The Proposition/Three Times

Over the last few days I've been Netflixin' some films that turned up on top ten lists and end-of-year polls that I missed in theaters (or that never arrived in my bucolic corner of New Jersey). Many of these film are from foreign shores. Today I'm writing about films from Australia and Taiwan.

The Proposition is a Western, but set in the west of Australia, not the U.S. Though it has been transplanted to the land down under, it shares many themes and attributes of the American Western. The film's concept is laid out simply in the first five minutes: two outlaws are captured by the law. One of them is told, if you kill your brother (the third, and most evil outlaw in the triumvirate) I will pardon you and your brother.

The lawman, played by Ray Winstone, thinks his plan is a good one. The third brother is a vicious killer, while he reckons the middle brother, Guy Pearce, will do anything to protect the youngest brother, who is a teenager and simple-minded. So off Pearce goes, to search the caves of the Outback for his older brother, Danny Huston. But of course, things never work out simply in the moral ambiguity of Westerns. The townspeople want the young outlaw strung up immediately, and Pearce has other ideas about what to do.

The film was written by musician Nick Cave, and it is a very polished bit of work for a novice scriptwriter, as tight as a snare drum. Either he has great instincts or he read a lot of screenwriting books, because it's all there: there are subplots involving Winstone's wife, Emily Watson, who is too refined for the rugged terrain she has been transplanted to from England, and a poetry-spouting bounty hunter, played by John Hurt, who steals the two scenes he's in.

The heart of this film is the nature of evil. When Pearce finally finds his older brother, we find that he's an intelligent man with a twisted sense of morals. He's a strong believer in family and loyalty, but has no compunction about killing anyone who is not Irish. As the film goes on, the outlaws seem better people than the petty policemen who are chasing them.

The film is directed by John Hillcoat with a wonderful eye for detail and realism. I've always hated Westerns where the actors have great teeth and shiny hair. Not so here--the people are dirty, and there are flies everywhere.

My only quibble is with the motivation of Guy Pearce's character. We're told that he is a vicious outlaw, but he stands as the moral center of the film. It's hard to figure out what makes him tick, and his actions end up serving the plot more than what his character would be likely to do.

From Taiwan comes Three Times, a film by Hsiaso-Hsien Hou. It is a triptych of stories, set in different points in Taiwan's history. The first panel is "A Time for Love," which concerns a young man in 1966 who meets a woman in a pool hall. He leaves to join the army, and months later returns and tries to find her. The second is "A Time For Freedom," set in 1911, when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. There are two aspects of freedom running through this segment--an intellectual longs for freedom for his country, while the woman he visits in a geisha house has her own wish for freedom. Finally, a contemporary story called "A Time for Youth" concerns a Bohemian couple--he's a motorcycling photographer, she's a singer, and their on-again off-again relationship. She's a bit wacky, a bisexual epileptic with a Yen symbol tattooed to her throat (implying she's for sale).

The pace of Three Times is, to put it kindly, leisurely (to be unkind would call it glacial). In the first segment, the soldier goes from poolroom to poolroom to find his girl (apparently Taiwanese poolrooms employ pretty girls as attendants, or at least did back then). There's not much drama involved, he simply asks for a forwarding address, and then drives across the mundane countryside to the next destination. The second segment is shot as a silent film, complete with title cards. I think it's the best of the three, for it subtly intertwines the dual nature of freedom and servitude for both men and women. The third is a bit puzzling. There's lots of email and loud club music, and I'm not precisely sure what the two were up to.

In each segment the pair are played by Chen Chang and Qi Shu. Shu is one of the more beautiful women I've seen in a film in quite a while.