Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/12/24

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, October 12, 2024

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)

Hitoshi Omika and Ryo Nishikawa in Evil Does Not Exist

Cast: Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, Ayaka Shibutani, Hazuki Kikuchi, Hiroyuki Miura. Screenplay: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Cinematography: Yoshio Kitagawa. Production design: Masato Nunobe. Film editing: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Azusa Yamazaki. Music: Eiko Ishibashi.

I happen to agree with the title of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's film: Evil does not exist, or at least not as some demonic entity named Satan or Lucifer. What we call evil are manifestations of human frailty and fallibility like ignorance and greed. What makes Hamaguchi's movie so challenging is that he's able to state the case for, or at least not lay the blame for, both of those manifestations. There's a long historical precedent for doing so: As Thomas Gray put it back in 1747, "Where ignorance is bliss,/'Tis folly to be wise." More recently, we've had assertions that "greed is good," which is the underpinning of laissez-faire economics and the trickle-down theory. Hamaguchi takes a long slow time establishing the idyllic setting of a rural community and the apparently simple man named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) who lives there with his small daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa). Into this earthly paradise come representatives of corporate greed, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), who are tasked with persuading Takumi and the other residents of this rural community that it would be in their interest to allow their company to build a facility for glamping there. (Glamping is a pursuit that reminds me of the court of Marie Antoinette playing shepherds and shepherdesses at the Petit Trianon.) Takahashi and Mayumi are overwhelmed by the well-founded environmental objections to their company's proposal. Both of the corporate emissaries find the villagers' objections persuasive, but when they return to headquarters in Tokyo they're stonewalled by management and forced to return for another pitch, this time directed at Takumi himself. And so goes the setup for a moral tale that has no easy conclusion. And it doesn't get one: Hamaguchi chooses to end the film enigmatically. Evil Does Not Exist wasn't received as whole-heartedly as Hamaguchi's Oscar-winning Drive My Car (2021), and its slowness and ambiguity turned off some viewers, but it's a deftly characterized movie made with a capable cast of unknown actors, beautifully filmed with a haunting score by Eiko Ishibashi.