CIFF Notes: The Sadness (Saturday Oct 23 - 10:30pm)

Another entry in the CIFF's "After Dark" series is the Taiwanese bone-rattler The Sadness, directed by Canadian animator Rob Jabbaz. For a first feature, The Sadness is particularly accomplished in terms of it's pacing, editing, and it's primary lingua franca: intense, splattery, zombie violence. Having only minutes before walked out of the much more leisurely paced The Hand of God by Paolo Sorrentino, the increasingly relentless rhythm and piercing score of The Sadness were a somewhat welcome wake-up call. What I didn't expect was the point of conversation between the two seemingly disparate films is their position to particular filmmakers and their ability to expand the cinematic conversation between them without feeling derivative--while Sorrentino's movies are speaking the language of Fellini, Jabbaz and his crew are speaking the language of Romero, albeit with a healthy dose of manga sadism, while effectively drawing a through-line to the current pandemic, both on a biological and social level. 

There's a lot to admire about The Sadness both in it's ideas and aesthetics, but the film's precarious ethical nature, balanced somewhere between irreverent satire and shock cinema, feels out of whack. The film is not breaking form with it's zombie outbreak plotline, but it's adding the currency of "second wave mutation" as the point of incitement, after establishing rather nicely an air of calm and budding domesticity between the central young couple, Kat (Regina) and Jim (Berant Zhu). Nothing "nice" or "calm" follows the establishing of this relationship. The "sadness" of the title eventually develops as a visual motif through each encounter with the infected, tears running down their bloody faces as they seem to consciously grapple with the reprehensible, libidinous violence they can't help but be physically driven to commit. Yes, the zombie infection of The Sadness adds a crazed amplification of the sex drive to the desire for blood and brains in a way that feels both commendable in it's audaciousness and, sadly, ultimately distasteful and damaging to what works about the film. It's the kind of movie that will unfortunately provoke more macho posturing than critical engagement, which no one needs.  

As is always the case on Ecstatic, I say this with a love for subversive cinema (particularly on my mind, as I write this near the centenary of Amos Vogel, curator of the subversive cinema temple Cinema 16 and author of "Film as a Subversive Art"), and to point out that this movie will be very well received by a certain type of horror fan that will be insufferable to anyone in ear shot who doesn't think it rules. I'm sure I've been that guy, but like to think my consideration of subversive films--and The Sadness most definitely qualifies--is generally a bit more evolved than that. Clearly, the film is smarter than this type of blunt, unthinking response, particularly in the thin line it draws between the "creep on the train" (played with exceptional creep-a-tude by Tzu-Chiang Wang) who daily ogles Kat on his commute, and the post-infected "creep on the train" who becomes Kat's primary pursuant. The "sadness" as a device of social commentary is bringing the teeming sexual repression already present in the day-to-day to a boil--a risky proposition, to be sure--and Jabbaz accents this point visually throughout, most effectively when Kat needs to find a phone and to escape her pursuant, finally locating a security guard whose phone displays impossibly huge-breasted anime porno figures as his wallpaper. As for the Bunuelian razor (a frequent and unifying image for Ecstatic), Jabbaz finds his own homage to Un Chien Andalou via some eyehole violation that I hesitate to go into detail about here. Use your imagination. In other words, the film has an ability to make a horrific, yet astute, visual critique of our cultural attitude toward pornographic saturation and sexual violence, but the extent to which it wants to balance the comedy and the commentary does a disservice to what's truly smart about this new evolution of zombie terror--a genre which, by this point, feels as if it has little chance of having any life left anyway. I don't want to totally dismiss the film, though I will put out a warning to anyone who might feel traumatized by sexual violence to chose something else. For those who are interested in horror and shock cinema, I'll frame The Sadness as a study in tremendous technique that makes a solid attempt at pushing the boundaries of the genre, but ultimately fails, perhaps, because it didn't take it's own good ideas more seriously.