Eastern and western identities cross over to striking effect in two of this week’s major DVD releases. Where the English-language, Scarlett Johansson-led Ghost in the Shell (Paramount, 12) took flak in many quarters for “whitewashing” a beloved Japanese manga, South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s mischievous The Handmaiden (Curzon Artificial Eye, 18) balances the scales a little by giving a radiant Asian makeover to the brittle Victorian mystique of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith.
As adaptations go, Park’s is far the more fearlessly individual. The slinky mechanics of Waters’s uncorseted mystery survive intact, but relocating the action to Japanese-occupied 1930s Korea adds tissue-fine layers of political and erotic complexity to an already ornately knotted mystery. Even at their most hot and heavy, the novel’s deviously entwined lesbian lovers might have blushed in response to some of the tentacle porn served up by Park here, though The Handmaiden consistently prizes sensualism over shock.
Even if you go in with a reasonable memory of who-done-what – and if you don’t, lean back, for it’s a triumph of dizzy, ping-pong plotting – the film’s sensory world building should make your jaw drop. Painted in shades of jade, ruby and unblemished flesh, its ravishing visual design fuses not just the characters’ duelling Asian sensibilities, but the western intrusions of gothic and film noir styling too. One of those rare films that enriches and improves on its literary source, it’s a writhing, steaming, thrilling tangle of colonial conflict.
Ghost in the Shell is very nearly as profligately beautiful: an action spectacle of scintillating excess. Director Rupert Sanders has realised the “New Port City” of Masamune Shirow’s manga – and Mamoru Oshii’s steely animated films – as a glassy, glistening megalopolis at the imaginary intersection of Tokyo and Blade Runner. Even the high rises glow translucently like jellyfish; no wonder human-android anti-terrorist operative Killian (Johansson) has a hard time finding much in the world to hold on to and that’s before a glitch in her internal wiring plunges her into a concealed past.
In their most overt departure from the source, the screenwriters have devised a troubling backstory for an otherwise remote protagonist that directly invites questions about Killian’s racial identity relative to her Asian surroundings. As an effort to pre-empt the controversy surrounding Johansson’s casting in a Japanese-originated role, it’s not quite successful, but it’s indicative of a remake that takes more care over the material’s psychological and emotional nuances than might have been expected of the hegemonic Hollywood machine.
Colonial tensions resurface to less contentious but disappointingly staid effect in Viceroy’s House (Fox, 12), Gurinder Chadha’s luxuriously appointed but candlestick-stiff dramatisation of the 1947 partition of India. The half devoted to Lord and Lady Mountbatten, while shorn of all tasty personal rumours, is diverting in a Downton Delhi sort of way; sadly, the opportunity to reframe events from an Indian perspective is squandered on a pallid, underwritten Romeo and Juliet romance between two Rashtrapati Bhavan servants.
It’s hardly fair to draw comparisons with Satyajit Ray, but for a more soulful, intricate examination of power, class and legacy in historical India, pick up the new Criterion reissue of Ray’s wonderful 1958 film The Music Room (Sony, PG), a stark social dissection swirled through with brilliant sensual and musical detail.
There are no politics – nor any human stakes whatsoever – to consider in Free Fire (Studiocanal, 15), in which Ben Wheatley sets out to make quite possibly the most literal shoot ’em up of all time. In the orange-tinted 1970s, a gaggle of polyester-clad miscreants gathers to complete an arms deal, before haphazardly proceeding to liberally test the wares on one another. There are no further motivations or subtleties worth explaining: Wheatley, out to prove himself a master of mounting chaos after High-Rise, simply fires away in ever more virtuosic, vertiginous fashion as the body count mounts. It’s loud, proud and rather dull, and while Wheatley’s film has more stylistic vim than City of Tiny Lights (Icon, 15), which has the terrific, if fumblingly realised, idea of casting Riz Ahmed as a modern-day Philip Marlowe type in a multicultural London gumshoe mystery, I found more life and soul in the latter. Meanwhile, Danish director Jeppe Ronde’s Bridgend (AX1, 18), a despairing fiction built around the real-life teen suicide epidemic in the eponymous Welsh town, is assembled with near-feverish atmospheric intensity. It’s no fun to watch, but hard to turn away from.
Finally, a genuine, excavated curio on Mubi.com: Umbango and Fishy Stones, a double bill of rollicking 1980s genre excursions from South African film-maker Tonie van der Merwe, an Afrikaner who pioneered a “B-scheme” to make all-black films for black audiences under apartheid. As a South African discovering his work now, I find them revelatory. Mubi’s two selections are inevitably itchy, scratchy and uneven, modestly modelled on Hollywood yarns, but van der Merwe caught a vein of fury and restlessness amid their raw humour and roughshod storytelling.
