New-made furniture, scuffed to look vintage, rarely convinces as anything other than pastiche. Portraits painted as closely as possible to resemble the photographs on which they’re based are a similarly strange phenomenon: admiration for the painter’s skill is undercut by the sense of creative constraint. For the same reasons The Peasants, on which married directors DK and Hugh Welchman apply the technique — of hand-painting over live-action frames — that brought them breakout success with Van Gogh biopic Loving Vincent, is a film that impresses in its painstaking, years-long construction, without ever really supplying a reason (beyond prettiness) for such a laborious aesthetic.
Near the beginning and near the end of Mirlan Abdykalykov‘s beautifully made but tough-minded, enraging Bride Kidnapping there are literally mirroring shots of the main character, 19-year-old Umut (Akak Berdibekova). At the start, she gazes at her reflection in modest pleasure as she gets dressed: a lovely young woman, with a ready, dimpled smile, looking forward to the day and to a simple but fulfilling future as a nurse. In a matter of a few days she will be again at that wardrobe mirror, but her demeanor will be entirely changed.
Family will break your heart and bruise your heart and mend your heart like no one else can — not always in that order, and sometimes all three at once. In his exceptional, happy-sad-funny debut film House of the Seasons, Oh Jung-min creates a beautiful tapestry of intimate sprawl, as three generations of a meddlesome, quarrelsome, loving Korean clan experience all the colors of familial life while the hills of their village home phase from lush green to copper and russet to stark, snowy white.
