(If you haven’t already, please be sure to check out Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 1 for a series explanation and to read the first batch of reflections.)

Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 7

The appeal of Asian pop music is something I have a difficult time describing to my music snob friends. I was born and raised in Malaysia and saw both my siblings drifting inexplicably from ’80s New Wave to Cantopop. As much as I tried to divert myself with the noisy angst of grunge in my teens, a part of me was strangely comforted by the tacky and predictable aesthetics of Asian pop music, where a sentimental number usually, if not always, begins with an acoustic piano intro, and the use of an electric guitar riff means that the artist is trying to “rock out.” And let’s not forget about synthesizers—lots and lots of synthesizers. I do get what good, quality music is all about, but I also really do get the essence of Asian pop, which is comparable to ramen noodles in a way: they come in bulk (it’s not unusual for a popular artist to crank out two to three albums a year while juggling with his/her acting career) and they’re not terribly unique or original, but they sure hit the spot at the right time.

Asian pop music is often used gratuitously in Asian films (extended music video-esque montage, anyone?), but once in a while, it’s also used very movingly and insightfully, like in Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis (2002). The story revolves around the unlikely romance that develops between Jong-du, a social misfit who has just been released from prison, and Gong-ju, a woman suffering from a very crippling form of cerebral palsy. The scene takes place where they’re both waiting for a train at the subway station; him carrying her on his back. Jong-du had just taken Gong-ju to a karaoke bar, where she stared at the monitors blankly, incapable of singing along to the words of a tacky Korean ballad. Every now and then, the film reveals the perspective of Gong-ju’s imagination, where she can function like a normal human being, being able to walk and talk like the rest of us. In this instance, as they’re standing alone on the station’s platform, she begins to sing an a capella rendition of the same song to her lover and lead him to a dance:

If I were the sky…
I’d want to be colored into your face.
Like the sky tinged red by the setting sun…
I’d want to be colored on your cheeks.
If I were a poet…
I’d recite my poem for you.
Like a child resting in its mother’s bosom…
I want to sing happily…
I want to become whatever there is…
Just for you.
Do you have any idea, my love…
How great a joy this is?
Just to be together like today.
Do you know what’s in my heart?

I must have seen Oasis close to a dozen times by now, and this graceful little sequence still moves me to tears. It’s funny—and pretty ingenious on Lee’s part—how a slight adjustment in context could make some pretty god-awful lyrics sound like the sweetest and most genuine words in the world. There are days where I’m driving, and my iPod shuffles from Animal Collective to Faye Wong, or Junior Boys to Chage and Aska, and it takes me right back to my younger days when I hadn’t quite developed a refined taste in music (and it wasn’t about listening to bad shit to be “ironic”), but everything I felt and everything I responded to then was pure and immediate and true. And maybe that’s where the power of Asian pop music lies for me. It’s a fateful reminder of the part of my soul that still holds onto saccharined ideas of life and love.

May I never ever lose that part of my soul. May I never stop listening to Asian pop. — Yen Tan (Ciao)

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I was going to write about The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which seems to me the most influential film of the past decade (firstborn of the Romanian New Wave, and I couldn’t have made Canary without it), but I decided to write about Open Hearts instead.

As it happens, I have a personal interest in Open Hearts, which might supersede my professional debt to its technical mannerisms. I saw this film with my wife just after cooling an extramarital flirtation. The other “relationship” ended before it began, but the subject of infidelity was fresh on our minds when we saw Open Hearts, and the woman with whom I’d exchanged the ultimate vows spent much of the film glancing at me untrustingly.

In synopsis, it’s a frothy melodrama. Joachim is struck by a car. His neck is broken, and he’s paralyzed for life. The driver of the car is Marie, who had been urged to drive faster by her teenaged daughter Stine. Joachim’s fiancée Cecilie is distraught after the accident and haunts the hospital until Marie’s husband Niels, conveniently a doctor, finds her and says something apologetic and reassuring. Of course it isn’t long before Niels is reassuring her sexually.

Infidelity with the best intentions. Sympathy carried beyond a reasonable limit. Comforter and comforted losing themselves in each other at the expense of standing emotional commitments. The film provides no relief from what it puts in motion, as Niels leaves his family for Cecilie and is in turn left by her. A family is destroyed and no one is punished for it; a woman with two lovers chooses to be with neither. Happiness is not defined—it doesn’t even seem to be an explicit aim of any of the characters. There is emotional survival on the one hand and reckless self-gratification on the other, but no happiness in sight.

Open Hearts is a jumbled nexus of competing emotional entanglements. The most nuanced and sophisticated element in the film is Stine’s culpability in the accident that results in Joachim’s paralysis (she had told her mother to drive faster just before their car struck him) and how this interacts with her nearly sexualized possessiveness toward her casually adulterous father. When she learns he’s bought furniture for his new girlfriend, Stine says, “You won’t even buy me a dress!” This tangled hierarchy of love, guilt and responsibility—I’d have a hard time working it out on a chalkboard.

So who needs forgiveness here? Joachim for lashing out at everyone who helps him after the accident? Marie for hitting him with her car? Stine for telling her mother to drive faster? Cecilie for appropriating Niels in heart and body? Niels for leaving his family? Exactly.

After Cecilie rejects Niels, he tells her, “I want you to know that had I known all this would happen, I’d have done it anyway.” In a film which puts irresponsibility and self-exculpation smack in the center of every scene, one character finally gets it—a parting magnanimous gesture toward an interloper who did in fact play a part in destroying his family, even if her own suffering blinded her to the needs of others. Niels will carry the burden of this guilt for both of them.

The original Danish title of the film is Elsker dig for evigt, which translates colloquially: “Love you forever.” But this is a vow, colloquial or not. In the film Cecilie says it to Joachim as she leaves the hospital room where he’s permanently convalescing. It’s a vow, and how. The international title of the film is Open Hearts, which alludes broadly to the events of the film but not to its subtext, not to its fundamental concerns. Cecilie tells Joachim’s doctor that she’s seeing someone else “but it’s not real because he’s married.” The doctor smirks and replies, “You can’t fall in love with him because he’s married?” The film is concerned with where love is permitted, how it generates, what sustains it, and the point at which it becomes an impermeable promise—a marriage license and children don’t seem to have anything to do with that. Infidelity doesn’t require love; a family can be destroyed over a relationship which hasn’t even had time to congeal. “It was an accident,” Cecilie tells Stine. “I didn’t mean this to happen,” Niels tells Marie. Intentions are beside the point; the act and its consequences are what we’re left with. Look at that destroyed family, that boy asking his father not to leave after a birthday party. Someone must take responsibility for that.

Okay, I will. — Alejandro Adams (Canary, Around the Bay)

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ALSO READ:

Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 1
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 2
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 3
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 4
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 5
Filmmaker Reflections - The 2000s: Vol. 6