CLAUSTROPHOBIA (CHAN MAT)

Hong Kong - 2008 - 35 mm, 100 min.

Director:
  IVY HO
Script: Ivy Ho
Production: Runaway Films Production Ltd. i Mega Profit Creation Ltd.
Cast: Karena Lam, Ekin Cheng, Andy Hui, Felix Lok
Section:
  Competition
Screenings:
Cines Aribau Club 2 - 01/05 - 22:00
Cines Aribau Club 2 - 08/05 - 20:15

No stranger to love stories, screenwriter Ivy Ho (including Flying Butterfly for Johnny To) makes her directorial debut with an exceptionally subtle one that has a mastery that recalls Eric Rohmer abd Harold Pinter's Betrayal. Narrative covers an illicit, yearlong office romance between a marketing secretary and her married manager. The script is constructed from periodic snippets of the couple’s innocent and not-so-innocent conversations and the dialogue between the central personalities exposes their characters and interrelationships. Throughout the film, but in a space as small, crowded and claustrophobic as the office, love doesn’t grow - it incubates and breeds, like a virus. Given that a clever, seasoned scribe like Ho can often guide a helmer’s directorial choices, her own direction is understandably smart, augmented by the smooth camerawork of Taiwanese-born lenser Mark Lee Ping Bing (he has shot most of Hou Hsiao Hsien’s films) that highlights the romantic tension of the film.

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