occam

Adrift and Air Doll

Let’s continue the little movie review from the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Today i saw Adrift and Air Doll, who both have love / sex in contrast to our society as topic. Even so both Asian, they come from totally different perspectives.

Air Doll by Hirokazu Koreeda from Japan, is all about the emptiness, the non-feeling, the heartless artificial surface and the lack of any emotional substance. The fear to feel, the possible calculated risk of getting hurt.

Koreeda also made the wonderful “Nobody Knows” and one of my all time favorites, “Maborosi”. It’s again a very solid good work and lets the audience think about common problems in the society. The air doll sex toy as metaphor for the empty human beings.

From the absolute opposite direction came Adrift (Choi voi, 2009), a viatnames movie by the rather new director Chuyên Bui Thac. It portraits a young married couple and their relationships to other men and woman. Their environments, desires, emotions and adventures.

It wasn’t really the intensity of the emotions, but rather the wide range of different situations, unique characters and authentic story telling, that made this movie so moving. A constant change, always development and even the small characters become a certain depth in this progress. The sensibility for the characters was astonishing and quite remarkable for the current times. A sensibility you only see in very few movies, like La Strada for example.

The director was available for Q&A and provided some background information. The topic of desires and sexuality is rather privat in the Vietnamese culture, and Adrift is intentionally hitting that nerve. Also, his portray of very strong female, and rather weak male characters divided the Vietnamese audience.

Last but not least, the soundtrack is a wonderful mixture of modern instruments with classic Vietnamese folk music. Something i have never heard before.

Trailer and more for Choi voi.