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Another year, another Criterion Month, already a fading memory, soft and delicate, like a confessional whispered into a tape recorder. Much like Glen records his subjects speaking of love and intimacy in Andrew Haigh’s subdued romantic drama Weekend. Yet again, I’m saying farewell to Criterion Month with an Andrew Haigh film, despite my ongoing struggle to articulate what it is he does best: people talking.
It’s a cliche at this point but, if you don’t mind indulging me, Infernal Affairs III makes Infernal Affairs II look like Infernal Affairs. Released just a year after the first movie, Infernal Affairs III exists to show fools like me that I had no idea what was *really* going on back when I enjoyed the story that would one day become The Departed. Is dumping this much lore on top of an already dense story a good idea? As a Star Wars fan, I feel confident in saying: eh, sometimes, I guess, but usually no!
These last few years I’ve been jumping around the World of Wong Kar-wai so I think a little bit of context helps for Happy Together. In 1994, while working on the epic Ashes of Time, Wong took a break and made Chungking Express to clear his head and fall in love with filmmaking again and it ended up being a huge hit and made him an international darling. The next year, he followed that up with the stylistically similar Fallen Angels, which further earned him widespread recognition. Both movies were heavily influenced by the looming handover of Hong Kong to China, so when his next film, Happy Together, was slated to be released just weeks before the handover, everyone expected this would be what it was about. And they were sort of right, it’s just almost entirely set in Buenos Aires.
Merely seven months after their first adventure, the heroic trio of Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, and Michelle Yeoh return Executioners. And if you thought things were bleak before, let me tell you, this one starts with a bang! Nuclear war has poisoned the world and the survivors are forced to grovel at the feet of anyone who can provide clean water. Hong Kong’s president (Kwan Shan) is desperately trying to keep the government on top while a masked, disfigured maniac (Anthony Wong) pulls the strings from the shadows. This is a world that needs heroes more than ever before, so where are they?
It is to my great surprise that I am once again reviewing a movie where the third act twist is our traveling heroes stumble upon a house occupied by a lone Italian woman who one of them instantly falls for. Yes, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is, like Down By Law, a story about an unusual friendship, but more than that it’s an unique gay road movie set all over the Pacific Northwest. And more than that, it’s an unlikely, loose take on Shakespeare’s three-play Henriad. So Midnight Cowboy meets Chimes at Midnight? Sign me up!
Director Jim Jarmusch has made a lot of movies that you could describe as being “of a place” and Down by Law is no exception. Here we get a miserable, film noir-inspired version of the Louisiana bayou country that Jarmusch conceived of before he even arrived to make this movie. The story begins in New Orleans and it’s portrayed as a moody, rundown, desolate, rotting carcass of a city, populated only by the damned and the pitiful. And then we go to jail. Shot in Jarmusch’s signature black and white, on the surface, Down by Law seems like it might as well have been called “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But, more than my now-missed posting deadline, there was something to this story about three misfits which inspired me to keep watching.
3 Women, beyond being an apt description of the number of women directors we’ve covered in nine years of Criterion Months, is a freaky deaky little movie Robert Altman made based on a dream he had while his wife was in the hospital. It was a forgotten gem for some time, having missed the VHS generation entirely and only become available on home video when Criterion released it on DVD in the mid-2000s. Since then it’s gone on to be a favorite of the Criterion Closet and got another huge bump when Shelley Duvall passed away about a year ago, as it contains one of her finest performances. But is it any good?
