_The Last Time I saw Macao_: documentary + fiction = fraud

[septimus_...@q.com]

[septimus_...@q.com]

The film I saw at the Gene Siskel Film Center was the highly
touted _The Last Time I Saw Macao_. Of the trendy mix of
fiction and documentary (or found-footage) genre, it even made
the cover of Cineaction (or one of the other "Cine ..."
magazine. I was interested in seeing Macao anyway, having
been there once 30+ years ago and haven't returned since myself.
Turns out the film is a complete fraud, a bloated mess soaked
through with latent racist overtones. The footage shown are
either the most dilapidated parts of Macao (deserted factories,
almost uninhabited outlying islands, along the garbage strewn
coastline) or the most tacky (tranvestite cabaret acts in
casinos, old people exercising Tai Chi in public parks). Many
reviewers compare this film to Chris Marker's essay films, but
while Marker has a thesis to flesh out, he clearly chose images
and sequences which were truthful and representative. The
people and situations found in _Sans Soleil_, for example,
clearly represented a significant cross-section Japanese society
in the 80s. _The Last Time I saw Macao_ opens by telling us
Macao is the most densely populated place on earth and then
proceeds to show footage that has almost no people in it, focusing
on the most outre, stereotypical images of aging Chinese carrying
birdcages and manning 1960 era storge fronts and eating places.
The only programs on TV are apparently ancient Chinese opera. What
a joke. Where are the cell-phone hugging, hair-dying, night-club
hopping youngsters listening to rap? (I just saw _The Last Train
Home_, a serious documentary about the rural and industrial fringes
of China, and even there, there are plenty of nightclubs and bad,
loud, modern ballads.)

But that just concerns the images. The fictional "story," such
as it is, mostly told via the narrator's voiceover and supposed
phone conversations among the Chinese mafia, concerns the said
mafia's attempt to silence the protagonist's tranvestite friend
while engaging in a conspiracy to turn themselves into dogs via
some ancient, magical relic (?!). These Chinese villains have
badly dubbed cryptic conversations that usually end with them
calling themselves dragon-this, dragon-that. It is disgusting,
stereotyping, racist, and has nothing to do with Macao whatsoever.

I also saw Soderbergh's _Contagion_, against my better judgement.
Racism is also a problem there; the people of Hong Kong are the
arch villains. Not only does the plague originates in Hong Kong;
its people also kidnap a United Nation health investigator at gun point
to ransom vaccines from the U.S. and Europe. (Where do they find
all these guns in Hong Kong, which has the strictest gun laws?)
But Americans are also slandered upon, depicted as packs of rapid
dogs fighting each other for scraps of medication and food.
Supposedly about a global pandemic, the film does nothing to
differentiate various cultural responses to this crisis. The
goal here is to show humanity at its worse so that the director
and audience can satisfy their need for condescension. Sure enough,
the soundtract sounds like wannable porno music (not that I'm an
expert on that). _Contagion_ is indeed human bad-behavior porn,
with a liberal dose of racism thrown in. I thought racism was
largely eradicated in the civilized society of art-house cinema.
In the desperate attempt to find something new and different, it
has apparently been resurrected. What is old is new again, no
matter the cost, I suppose!