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Reviews
Mai wei (2011)
Terrific film
I'm not sure why this film is not being promoted anywhere, as far as I can tell, but I saw it last weekend and it's extremely well-done. It's based on a supposedly true story of how a Korean marathon runner ends up impressed into service in the Japanese army during World War II, then is captured by the Soviets during the Japanese campaign in China, survives a Soviet POW camp, then is impressed into service in the Soviet army, defects to the Nazi army during a battle, and ends up unwillingly fighting for the Germans in Normandy during the D-Day invasion. I won't spoil the twist ending, but the script is terrific, the acting is great, cinematography is excellent, and the budget was huge. There are one or two sappy scenes at the very end, the title (at least as translated into English)is baffling and irrelevant to the story, and an Andrea Bocelli closing-credits song is saccharine and inappropriate, but those are the only deficits that keep me from giving this film a ten-rating. Highly recommended. In Korean with subtitles.
La fille du RER (2009)
Thought provoking and definitely worth seeing
I disagree with the negative reviewer, who I think missed the point. This film intentionally avoided telling the viewer what to think about the situation or characters in this film, forcing the viewer to come to his or her own conclusions, thereby provoking a lot of thought and discussion. I saw the film with my Jewish girlfriend, and we had completely different takes on the movie and its central character. My girlfriend thought the movie itself was anti-Semitic for its negative depiction of a broken Jewish marriage-- an impression I did not (and still don't) share.
The film, based on actual events in Paris in 2006, is divided into two parts. The first part is entitled "The Circumstances" and tells the story of a 19-year-old girl and the affair she unthinkingly falls into with a young French wrestling star. They end up moving in together and he gets involved with a shady drug business, of which she is unaware. He is stabbed by a drug runner and arrested. She returns home to her mother (Catherine Deneuve). Unable to get a job, distraught over her disastrous relationship, the girl impulsively cuts herself, draws swastikas on her stomach, and tells the police she was attacked by a gang of 6 boys on a commuter train outside of Paris because they mistakenly thought she was Jewish (she is not) on the basis of a business card of a Jewish lawyer she said she had in her purse.
The second part of the film is titled "The Consequences." The media pick up the story-- a development she hadn't apparently foreseen-- and her mother asks her friend, the Jewish lawyer, for advice. He advises her to bring her daughter to his country home, where he, his son and daughter in law, and their 13-year-old son, who is preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, are spending the weekend. Everyone at the house seems to understand immediately that her story is false, and they want to minimize the amount of trouble she will be in if she confesses. She ultimately admits that she made up the story and writes out a confession to that effect. The French judicial system lets her off easy, and that wraps up the film.
But the viewer is left to grapple with unanswered questions. Why did she make up this story? She doesn't seem to have wanted attention, and seeks to avoid the media, whose interest seems to surprise her. With all its obvious holes and weaknesses, why did the police and the media believe the story? (She is, after all, not Jewish.) The film makes the point that anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in France. Why then does the media focus on an obviously false report of an anti-Semitic attack in which the victim is not even Jewish? Give this film a chance. The filmmakers could have tried to answer all those questions for us, as most American directors would have done, but instead set their viewers the challenge of answering them for themselves. Ultimately, that decision made for a much more interesting movie-going experience.