Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/13/18

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

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960)

Tamio Kawaji in The Warped Ones

Akira: Tamio Kawaji
Yuki: Yuko Chiyo
Masaru: Eiji Go
Kashiwagi: Hiroyuki Nagato
Fumiko: Noriko Matsumoto
Shinji Kumaki: Kojiro Kusanagi
Gill: Chico Roland
Yuki's Mother: Chigusa Takayama
Neighbor: Reiko Arai
Woman in Atelier: Yoko Kosono

Director: Koreyoshi Kurahara
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Cinematography: Yoshio Mamiya
Production design: Kazuhiko Chiba
Film editing: Akira Suzuki
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

The TCM programmer who scheduled Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Warped Ones right after Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997) evidently has a dark sense of humor. Both are fine examples of movies about people doing bad things and getting away with it. Funny Games ends with its mass murderer smirking at the camera, and while the bad-boy protagonist of The Warped Ones doesn't get away with murder, since as far as we know he hasn't committed one, he does get away with rape, theft, and assault. The film ends with Akira and his prostitute friend, Fumiko, laughing it up at an abortion clinic, amused that they are there with the virtuous Kashiwagi and Yuki because the former has impregnated Fumiko and the latter is pregnant with Akira's child. The Warped Ones belongs to a genre known as taiyozoku, or "Sun Tribe" films, portrayals of the undisciplined youth of postwar Japan. Among them are movies like Ko Nakahira's Crazed Fruit (1956) and three released the same year as The Warped Ones, Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth and The Sun's Burial and Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury. But even hard-edged directors like Oshima and Shinoda couldn't resist putting a moral spin on their portraits of wayward youth. Kurahara could, and The Warped Ones is all the more fascinating for its willingness to see the world the way Akira sees it. Tamio Kawaji gives an amazing over-the-top performance in the role, never quite standing still for a moment. He doesn't walk, he dances, prances, skips, and contorts, and Yoshio Mamiya's camera swirls and jogs along with him, ever restless, ever kinetic. Even in closeups his face is constantly in motion, often with a cigarette stuck between his lip and teeth or in the corner of his mouth. He is the embodiment of a certain kind of existential freedom, so self-centered that he refuses, unlike his friend, Masaru, to join a gang that might multiply his opportunities for mayhem. The only thing on Earth to which he pays obeisance is jazz, provided by Toshiro Mayuzumi's score. But even without punishing Akira for his considerable crimes, the film manages to make the point that he's no role model. Instead, he's an object lesson in the impossibility of achieving pure freedom.