breath Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Two more countries have officially tossed their hats in the ring for the Foreign-Language Oscar, according to separate stories in Variety, and both selections are screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. South Korea's entry is Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine. The well-regarded drama debuted at Cannes, where Jeon Do-yeon won the award for best actress. As the Variety story notes, she plays "a young widow who moves from Seoul to start over in a provincial city." Variety says that Secret Sunshine was selected over Kim Ki-duk's Breath (also a Cannes selection) and May 18, a box-office hit based on real events. In addition to its screenings in Toronto, Secret Sunshine will also be playing at the New York Film Festival and at AFI Fest in Los Angeles, but does not yet have US distribution.

Another Variety story covers the general wariness of buyers toward the films on display in Toronto, but also reports that Lebanon officially selected Nadine Labaki's directorial debut Caramel as their Oscar entrant. According to Variety, the film opened in France and Lebanon in August and is already on course to become the top-grossing Lebanese release in those two territories. Caramel is a romantic comedy revolving around the lives of five women, set in and around a beauty salon in Beirut. The trailer at the official French site looks low-key and glossy. Jason Anderson at Eye Weekly called it "a Lebanese chick flick" that's "usually as fetching as it is familiar." Roadside Attractions has US distribution rights.

One of these years, Cinematical is going to have to send someone Down Under to watch things drain the opposite way and check out the Melbourne International Film Festival. The fest, which opened Wednesday and runs through August 12, has a bonanza of excellent films for fest attendees to revel in. If you live in Melbourne and don't want to waste your precious fest budget on films that are going to open there soon anyhow, Man About Town has a super-convenient reference chart of films that have already secured local distribution. It's a great idea, and hopefully one that we'll see with other fests -- it's a bit of a battle to figure out which films you can see a week or month later in theaters, thus opening your schedule for the films that might never hit the screen again.

The selection of films contains everything from old-news films like Inland Empire and Red Road, to great new documentaries like Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten and A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, which I recently reviewed from Toronto's HotDocs. But those are on the already-found distribution side of things. The Melbourne Film Blog is posting short reviews of a number of films, such as Kim Ki-Duk's Breath, and the festival's website is posting extra news about screenings and filmmaker chats. Heck, Ethan Hawke will be on-hand to introduce The Hottest State and give a Q&A, something my screening at TIFF last year was sadly without. The fest has only just begun, so if you're itching for films to see during the Aussie winter, I'd suggest checking it out.

I expected Kim Ki-Duk's Breath to cause some kind of stir when it played at Cannes last month. It was the provocative Korean director's first selection in the Official Competition, which normally draws greater critical attention. But it seems that Breath screened and everyone yawned. David Hudson gathered the reactions at GreenCine Daily; the trades were generally positive, if not exactly enthusiastic (Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily: "Works wonders within the minimalist conditions"; Derek Elley in Variety: "Will play best to Kim's existing fan club"; Ray Bennett in The Hollywood Reporter: "Unlikely ... to make much headway beyond those who are already fans"), and Mike D'Angelo of ScreenGrab speculated that it would be memorable only because it's the one in which "his predilection for mute protagonists officially became intolerable even to his fans." In the recent past, Variety film critic Robert Koehler called Kim "South Korea's worst filmmaker"; blogging for filmjourney.org, he wrote that the director "surprised no one -- except perhaps Derek Elley -- with Breath, which was screened and mercifully forgotten."

Mercy, indeed! Reviewing Kim's previous film, Time, Koehler wrote: "As always with Kim, under the frantic and bloody surface, underneath is ... nothing." Kim's films are visually beautiful and told in an indelible narrative style, but are attractive surfaces enough? Some of his work has struck me as thematically repellant (Bad Guy, The Bow, Time), yet the imagery in others (The Coast Guard, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring) has stayed with me for years. Breath features a young married woman who discovers that her husband is cheating on her and decides to have an affair with an imprisoned murderer. Tartan has acquired all US rights. Whenever it becomes available -- most likely direct to DVD -- we can see if the critics are right.