A Rogue Film Festival Earns Respect (Sort Of)
Film 4:41 AM
By MIKE HALE
The New York Asian Film Festival has an image to uphold, based on a well-honed story of low-rent beginnings and disreputable programming. This familiar narrative starts in 2002 with five young guys and their credit cards, and embraces rowdy, fiercely obsessive audiences jammed into downtown theaters watching movies about young Japanese women whose breasts double as machine guns.
Andy Lau in “Detective Dee & the Mystery of the Phantom Flame,” which blends kung fu into a seventh-century tale.
Asked where his baby ranks among the city’s annual film conclaves, Grady Hendrix, one of the festival’s founders and its longtime spokesman, toes the line. “Firmly at the bottom,” he declares.
He’s exaggerating for effect, but he’s serious about maintaining the event’s renegade character. “In terms of that film festival circuit, we’re pretty much the outsiders looking in,” he said in an interview. “We don’t have enough fancy parties.”
Maybe not. But whatever it lacks in red carpets and seafood towers, it makes up for in the quality, quantity and variety of films. As it celebrates its 10th year with a program of 40 features, showing Friday through July 14 at the Walter Reade Theater and Japan Society, it’s time to acknowledge that this outsider actually belongs in the top tier of New York’s film festivals, next to some very serious, very inside gatherings.
Not every selection in the New York Asian Film Festival is great, or even good, but neither is every one in the New York Film Festival or New Directors New Films. Meanwhile the Asian fest presents virtually the same number of major new releases as those two august events, while maintaining more consistent quality and focus than the sprawling Tribeca Film Festival.
Of course, the Asian Film Festival suffers from a complete lack of two things that, in addition to big stars, give a film event credibility: European art-house movies and scruffy American independents. While operating on the geographic and cultural fringe, the festival is proudly mainstream in its taste and gorges itself on genre films and wacky comedies.
At the same time, it has helped introduce New York to highbrow favorites like Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho and Seijun Suzuki. This year’s lineup includes directors like Takashi Miike, Tsui Hark and Na Hong-jin that any highfalutin festival would be happy to recruit.
And over the course of a decade of relentlessly tracking down and watching Asian movies in whatever time they can take away from their day jobs, the founders have grown into their roles.
“We’re all getting older,” Mr. Hendrix said. “Our tastes are changing. And I think we have a better feel for the audience’s taste.” They’re now willing to book slower, more serious, less categorizable movies that would have scared them off before (given that empty theaters can mean empty pockets for the volunteer programmers).
But the emphasis is still on visceral, accessible entertainment of all kinds, especially in this 10th-anniversary year, when, as Mr. Hendrix put it, “we’re sort of being a little self-indulgent.” That means a subset of Chinese wu xia (martial arts) movies that includes four films written or directed by Mr. Tsui, who will appear at screenings on July 9 through 11, and a generous, diverse selection of Korean thrillers.
This year’s festival breaks down fairly evenly into films from China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan), South Korea and Japan, with single films from a few other countries (Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines) thrown in.
In “Detective Dee & the Mystery of the Phantom Flame,” Mr. Tsui’s most recent film, and “Reign of Assassins,” directed by the up-and-comer Su Chao-pin and the veteran John Woo, the festival is offering two light-on-their-feet martial arts capers that stand in pleasant contrast to the bloated, nationalistic epics that are China’s main cinematic export these days. (“If it’s got more than five horses in it and more than two scenes of giant armies massing on the plain, waving flags, we avoid it,” Mr. Hendrix said.)
“Detective Dee,” starring the Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau as the title character, works its kung fu into a reasonably credible seventh-century mystery story (with supernatural elements). Its most memorable sequence, a teasing, not-quite-nude scene in which a beautiful courtier (Li Bingbing) uses her martial arts skills to dress herself while dodging hundreds of arrows, recalls the famously sexy duel between Brigitte Lin and Maggie Cheung in “Dragon Inn” (1992), which is also being shown in the festival.
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