Bright life
Asano rules the Vancouver film fest.

By Johnny Ray Huston

ONLY AT THE Vancouver International Film Festival can you casually stroll from the classicism of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant – where the bruise-tinted, flawlessly composed shots capture a story the emotionally blocked photographer protagonist misses – to a theater where "Cop Festival" (a below-low-budget collection of video shorts by renowned Japanese directors and actors) is being shown with freestyle tag-team benshi narration instead of subtitles. Not yet constrained by the established limits of other fests, the VIFF indulges passionate impulses, making paths that are fun to follow.

In Vancouver it was easy to see that this era's on-screen king is Asano Tadonobu, whose sly bemusement and bone-caged strength continue to inspire homoerotic love letters from male directors. Tony Rayns's "Dragons and Tigers" program offered a double dose of Asano, and Rayns's program notes for Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Bright Future (and his decision to show Kurosawa's initial, longer cut) highlighted that film's male-melodrama romanticism. Wrapped skintight in glam-dandy fashions, Asano is at the core of Bright Future's fraternal and paternal network of sublimated love affairs.

Like Kurosawa, Pen-ek Ratanaruang is obviously inspired by Asano's handsome presence. The highlight of the festival – and my favorite film of the year so far – Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe, is almost too with-it: cinematography by Chris Doyle, a cameo by Takashi Miike (as well as a plot that springboards from the yakuza madness of Takashi's Ichi the Killer), and credit placement that echoes that of fellow Thai director Joe Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours all prove Ratanaruang is watching his contemporaries very closely. His command is so assured, though, that these elements flow with a liquid grace matched by the film's shimmering minimalist score. Last Life is 2003's true lost-in-translation love story, and knowingly or not, its convertible cruises along a shoreline result in a priceless valentine to Jacques Demy.

Asano did have one rival in Vancouver. As the cold, unreadable touchstone of Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder and the confused suitor in Park Chan-ok's Jealousy Is My Middle Name, Park Hae-il possesses Asano's somber range and takes it into discomfiting terrain. Sometimes androgynous, sometimes boylike, he allows an element of mystery into his performances that benefits both films.

Film festivals are exhaustingly meta, but in Vancouver it's easy to recognize intelligent programming amid the random coincidences. It was surely no accident that The Fog of War and Elephant became the chief double feature at the fest's largest theater – the Vogue – one evening: U.S. violence got the large stage and extended close-ups it's demanded. Just one night earlier, Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn had ricocheted off the Vogue's walls and floors. An ode to cinema's imminent death set in an ailing cinema, Tsai's film could also borrow the title of Boyd McDonald's old essay collection Cruising the Movies. Though Jacques Nolot's recent Porn Theater used a similar concept first, Tsai – armed with a fresh bag of sight gags – is far more adept at finding new points of view in the bright lights and shadowy corridors. Any movie theater that plays Goodbye Dragon Inn becomes part of the film's narrative space. During the question-and-answer session afterward, Tsai revealed he'd funded the film out of his own pocket after receiving "insulting" offers from European production companies.

The film market may be lively, but Jack Valenti-style commercial tyranny is still in place. Thom Anderson's three-hour documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself thoroughly maps Hollywood distortions. A Los Angeles (he dismisses "L.A." as a pejorative) resident who resents the city's treatment at the hands of the film industry, Anderson has fashioned an unapologetic screed – as meta as Goodbye Dragon Inn – that just might fundamentally alter the way you see movies. Here's hoping his scathing revision of Hollywood travels to San Francisco, along with some of the hard-to-find gems (Bush Mama, Bless Their Little Hearts, The Exiles) he and the VIFF selected to accompany it.