THE STRANGERS IN THE SEA (2008, Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa)

This is my comment in Screenout Webboard:
http://www.xq28.org/zaa/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=79&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=225

ตอบน้อง ZM

พูดถึงคนหล่อๆในมิวสิควิดีโอ ก็เลยทำให้นึกถึงพระเอกมิวสิควิดีโอ “เกี่ยวกันมั้ย” ของ Lydia น่ารักมากๆเลยค่ะ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=644kGFtJ7Pg

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เพิ่งไปเที่ยวภูเก็ตมา ก็เลยนำประสบการณ์มาฝากค่ะ

Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa, aka Filmsick, posted his new film called THE STRANGERS IN THE SEA, in youtube. You can watch his new film at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWC0enV1l0E

I just met him in Phuket and we went to Naiyang Beach on the northern part of the island on Saturday, May 3. He shot this film there. I like this beach very much.

My trip to Phuket surprised me a lot. Before the trip began, I hoped it would turn out as THE GREEN RAY (1986, Eric Rohmer, A+++++), which means I might find a handsome man to be my husband or something like that. Unfortunately, my trip turned out to be OPEN WATER (2003, Chris Kentis, A+), because my friend and I went snorkeling on Friday, but we were carried away by very strong waves farther and farther from our boat and the shore. The more we swam, the farther we were from the boat. We couldn’t fight the waves. The boat crew didn’t help us immediately because they had to take care of other tourists. So they let other tourists snorkeling for one hour as promised, then they came to pick us up from the sea after we were adrift in strong waves for one hour. I don’t think I will ever go snorkeling again.


Some images from Naiyang beach:

FILMSICK'S REVIEW ON "CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING"

--Senses of Cinema has included my list in its world poll. I feel very glad. Thank very much to the editor of Senses of Cinema. You can now read my list here:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/08/46/2007-world-poll-3.html#Phokaew


--Aaron, who is a huge fan of Jacques Rivette, asked me to translate Filmsick’s review on CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING from Thai to English. So here it is. If you find any mistakes in my poor English, please tell me about it so that I can correct it.

You can read Filmsick’s original writing in Thai here:
http://filmsick.exteen.com/20070318/celine-and-julie-go-boating

The following is my translation of Filmsick’s review:

It happens in a summer afternoon. Julie, a librarian with big glasses and curly red hair, is sitting in a garden. She is reading a big book about magic and using the heels of her shoes to draw a magical sign on the sand. Suddenly Celine, a small black-haired woman with strange haircut, loose-fitting shirt and gigantic bag, is walking past Julie. Celine's eye-glasses are dropping out of her bag.

Julie sees it and tries to call Celine. Julie shouts and runs after Celine, but Celine never looks back. She even drops many more things along the way. Julie tries to pick them up. At first Julie tries to help Celine, but later it seems as if they are playing a game by chasing each other around the town in the afternoon sunlight. Julie wears the eye-glasses and scarf of Celine, and follows Celine into a small shop in which Celine performs some magical tricks. Their chase ends at a coffee shop.

After that, they move into the same room. Each of them takes turn living the other one's life. They discover an extremely strange haunted house where each of them alternately enters to try to find the truth about the murder of a little girl. Everything happens in a cheerful mood.

"It is as if the air is full of magic," says someone who watches CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING. This is a film made in 1974 by Jacques Rivette, one of the French New Wave filmmakers who collectively wrote a new page for the history of cinema. They began by working as critics for the magazine Cahiers du Cinema and formed a group of friends, including Francois Truffaut who made some tender films (JULES AND JIM, THE 400 BLOWS), Jean-Luc Godard who tirelessly experiments with films (BREATHLESS, ALPHAVILLE), Claude Chabrol who is the master of films about marital problems and skeletons in the closet (LE BOUCHER, LES BICHES), and Eric Rohmer who is the master of films about the witty and sensitive relationships between men and women (A WINTER'S TALE, PAULINE AT THE BEACH). Rivette may be the least well-known among them, but if we compare them by their skills and techniques, Rivette may be one step ahead of his friends.

In CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, which can be considered Rivette's most successful film, Rivette takes us into a strange magical world. It is a world where everything is possible, a world where a haunted house is another side of an amusement park, a world where alphabets and magic stay the closest to each other, a world where dreams and reality merge into each other, a world where an image tastes as sweet as candy, a world which we can simply call it a movie.

This is a film which speaks about films. It isn't only a film which refers to other films, not only a film which contains another film, but it is also a film which speaks about films and filmgoers with love and mockery.


FILM IS A LIBRARIAN AND AN ILLUSIONIST

In the first twenty minutes of the film, we watch Celine and Julie play with each other. If we regard it as the chase between a librarian and an illusionist, it can be considered as the phenomenon of the invention of cinema, because cinema is the combination between a story (a librarian) and an illusion of moving images (an illusionist). Sometimes Celine and Julie switch into each other's role. Sometimes Celine, the magician, goes to a library and draws pictures in books. When Celine is among her friends, she tries to tell a story (this is the only scene in the film which is improvised by the actors), but her story about an American friend is ridiculously full of plot holes. Sometimes Julie, the librarian, goes to perform some magic tricks instead of Celine during the time Celine visits the haunted house. But instead of giving a magic performance, Julie tells such a weird story on the stage that the shop owner cannot stand her any more. Each of the women has her own roles. When each of them switch into the other's role, the result would look ridiculous (though lovely). And when each of them alternately visits the haunted house, their memories are full of fragments. Everything can be clearly understood only when both of them enter the haunted house at the same time.

In one scene we see both of them transform into skating ninjas to steal a book from a library, because they want to find a formula to make magical drinking water! This is the meeting between books and magic, stories and illusive images, which lead to a new thing—the magical drinking water which can take both of them into the world of the haunted house, or the world of films.

In one scene when Celine is in the haunted house, Julie climbs the stair on the other side, and that stair becomes an important thing in the final part of the film. It is as if the support that stories and images give to each other is the only thing that can make films go farther than before.

But in another way, Celine and Julie may be the same person since the beginning. In the first scene, Julie is reading a magic book, and suddenly Celine, who is a magician, appears in front of her. In another scene, when Julie visits the haunted house, Celine disguises as Julie to go on a date with Julie's fiance and he seems to notice no difference between them. (Celine even makes him go naked.) Sometimes Julie recites some magic words when she stays home, as if she becomes Celine. Each of them alternately plays the same part of the nurse in the haunted house.


FILM IS A SWEET CANDY

After visiting the haunted house, both Celine and Julie seem to be exhausted, and their mouths always contain some sweet candy. This seems like an experience of watching a movie in the afternoon. Some good movies draw our life energy until we become exhausted. We walk out of a theatre, with some tastes linger in our memories so that we can cherish them for a long time. After Celine and Julie come home, they sit beside each other and face the camera, and they swallow the candy, and then they are lost inside the haunted house again.

In this aspect, Celine and Julie are the audience. The audience has seen a film which has sucked out their life energy. And when they come home, they try to remember the film. When Celine and Julie swallow the candy, images start to appear. We see images inside the haunted house juxtaposing with images of Celine and Julie laughing, feeling sleepy, becoming excited, and screaming. This is not different from watching images of a film shown on a screen juxtaposing with images of the audience in the theatre. Before this scene, Celine and Julie are the raw materials used in making a movie, but in this scene, Celine and Julie become the audience who watch a whodunit thriller.


FILM IS A HAUNTED HOUSE

This is the most precise definition of film. Film is a haunted house. The experience of watching a film is like going into a haunted house. We walk into a dark room. We are haunted by unknown lights and shadows, which forcefully stir our feelings and emotions—our suffering, our happiness, our love, our hatred, our bravery, and more importantly—our fear.

The experience inside the haunted house takes both of them back into the 1940's, into a big mansion in which a widow resides. He has a sick daughter, a nurse to take care of her (they alternately play the role of the nurse.), and there are two other women in the house. Images in their memories come in fragments. First the images appear very briefly, very incomprehensible. Then we begin to see a scene or an event. Every time a scene appears before our eyes, Celine and Julie (and all of us) will start guessing the outcome of an event in different ways, until our guesses are betrayed by the next images.

At this time Celine and Julie become characters in a film. They become a nurse who does more than the role of a supporting character. In the final part when both of them enter into the haunted house at the same time, they even take a nurse's uniform with them so that they can both take turn performing a nurse without interruptions.

Some critics say that the events inside the haunted house take us back to the period of Henry James' novels with a story about melodramatic love inside a luxurious mansion. Even the names Celine and Julie are familiar names used for the characters of Henry James.

At the moment when both of them have to start performing a nurse, we always hear a knocking sound. Some critics say that the knocking sound is the sound used to call a performer to appear on the stage. At this moment Celine and Julie have fully become actresses.

But they do more than that. They start changing many things in the haunted house, but the story still moves forward. At this point Rivette makes us understand how ridiculous and static a story can be. (We can see in the later part that the people in the house, except Celine and Julie, have very pale faces and move like zombies.) Celine and Julie's attempts to change the story cannot really change the fixed plot of the story. Even when Celine and Julie play tango music, the characters still dance to waltz music. Celine and Julie try further by changing the clothes of these characters and dancing by themselves. Finally Celine and Julie transform the story by an aggressive means—kidnapping a character!

Finally Celine and Julie become filmmakers, and they make unusual films. Starting by representing the audience, they later become the representation of Jacques Rivette, a filmmaker who chooses not to let the story dominate the lives of people in his films. A story is only an element under the control of the filmmaker, who can twist it in any which way he desires. When a story moves forward, it doesn't mean that the significant thing is only the progress of the story, because there are other stories outside the main story. Sometimes some stories merge into each other. Sometimes some stories diverge from each other.

In one scene Julie discovers her own box which contains an old photo of that haunted house. She used to live in that neighborhood when she was a child. When she goes there, she meets her nanny. If we consider the fact that the person who takes Julie back to that house is Celine, we may think that all of this is just a daydream of Miss Julie—an intense dream full of magic, madness, and energy. We should also notice that Celine and Julie wear blue and red clothes in the early part of the film, but they stop wearing these colors when the characters in the haunted house wear these colors. Celine and Julie's colors are transferred to these characters.


FILM IS GOING BOATING

In the final scene of this film, Celine and Julie and her character go boating along a quiet river in the afternoon sunlight. They meet the boat of the characters in the haunted house. Maybe all of this is an experience of going boating in a quiet afternoon. We feel the fresh air, but we also have a deep fear, because we are journeying into an unknown area, creating stories out of the things we meet, and destroying stories within the same river. The film repeats itself but changes the origin as if stories can be told and re-told forever. And the cat (which we see at the beginning and at the end of the film) watches us and daydreams about us.

The crossing between fiction and reality has blurred the line between them and destroyed the audience's senses until we cannot understand it within one dimension. (It is very interesting that during this period there are some other films which twist and play with the dimensions of storytelling, such as INDIA SONG (1975, Marguerite Duras) and EDEN AND AFTER (1970, Alain Robbe-Grillet)) This helps turning film watching into an exciting experience, like an experience of going into a haunted house and leaving it with a souvenir in the form of a sweet candy in a late afternoon sunlight.

FILMSICK'S REVIEW OF "KRISANA" (FALLEN)

FILMSICK wrote in Thai about KRISANA (FALLEN) (2005, Fred Kelemen, A+) in his blog:
http://filmsick.exteen.com/20071109/fallen

This is my translation of his article:

This article contains spoilers.

This article comes from Filmsick’s personal opinion and the conversations with Fred Kelemen both in the Q&A session and after the session.

FALLEN

It happened in a dark night, which might be too dark. Somebody wandered in a lonely, quiet, deserted street. He climbed up a stair and walked on a bridge to cross a river. The lamps on the bridge gave too little light to fight the darkness. Another person appeared in the small lighted area. Her fragile body was on the edge of the bridge. She turned her face to look at the pedestrian. What flickered in her eyes might be a cry for help, or just a glance, or the feeling of guilt for a sin she was going to commit. He couldn’t tell it, because everything was too dark. He paused to look at her. There was darkness between them. He walked on by, saying nothing. He walked from the beam of light into the embrace of darkness. Suddenly he heard a scream from far away, and the sound of something falling into the water.

Then darkness seized upon his heart and no light could enter it any more.

FALLEN tells the story of a man who happened to witness a suicide of a woman, but didn’t try to stop her. After her body disappeared, he started to search for her identity, creating the story of her life out of traces left behind in various places. And that led him to meet another man and some unpredictable secrets.

FALLEN was shot in gloomy black-and-white. Its location looked more like a deserted town than a real town. In this film, Kelemen reduced the bravura cinematographic effects and chose to shoot it simplistically. He used the story to tell the state of the characters, and that may make us overlook hidden meanings in each scene and may make us pay attention to the story which has nothing new. In fact, the story of FALLEN needs nothing new, because Kelemen hides the meanings in each scene which advances with deliberate pace.

Matiss Zelcs (Egons Dombrovskis), the main character, worked as a clerk in an office. His job was to deal with tons of document, compiling them and put them in the right places. He met a woman who tried to commit suicide, but didn’t help her. He did what he usually did, which was compiling documents about her or her evidence. He tried to create her story out of her traces, treating her life as if it was a document job which kept bothering him. After he told a policeman about what he had seen, the policeman told him about a lot of statistics on suicide. The policeman told him that we always wanted to get to know someone only after that person had been dead. What Matiss did resembled the police’s job—collecting evidence to find the cause of it all.

After that, he transformed himself from a clerk into a detective. He played a role which we usually see in regular detective movies. A woman disappeared. A man got suspicious and tried to find some clues and then he found the reasons behind the disappearance. But what makes FALLEN different from other films is the fact that FALLEN has asked us since the beginning whether what the main character did is the act of hero or just a deformed expression of curiosity and guilt.

He tried to trace back her trip on that night. He started from the place where she jumped into the water. Then he found a bar nearby and a barman who kept a handbag she had left in the bar. In the handbag, he found some unsent suicide letters, some trinkets, and a photo retrieval coupon from a photo shop. He read the letters and went to retrieve the photos. They were photos of a party, including photos of the woman, a man and a child. They might be her family. And there were also photos of her with a male stranger in the party.

He tried to imagine the story of her life and her death by using her letters and her photos. He created the story of her life as he wished, trying to make her into a flesh-and-blood character, instead of just a female stranger on a bridge. From that point, he started searching for the male stranger in the party, and got to know the whole story, which led to a shocking conclusion. The male stranger decided to commit suicide after talking to him. It seemed as if everything had come to an end. But it wasn’t like that. Because the woman (whom he believed to be dead) suddenly appeared.

The film seems to follow the full pattern of the detective genre. (Sometimes we may be reminded of the main character in Hitchcock’s VERTIGO, which also got involved with a ‘dead’ woman.) But FALLEN goes farther than that, because Kelemen lets us see the “myth” of those heroes in the detective genre.

Throughout the investigation, he behaved like an ordinary detective. He tried to make some assumptions from the clues. But isn’t it true that all these clues were full of gaps and holes, holes of flesh and blood and life? After he had gathered enough evidence, he started to criticize and judge her life and people around her. After he had picked up her photos, he watched the slides from the party. He kept watching the slides backward and forward, paying attention to the gaze of people in the photos. Then he uttered, “Pure jealousy,” when he saw the photo of a man watching his wife, who was watching the other guy. Matiss then became someone who judged other people by using just the data he had. His judgment was just a response to his curiosity. (He had watched the slides until he saw a photo of the woman going on a trip with the stranger, then he rewound the slides to look at them again. By that time, he had already guessed that she might have a secret lover and that her husband might get suspicious.)

He searched and found her lover. In an important scene, the lover told him about his relationship with the woman, while the camera circled around both characters in a small, uncomfortable bar. Then he judged other people again. He told her lover, “You don’t love her. You just want to possess her. You ruined her life.” His judgment brought about the lover’s guilt and ended in death.

Before that, guilt had already made Matiss interested in the life of the woman. He wouldn’t have had to go through things like this if only he had helped her on the bridge. But he was an archivist who spent most of his time with piles of documents instead of human beings. So it is understandable why he couldn’t make a quick proper decision when he suddenly saw a woman trying to commit suicide. (Kelemen said that in a Q&A after one screening, a viewer said that he would have helped the woman if he saw her, and Kelemen replied, “Everybody believes you would help her. But I don’t think everybody here would do the same thing.”)

So what motivated him is guilt. He felt guilty for something he chose not to do. His guilt is not so much different from the guilt of someone who tried unsuccessfully to kill another person. The guilt in this case doesn’t depend on the result of the action, but depends on the motivation to the failed action. The guilt of “wanting to kill” still remains with the person who had that desire, though the killing didn’t take place. Similarly, Matiss still felt guilty for not helping the woman, and that caused him to do other bad things such as lying to the police that he hadn’t seen her face. (He lied because he was afraid of his guilt and afraid of what other people, including the police, might think of him. His inaction transformed into guilt and neglect, and it might result badly.) The more he lied, the deeper he fell into the black hole of guilt. His search for the woman is a reaction to his own guilt, and also a way to transform himself into a “hero” who tried to bring the dead back home.

But his guilt and morals paid him back with the death of another man, after he had forced that man to feel guilty by using his moral principles. That man committed suicide in a toilet, maybe out of guilt, maybe out of drunkenness. Matiss’ guilt was not lessened, but multiplied.

The film satirizes the morals of the “hero”. We often view guilt as a good thing, but in fact it may be just a myth and has a very bitter taste. After the death of that man, Matiss, who believed in morals and ethics, walked into a church and vomited. This vomit in the church might be a too-late reaction to the death of that man, or it might be a satire to the fickleness of moral principles.

In that moment the woman walked out of the church, and his world came tumbling down. Her walking out of the place of virtues reflected very well his fickle moral principles. He had believed he was a hero, but in fact he was just a careless person who liked to judge other people quickly for his own benefits. He had presumed that the woman must have been like this or like that, judging her affairs with that man a bad thing. His doing is not different from ours, because we often believe that we are good and moral, and like to judge other people good or bad after reading about them from newspaper. We like to judge other people to prove our own morals and to bury our own guilt for our secret desire to be like the people in the newspaper. His using of moral standards to judge a stranger led to nothing except the increase of his self-importance. But the result of it is that he fell deeper into the black hole of his own guilt.

After that scene, we saw him tried to climb up a river bank into an empty space. We saw him falling back and climbing up again. All his efforts led to nothing except emptiness.

The film cleverly talks about guilt and redemption, and concludes them in the final scene. There are many gaps in this film, for example, we never know if the woman who jumped from the bridge is the same woman at the end of the film. She might not have committed suicide because she had suddenly realized the value of her life. We are not sure whether her lover was dead or not. (Because in both suicide scenes we never see the corpse. We only hear the sound of suicide and we imagine by ourselves what must have happened.) Death is not a way to redemption, and redemption itself may be just a way to satisfy our own personal desire.

If we step back a bit from the film, we may realize that the audience of this film is like the “hero”. We pay the ticket to watch the lives of others. We imagine the lives of these characters by using what we see on the screen. Kelemen said that whenever you use a camera to film something, what is captured by the camera is not the truth anymore, because the cameraman must select what should be inside the frame, and what should be left out of the frame. This selection makes what happens inside the frame a fragment. And no matter how many fragments we try to put together, we can never see the whole truth. Sometimes we judge other people as jealous person. Our act is similar to what the hero did when he watched the slides. We carry our guilt and sins within ourselves when we go to watch any films, and we hope that the films may redeem us. But films can only give a temporary illusion of redemption. They can only give us a little time to bury our infected wounds deeper within ourselves. But FALLEN opens these wounds.

The falling into sins in this film is presented by gloomy black-and-white images in which blackness occupies more than half of the screen. This film has many sound effects, but every song in the film is diegetic. We hear many noises whose sources are not present on the screen but exist in the narrative space, such as the barking of a dog, the chirping of birds, and the sound of a train. All of these noises create a realistic atmosphere, but also remind us of “the reality” of things outside the frame. (Kelemen is always very precise in the use of sound in his films.)

Comparing FALLEN to previous films by Kelemen, we may find that Kelemen reduces the bravura effects of his cinematography, and pays more attention to the complexities of the characters’ minds. The situations in FALLEN are complicated and strong enough to make an entertaining film out of it, but Kelemen chooses to use this story in the opposite way. He uses it to peel away the façade of these characters to find the hollowness inside.

FILMSICK'S REVIEW OF "PHANTOM LOVE"

FILMSICK wrote in Thai about PHANTOM LOVE (2007, Nina Menkes) in his blog:
http://filmsick.exteen.com/20071109/phantom-love-1

This is my translation of what Filmsick wrote:

A big snake slithered in the middle of a narrow corridor which Lulu had to pass through. Its gigantic body reflected the neon light, making its skin glitter. She paused for a while, staring at the big snake slithering slowly. She moved towards the snake. Suddenly, when she was going to walk past it, the image is paused for a while, maybe for 3-5 seconds. We saw the back of a woman in black dress, her feet pausing in the air, and the snake!

The black-and-white images which appear repeatedly and in a rhythm, the haunting sound effects, the editing which is hostile to the story (if there is a story)—all of these are in the latest film of Nina Menkes, an American female director. Most of her films are not widely distributed. Most of them are shown in film festivals and arthouse theatres. Most of them were made with low budget, star her own sister, and were shot in distant locations, such as in Israel or India. Her films don’t focus on chronological order or on telling stories.

PHANTOM LOVE is more like a record of nightmares than a lucid story. The story in this film is like a small wire used to connect fragments of dreams. The story is about Lulu, a woman who worked in a dark casino full of Chinese customers. She lived in a dark house, which looked very much like a hotel room. Her lover did nothing except having sex with her and staying on top of her. She had a cat, and spent her free time watching news about Iraqi war. She had a mad sister who had wounds on her face and lived with two black dogs. Their mother did nothing except calling Lulu to complain to her about Lulu’s sister and keeping on attacking Lulu in Lulu’s dream.

Big and small fragments in this film seems to be shot with no connection to one another, before these fragments are put together to create repeated rhythm in the film. In the earlier part of the film, we see same events occurring in repeated rhythm—having sex, filing nails, watching TV, going to work. We see her “self” and her repeated chores, but we can’t put these scenes into a chronological order, can’t predict anything, or can’t understand their details. All of these scenes are punctuated by images of animals. Some of them are parts of the story; some of them appear out of nowhere. A big snake, an octopus, a cat, bees—all of them seem to signify something and create a strange and inexplicable rhythm.

The story moved forward. Lulu went to visit her sister who had some strange wounds. Her sister lived in a dirty house. Her wounds might be the result of her allergy to some drugs or maybe she was physically abused. Maybe her wounds appeared out of nowhere. Her sister just kept crying and saying that their mother tried to make her commit suicide.

Their mother appeared in a dark room. Her high shrieking voice asked the magic mirror who was the fairest of them all. Then she appeared in Lulu’s dream as an attacker--once she tried to rape Lulu, then she tried to kill Lulu.

The film creates alienation towards both the characters and the audience in a very interesting way. Generally, alienation towards the audience may be accomplished by making the audience being aware that they are watching a film. Bertolt Brecht, a German author and dramatist, did this thing. (The example of this kind of awareness is when a character turned to talk to the audience and rewound a scene in Michael Haneke’s FUNNY GAMES). Some films create alienation towards the characters by using the frame to oppress the characters as if they are just objects amidst landscape. But all of these things usually appear very smoothly in a film with well-told story.

But in PHANTOM LOVE, the film creates alienation among many dimensions—the characters, the audience, the characters’ minds, and the film itself. The film makes the characters alienated to their surroundings, and then makes many places in the film seem to be unconnected to each other. In one scene, a character sat in a place which looked like a house, but when the camera cut away to another corner of the room, that corner looked very much like a corner of a luxurious hotel room. In one scene we saw a character sleep in a room, but wake up in another room. We see a Caucasian character work in a Chinese dress in a casino full of Asians. We see Lulu walk only in passageways which look like tubes or caves. Her sister’s house seems to be in the USA, but the location outside looks like India. When Lulu crossed the bridge (which also looks like a tube or a cave), Indian people appeared suddenly, making Lulu look like an alien in India. One of the most important scenes in this film also happens in a tube-like passageway. It’s when her sister held a lamp and walked out of a dark corridor before she merged her body with Lulu.

All of these things appear in no chronological order. There’s no scene indicating that the characters travel to other places or giving enough background to the place of the characters. (The characters are given nearly no background and no motivation in the film. All of this information is unnecessary.)

Of course, all of these things are connected to the strange appearances of many kinds of animals. I have heard that Nina Menkes believes that human spirits are connected to animals, and each kind of animal is a symbol of power inside a human being. Lulu had an agile cat. Her sister had big loyal dogs. Whenever Lulu had sex, images of an octopus appeared. The octopus looked frightening and charming at the same time. Her mother usually appeared with bees (such as in the scene which the mother stood in front of a mirror with bees flying around). In the only one flashback scene in the film, we see Lulu’s father threw a fish bowl to the floor. This fish may symbolize Lulu’s family life. After the fish bowl broke, her mother became the bees, her sister became the dogs, Lulu became the cat.

If we connect the animals to the characters (as if the characters can transform themselves into animals), we may discover that the wounds on her sister’s face might be caused by the stinging of the bees. These bees kept on annoying, like their mother who kept on calling Lulu repeatedly. (In some scenes Lulu had hung up the telephone, but we could still hear it ringing continuously.) And while the bees could attack Lulu’s sister, the mother was so afraid of Coco (Lulu’s cat) that she screamed out loud when she saw Coco enter her room.

We rarely see male characters in this film. They exist without appearance. Lulu’s father appears only in the scene of the breaking of the fish bowl. Lulu’s lover appears in the form of his back, which kept on moving up and down while Lulu’s face indicated extreme boredom. Then her lover hit her. Male characters in this film seem to have only two functions—having sex and assaulting women. Maybe we can say that the love between men and women is a form of “Phantom Love” or “Wicked Love”. When we look at the roles of men in this film, this film seems to look like a feminist film which talks about oppressed women who have to stand boring chores, boring activities (filing nails), boring service (Lulu’s casino job) and being a sex object. Women seem to be in a completely disadvantage position.

But wicked love in this film is not about that, but it’s about the love between women themselves. This film talks about the relationships between three women—mother and her two daughters. But their relationships are wicked. They hate one another.

The hatred between sisters is not obvious. We can see only the cold compassion Lulu had towards her sister. But in one scene we see that her sister merged with Lulu and became one woman. They seem to be two divided minds of a woman. One is weak; the other is cold-hearted. They are abused, not by men, but by a woman—their own mother.

Maternal love is a kind of love which only women can possess. Maternal love gives an honor to women. Many people say that maternal love is caused by instinct, but filial love is a duty. But in this film maternal love (particularly towards a daughter) usually comes with envy--envy of daughters as competitors, envy of their younger ages, especially when the daughter becomes a woman and the mother gets old (which leads to the question who is the fairest of them all). We never see the direct reaction between mother and daughters in this film, but we can guess about it from Lulu’s dream and from her sister’s talk and can understand how negatively their mother influenced them. In the scene which the mother tried to kill Lulu in her dream, Lulu fought back by using the reflection of a mirror to make her mother see the motherhood and the ugliness inside herself before the mother fled away.

Therefore, we can say that animals in this film may signify only femininity. They signify not only the characters, but also the situations facing the characters, including the big snake on the floor and the butterfly on a lamp which appeared after Lulu’s last dream about being cleansed in the Ganges river.

Apart from the animals, this film is also full of haunting noises and TV news about Iraqi war. Every TV in this film seems to show only this news. In one scene, Lulu was watching the TV news, and when she pushed her remote control, we heard an explosion in the news, as if Lulu’s life was destroyed in the explosion. Other noises include the telephone noise and the haunting soundtrack. In one of the most important scenes, we see someone running and trying to evade bombs between a narrow passage between buildings. The shape of this passage looks very much like the corridor with the snake and the bridge with Indians. The state of someone walking in a narrow passage full of dangers (snake, bombs, strangers, or even the river) may signify the oppression of the main character which is the female sex.

However, there are two interesting scenes in this film. One is when Lulu found a crystal ball on the floor. The other is when she dreamt that she was floating along the Ganges river. The first scene leads to the scene in which she dreamt that she exploded into pieces. The other scene leads to the scene in which her naked body evaporated into white light. These scenes seem to indicate cleansing and getting away from the state of oppression. This can only be achieved by getting rid of femininity.

This film may remind someone of David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD, films by Maya Deren, or films of Michelangelo Antonioni which analyze emptiness inside human beings. But that doesn’t make Nina Menkes’ film inferior to or being the reproduction of other films. Menkes has absorbed and created her own unique world, the haunting world which is the realm of women, the world in which films don’t have only narrative function, but can also go much farther than that to be something which can capture indescribable mirage. Menkes’ films can create this kind of images, bind them together by using the seam between each film frame, and present something which is beyond the power of literature.