Films about filmmakers in the midst of some kind of artistic/existential crisis can usually be taken to be at least somewhat autobiographic, and Director Shin has confessed that Host & Guest did in fact emerge from a very dark time in his life. In this film, a teacher of film and would-be filmmaker experiences a series of personal blows that leave him literally on the floor. At his most humiliated, vulnerable, pathetic point, Ho-Jun cries out in desperation, "God…" followed by a long pause, then, "Godard… Help me…" Now that's a great joke in English subtitles, though it wouldn't work as well if you were pronouncing correctly that French director's name. It certainly doesn't work in Korean — which is really too bad, because it would have been perfect summary of where the director takes the film.

Through various circumstances, Ho-Jun strikes up an odd friendship with Gye-sang, a young man he first meets when he chases him away from the door, where he'd appeared as a religious missionary. The film leverages the differences between the moody, burned-out, cynical film teacher and bright, humble, helpful Christian. But Gye-sang doesn't preach: indeed, he's gotten fired from his job as a tutor because his boss accused him of hiding his religion. "It's just an ordinary life," he maintains, and his friendship with Ho-Jun is just an ordinary friendship — or, rather, an extraordinary friendship inasmuch as Gye-sang is a true friend. These two characters are allowed a certain amount of argument over theological, personal and aesthetic questions, but the meat of this film is not philosophical debate, but genuine unfolding of affection between two very different people, and moreover, two fully-realized characters.

There's a political thread that will probably translate only in part to non-Koreans, having to do with the way politics have evolved in a country just south of fanatically-communist North Korea. Ho-jung is the typical leftist artist, and gets into a fist fight with a fervent Korean Bushite in the back of a taxi cab (a series of anti-Bush jabs suggest this is part of the director's autobiography as well). The two points that Dubya is both a "faithful Christian" and wants to spread "freedom" by force are wound into this film's themes, focused as it is on freedom, faith, and, ultimately, on the question of Christian faith and war. But that latter theme is less the punchline of this film than an excuse just to meet these characters as they meet, and help, each other on their very different journeys. The director says he relates more to the skeptical Ho-jun character, but his treatment of the Gye-sang is among the most fair, realistic, sympathetic, and knowing portrayals of Christian faith I've ever seen in a film; one is tempted to speculate that a director who understands faith this well can't be that far from it. (Note: in specific, Gye-sang's religion is some Korean brand of evangelicalism, with its own peculiarities, yet even these are observed by the film with humility and respect.)

The flat, unadorned style of the film may have everything to do with budget (it was the director's first feature, filmed in his apartment), but I thought it complemented well both the quiet objectivity of the point of view and the occasional odd outbursts of the troubled Ho-jun. There's a sequence in the film where the film professor drags the Christian to an art cinema, which turns out to be one of my own recent favorites, the Turkish film Uzak (whose director had a new film at CIFF this year.) There's even some neat parallels between that film, aka Distant — which features a photographer in similar crisis who gets a roommate from the provinces — and Host & Guest, though Director Shin insists he only used Uzak because he could get the rights to use the footage. Still, it was fun to see this earnest young Christian having to work through whether this film will be kosher according to his own moral standards, and the professor arguing with him the question "How can you have holy stories in this f****d up world?" Host & Guest is perhaps not a holy story by that presumed standard, but by my own, I found it holy indeed: a beautiful example of human beings reaching out to one another, offering a certain healing and even salvation to one another, in just "an ordinary life." This sweet, quixotic, enigmatic and intensely personal film was one of my favorite discoveries of CIFF '06.  

Waiter covers similar territory as Stranger Than Fiction in that it's a postmodern magical tale crosscut between the film's ostensible protagonist and the "writer" of the protagonist's life, in this case a scriptwriter and in the other film a novelist. Depending on how this setting is treated, it can evoke meditation on the theme of predestination versus free will, human dealings with a Creator, questions of how narration makes or unmakes our lives, of suffering and meaning — all sorts of questions in fact which both these films tease out in bits but I suspect there's plenty more to plumb or plumb better if someone else wants to take this up further. Both leave gaping holes in their weird scenarios (questions like, Who writes the scenes where the main character goes "off script," something that happens in both stories), but the tone is generally loopy and the scenario intriguing enough that audiences will suspend disbelief and roll with it to see where it goes.

While Stranger Than Fiction remains a conventional Hollywood film, Waiter is both more loopy and more serious, springing as it does from Northern European sensibilities, specially-attuned to the violently absurd and the existentially bleak. The title character, Edgar, lives a tedious, unsatisfying life, filled with meaningless suffering and humiliating mediocrity. Without explanation, he shows up at the apartment of Herman, the scriptwriter of his life, and demands changes: this waiter who hears complaints and is bullied around for a living finally complains about his life to the chef himself, whining, pleading, bargaining and even threatening in hopes of getting something better. This, of course, evokes either desperate prayer to God or the gods, or shaking one's fist at the universe, and given the perspective of this film, more like the latter. For, as his scriptwriter tells him, Edgar is living a modern life, with no purpose, at the mercy of the mood or whim of Herman, or changes made by his girlfriend Suzie while he's in the bathroom. This perspective does not have to make any compromises which would be necessary for mass audiences — which, despite some self-conscious talk about happy endings, Stranger Than Fiction is compelled to do.

Indeed, compulsion, even violent compulsion, is a great metaphor in Waiter, as poor Edgar seems compelled at every turn to say and do things by forces who will hurt him if he doesn't, and probably hurt him regardless. He does manage to get his scriptwriter to make a change he's requested (prayers can be answered, or at least some wishes do come true) but the moral is to be careful of what you wish or pray for: there are consequences, not always as in an EC comics vengeance story, but because life is complex and every plot development unfolds its own unforseen consequences. We're drawn into Edgar's story, even though we know how arbitrarily constructed it is, but ultimately the arbitrariness may pile up and leave some viewers wanting to send this film back to the scriptwriter. It is worth noting how convenient it is for a scriptwriter depicting an absurd, arbitrary universe, if their story is subject to logical lapses and tonal shifts "because that's the way the universe really is". In any case, even a non-theist might wish this scriptwriter had turned his attention, like Stranger Than Fiction, to figuring out how to live a human life in even a meaningless universe rather than just rubbing our faces in the meaninglessness of it all — even if it is often hilarious.  

Days of Glory is Glory for Algerians: as the latter film sought to redress the unjust lapse of any recognition for the the courageous service of African-Americans in the US Army, this film does the same for Algerian colonials who fought with the French in World War II. Perhaps it is justice enough to make sure everybody who did their bit in the Good War gets their fair share of recognition in a classic, epic widescreen WWII movie — which is just what this film is, no more and no less.

Beyond the inherent culture-clash, the angle of approach taken is a fresh one to a story we've seen many times before. We follow the familiar Allied rollback of the Axis through the experiences of the Seventh Algerian Infantry Regiment, made up of colonial soldiers who answered the desperate call to defend Mother France. Indeed, there's lots of awkward, ironic talk about defending the "homeland," singing of the Marseilles, waving the tricolor and shouting "Vive le France!" by young Muslims whose relationship with their "mother" has always been problematic. "When I free a country, it's my country — even if I've never seen it before," asserts an infantryman named Saïd, one of the small group of soldiers we come to know. Saïd's friend Messoaud becomes the company marksman, who seeks to win the heart of a newly-liberated French girl; Yassir would probably be described in most movie platoon guides as "the Big Guy," and Corporal Abdelkadar, an officer in any other army, whose devotion to duty, belief in the system, the word of his commanders and the rightness of the cause becomes the obvious bellwether as to how the film wants us to view the wartime experience of the Algerians.

We begin our march in Africa, with the assembly of the company and its initial engagements there with the enemy, when they are thrown into the teeth of German machine guns while the French officers observe from a safe distance. The story continues through Italy and France, making many of the usual stops from battles in French forests through flag-waving liberations of towns. The clashes of cultures are predictable enough, with the Algerians facing second-class treatment, racism, abuse and/or indifference at the hands of their "homeland's" regular army and officers. An exception is their own Sergeant Martinez, whose relation to the colonials is a complex mixture of love and hate: though he treats them harshly at times, he genuinely respects and stands up for his men, especially Saïd, for whom he develops a genuine esteem. These five Algerian actors shared Best Actor honors at Cannes, and the film took the Silver Hugo at CIFF. And, as I said, if making sure everybody gets their epic widescreen WWII movie is justice, than this film surely does that.

On the other hand, it seems to me there's more to the story here than former colonials getting their recognition, or pension, from their colonial masters, or getting their motherland to live up to its own values (liberty, equality and fraternity). In order to get to its Private Ryan-ish flashforward coda in the present day, the film has to skip over the subsequent colonial war between France and Algeria, and remains all but devoid of allusions to the present "clash of civilizations" that has made The Battle of Algiers a much more pertinent and urgent film. This film fills in an important missing piece to the story of World War II. But I couldn't help but feel like it was leaving out some pieces as well.