Rotterdam Film Festival: Day One

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After spending only a few hours in Rotterdam it’s evident that the city is a near perfect venue to host such a large festival. It’s compact enough to crisscross between screenings quickly on foot, and although the city is lively, there isn’t an abundance of other cultural distractions to tempt you away from the cinema. Of course it’s also held in late January, when it’s so cold that there’s nowhere else that you’d rather be than in a movie theatre all day long.

The Korean drama Paju was the opening film of the festival and it sold out long ago, though I was lucky enough to score entry to the ’sneak preview’ shown simultaneously at the Pathé cinema. After spending a couple of worrisome hours making my way through the 400-page catalogue, making futile attempts to keep the longlist of films I want to see within some realm of possibility, it was good to have the burden of choice removed, if only for one evening.
The film shown was Eighteen (which I hadn’t planned to see), winner of the Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema at Vancouver last year. Unfortunately this coming-of-age drama about young love in Seoul is troublingly rote in the narrative line it draws from Tae-Hoon and Mi-Jeong’s breakup through to an eventual reunion.
First time director Jang Kun-Jae has a fussy style that dilutes any power the actors formulate, flitting from sedate tracking shots to camera phone footage with little justification. Representational of Tae-Hoon’s impulsive and erratic energy, there’s use of voiceover, flashback, slo-mo, and fade-to-black, yet this only yields fatigue, the image unfastened, baggy, and a deviation from the leaden narrative that’s unfolding beneath.

What’s disappointing is that Jang Kun-Jae often has a great eye for small details – the speed Tae-Hoon eats fast food, the frequent spitting, the way he looks at Mi-Jeong’s photos on her dresser – that give more away about his characters than the overarching concerns of maturation and parent-child divisions. Framing a year of adolescence so schematically does a disservice to the emotions Eighteen attempts to illuminate.

On Day 1 proper I plan to see Tiger Awards nominee Alamar and the premiere of the new John Gianvito documentary, so check back for more updates.