Dir.
Jieho Lee, Mexico/US, 2007, 96 mins, with subtitles if appropriate
Cast: Forest Whitaker, Sarah Michelle Gellar,
Brendan Fraser, Kevin Bacon, Andy Garcia
Review by Carol Allen
This is one of those movies, like Short Cuts,
Crash and Babel, composed of a series of interlinked stories,
where the characters overlap into each other's scenarios. It's
based on an Asian proverb that says life is composed of four
emotions: happiness, sorrow, pleasure and love, though the
tales do not always ostensibly match their titles.
In "Happiness" Whitaker, unusually for him, plays
a timid banking clerk, who risks his all on an overheard tip
about a rigged horse race and comes a cropper. Brendan Fraser
in "Pleasure", doesn't get a lot of that. He's a
hit man for Andy Garcia's gangster Fingers, so called because
of his nasty habit of depriving those who owe him money, which
includes Whitaker, of some of their digits.
Fraser also has the gift of seeing into
the future, which he finds more of a blessing than a curse.
He's instructed to show Fingers' somewhat objectionable nephew
(Hirsch) the wicked ways of the world, in the course of which
he loses his gift. Fraser also crops up in the next scenario "Sorrow",
which features Gellar as an up and coming pop star, whose manager
passes her contract over to Fingers, thus effectively enslaving
her. Fraser rescues her, hides her and falls in love with her.
And in "Love" doctor Bacon searches desperately for
a much needed rare blood type transfusion for the love of his
life (Delpy), a blood type which the pop star shares.
The four stories are then pulled together
in a somewhat strained resolution.
It's well acted and with the only constant
factor character throughout being a gangster, it's also pretty
violent in places. There are times in the story of the pop
star where its exploration of her past teeters over into
unintentionally comic banality. Director Lee, who is a Korean
American, seems to be trying to make some deep philosophical
point in the movie. He's been heard to describe it variously
as a reflection of his “journey
as an Asian-American in a bimodal world", a film noir
variation of The Wizard of Oz and an exploration of the theme
of character as destiny. Can't say any of that comes over very
clearly and probably just as well but as a gangster movie with
a bit of a difference, it's entertaining enough and worth seeing
for the quality cast.
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