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September 23, 2007
Remember Ciao?
I've been feeling pangs of painful nostalgia for the Ciao shoot, which was wrapping up its first week exactly a year ago. An attempt was made tonight, twelve months hence, to approximate some of that magic by shooting some new footage for the film. Ladies and gentlemen, I must admit - it was for naught. The past is the past, and a flickering image shot off a TV screen offers neither conduit to nor fascimile of something long since faded.
In other words, it's not really new footage. There's an important scene in the film where the characters watch footage of someone else on TV, and in the original cut we just used the actual video they were watching (we had shot it off a monitor during principal photography, but somehow it ended up being shot at the wrong frame rate and was summarily unusable). It always bugged Yen and I, how clean it looked. It needed that touch of generational decay to really sell the distance between the characters and what they were watching. So we spent a few hours this evening shooting the footage off a TV and dropping it into the original cut. Then we wound up making a few other trims. Nothing huge, nothing that'll warrant a re-pressing of all the screener DVDs that have been making the rounds. Just little things that'll make the film that much better when it finally hits the big screen.
After we wrapped (if you could call it that), we watched Lee Chang Dong's new film, Secret Sunshine. It's been a long five years since Dong's Oasis; perhaps my anticipation was built up too much in the interim, or perhaps lead actress Jeon Do-yeon's award at Cannes this past spring raised my expectations a little bit too high - whatever the case, I was slightly underwhelmed by this new film. I truly appreciate Dong's refusal to sensationalize his subject matter (particularly in its gentle but pointed criticism of organized religion), but as a character study it's so protracted that it becomes a bit predictable. It's still very much worth seeing, though, particularly for two scenes: one set in a jail, and the other occurring at the very end, just before the credits roll, in which a woman cuts her hair and the camera pans away to the ground. Both scenes are so perfect, in such completely different ways, that I look forward to seeing the film again for their sake alone.
Posted by David Lowery at September 23, 2007 04:49 AM