During the winter season in Tokyo, two disillusioned models fall in love. When their stay extends, the relationship combusts.
TIGER is a reminder that for the million people who talk about making a film someone goes out and does it. In this instance, Beaufort (nee James McFay)
My Fay’s creative output is consistent across a number of media, [the volume of short stories the Venus 200 is another example]. Here it operates under his own quite evident muse on the subject. TIGER is the clearly autobiographical tale of two young people falling in and out of love during a stint of modelling in Tokyo. It is also a touchstone to the Zeitgiest in a number of ways.
TIGER is compared to the recent American Mumblecore genre, by one reviewer, entirely on a viewing of its trailer. Sure, the production inflects elements of the Mumblecore oeuvre. Clearly low budget – self funded – it is set frequently in close interiors and it makes a character device of speculative and rambling dialogue that becomes the reason for entire scenes. More importantly, it depicts the relationships between young people in interstitial periods – between things and places and without particular responsibilities, a preoccupation of the style.
TIGER’s characters are, like Derrida’s ontological negativism, itenerant subjectivities – defined in terms of a future that never arrives. Waiting. They all want to “do this for a while – to make some money….and then get out….”
Mumblecore, as an American genre, usually sets itself in locations familiar to the protagonists – it’s a theatre of the everyday. These locations are depicted as the mise en scene that frames the dislocation and ennui of the characters.
The films are, in this sense, low tech critiques of comtemporary America, where locations are used [often with intended irony] to frame the characters own removal form the broader narratives of social participation.
This is a particularly American trope. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation could be seen as a more grandiose (and admittedly well realised) version of the highly DIY aesthetic exhibited by the Mumblecore auteurs. She uses Tokyo a topical backdrop to the characters’ relationship and their abiding sense of alienation, exaggerating the ironic and in doing so trivialising the culture in which they find themselves.
Contemporary American Indie films frequently highlight kitsch and the banal in their depiction of contemporary America, and this amounts, cumulatively, to a preoccupation with the empty shell of capitalist spectacle as it is seen in decay. The films are possibly a response to the exaggerated, hyper realist spectacle of both American urbanity and it’s bombastic cultural output – cinematic and otherwise. How often do young people in “indie” films work in fast food outlets in strip malls?
This desire for authenticity through the rejection of Hollywood production values exploded, I feel, with a slew of films that I would call American Rural Gothic – made at around the time of Wim Wenders Paris Texas, and wrung to death with David Lynch’s cliched Wild at Heart. These films parlayed the desert landscape, endless petrol stations, desert roads, remote diners and dusty strip malls into a stage for the love lives and minor criminalities of the protagonists. These films themselves seemed a response to the the history of the Western and the white picket fence suburban melodrama.The Cohen Brothers’ deft Raising Arizona is perhaps the most well realised example of the genre.
Lost in Translation, as a film set in Tokyo, manages to parlay this obsession with cultural irony into an almost monotonous trivialisation of Japan and Tokyo – as if it can exist for nothing more as a stylised amplification of American urban disconnection.
TIGER never lapses into this cliche of culture as backdrop, staying resolutely with the two main characters, their relationship, and more subtly, on the mechanisms that have brought them here in the first place. All of the models inhabiting the lifestyle portrayed by the film are in search of an undefined financial outcome – there’s no specific end game in sight. They are frequently shown as inert figures who are discussed, driven, housed and instructed to attend castings in the service of information capitalism.
Offscreen voices from modelling agents make cutting asides in Japanese about the weight and attractiveness of the models. They instruct them over the phone to attend go-sees and to travel to other countries. The models are shunted in joyless herds in minibuses like well treated cattle – pacified with ipods.
Models and agents in the film are like children and their perpetually absent parents. The models constantly seek approval and engagement through being allowed to work. In this respect, agents become the underlying motivation for any action – apart from waiting. The final scene in the country where the relationship between the two main characters finally implodes happens in there at the behest of an agent, who remains as always, unseen in the process. The models wait for them to turn up and argue over taking polaroids of themselves in the meantime.
The film makes this theatre of inactivity a clearly motivated outcome of the minor political economy in which the couple finds themseleves. Bussed into their agency apartments with cheap bunk beds and entertained for free in nightclubs where the passport to entry is a model’s composite. Being “at home”, going to nightclubs, changing cities… all become part of the non action that is the defining aspect of their lives.
Cleverly, TIGER skirts the use of Tokyo as a kitsch backdrop, forgoing the glib outsider view of the city that Lost in Translation can’t resist. The Japanese themselves barely feature in the film, and the naïve observations of the cultural outsider are mercifully absent.
Unlike most of the films it will be compared to, TIGER is actually shot on film, not mini DV, in a style that is albeit spare and somewhat constrained by the limited shooting ratios such a production pathway will necessarily entail. Within this limitation, it retains a vibrancy of vision that holds together extremely well over the hour or so that it runs. Combining this with what are genuinely resonant moments of observation, it is a pleasure to watch.
The project is amplified, in the way of modern underground media, by a profusion of references in Blogs, cross media promotional parties and a cultivated network of social media postings. Particularly clever are the short subject mock interviews with female models that obliquely explore the themes of the film and act as references – distributed pointers to the text itself. As a film it manges to transcend for moments the directionless “slacker” milieu to which it will undoubtedly be compared. As a work of self promotion, it is surprisingly modest. TIGER operates through a veil of aliases – neither Beaufort or McFay are James’ real names, rather nom de plumes that refreshingly distance the creative process from mediated references to the self.
Six months after its date of production it would undoubtedly be shot as HD video on a Canon 35mm still camera – with spectacular results. Without doubt, it is enabled, in its present and somewhat iterative incarnation, by the possibility of laptop editing, promotion and marketing. As a work of trans-media enterprise, it is a splendid example of the enabling possibilities of the moment.
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