THE 34th PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, DAY 9

"the whistleblower," canada, dir. larysa kondracki

"the whistleblower" is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, although too strong of a heart or too sensitive of a social conscience would make the movie difficult to watch as well. several people walked out of the screening i attended. i couldn't help crying...twice. kondracki's film tells the (based on a true) story of a nebraska policewoman, kathy, who, in 1999, moves to sarajevo to work as a peacekeeper for the united nations. kathy is good at her job, or at least more willing to do it well than many of her fellow privately contracted colleagues. her efficacy earns her a position at the united nations' office for gender affairs investigating sexual assaults. she comes to know the face of the human trafficking that stocks the post-war brothels of bosnia and serbia. that face isn't pretty. it's been hit and underfed and subjected to horrible physical, psychological and emotional abuse. quite a bit of that gets shown. what's more, the peacekeepers are involved. so are military officials and diplomats. looking to protect its own, the bureaucracy of united nations internal affairs closes all of kathy's case files. "i'm just doing my job." "i know. but no one cares about you." "the whistleblower" is, ultimately, a thriller and sacrifices character development to the pace of its plot -- kondracki manages to get the whole thing in under two hours -- but it knows how to tug the heartstrings. though i suppose the formula demands him, i didn't give a damn about kathy's dutch lover. but i felt for those girls. i left early, too, by about ten minutes, to make another screening downtown. that may have been a mistake, as i was gambling on missing out on a final glimmer of humanity and redemption. but, to be honest, i can't imagine how "the whistleblower" could have ended happily.

"the housemaid," south korea, dir. im sang-soo

i want to see the original. the program didn't say this was a remake, but i think i'm doing good by making that known. i didn't find out until the credits, after which i wondered if watching the 1960 version of "the housemaid" might be of some help in explaining why i was absolutely confounded by the final scene. wow. ...so you can watch the original for free online, and the site thinks that i'm as rich as the family in the remake because the video of the original opened with ads from cartier and qatar airlines. a comment at the same site laments that the 1960 version isn't better known in the west as it's a seminal work of south korean cinema. (i feel the same way about "funeral parade of roses" from japan -- and so did stanley kubrick, for your information.) hmmm. the moral of the 2010 version seems to be that money breeds sociopathy, but then again, there isn't really a moral. despite the modern western interior design of husband and pregnant wife and young daughter's home, the driving emotions in "the housemaid" are underpinned by a very asian sense of service, resignation and ill will breeding ill will. liberation comes at a price that might not be worth the, well, there isn't actually a reward. but the sex scenes go for it and succeed. "the housemaid" deserves the too often tossed around designation of "erotic thriller." fantastically, though, even during sex its characters move with an eerie phlegmaticness, always as if within a tableau titled something like "man at piano" or "family at repose" or "trouble in the foyer." "the husband with the housemaid in the servants' quarters."