While Mr Vengeance Casts his Dark Cloud

A much-cheered late-night screening of the digitally restored version of Chang Cheh's classic wuxiapian The One-Armed Swordsman closed the curtain on Udine's Far East Film Festival's 5th edition. Previously, the Audience Awards were announced, going to films from Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. First came Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs, a big-budget, star-studded urban thriller directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. The Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau starrer was last year's biggest box office grosser and most critically acclaimed picture in Hong Kong. The film proved itself as one of the very few totally engrossing recent Hongkongese productions and Udine's audiences, though a bit confused by far-fetched storytelling, were no doubt seduced by its first-class production values.

Rather unexpectedly, runner-up was Miike Takashi's Shangri-la. An unusual excursion into comedy from a director widely known for his outrageously violent yakuza-eiga (yakuza movies), the film was one of the two from Miike in show at Far East Film, the other being Graveyard of Honour, a masterly rendition of ethics tragedy in gangster world. Shangri-la depicts the Japanese economic crisis with humorous touches, through a bizarre gallery of protagonists: a bankrupted brochure printer, a former best-seller writer and the "mayor" of a homeless-people camp. Sano Shiro, who stars as the writer, was the only renowned actor who made the trip to Udine.

Third prize was awarded to Korea's box office champ The Way Home, by second-timer Lee Jeong-hyang. A wonderful piece of subtle storytelling the film peacefully describes the growing warmth between a 7 year-old boy, sent for summer holidays in a far away countryside village by his divorced mother, and his 77 year-old grandmother, who's both deaf and mute.

The closing day of the festival was also marked by the commotion provoked by an early afternoon screening of Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. Some people in the audience overtly manifested their discontent after the projection, as they felt morally insulted or drastically disturbed by the film's supposedly gratuitous violence. Nevertheless, Park's film was probably the best seen in Udine, confirming an exceptional year in Korean moviemaking. The film centres on Ryu, a deaf-mute factory-worker, who's in desperate need of money to grant his severely ill sister a kidney transplant. After selling one of his own kidneys to some illegal organ dealers, who run away without paying him, he resolves to follow his girlfriend's suggestion of kidnapping an industrialist's daughter. Everything then turns wrong, and Park lets hell loose in a spiral of challengingly desperate and inevitable violence. Apart from an impressive mature use of cinematic language, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance displays a gut-wrenching sense for human compassion in depicting unbearable violence that can only lead to further grief and sorrow. One of the decade's great movies.

Mr Vengeance's incident aside, the festival compensated a slight decrease in local audiences - caused by the overestimation of SARS virus propagation risks, as its international reputation of a world class event grows fast, and was also able to warrant the habitual crowd-pleasing fare. Among the undisputed peaks were Sori Fumihiko's Ping Pong, an inventive and cinematically brilliant adaptation of a popular manga about high-school students competing in a table tennis tournament, stuffed with ultra-camp homosexual undercurrents; Nakata Hideo's much-celebrated brooding fusion of psychological drama and supernatural horror in Dark Water; Chinese gritty urban melodrama Chen Mo and Meiting by newcomer Liu Hao; Johnnie To's efficiently elegant one-night thriller PTU, featuring a soothing crescendo towards its explosive ending, and a personal coup de foudre, Taiwanese comedy Better Than Sex, début feature by Su Chao-pin, that irresistibly demonstrated how intelligent and creative filmmaking could work American Pie-like premises into a film which is shamelessly vulgar, but never feels idiot.

The festival programme was completed by a retrospective on Korean Cinema's Golden Age in the 60's, that permitted Western audiences to discover such little-known gems as Kim Ki-young's gruesome domestic melodrama The Housemaid and Kim Soo-yong's powerful journey through a man's memory in Mist, and a tribute to prolific Japanese cult director Ishii Teruo, that spanned from his 60's classics, such as prison movie The Man From Abashiri Jail or controversial horror Island of the Malformed Men, to his 90's manga adaptations. A late addition was the homage paid to Japanese filmmaker Hirayama Hideyuki that granted Far East Film the international premiere of his Out. Chosen as this year's Japan flag-bearer in the competition for the Academy Awards, Out is a sagaciously written and sensitively directed story of four women of different ages, working in the same factory, brought together by the rather annoying urge of cutting into pieces the corpse of the youngest one's husband. Deliciously politically un-correct and driven by out-of-par performances from four amazing actresses, Out suitably represents the perfect balance between popular appeal and author's ambitions that Udine's Far East Film supports.

Paolo Bertolin