Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/12/24

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

Thursday, December 12, 2024

The Unfortunate Bridegroom (Jiri Krejcik, 1967)

Iva Janzurová in The Unfortunate Bridegroom

Cast: Iva Janzurová, Vladimr Pucholt, Jan Vostrcil, Frantisek Filipovsky, Stella Zazvorková, Jiri Hrzán, Alina Hessová, Pavel Landovsky, Jan Schánilek, Jan Libícek. Screenplay: Jiri Krejcik, Zdenek Mahler. Cinematography: Josef Strecha. Production design: Oldrich Okác. Film editing: Josef Dobrichovsky. Music: Zdenek Liska.

A farce about a gang rape could never get made today, nor should it. So what does it say about Czechoslovakia in 1967 that Jiri Krejcik's The Unfortunate Bridegroom was a big hit? One thing it may say is that viewers were willing to see the rape as a metaphor for what the government and the police of their country were doing to them. That's the subversive premise underlying this raucous, knockabout comedy in which a young woman's attempt to get a ticket for her commute home leads to the near-undoing of a young man's wedding to his pregnant bride. Comically, it has a more-than-passing resemblance to all sort of madcap comedies from the Marx Brothers to some of the Preston Sturges oeuvre, and it made me laugh more than once (while feeling a little queasy), but I found it a little too frantic for its underlying premise.

Ken (Kenji Misumi, 1964)

Raizo Ichikawa in Ken

Cast: Raizo Ichikawa, Yusuke Kawazu, Hisaya Morishigi, Akio Hasegawa, Noriko Sengoku, Keiju Kobayashi, Yuko Konno, Junko Kozakura, Yoshio Inaba, Rieko Sumi, Kuniichi Takami. Screenplay: Kazuo Funahashi, based on a novel by Yukio Mishima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Kanji Sukanuma. Music: Sei Ikeno.

Kenji Misumi's Ken, also known as The Sword, is based on a novel by Yukio Mishima and shares that author's intense focus on Japanese tradition. It centers on Jiro Kokubun (Raizo Ichikawa), the captain of his university's kendo club, which is preparing for a tournament against a rival university. Kendo is swordplay, performed with bamboo swords, and Kokubun is obsessively devoted to the sport -- so much so, in fact, that he almost loses out on the captaincy because his coach fears he's a little too intense. His chief rival for the position, Kagawa (Yusuke Kawazu), is equally proficient, but not so obsessive. Eventually this leads to a conflict between the two young men, especially after Kokubun punishes Kagawa for a minor infraction, using him to set an example of complete devotion to the sport. Kagawa retaliates by asking a pretty classmate, Kiuchi (Noriko Sengoku), to try to seduce the chaste and ascetic Kokubun. But the real crisis comes when the club goes on a training retreat in which Kokubun tries to instill the same devotion to the sport in the rest of the team. It takes place in a seaside town, but Kokubun prohibits swimming in the ocean even though the trainees suffer from the intense heat of summer. Kagawa seizes another opportunity to undermine Kokubun, with terrible consequences. The film sympathizes with Kokubun, turning him into a tragic figure, while at the same time suggesting that his intense virtue, analogous to the bushido code of the samurai, is out of place in a modern context. Handsomely photographed and superbly acted, Ken is the middle film in Misumi's Sword Trilogy, which includes Kiru (1962) and Kenki (1965).