Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/17/18

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 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.

The Garden of Women (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

Mieko Takamine and Chieko Higashiyama in The Garden of Women

Mayumi Gojo: Mieko Takamine
Yoshie Izushi: Hideko Takamine
Tomiko Takioka: Keiko Kishi
Akiko Hayashino: Yoshiko Kuga
Sankichi Shimoda: Takahiro Tamura
Yoshikazu Sagara: Masami Taura
Masao Izushi: Takashi Miki
Masao's Wife: Kuniko Igawa
Landlady: Yoko Mochizuki
Schoolmaster: Chieko Higashiyama
President: Kikue Mori

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a story by Tomoji Abe
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Youth rebellion films became a prominent genre in Japan, but Keisuke Kinoshita's The Garden of Women is distinctive in that the rebels are all women. They have a lot to rebel against: They are students in a hidebound women's college more determined to turn them into proper young ladies than into educated women. This causes difficulties for Yoshie Izushi, who is a few years older than her fellow students. Most of them come from wealthy families, but Yoshie had to work for several years to earn enough money for the tuition. She wants an education that would make her a fitting partner for her upwardly mobile boyfriend, Sankichi. But she struggles with some subjects, especially math, and when she tries to study after hours she comes up against school rules that forbid her from studying anywhere except in her room -- which is usually filled with her roommates' friends, who are plotting against the stern headmistress, Mayumi Gojo, aka "The Shrew." Yoshie wants no part of the rebellion: She wants to graduate and marry Sankichi before her family forces her into marriage with a wealthy man of their choosing. Eventually, the student rebellion succeeds, but Yoshie gets caught in the crossfire. The Garden of Women is one of Kinoshita's more successful films, mostly because it gives us an unexplored angle on Japanese society and its tumultuous postwar society. But it's somewhat overplotted, with a few too many characters whose backstories take away from the central narrative.