The Happiest Girl in the World (Jude)
The downfall of this film is the use of repetition, which is neither structurally interesting nor narratively progressing; it seems to act only as a tactic of drawing out this well-acted morality tale from a long short to a feature length. The repetition involves take after take after take by a commercial filmmaking crew trying to get a good shot of Delia, the teenage protag, in which she is required to look happy in a TV ad because she won a contest that grants her a new car. The drama is that her parents want to sell the car to fund their own goals, which would supposedly indirectly provide a better life for Delia in the longterm. Both sides of the debate on whether or not this is fair to Delia are well-argued and thorough, but, like the monotonous takes for the commercial, are repeated too many times to sustain tension or interest. Worth watching for the engaging, typical Romanian realism, baffling me again with how so many different filmmakers can make films that feel so alike.
Face (Tsai)
Less a feature film than a succession of related shorts, many of the scenes, filmed exclusively with a static camera if I recall correctly, involve characters engaging in a Tsai-esque performance art act. Scenes of a woman taping up the windows and mirrors around her are compelling without doing more than providing palette of symbolism to be on hand for deciphering Tsai’s themes. Though I hate breaking films down into partitions, I always thought an interesting, though flawed, rubric for deciding on whether a film is ‘great’ was that if the film has at least 4 amazing scenes and no bad ones then it has done its job; Face is a case against this criterion, as it has at least 6 stellar scenes and moments, nothing that isn’t at least peculiar, and yet it doesn’t work completely as a whole. Much of it feels empty in a way that suggests that Tsai made the film because it was time to make a new film, rather than needing to make something and then making it (unless, of course, he needed to make a few great shorts and decided that they should be accompanied in a feature)