L., a friend with whom I share a love for comic books, recently nominated me to post a movie I like every day for 10 days. The instructions she reposted included “nominating” a person each day to create his or her own list of 10 movies.
Also: no explanations are needed; just post the movie poster.
As I write this, I am on the fourth day of carrying out what seems to have become a series of complications. First, searching for a movie poster turns out to require more time than choosing the movie.
My immediate choice for day 1 was Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love”. There are at least three commercial movie posters, one of which was on the cover of the VCD I bought on regular price, without second thoughts, when I finally found a copy in the mall.
The movie is about longing, the unfulfilled desire that makes the best, the only possible love stories. (After consummation, everything goes downhill, which is true in fact and narrative arc.)
Lush and erotic, the American, Chinese, and Japanese movie posters, specially the ones showing Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung clinching, are misleading and predatory. The alluring cheongsam encasing Cheung in these posters are not cut from the same metaphor as the movie’s finger-hugging costumes engendering the tensile delicacy of the Hong Kong conventions of the 1960s that trap the couple.
I think the movie poster that preserves Wong Kar-wai’s elegy on the ghosting of love is a “fan poster” created by Janet Leigh, which I first read about in Adrian Curry’s article on mubi.com.
Leigh’s poster shows descending streaks of light and shade that still have the solidity of the walls of their adjoining apartments, which, like society, keep these two individuals close but never intimate.
Narrow door frames, thin walls that tremble with betrayal, constricting corridors, stairwells of darkness—Leigh’s “fan poster” captures the architectural details that, like the music, soak up the aches best whispered to a hole in the wall and smothered with earth.
A poster is created to promote the movie. If one likes a movie, the poster should be more than that.
The other movies I have chosen so far—“A Walk to Remember,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” and “The Road Home”—have posters that “competently” capture the movie plots.
Yet, as the late Anthony Bourdain pointed out, there should be no place for “competence” in storytelling.
Applying this rule means segregating the posters that aim to sell tickets from the ones that aspire to freeze “the pictures,” a term used in the past to refer to cinema, through one telling picture or image.
And I have not yet explained how I chose the 10 movies in 10 days.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 17, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”
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