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Mill Valley Film Festival

E J-yong’s Asako in Ruby Shoes, starring Ko So-yong, Kang Jin-won, Lee Suk-won, Lee Jung-jae, Tachibana Misato and Ren Osugi. Photo Courtesy of Hamilton Ink

By Justin Lowe

The widely-celebrated producer-director team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory has established an international reputation for high-quality independent films with a string of award-winning titles that includes A Room With a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day. Only occasionally over the last 40 years has Merchant found the opportunity to shed his producer’s role and direct, so the Mill Valley Film Festival’s presentation of his sixth release, The Mystic Masseur, offers an excellent opportunity to watch a master filmmaker at work. Merchant’s latest is among three opening-night presentations inaugurating the MVFF and will feature a personal appearance by the director.

Set in the Indian-emigré community of 1940s Trinidad, the film stars Aasif Mandvi as Ganesh, an aspiring novelist supporting his family with a traditional massage business. Ganesh’s expertise as a masseur and healer quickly grows, and when he decides to enter local politics, the would-be writer becomes torn between his art and his ambition. Adapted from V.S. Naipaul’s 1956 novel and featuring a soundtrack by renowned musician Zakir Hussain, The Mystic Masseur represents the type of stylish, story-driven period narrative that has popularized Merchant’s previous releases.

Far removed from Merchant and Ivory’s genteel drawing-room dramas, Wang Chao’s The Orphan of Anyang continues a recent trend in Chinese cinema for low-budget, vérité productions. Rewriting his own novel for the screen, Wang’s debut feature probes the ties that bind together an abandoned baby boy and the three adults responsible for his fate. After middle-aged factory worker Yu Dagang loses his job, he discovers an infant left behind at a neighborhood noodle stand and takes the baby home, more out of practicality than compassion: an anonymous note offers a $25 monthly stipend for child support. Calling the pager number provided, Yu meets the boy’s mother, hard-luck young streetwalker Feng Yanli, who offers the parentally challenged bachelor his first “welfare” payment. Yu quickly tires of caring for the child and attempts to return the baby to Feng, but after she sleeps with him Yu relents, offering to let her move in and use his one-room apartment to conduct “business.”

Their tenuous, makeshift family circle is disrupted, however, when Si-de, Feng’s pimp and the baby’s putative father, learns he’s dying of leukemia, becomes concerned about his legacy and attempts to reclaim the child from Yu and Feng. Wang, a former assistant director to Chen Kaige, favors stripped-down social realism, employing non-professional actors, sparse dialogue and static camerawork to convey the apparent futility of his characters’ lives. Despite its harsh portrayal of China’s new economic realities, the film’s ambiguous conclusion is not without a curious sense of redemption.

Wonsuk Chin’s e-dreams takes on the brief life and sudden death of Internet upstart Kozmo.com, in a style that’s rapidly becoming it own genre: the dotcom documentary. After a frustrating online experience with Amazon left his desire for instant gratification unfulfilled, twenty-something investment banker Joseph Park quit his six-figure job at Goldman Sachs to establish a Web-based company that would deliver orders for videos and snacks within an hour. Working with co-founder Yong Kang and a small team of mostly male dotcom acolytes, CEO Park took the company from a basement warehouse startup to pre-IPO stardom within a year – before the market collapsed, along with the company.

Chin’s digital video doc takes up the storyline as Kozmo is seeking its first round of venture capital in a process that eventually raises more than $250 million. Throughout the film, Park displays a jovial charisma that inspires co-workers, charms investors and massages the media, while sober company president Kang plays the straight-man to his partner’s natural showmanship. Chin relies on interviews with company staff and Park’s immigrant Korean family, vérité footage shot on location at Kozmo’s offices and Park’s media-induced megalomania to convey a sense of urgency and excitement. Despite a standout soundtrack of electronica, funk and acid jazz that lends some key momentum to the film, the inevitable outcome, cradle-to-grave narrative and a dearth of interview subjects outside the immediate Kozmo.com circle, leave e-dreams feeling flat and anti-climactic.

Among its other selections, the MVFF also features an unusual Japanese-Korean co-production, Asako in Ruby Shoes, a quirky Internet romance between a lonely government worker in Seoul and a suicidal, Tokyo-based web actress. From India, Calmness explores the aftermath of sectarian violence when the mother of a murdered young man attempts to achieve shantham (spiritual calm) by reconciling with the killer’s mother. Iran is well represented by several feature, documentary and short films, including ABC Africa, the latest from renowned director Abbas Kiarostami, and the charming, allegorical The Legend of Love, about a woman’s search for her beloved through the mountains of Kurdistan.

The Mill Valley Film Festival runs Oct. 4-14 at the Rafael Film Center and Mill Valley’s Sequoia Theater. Call 925/866-9559 for program and ticket information, or go online: www.mvff.com.