Le maître de marionnettes

I hate to say it, since I liked The Assassin, Millennium Mambo, and (especially) A City of Sadness, but The Puppetmaster is sort of a misfire by Hsiao-Hsien Hou's standards. He makes a biopic of sorts that also sometimes feels like a documentary, since the central figure gives interviews throughout the film, but the scenes between these interviews are so lifeless. There might be some point being made with the approach here, but it just feels borderline disrespectful to have Li Tian-lu tell a story about his past coherently and compellingly, and then for it to cut to (sometimes cutting the narration off in the process) a dramatized scene that farts around and doesn't do much. I'll stress that I said it feels borderline disrespectful, not that it is disrespectful, because I'd like to hope there's some reason for this approach I just didn't pick up on. But I didn't like how it felt, and that's something I can't help but take away from watching this film just this once.

It's a little more interesting nearer the end, and the interview segments are good. It's the first 45 or so minutes that are the most torturously slow. The film is visually distinctive, even if I didn't really like how most of it looked and was edited. But it's all just a bit baffling, enough for me to suspect it might be a Hsiao-Hsien Hou misfire, even if it's more likely something I didn't get, just based on the strengths of his other works.

From start the finish, there is absolutely nothing exciting about this movie. It is a character driven piece, that lacks absolutely any excitement. In fact, it is at times hard to pay attention to the movie due to how dull it is. Avoid watching at all costs.

In fact, I haven't seen a movie that has been as dull as this. From the music, which consists mainly of drums, to the lack of any visual appealing elements. There is absolutely nothing appealing about this movie. Most of the movie, is a series of characters having long monologues. These speeches last anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 minutes usually. They add plot details, but the way they do it is so incredibly dull and boring. Once again AVOID watching this movie at ALL costs.

This movie is truely a puppet show: If I remember correctly the camery doesn't move even once - just a dozen or so cuts, each depicting one scene with a different set-up, each scene remaining for several minutes. Persons move through the scenerey: sometimes you see someone doing something, sometimes you even recognize what he is doing. After a while you realize the same persons appear in different scenes. Even later you start picking up the story. Yes, there is a story, even though noone explains anything, hardly any word is said (was there a word at all? Maybe even not). all your concentration is needed to find out what is going on. The audience finds itself in the situation of an ethnographer meeting for the first time some unknown group of people, trying to find out something about them. The scenes, which initially seemed to keep on forever suddenly appear to change much too fast - you might be able to understand more, if they kept on longer.

Once you get into this movie, it is pure gold. If you want action, even one minute of The Puppetmaster will bore you to death.

I wonder if the people who write rave reviews of this movie have actually ever sat down and watched it? I wonder if the director of this film has ever watched any movies himself--except his own. Everything about it is wrong--except maybe the actors are ok--but not very interesting or involving to watch.

Jeeze, whoever decided, out of the blue, to declare Hou Hsiao-hsien a master filmmaker was really pushing it. Those who chose to believe that opinion are even more guilty. I don't want to declare that he's untalented. I did truly like Dust in the Wind and City of Sadness, no matter how flawed I found them to be. The Puppetmaster is an enormous step in the wrong direction, more like the atrocious A Time to Live, a Time to Die than the two I actually tolerated. Hou's just not especially talented. People praise him to high heaven, claiming that his style is incredibly unique. Let me diagram his directorial technique: 1. Static long shots with few movements and few close ups. 2. His shots are often framed by doorways and the like. 3. Many landscape shots. 4. Characters in a scene often remain out of sight for a long time at the beginning of a scene, which confounds the audience when a visible character is talking to or interacting with them. 5. Loose narrative structure. 6. The subject of his films is most often Taiwanese history, often radiating from the tumultuous period of the WWII era. That's it. There is not one thing on this list that hasn't been done before and much better, whether Asian or Western (well, maybe the thing about Taiwanese history, but plenty of great filmmakers have illuminated their own country's history). The combination of several of these factors (and no more) is a recipe for insomnia medication. His cinema is about as limiting as cinema can get, reminscent of pre-Griffith cinema, where filmmakers never thought to move their camera or give a close-up of anything. The effects are all de-dramatizing, which is extraordinarily pointless. As Pauline Kael once said, if films aren't supposed to be entertaining, then what are they supposed to be? Torture? I know what Hou's answer would be.

Sorry. I went a bit too far with that last paragraph. The Puppetmaster does have its great moments, mostly coming in two forms: theatrical performances (puppet plays and opera) and one-on-one interviews with the Puppetmaster himself, Li Tien-lu, where he tells long and rambling stories - long and rambling, but very interesting and entertaining - about his life. The rest of the film is made up of accounts of the events he's talking about acted out on screen. Some are good, some are bad, but none of them are inherently interesting. Since these episodes are only tenuously connected to the past and the future, there is absolutely no weight to these scenes. This is particularly pathetic, because the real Li Tien-lu was the best part of both Dust in the Wind and City of Sadness. I would have been infinitely more contented to just watch the interviews without the sketches, because Li is a beautiful human being (not to mention a marvelous actor) whose face, body movements, and tone of voice communicate infinitely more than the motionless actors and actresses who are insultingly acting out his life experiences.

And people who would like to deify this director and, consequently, want to crucify me, check out my other tastes: if you want to jump to the conclusion that I'm a brainless American who needs his movies fast, chew on a few of my favorite films that 99% of the population would find as slow as molasses: 2001, anything by Andrei Tarkovsky, anything by Antonioni, most things by Bergman, My Dinner with Andre, Dreyer's sound films (Ordet, Day of Wrath, and Gertrud), Rhapsody in August, The Decalogue, and The Dreamlife of Angels, for starters. How about those who would criticize me for not liking loose narratives? Godard is one of my very favorite filmmakers. And seeing that The Puppetmaster was supposedly improvised, at least in the editing room, I happen to love Pierrot le fou, Godard's film where he, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Anna Karina grabbed a camera and went out on the road, improvising an entire film (as rumor has it). And if this is all Hou could come up with if he came into this film not having an idea what he was going to make, Fellini did the same thing with 8 1/2, and that is one of the ten best films ever made, in my opinion. Now how come I don't love this master's films? The answer is simple, methinks: he's no master.

I have very stubbornly stuck with a different Hou film every Friday for a month now, and he has revealed little or nothing to me about the human condition or the nature of filmmaking. Seeing that the showings are free, I'm not going to skip them. However, I can breathe a huge sigh of relief that there is a two week break in this particular series. 5/10 for The Puppetmaster.