In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

In the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films of all time, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love placed at No. 24, in a tie with Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) and Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955). I have to admit that I wouldn't rank it quite so high, especially putting it on a par with the other two films, but its intense, elliptical love story -- one in which there is no nudity, no sex scenes, and in fact not even a consummation of the affair -- is certainly unique and challenging. It's a film whose claustrophobic settings occasionally reminded me of the below-deck scenes in L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934). The would-be lovers, Chow (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), are as trapped in their Hong Kong rooms as the newlyweds in L'Atalante are on their river barge, with the additional limitations that they are trapped in their marriages, in their offices, and in the social conventions of the 1960s. In one marvelous sequence she is trapped in his room when their landlady, Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan), comes home earlier than expected and then stays up all night playing mahjong with the neighbors, preventing her from leaving and adding fuel to the gossip but also fueling their intimacy. It's a masterstroke that we never see their respective spouses or even receive direct confirmation of what Chow and Su Li-zhen suspect: that her husband and his wife are having an affair with each other. They can't redouble the scandal by openly pairing off with each other, and in the end the paralysis becomes so ingrained in them that they are unable to consummate their relationship even when they are liberated from their claustrophobic living arrangements. Wong makes the most of the cinematography of Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin, framing them in the clutter of the offices where they work, focusing intensely on them as they meet in restaurants, using a variety of techniques such as slow motion and swish-pans, always with the effect of emphasizing their alienation. The score is often exquisitely appropriate, with themes by Michael Galasso and Shigeru Umebayashi as well as pop recordings by Nat King Cole and others. The historical references -- the tension evident in Hong Kong as it approaches the handover by Britain to China, a 1966 newsreel featuring Charles de Gaulle, Chow's final scene in Angkor Wat -- strike me as an unnecessary attempt to give the relationship of Chow and Su a connection to something larger than just a frustrated love affair. The story is poignant and resonant enough without them.

The 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1941)

Chojuro Karawasaki in The 47 Ronin

As stately a samurai film as you're ever likely to see, with no action except the initial attack on Lord Kira by Lord Asano and later moment of brief swordplay, The 47 Ronin has a staginess to it that betrays its origin in a play by Seika Mayama. But that staginess is Shakespearean in essence: It's a tragedy, like Hamlet, about the consequence of delaying an action. And like the character Hamlet, the central character of the film, Oishi (Chojuro Kawarasaki), is a man tormented by delay. It's director Kenji Mizoguchi's mastery of pace and tension -- i.e., the pace is slow, but the tension is high -- that kept me riveted to the screen. Admittedly, others may not find it so riveting, and perhaps it's my fascination with unconventional moviemaking (assuming that the conventions have been established by Hollywood) that kept me going. But the opening scene, which consists of a long, slow pan around the courtyard of a Japanese castle, drew me in by a sort of immersive process. We see groups of men kneeling in expectation of something, and then finally a quarrel breaks out: Lord Kira (Kazutoyo Mimasui) berates a man in words that insult Lord Asano (Yoshizaburo Arashi). Suddenly, Asano rises from his kneeling position, draws his sword, and attacks Kira, causing a commotion. Unless you're familiar with the historical story known as the Ako incident in Japanese history, you probably won't have a clue initially to what's going on. But gradually the incident unfolds itself. Asano is ordered to commit seppuku, whereas Kira, who provoked him and survived, goes free. Moreover, Asano's lands are confiscated and his samurai are now masterless -- i.e., ronin. It falls to the ranking member of the Asano household, Kuranosuke Oishi, to lead the ronin in taking revenge on Kira not only for provoking the attack but also to protest the unequal justice that has been dispensed. But Oishi has a dilemma: If a petition for reinstatement of the Asano household is successful, it would rob them of their justification for killing Kira, so any attack on him would have to be well-timed. Eventually, the attack succeeds, but at a high price: the 47 ronin who break into Kira's castle and kill him are honor-bound to follow an edict that they must now all commit seppuku. And so it ends, but not without an interpolated romantic incident that seems to come out of the Hollywood playbook, with however another Shakespearean twist. A young woman (Mieko Takamine) comes, disguised as a man, to where the condemned ronin are awaiting their end. She explains that one of the ronin, Isogai (Kuntaro Kawarazaki), had worked his way into the Kira household as a spy and that they had fallen in love and were about to be married just before the assassination of Kira took place. She wants to know whether Isogai truly loved her or was just using her to work his way into the household. He did love her, of course, and just before he is about to die, she commits seppuku herself. It's a tribute to the tone maintained throughout the film by Mizoguchi's direction of the screenplay by Kenichiro Hara and Yoshikata Yoda that this touch of melodrama feels integral, more Shakespearean than Hollywood.

The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946)

Humphrey Bogart and Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep

Philip Marlowe: Humphrey Bogart
Vivian Rutledge: Lauren Bacall
Eddie Mars: John Ridgely
Carmen Sternwood: Martha Vickers
Book Shop Owner: Dorothy Malone
Mona Mars: Peggy Knudsen
Bernie Ohls: Regis Toomey
Gen. Sternwood: Charles Waldron
Norris: Charles D. Brown
Lash Canino: Bob Steele
Harry Jones: Elisha Cook Jr.
Joe Brody: Louis Jean Heydt

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman
Based on a story by Raymond Chandler
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Art direction: Carl Jules Weyl
Film editing: Christian Nyby
Music: Max Steiner

I've cited Keats's "negative capability" before in warning about getting too involved with the literal details of a movie at the expense of missing the total effect, and it still seems appropriate here when it comes to figuring out exactly who did what to whom in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep. Screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman are said to have consulted Raymond Chandler, the author of the novel they were adapting, about certain obscurities of the plot, and Chandler admitted that he didn't know either, which is as fine an example of being "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" as even Keats could come up with. So ask not who killed the Sternwoods' chauffeur, or even who really killed Shawn Regan -- if, in fact, Regan is dead. This is one of the most enjoyable of films noir, if a movie that has so many sheerly pleasurable moments can really be called noir. It's also one of the most deliciously absurd -- or maybe absurdist -- movies ever made, including its persistent presentation of Humphrey Bogart's Philip Marlowe as an irresistible hunk, who has bookstore clerks, hat check girls, waitresses, and female taxi drivers swooning at his presence. The only thing that makes this remotely credible is that Lauren Bacall, and not just Vivian Sternwood Rutledge, actually did. In his review for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, one of the most obtuse critics who ever took up space in a newspaper, called it a "poisonous picture" and commented that Bacall "still hasn't learned to act" -- an incredible remark to anyone who has just watched her exchange with Bogart ostensibly about horse racing. This is, of course, one of Howard Hawks's greatest movies, and of course it received not a single Oscar nomination -- not even for Martha Vickers's delirious Carmen Sternwood. Vickers was so good in her role that her part had to be trimmed to put more focus on Bacall, who was being groomed for stardom. Sadly, Vickers never found another role as good as Carmen. Dorothy Malone, who did go on to stardom and an Oscar, steals her scene as the bookstore owner amused and aroused by Marlowe's charisma. And then there's Elisha Cook Jr. as a small-time hapless hood not far removed from the Wilmer who stirred Sam Spade's homophobia in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1946). Except this time his demise elicits something Marlowe would seem otherwise incapable of: pity.

Excuses, Excuses

I watched Samurai Rebellion (Masaki Kobayashi, 1967) last night, but I'm not going to write about it today because I'm facing a deadline for a book review. Back with more posts after that's done.

The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013)

The great beauty referred to in the title of Paolo Sorrentino's film is Rome itself, which for millennia has transcended the ugliness that has overrun its seven hills. It's a city whose beauty and ugliness are seen in the film from the point of view of Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), who is celebrating his 65th birthday as the film begins. Jep first received acclaim 40 years earlier for a well-received novella, but the rest of his life has been spent as a celebrity journalist, interviewing and gossiping about the rich and famous. This career has earned him his own fame and fortune -- he lives in a luxurious apartment whose balcony overlooks the Colosseum. He's a bit like a straight Roman Truman Capote. The Rome in which Jep moves is filled with absurdity and excess: a performance artist who runs headlong into an ancient aqueduct; a little girl who has made millions by splashing canvases with paint and then smearing and tearing at them in a tantrum; a doctor who maintains a kind of assembly-line botox clinic in which patrons take numbers as if they were waiting in a delicatessen; a saintly centenarian Mother Teresa-style missionary whose spokesman is an oily dude with a shark-toothed grin; an archbishop considered next in line for the papacy who can only talk about food; and hordes of glitterati who spout inanities that they think will pass for wit. The Great Beauty is a satire, of course, but oddly it's a satire with heart: Jep Gambardella's long-since-broken heart. Servillo is terrific in the key role: elegant and cynical, but also capable of exposing idiots for what they are. Jep and the film in which he appears have obviously been compared to Marcello Mastroianni's character in La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960), but Jep is less jaded than Marcello, less ground down by the decadence. And Sorrentino's view of his Rome is more genially ironic than Fellini's carnival of grotesques. Beautifully filmed by Luca Bigazzi, with a score by Lele Marchitelli augmented with works by contemporary composers like David Lang, Arvo Pärt, John Taverner, Henryk Górecki, and Vladimir Martynov, The Great Beauty was a deserving winner of the 2013 Oscar for foreign-language film.

Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)

A study in tragic irony, Harakiri was intended as a commentary on Japan's history of hierarchical societies, from the feudal era through the Tokugawa shogunate and down to the militarism that brought the country into World War II and finally the corporate capitalism in which the salaryman becomes the latest iteration of the serf, pledging fidelity to a ruling lord. Working from a screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto from a novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi, director Masaki Kobayashi sets his film on a steady pace that at first feels static. There are long scenes of talk, with little moving except the camera's slow pans and zooms. But as Kobayashi's protagonist, Hanshiro Tsugumo (brilliantly played by Tatsuya Nakadai), tells his harrowing tale of loss, the film opens out into beautifully crafted scenes of action, as well as one terrifying and painful scene of cruelty, in which a man is made to commit the title's ritual disembowelment with a sword made of bamboo. Although there is an extended fight sequence in which Hanshiro takes on the entire household of the Ii clan, the true climax of the film is the duel between Hanshiro and Hikokuro Omodaka (Tetsuro Tanba), the greatest swordsman in the Ii household. Especially in this scene, the cinematography of Yoshio Miyajima makes a brilliant case for black and white film, aided by the editing of Hisashi Sagara that cuts between the dueling men and the waving grasses on the windswept hillside where the fight takes place. Harakiri is one of the best samurai films ever made, but even that observation contains its own note of irony, since Kobayashi's aim with the film is to validate his protagonist's assertion that "samurai honor is ultimately nothing but a façade."  

A War (Tobias Lindholm, 2015)

Pilou Asbæk in A War

Claus Michael Pederson: Pilou Asbæk
Maria Pederson: Tuva Novotny
Martin R. Olsen: Søren Malling
Kajsa Danning: Charlotte Munck
Najib Bisma: Dar Salim
Lasse Hassan: Dulfi Al-Jabouri

Director: Tobias Lindholm
Screenplay: Tobias Lindholm
Cinematography: Magnus Nordenhof Jønck

A war movie that appeals more to the brain and the heart than to the viscera, Tobias Lindholm's A War raises some haunting ethical questions about war and justice. Claus, a Danish officer, while leading a detachment of his men in an assault on the Taliban, calls in an air strike on what he believes to be the source of the gunfire that has pinned them down and left one of his soldiers critically injured. Under cover of the bombing they are able to make it to the rescue helicopter, but Claus is later charged with a war crime: There is no evidence that the gunfire came from the village where the bombing killed civilians, women and children. At the trial, held back in Denmark, Claus is acquitted after one of his men perjures himself, claiming that he had seen a muzzle flash from the village, justifying Claus's decision. But it's not a "happy ending." The film has provided many emotional justifications for Claus's action: We earlier saw Lasse, the critically injured man whose life Claus saves by calling in the air strike, in extreme emotional distress after witnessing the death of one of his fellow soldiers who stepped on a land mine. Claus had comforted Lasse, but nevertheless insisted that he go on this near-fatal mission. Claus also struggles with guilt because he had turned away an Afghan family seeking refuge in the military compound: They had been threatened by the Taliban after they sought medical help for their little girl, suffering from a bad burn. Reconnoitering for the assault, Claus discovers that the Taliban had made good on their threat and slaughtered the family. Claus is also struggling with pressure from home, where his wife, Maria, is having trouble looking after their three small children: The middle child is acting out at school, and the youngest, a toddler, has had to have his stomach pumped after swallowing some pills. Writer-director Lindholm beautifully balances the combat scenes with those depicting Maria's difficulties at home. But he also stages a fine courtroom scene in which the prosecutor demonstrates that Claus is in fact guilty as charged: There was no evidence that the destroyed village was the source of the gunfire that pinned down Claus and his men. So, even though his acquittal comes at the expense of a witness's lie, are we right to feel good that Claus is free and able to look after his family? There are hints that Claus will never be free of the burden of guilt: After the verdict, he is seen tucking in his children at night. The feet of one of the children are sticking out from under the covers, and Claus carefully pulls the blanket over them. It's a moment that echoes the earlier scene in which Claus discovered the slaughtered Afghan family: One of the dead children's feet were protruding from the covers just like Claus's own child's. Lindholm beautifully trusts the audience to recall this detail, without having Claus flash back to it himself, but the final scene of the film, in which Claus sits alone on his patio, smoking, suggests that he will always be alone with his guilt.

The Navigator (Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton, 1924)

Buster Keaton always makes me grin. The first time I did it while watching The Navigator was when rich twit Rollo Treadaway (Keaton) puts on a straw hat and then gracefully steadies it with the crook of his cane. Keaton can do more with a hat -- or, later, hats -- than anyone, even Cary Grant with the outsize hat in my favorite scene in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937). And then the grin became a guffaw when Rollo gets in his chauffeur-driven limousine to go propose to Betsy O'Brien (Kathryn McGuire), another rich twit. The limo starts out and immediately makes a U-turn to the other side of the street, where Betsy lives. It's not just Keaton's physical grace and dexterity, for all that he pretends to be a klutz, or even the unexpectedness of some of the gags that make me so happy. It's primarily the sense of joy I get in watching a kid play with his toys. For Keaton has such wonderful toys in his movies. In The General (Keaton and Clyde Bruckman, 1926) he has an entire antique railroad train to play with (and destroy); in Go West (Keaton, 1925) it's a herd of cattle; in Steamboat Bill Jr. (Charles Reisner but really Keaton, 1928) it's a town in a terrific windstorm. So you can imagine his delight when he heard than a retired Army transport ship was for sale, and he could refit this enormous toy into the cruise ship Navigator and do with it as he pleased. And he certainly made the most of it, using the exposed decks and corridors for a hilarious game of unwitting hide-and-seek between Rollo and Betsy, turning the galley into an improbable kitchen for two rich twits who have never had to cook their own breakfast, and donning an old-fashioned diving suit for an extended underwater sequence: Keaton does the only pratfall I've ever seen anyone do underwater and in a diving suit, legs straight out as all the great slapstick comics did pratfalls. There are some occasional slow moments: The battle with the "cannibals" goes on much too long. But the pacing mostly stays so rapid that you want to rewind and watch some scenes to see what you miss -- a luxury denied his original audiences, who had to stay and sit through it twice. McGuire also appeared in Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), proving herself what any of Keaton's leading ladies had to be: game for almost anything, including repeated dives and dunkings.  Although Donald Crisp, better known to us as an actor, was an experienced director -- he has 72 IMDb directing credits from 1914 through 1930 -- he turned out to be a mismatch with Keaton, who took over and finished the film, sometimes reshooting scenes that Crisp had directed.

Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

Seeing Julian Beck as Tiresias in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex reminded me of an excruciatingly boring evening I spent in Brooklyn in 1968. Some friends had invited me to go with them to see Beck's Living Theatre perform their play Paradise Now, which as I recall featured the semi-naked company, including some pale and pimply dudes in jockstraps, wandering through the audience, yelling at us about our bourgeois complacency. Those who know me will realize that this is not my sort of thing at all. I realize now that Beck and Judith Malina had a tonic effect on theater with their avant-garde productions, and I salute them for that, but I was not receptive to their efforts on that evening. Fortunately, Pasolini's Oedipus, though infused with some of the radicalism of the Living Theatre, is not at all boring. It's sometimes raw and rough-edged, especially by standards of mainstream cinema. The Technicolor camerawork -- the cinematographer is Giuseppe Ruzzolini -- is often very beautiful, with its astonishing images of the Moroccan desert and ancient buildings, but there are some bobbles in the hand-held camera sequences that move beyond shakycam into wobbly-out-of-focuscam. Franco Citti, who made his debut in the title role of  Pasolini's Accattone (1961) and appeared in many of his other films, is a bit out of his depth as Oedipus, but Silvana Mangano is an impressive-looking Jocasta, and Beck is a suitably foreboding Tiresias. Pasolini's screenplay does justice to its Sophoclean origins as well as to the perdurable myth, although the frame story that begins in Italy during the Mussolini era, with the Fascist anthem "Giovinezza" on the soundtrack, and ends in Pasolini's present seems extraneous. But the truly astonishing contribution to the film was made by costume designer Danilo Donati, whose eerie designs, seemingly cobbled together from scrap metal, clay, and leaves and branches, don't belong to any particular era but have the right aura of primitive myth. Some examples:

The Oracle of Apollo in Oedipus Rex

Silvana Mangano as Jocasta

Headdress for a priest 

Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens (J.J. Abrams, 2015) revisited

When I blogged about seeing Star Wars: Episode VII -- The Force Awakens, to give it its full and exhausting title, 10 months ago, I was more involved in the novelty of seeing it in a theater and in 3-D than in commenting on the film itself. "I look forward to seeing the movie again, but this time in the comfort of my home and on a smaller 2-D screen," I said then, predicting that it would "play just as well there." So the time has come, and Starz is running it almost every day on one of its many channels, so I availed myself of the opportunity, and I think I was mostly correct. The flat version is less awe-inspiring than the three-dimensional one, but I've long since got beyond the excitement of having lightsaber beams waved in my face, and to my mind the added depth of the images is counteracted by a sense of their insubstantiality: Is it only the force of long habit and familiarity that makes two-dimensional films seem more like documented reality? The 2-D Episode VII stands up because J.J. Abrams knows the grammar of film: the cutting and pacing that has brought excitement to movies ever since Griffith and Eisenstein and other first learned to use them. In 3-D there's always going to be something a little disorienting about the shift from a close-up to a long shot, for example. Perhaps a grammar of 3-D will be developed that lets filmmakers use it as effectively as they do in two dimensions, but that time has yet to come. As for the film itself, it had to do two things: It had to tie the new material to the core trilogy -- I mean Episodes IV-VI, of course -- and it had to whet our appetites for more new stuff. It succeeds on both counts, partly by bringing back Han (Harrison Ford), Leia (Carrie Fisher), and, albeit briefly, Luke (Mark Hamill), and the leitmotifs of John Williams's score, but also by pretty much shamelessly borrowing from what's now called Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977). (I will always call it just Star Wars.) As I said in my first post, VII is pretty much a remake of IV: Both have "the young hero on a desert planet, the messenger droid found in the junkyard, the gathering of a team to fight the black-clad villain, and the ultimate destruction of a giant weaponized space station." VII also echoes the Oedipal conflict of the subsequent episodes of the core trilogy, with the conflict of father Han and son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) echoing that of Darth Vader and Luke. What we have to look forward to is some account of Ren's (or Ben's) fall to the Dark Side and some resolution of that character's patricidal act. We also have to find out who or what Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) is. Is there a little old man lurking behind what seems to be a hulking hologram, like the Wizard of Oz? And what are the backstories of Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), and Rey (Daisy Ridley)? And what accounts for the luxury casting of the ubiquitous Domhnall Gleeson as the relatively secondary figure General Hux? And why waste a beautiful Oscar winner like Lupita Nyong'o in voicing Maz Kanata -- another character whose backstory needs to be told? So our appetites are whetted, and not just for further adventures of Luke Skywalker.