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It required considerable willpower to endure the 3 hour and 18 minute “Platform” [China-Japan} which traces the history of Chinese cultural evolution in the decade between 1979-1989. It shows a theater commune, from Shanxi province, as its work changes from sloganeering propaganda pieces, in dun-colored dress, performed in local, workers’ halls, to the bright colors and attenuated Westernization of break-dancing and punk rock concerts. Progressively, color begins to seep into the film (the girls do “Hullabaloo” routines like “The Monkey” dressed in outlandish pink — extravagant for this drably clad troupe of young performers in the most colorless, provincial towns imaginable. (The towns’ looks never improve, but some of the troupe’s vivid green and yellows posters add a splash of color to the grey walls of a town square.)

The reason this saga of a cultural thaw and liberalization is so deplorably unappealing is that everything about the picture is appallingly homely, including the looks of the young members of the troupe. Two members of the company have an on-again-off-again liason (which is a cultural taboo, since they are unmarried). But because the director fails to show us precisely how the couple cohabits in the group dormatories where the troupe is quartered, and because the young couple is so wretched to look at, we really don’t care.

Possibly writer-director Jia Zhang Ke is inventing a new minimalist cinematic vocabulary like the Dogma school of Denmark. If you are thrilled by a fire lit in the left hand corner of the screen as it progressively fills the picture frame; if you are excited by waiting for the movement of a train crossing from screen left to screen right; if you are thrilled by the view through a muddy windshield of yet another wretched town’s main street because it’s the first camera movement in this static epic in at least half an hour. . . then you might find some relevance to being shown how the propaganda pageants are every bit as vacuous as the bugaloo dancers. In which case, you too should endure “Platform.” Amy Taubin of the Village Voice found it “a corrective to the spurious falsity and glamor of “Almost Famous” (which does have a story line and brevity unlike “Platform.”) There is one scene of the company’s director chewing out a member of the troupe when he misses a late night roll-call and boards the bus later than the others. That dressing down and one scene of the company trying to buy every piece of wretched but new-fangled clothing at an open air market, were the only scenes which seemed authentic to me.

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“Kippur” [Israel/France–Kino International] is a sporadically impressive film by Amos Gitai about the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which the filmmaker himself, now 50, was wounded. It aims to be innovative by elevating to heroism the dirty work of an Israeli team which combs battlefields in order to help the non-mobile wounded to field hospitals.

During Yom Kippur, its highest holy day, Israel was caught off guard by the invasion of Syria and Egypt. which obliged the Jewish State to play catch-up war.

“Kippur” has a number of privileged moments. One is a Belgian-Jew’s exhausted confession of how he rejected his mixed-race mother, while he was still a child, when she tried to return to him after her wartime detention. Another is a remarkable examination room scene, in which an overtaxed doctor gives rapid-fire diagnoses and recommends treatments for the battlefield retrievers, who are themselves hospitalized after their helicopter is brought down by a missile and anti-aircraft attack.

Gatai’s recreation of the carnage of the battlefield is as impresssive as actual documentary footage.

The most notable failing of the film is that the director keeps falling in love with such images as his initial one of a passionate couple amorously entwined in their progressively paint-smeared bed. One bout of messy love-play was more than enough, two was exhibitionistic. There is also a long-held shot of the dark, curly-haired head of the leading man (Liron Levo) hanging out of the helicopter’s loading door. I kept silently screaming, “Cut,” but the director held and held and held. Finally there is the protracted agony of the rescue team struggling to drag a badly wounded soldier to safety through a sea of mud on the Golan Heights. We understand the Sisyphus-like point of this ordeal, but Gitai holds the shots well beyond the point of our extreme discomfort — as if our boredom and distaste could equal the unit’s desperate frustration.

“Kippur,” like most of the lackluster Israeli features I’ve seen, lacks both humor and character development.

Gitai wants to renovate the conventions of the combat unit genre. He does so as unsuccessfully as Terrence Malick did in “The Thin, Red Line” by eliminating all the distinctive types who might stand out despite the quantity of battlefield gore. As we can’t tell who’s who in battle dress, the rescue team appears to be composed entirely of dark, curly-haired, Jewish men.

If only Gitai could have sustained the momentum of his energetic opening, where two officers (L. Levo and Tomer Ruso) are driving a little, white Fiat into the chaos of the battle zone in order to get into the fray, I could have recommended this film without reservation. But “Kippur” keeps getting bogged down, and the obstacle is not always muddy turf. ****

The unheralded sensation of the 38th NYFF was the Mexican “Amores Perros” (“Love’s A Bitch” – Lions Gate Films) the debut of a 37-year-old commercial and MTV director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. “Amores” is the most most visceral multiple-story picture I have seen since Tarentino’s “Pulp Fiction.”

The first section (#1) is the most adrenalin filled. It concerns two young and vicious brothers vying for the affection of the elder’s pretty wife, who has had a child with her husband but who has been impregnated, more recently, by his hotter, younger brother.

Number two (#2) deals with the clandestine affair of an adulterous magazine publisher and a gorgeous fashion model, one of whose well- publicized legs is shattered in a car crash involving a speeding shootout between the brothers of part #1.

#3) A derelict hit man pits two homicidal half-brothers against each other and donates his ill-gotten gains–for murders he hasn’t committed — to his beloved but estranged daughter.

Inarritu is juggling three sequential tales connected by a spectacular car crash (filmed by no less than 9 cameras.) Though #2 and #3 are less strong than #1, all of these combats — stemming from misguided love — are superior to the interwoven tales of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999).

The first episode is torrid with furtive sex and bloody with vicious dog fights which recur throughout the film. (It’s dog-eat-dog in teeming Mexico City, population 21 million.) Add in the car chase/shoot-out and the action is relentless.

Alejandro Inarritu is proof that a longtime DJ (the soundtrack of Amores Perros is notably seductive) and maker of commercials can make a successful leap to directing feature films. Mexico has, once more, a hot new director. Ole!

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You would probably utter a different expletive than “Eureka,” after enduring this furiously boring, 3 hour and 37 minute would-be epic. This ponderous tale, told elliptically by writer-director Shinji Aoyama, is so trivial and fabricated it would scarcely sustain a 90-minute pseudo-Antonioni enigma. However, “Eureka”‘s black-and-white, CinemaScope photography by Masaki Tamra is handsome. It even turns to color at the end when it genuflects to some apocalpytic monument (neither Hiroshima or Nagasaki is specified but Japanese audiences will know).

It’s Aoyama’s imagery that is blank although it deliberately alludes to his classic betters. Aoyama claims he was thinking of Ford’s “The Searchers,” and “Eureka”‘s bus driver is reading a picture book, ‘AKIRA.” The Village Voice’s Amy Taubin bought into these false comparisons to Ford and Kurosawa for her Festival preview.

The characters in “Eureka” are every bit as blank as the non-events of this “road picture.”. Its plot concerns the three, traumatized survivors of a bus-jacking in which 12 (passengers and their captors) were killed. The bus driver (Koji Yakusho of Imamura’s “The Eel”) plays one of those long-suffering Everymen we see often in Festival art films. He collects his shell-shocked but handsome young passengers — a brother and his sister as well as their intrusive, slimy cousin — and outfits another bus-van to take the survivors on a redemptive journey. Their road to false wisdom or self-discovery doubles back to the parking lot where the initial bus-jacking occurred. The brother turns out to be an unlikely serial killer of women although the blameless driver is the initial suspect.

“Eureka” altogether lacks what the long, ruminative, and comparable French sensation, “L’Humanite,” (1999) has in fascinating abundance. Bruno Dumont’s film gradually reveals its homely and lonely police investigator to be the actual slayer of school girls he has been hunting. Dumont’s ingredients missing from “Eureka” are: mystery, atmosphere, observation, paradox and brutal sex.

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Lars von Trier (“Dancer in the Dark”) believes he is the only director audacious enough to revive the movie musical. In fact, the genre only migrated to quick-cut song and dance numbers on television’s MTV and VH1. In “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” [Taiwan/ Sony Pictures Classics], the Festival’s prestigious Closing Night attraction, the gifted Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility” and “The Wedding Banquet”) tries to elevate traditional, B-movie martial arts pictures to an A-level by operatic means — sublime music and the choreography of action scenes into fantasias of flight. (The flying sequences are staged by Yuen Wo-Ping and his team, responsible for the new weightlessness of the flights through the air of “Matrix.”)

“Tiger/Dragon” is so gorgeous, it demands to be seen and heard and owned on DVD. The luscious score is by Tan Dun, an opera composer with the atrocious “Marco Polo” behind him and a commission from the Metropolitan Opera in his future. Dun’s score is filled with celestial solos for cello, played by the great Yo-Yo Ma.

The film’s chief novelty for the Kung Fu devotee is that Lee and his skilled partner, James Schamus (co-writer, co-Executive Producer), have shifted the fights from the usual all-male contests to bouts between men and women, as well as those between the female marital arts stars of three generations (the wondrous Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi and Cheng Pei Pei). Add the top male action star, Chow Yun-Fat, and you have the receipe for an Asian blockbuster, last summer, which director Lee hopes will repeat its success in Europe and the U.S. this winter.

It’s hard to make an art film out of an action picture, but I think Ang Lee has achieved this improbable feat. Though it represents a departure for its director, “Crouching Tiger” is every bit as concerned with family conflicts as “The Ice Storm,” and Lee’s Taiwanese hits before he made his superb English-language films. Only now these familial divisions are expressed in fantastic, aerial combats.

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