This is my reply to Nina Menkes in my English blog:
http://celinejulie.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/phantom-love-2007-nina-menkes-a/
I truly love your film, but your film gives me such indescribable feelings that I can’t find words for them. So I think as for now I had better translate what my friends wrote in Thai about your film.
The comment below is what my Thai friend, Filmsick, wrote in his blog :
http://filmsick.exteen.com/20071101/my-world-film-fest-2007-2
“This film tells a story about a woman who has a boring life, a boring job, a boring lover, and watches boring news on TV. She has a sick sister and a crazy mother who keeps calling her on the telephone all the time. Her mother also tries to kill her in her dream.
The film makes me feel very excited, because it abandons the narrative and becomes a journal of never-ending nightmares of someone who was born as a female. The film has no chronological order and doesn’t specify where each scene takes place. Many scenes in the film have no indication whether they happen in reality or not. The story becomes confusing with the repetition of daily chores and supernatural events.
The film is full of animals. (I have heard that the director may believe that human spirits are connected to animals) So in this film we can see animals such as octopus, snake, dogs, cat, bee, and butterfly. Some of them exist in reality, while some of them may not. Maybe they are symbols of some kinds of power, maybe not.
In my personal opinion, I think this film is a special kind of feminist film, because even though the film may portray women in a patriarchal world, the film doesn’t tell women to unite and fight, but portraying women who hate each other. Even the mother-daughter relationship is unusual, because in the heroine’s dream, the mother tries to rape and kill her (before the heroine uses a mirror to make the mother see the motherhood in herself).
The film is full of many interesting topic, including illusion, dreams and strange places (the heroine wears a Chinese dress and works in a casino which seems to be in China, but some parts of the story take place in USA and her sister’s house, while the bridge on which the heroine walks many times is in India, and the TV always shows news about Iraq.)
Some audience may think this film is made by someone who has no ability to make film, while other audience may think this film is made by someone who is brave enough to tell a story in every possible way.”
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--Merveillesxx, who is another Thai friend of mine, also wrote about your film in English in a webboard as following:
“In my opinion, Phantom Love concerned about the woman who trapped in both physical and psychological way. The first one was shown by her job (she has only said the same sentence “No more bet, Thank you”), her boyfriend (their intercourse is something like a vicious cycle and the disgusting octopus is the explanation of her feeling), and her family. The second one was presented in abstract and surreal approach. I think her younger sister’s character didn’t really exist. It was a symbol that portrayed her long-termed painful mentality. Anyway, I feel that the woman can release herself from something at the end of the film.”
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--As for my personal feelings, the scene in which the heroine’s sister walks with a lamp gives me such a strongly surreal feeling. I felt as if the sister could step out of the screen at that moment. I felt as if I was not watching a movie. I felt as if the screen which showed this film became a door to another world or a door connecting the real world to a twilight zone.
--In my first viewing of this film, I felt the octopus was very ugly and disgusting. In my second viewing of this film, I felt the octopus had its own kind of beauty.
--Nearly each scene in this film gives me very strong feelings, especially the scene of someone running and evading bombs in TV, which appears after the levitation-explosion scene. I think the scene of a person trying to evade bombs might look very ordinary if it appears in other films. But when it appears after the levitation-explosion scene, this TV news scene becomes something truly extraordinary.
--One of my friend said that he felt very tortured when he watched the nail filing scene.
--I really agree with my friend that if one has to find a film to screen together with PHANTOM LOVE, that film might be THE SLEEP OF REASON (1984, Ula Stoeckl), which is a very surreal film about a woman who kills her daughters, her rival, and herself. These two films are not alike, but both are great surreal films about women.
http://www.ula-stoeckl.com/Film-Seiten/17_Der_Schlaf_E.html
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