DJ Ahmet

DJ AHMET
Writer & Director ~ Georgi M. Unkovski
2025, North Macedonia-Czech Republic-Serbia-Croatia
Stars ~ Arif Jakup, Agush Agushev, Dora Akan Zlatanova

One of those minor bildungsroman that leaves you life-affirmed and takes up a small corner in your affection whilst the mainstream is mostly bombast and performative emotions. Its worth is in showing a small far away community and highlighting that the emotional simularities between cultures aren’t so conflicted at core. Ahmet is a typical fifteen year-old, a Yuruk teen from a remote Macedonian village, trying to cope with the loss of his mother and a difficult father who takes him out of school to work sheperding, as well as looking out for a younger brother that hasn’t spoken since their loss. Ahmet isn’t even really an odd-one-out, an outsider, just coping with domestic and social circumstance and first love. The pink sheep may symbolise otherwise, but it just needs time to find its way back.  

What is perhaps enlightening is the portrayal of how the contemporary TikTok age reaches such a relatively isolated and traditional community. Indeed, if anything, it is almost conventional for these stories that the enemy here is tradition and the patriarchy. While the mosque is broadcasting prayers from a PC (some of the film’s best laughs come from this), the men are still trying to marry off teenage daughters to their adult sons. The location offers many, many gorgeous vistas, making this, as Daniel Eagan says, “both wildly exotic and completely down to earth.”  He also says that

Jakup, who's in almost every scene as Ahmet, gives a solid if occasionally stiff performance. He can be charming, especially with his younger brother, but his character is too withdrawn and hesitant for much of the movie.

Jakup’s performance offers an unpolished natural niceness and sudden expressions that charm in their spontaneity. But not everyone is a go-getter or fiery or a traumatised lover, and if there’s anything the coming-of-age genre is good at it is showing how the ordinary is extraordinary to someone, how dilemmas are melodrama. And how limitation inspires invention: with the right motivation – music and love – Ahmet turns his tractor into a sound-system, for example. There’s a maintained sense that he is just on the verge: of being music-obsessed, of defying his father, of falling in love. Incidentally, Arid Jakup comes from that very village. 

It is Dora Akan Zlatanova as Aya that steals the show, rightfully so to knock Ahmet off his feet, sparkling with a worldiness that this town has little idea about. Yes, there are secret festivals happening just outside, but the patriarch aren’t truly aware or consenting, so they are not about to agree to her dance routine with which she hopes to sabotage her arranged marriage. The music itself appropriately goes from EDM to traditional, bursting out and blurring in but never quite dominating the set-pieces until it needs to.

It is not a film that feels angry or unsympathetic to any of its characters, but one that broadcasts empathy and the generational struggle between what is coming and what is already happening. If its simple message is to be brave, that’s powerful enough for a little funny film. We know he’ll be okay.

In the Mood for Love

 IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
FA YEUNG NIN WAH
(traditional Chinese: 花樣年華
simplified Chinese: 花样年华 
lit. 'Flower-like Years', 'the prime of one's youth') 
Writer & Director ~ Wong Kar-Wai
2000, Hong Kong-France
Stars ~ Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Chiu-wai, Ping-Lam Siu

It starts with a set-piece straight from a farce: two neighbours moving in at the same time, the movers getting their possessions mixed up when delivering to the wrong apartment. It could be comedy, or meet-cute, but that’s not this film. It’s the first of many times that they graze past eachother before they meet properly, and when they do they just kinda drift into the narrative. They fall into dramatising their belief that their spouses are having being unfaithful with one another; they role-play how they think the affair happened and confrontations. And of course. It is no surprise that they fall into the very trap that they themselves have set.

In fact, that’s not the only farcical situation they find themselves in, trapped in a room to avoid discovery while their neighbours play mah jong outside all night. Indeed, the supporting cast we see could easily be comedic if turned up a bit. But the film is harnessed to the introverted, somewhat serious and brittle lead characters. 

It is Wong Kar Wai’s seventh film, built from daily improvisation and collaboration with the actors, an idea rather than a script; Wong crafts the story in the edit, describes himself as a band leader. Developed originally from the idea of exploring characters through food and the title ‘A Story of Food’. It is set in Hong Kong1962, the year Wong’s family moved from Shaghai to Hong Kong.The surface of this film, encapsulating highly attractive people with unspoken desire, has had a long-term influence on advertising. Certainly its use of slo-mo moodiness hasn’t dated, a motif of romantic evocation. In fact, ‘In the Mood for Love’ has proven a popular recurring screening with twenty-somethings at London’s Prince Charles cult cinema.  The whole film looks dipped in mint and rouge, perhaps the occasional plum, and a jukebox of oldies. The choice of Nat King Cole is because Cole was his mother’s favourite. It is chic and dressed to knock you out; even the characters say of Maggie Wong’s gorgeous parade of cheongsam dresses, “She dresses like that to buy noodles?” They have money but nowhere to go?

Wong started in Hong Kong With Chris Doyle, then moved the shoot to Bangkok with Mark Lee when Doyle walked away. He discovered that Bangkok looked more like the era he was trying to capture, meaning the film was shot twice over. This added to an already arduous production that had endured Asian financial crises on top of Wong’s protracting improvisational style and starting production on already for its sequel, ‘2046’. And yet it is obvious that he had a confident vision, for the film feels of a whole, never hinting at any fractuous two year production. For example, Wong talks of how the intent was “we always wanted to keep the audience as one of the neighbours” and a passing-by and voyeuristic mood is kept throughout. 

Where the mode for much film is for characters asserting themselves, finding their voice, the characters of journalist Chow Mo-wan and a shopping company secretary Mrs. Chan are both introspective and quiet. For the most part the mood, movement and music elucidate their thoughts and turmoil. Tony Leung seems to have simply gone with the flow whilst Maggie Cheung struggled at first with the lack of structure and dialogue, although eventually finding her rhythm with it. She now considers that she put her soul into it, and certainly Wong casts the impression that he sees this definitely as a collaboration, always saying “we” when interviewed about the production. Rarely are reserved characters given such elegant context and roam and romance in. 

Wong has spoken  of the influence of Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’, of the fact because the protagonists are a handsome pair that we don’t suspect them of darkness or creepiness: “Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, ‘This guy is really weird.’” That’s true, but also that the aesthetic doesn’t play that card either, saturating us in the tragedy of the unrequited love of two heartbroken people, giving that as the impetus. Certainly when you add suspicion to their behaviour, you can detect that Chow is perhaps manipulating Mrs. Chan, where he appears to be the director of the role-playing. Yet, malevolence does not linger as an aftertaste, just loneliness.  
 
Like Truffaut’s ‘Lift to the Scaffold’, ‘In the Mood for Love’ is a quintessential example of a jazzy mood put on screen. One could translate the slow motion and glides punctuated repeatedly by ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ as an evocation and romanticism of nostalgia and memory itself: certainly it insists on its own mournful elegance. It is a film where Wong is trying to recapture an era and the gossip of his childhood. With that, the longing of the film is similar to that of coming-of-age. Mood and memory is the story.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE
Director ~ Adam Wingard
Writers ~ Terry Rossio, Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett
2024, USA-Australia
Stars ~ Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens

Within minutes, Kong is leaping in slo-mo to a dimuendo, and I’m thinking, “|Oh, one for the trailer.” But that’s far from the last. Godzilla curled up in the Colloseum is kinda cute, an example of a ridiculous detail that amuses. But I’m distracted thinking, “Why has she parked on the grass? No tyre tracks…?” Then we have the fast-talking loundmouth blogger that knows better than the uptight experts. And I’m thinking: “There’s a lot of sparks flying around in that underground base where people are running around like headless chickens – isn’t that very unsafe?” It is the kind of film where you notice the nonsensical details, the kind of film that knows you know it’s affronting your intelligence. And anything but red blood. Then it all hinges on Kong’s dentistry and a funky song saying “I gotcha!”, so, you know. Needle-drops that make sure you don’t take anything seriously and add nothing but nonsense (everyone thinks they can do what James Gunn or Tarantino can do).

The first fight between Kong and other giant apes had me locked in for a moment. Baby Kong isn’t as cloying-annoying as you might anticipate from the trailer. How much did this cost? Despite Kong occasionally impressing, very much fake gamesystem visuals, insulting compared to the focus of ‘Godzilla Minus One’, although more expensive – and something like this is why something like that was such a revelation. Whether it meets a “fun” quota depends on your taste. After all, Kim Newman says, “This spectacle fully embraces the toddler-tantrum-on-a-colossal-scale aesthetic and is winning because of rather than despite its essential goofiness.” I sensed shrug rather than goof.  

 

There’s potential in the premise of a bunch of humans trying to co-exist with kaiju, focusing on the minutiae of doing their dentistry for example, serios or fun, but this doesn’t care.  Lots of sound and monsters signifying nothing. Leave your brain and need for internal logic waaayy behind. Stuff on top of stuff with the constant pace of desperately urgent! And a roar! to imply excitement. But it is all just shallow distraction. Just: Kong knows sign language. Good Kong x Bad Kong. Kong has giant super-axe. Kong has … robo-arm? Oh, and here’s Godzilla putting in a cameo.