THE SOUND OF WATER DRIPPING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

This is my reply to Harrytuttle in my blog:
http://celinejulie.blogspot.com/2007/11/world-film-festival-bangkok-2007.html

--Yes, I like YUMURTA a lot. I think I even like YUMURTA and ANGEL’S FALL (2005, Semih Kaplanoglu) more than the three films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan that I saw—CLOUDS OF MAY, DISTANT, CLIMATES. I like Ceylan’s films very much, but the main characters in YUMURTA and ANGEL’S FALL fascinate me more than the main characters in Ceylan’s. I think the character “Yusuf” in YUMURTA is enigmatic to me. I couldn’t guess anything about him when I was watching this film. I didn’t know if he was a psycho, a man with deep secrets, a man with tortured soul, a man with a broken heart, a man with a past or without a past, etc. Kaplanoglu gave us so little information about the characters, and the characters in YUMURTA always restrain their expressions and emotions. And when I face characters like this, my imagination tends to run wild. At first I guessed some evil things would surely happen in YUMURTA, like the sexual crime and murder in ANGEL’S FALL, so I felt quite relieved when nothing evil really happens in the film.


--In my opinion, I like THINGS WE DO WHEN WE FALL IN LOVE very much, though a little bit less than BEFORE WE FALL IN LOVE AGAIN (2006, James Lee). I think BEFORE WE FALL IN LOVE again is weirder, more original, more minimalist. THINGS WE DO WHEN WE FALL IN LOVE, for the most part, is like a naturalistic film about stale love relationship. I felt great when I was watching this film, but it doesn’t make me feel as if I was watching something “new” as in the case when I was watching BEFORE WE FALL IN LOVE AGAIN.

One reason why I love both films very much is because these two films seem to portray love or relationship in a bad way. After I saw these two films, it’s hard for me to believe in love, the eternity of love, the sincerity of love, or something like that. These two films seem to portray the other side of love relationship, the side which most romantic films intend to ignore.

My most favorite scene in THINGS WE DO is the scene in which the main couple was sleeping in a bed, then the woman (if I don’t remember it wrongly) woke up and seemed to be troubled by the sound of water dripping in the bathroom. I don’t know if this scene symbolizes anything or not. This scene is surely not important at all to the plot of the film, but I like this scene very much because it seems like a small detail in our daily life, but this small detail in life is rarely portrayed in films.

Though most parts of THINGS WE DO are as naturalistic as French films about human relationships, there are two unnaturalistic scenes in this film which are very interesting to me. First, it is the scene in which the hero suddenly found himself wandering in a barren landscape. The use of surreal barren landscape in this scene somehow reminds me of some Indonesian films of Faozan Rizal. The second scene is the scene in which the hero danced in front of his car. This scene reminds me of some stupid Thai films in the 1980’s. If this scene appeared in old Thai films, I would have thought the scene was very ugly and stupid. But when this scene appears in this film and seems to be totally different from other scenes in the film, I think I like this scene for its craziness.


--You can see the photos from THINGS WE DO WHEN WE FALL IN LOVE here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doghouse73pictures/sets/72157594510575195/