A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, August 31, 2018

Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961)

Anouk Aimée in Lola
Lola / Cécile: Anouk Aimée
Roland Cassard: Marc Michel
Michel: Jacques Harden
Frankie: Alan Scott
Madame Desnoyers: Elina Labourdette
Jeanne, Michel's Mother: Margo Lion
Cécile Desnoyers: Annie Duperoux
Claire, the Bar Owner: Catherine Lutz
Daisy: Corinne Marchand
Yvon, Lola's Son: Gérard Delaroche

Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay: Jacques Demy
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Production design: Bernard Evein
Film editing: Anne-Marie Cotret
Music: Michel Legrand

The characters in Lola, as in many of Jacques Demy's films, see life as performance art. They're ready to don the mask and play the role at any moment: Lola even wears her black lace cabaret-performer costume under a trenchcoat when she's out on the street. The film opens with a poseur, the then-mysterious "cowboy" dressed in white and driving a white Cadillac convertible, who is later revealed to be Lola's missing husband, Michel. Everyone, it seems, is putting on an act, especially Mme. Desnoyers, whose constant concern with appearances has begun to rub off on her daughter, Cécile. Sometimes Demy imposes a role on his characters: The young American sailor, Frankie, hangs out with a troupe of sailors that recalls MGM musicals of the 1940s like Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) and On the Town (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1949) which starred a famous Frankie. Even the most spontaneous character in the film, Roland, wears his ennui like a costume. To my taste, this constant role-playing gets a little tiresome -- I keep wanting the characters to have an unguarded moment. Although Demy's films often seem to me to be better in retrospect than in the watching, as you work out the playful cross-references -- young Cécile's name is the same as Lola's real one, and so on -- and allusions to books and movies, there is much to be said for what's on screen, particularly Anouk Aimée's giddy, uninhibited Lola, a long way from her role in 8 1/2 (Federico Fellini, 1963) as Guido's soignée neglected wife. There's some roughness in this film, Demy's first, such as the odd fact that Alan Scott, an American actor, speaks with a non-American accent when his lines are in English -- I don't think anyone born in New Jersey would pronounce "Chicago, Illinois" the way Frankie does, so I suspect dubbing. But as self-conscious a film as it is, Lola is a rewarding one.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

The Portrait (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Chieko Higashiyama, Kuniko Miyake, and Ichiro Sugai in The Portrait
Midori: Kuniko Igawa
Kaneko: Eitaro Ozawa
Tamai: Kamatari Fujiwara
Nomura, the Artist: Ichiro Sugai
The Artist's Wife: Chieko Higashiyama
Kumiko, the Daughter-in-Law: Kuniko Miyake
Yoko, the Artist's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Midori's Friend: Mitsuko Miura
Nakajima, Yoko's Boyfriend: Keiji Sada
Ichiro, the Artist's Son: Toru Abe

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Production design: Motoji Kojima
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's The Portrait deserves to be a little better known, if only because its screenplay is by Akira Kurosawa. Not that it's a masterpiece, or even a particularly felicitous example of Kurosawa's screenwriting, but it's one of the better films of the enormously prolific and sometimes misguided Kinoshita. IMDb, oddly, gives only the names of the cast members, not indicating what roles they play, which can be something of a challenge to those of us who aren't completely familiar with Japanese actors. Fortunately, I was able to track down a cast list and a useful summary on French Wikipedia. At the core of the film is an old trope: the portrait that reveals the truth. In this case, it reminds Midori, the mistress of real-estate hustler Kaneko, of her innocent past, causing her to break off their relationship. Kaneko has entered into partnership with Tamai to buy a rather rundown and ill-planned house, make some renovations, and flip it for double the price. The problem is the tenants, an artist named Nomura and his family. Kaneko is reluctant to evict them outright -- this guy is in real estate? -- so he concocts a plan: He will move Midori, who has somewhat of a temper, into the upstairs room of the house, and she'll prove such a torment to Nomura and his family that they'll be glad to leave. But things start to go awry almost immediately: The family think that Midori is Kuneko's daughter instead of his mistress. Naturally, she's somewhat flattered by this misconception. She softens even more when Nomura wants to paint her portrait, and falls completely when the family downstairs prove to be kind and affectionate people. Watching Yoko, the daughter, dance with her boyfriend under a full moon, and then be joined by Nomura and his wife, Midori starts to turn against Kaneko. But then even Kaneko is softened by the tenants and abandons his scheme. This is typical movie sentimentality, a fault Kinoshita (and sometimes Kurosawa) was often guilty of, but there is a bittersweet touch to the ending when Midori, having seen her portrait on display at a museum, walks away into an unknown future.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Madeleine (David Lean, 1950)

Ivan Desny and Ann Todd in Madeleine
Madeleine Smith: Ann Todd
William Minnoch: Norman Wooland
Emile L'Anglier: Ivan Desny
Mr. Smith: Leslie Banks
Mrs. Smith: Barbara Everest
Bessie Smith: Patricia Raine
Janet Smith: Susan Stranks
Christina Hackett: Elizabeth Sellars
Thuau: Eugene Deckers
Defending Counsel: André Morell
Prosecuting Counsel: Barry Jones
Dr. Thompson: Edward Chapman
Mrs. Jenkins: Jean Cadell

Director: David Lean
Screenplay: Stanley Haynes, Nicholas Phipps
Cinematography: Guy Green
Production design: John Bryan
Film editing: Clive Donner, Geoffrey Foot
Music: William Alwyn

I wanted Madeleine to have the emotional depth of Brief Encounter (1945) or the imaginative finesse of Oliver Twist (1948), just to sustain my argument that David Lean was a greater director before he aimed for the epic scale of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). But even Lean would later admit that Madeleine is something of a dud. The story of an "unproven" murder -- the verdict the Glasgow jury returned at the trial of the real Madeleine Smith -- the film needs to generate a Hitchcockian tension that Lean never quite masters. One reason, I think, is that it stars the rather pallid Ann Todd, Lean's wife, who had played Madeleine Smith in a stage version of the story, when it needs a more accomplished and charismatic actress, a Deborah Kerr or a Jean Simmons, to bring out the ambiguities in the character. Todd rises to the role only in the final scene, when Madeleine rides away a free woman, a mysterious smile flickering across her face as the voiceover narrator questions whether she was guilty or not guilty. Otherwise, she generates little heat in her love scenes with Ivan Desny as L'Anglier* and the scene in which she throws him over for her father's choice as a fiancé, William Minnoch, comes as an abrupt about-face. Lean seems to be trying to do something with the character of the lover, including much business with his brandishing a phallic walking stick, but it doesn't come off. On the plus side, there are good performances by Leslie Banks as Madeleine's father, the quintessential tyrannical Victorian paterfamilias, and André Morell gives a rousing argument for the defense in the trial scene. Guy Green's chiaroscuro cinematography creates the proper mood, as do John Bryan's sometimes oppressive interiors.

*The spelling in the credits. The historical figure was called L'Angelier, which is also the way André Morell, playing the defense counsel, pronounces it.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola in Bicycle Thieves
Antonio: Lamberto Maggiorani 
Bruno: Enzo Staiola 
Maria: Lionella Carell 
The Charitable Lady: Elena Altieri
Baiocco: Gino Saltamarenda 
The Beggar: Giulio Chiari
The Thief: Vittorio Antonucci

Director: Vittorio De Sica 
Screenplay: Oreste Biancolli, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Vittorio De Sica, Adolfo Franci, Gheraldo Gherardi, Gerardo Guerrieri, Cesare Zavattini
Based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini
Cinematography: Carlo Montuori
Production design: Antonio Traverso
Film editing: Eraldo Da Roma 
Music: Alessandro Cicognini

One of the many things I love about Bicycle Thieves* is the omnipresence of bicycles. At the beginning of the film, we spot them whizzing by the bike-deprived Antonio, as incidental and elusive as birds in the sky. But by the climactic scene, when Antonio and Bruno are sitting despondently on the curb, they are everywhere: There are hundreds of them parked outside the nearby sports arena; a bike race whizzes by only inches from the father and son; and of course there's that fateful bike outside a doorway just around the corner. Bikes become as tempting to Antonio as bottles and glasses would be to a recovering alcoholic in a bar. I wonder how much of the greatness of Bicycle Thieves depends on that list of no less than seven screenwriters: Did Vittorio De Sica really need six other people to tell what is essentially one of the simplest of stories? I think perhaps he did, for the film is crowded with incidentals, with scenes and details that give it such a wonderful texture, from the relationship between Antonio and Maria to the crowd of job-seekers outside the employment office to the bustling bike market scene, and so on. Details such as Antonio's ignoring the fact that Maria is carrying two heavy buckets of water when he finds her to tell her of his job add immeasurably to our sense of his flawed, self-obsessed character. Did the scene in which Antonio watches a man climb up and up and up stacks of shelved, pawned sheets arise from observation on location, or was it suggested by a writer as a way of signaling the depth of poverty in postwar Rome? There are small, non-essential but telling moments in every scene, such as the man at the bicycle market who is clearly a pedophile trying to lure Bruno astray. De Sica and his writers have loaded every rift of Bicycle Thieves with ore. But only De Sica could have been responsible for drawing such miraculous performances from unknown actors like Lamberto Maggiorani, who has the haunted look of a young Robert Duvall, and Enzo Stailolo, whose Bruno verges on cute -- especially when his face lights up at the thought of food -- but never becomes cloying, and at the end exhibits a wonderful mixture of disappointment and love for his father.

*This seems to have become the official English-language title of the film, sanctioned by IMDb among others, after many years of being known as The Bicycle Thief. It is, of course, the literal translation of the Italian title, Ladri di Biciclette. But it's not only preferable because of fidelity to the original but also because, as David Thomson puts it in his entry on the film in Have You Seen...?, "in the world it shows, there are thousands of bicycle thieves because of the terrible economy."

Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1986)

Tim Streeter and Doug Cooeyate in Mala Noche
Walt: Tim Streeter
Johnny: Doug Cooeyate
Roberto Pepper: Ray Monge
Betty: Nyla McCarthy

Director: Gus Van Sant
Screenplay: Gus Van Sant
Based on a story by Walt Curtis
Cinematography: John J. Campbell
Film editing: Gus Van Sant
Music: Creighton Lindsay

It occurs to me that Gus Van Sant's first feature, Mala Noche, has something in common with his best-known and most commercially successful films, Good Will Hunting (1997) and Milk (2008), both of which earned him Oscar nominations (and won Oscars for, respectively, actors Robin Williams and Sean Penn): They're all about dispossessed young men. Harvey Milk manages to overcome the political stigma of being gay, but is gunned down by a homophobe. Will Hunting emerges from South Boston as a mathematical savant, but never quite overcomes the feeling of being out of place. And Walt, the protagonist of Mala Noche, is a gay man living apparently by choice on Skid Row in Portland, working as a janitor and as a clerk in a tiny liquor store that mostly sells cheap hooch to winos. It's pretty clear that Walt is not much for impulse control: The object of his obsession, Johnny, with his long dark eyelashes and full lips, looks like a cross between Mick Jagger and a Pre-Raphaelite angel, and Walt pursues him relentlessly. Unable to get Johnny to sleep with him, Walt goes for proximity -- having rough sex with Johnny's friend Roberto. (Wouldn't a gay man have a better lube in his medicine cabinet than Vaseline?) Van Sant intentionally withholds much of Walt's backstory: We suspect from his good looks and affable, articulate manner that he comes from middle-class origins, so his slumming and his frustrated erotic obsession look like a kind of masochism. Mala Noche is no masterpiece, but it's a fascinating work of first-film ultra-low-budget ingenuity, with its location shooting, its high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, and its plausible performances by actors who were then unknown and have pretty much remained so.

Monday, August 27, 2018

Women of the Night (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1948)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Sanae Takasugi in Women of the Night
Fusako Owada: Kinuyo Tanaka
Natsuko Kimijima: Sanae Takasugi
Kumiko Owada: Tomie Tsunoda
Kenzo Kuriyama: Mitsuo Nagata

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Eijiro Hisaita
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Production design: Hiroshi Mizutani
Film editing: Tatsuko Sakane
Music: Hisato Osawa

Rougher and less polished than Kenji Mizoguchi's prewar films and the masterpieces -- The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) --  that would follow, Women of the Night is still one of his harshest and most unforgiving works, with several breathtakingly raw moments. It begins in the aftermath of the war, with Fusako struggling to get by: Her husband is still missing and their small child is dangerously ill. A woman to whom she tries to sell some spare items of clothing hints that her best option is to prostitute herself, an idea that she rejects in shock. She then learns that her husband has died, and the opening sequence ends with the sick child going into convulsions. There's a remarkable jump cut at this point, and we see Fusako somewhat better dressed and learn that the child has died, but she has gone to work for her husband's former boss, Kuriyama. By accident she also meets her sister, Natsuko, whom she has not seen since the war, when Natsuko and their parents were in Korea. Natsuko is working as a "dance hostess," and when Fusako introduces her to her teenage sister-in-law, Kumiko, the girl is taken with what sounds like a glamorous job. Fusako and Natsuko move in together, but Fusako has been cultivating a profitable illicit relationship with Kuriyama, and one day she arrives home early to find that Natsuko is also sleeping with him. Furious, Fusako finds the old woman who had suggested that she become a prostitute and takes her revenge on her sister and her boss by becoming a streetwalker. Meanwhile, Kumiko runs away from home and she, too, winds up prostituting herself. Eventually, the three women find one another and struggle to get out of the destructive cycle into which they have been drawn. The story is highlighted by a couple of remarkable scenes: In the first of them, the naive Kumiko encounters a street hustler who belongs to a gang of young thugs; after raping her, he sics the girls in the gang onto Kumiko, who strip her and then make her one of them. Later, Fusako discovers that Kumiko has become a prostitute, but when she tries to get the girl to an organization that tries to rehabilitate prostitutes she is set upon and severely beaten by a gang of streetwalkers who oppose the reformists. Mizoguchi stages these violent scenes with brutal clarity. Unfortunately, Women of the Night ends with a somewhat sentimental scene in the ruins of a church whose stained-glass window of the Madonna and child seem somehow to have escaped breakage. Even Mizoguchi later felt inclined to apologize for the film, particularly for what he felt was its dominant note of anger. But as a story about the predicament of women, it's still a fascinating postwar complement to his more finished 1936 films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion.

Man Is Not a Bird (Dusan Makavejev, 1965)

Janez Vrhovec and Milena Dravic in Man Is Not a Bird
Rajka: Milena Dravic
Jan Rudinski: Janez Vrhovec
Barbulovic: Stolan Arandjelovic
Barvulovic's Wife: Eva Ras
Bosko, the Truck Driver: Boris Dvornik
Roko the Hypnotist: Roko Cirkovic
Zeleznicar: Dusan Antonijevic

Director: Dusan Makavejev
Screenplay: Dusan Makavejev, Rasa Popov
Cinematography: Aleksandar Petkovic
Production design: Dragoljub Ivkov
Film editing: Ljubica Nesic, Ivanka Vukasovic
Music: Petar Bergamo

At first glance, Dusan Makavejev's first feature, Man Is Not a Bird, isn't much like his savage, surreal WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974). Its focus on the working class reminded me of some of the other films that came out of Eastern Europe in the 1960s and '70s, such as Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965), Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (1966), and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Camera Buff (1979) -- humorous but filled with a strong irony, especially where the heavy-handed communist regime was concerned. The events are set in a place of bleak documentary realism, in this case a gray, sooty mining town -- Makavejev began by shooting a documentary in the mining town of Bor in what's now Serbia, but getting to know the people and their stories led to what we might call meta-documentary, a fictionalized Bor and inhabitants. Somehow, they eke out their lives in a dreary place where the only amusements seem to be a con-man hypnotist and a very shabby circus. The mine and adjacent processing plants are visions out of hell: At one point, musicians arrive for the performance of the "Ode to Joy" choral section of Beethoven's Ninth, and a few of them lose their way to the hall where they're performing and find themselves in the smelting area where a shower of sparks ignites one woman's long dress. But Makavejev never makes the depressing setting and the bleak and sometimes brutal lives of his characters oppressive. There is just enough distancing from these characters that we can see them ironically and find even the brutish, abusive Barbulovic a satiric figure rather than a realistic one. The pomposity of the bosses in awarding the engineer Jan Rudinski a medal and a concert instead of a bonus for finishing his installation of new turbines ahead of schedule is a keen glance as the communist bureaucracy. It's not a particularly likable film, and it clearly has moments where it avoids treading on the censors' sensibilities, but I prefer it to Makavejev's later, more unfettered work.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Le Silence de la Mer (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1948)

Jean-Marie Robain, Howard Vernon, and Nicole Stéphane in Le Silence de la Mer 
Werner von Ebrennac: Howard Vernon
The Niece: Nicole Stéphane
The Uncle: Jean-Marie Robain
The Fiancée: Ami Aaroë
The Orderly: Georges Patrix
The Friend: Denis Sadier

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Melville
Based on a novel by Jean Bruller aka Vercors
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Film editing: Henri Decaë, Jean-Pierre Melville
Music: Edgar Bischoff

Le Silence de la Mer marked an extraordinary double debut: This was the first feature film for not only its writer and director, Jean-Pierre Melville, but also its cinematographer, Henri Decaë. Both were working under handicaps of budget and location -- the film was made in the home of Jean Bruller, who wrote and published the celebrated underground novel under a pseudonym, Vercors. Exterior shots, such as the countryside and the glimpses of Paris, were filmed mostly on the fly and sometimes rely for their effect more on editing than on camerawork. But it's the spareness and somewhat makeshift quality of the making of the film that gives it such a haunting quality. The novel was embraced by the French Resistance for its object lesson in resisting: Forced to house a German officer during the occupation, an elderly man and his young niece remain completely silent whenever he is present. The German comes to accept this silent treatment, and visits the two in the evening to deliver monologues about his life and his ideals, which were awakened, he says, by the Nazis. He sees the German occupation as a step toward a uniting of Germany and France. He admires French culture to the extreme, particularly its literature, fondling the volumes on the shelves in the room as the Frenchman smokes his pipe and the niece does her mending and knitting. The Germans, on the other hand, he claims are superior in music -- he was a composer before he became a soldier -- and he once sits down at the harmonium in the room to play a Bach prelude. The Frenchman occasionally gives a flicker of wanting to respond to the German's statements, but his niece's steadfast silence hold him in check. These visits continue from winter into summer, when the German goes away to Paris to meet with the German command. He returns a changed man: He has learned to his horror of the death camps and of the designs of the Nazis to obliterate the French culture he so admires. At the end he goes away, having volunteered to serve at the front, a suicidal gesture, and the niece speaks, in a faint whisper, the only word she has ventured in his presence: "Adieu." Melville's manipulation of the relations among the three characters, only one of whom speaks, is extraordinarily subtle, and Decaë's brilliant use of light and shadow -- when we first see the German, he emerges from the darkness in the doorway in a glare of light that makes him look like a sinister presence -- adds immeasurably to the quiet drama of the film.

Miracles of Thursday (Luis García Berlanga, 1957)

Guadalupe Muñoz Sampedro and Manuel Alexandre in Miracles of Thursday
Martino: Richard Basehart
Don José: José Isbert
Don Salvador: Paolo Stoppa
Don Antonio Guajardo Fontana: Juan Calvo
Don Ramon: Alberto Romea
Don Evaristo: Félix Fernández
Don Manuel: Manuel de Juan
Doña Paquita: Guadalupe Muñoz Sampedro
Mauro: Manuel Alexandre

Director: Luis García Berlanga
Screenplay: Luis García Berlanga, José Luis Colina
Cinematography: Francisco Sempere
Production design: Bernardo Ballester
Film editing: Pepita Orduna
Music: Franco Ferrara

I have always admired filmmakers who could get things by the censors. In the United States, for example, nobody did it better than Preston Sturges, who could get away with such outrageous gags as, for example, naming the lead character of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) Trudy Kockenlocker and having Trudy become pregnant by a soldier (whom she of course married) whose identity she isn't quite sure of. So there's much to admire in Luis García Berlanga's finessing the Franco censors in Miracles of Thursday, a film that sends up small town chicanery and piety. Berlanga does it in part by providing an ending that seems to validate at least the piety, but the main effect of this raucous, entertaining comedy is to portray the easy credulity of the faithful where miracles are concerned. The plot centers on the efforts of some of the prominent citizens to revitalize a moribund spa town by faking a miracle: the appearance of St. Dismas. This, they think, will draw the faithful the way the miracle at Lourdes did, and spark the return of the people who used to come to their town to "take the waters" at their mineral spring. The fall guy for the miracle is Mauro, a mentally challenged man who lives in a boxcar by the railroad station (which has been bypassed by express trains since the decline of the spa). As ineptly staged as their miracle is, Mauro is convinced that he has experienced a holy vision. But the initial flurry of excitement dies down until a stranger named Martino arrives, and helps the plotters with their scheme. Martino is played by the American actor Richard Basehart, who appeared in numerous European films, most notably Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954), during his marriage to Italian actress Valentina Cortese. He's a sardonic fellow with some tricks up his sleeve, and Berlanga keeps us guessing whether he's devil or angel until the very end -- and perhaps beyond. The ending feels a bit flat and perfunctory, but there's fun to be had before then.

Saturday, August 25, 2018

The Funeral (Juzo Itami, 1985)

Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsutomu Yamazaki in The Funeral
Wabisuki Inoue: Tsutomu Yamazai
Chizuko Amamiya: Nobuko Miyamoto
Kikue Amamiya: Kin Sugai
Shokichi Amamiya: Hideji Otaki
Shinkichi Amamiya: Kiminobu Okumura
Shokichi's wife: Hiroko Futaba
Priest: Chishu Ryu

Director: Juzo Itami
Screenplay: Juzo Itami
Cinematography: Yonezo Maeda
Art direction: Hiroshi Tokuda
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Joji Yuasa

The Funeral has been compared to the films of Luis Buñuel for its satiric, sometimes almost surreal portrait of a bourgeois Japanese family, and to the Jean Renoir of A Day in the Country (1936) and  The Rules of the Game (1939) and for its amused look at people tempted by an unusual situation to cast off conventional behavior. But do I also detect something of an homage to Yasujirio Ozu? There's a wonderful cameo by Ozu's favorite actor, Chishu Ryu, as the Rolls-Royce-driving priest, of course, but there's also something about the quiet, almost meditative ending, after the turmoil of the arrival of the mourners, the wake, and the funeral itself, when Kikue Amamiya, the widow, gives her heartfelt eulogy to her husband. Until this point, Kikue has hardly shed a tear while going on with the endless preparations and the inevitable unexpected screwups. But mostly, it's a Juzo Itami film, not so raucous as Tampopo (1985), but as witty in its treatment of human obsessions. In this case, it's the obsession with doing things right, especially on the part of Wabisuki, the son-in-law of the deceased, who with his wife, Chizuko, wants to follow Japanese tradition to the letter, even though both of them are very modernized people. Both are actors, whom we first see filming a TV commercial, and they want to get things staged just right. But since neither has experienced a traditional Japanese funeral, they resort to watching a video called The ABCs of the Funeral, which explains all the elaborate protocol involved. Inevitably, things get more complicated, particularly when Wabisuki's mistress shows up, gets drunk, and drags him into the bushes for sex. There's also the wake, where there's more drinking and a problem of getting the inebriated guests to go home, most of which is shown in a wonderful long take in which we watch outside the windows of the several rooms where guests are being urged to leave. Even the cremation takes a macabre-funny turn when the oven attendant invites the mourners backstage, as it were, to discourse on the difficulties of turning a corpse to ashes. The Funeral is a bit overlong, but it has heart to compensate for its bite.

Friday, August 24, 2018

A Song Is Born (Howard Hawks, 1948)

Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo in A Song Is Born
Prof. Hobart Frisbee: Danny Kaye
Honey Swanson: Virginia Mayo
Prof. Magenbruch: Benny Goodman
Prof. Twingle: Hugh Herbert
Tony Crow: Steve Cochran
Dr. Elfini: J. Edward Bromberg
Prof. Gerkikoff: Felix Bressart
Prof. Traumer: Ludwig Stössel
Prof. Oddly: O.Z. Whitehead
Miss Bragg: Esther Dale
Miss Totten: Mary Field
Buck: Ford Washington Lee
Bubbles: John William Sublett

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Harry Tugend, Helen McSweeney
Based on a story and screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Thomas Monroe
Cinematography: Gregg Toland
Art direction: Perry Ferguson, George Jenkins
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Hugo Friedhofer, Emil Newman

If you've seen Howard Hawks's Ball of Fire (1941), there's really only one reason to see Hawks's A Song Is Born, a musical version of the earlier film that retains its rather silly plot and a large part of the dialogue. But that one reason is a good one: the music is provided by the likes of Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, and a host of other stars of the big band swing era. Otherwise, Hawks's direction is mostly a carbon copy of the first film, except that instead of Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, he's working with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, neither of whom Hawks liked. I happen to like Mayo, but I have a low tolerance for Kaye's shtick, his mugging and his patter songs. Fortunately, he's more subdued than usual in A Song Is Born, reportedly because he was going through marital problems and was under heavy psychoanalysis. Still, to hear Kaye repeating some of the dialogue carried over word for word from A Song Is Born makes me appreciate how good Cooper was in screwball comedy. The chief switch in the plot is that the encyclopedia Kaye's Prof. Frisbee is working on with six other professors has become a musical one, so that instead of rushing to compile a volume on slang, as Cooper's Prof. Potts was tasked to do, Prof. Frisbee has to cobble up a volume on jazz -- of which he has somehow remained ignorant. There is less emphasis on the other cute little professors in A Song Is Born than there is in Ball of Fire, which was inspired in part by Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). One of them, however, is played rather amusingly by Benny Goodman, who is invited by the other musicians to join in a jam session and of course distinguishes himself. The gangster plot, featuring Steve Cochran in the role played by Dana Andrews in the earlier film, is also trimmed down. Mayo's singing voice was dubbed by Jeri Sullavan.

Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)

Nobuko Miyamoto and Tsutomu Yamazaki in Tampopo
Goro: Tsutomu Yamazaki
Tampopo: Nobuko Miyamoto
The Man in the White Suit: Koji Yakusho
Gun: Ken Watanabe
Pisuken: Rikiya Yasuoka
Shohei: Kinzo Sakura
Noodle-Making Master: Yoshi Kato
Rich Old Man: Hideji Otaki
Mistress of the Man in the White Suit: Fukumi Kuroda
Mistress of the Rich Old Man: Setsuko Shinoi

Director: Juzo Itami
Screenplay: Juzo Itami
Cinematography: Masaki Tamura
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Kunihiko Hirai

I would like to experience bliss like that of the baby at its mother's breast at the end of Juzo Itami's Tampopo, oblivious to anything else but its food and its source. If Itami's charmingly satiric film is to be trusted, of course, that kind of bliss is available to us at any well-made meal. I say "well-made" because that's the process that forms the plot of the movie: the quest for the perfect bowl of broth and noodles. There weren't as many foodies around in 1985 as there are today, and Tampopo may be credited with awakening some who now dabble in gastronomy, not to mention the others like me who are voyeurs of the food-obsessed and the translation of cuisine into competitive sport on shows like Top Chef or Chopped. The recent death of Anthony Bourdain brought on a wave of mourning that used to be reserved for the passing of beloved movie stars. But Tampopo is not just a celebration of food and eating; it's also a survey of food as accessory to other pursuits, such as sex -- the interpolated scenes featuring the Man in the White Suit and his girlfriend -- and business -- the scene featuring the stodgy corporate honchos baffled by a French menu and one-upped by a lowly but savvy junior executive. Tampopo feels as alive as it did more than three decades ago.

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Wedding Ring (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1950)

Toshiro Mifune and Kinuyo Tanaka in Wedding Ring
Noriko Kuki: Kinuyo Tanaka
Takeshi Ema: Toshiro Mifune
Michio Kuki: Jukichi Uno
Tetsuya Kuki: Kenji Susukida

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Mikio Mori
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's Wedding Ring could easily have been made by MGM in the 1930s with Clark Gable, Norma Shearer, and Franchot Tone, and audiences would have lapped it up while critics dismissed it as old-hat. What Kinoshita's movie has going for it is the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka and the young and hunky Toshiro Mifune. In truth, Tanaka, whose own production company was responsible for Wedding Ring, is a little old for her role -- she was 10 years older than Mifune -- and not particularly suited for the film's frequent celebrations of her beauty. Kinoshita seems more fascinated with Mifune's virile presence, giving him multiple opportunities to appear shirtless, and even providing a scene in which Tanaka's Noriko cuddles the sweat-soaked jacket Mifune's Takeshi Ema has just removed. The plot is familiar stuff: Noriko's husband, Michio, whom she married just before he went to war, has come home with tuberculosis, and Ema is the doctor who visits him to supervise his recovery. Noriko spends much of her time running the family business, a Tokyo jewelry store, and she and Ema frequently encounter each other on their commutes to the seaside resort where Michio is recovering. One thing leads to another, of course. But Ema is made of sterner moral stuff than Noriko, and when Michio, becoming aware of his wife's attraction to the doctor, makes an attempt to kill himself by going swimming, something Ema has demonstrated his proficiency at, the doctor remembers the Hippocratic Oath and determines to break it off. Duty conquers love, and so on. The film is nobody's finest hour, but it's fun to watch Mifune when he was not being directed by Akira Kurosawa -- their Rashomon was released the same year, making Mifune an international star. As for Tanaka, she gave what is perhaps her greatest performance two years later for Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

Ken Ogata in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
November 25, 1970, and flashbacks:
Yukio Mishima: Ken Ogata
Masakatsu Morita: Masayuki Shionoya
Gen. Mashita: Junkichi Orimoto
Mother: Naoko Otani
Grandmother: Haruko Kato
Mishima, age 18-19: Go Riju
Mishima, age 9-14: Masato Aizawa

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion:
Mizoguchi: Yasosuke Bando
Kashiwagi: Koichi Sato
Mariko: Hisako Manda
Monk: Chishu Ryu

Kyoko's House
Osamu: Kenji Sawada
Kiyomi: Reisen Lee
Mitsuko: Setsuko Karasuma
Osamu's Mother: Sachiko Hidari

Runaway Horses
Isao: Toshiyuki Nagashima
Lt. Hori: Hiroshi Katsuno
Kurahara: Jun Negami
Izutsu: Hiroki Ida
Interrogator: Ryo Ikebe

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader, Chieko Schrader
Based on novels by Yuko Mishima
Cinematography: John Bailey
Production design: Eiko Ishioka
Film editing: Michael Chandler, Tomoyo Oshima
Music: Philip Glass

In the midst of watching Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, I found myself having feelings of déjà vu -- specifically, during the chapter titled "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," a dramatization of one of Yukio Mishima's novels. Then it came to me: It was the novel on which Kon Ichikawa's film Conflagration (1958) was based. I had faulted Ichikawa's film for the confusions caused by a "truncated" adaptation of Mishima's novel and for its "sometimes plodding narrative," while praising the intensity of Tatsuya Nakadai as the crippled young acolyte. Seeing the condensed version of the Mishima novel in Schrader's film makes me want to go back to watch Conflagration again, or really to read the novel along with the others integrated into Schrader's film about Mishima's troubled but intensely creative life. The point of the Schrader film is that Mishima's art was inextricable from his life, from his coddled and repressed childhood through his sexual excesses and finally his disastrous paramilitary adventure and suicide. Ken Ogata doesn't look much like Mishima, but as his work in such films as The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978) and Vengeance Is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979) shows, Ogata has the kind of raw commitment to acting that makes him perfect for the role of the charismatic and self-destructive artist. Schrader's Mishima is one of a kind, a fascinating blend of superb cinematography, evocative art direction, and hypnotic music, along with a disturbing story. In some ways, I prefer Schrader's film to the more celebrated ones made by Martin Scorsese from Schrader's screenplays, namely Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Miss Julie (Alf Sjöberg, 1951)

Anita Björk, Märta Dorff, and Ulf Palme in Miss Julie
Miss Julie: Anita Björk
Jean: Ulf Palme
Kristin: Märta Dorff
Countess Berta: Lissi Alandh
Count Carl: Anders Henrikson
Viola: Inga Gill
Robert: Åke Fridell
Julie's Fiancé: Kurt-Olof Sundström
Farmhand: Max von Sydow
Governess: Margarethe Krook
Doctor: Åke Claesson
Julie as a child: Inger Norberg
Jean as a child: Jan Hagerman

Director: Alf Sjöberg
Screenplay: Alf Sjöberg
Based on a play by August Strindberg
Cinematography: Göran Strindberg
Art direction: Bibi Lindström
Film editing: Lennart Wallén
Music: Dag Wirén

"Opening up" a play when it's made into a movie is standard practice. Directors don't want to get stuck in one or two sets for the entire film, so they shift some of a play's scenes to different locations or have new scenes written. But nobody has done it with such imagination and finesse as Alf Sjöberg, taking August Strindberg's Miss Julie out of the kitchen in which the play confines the characters and into the other rooms of the house and onto the grounds of the estate. Sjöberg plays fast and loose not only with space but also with time, giving us scenes from the childhood of some of the characters, showing us the cruelties that warped them into the twisted adults they have become. But he also does it by letting the characters from the past appear in the same room as their equivalents in the present, giving a sense of the indivisibility of past from present. Granted, Strindberg's play, with its long reminiscent speeches, facilitates this reworking of the drama by providing the material for Sjöberg's added scenes, but there's a fluidity to Sjöberg's melding of memories into the tormented present of Julie and Jean. There are some who argue that Miss Julie is meant to be a claustrophobic play, that dramatizing too much of Julie's relationship with her mother or Jean's early lessons in not transgressing the limits of class undermines the play's psychological realism with too much action and melodrama. The answer to this, I think, is that the play remains, and continues to be performed with success -- and, incidentally, to be filmed repeatedly in ways more faithful to Strindberg's original plan. What we have with Sjöberg's film based on Strindberg's play is a second creation, rather the way Verdi's Otello and Falstaff can stand on their own as masterpieces without denying the virtues of the Shakespeare plays on which they're based.

Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1986)

Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa
George: Bob Hoskins
Simone: Cathy Tyson
Mortwell: Michael Caine
Thomas: Robbie Coltrane
Anderson: Clarke Peters
Cathy: Kate Hardie
Jeannie: Zoë Nathenson
May: Sammi Davis

Director: Neil Jordan
Screenplay: Neil Jordan, David Leland
Cinematography: Roger Pratt
Production design: Jamie Leonard
Film editing: Lesley Walker
Music: Michael Kamen

If prostitution didn't exist, the movies would have had to invent it. What profession, other than doctors and lawyers, has generated more film footage? Mona Lisa is one of the worthier films about the life of a sex worker, never sinking into prurience or glossiness, even though occasionally it did bring to mind one of the worst movies in the genre, Garry Marshall's Pretty Woman (1990), in which an LA streetwalker undergoes an Eliza Doolittle transformation from tawdry to chic in the hands of a high-class john. Here, writer-director Neil Jordan reverses the process: It's the glamorous high-class London call girl Simone who turns schlubby George, her mob-appointed chauffeur, into a fashion plate, making him a better man and unintentionally causing him to fall in love with her. We're in the realm of romantic fantasy in both films, but Mona Lisa at least creates a plausibly cruel and dangerous milieu for its story, and Simone's fate after murdering the mob boss and her former pimp is ambiguous at best. Mona Lisa is distinguished by its cast, especially a star-making performance by Bob Hoskins, who won as best actor at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar. But it's Jordan's screenplay, co-written with David Leland, that gives the cast so many interesting things to say and do, especially Robbie Coltrane as George's quirky chum and Michael Caine as the sinister Mortwell.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Fireworks Over the Sea (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Tarobei Kamiya: Chishu Ryu
Mie Kamiya: Michiyo Kogure
Miwa Kamiya: Yoko Katsuragi
Sami: Teruko Kishi
Kaoru Uozumi: Isuzu Yamada
Mitsu: Chieko Higashiyama
Shogo: Takashi Miki
Yukiko Nomura: Keiko Tsushima
Tsuyoshi Yabuki: Rentaro Mikuni
Kono Kujirai: Haruko Sugimura
Tamihiko Kujirai: Keiji Sada
Ippei Nagisa: Akira Ishihama

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Fireworks Over the Sea is an overlong (a little over two hours) and overplotted film about the tribulations of a family-owned fishing company. The always-welcome Chishu Ryu plays the head of the Kamiya family who has to struggle with not only keeping his business literally afloat but also the romantic entanglements of his daughters. There are love scenes and fist fights, as well as a dark family secret, but not much of an attempt on writer-director Keisuke Kinoshita's part to give it all coherent dramatic shape. The music track by Chuji Kioshita, the director's brother, doesn't help much by muttering about behind the scenes, sometimes inappropriately.

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

Nadine Nortier in Mouchette
Mouchette: Nadine Nortier
Arsène: Jean-Claude Guilbert
Mouchette's Mother: Marie Cardinal
Mouchette's Father: Paul Hébert
Mathieu: Jean Viminet
Schoolteacher: Liliane Princet
Undertaker: Suzanne Huguenin '
Luisa: Marine Trichet
Grocery Shop Owner: Raymonde Chabrun

Director: Robert Bresson
Screenplay: Robert Bresson
Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos
Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Film editing: Raymond Lamy
Music: Jean Wiener

I used to think that Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) was the most depressing and enigmatic of Robert Bresson's works, but I hadn't seen Mouchette. It's an unsparing film, in which I can't find even a feint at Bresson's usual religious consolation or symbology. Mouchette's name means "little fly," and her existence is as brief and mucky as that. Yes, I've read the essays on Bresson and on Georges Bernanos's source novel that posit some kind of redemptive motif in Mouchette's bleak life, but experiencing the film doesn't reinforce that for me. Abused endlessly, Mouchette is no martyr, no saint; she is as spiteful and deluded as you might expect. She refers to her rapist as her lover, and once her mother, to whom she was at least dutiful, is dead, there seems nothing to which she can connect, even her baby brother, whom she carelessly swaddles, and when she goes out to get milk for him she dawdles, leaving him at the mercy of her gin-soaked father and brother. She is too proud to accept charity, scrubbing her muddy shoes into the carpet of the crabby old lady who at least is kind enough to give her a shroud for her mother and some clothes for herself. When she goes out to roll down a slope next to a pond, it looks like she's spitefully dirtying these gifts. And then we realize that what looks like mean-spirited play is in fact preparation for a most unusual suicide, which Bresson doesn't actually film but leaves us to infer. The film has been called tragic, but it looks to me like unfettered naturalism.

Monday, August 20, 2018

The Good Fairy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1951)

Chikage Awashima and Rentaro Mikuni in The Good Fairy
Yoshio Nakanuma: Masayuki Mori
Itsuko Kitaura: Chikage Awashima
Rentaro Mikuni: Rentaro Mikuni
Mikako Toba: Yoko Katsuragi
Ryoen Toba: Chishu Ryu
Tsuyoki Kitaura: Koreya Senda
Suzue: Toshiko Kobayashi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Kogo Noda
Based on a novel by Kunio Kishida
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The Good Fairy is a shamelessly tearjerking snarl of plot threads, any one of which might have made a coherent movie, but together make for a complete mess. Nor would any of them justify the oddness of the title. (The original is Zen-ma, but Google Translate failed me.) It begins when Yoshio Nakanuma, a newspaper assigning editor, sends a young reporter, Rentaro Mikuni,* to track down Itsuko Kitaura, the runaway wife of a wealthy businessman. Naturally, there are complications: Nakanuma was once in love with Itsuko, who has a younger sister, Mikako, with whom Rentaro falls in love. She's dying, however, and by the film's end Rentaro is so devoted to her that he persuades her father, a former Buddhist priest, to let him marry Mikako on her deathbed. But Rentaro wants Nakanuma to witness the marriage, and by the time he gets there, Mikako is dead. Meanwhile, Rentaro has witnessed Nakanuma's cruelty to his longtime mistress, Suzue, whom he dismisses coldly now that he has reunited with his old love, Itsuko. Angered by his boss's treatment of Suzue, Rentaro sends Nakanuma away, then marries the dead Mikako. No, really. The thing is, this incredible nonsense seems to have been plausible to director and cast, all of whom do their best to make it work. At least the glimpses inside a Japanese newspaper office are interesting, but there are no fairies to be seen in the film, good or otherwise, unless it's Chishu Ryu's gentle, infinitely understanding ex-priest.

*Rentaro Mikuni is both the character and the screen name of the actor, born Masao Sato, who, like the American actors Gig Young and Anne Shirley, took his screen name from a role, in his case the first of a long career.

My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

Jean Lenauer, Wallace Shawn, and Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre
Andre Gregory: Andre Gregory
Wallace Shawn: Wallace Shawn
Waiter: Jean Lenauer
Bartender: Roy Butler

Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory
Cinematography: Jeri Sopanen
Production design: David Mitchell
Film editing: Suzanne Baron
Music: Allen Shawn

How interesting that a film that has no story of its own should be such an engaging tribute to the power of storytelling. Having realized that My Dinner With Andre is going to be just watching two rather ordinary-looking men having dinner in a nicely appointed but not particularly unusual restaurant, we have to supply our own visuals. That is, we supplement what's on screen with our imagined visualizations of the stories Andre Gregory tells Wallace Shawn about his travels. Gregory is such an artful raconteur that our task is easy, and we conjure up our own versions of his experiences in a Polish forest, the Sahara desert, the Findhorn community in Scotland, and an especially weird Halloween on Long Island. But Shawn is not a sponge: He's us, a bit skeptical, willing to affirm "Enlightenment values" and ordinary life against Gregory's spiritual enthusiasms and dodgy adventures. Meanwhile, we're also watching the men eat -- or perhaps not eat, for I grew rather impatient with their ignoring the meal they have ordered. And we're watching the ambience, the comings and goings of the restaurant, the waiter and bartender and the servers in the background -- and sometimes the foreground, for director Louis Malle has provided flickers of action as people pass between the camera and the Shawn-Gregory table. The designers have also cleverly positioned a mirror over the table, so that we get glimpses of people other than our interlocutors. Malle uses this mirror smartly toward the end of the film when we see the waiter standing still in the mirror and realize, before Shawn and Gregory do, that the staff is waiting to close up, delayed only by their conversation. That so much can be made out of so little is one of the surprises and delights of My Dinner With Andre. For some people, I know, it's like a film about watching paint dry, but I find it a small triumph of unconventional filmmaking.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Flamingo Road (Michael Curtiz, 1949)

Joan Crawford and Sydney Greenstreet in Flamingo Road 
Lane Bellamy: Joan Crawford
Fielding Carlisle: Zachary Scott
Sheriff Titus Semple: Sydney Greenstreet
Dan Reynolds: David Brian
Lute Mae Sanders: Gladys George
Annabelle Weldon: Virginia Huston
Doc Waterson: Fred Clark
Millie: Gertrude Michael
Boatright: Sam McDaniel
Pete Ladas: Tito Vuolo

Director: Michael Curtiz
Screenplay: Robert Wilder
Based on a play by Robert Wilder and Sally Wilder
Cinematography: Ted McCord
Art direction: Leo K. Kuter
Film editing: Folmar Blangsted
Music: Max Steiner

In The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, Andrew Sarris paid grudging tribute to Michael Curtiz: "The director's one enduring masterpiece is, of course, Casablanca, the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory." Sarris's point is that Curtiz was one of the most skillful of studio-era directors, able to take almost any project handed to him by the front-office bosses and deliver it with polish and finesse. Certainly Flamingo Road fits that role precisely. As a script, it must have looked like a routine though somewhat overheated melodrama, its sexiness and violence toned down by the Production Code office, with a female lead who setting out on the downslope of a long career and a male lead who not only never quite made it big but also found the film taken away from him midway by a second lead whose career also never took off. At least there was ham to be had in the presence of Sydney Greenstreet, even though he's cast in a role for which he wasn't quite suited. And yet, Flamingo Road works, largely because Curtiz doesn't just grind it out. He treats the material as if it deserved its swift pacing and its occasional injections of humor. He knew enough to let Joan Crawford have her way, which he had done earlier with Mildred Pierce (1945), their finest couple of hours together. There's not much mileage to be got out of either Zachary Scott or David Brian as leading men, but we're not watching them. We're watching Crawford, and Greenstreet (trying to swallow his British accent and play a backwoods political boss), and Gladys George as the proprietor of a "roadhouse" (read: brothel). True, none of the story makes a lot of sense, especially the political intrigues, but there's enough sass and edge in the dialogue to make you forget about the improbabilities.

Tragedy of Japan (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953)

Keiji Sada and Yuko Mochizuki in Tragedy of Japan
Haruko Inoue: Yuko Mochizuki
Utako, Haruko's Daughter: Yoko Katsuragi
Seiichi, Haruko's Son: Masami Taura
Sato: Teiji Takahasi
Tatsuya, a Street Musician: Keiji Sada
Masayuki Akazawa: Ken Uehara
Mrs. Akazawa: Sanae Takasugi
Wakamaru: Keiko Awaji

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Tragedy of Japan is the Criterion Channel's title for Keisuke Kinoshita's film, but I prefer the one used on IMDb and elsewhere: A Japanese Tragedy. Not only does that title echo Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, but it also particularizes the story better. What happens to Haruko Inoue and her children is not a microcosm of recent Japanese history but a product of it -- one among millions, including those told in Kinoshita's many films. The film also demonstrates something of Kinoshita's tendency to overreach, often with distracting innovations such as the oval masks that frame scenes in You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (1955) or the color washes that creep into The River Fuefuki (1960). Here it's an unwise use of extensive documentary footage of the war and its aftermath as a frame for the fictional story. The contrast between the raw actuality of news footage and the artifice of movie storytelling works to the disadvantage of the latter. Which is unfortunate because Kinoshita has a good story to tell about Haruko's attempts to survive and to provide for her children and the unforeseen consequences of her efforts, as well as the problems faced by Seiichi in his ambitious pursuit of a medical career and Utako in her disastrous involvement with her English teacher. None of Haruko's good deeds, it seems, go unpunished, as the skirting of the law that she found necessary is held against her in more peaceful and prosperous times. Despite the mistaken attempt to fold these stories into a larger historical context, this is one of Kinoshita's better films, marked by some very good acting and genuine human dilemmas.

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991)

Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder in Night on Earth

Armin Mueller-Stahl and Giancarlo Esposito in Night on Earth

Béatrice Dalle and Isaach De Bankolé in Night on Earth

Paolo Bonicelli and Roberto Benigni in Night on Earth

Matti Pellonpäá in Night on Earth
Victoria Snelling: Gena Rowlands
Corky: Winona Ryder
Helmut Grokenberger: Armin Mueller-Stahl
YoYo: Giancarlo Esposito
Angela: Rosie Perez
Paris Cab Driver: Isaach De Bankolé
Blind Woman: Béatrice Dalle
Rome Cab Driver: Roberto Benigni
Priest: Paolo Bonacelli
Mika: Matti Pellonpää
Man No. 1: Kari Väänänen
Man No. 2: Sakari Kuosmanen
Man No. 3: Tomi Salmela

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Screenplay: Jim Jarmusch
Cinematography: Frederick Elmes
Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz
Music: Tom Waits

I guess people don't smoke in taxis anymore -- at least in tobacco-hostile America -- so Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth probably evokes a kind of nostalgie de la boue in smokers or ex-smokers. Everyone lights up in the five segments of the movie, although Los Angeles resident Victoria Snelling at least chides her driver, Corky, for indulging the habit -- only to light up her own after Corky sarcastically refers to her as "Ma." Perhaps Victoria's advice crosses some kind of line between passenger and cabbie. In Rome, it will be the cabbie who crosses the line, persuading his priest-passenger to hear his taxicab confession, an experience that will bring about the priest's demise. In New York, passenger YoYo even becomes the cabbie, taking over the wheel from the incompetent driver, new immigrant Helmut Grokenberger. At least in Paris and Helsinki the old conventions remain, although Isaach De Bankolé's driver is infuriated at the liberties some of his passengers take with him, especially the well-to-do Africans who taunt him for his lowly Côte d'Ivoire origins. In Helskini there's a kind of working-class solidarity between Mika and his drunken passengers, one of whom has not only just been fired but has also learned that his daughter is pregnant and his wife has left him. What do all of these slices of life add up to? That's one of the charms of reflecting on an anthology film like Night on Earth, in which discrete segments seem to echo and enlarge one another. One of the reasons that taxicabs are so effective a setting for movies is that they can become crucibles for temporary relationships, moments out of time and space that seem more freighted with meaning than they really are -- Roberto Benigni's cabbie makes the resemblance of taxi to confessional booth part of his appeal to the priest. Put together five such moments, in five distinct cities, and you have something that looks like a statement about our common humanity. Although each segment neatly evokes the character of its particular city -- the glitz of LA, the grubby hopefulness of New York, the weary cosmopolitanism of Paris, the religion-steeped past and skeptical present of Rome, the chilly Cold War-haunted between-two-worlds quality of Helsinki -- the space and time inside their taxicabs seems oddly universal. That's what I love about Jarmusch's movies: Long after you've watched them, you're still savoring the details while bemused about the whole.

Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky (Masaki Kobayashi, 1954)

Masami Taura and Akira Ishihama in Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky
Ryochi Morita: Keiji Sada
Hiroko: Yoshiko Kuga
Yasuko: Hideko Takamine
Noboru: Akira Ishihama
Shun-don: Minoru Oki
Hisako: Toshiko Kobayashi
Mitsui: Masami Taura
Shige: Kumeko Urabe
Natsuko: Chieko Nakakita
Imai: Shin'ichi Himori
Shinkichi: Ryohei Uchida

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Yoshiko Kusuda
Cinematography: Toshiyasu Morita
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky* is a reminder that Masaki Kobayashi began his career as an assistant to Keisuke Kinoshita. It not only employed Kinoshita's brother Chuji as composer of the score, along with the director's usual film editor, Yoshi Sugihara, it also displays one of Kinoshita's usual domestic drama themes: the conflict of tradition and modernity as several generations of a family try to work out a way of living together in postwar Japan. And it shares some of Kinoshita's sentimentality in the developments of its plot. In tone and theme, Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky could not be more different from the film Kobayashi made just before it: the harsh, fierce The Thick-Walled Room, which was made in 1953 but which the studio withheld from release until 1956. For that matter, it's not much like Kobayashi's bleak slum drama Black River (1956) or his unsparing three-part antiwar epic The Human Condition (1959-1961). Kobayashi would find his way out of the genteel trap that Somewhere etc. represents. Which is not to say that he didn't make a pleasant, thoroughly enjoyable film in which everyone seems to find themselves on the right path by the time the plot works itself out. Ryochi and Hiroko, who run the family liquor store, have married for love, which alienates his stepmother, who would have preferred an arranged marriage. Abetted by Ryochi's depressed, self-loathing sister, Yasuko  the stepmother constantly finds fault with Hiroko. Eventually, however, everyone makes peace, thanks in large part to Ryochi's steadfast good nature in defense of his wife and to Yasuko's unexpectedly finding love and a new purpose in life. The feel-good elements of the film are not quite so convincing as the harsher parts, but the performances -- especially that of Hideko Takamine in a cast-against-type role -- are persuasive.

*The Criterion Channel title is a translation of the Japanese title Kono hiroi sora no dokoka ni. IMDb gives it as Somewhere Under the Broad Sky, and I've also seen it referred to as Somewhere Beneath the Vast Heavens.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Orphée (Jean Cocteau, 1950)

Jean Marais in Orphée
Orphée: Jean Marais
Heurtebise: François Périer
The Princess: María Casares
Eurydice: Marie Déa
The Editor: Henri Crémieux
Aglaonice: Juliette Gréco
The Poet: Roger Blin
Jacques Cégeste: Édouard Dermithe

Director: Jean Cocteau
Screenplay: Jean Cocteau
Cinematography: Nicolas Hayer
Production design: Jean d'Eaubonne
Film editing: Jacqueline Sadoul
Music: Georges Auric

Though it's not as sumptuous as his Beauty and the Beast (1946), Jean Cocteau's Orphée seems to me in some ways the more beautiful film. It embraces ugliness as a foil for beauty in ways that the earlier film doesn't. (As many have noted, the Beast of Cocteau's film is too beautiful a creature to inspire the disgust he presumably was doomed to evoke.) In Orphée the ugliness is that of the modern world, still in the time of the making of the film filled with the rubble of war, such as the bombed-out Saint-Cyr military academy that serves as the film's underworld. So the entire film is a kind of balancing act between antagonistic forces, not just ugliness and beauty or ancient myth and modern reality, but also and especially Eros and Thanatos. It is, of course, dreamlike, not in the cliché surrealist manner of most movie dreams, but in the oddities of its settings: an upstairs bedroom, for example, accessible only by a trapdoor or a ladder outside the window. I'm particularly drawn to the low-tech special effects, created by obvious means: film run backward, rear-screen projection, sets built on an incline. Even if we know how the tricks are done we marvel at the magic they add. Cocteau has de-sentimentalized the Orpheus myth. The marriage of his Orpheus and Eurydice is hardly an ideal one: He's a self-centered crank, and she's a wimp. But by doing so he has made the film's "happy ending" more poignant, as the couple return to life in improved versions and the Princess and Heurtebise (a marvelously imagined character) wander deeper into the underworld. It's an ambiguous fairytale at best.