Sandakan 8 (Kei Kumai, 1974)

Kinuyo Tanaka in Sandakan 8

Keiko Mitani: Komaki Kurihara
Osaki Yamakawa: Kinuyo Tanaka
Osaki as a young woman: Yoko Takahashi
Okiku: Takiko Mizunoe
Hideo Takeuchi: Ken Tanaka

Director: Kei Kumai
Screenplay: Sakae Hirosawa, Kei Kumai
Based on a book by Tomoko Yamazaki
Cinematography: Mitsuji Kanau
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Music: Akira Ifukube

Kinuyo Tanaka was one of the world's greatest actresses, celebrated particularly for her work with Kenji Mizoguchi in The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and she gives a heartbreaking performance in one of the last films she made before her death in 1977, Sandakan 8. She plays Osaki, an elderly woman who was sold into prostitution as a girl, servicing overseas Japanese in brothels in what's now Malaysia. In the film she tells her story to a young woman, Keiko Mitani, who is researching the history of the karayuki-san, women who were sent throughout the South Pacific to work as prostitutes. We see Osaki's life in flashbacks in which she's played beautifully by Yoko Takahashi. Osaki struggles at first against the life she has been forced into, but eventually gives in to the reality of her situation. Still, once the practice of selling girls for overseas prostitution is ended by the Japanese government and Osaki is able to return home, she finds herself the object of scorn. Even in old age, living in a shack on the outskirts of a town, she is looked down upon by her neighbors because of her past. When Keiko first visits her, Osaki tries to pass her off to the neighbors as her daughter-in-law from Kyoto. (After her first return to Japan, Osaki went to Manchuria, where she married and had a son. He sends her money, but his wife has never visited and seems determined to have nothing to do with her.)  Sandakan 8 tells a compelling story without excessive sentimentality or sensationalism. It drifts occasionally into clichés, as when Osaki falls in love with a shy young man who loses his virginity with her and promises to return when he's made enough money to buy her out of prostitution, but eventually he betrays her when he finds her exhausted after servicing a pack of randy sailors that has swarmed into the brothel after their ship came to port. But the rapport that develops between Osaki and Keiko is splendidly portrayed, as is Keiko's determination to make the story of the karayuki-san known in a country that would prefer to keep it an unknown episode in Japan's history.

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Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

Daria Halprin in Zabriskie Point

Mark: Mark Frechette
Daria: Daria Halprin
Lee Allen: Rod Taylor
Cafe Owner: Paul Fix
Lee's Associate: G.D. Spradlin
Morty: Bill Garaway
Kathleen: Kathleen Cleaver

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Rossetti, Sam Shepard, Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe
Cinematography: Alfio Contini
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Music: Jerry Garcia, Pink Floyd

It sometimes seems as if every bad movie eventually finds an audience, even if only as fodder for wisecracks on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Makers of bad movies even have movies made about them, like Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) or James Franco's The Disaster Artist, his upcoming film about Tommy Wiseau, the auteur of The Room (2003), a film whose badness turned it into a cult movie. Things get a little more complicated when the filmmaker is a director of the stature of Michelangelo Antonioni. Zabriskie Point is certainly a bad movie by any usual standards of plot or performance. Its endorsement of the revolutionary fervor of the young felt naive at the time and now seems at best simplistic. It was a critical and commercial flop: Roger Ebert called it "silly and stupid," and it banked only $900,000, against a cost of $7 million, on its initial theatrical run. But like another major flop, Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980), it has been the subject of a continuing reassessment, attracting defenders and even a small coterie -- not to say cult -- of admirers, especially for its ending: a spectacular demolition of a desert house, with interpolated shots of the contents of a refrigerator and a closet being lofted in the air in slow motion. The fact remains, however, that Zabriskie Point really has nothing to say except that capitalist consumerism is bad and being young is good -- especially if you're hot. Neither point is made subtly and persuasively. The most glaring weakness is in the casting of its two young leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, who give almost hilariously inept performances as lovers drawn together in their rebellion. We never learn, for example, why Daria becomes so destructively disillusioned with her boss, real estate developer Lee Allen, that she imagines the cataclysm that ends the movie. It seems to have been inspired by her improbable encounter with Mark, who has stolen a small plane and, seeing her driving far below, decides to buzz her automobile. When he lands and they meet, they wander out into the desert, where they have sex. Their coupling is multiplied by a fantasy sequence of perhaps a score of couples rolling around in the dust. Incredible as the meeting of Mark and Daria is, it's perhaps more incredible that Antonioni, who had worked with actors of the caliber of Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon, and Monica Vitti, should have found anything to work with in Frechette and Halprin, whose lack of affect and stilted delivery verge on the ludicrous. Still, the film always gives us something to look at. Cinematographer Alfio Contini has an especially keen eye for the absurd and ugly jumble of billboards and signs that clutter Los Angeles, but he's equally skilled at capturing the beauty of Death Valley and the high desert in Arizona. Too bad that the visuals only serve to reinforce the banal contrast between civilization's corruption and nature's purity.

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