They Live by Night (1948) A Film by Nicholas Ray

"François Truffaut called They Live by Night 'the most Bressonian of American films,' and while his characterization was overzealous, there’s more than just these performer resemblances to link the two directorial sensibilities. Like many Bresson films, Ray’s debut is a genre movie featuring only the bare minimum of generic trappings, one that favors the quiet dramas of decision-making and one-on-one commiseration to the louder spectacles that occur, often unseen, to push the plot along. It’s also a story about a pursuit of grace cut short by the callousness of society, which is manifested most plainly in a number of scenes detailing monetary transactions."

Full review of They Live by Night, now out in a stunning Criterion Blu-ray, continues at Slant.

Woman of the Year (1942) A Film by George Stevens

"Harping on the politics of a 1942 romantic comedy is a dubious game, especially when one considers that the context for Woman of the Year's American exceptionalism was the pall of Nazism. But the film plays particularly poorly in 2017, and not only because its central narrative thrust involves the question of how to handle refugees, the relevance or lack thereof of the traditional blue-collar American male, and the place of feminism within American life. The film's conservative agenda also shortchanges Tracy and Hepburn's chemistry. The former's earthy restraint and the latter's electric sensuality are best collided in the early stages of the plot before Sam and Tess's differing worldviews stir conflict (one alcohol-lubricated back and forth in which the lovers hesitantly flesh out their respective backstories features a sizzling arrangement of intimate close-ups). But the screenplay's emphasis on Sam and Tess's disparities quickly fosters an environment that runs counter to Tracy and Hepburn's finest asset when sharing the screen together: the sense that the actors, and not just the characters they're playing, can barely contain their affection for one another."

Full review of The Criterion Collection's new Blu-ray release of Woman of the Year continues here.

The Great Madcap (1949) A Film by Luis Buñuel

When Ramiro (Fernando Soler), the rich drunkard in Luis Buñuel's The Great Madcap, wakes up from an intoxicated stupor to find himself dressed in rags and surrounded by dusty, cement walls, he resembles Lon Chaney Jr. awaking to the shock of misplaced hair and fangs in The Wolf Man, or Bela Lugosi finding much to his dismay that a scientific experiment has given him thick black fur in The Ape Man, or any other B-horror character emerging in unexpected new form after a night's sleep. The only difference is that it's not hideous physical deformities that cause Ramiro's horror and disgust but rather a sudden shift in material wealth and social class, as if he had taken one wrong turn and wound up in the slums indefinitely. In the context of the film, it turns out his experience of poverty is only fleeting; he eventually discovers that his family, fearing that he might descend into alcoholic madness, has merely played a prank on him to inject some much needed doses of humility (their wanton gamesmanship is no less a trivialization of the poor). But like many of the Spanish director's bold conceits, this one has an inherently charged political connotation: the privileged bourgeoisie always possess a knee-jerk smugness towards the lower rungs in the social system, as well as a denial of the existence of economic hardship so powerful that issues of poverty might as well be a surreal fabrication.

One imagines this disorientation to have been something like the feeling Buñuel himself had when suddenly forced in the midst of public backlash following L'âge d'or to stop making features, and subsequently when he re-emerged nearly twenty years later to begin working on commercial Mexican fare. The Great Madcap is the second of these efforts (following the light musical Gran Casino) and the first to point convincingly towards Buñuel's future, even if it's a somewhat rigid and lopsided screwball comedy, a film with only fractions of the satiric bile and mad logic he dropped in L'âge d'or and would eventually unload later in his career. Hints of these tendencies are most apparent in the film's absurdly broad setup, which begins with Ramiro getting bailed out of jail and segues into his reintegration with his ungrateful family. No one in the family - not Ramiro's marriage-obsessed daughter Virginia (Rosario Granados), his spoiled son Eduardo (Gustavo Rojo), or his two scheming, deadbeat brothers Gregorio (Francisco Jambrina) and Ladislao (Andrés Soler) - has fully absorbed the impact of the recent death of Ramiro's wife, even as it's launched Ramiro himself into an alcoholic fit. They continue to shamelessly feed off of their father's wealth and resources.



During these opening scenes that establish the family and their regular routine of debauchery, Buñuel abandons subtlety in favor of wide strokes at upper-class complacency. Vignettes around the mansion include the family butler Juan justifying the theft of his Ramiro's cigars by claiming that he feared they would dry up, Eduardo pining for a new luxury car after supposedly destroying his previous one, and Ramiro fielding various requests for money. At work, Ramiro has taken to drinking in an attempt to forget his grief and has received blunt criticism from his peers for it, but his economic and professional status has allowed him to indulge regardless. In this early stage of the film, everything takes place indoors on boxy, conspicuously cheap sets, a logistical necessity that helps to emphasize the sense that the accoutrements of a wealthy lifestyle are ultimately synthetic, superficial, and fleeting; stripped suddenly of their luxuries, the family would resemble ducks with their heads cut off, totally ignorant of how to exist organically in the exterior world amongst other people. In one hilarious wide shot, Buñuel frames Ramiro and his well-dressed friends stumbling drunkenly to sappy orchestral music, the idea being that even within their familiar surroundings, they're already clueless.

The family's subsequent prank on Ramiro is therefore tinged with devilish irony, ostensibly designed to teach the patriarch human values that they themselves lack. Without the knowledge the family possesses that all will naturally return to "normal," Ramiro, after shaking off his dreamlike shock, inevitably descends into depression and makes a ridiculously botched attempt at suicide. Aiming to jump off the roof of a building in a poor district of Mexico City, he only falls a few feet before being braced by a bit of scaffolding and rescued by a construction worker named Pablo (Rubén Rojo) who insists that if he were to hit the ground from such a height it would only result in a life in a wheelchair that would arguably be worse than death. That Ramiro falls for Pablo's heroic rescue disguised as an obvious lie does little to bolster his appreciation of life and love though; soon after, when he overhears a conversation about the prank and fumes at his family's insensitivity, he responds by launching a trick of his own in which he purports to have actually lost his fortune, meanwhile continuing to live in his mansion and overseeing his family's newfound poverty. It's a mean-spirited turn of fate engineered by Ramiro that he passes off as his own attempt to teach his family members a sense of dignity and humility; the difference is that they gradually come to embrace their modest means of living, finding small sources of success and happiness.



Despite the ludicrous nature of these twists and turns, there's a fundamentally simple-minded core to The Great Madcap, an element of moralistic pandering inherent in its script that belies even Buñuel's subtle suggestions that the problems with humanity are too broad and diffuse to be reduced to class distinctions (after all, nothing proves capable of shaking the family's place in the upper-class, but their pettiness largely remains even after some breakthroughs). Buñuel sees the major issues in the film's ensemble of characters to be an absence of love and appreciation towards others and a blindness towards diversity, issues too deep-seated to be cured by loopy plot devices, but the film nevertheless implies that Ramiro's family has been taught a lesson through their involuntary hardship. Virginia, initially set upon a marriage to the wealthy Alfredo (Luis Alcoriza), changes her mind when confronted with her love for Pablo, a romance that transforms her initially narrow worldview. Pablo's near-rejection of Virginia on account of his discovery that she is in fact rich adds a blip in the streamlined nature of the film's moral, offering a lower-class attitude nearly as reductive as that of the financial elite, but it's treated merely as a momentary reaction to shock rather than a bottomless aversion to a group of people and therefore doesn't signal as the locus of Buñuel's energy in quite the same way that his skewering of privilege does. For the most part, there's a black and white dichotomy at the heart of the film that is occasionally saved by the sheer hilarity of Buñuel's investment, but otherwise threatens to reduce the film to a blunt parable.

If the script's spiral into easy moralizing is its greatest flaw, Buñuel's stiff visual style often fails to shift the attention. Some of Buñuel's stylistic tics - his method of starting a scene on a minor detail before dollying back to reveal the entire space, his habit of bunching bodies together in comical medium shot - emerge in striking ways, usually to underline the way that objects have defined the wealthy lifestyle or to emphasize the smallness and dysfunctional nature of the characters, but the film's default mode is unimaginative wide shots that exist seemingly for no other aesthetic reason than to capture all of the often busy staging in one fell swoop. (An early instance of effective camera movement and cross-cutting follows Ramiro as he makes a mess out of his daughter's wedding recital, and it's predictably one of the most dynamic scenes in the film.) But directors like Buñuel tend to couple weak decisions with convincing ones, and as such, The Great Madcap's combination of rigid studio setups and freer on-location sequences anticipating Los Olvidados' primal vérité offers a fascinating counterpoint to the more schematic choices. When we see children run through the background of a frame, it alone sends a ripple of anarchist energy through this otherwise commercially contained, if frequently funny, product.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) A Film by Jacques Tourneur

In the Val Lewton-produced, Jacques Tourneur-directed RKO horror classic I Walked with a Zombie, the "zombie" is chiefly a metaphor for the steady encroachment of a dark past, the messengers of a long-overdue retribution. Placed beside the contemporary predilection for zombies as empty purveyors of shock and gore, the film's thematically charged representation of the folkloric figure is a refreshing difference. Set on an island in the West Indies during what is presumably the time of production (1943) - that is, only a short 75 years or so after the Civil War and right in the final three decades of Jim Crow-era America - the film focuses on the arrival of a young nurse named Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) to care for the vegetative wife of Paul Holland (Tom Conway), a wealthy plantation owner. The precise cause of Jessica Holland's (Christine Gordon) mysterious illness is unknown, though metaphorically there is a suggestion that it is some kind of karma-like punishment for an affair with Paul's brother Wesley (James Ellison) that the script hints at vaguely. On the outskirts of this melodrama is a strange voodoo camp lead by the African-American workers at the plantation, and although only revealed in the second half of the film, the camp has a constant, menacing presence in the film, its eerie tribal drums and atmospheric chants echoing through the humid Caribbean air.

The visual and geographic division between the slave laborers in the corn fields and the Americans with their petty dramas in the palatial estate is an immediate sign of Tourneur's intent. This is a film about the massive, often unaddressed exploitation of blacks by white men and women of privilege, a history of condescension and subservience that continues today in subtler iterations. Late in the film, the mother of the Holland brothers as well as a nurse sympathetic to voodoo, Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett), gives a matter-of-fact description of zombies as "both living and dead," which might as well be in reference to the film's underlying subtext: the ceaseless struggle between blacks and whites. For the plantation owners, the African Americans are both living - living enough to complete work for them - and dead, totally peripheral to their lives of luxury. Even more unsettling in retrospect is the notion that our collective memory of the atrocities of 20th century America (and before) jibes with the same description. They can never quite be snuffed out, even as many try so desperately to block them from consciousness.

I Walked With a Zombie traces the ways in which the African-Americans gradually infringe upon the tale of Betsy and the Hollands and ultimately reclaim the land as their own. First, Betsy, an audience surrogate stumbling into this uneven social landscape, is introduced to a strangely foreboding statue within the Holland's gates of St. Sebastian with arrows shot through its heart that was allegedly ushered into the island on a slave ship. It's a striking, multivalent image and one that seems to be a self-congratulatory emblem of equality for the white folk, as if their use of laborers in the corn fields is an act of salvation from their prior exploitation as slaves at sea. Yet it carries a secondary, possibly unintentional meaning as well: the notion that the African-Americans can be freed from brutality in death, which is particularly ironic given the progression of the narrative therein. A tall, black zombie known as Carrefour (Darby Jones), the guardian of the late-night voodoo tribe, eventually finds his way into the grounds of the plantation, silently beckoning forth the comatose soul of Jessica, knowing that she too longs vacantly for the blissful release from her pitiful worldly existence. She is also a victim of a powerful white, patriarchal grip.



Tourneur keeps the ostensible narrative of the film to a minimum. What is revealed is mostly fragments of a past story weighing on the present, which deepens the film's circular idea of history and shifts the emphasis to the metaphorical implications of the horror. Betsy is made privy to the Holland backstory through the gossip delivered in song form by a black man (Sir Lancelot) crooning near her afternoon lunch with Wesley. Clearly, the island's inhabitants have made a fuss about whatever happened between Paul, Jessica, and Wesley, and the rumors fly across the town, taunting the rich, snobby men. When Wesley overhears the song, he fumes angrily and quickly puts an end to the man's entertainment. In a scene shortly after, the man signs the song again, this time at dusk in a quietly menacing tone. He trudges slowly towards Betsy during his airy calypso ballad, his face becoming fully submerged in shadow. What was at first a harmless tune is now a dark omen through Tourneur's chiaroscuro light and somnambulant staging. The same effect is achieved in the film's horror centerpiece when Betsy guides the sleepwalking Jessica through the corn fields at midnight, stalling occasionally at portentous indicators of death such as a skull, an animal carcass, and the towering Carrefour. Tourneur's minimalistic staging and lighting, as well as his lingering, evocative close-ups, makes it easy to forget the sequence was crafted in a soundstage with cheap props.

Such is the essential lesson of Tourneur and Lewton's cinema: that careful, crafty wielding of sight and sound, as well as a purposeful use of space, absence, and metaphor, renders production value and budget quite negligible. I Walked with a Zombie is so unsettling, so politically and racially motivated, that it's almost as if Tourneur's entire purpose for the relatively measly $150,000 granted to Lewton from RKO was to unravel a disguised attack of white privilege and historical disregard. It's possible to make the case that Tourneur's reliance upon the African-American figure as the source of schock and horror merely perpetuates negative stereotypes, but the film actively denies presenting these "zombies" as malicious monsters, instead treating them as melancholy figures seeking acceptance. In this light, Darby Jones gives a truly haunted performance as Carrefour, the zombified slave carcass with beady eyes and a perpetually sad, disheveled deer-in-the-headlights expression. Shirtless so as to expose the lung churning determinedly inside his bony frame, and with dark pants too short to extend the entire distance down his lanky legs, Jones glides through the film enigmatically, a specter from a dark past that just won't go away. And Tourneur's film operates in a similar fashion, its creepy, insistent rhythms and vital worldview still possessing a raw energy today.

The Lady from Shanghai (1947) A Film by Orson Welles

In its first twenty minutes, Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai has made quick work of establishing its main characters and their scenario: an Irish seaman, Michael O'Hara (Welles himself), becomes visibly infatuated by the angelic Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) after saving her from a mugging in Central Park and therefore agrees to work on her older husband's yacht on their trip to San Francisco. Mrs. Bannister has little interest in her schmucky husband, a balding lawyer with crutches, but stays with him due to some unspoken motive, likely money and prestige, whilst secretly building a romance with Michael. One of Mr. Bannister's business associates, George Grisby (Glenn Anders), arrives on the yacht and works a deal with Michael to sign a confession of the murder of Mr. Grisby so that he can disappear unscathed, claiming that O'Hara cannot be accused without visual confirmation of there being a corpse.

For some time, Welles does not slow down the narrative drive, frequently even appearing to have skipped over some necessary bits of information along the way. The characters are roughly sketched, with Elsa and O'Hara's relationship seeming to have missed a beat. Nonetheless, Welles infuses his performances with enough gusto to keep the story intriguing, providing a strong basis for the film's final act, which was undoubtedly given the most effort. The Lady from Shanghai is based somewhat arbitrarily on a novel by Sherwood King, and Welles used the film mainly as a way to profit for future endeavors. Although the pacing is quick, the film lumbers along, and Welles' apathy regarding the material is somewhat conspicuous. What did interest him was the story's rather convoluted finale, which he renders magnificently, so what comes before is carried only by character idiosyncrasies and stylistic flourishes (the long crane shot that follows the mugging and subsequent horse and buggy ride at the beginning). While Hayworth is positively radiant as the femme fatale, serviced greatly by Charles Lawton Jr.'s delicate blankets of light, the character of George Grisby is the finest example; he is a hulking enigma who chuckles at O'Hara via suffocating close-up and has an unorthodox way of dragging out consonants ("just tell 'em you're taking tarrrrget practice").

When O'Hara carries out his fake murder and Grisby speeds off on a boat across the pier, he becomes suspicious of Grisby's true intentions, and eventually finds himself being blamed for Grisby's unexpected death. Michael goes to court being defended by Mr. Bannister, himself angrily curious of O'Hara's relationship with his wife. In the film's mesmerizing funhouse mirror sequence, the double crosses of Elsa and Mr. Bannister are revealed to O'Hara in a stunning visual arrangement. It is as if the extent of secondary personalities that the characters harbored throughout the film are multiplied perpetually against the mirrored walls and Welles takes every opportunity to manifest this climactic meeting in a tricky manner; large faces superimpose over full, duplicated bodies, characters jigsaw along the fragmented frame, and bullets then shatter their images into full-fledged abstraction. It is one of the most experimental resolutions in a Hollywood narrative film and has lost none of its audacity. Unfortunately, studio executives became the downfall of many of Welles' films, and the finished Lady from Shanghai allegedly contained much more of this Wellesian brilliance before being hacked up for commercial purposes. What remains is short and clumsy but compelling.

The Third Man (1949) A Film by Carol Reed

Carol Reed's noir thriller The Third Man contains a sequence towards the end that is often said to be one of Orson Welles' defining moments on screen. He is playing Harry Lime, a friend of cheeky American novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who, in this scene, is witnessing Lime for the first time after investigating his supposed death in Vienna. The two ascend on a ferris wheel and Welles gives a wonderfully quick-witted speech that, like the carnival device they are stationed on, goes in circles continuously. It's a nicely written scene by Welles himself, but it lasts so quickly that it brings into question the performance itself. Surely any great actor can enter a film for a moment and deliver some eccentricities, but should this mean they are remembered so fondly for the entire tenure of their art?

This scene is much like the remaining scenes in The Third Man, an impermanent romp that feels out of step with the rest of the film. Indeed, I do believe the film is largely overrated and is by no means the classic it is almost ubiquitously regarded as. This bothersome modular quality in the film is also reflected in Roger Ebert's review; each paragraph lists seemingly meritable aspects of Reed's picture but fails to bring it to any sort of cohesion, some sort of decision on why the several parts add up to a solid whole.

The film follows Holly Martins on his trip through a post-war Vienna, meeting Lime's associates and his rigorously loyal girlfriend Anna (Alida Valli), but finding that the truth is rather elusive. A British official named Calloway insists Holly stop wasting time over Lime, for he was an unjust man. Nonetheless, Martins continues his search, naive in the face of it as well as his company with Anna, whom he fruitlessly tries to flatter. Reed tells the story with a weakness for economy, diverting from his thriller plot several times to focus on mundane aspects of Holly Martins' bluntly American character, who Joseph Cotten plays quite forcefully.

Robert Krasker's cinematography is likely the high point of the endeavor; the murky Vienna streets are extremely well photographed, lending an expressionistic glaze over the story, but the film does not embellish his visuals for lengthy amount of times, save in the final, and best, sewer scene. In spite of this, Krasker manages to give birth to one of my biggest pet peeves in cinema: the wretched tilted angle shot. It seems a far too literal way to evoke a crooked, out of synch atmosphere, not to mention leaves a viewer's neck with a subtle ache by the roll of the credits.

Elsewhere, Anton Karas' famous zither score is only detrimental to The Third Man. Its annoyingly repetitive and clanky sound blatantly contrasts the mise-en-scene, turning what should have been a low-key thriller setup into a story that nearly seems to be a parody of itself. Although the surface elements of the film are extremely disjoint, there does seem to be something stirring underneath, a notion that is hinted at in the final scene involving the men chasing Lime through the shadowy Vienna underbelly with (beneficially) no zither. Sometimes however, it's just too difficult to get past the film's lackluster pacing and bother to find out.

The Naked City (1948) A Film by Jules Dassin

When taking into account the widely acknowledged schematics of "film noir", Jules Dassin's influential procedural drama The Naked City seems not to fit at face value. However, if one takes noir in the grim, direct, and realistic sense of the word, the film does not seem too distant from the trend. This is because Dassin separated himself from the influx of glossy studio-produced dramas of the period and created a film that was shot entirely on location in New York City. In order to capture a documentary-like immediacy, Oscar-winning cinematographer William H. Daniels went to the great length of lugging his bulky camera inside a car with tinted windows, explaining some of the perplexed glances the onlookers give to the focused actors.

Dassin tells the step-by-step story of the murder investigation of Jean Dexter, a popular fashion model in the country's most vibrant city. On the prowl for suspects are Lieutenant Muldoon (the prolific Hollywood actor Barry Fitzgerald), his right-hand man, Detective Jimmy Halloran (Don Taylor), and the remainder of steadfast crew members. Dassin is relentlessly economical in his delivery, never hanging for a moment on a scene inconsequential to the investigation, which includes a crooked jewelry business, seemingly unlikely connections, and jealousy and lies of all sorts. Unfortunately, the film dips into some lousy characterization, a result of the story's matter-of-fact, newspaper-like presentation (famously deemed by radio-personality-turned-producer Mark Hellinger as just one of the "eight million stories in the naked city"). Muldoon, despite being played splendidly well by Fitzgerald, verges frequently on caricature; he is a classic hard-boiled lieutenant committed wholly to doing his job and earning his salary. Halloran is broadly sketched, and a scene involving him at home with his wife before being ripped away by an important business call feels like a strained attempt to toss in some depth to his character, and the fact that he's young and married and juggling several commitments isn't given any future resonance.

However, where the film may lack in emotion, it shines in verité quality and deft pacing. Dassin's direction is taut for its entirety, and in the end, memorably exciting. He treats the city as a microcosm of society as a whole, where truth is continually elusive through a number of subjective views. The images, albeit not as flashy or atmospheric as some of the other 40's productions, are - due to practical reasons - flooded with sunlight, creating harsh snapshots of the busy daytime streets of the Big Apple in the mid 20th-century. The Naked City's influence on television shows like C.S.I and Law and Order remains noteworthy, and the film still has the ability to lock viewers in.

Citizen Kane (1941) A Film by Orson Welles

The opening sequence of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane introduces a myriad of striking detail shots around a cryptic mansion. A fence standing before fog, a cat seated slyly by a creek, a man's mouth whispering the word's "Rosebud"; each lends itself to a rather bold noir atmosphere, especially given the fact that they were indeed the first frames being committed to film under a studio agenda by a writer/director who came to be one of the most exemplary cinematic practitioners of sound film. Welles transitions from this cryptic style frenzy to a news montage covering the life and death of Charles Foster Kane, the heavyweight of New York City press. The two scenes are remarkably dissonant, and such a decision is certainly an audacious one for Welles. Once the film finally snaps into reality (that is, in relation to the remaining conventions of the film) in a small screening room, the sheer tenacity of the image's willingness to play with a Godly slice of light officially signals the coming of a truly grand film.

Welles, who assembled a band of Hollywood experts to work with on Citizen Kane, including scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz, cinematographer Gregg Toland, and quintessential Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann, must still unavoidably be deemed the one man wrecking ball for the film. His portrayal of Charles Kane, the massively successful press tycoon based loosely on the real-life William Randolph Hearst (who attempted to block the film's release because he found it offensive), is charismatic, hilarious, and believably varied. The film covers his whole life in flashback, however the chunk of material surrounds his entrepreneurial adulthood, rising to power in the news industry and carrying his power spontaneously to new heights, such as the creation of a prestigious theater to showcase his not-exactly-prima-donna-material mistress. A reporting crew in the present (after Kane's death) is on a mission to decipher the seemingly immortal last line of Kane: "Rosebud".

The film cycles in between the story of Kane's life and the quest of the reporters with faint urgency. Nearly every stretch of fine tuned pacing holds its parallels with the ensuing 67 years of Hollywood movies. Each newspaper montage created since most certainly has a tiny place in its heart for Citizen Kane. This doesn't necessarily excite me, for I find that the newspaper montage has become an insanely banal technique, but rather cements my belief in Citizen Kane's influential nature. The culmination of the film is shattering; Kane retreats to an almost cumbersome palace (these interiors are the high points in the film visually) with his singer wife Susan Alexander only to discover what his success and money have really brought him. Pluck out the simple but universal message and witness how so many films since have reworked it, but never to such a virtuous degree.

Late Spring (Banshun) A Film by Yasujiro Ozu (1949)

Without the contribution of Yasujiro Ozu to the landscape of art cinema, a lot of the current trends in Asian cinema would not be the same. Filmmakers like Tsai-Ming Liang, Apichatphong Weerasethakul, and Abbas Kiarostami have taken great lessons from one of the most understated masters in the history of the medium. With Late Spring, Ozu proved to have just reached the pinnacle of his grip on the art, a level of talent that was maintained more or less for the rest of his career. The story is simple: Noriku, a women in her twenties, lives pleasantly with her widower father Shukichi until one day her Aunt and friend begin to suggest strongly that she should marry. Noriku does not have any interest in such a commitment, for she is more than content with the plain life she leads, resulting in a moral dilemma.

However, her dilemma is not portrayed with a heavy existential weight, much like most of Ozu's oeuvre. His films are easy-going, and transform the mundane into the sublime, one of the many transformations that are undergone in this picture. The film kicks off looking almost like any other Japanese bourgeois film you've ever seen: a scene with a group of women dressed eccentrically in a room with gorgeous interiors. Noriku's personality throughout the first 30 minutes left me feeling skeptical; she seemed like a very flat character because her cheek-to-cheek smile was unrealistically resilient. However, her depth is compiled gradually and believably. In the end, although the narrative is set directly across the globe from me, I felt completely at home with its themes. Ozu speaks volumes about the pressures of societal norms, the vicissitude of change, and the bittersweet symphony of familial love. As a film aesthete, what struck me on a gut level the most was Ozu's incredible focus on the structure of his cinematic language. His dedication to still shots is impressive throughout; only one pan is exhibited in the film and it was necessary. Often times he will place the camera on a dolly, but it nonetheless feels forever contained in its powerful prism of side-to-side immobility.

I can't think of another film that finds such a perfect harmony with its camerawork and the lifestyle of its characters; in a sense, Late Spring has a literal physical level to it. Because it is everyday Japanese tradition to sit on the floors in their homes, the camera often times looks as if it was placed directly on the ground. Interestingly, the film relates its physical positioning (grounded) to its plot's moralities (grounded/realistic). With another type of camera approach, this film would not be the same. Of course there are also what Roger Ebert calls the characteristic Ozu "pillow shots". Basically, these are simply photographic cutaways that immerse the viewer in the atmosphere of the film and allow for somewhat of a reflection period on what was just seen. Naturally, this places Ozu in the realm of a simplistic mood setter. However, this is one of his great strengths. He has the ability to encapsulate what is so holy about cinema: its utter simplicity and complexity working in symbiosis. When the final shots grace the screen, I defy any film connoisseur to watch closely and not be moved tremendously.