Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2000)

Conceived and edited by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Cinematography: Plasong Klimborron, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

We tell stories to try to find meaning in what our senses provide us from the bewilderment of force and matter in which we exist. Stories become myths which become religions which eventually become science, our only bulwark of knowledge. Even when we sleep, our dreams are stories crafted out of the incessant neural storm. So it's not surprising that we love stories so much that we spend much of our lives telling them and hearing them. The story around which Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon whirls is begun by a traumatized young woman, who has just told her own story of being sold into servitude by her own father. Prompted to tell another story, one that she has heard or read, she speaks of a boy who can't walk, so he's tutored by a young woman. One day, she excuses herself from the lesson to go to the bathroom, and when she doesn't return soon, the boy rolls his wheelchair to another room where he finds the teacher unconscious. As he tries to move her to a bed, a mysterious object rolls out from her skirts. And there the young woman's story stops, only to be continued across the country of Thailand by a number of willing narrators prompted by the director and his crew. In the various elaborations on the premise, the teacher receives a name, "Dogfahr."* The object transforms itself into a boy, but one with shape-shifting powers, so he also takes the form of the teacher herself, leading to a confrontation between Dogfahr and her doppelgänger. Some narrators attempt to provide a backstory for the disabled boy: He survived a plane crash during the war that killed his parents. The story takes on political and social overtones, as well as being colored by movies and TV shows. The narrators range from villagers to a traveling troupe of players to a group of eager schoolchildren, as well as the filmmaker himself, who tries to convert these stories into a movie. The result is a fascinating mélange of fable and fact, of the imagination and the literal reality of Thailand as seen through Weerasethakul's camera eye. It's a hypernarrative: a story about telling stories.

*That transliteration appears in the subtitles, but it's often seen as "Dokfa" in sources that attempt to translate the film's original title, "Dokfa in the Devil's Hand."

Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)

Lana Turner and Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life

Lora Meredith: Lana Turner
Annie Johnson: Juanita Moore
Steve Archer: John Gavin
Sarah Jane Johnson: Susan Kohner
Susie Meredith: Sandra Dee
Allen Loomis: Robert Alda
David Edwards: Dan O'Herlihy
Sarah Jane, age 8: Karin Dicker
Susie, age 6: Terry Burnham
Frankie: Troy Donahue
Choir Soloist: Mahalia Jackson

Director: Douglas Sirk
Screenplay: Eleanore Griffin, Allan Scott
Based on a novel by Fannie Hurst
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Art direction: Alexander Golitzen, Richard H. Riedel
Film editing: Milton Carruth
Music: Frank Skinner

John Gavin was Hollywood's ultimate decorative male, there to look good in bed with Janet Leigh in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) but otherwise to play no significant role in the film. (When he shows up later with Vera Miles, playing Leigh's sister, to find out what happened to Marion Crane, she's the one who does all the work, including the discovery of the mummified Mrs. Bates in the cellar.) It's no surprise that when Gavin died recently, several of the obituaries mentioned the scene in Thoroughly Modern Millie (George Roy Hill, 1967) in which his character is paralyzed by a poison dart: He's been presented as so handsomely wooden that it takes a long time before anyone notices he's just sitting there. He's not quite so inert in Imitation of Life, but that's because Douglas Sirk, like Hitchcock, knew how to make use of him: He's there to hang as nicely on Lana Turner's arm as the Jean Louis gowns do on her body. Unfortunately, this makes for some of the film's weaker scenes, the ones in which Sandra Dee's Susie develops a crush on him, but even there the fault is more Dee's limitations as an actress than Gavin's as an actor. He comes off much better in one of the key scenes, in which his Steve Archer proposes to Turner's Lora Meredith. It works because Turner is skillful enough to make Lora into a woman who knows how not to get trapped by male expectations of what women should be. It's not quite so well-played as the scene in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) I wrote about a couple of days ago, in which Charlotte Vale rebuffs Jerry Durrance's suggestion that she should be looking for a man instead of taking care of his daughter, but that's because Lana Turner wasn't Bette Davis. Still, the scene comes off, and it's reinforced later when Lora is the one who proposes to Steve, after she's gotten what she wanted. The film belongs, of course, to the women, not only Turner but also and especially to Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, who got the Oscar nominations they deserved. It's possible to fault the film for "whitewashing" by casting Kohner as the black girl who tries to pass for white, especially since in the earlier version of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934), the corresponding character was played by Fredi Washington, who was indeed black. But even to raise the issue of "passing" in 1959, especially in a film that some considered little more than soap opera, was audacious: The Production Code had long forbidden any treatment of miscegenation. And Sirk artfully turns the issue into a generational one: Sarah Jane's desire to be white as a reaction against the subservience of her mother, foreshadowing a generation gap that would be operative in the coming decade's civil rights struggle. Sirk's films have a way of working themselves into your head unexpectedly, putting the lie to my observation that drama makes you think and melodrama makes you feel. Sirk's melodrama -- Imitation of Life is unashamed of the clichés it exploits and usually transcends -- undoubtedly makes you feel. Is there ever a dry eye at showings of the film's funeral finale? But by confronting the problems that underlie the melodrama it also has a sneaky way of making you think.

Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

George O'Brien and Margaret Livingston in Sunrise

The Man: George O'Brien
The Wife: Janet Gaynor
The Woman From the City: Margaret Livingston
The Maid: Bodil Rosing
The Photographer: J. Farrell MacDonald
The Barber: Ralph Sipperly
The Manicure Girl: Jane Winton
The Obtrusive Gentleman: Arthur Housman
The Obliging Gentleman: Eddie Boland

Director: F.W. Murnau
Screenplay: Carl Mayer
Based on a story by Hermann Sudermann
Cinematography: Charles Rosher, Carl Struss
Art direction: Rochus Gliese
Film editing: Harold D. Schuster

Sunrise has always seemed to me a triumph of style and technique over substance, which is why I'm not over-eager to join in the chorus hailing it as a masterpiece. Extraordinary, ingenious things are brought to bear on material that seems to me tired and derivative: the town-country divide, the good wife vs. the scheming vixen, the rescues and revelations, the sentimentalizing of the simple folk. All of these were clichés in 1827, let alone 1927. The pretentious subtitle, "A Song of Two Humans," and the labels pasted onto the characters instead of names seem to me laborious attempts to heighten the material into a significance it doesn't really have. That F.W. Murnau, with the considerable help of cast and cinematographers and designers, was able to overcome these flaws and give us something of lasting distinction is undeniable. But a masterpiece would have given us something new, the way, for example, Fritz Lang was able to do the same year in Metropolis, a film that rises above its banalities in visionary ways. There are great moments in Sunrise, but too much of it is horseplay like the pig chase sequence and condescending hokum like the "peasant dance" performed by the Man and the Wife for the amusement of the city slickers. That said, it's possible to be moved by Sunrise without being completely snookered by it.

Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)

Paul Henreid, Bette Davis, and John Loder in Now, Voyager

Charlotte Vale: Bette Davis
Jerry Durrance: Paul Henreid
Dr. Jaquith: Claude Rains
Mrs. Vale: Gladys Cooper
June Vale: Bonita Granville
Eliot Livingston: John Loder
Lisa Vale: Ilka Chase
Deb McIntyre: Lee Patrick
Mr. Thompson: Franklin Pangborn
Dora Pickford: Mary Wickes
Tina Durrance: Janis Wilson

Director: Irving Rapper
Screenplay: Casey Robinson
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Robert M. Haas
Film editing: Warren Low
Music: Max Steiner

"A campy tearjerker," "kitsch," "a schlock classic" -- that's pretty much what you have to call Now, Voyager if you're a critic trying to prove your tough-mindedness, like Pauline Kael or the unidentified New York Times reviewer who dismissed it as "lachrymose." But there are at least two moments in the movie that bring it into focus as something more than just a routine weepie, or rather that suggest that even a routine weepie has a point to make. One is the scene in which Charlotte Vale and Eliot Livingston break off their engagement in an off-handed, all-in-a-day's-work manner. Eliot is, after all, as square as John Loder's jaw, and not at all the mate for a woman who has just discovered who she is. Of course, the breakup kills Charlotte's mother, but that consequence is long past due. The other key moment for me is in the long final scene between Charlotte and Jerry Durrance. She has more or less adopted Tina, the daughter that Jerry's never-seen wife doesn't want. But when Jerry tells her that he's taking Tina away, there's one of the more magnificent Bette Davis moments from a career full of them. His reason, you see, is that by devoting herself to Tina, Charlotte is apparently depriving herself of the opportunity to catch a man. For a brief moment we see Charlotte incredulous at the reason, followed by another moment of something like, "Lord, what fools men are." Jerry drops several notches in Charlotte's esteem at the moment, which leads into the film's most famous line, in which she dismisses Jerry's egocentric wishful thinking: "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." Charlotte Vale emerges from the film as one of the more admirable, level-headed women ever seen on a movie screen.

The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (Masaki Kobayashi, 1961)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer

Kaji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michiko: Michiyo Aratama
Shojo: Tamao Nakamura
Terada: Yusuke Kawazu
Choro: Chishu Ryu
Tange: Taketoshi Naito
Refugee Woman: Hideko Takamine
Ryuko: Kyoko Kishida
Russian Officer: Ed Keene
Chapayev: Ronald Self

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Koichi Inagaki, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa
Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Homer's Odysseus made it home to Ithaka and Penelope, but Masaki Kobayashi's Odysseus, Kaji, doesn't make it home to his Penelope, Michiko, and he's not certain that his Ithaka in southern Manchuria still exists. Kaji struggles toward her against all odds, but dies in a snowstorm, without even a moment of transcendence or a heavenly choir on the soundtrack to ennoble his death. It's a downer ending to a nine-hour epic, but if it feels right it's thanks to the enormous conviction of Tatsuya Nakadai as the stubborn idealist Kaji. The Human Condition is an immersive experience rather than a dramatic one: Drama would demand catharsis, and there is really none to be had from the film. The human condition depicted in the film is Hobbesian: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short -- though the length of the film works against the last adjective. It is a statement film: War is a stupid way for people to behave to one another. And as such it never quite transcends its message-making, leaving the film somewhere short of greatness. Still, it has to be seen by anyone who seeks to understand Japan in the twentieth century and after, and by anyone who wants to know the limits of film as an art form.

The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959)

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity

Kaji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michiko: Michiyo Aratama
Shinjo: Kei Sato
Obara: Kunie Tanaka
Yoshida: Michiro Minami
Kageyama: Keiji Sada
Sasa Nitohei: Kokinji Katsura
Hino Jun'i: Jun Tatara

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa
Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

If, as I said yesterday, the first part of Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition makes me think of the earnest "serious pictures" that came out of Hollywood in the 1940s -- I have in mind such movies as The Razor's Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946), in which Tyrone Power searches for the meaning of life, or Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), in which Gregory Peck crusades against antisemitism -- then the second part, Road to Eternity, suggests, even in its subtitle, the influence of  From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), that near-scathing* look at brutality in Army basic training. Kaji, our idealistic protagonist, has been sent to war, and has to endure all manner of abuse even though he's an excellent marksman and a sturdy trooper. His objections to Japanese militarism and his belief that the war is wrong mark him out as a "Red," and for a time he contemplates escaping into his idealized version of the Soviet Union. But his sympathy for his fellow recruits keeps him plugging away, occasionally taking heat for his defense of them, especially from the military veterans who have been called up to serve. They object to his treating the recruits he is put in charge of training with respect and human decency -- they went through hell in basic training, so why shouldn't everyone? The film ends with a cataclysmic battle sequence, during which Kaji has to kill one of his fellow soldiers, who has gone stark raving mad and with his antics threatens the lives of other soldiers. It's not the first time Kaji has resorted to killing a fellow soldier: Earlier, he has been mired in quicksand with a brutal man who has caused the suicide of a recruit, and Kaji lets him drown. The intensity of the battle scenes takes some of the focus away from Kaji's intellectualizing, which is all to the good.

*I have to quality: From Here to Eternity is not as scathing as the James Jones novel on which it's based, thanks to the Production Code and the residual good feeling of having won the war. In some ways, The Human Condition II is more properly an anticipation of Stanley Kubrick's no-holds-barred
Full Metal Jacket (1987).

The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (Masaki Kobayashi. 1959)

Tatsuya Nakadai and So Yamamura in The Human Condition I: No Greater Love

Kaji: Tatsuya Nakadai
Michiko: Michiyo Aratama
Tofuko Kin: Chikage Awashima
Shunran Yo: Ineko Arima
Kageyama: Keiji Sada
Okishima: So Yamamura
Chin: Akira Ishihama

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi
Based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa
Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima
Art direction: Kazue Hirataka
Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The first three and a half hours of Masaki Kobayashi's nine-hour, 47-minute epic The Human Condition are themselves divided into two parts, though the break seems more a courtesy to the Sitzfleisch of the viewer than to any inherent division in the story. I have a friend who says he's never read a bad novel over 600 pages long, because once he's done with it he has to justify the time spent reading. I think something like that may apply to The Human Condition once I've finished it. Which is not to say that there isn't a greatness that adheres to Kobayashi's unsparing, audacious film, even though at times I found myself feeling that The Human Condition I: No Greater Love derived as much from the more earnest black-and-white Hollywood films of the 1940s, the ones that starred Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck, than from the high artistry of Ozu or Mizoguchi. It is often unabashed melodrama: We worry that Kobayashi hasn't burdened his protagonist, Kaji, with more than is really credible. An idealist, he not only finds himself supervising slave Chinese labor in Manchuria during World War II, he also has to manage a brothel staffed with Chinese "comfort women." And the more he does to better the lot of the workers, the more he elicits the ire of the kenpeitai, the Japanese military police. On the other hand, if he compromises with the authorities, the Chinese prisoners and prostitutes make his life miserable. And not to mention that, his wife is incapable of comprehending the stresses that make him so distant at home. But Tatsuya Nakadai is such an accomplished actor that he gives Kaji credibility, even when we're beginning to think he's too virtuous, too idealistic, for his own good.

The Pornographers (Shohei Imamura, 1966)

Sumiko Sakamoto and Shoichi Ozawa in The Pornographers

Subuyan Ogata: Shoichi Ozawa
Haru Matsuda: Sumiko Sakamoto
Keiko Matsuda: Keiko Sagawa
Banteki: Haruo Tanaka
Elderly Client: Ganjiro Nakamura
Koichi Matsuda: Masaomi Kondo
Shinun Ogata: Ichiro Sugai
Doctor: Kazuo Kitamura

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Shohei Imamura, Koji Numata
Based on a novel by Akiyuki Nosaka
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Art direction: Hiromi Shiozawa, Ichiro Takada
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Kusunoki, Toshiro Mayuzumi

Fascinating. confusing, sometimes funny, and sometimes just a little repellent. Must be a Shohei Imamura film. I don't shock easily, but Imamura always keeps me on the edge of being shocked, mostly because I don't know how far he'll go next. In The Pornographers, we're dealing not only with the title subject but also with incest and prostitution and even abuse of the mentally challenged, while desperately trying to sort out the very confused life of Subuyan Ogata. He is one of the pornographers of the title, and he lives with a widow, Haru, who thinks her dead husband has been reincarnated as the carp she keeps in a very confining fish tank. She has two nearly grown children: Toichi, who seems uncommonly attached to his mother, and Keiko, a rebel without a cause. Ogata is obsessed with Keiko, whom he has known since she was a little girl. Nothing good is going to come out of his relationship with the Matsuda family, of course, especially after Haru gets pregnant and goes insane. But figuring out the ins and outs of the film's plot, and even whether what we're watching is flashback or dream or fantasy is part of the essence of its fascination -- and its repellent quality. Imamura isn't quite like any filmmaker I know of.

Nine Days of One Year (Mikhail Romm, 1962)

Aleksey Batalov in Nine Days of One Year

Dmitri Gusov : Aleksey Batalov 
Lyolya : Tatyana Lavrova 
Ilya Kulikov : Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy
Prof. Sintsov: Nikolai Plotnikov
Narrator: Zinoviy Gerdt

Director: Mikhail Romm
Screenplay: Daniil Khrabovitsky, Mikhail Romm
Cinematography: German Lavrov
Production design : Georgi Kolganov 
Film editing : Yeva Ladyzhenskaya
Music: Dzhon Ter-Tatevosyan

The Soviet film Nine Days of One Year, about nuclear physicists, appeared in 1962, which makes for an interesting counterpoint to the major news event of that year, the nuclear standoff known as the Cuban missile crisis. But for all its geopolitical significance, Mikhail Romm's film is a love story, a blend of the eternal triangle and a conflict between marriage and career. Dmitri Gusov, known as Mitya, is a dedicated scientist who in the first of the film's nine days -- they aren't consecutive but spread out over the year -- receives a dose of radiation while overseeing an experiment conducted by his mentor, Prof. Sintsov. The professor gets a lethal dose, but Mitya is told that he's safe as long as he doesn't get exposed to another large burst of radiation. Mitya is in love with a fellow physicist, Lyolya, who is also involved with Mitya's friend Ilya, a theoretical physicist. Ilya and Lyolya are on the verge of telling Mitya that they're going to get married, but the accident propels Lyolya into marrying Mitya instead. It's a rocky marriage, to be sure, with Lyolya worrying that Mitya is putting himself in harm's way while at the same time fretting that she's not doing enough to overcome his coldness and obsession with work. Through all this there's much talk, especially between Ilya and Mitya about the morality of nuclear science, the nature of humanity, and even about whether they're doing enough to advance the future of communism. Fortunately, the ideological talk is kept to a minimum. Romm directs all of this with great style: long takes shot at low angles and a camera that moves restlessly between the characters as they talk. Somehow the film never falls into the obvious clichés, maybe because Aleksey Batalov, Tatyana Lavrova, and Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy bring their characters to life.

The Cossacks (George W. Hill, 1928)

John Gilbert and Renée Adorée in The Cossacks

Lukashka: John Gilbert
Maryana: Renée Adorée
Ivan: Ernest Torrance
Prince Olenin Stieshneff: Nils Asther
Sitchi: Paul Hurst
Ulitka: Dale Fuller

Director: George W. Hill
Screenplay: Frances Marion
Title cards: John Colton
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Percy Hilburn
Art direction: Cedric Gibbons
Film editing: Blanche Sewell

Nobody comes off well in The Cossacks. Not even John Gilbert, for whom MGM made the movie, hoping the reteaming with Renée Adorée, his co-star in The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925), would strike fire at the box office. Gilbert spends much of the movie in a shaggy Astrakhan hat that makes his nose look big. Nor was the film much fun for screenwriter Frances Marion and director George W. Hill, who spent much of the production time fighting with studio interference and handling complaints from Gilbert and Adorée. Hill eventually quit and was replaced by an uncredited Clarence Brown. Nor does the film do much justice to the novel by Leo Tolstoy on which it's based. It completely inverts the story, in which Prince Olenin is the protagonist, an idealistic Russian who hates Moscow society and finds himself in the simpler, more primitive way of life in the Caucasus. In the film, Olenin has been sent by the tsar to mingle with the Cossacks and find a bride in some vaguely diplomatic attempt to cement relations between the urban Russians and the rural populace. Nils Asther is a very pretty Olenin, who of course lights on the equally very pretty Maryana, played by the very pretty Adorée, but she's in love with Lukashka, even though he's a "woman man" who doesn't like killing Turks, which is all that the male Cossacks seem to do. (The women, meanwhile, do all the work.) The film winds up as an absurd paean to the Cossack way of life, after Lukashka decides he really does like killing after all. True, The Cossacks is often fun to watch, and there's some spectacular stunt riding by a troupe of actual Cossacks brought to the United States for the film. But there's too much nonsense and too many clichés.