities, an improbable mess that only rides so far on cute delicacy before the tape unwinds entirely.

At first, things seem steady, though speedy. A wistful camera wanders over pristine decorative interiors like a gift shop, so much of the plot to come only teased through low-budget VFX snapshots. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan, having met-cute at record pace, are two entities who spend most of their time longingly sighing and staring out into the distance, their vague young adult concerns very present, though indecipherable. Teens at odds with their singularity, so commonplace in the drama of modern Chinese media, cannot just be scanned for relatability – something needs to be presented to the viewer, clearly.

And so enters the plot of Someday or One Day – shocked from the sudden death of Quan-Sheng, Yu-Hsuan spends her years daydreaming away from society, stuck in her own head, before waking up years later in the body of a mutual friend Chen Yun-Ru (also Ko playing a double role) years prior before her love’s demise. Yun-Ru finds herself in the most complicated role perceivable, forced to convince her friends from their past of their oncoming danger, barely able to articulate the hell she’s been pacing through ever since.

To Ko and Hsu’s credit, nothing about their performances here drag, the success of their well-established chemistry is the only real ingredient to make the movie’s breakthrough romantic first kiss come close to operating. Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan relate through their favorite couple song, lifted from the TV series; they incur the abusive collateral of time spent together equal to time spent apart. If everything seems trivially, tonally normal in their lives, maybe it’s because it should be, for the most part.

The most interesting thing at play with Someday, as with a lot of Chinese rom-coms in this vein, is the relationship of everyday individuals to their romantic fate: if it’s coincidence that brought us together, is it coincidence that is keeping us together? Altogether, not a bad question that “Someday asks directly at least once. Huang even guides us to a different existential question: are dreams the barrier to our happiness? The normalcy of a relationship growing into, outward and apart can and has been subject to a more inspective eye than this hundreds of times, on better and easier to ascertain platforms.

The original TV series, spanning 13 episodes that dive deeper into the sinister mystery behind Quan-Sheng and Yu-Xuan’s body bouncing history and conundrum, gained acclaim for its nourishing continuum, a collective audience experience that intertwines pop tendencies and true-hearted romance. How this film adaptation, branded neither specifically as a sequel nor a creative reboot, functions parallel to that is beyond comprehension.

Seen at AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Monterey Park