Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/25/18

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

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.