Tomorrow night Doc Films will screen Days and Nights in the Forest, one of Indian director Satyajit Ray’s greatest accomplishments, and on Friday Hong Sang-soo’s minimalist Grass opens at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a weeklong run. What do these movies have in common? For one thing neither seems particularly interested in storytelling—both feel like collections of social observations, organized around the characters’ unforced behavior. (Both films are, in fact, exquisitely written, developing themes and even subtle suspense through the careful sequencing of nonevents.) It speaks to the power of cinema that narrative filmmakers can achieve greatness without obvious plotting. In the right hands, the intricacies of performance, visual composition, and atmosphere can be more than enough to sustain a motion picture.
La Collectionneuse The fourth episode of Éric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” series (actually the third in order of shooting, and the first of feature length). Haydée, the “collector” of the title, is a young woman who hoards sexual experiences, though she refuses to sleep with either of the two stuffy males with whom she shares a villa. Rohmer’s impossibly light, graceful way of posing profound moral questions hasn’t yet wholly coalesced, though this 1967 film does have his soft, slow rhythm. With Patrick Bauchau and Daniel Pommereulle. —Dave Kehr
The River In Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and Vive l’Amour (1994), Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang followed Lee Kang-sheng, a young, nonprofessional actor, through the streets of Taipei. A seductive misfit, an alienated urban dweller struggling with loneliness and sexual identity, Lee is reunited in this 1997 feature with his fictional family from the first film. The mother (Lu Hsiao-ling) works as an elevator operator and seeks solace and affection in a trite affair with a porn-video salesman; the father (Miao Tien, a former kung fu actor), now retired, cruises Taipei’s fast-food restaurants and bathhouses for young male bodies; and Lee, against his better judgment, agrees to play a corpse floating in a dirty river to help a commercial film director (Ann Hui). As always in Tsai’s films, water means trouble, excess, passion: as soon as Lee dips into the river he experiences excruciating pain in his neck and shoulders, which traditional Chinese medicine is powerless to cure. Meanwhile a leaky faucet wreaks havoc in the father’s bedroom, but since the members of the family barely talk to one another, nothing is done about it until the dark, moving, unexpected climax. Filmed in a single cut, with the minimal sounds of breathing and rustling paper, this scene is one of the most beautiful, disturbing, yet tender produced by contemporary Taiwanese cinema. A quiet masterpiece. —Berenice Reynaud v
