Louis Vuitton Hawaii International FIlm Festival 2008

Rather than foregrounding a relatively simple narrative, THREE MONKEYS works through the silences about active ignorance. Becoming paramount is mood, of which the establishment is not easy. Affection-images abound, but their characters are always to the side, removed from the center of our focus. Lighting is certainly crucial, shifting from the illumination of characters to emphasizing their shadows. And grey clouds, sharing their tones with the earth below, glide across an ominous sky to the deafening sounds of thunder. Indeed, the tempest of nature resonates with that of the domestic, a space penetrated in so many scenes by the blinding light of day filling the home's interior with nothing but darkness. The melodrama is displaced in the temptation of our senses in a cinematic style that reveals everything that is happening without needing to utter a single word.

A masterly cinematic triptych, TOKYO! offers three charming tales that, through their levity, confront a number of social and philosophical issues. Transcending the bounds of what its title normally designates, INTERIOR DESIGN tracks the self-fashioning of a woman who, in response to feeling invisible and unimportant to her boyfriend, traces a line of flight with and into her imagination to locate a feeling of self-worth within invisibility itself. MERDE elucidates that the formation of absolute Otherness can erupt only from within the bowels of the space opposed to it. SHAKING TOKYO, by pointing to the inability to forget debts to alterity by resorting to absolute reclusiveness, depicts the figure of the hikikomori as one for whom the slightest connect produces seismic reactions. Taken together, the film shorts resonate to produce heterogeneous images of Tokyo such that the city cannot be narrativized within a single frame, but rather, demands situated engagements by multiple constituencies to reveal incredibly rich and overlapping navigations of the cityscape in which diverse sites of intimacy and alienation become im/possible.

Against the dreary landscapes of a wintery Sweden that evoke a great feeling of loneliness, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN locates a sense of belonging not within traditional relationships by summoning vampirically queer sexualities. Oskar, an androgynous boy emasculated by schoolyard bullies, lives under the broken marriage of his parents. Eli, the new "girl" next door, lives with an elderly man initially presumed to be her father through our expectations about kinship but later revealed to be her lover. Though one could assume that Oskar and Eli become friends contrary to Eli's warning in In their first meeting, perhaps the two share something other than friendship. "Love" also certainly fails as an appropriate descriptive for a deviant relationship that is sexualized without sex, revealed in the film's transformation of the gender dynamics and removal of overtones concerning sexual propriety of "letting the right one in." It is Oskar who lets in Eli, a non-penetrative penetration that locates affective attachments not merely within each other but also through a variety of external mediating agents like a victim's blood shared in their only kiss. It is not a "love" that knows no boundaries; rather, it is precisely because of those boundaries that intimacy between Oskar and Eli grows. Age, gender, and species differentials negotiate themselves through eroticized violence and gentleness as the obscene third parties bringing Oskar and Eli together. By removing heteronormativity as the privileged access point to romance to invite multiple parties and pleasures that pervert the meaning of romance itself, LET THE RIGHT ONE IN simultaneously fills us with queasiness and warmth to redistribute the intimate sensible in a forced recognition of queer affects.