Watch and learn.
THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA
NR, 104 min.
Vietnamese filmmaker Anh Hung Tran's lyrical piece,
The Scent of Green Papaya
, is assembled from some of the most stunning and complex choreography in cinema. A woman sits; the outline of her hair, backed by plants and a staircase, forms a perfectly balanced composition of blacks, greens and wood. She turns, the camera pans, a different set of plants are revealed; a new composition, equally harmonious. These shots sometimes last upwards of eight minutes, making the rhythmic, ornate and painterly
Scent
a mesmerizing celluloid haiku.
WOMAN IN THE DUNES
NR, 147 min.
Based on the novel by Kobo Abe,
Woman in the Dunes
is Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 masterpiece; a classic of Japanese cinema and cinema, period. An entomologist, Niki Jumpei (Eiji Okada), searches for a rare beetle among dunes by the sea. A band of villagers offers him a place to sleep for the night and he is taken to a pit in the sand, where he is forced to live with a woman (Kyôko Kishida) and help her push back the sand that constantly encroaches. This hypnotic film is one of the most profound meditations on human existence ever committed to celluloid. The black-and-white cinematography, which contemplates the flow of sand, of water and of time, is magnificent to behold-visceral and full of texture.
TIERRA
NR, 125 min.
A man, Ángel (Carmelo Gómez), is released from an asylum and hired as an exterminator in an agricultural village. Tiny creatures in the soil imbue the wine made there with an "earthy" taste that is disliked by the local population. Ángel, a self-described "complex man," contends with his own double personality along with his attraction to two very different women. This allegorical and psychologically fascinating film comes from Spanish, and more specifically Basque, filmmaker Julio Medem. 1996's
Tierra
is a must-see for lovers of Fellini or Buñuel or for those who have enjoyed Medem's more accessible films, such as
Lovers in the Arctic Circle or Sex and Lucía
.
