PhantomOfLiberty

Here we have something truly original, for better of for worse. If one would dare to come up with some references it may be described as some sort of mixture between Takashi Miike when he is most inclined at breaking taboos (think "Visitor Q") and Wong Kar-Wai's poetic film-making. Or something.

The picture is divided into four parts. In three of these the young characters (two men and a woman) which the film revolve around are being presentated in long narrated monologues in first person perspective. They inhabit lives of emptiness and loneliness, we are talking about very deeply emotionally disturbed individuals. This take on different expressions for each of these human beings. The man in the first part is a serial rapist, the woman in the second is obsessed with dead bodies (she has contact with a killer and take pictures of his victims) and the man in the third collect other peoples garbage and then map out their lives.

Visually director Kenji Goda stretch most of the limits. For the film – made on DV – is for the most part constructed like an organic collage. There are moving and still images, split screens, morphing, number graphics, etc. etc. "Analife" is closer to some kind of "video art" than to the pictorial language of a conventional movie. And while it of course is admirable that one is doing something that unique – and I like the idea in itself – I do feel that Goda goes overboard with this style. The piece would've benefited had it been more toned down.

One of the strongest aspects of the film are the three characters monologues. I know of two different versions of these – a Japanese and a British-English. Because I don't know Japanese I've seen "Analife" with the English language narration. These well-written monologues, which takes us inside these persons psychics, are really brilliantly delivered. Some might dislike the fact that the Japanese voice-overs weren't simply subtitled but I can see why the choice was made not to do it that way. Because it's very much narration, and at the same time constantly happening different things visually, the subtitles and the pictorial language would've most likely fought too much over the viewer's attention and thus something in the experience in its whole would've been lost.

In the fourth part of the movie the three individuals lives are tied together. Here the mood of the three first quarters is completely broken and the film crashes. Things just gets weird and silly and it really doesn't work at all. In this last part there is "regular" spoken dialogue in Japanese with English subtitles.

Worth noting is the artist Rei Harakami's fine electronic music.

Seldom have I been so split in my opinions of a film. I'll simply finish this with saying that if one is looking for something very different "Analife" comes recommended.

"Falling... In Love" revolve around torn relationships and the emotionally damaged human beings they bring with them. It's frustration, hope, anger, sex, deceit, despair - and small big city apartments. Everything played out in a very appealing, restrained fashion.

What director Wang showed glimpses of in his debut "Brave 20" feels already - in this, his second movie - completely developed. The acting is great and the cinematography by Chin Ting-Chang is simply brilliant (we're talking in the league of Chris Doyle here)! The fact is that it is impossible to get a fair picture of "Falling... In Love" if one doesn't speak more in detail about the visual. The colour range is fantastic. The film bathe in piercing hues of green, yellow and red, captured with a well-manoeuvred hand-held camera. Another thing which deeply impressed me is the creative work with extremely short depth in the sharpness of the photography and the way characters are sometimes out of focus, way off the traditional way of shooting such scenes. This give the pictorial language a very original expression.

Also, it's impossible not to think of another Taiwanese film when seeing "Falling... In Love, namely Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "Millennium Mambo", as that one also moves from Taipei to a snowy Hokkaido.