Prince of tears

Hunan-born Yonfan (aka Yeung Fan) holds a special place in Hong Kong's film industry. Best known as a photographer (first; cinematographer second) enchanted by natural and human beauty, colourful settings and romantic messages, he's been a highly distinctive director, an auteur sans equal since 1970 (when he was 23).

His latest (2009) melodrama, Prince of Tears, tells tearful tales of Republican Taiwan during its early years of anti-Communist paranoia and injustices. Somehow, it was nominated as the official Hong Kong entry for that year's Oscar for best foreign-language movie, despite being a Taiwan production and story with much post-production work done in Bangkok. The movie also competed (and also unsuccessfully) at the 2009 Venice film festival.

Yonfan once won a Best Film award, at the 1998 Milan International Lesbian and Gay festival, for Bishonen, his melodramatic overview of gigolos in Hong Kong. I recall going to watch it at the Central's original, large Queen's cinema, and being the only audience member. Yonfan had hired the place for a week (presumably to qualify for competitions requiring public exhibition), hung velvet drapes in the lobby, and produced a lavish souvenir booklet. He clearly had access to large funds.

Presumably, he still does: the executive producer for his latest movie is indie auteur and multi-award-winning writer-director Fruit Chan. Yonfan, as usual, wrote his own screenplay and created his own art designs. He also uttered the narrative notes that ensure the audience knows about plot points and ironies in the moodily mournful story about two young girls whose parents are arrested and imprisoned as suspected spies for the PRC. Their handsome father (Joseph Chang) is an airforce pilot who plays the accordion and loves Slavic music; their beautiful mother (mainland newcomer Zhu Xuan) cooks lovely meals.

Together with them in the charming rustic accommodation and leafy lanes of a Taiwan air base in 1954 are a moody limping military friend with a scarred face (Fan Chih-wei) and an even more beautiful mystery woman (Terry Kwan), the wife of a KMT general (veteran Kenneth Die Another Day Tsang). Their young daughter is a schoolmate of one of the pilot's girls. All will not end prettily, we soon realise in the movie, when a girl's favourite teacher is arrested for espionage, unwisely painting glorious coastal scenery amid exquisitely-hued wind-rustled vegetation in a military zone, and is thrown off the cliff in a bag.

The movie shows the father being executed too, although he reappears at the end of the film. By then we've learned that the oldest child had a different father, her mother had some sort of eye-flashing love affair with the general's wife, who was some sort of agent for something. Yonfan's dreamy (and beautifully dreary) script floats very prettily, but illogically. His end credits state that it was based on a real Taiwan family which experienced similar melodramatics and produced one of the island's better-known (and unidentified) actresses.

Sadly, another Yonfan creation wastes lots of good actors, technical talent and money, albeit prettily.

Daylight drinking

Road movies are a favoured genre for telling an episodic story that takes one or more characters from A to a life-changing B position. Original variations on that theme are difficult to imagine, and a novice South Korean director chose to follow a path taken in the USA by Sideways, finding truths through booze.

Young-seok Noh's Daytime Drinking is a one-man labour of love of movies on his first credited work - as its writer, director, cameo actor, cinematographer, music composer, production designer, editor, sound controller and producer! The end credits show that he'd employed various technical staff to back him up. Most important, he recruited an exceptional cast of acting unknowns.

The lead character is spotty-faced plumpish Hyuk-jin (Sam-dong Song), a young man just dumped by his girlfriend. His drinking buddies suggest they all cheer him up by going to a mountainous resort area for R&R and boozing. When he gets there, at the little-visited height of snowy winter, he learns they've abandoned the idea and he's on his own.

A series of mildly bizarre and/or comic escapades lead Hyuk-sin from one disastrous female to another, from robbers to sexual gropers, from hitching in his underwear to finally meeting up with the best friend who'd suggested the trip and has a good reason for feeling extra guilty. The only connection between everyone is the strangers' passion for alcohol, from cheap Korean soju plonk to local whisky and potent home brews.

Much of the time the camera simply sits in a visibly cold setting recording conversations that travel from bashful chitchat to despair, dipsomaniac farce or surrealistic drollery. Nearly a dozen richly detailed and well-acted characters, offbeat but entirely credible, cross the lost young man's confused path to nowhere, which ends up at the hopeful start of another bus journey into the strikingly harsh Korean scenery.

A small low-budget calling-card for the director, the movie is a charmingly modest first step for a director exhibiting no pretensions or wild ambitions.

Joan Rivers: a piece of work

Documentary-makers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg earned awards for The Trials of Daryll Hunt in 2006 and The Devil Came on Horseback the following year. They co-wrote both films too. In 2008, they gained no awards for directing The End of America, two other women writers' adaptation of Naomi Wolf's volume of anti-fascist political warnings. In 2010, they did their own thing again, condensing hours of interviews and location work into a study of the life and working methods of veteran stand-up comedienne Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work at the age of 75.

So far, its editor, Penelope Falk, has won the film's only award, and the movie has reportedly been declared ineligible for Oscar nomination. That of course would tie in with the comic's clear feeling that she never gets the appreciation she deserves from the entertainment industry.

The documentary shows her to be a workaholic Jewish princess royal, setting forth from her palatial New York apartment on a relentless schedule of live performances, professional challenges, money-making ventures and constant need to be her world's focus of attention. She's collected a strong supportive team, what she calls a minor industry, and the saddest aspect of the movie is her admission towards the end that she has to part company with her increasingly absent manager (and sole surviving old showbiz friend) after more than 30 years. Her relationship with her daughter (single child and fellow comic) is also depicted well, without sentimentality.

For a year the producer-directors popped in and out of her schedule, from the American hinterland to the Edinburgh Festival, from Comedy Television's roast to the first night in London of the play she wrote for herself. The known key events in her biography are covered crisply, with well chosen clips from her past to illustrate how she and her trademark crudity survived four decades of live performances.

In the final clip under the end credits, Rivers jokes with an interviewer that the documentary would be a greater commercial success if she'd died during the making of it. One knows that she intends to be the subject of another profile feature when she's close to her 100th birthday.