Perfected Simplicity: Jang Kun-Jae's Sleepless Night

Jang Kun-Jae's Sleepless Night will play as part of the Museum of Modern Art's ContemporAsain series on Saturday 8/10 and Sunday 8/11. I wrote about the film earlier this year, and have revised that piece below:

The utter simplicity of Jang Kun-Jae’s Sleepless Night makes it feel like such a tender work of art, whose intimacy feels utterly sublime in its feeling. Here’s a film about a couple in their early 30s. They both have jobs and seem genuinely happy with each other. They eat dinner, go on walks in the park, and wash each other in the shower. This is an actual couple, who have a major concerns about where their life is heading, but it never dominates their thoughts or minds.

The digital frames of Sleepless Night (not to be confused with the French action film) might come off as almost amateurish, but Jang is no amateur. This South Korean director, making his second feature (I’ve been told his first feature, Eighteen, is equally impressive), seems to be inspired by a wave of great Asian artists behind him: Yasujiro Ozu, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Hong Sang-soo. It's a film with almost no pretensions to raise the stakes of its narrative beyond its extremely limited scope, but it executes it with such lyrical precision, that it held me rapturous for its brief, 65-minute run time.

EXCLUSIVE: Subject of New Errol Morris Film Claims Fabrication

Joyce McKinney, in blue, talks about Errol Morris's Tabloid

UPDATE (6/28/2011): Mark Lipson, a producer for Tabloid (as well as a few other Errol Moris films, including The Thin Blue Line), has responded to the story as told below. Lipson notes that Showtime is indeed a partner on the film, remarking, "Showtime is in fact a partner in the enterprise of Tabloid." As for the other allegations, Lipson prefered to stay on the sidelines for now. "I agree at some point it would be worth addressing all the various questions. But for now.. certainly for the next couple of months, I would like the movie to speak for itself."

Does this mean that some of the movie is in fact fabricated? My gut says if yes, only by a small bit, as Morris' film is about the impossibility of ever reaching the truth. My take on the story is that McKinney simply beleived that having seen how Morris has created sympathetic portraits of people like Robert McNamara in The Fog of War or the soldiers from Abu Ghraid in Standard Operating Procedure that she would get off with the same sort of nice light on her. The film is somewhat sympathetic in the end anyways, though it certainly allows the other side to have its way as well. Thus, only time will tell if McKinney will have her way.

THE ORIGINAL STORY

            Audiences were in laughter and applause tonight at the Museum of Modern Art for an early screening of Errol Morris’s latest film, Tabloid, but they got a second story after the film had ended. Tabloid is the latest documentary from the filmmaker behind The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. It follows the strange story of Joyce McKinney, who snuck into tonight’s screening in New York, lambasting the film’s validity during the credits and beyond tonight.

Tabloid recounts the story of McKinney, who followed her Mormon boyfriend from Utah, who she believed had been brainwashed by the Mormon Church and sent to the United Kingdom. The girl went with a couple companions to England and stole him back, and then claimed to have three days of passionate sex in a Southern English cottage, some of which included ropes and chains. But Morris shows the sides from others involved in the story, including the reporters that made her a tabloid sensation, which instead reveal kidnap, rape, and other kinky stuff. McKinney escaped charges in court by fleeing to the United States while on bail, but remains a tabloid sensation for years to come.