BLUR @ PHI until March 29, 2026

Photo © Lena Ghio, 2026

 FRANÇAIS app de traduction en haut

There are artists who traffic in illusion, and there are artists who dare to make illusion feel like an ethical event. With Blur, Phoebe Greenberg and Craig Quintero come as close to conjuring magic as contemporary technology will allow — not the prestidigitator’s sleight of hand, but the older, riskier magic of summoning the dead and asking them to speak.

Presented in its North American premiere at PHI from February 19 to March 29, 2026, and coproduced with PHI Studio, Riverbed Theatre, and Onassis Culture, Blur arrives with the patina of international acclaim: a sold-out world premiere at the National Theater & Concert Hall in Taipei and a European unveiling at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival’s immersive section. Yet prestige is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is the audacity of its premise and the precision of its execution.

Set in a near future where cloning and de-extinction have leapt from speculative fiction into corporate feasibility, Blur centers on a mother whose child has drowned. Her grief is not a metaphor; it is an abyss. And into that abyss steps science, offering resurrection not as miracle but as service. What would you do if you could defeat death? The question hovers over the production like a moral storm cloud, refusing to dissipate.

It would be easy to reduce the piece to its technological apparatus — volumetric motion capture, augmented reality overlays, extended-reality headsets that dissolve the boundary between the live and the virtual. But that would be akin to describing a cathedral solely in terms of its scaffolding. In Quintero’s hands — and he has, over the past decade, earned a reputation as a kind of sovereign of 360-degree dramaturgy — technology becomes atmosphere, not ornament. A technique that often feels gimmicky elsewhere acquires, here, a dream logic both unsettling and intimate. His images close in, encircle, breathe against your neck. You begin to doubt not only what you are seeing but where you are standing.

There are faint, mischievous winks at Matthew Barney’s operatic grotesqueries in The Cremaster Cycle, that feverish intermingling of biology and myth. And in certain passages — corridors that seem to pulse with subconscious dread, lighting that feels siphoned from nightmare — one detects the surreal cinematographic DNA of David Lynch, particularly the haunted Americana of Twin Peaks. But Blur is no pastiche. Its aesthetic references function less as homage than as atmospheric kinship: a recognition that we are wandering through a landscape where innocence and monstrosity share a bloodstream.

What distinguishes Blur from lesser immersive spectacles is its refusal to let technological dazzle eclipse emotional gravity. The actors’ performances — raw, unvarnished — are not subsumed by the virtual landscapes but rather bleed into them. Grief here is not digitized into abstraction; it is amplified, refracted across algorithmic terrains. A mother’s sob becomes a seismic event, reshaping the topography of an AI-controlled underground facility where humanity’s ambitions and follies intertwine. The result is not escapism but confrontation.

Technically, the production achieves a level of visual acuity that borders on the hallucinatory. The sharpness of the images — rendered through advanced volumetric capture and seamlessly integrated augmented reality — is not merely high-definition; it is high-intensity. Edges are crystalline, textures palpably tactile: the sheen of synthetic skin, the granular dampness of cavern walls, the spectral shimmer of resurrected creatures moving through digital mist. There is no lag, no perceptible seam between body and projection. Light behaves with painterly intelligence, sculpting faces in chiaroscuro one moment and dissolving them into pixelated ether the next. The engineering precision behind these environments is invisible in the best sense; it allows the spectator to surrender wholly, trusting that the world will not fracture under scrutiny. In an arena where immersive works often betray their mechanics, Blur maintains an almost surgical clarity, as if each frame had been honed to a blade’s edge.

At the center of this landscape is Dolly, a human-animal hybrid whose very name invokes the first cloned sheep and the Promethean bravado of late-20th-century genetics. Dolly is not a villain, nor a mascot. She is an embodiment of triumph and ambiguity — the soft-eyed proof that scientific genius and ethical vertigo often arrive hand in hand. When she appears, rendered through motion capture into a liminal creature both tender and uncanny, the audience feels the tremor of recognition: we have already crossed this threshold in our laboratories; the stage merely makes the crossing visible.

In this sense, Blur is less about cloning than about the unbearable seduction of repair. We live in an age intoxicated by optimization — of bodies, of ecosystems, of death itself. The production’s resurrected mammoths roaming a precarious environment are not merely spectacle; they are indictment. If extinction can be reversed, should it be? If a child can be reconstituted cell by cell, does the act restore love or counterfeit it? The piece does not sermonize. Instead, it stages the ethical dilemma as lived experience, forcing the spectator-participant to inhabit the tremulous space between desire and consequence.

Greenberg’s curatorial vision, honed through years of championing boundary-dissolving art, is palpable in the work’s architecture. There is indeed “a bit of everything” in Blur: theater, artificial intelligence, animation, philosophical inquiry, even a strain of gothic melodrama. Yet the hybridity never feels chaotic. Rather, it registers as hunger — a restless experimentation at the crossroads of languages. At a time when immersive art risks calcifying into formula, Blur feels perilously alive.

One of the most remarkable achievements of the piece is narrative clarity. For all its visual audacity — for all its “absurd” imagery — the thematic spine remains legible. We understand the stakes. We grasp the implications. The storytelling does not dissolve into abstraction; it sharpens. In an era when spectacle often masquerades as depth, Blur accomplishes the inverse: it uses spectacle to excavate depth.

The experience culminates not in resolution but in disquiet. Can science mend a broken heart? The question lingers, unanswered, as the virtual and the corporeal collapse back into their respective domains. Perhaps the more unsettling inquiry is whether we would accept the answer if it were yes. What becomes of mourning in a world without finality? What becomes of humanity if death is rendered optional?

To call Blur immersive is accurate but insufficient. It is immersive in the way grief is immersive — enveloping, disorienting, impossible to observe from a safe distance. It shatters conventional storytelling not for novelty’s sake but because the story it tells — about resurrection, about defiance of fate — demands a form as unstable as its subject.

TRAILER

In the end, Greenberg and Quintero have fashioned something rare: a work that treats technology not as a toy but as a moral instrument. Blur does not simply ask us to witness the ramifications of resurrecting the dead; it implicates us in the desire to try. And in that implication lies its quiet, terrible magic.

INFORMATION

LENA GHIO   

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PHOTOS © Yoo-Wei Chen

I Live Here Now: A Motel of Mirrors and Mothers • a film by Julie Pacino

TRAILER

In I Live Here Now, the feature debut of writer-director Julie Pacino, the first question arrives early and lingers like smoke from the wildfires that encroach upon its heroine’s flight: “Why do you make everything so weird?” It is asked of Rose, a struggling actress played with tremulous restraint by Lucy Fry, by her dim, cosseted boyfriend Travis (Matt Rife). But it might just as easily be directed at Pacino herself, whose debut is a fever dream of saturated color, recursive trauma, and gothic interiors that seem to breathe alongside their inhabitants.

That weirdness is both the film’s calling card and its stumbling block. Born from Pacino’s NFT photography series of the same name, I Live Here Now announces itself as a work of image-making first and narrative construction second. It is a puzzle box less concerned with the elegance of its solution than with the baroque flourish of its compartments. Yet within its lacquered surfaces lies a thorny, sometimes piercing meditation on bodily autonomy, inherited shame, and the monstrous expectations placed upon women’s bodies.

The premise is deceptively simple. Rose, on the brink of what might be her last chance at professional redemption, receives a callback from a formidable casting agent, Cindy (Cara Seymour). The stipulations are punishingly familiar: lose three pounds in two days; submit a self-tape; become smaller, more pliant, more bookable. Then comes the rupture. A positive pregnancy test—impossible, she thought, after years of believing herself sterile—threatens to derail the fragile architecture of her ambition.

Telling Travis goes badly. Telling his mother, Marge (a glacial, blade-sharp Sheryl Lee), is worse. Marge, swathed in crimson and contempt, is less interested in Rose than in the fetus she considers family property. Faced with this encroaching matriarchal tyranny, Rose flees. Wildfires blaze across California. She checks into a remote motel in Idyllwild called the Crown Inn. Or perhaps the Crown Inn checks into her.

From here, Pacino tips the film fully into phantasmagoria. The Crown Inn is a love hotel without an exterior, a pastel labyrinth of suites named “The Lovin’ Oven” and “Seventh Heaven,” each a chamber of regression and rebirth. Upon arrival, Rose is offered a complimentary glass of “pink milk tonic,” a prop so aggressively symbolic it might wink at the audience. The gesture recalls the “Drink Me” enticement of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and indeed the film’s most overt literary debt is to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—though its tonal register is darker, closer to the institutional horror of The Yellow Wallpaper.

The hotel’s denizens are less characters than embodiments. Ada (Lara Clear), the perpetually inebriated proprietor, exudes a dissipated sensuality. Sid (Sarah Rich), the cherubic receptionist, radiates infantilized cheer. And then there is Lillian, played by Madeline Brewer with predatory relish—a knowing, sadistic presence who seems to intuit Rose’s secrets before Rose herself can articulate them. Together, they form a triptych of possible futures and fractured selves, facets of womanhood warped by compliance, repression, and survival.

Pacino’s visual language is unapologetically referential. The saturated reds and blues nod toward Dario Argento’s giallo extravagance; the dream logic and doubling evoke David Lynch. At moments, one might detect the humid menace of Lynch’s Twin Peaks or the operatic dread of Suspiria. Yet Pacino’s sensibility is less derivative than devotional. She is not merely quoting her influences but situating herself within a lineage of filmmakers who treat space as psyche and décor as destiny.

Cinematographer Aron Meinhardt leans into this ethos, bathing corridors in hot pinks and jaundiced yellows, desaturating the “real world” so that the motel’s interiors throb with hallucinatory life. The production design by Hannah Rawson and Lucie Brooks Butler is a triumph of curated excess: womb-like chambers, mirrored hallways, brocades that seem to pulse. Editor Matyas Fekete, whose collaborations with Peter Strickland have honed a taste for sensory immersion, stitches together past and present with disorienting fluidity. Scenes do not so much cut as bleed into one another.

Sound, too, becomes an instrument of unease. The score by Jackson Greenberg and Pam Autuori (recording as TOMI) pulses with percussive anxiety and breathy, almost panting vocals. It underscores the film’s central conceit: that Rose’s crisis is both psychological and corporeal. Her body is a contested site—by her agent, by her boyfriend, by his mother, by the spectral memory of a childhood trauma hinted to be gynecological and unspeakable.

It is here that I Live Here Now locates its most compelling terrain. The horror is not primarily in jump scares or gore—though Pacino deploys a few jolts with bracing effectiveness—but in the slow realization that Rose has internalized the very forces that seek to diminish her. “You’re nobody’s prisoner but your own,” one character intones, a line that might feel trite were it not embedded within such an oppressive mise-en-scène.

And yet, for all its aesthetic assurance, the film sometimes withholds too much of the mundane world it seeks to destabilize. Because Pacino plunges us so swiftly into nightmare, we are given scant foothold in normality. Rose begins the film already unmoored; her baseline is abstraction. As a result, her descent—or ascent—lacks some of the emotional velocity it might otherwise carry. The stakes are clear in theory: autonomy versus erasure, individuation versus inheritance. But in practice, the narrative scaffolding can feel thin beneath the ornamental weight.

Fry’s performance is crucial in counterbalancing this tendency. Where others pitch toward operatic intensity—Lee’s Marge a study in icy hauteur, Brewer’s Lillian a feline embodiment of cruelty—Fry remains grounded, almost stubbornly so. Her Rose is not hysterical but hollowed out, moving through the motel’s rococo chambers with the wary stillness of prey. It is a canny choice. By refusing to match the film’s baroque temperature, she becomes its emotional anchor.

There are flashes of mordant humor. The suite named “The Lovin’ Oven” contains a crib. Wi-Fi is available only in the restaurant, though smoking is permitted everywhere. Pacino delights in these absurdities, and the film’s chaptered structure—announced like sections in a novel—further underscores its literary aspirations. At times, however, these gestures risk tipping into self-consciousness. One senses the director straining toward significance, eager to vault into the canon of feminist psychological horror.

Still, ambition is not a sin. If anything, it is the animating force of I Live Here Now. In an era when so many genre films arrive pre-packaged and algorithmically sanded, Pacino’s debut feels defiantly personal. Its preoccupations—with trauma, with reproductive choice, with the performance of femininity—are not merely topical but intimate. The film does not always cohere; its pacing can sag, its symbolism clatter. But it is alive with intention.

In the end, Rose’s confrontation is not with a single villain but with a lineage of silences. The Crown Inn becomes a crucible in which past and present combust, where maternal figures loom as both jailers and warnings. Outside, the wildfires threaten annihilation. Inside, another conflagration burns: the possibility of self-definition.

“I live here now,” the title insists—a declaration that is at once resignation and reclamation. For Rose, to live “here” may mean inhabiting her body without apology, claiming authorship over her own narrative. For Pacino, it signals an arrival. Imperfect, overwrought, but undeniably striking, I Live Here Now marks the emergence of a filmmaker willing to risk excess in pursuit of something visceral and true. In a cinematic landscape often allergic to sincerity, that risk alone feels worth taking.

LENA GHIO   

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The Ordinary Magic of Earth • the Earth's subtle voice ©

 INTRODUCTION 

Welcome.

Not to a program, nor to an argument armored in certainty, but to a threshold.

There are forces that move through us as wind moves through tall grass—unseen, undeniable, shaping the visible by their passing. We speak of gravity as though it were a number, of planets as distant stones circling a forgotten fire. Yet both ancient sky-watchers and modern physicists suggest something stranger: space is not emptiness but relation. The world is not inert matter. It is a living current of tension, rhythm, and exchange.

This journey begins there.

We turn away from the marketplace of distraction, where symbols are flattened into entertainment and intuition is diluted into mood. Instead, we approach astrology as architecture and orbital mechanics as scripture written in mass and motion. We inhabit a clockwork universe, yes—but it is a clock whose gears are carved from starlight, whose ticking is the pulse of becoming.

Gravity is not merely a force; it is a covenant between bodies across unimaginable distances. The invisible architects of life do not shout. They incline. And to listen, we begin with a witness.

The first magical story I will share with you is about lemon seeds.

Continued here : https://lenaghio.substack.com/p/the-ordinary-magic-of-earth

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-Lena Ghio

© 2026

BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS by Yuen Woo-Ping

TRAILER

 

There is a particular thrill that comes when a film announces itself not with a whisper of prestige but with the clang of steel. Blades of the Guardians—adapted from a popular manhua and directed by the legendary choreographer-turned-filmmaker Yuen Woo-ping—arrives swinging. It is enormous in scale, unabashedly pulpy in tone, and stacked with martial-arts royalty. Had it been produced on a tighter purse, it might have earned affection as a scrappy, retro-leaning genre piece. Instead, it emerges as something less common: a full-scale wuxia spectacle that still pulses with the spirit that made the form endure.

Yuen, still best known in the West for orchestrating the wire-fu miracles of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix, has had an uneven late period as a director. Projects like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destinyand The Thousand Faces of Dunjia felt more dutiful than inspired, ornate but curiously inert. Yet with Blades of the Guardians, Yuen rediscovers a simplicity that suits him. The film’s pleasures are direct: a fugitive warrior, a perilous escort mission, a desert crossing riddled with ambushes, and a gallery of rivals who express themselves most eloquently through swordplay.

Set in the waning years of the Sui dynasty, the story wastes little time before hurtling into motion. Dao Ma (Wu Jing), a former imperial soldier turned bounty hunter, makes his living navigating the moral gray zones of a collapsing order. He travels with a young orphan, Xiao Qi, whose presence softens Dao’s mercenary instincts without sanding down his edge. When a local governor—played in a fleeting but resonant turn by Jet Li—attempts to coerce Dao back into service, the refusal sets off a chain reaction. Soon Dao is on the run, tasked with escorting rebel leader Zhi Shi Lang (Sun Yizhou) across the Taklamakan Desert to Chang’an, joined by tribal chief Mo (Tony Leung Ka-fai), Mo’s headstrong daughter Ayuya (Chen Lijun), and a swarm of pursuers with old grudges and new contracts.

It is a busy narrative, but not a confusing one. The film understands that in wuxia, clarity of trajectory matters more than intricacy of plotting. The desert becomes both stage and crucible. Yuen and his team stage ambushes amid sandstorms, horseback chases through oil-slicked fields, and stagecoach melees that ricochet between slapstick and balletic grace. Even transitional skirmishes—encounters that in lesser hands would register as filler—feel consequential. Yuen’s gift, honed over decades, is character-driven action: every blow reveals temperament, every defensive parry discloses doubt or pride.

The film’s early highlight is an encounter that doubles as a meta-textual event. Jet Li’s brief appearance—his first significant action showcase in years—carries the weight of history. When Li and Wu Jing cross blades, it is not merely two characters testing one another but two eras of martial-arts cinema colliding. Their duel, which escalates into a three-way confrontation involving Max Zhang, is shameless fan service, yet it is mounted with such precision and relish that cynicism dissolves. Li, playing against type with cool authority, moves with an economy that belies his years; Wu meets him with a grounded ferocity. The wirework, often maligned by purists, is here unapologetically operatic. In Yuen’s hands, gravity is not defied so much as poetically negotiated.

Wu Jing anchors the film with a megawatt charisma that has only deepened since his earlier star-making collaborations with Yuen. Now in his fifties, he carries himself like a man who has survived too many campaigns to romanticize war, yet not enough to surrender to nihilism. Dao Ma’s smile—quick, teasing, almost boyish—flickers like a challenge to fate. Wu’s physicality is less about acrobatic flash than about controlled impact. When he unsheathes his blade, the gesture feels ceremonial.

Opposite him, Nicholas Tse delivers a steely performance as Di Ting, a former comrade with unfinished business. Tse has rarely been afforded such space to brood; here, his restraint becomes a weapon. The climactic duel between Dao and Di Ting unfolds near water, an elemental counterpoint to the desert that has dominated the film. If the emotional scaffolding of their rivalry is sketched more briskly than one might wish, the physical storytelling compensates. The fight is less about vengeance than about recognition—two men acknowledging the cost of loyalty in a world where allegiances are for sale.

Indeed, the film’s moral atmosphere is one of cynical fatalism shot through with romantic uplift. Good men sell their swords; rogues reveal inconvenient honor. Ayuya’s defiance of her suitor Heyi Xuan (Cisha) evolves from flirtatious sparring into a commentary on autonomy within patriarchal structures. Even stock figures—a retired assassin running an inn, a rival bounty hunter with a code—are granted moments of interiority. Yuen lingers on faces before unleashing bodies into motion, reminding us that spectacle is hollow without sympathy.

There are, inevitably, seams. A production of this scale shows signs of second-unit patchwork; some connective scenes feel perfunctory. The political stakes, gestured at in voiceover prologues and imperial intrigue, never quite attain the mythic resonance the film seems to promise. And yet these shortcomings fade amid the momentum. Blades of the Guardians is a chase film at heart—a rip-roaring procession of pursuits, reversals, and last-minute rescues. It understands that propulsion can be a form of poetry.

manhua 

What ultimately distinguishes the film from more cynical franchise-building exercises is Yuen’s evident affection for the material. Adapted from a comic property primed for sequels (the subtitle all but guarantees them), it could easily have devolved into brand management. Instead, it feels handcrafted. Yuen treats each character, no matter how fleeting their screen time, as worthy of attention. Cameos by veterans of Hong Kong action cinema function not as nostalgic gimmicks but as a lineage made visible. The genre’s past stands shoulder to shoulder with its present.

By the time the watery finale subsides, the viewer may not recall every subplot or secondary allegiance. What lingers is a sensation: of velocity, of steel singing through air, of desert horizons promising both doom and deliverance. Blades of the Guardians may not reinvent wuxia, but it reaffirms its vitality. In an era when blockbuster action often mistakes noise for grandeur, Yuen Woo-ping offers something sturdier—an epic that moves with the confidence of experience and the exuberance of a master who still believes in the romance of the blade.

Now in a THEATRE NEAR YOU!

LENA GHIO   

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NEW YORK NEWS: cinema français : Two Pianos by Arnaud Desplechin

TRAILER

 

TWO PIANOS by Arnaud Desplechin

Arnaud Desplechin has never been one for half measures, and Two  Pianos —his latest act of cinematic exuberance—plays out like a fugue written in a feverish frenzy. The film begins with a crash, quite literally: a man faints at the sight of his former lover, hitting his head against an elevator door as she flees, like a fugitive pursued by her own emotions. From there, Desplechin doesn't so much build as ricochet, orchestrating a melodrama so intensely devoted to its excesses that one can only admire its sheer endurance. It's a film that staggers, waltzes, collapses, and rises again in the same movement—an erratic concerto in two keys: the sublime and the absurd.  

François Civil , in the role of the prodigious pianist Mathias , carries the film with a controlled volatility that reflects his character's fractured relationship to art and affection. Returning from a self-imposed exile in Tokyo to Lyon—a city depicted here as both his birthplace and a psychological trap— Mathias confronts a gallery of ghosts: his imperious mentor, Elena , embodied by Charlotte Rampling with the stature of a marble statue and the glimmer of buried tenderness; his mother, who constantly begs him to flee mediocrity; and Claude , a love too fragile to survive, yet too intense to be forgotten. The film's title refers, of course, to the instrument they share, but also to the impossible duality of past and present, master and student, man and woman, reason and desire.

Rampling's Elena is the film's focal point: each of her words is a command, each of her silences an accusation. Desplechin films her with almost religious reverence—low-angle shots that elevate her to the status of a deity, light that polishes her features like a tribute. Yet, when she gives in, when her voice trembles or her smile betrays fatigue, the camera finally dares to meet her at eye level. In these rare moments of tenderness, Two  Pianos seems almost to abandon its theatrical pretense. We glimpse the film it could have been: an austere meditation on transmission, mortality, and the perilous intimacy of artistic creation. But Desplechin , the eternal dramatist, cannot resist revving the tempo to a feverish intensity.  

The screenplay, co-written with Kamen Velkovsky , constantly flirts with implausibility. Deaths arrive at conveniently timed moments, coincidences pile up like dominoes, and Lyon seems inhabited by a dozen characters trapped in their mutual torments. Yet, Desplechin 's cinema has always thrived on the porous border between sincerity and parody; here, the chaos seems both self-aware and profoundly sincere. One minute, you think you're watching Scenes from a Marriage ; the next, a French soap opera . Mathias , played by Civil , may be over the top, and Claude is sketched as a figure of erotic instability, but both perform with such conviction that you suspend your disbelief—or at least defer your judgment until the next emotional outburst.    

Paul Guilhaume 's photography , lush with ochre tones and impulsive camera movements, infuses the film with its pulse, while Grégoire Hetzel 's music —oscillating between Chopin and tempestuous original themes—acts as both ballast and provocation. Together, they maintain the illusion that this excessive narrative is in fact a piece of chamber music, whose dissonances are deliberate and crescendos deserved.

With its strange, muted conclusion, Two  Pianos has run its course, and we with it, but it leaves behind a lingering fascination. Desplechin , his eternal rival, has composed a new symphony of human folly: excessive, erratic, but undeniably alive. Like Mathias , he can't help but play too many notes—and all the better for it.  

Starring François Civil, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, and Charlotte Rampling  • New York Premiere March 6 at Rendez-Vous With French Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center • Opening In Theaters May 1

LENA GHIO   

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The Ugly by Yeon Sang-h / starts streaming March 10, 2026

TRAILER

Yeon Sang-ho, the director who electrified global audiences with the breathless panic of Train to Busan (2016), returns to live-action cinema with a very different kind of horror in The Ugly. Gone are the snarling zombies, the claustrophobic train compartments, the apocalyptic chase sequences. In their place: a slow drip of testimonies, recorded interviews, and flashbacks that seek to uncover the mystery behind a mother’s disappearance four decades earlier. What could have been a taut and psychologically incisive investigative drama instead becomes a sluggish, strangely inert exercise in storytelling—one that raises urgent questions about cruelty, beauty, and the monstrosity of ordinary people, but fails to embody them with the clarity or conviction that Yeon has proven capable of before.

The premise is promising. Im Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo), a blind master engraver of national renown, is the subject of a documentary directed by the young journalist Kim Su-jin (Han Ji-hyun). While the cameras are rolling, Yeong-gyu’s son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min, of Decision to Leave) receives a phone call: skeletal remains have been discovered, the bones of his mother, Young-hee, who vanished mysteriously in the 1980s. The family secret, long buried, quite literally resurfaces. What begins as an art-world profile transforms into a chilling excavation of abuse, humiliation, and familial betrayal.

From here, Yeon structures his film around a series of interviews—“Interview 1,” “Interview 2,” and so on—conducted by Dong-hwan and Su-jin with people who once knew Young-hee. Each interlocutor adds another layer to the grim portrait of a woman so relentlessly ridiculed that her identity seemed to shrink in the eyes of others to one cruel nickname: “Dung Ogre.” The epithet was born from an incident in a garment factory where a tyrannical boss denied Young-heethe dignity of relieving herself, forcing her into public humiliation. For decades afterward, that story metastasized into a legend of ugliness, her physical appearance obsessively described but never revealed. Even in flashbacks, Yeon keeps her face obscured, an artistic choice that at first promises mystery but eventually curdles into a gimmick, denying the character the humanity the story ostensibly mourns.

The thematic skeleton is visible from the outset: the “ugly” one is not the ostracized woman, but the society that mocks her, exploits her, and erases her. And yet the film’s failure lies not in its message but in its delivery. By relying so heavily on interviews that often feel interchangeable, Yeon drains his narrative of momentum. The characters speak their testimonies; the camera obligingly flashes back to re-enact the same memories. The result is not an accumulation of insight but a redundancy of tone. What should gather intensity with each revelation instead becomes repetitive, flattening a story that ought to pulse with suspense.

This structural miscalculation also has a devastating effect on character. Dong-hwan, who ought to be at the emotional core of the film—the son who never knew his mother’s face, who must reconcile his admiration for his father with the possibility of his complicity—ends up sidelined, his agency confined largely to listening. Su-jin, who begins as a potentially probing investigator, fares even worse: she becomes a device to move the interviews along, rather than a character in her own right. The irony is that Yeon, who once proved so adept at staging action sequences that revealed character through survival, here immobilizes his leads in a listening booth.

The greatest casualty, however, is Young-hee herself (played in flashback by Shin Hyun-been). While her tragedy is the axis on which the entire narrative turns, she is rarely allowed interiority. She becomes a subject narrated by others, seen only in fragments, her face literally hidden from us. The gesture might have been intended as a critique of how women’s identities are effaced by cruelty and gossip, but in practice it robs the audience of empathy, reducing Young-hee to a symbol rather than a person. Her story—of being loved by a blind man who could not see her supposed ugliness, of being mocked for entrapping him, of enduring a lifetime of humiliation—deserved the intimacy of her own voice. Instead, Yeon perpetuates the very marginalization he seeks to indict.

This is all the more frustrating because flashes of brilliance do appear. Park Jeong-min’s dual performance, playing both Dong-hwan in the present and the younger Yeong-gyu in flashbacks, anchors the film with a trembling intensity. His embodiment of two generations allows the narrative to collapse past and present into a single, haunted continuum. Kwon Hae-hyo brings gravitas to the role of the blind engraver, a man whose artistic genius cannot compensate for the personal wreckage he leaves behind. And the cinematography, bleak yet precise, often finds striking images: factory machines grinding like indifferent monsters, the obscured figure of Young-hee bent under the weight of scorn, the silent countryside where bones reemerge from the soil.

But these flourishes cannot compensate for the overarching tonal confusion. The Ugly oscillates between murder mystery, social critique, and family melodrama, never committing fully to any one form. Its pacing—at once ponderous and fragmented—blunts the impact of its revelations. And Yeon’s adaptation of his own 2018 graphic novel seems uncertain about what cinematic form should bring to the story beyond literalizing its panels. Where Train to Busan was kinetic, visceral, and unrelenting, The Ugly feels airless, a film more concerned with testimony than with lived experience.

That said, the project is not without cultural resonance. South Korean cinema has long probed the relationship between appearance and social worth, from the class allegories of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite to the surgical body horror of Kim Ki-duk. In that lineage, The Ugly positions itself as an indictment of superficial cruelty, a reminder that beauty and monstrosity are cultural constructions as much as physical traits. Its bleak worldview—people are far uglier in their behavior than in their bodies—lands with grim precision. The problem is that the film delivers this thesis almost immediately and then repeats it, chapter after chapter, until the insight dulls into monotony.

For Yeon, whose career has traversed animation (The King of Pigs), festival acclaim (The Fake), and blockbuster spectacle (Train to Busan), The Ugly marks his first theatrical feature in five years. That hiatus raises expectations that the film only partially meets. Admirers of his earlier work may miss the pulse, the urgency, the sense that the camera itself was alive. Here, the stillness feels less contemplative than exhausted.

In the end, The Ugly is a film about cruelty that risks committing its own subtle cruelties—toward its characters, toward its audience, toward its own potential. It dares to ask what ugliness really means, only to answer too quickly, too obviously, and too repetitively. The bones of a great story are here: a mother erased, a son searching, a society complicit in both. But like the skeletal remains unearthed at the film’s outset, what emerges on screen is incomplete, missing the flesh and blood that might have made it live.

LENA GHIO   

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RICHARD AVEDON: The Face of Time

A sobering exhibition of Richard Avedon’s relentless search for the truth about aging and his tireless quest for exactitude, presented by Museum Director Stéphane Aquin in the presence of exhibition curators Paul Roth, Director of The Image Centre, and Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Zhao-Ionescu Chief Curator of the MMFA.

 

FRANÇAIS app de traduction plus haut

Until August 9, 2026 

Richard Avedon: Immortal Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004

At the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Richard Avedon: Immortal — Portraits of Aging, 1951–2004 stages a confrontation long deferred in the photographer’s reception. Best known for the kinetic glamour of his fashion work at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and later for his editorial acuity at The New Yorker, Richard Avedon has too often been flattened into a chronicler of chic modernity. This exhibition—curated by Paul Roth with Mary-Dailey Desmarais—reclaims the other, more disquieting axis of his practice: an unrelenting meditation on aging, mortality, and the ethics of looking.

Avedon’s white seamless backdrop, that infamous void, here reads less as a formalist signature than as an existential device. By stripping away context, he does not universalize his sitters so much as expose them. The black edge of the negative—left insistently visible—becomes a memento mori: a reminder of the photograph’s material finitude, its indexical bond to a body that will perish. In this sense, Avedon’s minimalism is not cool but metaphysical. The white ground is not purity; it is the antechamber of disappearance.

The exhibition’s premise is deceptively simple: to assemble nearly a hundred portraits under the sign of age. Yet this curatorial gesture reorders Avedon’s oeuvre. Figures long canonized as emblems of charisma—Ronald Reagan, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Dalai Lama—are wrested from the circuitry of celebrity and repositioned within a more fragile temporality. Avedon’s lens neither flatters nor condemns; it waits. Reagan’s practiced geniality appears strained, almost lacquered over a slackening musculature. Ellington’s elegance is shadowed by fatigue. Morrison’s gaze, by contrast, seems to thicken with time—her face a palimpsest of vigilance and wit. The Dalai Lama’s smile, so often circulated as an icon of serenity, flickers here as something harder won.

Gabriel García Márquez

Jorge Luis Borges

If early civilizations revered elders as “living libraries,” modernity has tended to recode aging as malfunction. The industrial reorganization of life into productive and post-productive phases rendered the elderly economically peripheral; the contemporary biohacking imaginary recasts mortality as a technical glitch. Against this backdrop, Avedon’s portraits refuse both sanctification and repair. They neither romanticize wisdom nor promise optimization. Instead, they insist on visibility—on the face as an archive where experience accumulates without guarantee of redemption.

This insistence was controversial. In the 1960s and ’70s, when airbrushed perfection dominated fashion imagery, Avedon’s refusal to smooth wrinkles or soften sagging skin read as cruelty. Yet the exhibition makes clear that what was mistaken for severity is closer to a rigorous humanism. Consider the juxtaposition of directors John Ford and Jean Renoir, photographed on the same day in April 1972. Ford, eye patch stark against the white ground, turns away in a scowl that borders on defiance; Renoir’s expression is porous, almost wistful. The pairing stages two attitudes toward decline: resistance and acceptance. Avedon adjudicates neither. He frames.

The exhibition’s emotional fulcrum remains the series Jacob Israel Avedon, first shown at the Museum of Modern Artin 1974. Across nine portraits, Avedon documents his father’s deterioration from cancer. Here, the white backdrop becomes intimate, nearly claustrophobic. The son’s camera does not avert its gaze as the father’s body thins, his eyes recede, his skin loosens into translucency. These images risk sentimentality yet avoid it through restraint. They are less about filial grief than about time’s inscription on flesh. In them, Avedon’s project crystallizes: photography as an ethics of witness.

Avedon also undertakes meticulous photographic studies of ordinary people. Here, two farmers are depicted, retaining their human dignity after a lifetime of hard work.

Seen in 2026, amid Silicon Valley’s longevity evangelism and the spectacle of billionaires pursuing rejuvenation through stem cells and transfusions, Avedon’s work acquires renewed urgency. The medieval fantasy of the Fountain of Youth has mutated into engineering rhetoric—optimization, enhancement, extension. But as Carl Jung observed, “The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.” Avedon photographs precisely this afternoon: not as failure, but as density. His sitters’ faces do not ask to be repaired; they demand to be read.

The achievement of Immortal lies in revealing that Avedon’s true subject was never glamour, nor even fame, but finitude. By suspending his subjects in a white void, he paradoxically anchors them in the only context that cannot be airbrushed away: mortality itself. Each wrinkle becomes an event; each sag, a chronicle. In an era that treats aging as a bug to be patched, Avedon offers a counterproposal—aging as narrative, as exposure, as the final and most democratic portrait sitting.

Avedon’s work rewards sustained looking, and this exhibition in particular opens a space for deep meditation that moves beyond the familiar fashion narrative.

The most heartrending element of the exhibition is Avedon’s intricate observation of his father’s life, illness, and death.

For more information: HERE

LENA GHIO   

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photos © Lena Ghio 2026