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“Tale of Cinema” was a forgettable title which I couldn’t remember, even after looking it up seven times. The most sprightly aspect of this clumsy entry from South Korea/France, is the Festival publicist’s claim that the film “has a fresh, New Wave physical charm.”
Of course, I recall the writer-director Hong Sang-soo’s ponderous self-presentation at his Festival appearance in 2004, after his pompously sexist, “Woman is the Future of Man” was screened. At the previous festival, he insisted on using his own, laborious English rather than his interpreter’s, which was a turn-off.

“Tale of Cinema” is organized around the motif of the dominant, new and truly hideous Seoul Tower, perched high above the “beautiful, downtown” South Korean Capitol. The picture fastens on psychic recurrence far less gracefully than the Rodgers and Hart song, “Where or When.”

A tall, handsome, 19-year-old Boy (Lee Kiwoo) has trouble losing his virginity to Girl (Uhm Jiwon). He squeezes her breasts too roughly and, when she is turned off, he proposes a dual-suicide pact by sleeping pills, which they unsuccessfully attempt. Boy’s mom, a noted symphony conductor, chastises him for his foolishness.

When the couple attempt sex again, ten years or so later, Boy has been transformed into Man (Kim Sangkyung). (The cameraman, Kim Hyungkoo, favors oddly inappropriate, brightly-lit rooms for both trysts.) While Man still has Boy’s headful of black hair, he is now full-faced, squat, and more than a foot shorter. So I mistakenly thought Man was Boy’s brother, whom we had met in the picture’s opening scene.

It seems that Girl has transmuted into “Actress,” with no makeup to denote her maturation. There is a contretemps about Actress having told a filmmaker the humiliating story of their failed sex and suicide attempt–a story which he incorporated into a film starring the Actress, although we are not shown the director’s variant. (It would, of course, have been interesting to see this embarrassment from another filmmaker’s point of view, but I fear that it would still have been brightly lit.)
Man pursued the fleeing Actress while I made my way out of the screening. As Mr. Sang-soo, it seems, has now become a Festival regular, I will plan to avoid his future films.

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“Through the Forest” (France) may ever lack an American distributor, because it runs only 65 minutes, but, if the short films of Francois Ozon have found their way to DVD, I hope this beauty comes here as well.
The rare quality of this film makes one deeply grateful to the New York Film Festival Selection Committee, with whom I often find fault.
Of course it is “Ghost”-like twaddle to believe in the power of love to reincarnate one’s dead beloved, but this Gallic gem is so handsome and stylish that I was completely captivated. I felt it was my discovery and I was pleased to read, afterwards, that other critics felt the same.

Armelle (Camille Berthomier) and Renaud (Aurelien Wilk) are passionate lovers, as beautiful clothed as they are in the nude. When Renaud is abruptly killed in a motorcycle accident, Armelle is grief-stricken to the point of psychosis. Against her better judgment, she consults a medium who puts her in too great proximity to her lost beloved. Armelle hears and feels Renaud so close to her that it becomes tormenting. From this psychic communion she is led to encounter Hippolyte, who is no Greek god, nor the famed misogynist of antiquity, but a replica of the dead Renaud, parce que il sont fait par le meme comedien, Aurelien Wilk. (The French do coincidence far better than the Koreans.)

In re-encountering Renaud–or someone very much like him–Armelle is made vital and whole again, which makes for a transcendently happy ending.

The colors of this intricately shot and finely choreographed film (subtitled, “8 Signposts Accomplished in Only 10 Shots”) remain indelible. The red wall, of what turns out to be a restaurant, is such an unusual, intense shade that it will stay in my mind, like the vivid green-on-black end credits.

While I don’t believe in reincarnation, I do believe that people fall for the same type over and over again, and that, if the great poet of French cinema, Jean Cocteau, were himself revisiting us, his color films might be very similar to Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s “Through the Forest.”

M. Civeyrac is a teaching star at FEMIS, the French National Film School. His lucky students have a professor who knows whereof he speaks.

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“The President’s Last Bang” (South Korea/Kino International) is billed as a black comedy about the 1979 coup that overthrew and killed the tyrannical General Park Chunghee, after 18 years of despotism–the most significant historical event in South Korean history, according to writer-director Im Sang-soo, who is unrelated to the less gifted, Hong (“Tale of Cinema”) Sang-soo.

Sang-soo, 43, coolly treats this assassination as mockingly as he does the swift retribution visited upon Park’s turncoat chief of the Secret Service (the crafty actor Baik Yoonshik). Both sides are, as we learn, equally loathsome and corrupt, although the General privately boasts of his extreme personal reticence in only annihilating 10,000 South Koreans, as opposed to the Khmer Rouge’s slaughtering a million Cambodians.

Sang-soo took as his cinematic models “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas,” turning the entire Korean ruling class (circa 1979) into gangsters, which they most likely were.
One shot of one of the President’s men–attempting to replace a severed finger–is especially gruesome. However, I truly admired the camera placement of two amazing set-ups–one of an unsuccessful fugitive running down an immense flight of stairs into the arms of the law (with the camera placed below the staircase to emphasize its vertiginous height), and the other, an extreme long shot of a car, tiny in the frame, futilely circling the columned facade of the presidential palace with nowhere to escape.

Needless to say, this picture provoked enormous controversy in Im’s homeland. Perhaps his countrymen hadn’t realized their dictator and his henchmen were lecherous as well as corrupt. (At his last supper, the President entertained an attractive singer, 40 years his junior, as well as her ambitious stage mother. General Park’s amorous advances were curtailed by his assassin’s bullet.)
General Park’s family sued the filmmaker, so that there is no longer any archival footage of the dictator in the film. It’s not actually required.

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Top Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan’s “Breakfast On Pluto” (Ireland-UK/Sony Pictures Classics) was singled out as the Centerpiece of this year’s Festival, and it is a joy to behold–a rapturously beautiful film about the unlovely subject of a flaming and highly cheeky transvestite, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy). “Kitten” prefers love to violence, but keeps getting beaten up, when he is not the bloody victim of a London club bombing–for which he is erroneously blamed.

The orphaned, “Kitten” is left as a babe on the doorstep of a parish house. In fact, this is the very house in which his mother was impregnated, on the kitchen floor, by their local priest, Father Bernard (Liam Neeson).
The nine-lived Kitten’s quest is to locate his actual parents, in this delirious fairy tale derived from tales published in Irish girlie magazines. These short pieces provided the basis of a picaresque novel by Patrick McCabe, who, in turn, wrote the screenplay with Jordan. In consequence, the film is divided into 35, hand-lettered chapters. (McCabe is also the author of “Butcher Boy,” of which Jordan made a notable film in 1997.)
The screening audience went bananas over two sequences in which the chirping of two Belfast robins was translated, by sub-titles, into erudite allusions to Oscar Wilde and Mitzi Gaynor, the former Hollywood songbird.

I liked many sequences in this film–especially those involving the great Irish actor Stephen Rea as Bertie, a sweet, furtive and gay London magician. Bertie takes in Kitten as his lover, as well as the pinioned target of his knife-throwing and sawing-in-half tricks.
The fantastic beauty of a children’s theme park, where Kitten is employed for a time as a giant yellow mouse, is as extraordinarily designed, by Tom Conroy, as is the selection of a seaside location, where Kitten is briefly housed in a rundown caravan by his first lover, a rock bandleader (Gavin Friday). Of course, an IRA squad uses the caravan to hide its rifles, which Kitten has, pacifically, thrown into the sea. The frustrated IRA louts, in turn, avenge themselves on gentle Kittie, who prefers to be loved not mauled.
I hope to find and visit that lovely location by an Irish bay someday. The DVD has to be viewed to witness the exceptional beauties of this film that transcend its hokum.

Towards the end, the film turns offensively sentimental with a long scene of Neeson confessing his paternity to “Kitten” through the intercom of a peep show in London’s Soho, from which the priest rescues her.
Following this deliverance, there is a surreptitious meeting between “Kitten” and his step-brother, whom “Kitten” has found in South London after his contrite, Roman-collared father gives him his mum’s address. (His mother is, coincidentally, in a maternity hospital once more.)

Director Jordan finds no similarity between the guns and transvestitism of “Breakfast on the Pluto” and his “The Crying Game (1992),” but he appreciates that comparisons will be drawn between these alternately radiant and bitter works.
Cillian Murphy (“28 Days Later”), looking far younger than his 29 years, is a hero for risking his budding reputation by taking on such an extremely effeminate role. I regret to say that I find him rather one-note and wide-eyed in the part, and I grow weary of his constant, radiant beaming. But I appreciate Murphy’s effort, and understand that he was terrific in Wes Craven’s “Red Eye.” Kitten is certainly a showy part, but unrewarding in Murphy’s paws.

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