Film Carew: What We Do In The Shadows, Wetlands, The Grandmaster

What We Do In The Shadows

Vampire mythology is already pretty funny as it is, what with the penchant for Gothic clichés, the hoary saws of garlic and wooden stakes, the ruffled shirts, the decadent eroticism. Perhaps that’s why the ‘Vampire comedy’ has a long and unimpressive history: once the ‘funniness’ is played up, the jokes seem to obvious; the ridiculousness blown out too big. What We Do In The Shadows is, in contrast, an impressive vampire comedy, succeeding because it plays it straight.

It’s a mockumentary set in a Wellington sharehouse, ever-droll director Taika Waititi (Eagle vs. Shark, Boy) finding absurdity by putting dandyish bloodsuckers in mundane domestic situations. Whether it’s failing to put out the recycling or wash your bloody dishes, there’s a chore wheel to be obeyed. Come Friday night, however, and the vamps are on the bus into town, out for blood like bros on the pull. Getting dressed up is decidedly difficult when you don’t have a reflection, luring home a victim requires all kinds of elaborate seduction, and the clean-up’s the mother of all domestic chores if you hit the main artery.

The deadpan air never lifts, with Waititi and longtime collaborateur Jemaine ‘Flight Of The Conchords’ Clement old hands at straightface. In pursuit of the awkwardness to make the mockumentary ruse stick — and to summon the banality of reality-television — Waititi employs Cori Gonzalez-Macuer perfectly, as the doltish dude unintentionally turned new vampire (the change, he says, like “a hangover x 10”, just like the flu but with more bleeding from the eyes), and ropes production-assistant Stuart Rutherford in for a non-actorly performance as their newfound rosy-cheeked ‘human friend’.

Rutherford brings the undead bloodsuckers into the 21st-century, into a world of selfies, Facebook, Skype, and Google image-search; Clement now getting to do his “dark bidding” by eBay. There’s a flicker of a fascinating theme there — how mystical, old-world occultism must navigate the modern-day surveillance-state — that touches into the greater filmmaking conceit: the mockumentary posing as if peering into a secret world. It’s a funny premise in itself, given no genre is quite so overflogged as the vampire-movie. What We Do In The Shadows manages to find life in the old, dead horse by mockery; laughing at every creaky cliché along the way.

Wetlands

Internet trolls, letter-to-the-editor penners, and/or morally-outraged op-ed columnists have a new goal to aspire to: David Wnendt’s crowdpleasin’ adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s way-popular/way-controversial novel, Wetlands, begins with a title card from a horrified commenter, who haughtily commands that no one should ever read the book, or, God forbid, make a movie of it. Giving the small-minded their stage amount to a smirking opening that borders on self-congratulatory: Wnendt confident that Wetlands, the movie, will piss off as many people as the book; that you, gentle viewer, have never seen anything quite like it.

It’s a ribald ride into the idiosyncratic psyche of a smart-ass teenage punk (Carla Juri) falling foul of all laws of feminine hygiene, conducting ongoing ‘experiments’ on her vagina and anus, out to turn these nether-regions — these wetlands — into a fecund petri-dish of hard-partying bacteria. Roche’s text is a proud rebuke of gender stereotypes, and Juri brings its heroine to screen with true humanity, a figure of both joie de vivre and needy desperation, brave iconoclasm and debilitating fears. She’s, in short, a teenager: big on rebellion, but emotionally stunted, and big-picture myopic.

Befitting a teenager’s moodswings, the tone is all over the place. For all the gleeful prurience of its haemorrhoids and anal fissures and vaginal mucus, its public-toilet seats and swapped tampons and smeared semen, the film essentially bats back-and-forth between bawdy Sex And The City-style comedy and melodramatic, flashbacks-building-towards-formative-childhood-tragedy bildungsroman. By the time revelation comes and it ends all serious, Wetlands feels weirdly-conservative, its transgressive body-politics and furious feminism giving way to a narrative that feels all-too-familiar. Inevitably, it carries that indie-movie feeling where you witness a radical idea hammered into a three-act structure. You may’ve never seen a movie like Wetlands, but you’ve surely seen way too many that are close enough.

The Grandmaster

Finally, it’s here. Wong Kar-wai’s much-awaited, much-delayed, much-discussed The Grandmaster arrives on local screens after an interminable wait, marking the Hong Kong master’s first foray into genre since 1994’s bonkers, baffling barney Ashes Of Time. His ninth film — and his first since his ultra-disappointing English-language debut, 2007’s My Blueberry Nights — is a kung-fu movie; Wong’s career-long muse Tony Leung playing the master who trained screen legend Bruce Lee. The action comes choreographed by martial-arts legend Yuen Woo-ping (who also appears in a cameo), and the audience is immediately dropped into it: the film opening with a fight-scene dowsed in torrential rain and foot-deep water, droplets flying —and catching the light— with every fist and foot, each blow thudding like a clap of thunder. It’s impossibly stylised and confusing to follow: so far, so Kar-wai.

Across its two hours, Wong employs his familiar host of tricks: the opening voice-over, the ultra-shallow focus, the ultra-close close-ups, the dreaminess of ultra-slow slow-motion. Every stoush is less a fight than a ballet, especially when Leung and star-cross’d love-interest Zhang ZiYi spar in a tango loaded with erotic frisson; their battle symbolising a mutual attraction that plays out like a game of chess. The Grandmaster is posed as a martial-arts movie, but as soon as Zhang arrives, Wong can take it where he really wants: into the realm of romantic tragedy, in which desperate longing plays out behind social customs, and handsome stars sit in silent sadness in front of an immaculately-wallpapered, hyper-romantic Hong Kong. It begins in the frigid North — all drifting snowfall and cherry blossoms — but tracks ever south, until it reaches the island; walking through history (Manchuria, Hong Kong independence, the closing borders of Communist China) as it goes.

Initially, The Grandmaster presses-on apace, this the tale of a man on a mission, destined to become a legend. But Wong is too artful to submit something as simple as a biopic; and the narrative is handed over to Zhang at an unexpected moment, the forward momentum stalling as the story suddenly tracks backwards, through the recent death of her father (Wong Qiang-xiang), into the hazy impressions of a distant childhood. It becomes not a portrait of an Important man, nor even of the woman-who-loved him; but a melancholy yearning on family, honour, sacrifice, and the death of such noble old-world values across the hyper-modernising changes of mid-20th-century.

Tellingly, the film’s climactic battle is given to Zhang, even if its true victor is Wong himself: the fight staged on a train-station platform amidst a flurry of hissing steam, swirling smoke, drifting ash, and gathering snow; a visually-rich sequence that unspools like a delirious cinephile’s dreams. There’s more than enough wild fights to keep genre devotees in their seats, but The Grandmaster’s true delights will be savoured by those still harbouring fond In The Mood For Love memories.