Tazza, libertines, cardsharps from other worlds

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Category: Essays

 

The New York Korean Film Festival 2007, presented by Helio and organized by The Korea Society:

Tazza: the High Rollers will be screened  on

- Saturday, August 25th 2007, 9:00 PM. At Cinema Village

- Sunday, September 2nd 2007, 6:00 PM. At BAM Rose Cinemas

By some odd coincidence, as I was looking for the Japanese title of Tazza for some work I had to do in the prospect of the upcoming festival, I came across a charmingly quaint term: ikasamashi (written in the original below... it is the title of a book by Yanagihara Kei, apparently).

A cheater, a con man… a dirty… rotten scoundrel? Mad or bad… dangerous to know at any rate, as they say. A word that also happens to refer to a masterpiece of 17th century painting by George De La Tour: The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (which can be seen at the Louvre) and its avatar, The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum), the kind of vocabulary that Machida Ko (ex-punk rocker and Akutagawa-prize winner novelist) would not shrink from using.This might not seem immediately relevant (what’s relevant in a blog anyway?) but as odd as it might sound, there is something seductive about the idea of tracing a sort of unwitting lineage from classical painting to contemporary South Korean cinema in general and Tazza (which I commented earlier on, this year) in particular. The ghostly connection between the two (in so many ways, between high art and “pop” art) offers the occasion of a brief deviant commentary of Choi Dong-Hoon’s film.

In the realm of artistic representation, the card game card is hardly a novelty. Cinema has certainly exploited the theme threadbare, from the God of Gamblers series in Hong Kong (from Chow Yun-Fat to Gong Li) to the cockney hoodlums of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, from Paul Newman to Tom Cruise (!), from Rounders to Tazza, half a world away.  

 

Father back in time, in later 16th- and 17th-century art, the game of cards is already a popular pretext for “genre” painting (Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps circa 1594, Valentin de Boulogne’s The Cardsharps, c. 1615-18, and De La Tour’s own earlier version of this composition, The Card Players c. 1632).

Perhaps because games of chance, dice and cards, in addition to the excitement they can bring, have a strong transgressive edge: the Church threatens the players with excommunication and the King has banned the practice altogether.

This world is not very far from the underground universe of Tazza and its nonchalant hwatu gamblers, who play with both the truth and fire (literally, at the end). If gambling is still banned in a number of countries, or at the very least, strictly restricted, it is for a reason. Something about the games of chance threatens the social order. On the one hand, the player submits to a set of rules (hwatu, poker, etc.), without which there would be no game at all in the first place. On the other, s/he breaks the rules of the world outside the game, the norm that regulates the normal circulation of capital. With gambling, whether we are speaking about French characters in a 16th century painting, or faux-Armani-attired South-Koreans who play hwatu, a challenge to the way things are meant to work is posed. In one move, one roll of the dice, patiently accumulated earnings can vanish, making a mockery of the very idea of production or work ethics. Everything can collapse in an instant, toppling an honest life’s work into the precipice. There is the scandal, the unbearable lightness of gambling, its fundamental frivolity and dishonesty.

In this painting, as in the film, something is at work (at war?) between the characters. Three card players and a handmaid are gathered around a table. Two men and two women. Mouths are shut, gazes and gestures are suspended. In cunning and silence, a game is played, perhaps “prime”, the remote ancestor of poker. A plot is taking place. The surface may be one of simple conviviality, with its depth-less background made of an evenly-distributed blackness that brings out the colorful protagonists, who stand almost abstractly or abstractedly out of the scene, but beyond the game, the characters are lending themselves to an  all-too-human (and somewhat vain – this is a pre-Jansenist work after all) comedy.Invariably coupled with the pleasures of wine and of the flesh, the game of card has a potent allegorical value, - it is not unlike what Pascal calls divertissement, usually translated as “diversion” or “distraction.” A deviant practice, a wayward way off the straight path of honest living (which tends to come back to the protagonists of American noirs as constant reminders of the “what’s right”, like the return of the repressed).A large amount of money seems to be at stake here: the gold coins on the table provide a good explanation for the tension that permeates the scene.  But they remain discreet, almost like a cipher of actual material wealth. Almost like an unwritten check.What is really striking about this painting is the centrality of the woman, which is of course a salient aspect in Tazza, whose female lead, Kim Hye-Soo, cuts an unforgettable figure. Sitting between the two male players, with her long white face in a red headgear and a brown dress, her necklace adoring a generous and sensual expanse of throat, it is tempting to link her to the more “modern” figure of the femme fatale. Her eyes are something to see. Disquieting, enigmatic, they seem to express as much fausseté as can be.

She is the one character resolutely turned to the outside, pointing out to something other than herself, gesturing in the direction of the servant, with a sign of suspicion, to the side, possibly the cheat on the far left. She seems to be signaling to the turbaned servant, with this complex ambiguous sign that can be interpreted as a gesture of complicity or of defiance. A bright and brittle icon of libertine luxury and venal love, the courtesan (as her pearl necklace indicates, if we listen to what iconography has to say) dominates the scene, at an equal distance from both Truth and Trust. The cardsharp with ace of diamonds behind his back is too austere, too soberly dressed, and hidden in the shadow to counterbalance her presence, while the well-dressed cavalier on the right is too self-absorbed. The same could be said about the male characters of Tazza (including the lead, Cho Seung-Woo). Somehow, it is the woman who deals the cards and actually makes the silent witness of the scenario, the amused accomplice of her game.

 

Related article: Tazza, Cardboy Bebop (review)