Ascent (2016) A Film by Fiona Tan

"Splendor can't be diminished by context or weakened by one's overexposure to it. That's one of the principal lessons of Fiona Tan's Ascent, a docufiction photomontage film that meditates on Japan's magisterial Mount Fuji via its representation in photographic material captured over the course of the last century. Tan's comprehensive project discriminates against no particular era or pedigree of imagery, meaning that the depictions of Mount Fuji on display run the textural gamut from exquisitely staged shots on early color-tinted celluloid to pixelated, drive-by cellphone snaps and everything in between. The mountain's singular presence—astonishing, enchanting, intimidating—remains the one constant throughout, emanating in even the lowest-grade photos a peculiar autonomy, a tendency to float apart from the surrounding image as though possessed of its own life force."

Full review continues at Slant.

Anatahan (1953) A Film by Josef Von Sternberg

"The film's starting point is the real historical incident of a Japanese squadron found stranded alive on the titular island years after the defeat of their army. What Sternberg freely imagines are the seven years of toil and hardship endured by these men while separated from their homeland, which constitutes an act of speculative empathy that puts the project squarely in the realm of storytelling. Complicating this understanding, however, is the filmmaker's decision to narrate the tale himself in a droll tone that pinballs between Job-like questioning, poetic musing, and impartial reportage, including the use of such documentary-tinged phrases as 'we can only reconstruct the events' and 'we can only surmise what happened.'"

Full review of Anatahan, now playing in a Kino Lorber restoration at Metrograph in New York City, continues at Slant.

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939) A Film by Kenji Mizoguchi

"On the back cover of their Blu-ray release of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, the Criterion Collection heralds the 1939 Kenji Mizoguchi film as 'the first full realization of the hypnotic long takes and eloquent camera movements that would come to define the director's films'—a seductive claim, to be sure, but one with the potential to mislead. The Japanese filmmaker was experimenting with the cited aesthetic as early as 1935 with The Downfall of Osen, which withheld a close-up revelation of its titular protagonist until the tail end of a lugubrious flashback structure, while 1937's criminally underseen The Straits of Love and Hate, inspired by Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection, plays like a model for Hou Hsiao-hsien's work in its serene patience and pictorial distance. That's, of course, to account for only Mizoguchi's extant films; within the dozens undiscovered, it's reasonable to assume, given the stylistically bold temperament of something even as early as 1925's The Song of Home, that there's some sophisticated time-sculpting going on elsewhere."

Reviewed the new Criterion Blu-ray.

Be Sure to Share (2009) A Film by Sion Sono

"An anomalous tearjerker from Sion Sono couched between some of the director’s most outré genre eruptions, Be Sure to Share channels Sono’s own grief over the loss of his father into a modest tale of filial piety renewed against the backdrop of terminal cancer. Shiro (Akira), who’s happily employed in his late twenties and on the cusp of engagement to his mild-mannered girlfriend, Yoko (Ayumi Itô), has his world rocked when his father Tetsuji (Eiji Okada) unexpectedly keels over and is rushed to the emergency room. When the diagnosis consigns Tetsuji to the hospital bed for what will likely be a permanent stay, Shiro, recognizing that his relationship with his dad extends scarcely beyond old-fashioned tough love, endeavors to deepen their connection before it’s too late. The premise is a melodramatic softball right over the middle of the plate, the kind of idea that Hollywood would hypothetically poach and transform into two hours of sad-macho life lessons handed down from an award-sniffing veteran actor to a handsome newcomer."

My second contribution to the Sion Sono retrospective at In Review Online continues here.

I Am Keiko (1997) A Film by Sion Sono

"I Am Keiko is a film caught within the dimensions of its maker’s head, composed of and consumed by the limits of that brain’s capacity for thought. This is a statement of fact, not a value judgment, and a twofold statement at that. Sion Sono may have directed I Am Keiko but Keiko herself, a 22-year-old waitress grieving from the recent loss of her father to cancer, is positioned within the film’s fictional framework as the sole author of its images and structure, with the film we’re watching ostensibly a celluloid diary transmitted to us as we’re witnessing it. Keiko plainly addresses the parameters of her film in voiceover: in exactly one hour and one minute’s time—she dictates to us as we contemplate the ticking of a statically framed clock—we will finish watching a series of recordings from her daily life, over which she will exercise total freedom with regard to the content and means of expression."

Review continues at In Review Online, which is currently holding a Sion Sono retrospective.

Seijun Suzuki Introduction

"Like any shrewd workman, Suzuki was at his best when turning his limitations into strengths. Crowded shooting schedules encouraged impromptu technical experimentation, such as the in-camera superimpositions that became a unique Suzukian flourish when depicting internal states. Meanwhile, with the assistance of longtime production design collaborator Takeo Kimura, tawdry studio-built sets were embraced for their flimsiness, and it became a trend for Suzuki to disassemble them in the climaxes of his films so that his characters were suddenly adrift in two-dimensional color fields. In repeatedly calling attention to the artificiality of the medium and the construction of the narrative world, Suzuki’s form began to mirror his governing conception of society as a set of meaningless codes whose flimsy sense of order could easily be thrown into chaos."

"Time and Place are Nonsense: The Cinema According to Seijun Suzuki," a traveling program focused on the career of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki, is coming to the Harvard Film Archive. I wrote the introduction to the series, as well as program notes for Gate of Flesh, Youth of the Beast, Kanto Wanderer, Carmen from Kawachi, Fighting Elegy, and Story of a Prostitute. Read on here.

Happy Hour (2015) A Film by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

"Hamaguchi arranges most sequences around a handful of static, roomy medium shots that subtly suggest emotional dynamics through camera and actor positioning; several scenes around a dining table demonstrate how much the director is able to express, how much latent energy he brings to the surface, merely through who's in and out of the frame. In an excruciating trial scene brimming with the defense's implicit sexism, Hamaguchi develops his shot choices around the axis of Jun's head, keeping her central as the dehumanizing processes of the court play out in the distant background. The use of pillow shots and choices of placid interstitial music reveal Hamaguchi's kinship to Yasujirō Ozu and Hirokazu Kore-eda, but the film's formal DNA bears more traces of Eric Rohmer, who was similarly expert at orchestrating extensive dialogues with a minimum of overt directorial statement." An excerpt from my review of the wonderful Happy Hour, showing at this year's New Directors/New Films festival in New York.

Walk Cheerfully, That Night's Wife, and Dragnet Girl (1930-33) Films by Yasujiro Ozu

"In 1930's That Night's Wife, Walk Cheerfully and 1933's Dragnet Girl, Hollywood genre films in general stick out like product placement, albeit with an appreciative rather than mercenary function. It's a significant running detail, as Ozu's filmmaking in these early capers is unmistakably, spiritually indebted to American genre cinema without necessarily incorporating any specific references. Beyond their pulpy plots, which all more or less take the form of crime-doesn't-pay parables, there are visual flourishes that Ozu would largely dispose of as his career progressed." Reviewed a new Criterion Eclipse package of three silent Ozu films for Slant Magazine.

Kuichisan (2013) A Film by Maiko Endo

Over at In Review Online, I wrote about Kuichisan, the directorial debut of former Battles vocalist Maiko Endo. The film is opening at Anthology Film Archives in New York City tonight and will run for one week. I was no huge fan of this tediously arty city-portrait-cum-somnambulant-mood-piece myself, but I still found a decent amount of stuff in it to commend.

Like Someone in Love (2012) A Film by Abbas Kiarostami

Not unlike Abbas Kiarostami's previous film, Certified Copy, the director's latest, Like Someone in Love, hinges on one character's casual misunderstanding of the identity of another. But where Certified Copy uses this slip-up as a way to plunge into an extended play of artifice, all the while moving deeper and deeper into a realm outside the "real," Like Someone in Love allows the repercussions of this act to percolate into an everyday setting. In this film's version of Tokyo, role-playing (conscious or unconscious) is part of the texture of life, not an elaborate self-reflexive game imposed upon the setting by the filmmaker. Yet while the two films are ostensibly after different things on the surface, they're flip sides of the same coin: the interrogation into the concept of representation in life and art teased out by Certified Copy lays the groundwork for Like Someone in Love's drama of subtly shifting characters forging increasingly melodramatic scenarios within their own quotidian routines.

To a large degree the film's thematic concerns and off-kilter mood are crystallized in its first shot, already a subject of repeat fascination for critics. What at first glance resembles a merely functional establishing shot of an upscale bar in Tokyo gradually reveals, through the shot's lengthy duration, its destabilizing geometry and startling absence of a specific human subject. There are plenty of people in the shot but close inspection proves that none of them are responsible for the intimately recorded female voice heard on the soundtrack, exclaiming of some partially revealed backstory of romantic frustration. The assumption, then, must be that this is a shot from the girl's perspective, but when a woman who has previously been jabbering on the right-hand side of the composition suddenly nudges her way into the foreground of the frame looking slightly to the right of the camera's gaze to start talking to this off-screen character, suspicions of POV are extinguished. The scene eventually settles into a relatively standard shot-reverse-shot setup, but this uncanny reordering of information throws us immediately off balance. Confusion over the source of our perception and the subject of our gaze, as well as over the very contours of the physical space, is a fitting foundation for this study of lives tossed askew by false impressions and vague resemblances.

The source of the mysterious offscreen voice is Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a female escort called upon by an anonymous member of her agency to keep a lonely retired professor named Takashi (Tadashi Okuno) company on this particular evening. Because her grandmother is temporarily in the city, Akiko tries her best to dodge the gig, but her boss shows little sympathy, arguing that an abbreviated visit would be worse than no visit at all. Akiko is frustrated by her boss's pushiness, and in a significant editorial gesture, Kiarostami holds on a reaction shot as her shouted rebuttal – heard rather than seen – stirs bar patrons from their conversations; order has momentarily been disrupted due to a breach of social cool. By showing only the roomful of people, Kiarostami emphasizes that the response to Akiko's fleeting breakdown of self-control holds more weight than the act itself. Throughout Like Someone in Love, such a seemingly minuscule violation of the uninterrupted flow of life is exactly what the characters try desperately to avoid. Revelations of truth, displays of vulnerability, and honest expressions of emotion are to be brushed under the rug.



Feeling embarrassed about raising her voice, Akiko then gives in to the agency's callous exploitation. Thus, the drama ventures out of the bar and into a taxi – a familiar social arrangement in Kiarostami's world – where the film's most damning suppression of feeling takes place. In the process of listening back to progressively less hopeful voicemails scattered throughout the day from her grandmother, Akiko spots her waiting patiently beneath a public statue by the train station, the camera's angle just outside the window exposing the narrow but impervious barrier separating the two by no more than 50 yards. Akiko begins crying. She asks her driver to circle the block a second time. She looks away. The car continues on. It's a devastating moment that permeates the remainder of the film with a sharp feeling of loss, coming about as close to outright melodrama as Kiarostami will go.

The fluid choreography between public and private personas established by this dense opening act is taken a step further by the subsequent progressions of the narrative. When Akiko arrives at her destination after a nap, a long shot from her client's window shows her sandwiched between satin shades emerging from her taxi exhausted and distraught, fixing her hair and gathering her things for her upcoming job. Moments later, she is invited into the man's room with a smile on her face, looking dazzling and alert. She has shifted from a private to a public self, and one wonders to what extent her role-play is conscious or merely an unconscious routine underwent for the sake of professionalism. Regardless, the moment before registers as a brief emergence of Akiko's authentic self compromised by the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she was being watched. Like Someone in Love presents an urban space of constant social surveillance where any disruption to a given façade is bound to be noticed.

It is because of this partly paranoid, partly hereditary understanding that the film's characters engage in the experience of fantasy. Akiko and Takashi's sojourn together can be understood as such; in a contrived relationship that variably resembles that of a grandfather and granddaughter, a father and daughter, a husband and wife, and a prostitute and her client, the two sit down for amiable small talk, Takashi offers a special meal, and Akiko tucks herself into bed for the night, doling out half-hearted erotic permissions from beneath the covers. During Takashi's overzealous build-up to dinner, he throws on the titular Ella Fitzgerald song, whose lethargic rhythms and romantic melodies manage the rare blocking out of the outdoor traffic noises that otherwise insistently govern the film's soundtrack as a reminder of an external world both threatening and unavoidable. In this instance, both characters have fundamentally succumb to fantasy, to the artificial realm arguably occupied by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell for the majority of Certified Copy's back end.



Atop this already awkward relationship a third character is added: Noriaki (Ryo Kase), Akiko's anxious, suspicious fiancé, the man bitterly referred to in the offscreen phone call that opens the film. Noriaki's first appearance onscreen, forming an imposing road block on Akiko's path to her sociology class, does little to correct the negative impression already collected around him, but soon he approaches Takashi, practically invites himself into the car, and exposes a gentler side. Assuming Takashi is the husband to Akiko's visiting grandmother, Noriaki pleads for the grandfather's informal marriage vows and Takashi complies with the role, if not the request. When Akiko returns, she is silently caught off guard but the convenient role-play continues; all of a sudden the three of them resemble a lopsided family. Still, this newfound unity is marked by superficiality. In the car, Noriaki (Ryo Kase) shows Akiko a crumpled postcard advertising another young call girl he thinks looks like her, echoing an earlier moment when Takashi claims a likeness between Akiko and the subject of an oil painting on his wall. (Both instances speak humorously to the considerable differences in each man's toolbox of cultural reference points.) These reductions of the particular to the general, of the personal to the iconic, emerge as ways to avoid facing up to reality. They are part of the larger social deceit that these characters perpetuate.

Like Someone in Love marks Kiarostami's second fictional filmmaking venture outside his native Iran, and the film's Japanese setting makes his characteristically withholding, unobtrusive tactics look especially Ozu-like. But there's a deeper reasoning as well behind the director's choice of Tokyo. For a study of fractured social identities, Kiarostami has picked a culture that is steeped in formalities and standardized behavior. Every time Takashi enters his apartment, the film’s fluid rhythm is momentarily stalled for the small quotidian gesture of taking off his shoes and donning slippers. At one point, Takashi relates to Akiko by asking about her hometown, noting upon hearing her answer that it explains some of her mannerisms. In this film, characters must act in accordance with these inherited identities or else risk ruffling the orderly surface of society. Ironically, however, these acts of fitting into an expected model of behavior pile up until Akiko and Takashi no longer emanate individual cores of identity and become mere wisps of narrative abstraction. On the contrary, Noriaki, allowing a barely concealed jealousy to balloon into impassioned anger by the end of the film, becomes increasingly and disconcertingly palpable.

As is typical of Kiarostami's wise approach, the film neither bemoans the ontological issues it raises nor celebrates the anarchic polar opposite, which of course is embodied by the maniacal Noriaki. Instead, it expresses a profound solitude for the state of social affairs, a viewpoint manifested by a strange non-sequitur in the film's final act. When Akiko is waiting on Takashi's steps for the old man to return, yet another offscreen female voice emerges, this time speaking according to a distinctly different, more expressive acting style. At the end of the woman's speech, which lucidly tells of fond memories, unforgettable experiences, and hitherto suppressed feelings, Kiarostami finally reveals the source of the voice: an elderly woman speaking from within the space of a tiny window framed outside by a larger doorway. In this urban environment, a genuine display of emotion such as this – or such as Noriaki's startling last-minute expression of rage – is equated with either isolating oneself from the world peacefully or existing within it and causing chaos.

Cannes 2012 Round-Up

Below is a complete ranking of the films I saw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Enjoy!

1. Holy Motors (Carax, France, In Competition)

When I saw Leos Carax's first feature in thirteen years, Holy Motors, on the final day of rescreenings, it was by no small margin the most mysteriously beautiful, inventive film I'd seen at Cannes. Starting with the simple setup of a man working as a professional chameleon, riding a limousine stuffed to the brim with suitcases full of disguises around a serenely dreamy Paris and fulfilling different "appointments" around the city, Carax builds a multilayered meditation on performance, identity, virtual reality, and cinematic artifice. Much of the film's power comes from Denis Lavant, most deserving of the festival's "Best Actor" award, who lives each episode of the film's chronological but strangely timeless structure with the candidness and thoroughness necessary to breathe life into the film's motif of dual identities and the elusive "self". What at first seems to smell of redundancy and half-assed improvisation proves to be executed with such remarkable subtlety, grace, and precision by Carax that not a single delirious chapter - even as the director pushes Lavant to vaudevillian feats such as playing a repugnant sewer-dweller carrying an angelic Eva Mendes into his shit-stained lair, concluding with a sight-gag of Lavant's erection - feels out of place. This is a film with a fearless sense of movement and visual invention, not to mention a constant self-awareness and absurdist humor. I can't wait to see it again.

2. Journal De France (Depardon and Nougaret, France, Out of Competition/Special Screenings)

A basement full of unreleased newsreel celluloid from legendary French documentarian Raymond Depardon covering a vast range of small and large scale historical events circa the middle of the 20th century yielded the festival's most moving and poetic images. Uncovered by Depardon's wife and usual sound recordist Claudine Nougaret and positioned alongside contemporary footage of Depardon taking a photographic tour of France alone in his car, the resulting cut of Journal De France becomes a mesmerizing essay (set to killer musical cues!) on photographic truth and how images become a mirror of one's thoughts and feelings throughout the course of one's life. Yet as much as the film is a loving portrait of Depardon the artist and man, it's also, as the title suggests, a kaleidoscopic journey through France's history, its social and cultural charms, its regrettable involvement in wars, its strange political missteps (the scene of finance minister Giscard D’Estaing describing his public marketing campaign is a particular gem), and most of all, its ordinary civilians. The film's eye, like that of its primary subject, is humble, compassionate, and patient.

3. In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, In Competition)

The first time Hong Sang-soo's static camera compulsively snap-zoomed in on the action in In Another Country's extended opening shot, it's as if the entire audience experienced a collective lurch towards the actors. Perhaps this impression is just to due to my unfamiliarity with Hong's aesthetic, but in any case In Another Country provides a heightened intimacy with the filmed material, a direct relationship between director/audience and subject, and a sense of the film being conceived as it's being shot. A work so casual, spontaneous, and grounded rarely makes an appearance In Competition at Cannes, and Hong's glorious hangout of a film is all the more powerful for it. One of several films at the festival (along with Cosmopolis, Like Someone in Love, Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, In the Fog, and Moonrise Kingdom) that seemed to exist in a deserted bubble of a world comprised only of characters in the story, Hong follows Isabelle Huppert as she materializes the incomplete scenario ideas of an aspiring screenwriter (seen in the opening shot) on vacation in a South Korean beach town. The film's effortless narrative symmetry allows one to contemplate the subtle variations in the ways Huppert's three different characters are treated by a rotating cast of locals, thus providing insights into love, life, and otherness so off-the-cuff and fluid it puts shame to more heavy-handed treatments of these motifs.

4. Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas, Mexico, In Competition)

The obligatory pillar of provocation this year was held up by Carlos Reygadas with his new film Post Tenebras Lux, an ambitious collage-like expression of Mexican country life that unsurprisingly garnered equal parts applause and booing. (One wonders when Cannes crowds will grow up and learn to embrace artistic license and individualistic work without resorting to knee-jerk skepticism.) Post Tenebras Lux digresses rather significantly from the comparatively sobering and linear Silent Light, but what it does share with Reygadas' previous work is its insistence upon making its audience feel something, and it put me in an unusually discomfiting space that I've rarely experienced from cinema. Despite some of its age-old arthouse ingredients (nature, animals, mechanical sex, an unforgivably extraneous scene of animal cruelty), the film is quite unlike anything ever made, and truly unique to Reygadas' sensibilities. A dark energy pulses through the film as the Mexican filmmaker never shies away from presenting conflicting emotions (family bliss and marital tension, tenderness and unexplained violence, religious devotion and paralyzing fear of the Devil) alongside each other with fervent unpredictability, giving its mystical and quasi-autobiographical musings a distinctly different tone than the otherwise structurally similar Tree of Life from last year. Though Reygadas employed the suddenly in vogue but previously extinct Academy aspect ratio (the boxy, claustrophobic 4:3), no film at Cannes felt bigger or more expansive, as its loud, immersive sound design and ghostly visuals exploded from the screen.

5. Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, Iran/Japan/France, In Competition)

I'll join the chorus of critics intrigued but somewhat baffled by Abbas Kiarostami's new Tokyo-set feature Like Someone in Love. The film is startlingly open-ended, seeming to merely capture a few episodes in the middle of a much longer narrative, and in the thick of Cannes craziness, the mental space required to mine Kiarostami's complexity is simply non-existent. Here, the director charts a similar paradigm shift roughly at the midway point as that of Certified Copy when the relationship between a young girl (Rin Takanashi) and an old man (Tadashi Okuno) shifts from prostitute/client to grandfather/granddaughter based on the innocuous misunderstanding of the girl's psychologically abusive boyfriend (Ryo Kase). The side-effect is an opaque investigation into the nature of social roles and perception, limited to a few interiors in Tokyo and several of the director's trademark car conversations. It's amazing how economical this film is, using such a small number of tense, protracted dialogue scenes to open up a vast ocean of mystery around these three characters, each of whom appear to be hiding something authentic and unfettered beneath their social façades.

6. Walker (Tsai, Taiwan/Japan, Critic's Week) A new 30-minute short by Tsai Ming-Liang entitled Walker was one of the best surprises of the festival. I'm still eagerly awaiting a new feature from the Taiwanese master, but this new work is precisely the length it needs to be. The film is decidedly, unapologetically simple, though certainly not simplistic. In it, a Buddhist monk (Tsai apostle Lee Kang-Sheng) dressed in a bright red robe walks through the hustle-bustle of Tokyo at a snail's pace to fetch a snack (this narrative detail is only revealed later in the film in an unexpected sight gag), his head perpetually facing the ground and his eyes in a meditative squint. He lifts each foot as if lifting the weight of his spirit before returning it to the ground with patience and grace. Were it not for the real-time passersby - many of whom take note of the camera's presence (adding gravitas to the performative spectacle) - one might be tempted to assume Tsai shot at a high frame-rate for slow motion. Lee's persevering slowness, his utter commitment to the act, is astonishing. Tsai shot the film himself on a digital camera with his usual frozen takes and distinctive urban framing, and the result is a remarkably pure evocation of the ghettoized pursuit of faith in the modern consumerist environment.

7. In the Fog (Loznitsa, Russia, In Competition) An extreme seriousness towards death characterizes a great deal of the best Russian cinema, and Sergei Loznitsa's In the Fog joins that lineage. This 2-hour opus unwaveringly explores the rocky psychological landscape of men crawling inevitably towards a not-too-distant death, meanwhile caught between the absurd pressures of patriotism and a simple respect for human existence. On the frontiers of the German occupation, Sushenya (Vladimir Svirskiy) is wrongly accused of treason by his fellow men, and escorted out of his forest home by two Russian soldiers - Burov (Vladislav Abashin) and Voitik (Sergei Kolesov) - to be killed. Happenstance has it that Nazi soldiers interrupt the scene of the punishment, and Burov becomes the wounded, setting the stage for an extended inquiry into the ethical dilemmas of war under a misguided regime. Loznitsa's dialogue-heavy script - set entirely within the confines of the grey and foreboding woods - often stumbles and crawls, and, in its lack of variety, clearly shows the effects of working with limited funds (this is a film that could have benefited greatly from a more palpable sense of surrounding context), but In the Fog is nonetheless the most stirringly spiritual feature of the festival.

8. Morning of Saint Anthony’s Day (Rodrigues, Portugal, Critic's Week) There's not a single horizon line visible in João Pedro Rodrigues' 30-minute short Morning of Saint Anthony's Day, and it creates a powerfully destabilizing effect. Paired in a Critic's Week program with Walker, the films share a quiet observation of people walking through an urban space, but here there is an enigmatic undertone - teased out directly late in the film when one girl's Twilight Zone-esque ringtone sounds - of science-fiction and campy genre cinema that allows the images of a swarm of young adults emerging to level ground from within subway stations to suggest a kind of post-apocalyptic zombie invasion. Rodrigues covers all of the action - teenagers throwing up, keeling over inexplicably, walking into city ponds while holding up their cellphones seemingly in search of service, etc. - from vaguely aerial perspectives, bolstering the uncanny effect of the happenings. Is this a metaphor for the somnambulistic state of contemporary techno-youth, or is it just an unconventional vision of the undead traversing a posthuman landscape? The film's only press blurb is of little help: "Tradition says that on June 13th, Saint Anthony’s Day – Lisbon’s patron - lovers must offer small vases of basil with paper carnations and flags with popular quatrains as a token of their love." Morning of Saint Anthony's Day is an inspired oddity.

9. Amour (Haneke, France/Germany/Austria, In Competition)

Michael Haneke's Amour is an unapologetically traditional, by-the-numbers European arthouse film centering on the big themes of mortality, love, grief, family, and humiliation. Which is not to say it's fraudulent or insincere, just that it's precisely the unflinching film one would expect Haneke to make on the topic of an aging couple slowly coming to terms with death. Every formal strategy (detached wide shots, measured cutting, muted colors), narrative jolt (sudden violence, a metaphorical bird entering a French apartment), and casting decision (Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert as the central family) is justified and expected, but as a Bergmanesque chamber drama it lacks the magic and complex humane treatment of Bergman. In Amour, death divides a family, and Haneke, amazingly precise as he is, can't put forth an image of postmortal hope that is very convincing, instead preferring to unceasingly pick apart the physical and psychological strain of aging and death. There's an abysmal fear in this film that's disguised as cruel realism.

10. Lawless (Hillcoat, USA, In Competition)

John Hillcoat's Lawless, previously known as The Wettest County in the World and based off the book of the same name, received some undue critical hounding after its premiere, which is strange given that it's a pretty bareknuckled and well-made Western, nothing more and nothing less. Sure, Hillcoat waters down any moral ambiguity that might have existed in the film's awkwardly schmaltzy epilogue, and the sexual landscape leans towards vaguely misogynistic, but I'll take some of these missteps over The Road's simple-minded affectations of importance and superficially "contemplative" mise-en-scène. What's more, Lawless is chock full of thrilling performances by Tom Hardy as a daftly philosophizing brute, Gary Oldman as an indifferent mobster, Guy Pearce as the slimy villain, and Shia LaBoeuf (!) in his best role as a wannabe tough guy. Still, the greatest source of my enthusiasm for the film was the immaculately dusty and contrasty cinematography of Benoît Delhomme, who shoots these Prohibition-Era ghost towns - always wafting with the smoke of whisky and brandy production - in an undeniably conventional yet painterly manner. It's a ruthlessly brutal genre movie that for quite some time maintains an air of Peckinpah-like stoicism.

11. Lawrence Anyways (Dolan, France, Un Certain Regard) Another year of inclusion in Un Certain Regard for Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan represents yet another example of the mainstream hesitance to embrace youthfulness in auteur cinema. Surely, Lawrence Anyways has more personality, and is more expressive and heartfelt, than a number of the Competition entries, and it could have added further diversity to the lineup, especially in light of its focus on social minorities (specifically a transsexual intending to remain in a heterosexual relationship). Dolan's films clearly emerge from a passionate and genuine place, and their energy and messiness is entirely the product of a spontaneous excitement for cinema. Needless to say, Lawrence Anyways is sloppy, overlong, and digressive, but the strange allure of Dolan's work is that he manages to absorb these flaws into the texture of his character's lives, discovering ways to transform self-indulgent slow-motion shots (this one has even more than Heartbeats) into gaudy expressions of a character's veiled insecurity or overblown self-importance. Like Dolan's main character, Lawrence Anyways is split between two urges: that of individuality and personal fetishism (the film's often radical compositional style and its Felliniesque eccentricities, to name two), and that of conformity (its fiery scenes of romantic turmoil featuring a revelatory Suzanne Clément and its eye-rollingly sappy denouement, both of which achieve Hollywood rom-com stature). Upon close inspection of the film's insanity, it's not too difficult to see the structural design on display.

12. The Hunt (Vinterberg, Denmark, In Competition) Thomas Vinterberg's a director with a clear interest in the secrets lurking beneath the complacent surfaces of Danish communities and families, and he's exercised that concern yet again in The Hunt, a finely wrought but quickly forgettable drama about a Kindergarten teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) who is angrily cast off from his circle of friends and colleagues following the random lie of his female student (Annika Wedderkopp). There's a palpable socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure in the film's small town, as well as a solid sense of verisimilitude that must come from Vinterberg's years as a Dogme ascetic, but at the same time there's a sluggishness, a beating-around-the-bush quality to the film's narrative progression, as if Vinterberg has merely set up a troubling scenario to relish in his formidable knack for depicting societal disintegration. Furthermore, The Hunt feels too much like just a good story that was put to film, rather than a story that was expanded upon and expressed vitally through cinematic means. It's a small distinction, but it's the one that prevents Vinterberg from being as distinctive a director as he could be.

13. Moonrise Kingdom (Anderson, USA, In Competition/Opening Night)

The Darjeeling Limited suggested a director trying to engage with issues broader than his own tiny universe and Fantastic Mr. Fox showcased an artist's desire to work with a new approach, but Moonrise Kingdom represents a firm step back into the confines of Wes Anderson's own headspace, and at this point the refusal to make artistic evolutions more drastic than the simple changing of a typeface and the move away from anamorphic widescreen is somewhat damning. The film feels decidedly small and inconsequential, failing to achieve the surprise emotional punch or sprawling canvas of films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Furthermore, Anderson puts the burden of the film's momentum in the hands of two unknown child actors (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) who just cannot carry a scene or portray pre-pubescent love in a convincing manner. As usual for Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom is aesthetically irreproachable, shot with an oppressively diorama-like sensitivity and production designed to fantastical perfection, but it puts its eggs in the wrong basket narratively, all while wasting the naturally Andersonian flair of Anderson newcomers Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, and Tilda Swinton. My love for Anderson aside, and despite a hilariously overblown climax that utilizes some throwback color toning, Moonrise Kingdom is a frustratingly flimsy act of regression from this important American filmmaker.

14. Cosmopolis (Cronenberg, USA, In Competition)

The humid theater it screened in was of no help to David Cronenberg's already-stuffy Cosmopolis, the experience of which was akin to being suffocated by the director as he whispered his esoteric contemporary philosophies in your ear. Well, more precisely, Robert Pattinson, who has become the inert mouthpiece for Cronenberg's meandering and impenetrable dialogues on the current state of economics and politics. It's clear enough that this is the story of the 1%, but I'll admit total confusion and ignorance towards the remainder of Cronenberg's intentions, and I'm certainly not prepared or interested in trying to shuffle through the needlessly coded meanings in this never-ending string of talk. Intellectual detachment is all well and good though if Cronenberg were at least able to present his ideas in compelling cinematic fashion (hence the success of Like Someone in Love) rather than resorting to what feels like characters reading manuscripts to each other in a black box theater. The outside world is so closed-off and pared-down in Cosmopolis that it's as if any of Cronenberg's decisions apart from the dialogue (the NYC location, Pattinson's plot-churning desire for a crosstown haircut, the rat as a symbol of the deteriorating dollar) were arrived at arbitrarily. Add to this the flat digital cinematography and Cosmopolis is just a dull, unimaginative slog of a film.

15. The Paperboy (Daniels, USA, In Competition)

Ok, at least Lee Daniels dropped the wacked-out racial hierarchy of the abominable Precious, but in its wake he's yielded a frankly incompetent, meaningless, and misguided tribute to the low-budget homespun camp cinema of the film's 1960's era, and he's traded the revolting view of inner-city blacks in the previous film for stereotypes of southern white trash in this one. Surely, The Paperboy aims for ickiness, but to what end? In a climactic sex scene between recently-released criminal Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack) and blonde bombshell Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), Daniels cuts to images of livestock as a punctuation mark, as if deriding his characters' baseless behavior. As much as the film tries to approach a sympathetic note for its depraved characters in the end, for the most part it rides this reprehensive wave throughout, and it presents it all in a psychosexual storm of bad editing and crummy lighting. Zac Efron stumbles away with some surprisingly nuanced acting as a detective's (Matthew McConaughey) younger brother and a man struggling with overwhelming physical desire for an Kidman's older character, but otherwise the cast appears confused, seemingly lost in Daniels' inexact mise-en-scène, unaware of whether or not the cameras are rolling. This is a profoundly awful film.

Gatekeepers: Tarantino v. Besson?

A concept such as a “Gatekeeper Auteur,” as outlined by Leon Hunt in his book East Asian Cinema: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film, is less a useful critical term than a vague and pedantic categorization. Hunt uses the term to refer to Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson, two Western director/producers – one American, the other French - who are “attuned to cults surrounding Hong Kong, Japanese, and South Korean cinema” and end up “displaying their connoisseurship of Asian cinema” in their films. Tarantino is the more flagrant and unapologetic of the two, as well as the figure that is seemingly less at fault, while Besson reveals his fanboy status through allegedly invisible appropriations. For instance, the agile street fighting and urban parkour of Besson’s Banlieue 13 shares a kinship to Chinese martial arts, while Tarantino’s much-lauded Kill Bill series has an aesthetic field day with the Shaw Brothers, Yakuza films, Seijun Suzuki, Bruce Lee, and Takashi Miike, among countless others.

The more one digs into the surfaces of Kill Bill and Banlieue 13, however, the less they really seem to represent any sort of binary representation of Asian cinema influence. To what extent are Tarantino and Pierre Morel (Besson’s hired director) really operating on different ethical planes? How is Morel’s borrowing of a twice-recycled tagline recipe (“No Wires, No Special Effects, No Limits”) not a blatant admission of homage in the way of Tarantino? How is it fair for Tarantino to overflow his film with snatches of canonical influences whose specificities are likely to fly over the head of the majority of the target demographic and unfair for Morel/Besson to take the lesson of no more than one Asian reference point (the Kung-Fu street fighting of Ong-Bak) and let it billow to the surface only sporadically throughout the course of an entire film? (That David Belle’s pectorals remain elegantly exposed for much of the running time isn’t enough to concede Bruce Lee theft). Both directors seem to take sly advantage of their viewers - merely a fraction of which probably have any clue what’s being plundered – to present images and forms that fly as “homage” to one crowd and as “originality” to another.



Either way, there’s a long lineage of artistic borrowing that the directors are continuing here, a trait that hearkens way back to the earliest practitioners of motion pictures and even beyond the cinematic medium itself. Hunt problematically seems to draw the line of acceptability at this notion itself rather than at the particular modes of borrowing the filmmakers indulge in, as if to suggest that most American narrative cinema since the 1930’s is somehow “Russianized” because of its indebtedness to Eisenstinian montage, or that Godard is a phony because of his regurgitation, and simultaneous commentary on, a hodgepodge of global cinemas. Artistic recycling may be erroneous in the case of Morel/Besson and Tarantino, but it is so for different reasons, none of which include the mere fact that they are resorting to Eastern media consumption as influence.

It is a crucial distinction here that Tarantino is unabashedly honest and borderline arrogant in his film-literacy while Morel/Besson are more populist and unassuming in their ambitions. Nearly every shot and every sequence in Kill Bill is spiritually tethered to a similar moment in a marginalized (by Western standards) Asian Kung-Fu film, yet Tarantino’s ultimate resignation to “Orientalist tropes of impenetrable psyches and exotic otherness” betrays his appreciation. This is one area where Hunt nails it, discussing how Tarantino can only "have Asian" and not "be Asian." Morel and Besson feel no inclination to loudly proclaim their idolatry, instead disguising their influences in the comparatively unique French habit of parkour, which is questionable in an altogether different way. They, on the other hand, "have Asian" without seeming to desire to "be Asian", preferring to morph to their own context. The “right” thing to do here – that is, the approach that yields the greatest degree of respect and admiration and the lowest levels of hasty exploitation – is perhaps somewhere in the middle.

An Autumn Afternoon (1962) A Film by Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu's final cinematic testament was the tragicomic An Autumn Afternoon, a film that in some ways distills his signature concerns in a neat, summative manner and in other ways presents them as stiff and straitjacketed as ever. Its subject is one that comprises a large portion of Ozu's oeuvre, enough even to create its own microgenre: the lonely widower marrying off his aging daughter. Like in Late Spring, its closest companion, Ozu regular Chishû Ryû plays the father Shuhei Hirayama and Shima Iwashita replaces Setsuko Hara as the daughter, Michiko. This is Ozu reprising a common situation that is clearly of utmost importance to him for the impressions of family bonds, aging, generational dissonance, and loneliness it raises. It's as if he was determined to portray the scenario in as many subtly altered iterations as possible to mine the attitudes and behaviors as they transform and mature over time. Unsurprisingly, the preliminary notes for another film he was planning before his death from cancer in 1963 dealt with the same subject matter.

If Ozu's intention was clearly studied and compassionate though, it's only a shame that the execution sometimes comes across like repetition. Ozu wasn't a tremendously varied or risk-taking artist; he did what he did consistently and with the care and tact of a great architect. But in Autumn Afternoon, the scenario is stifled by its banality, too devoid of nuances that would set it apart from the other masterworks in this category of storytelling. As with all of his films, narrative punctuation is eschewed, leaving only a series of domestic snapshots, dedramatized glimpses from the lives of the central characters. Here Ozu rests his gaze most stringently on Shuhei, a father with a decent office job and consistently reliable friends. His days are ritualistically spent working and then catching up with Kazuo (Shinichirô Mikami) and Shuzo (Nobuo Nakamura) over Saki. Home life feels less intimate and united than in some of the director's previous works, with dinner usually occurring individually and an emphasis on cordial pleasantries rather than thorough family-to-family bonding. Though unclear at first, it becomes evident that Shuhei even has a son who is relegated largely to the background.



With his bold color palette that highlights neons and reds and his precise pictorial attention to household consumer objects, Ozu suggests that it is the force of modernity that is gradually distorting the traditional values of the Japanese family. One narrative strand has Shuhei's elder, married son returning home from work with extraneous purchases - first a brand new set of shimmering golf clubs, then an upgraded refrigerator - only to find himself in prickly quarrels with his wife about spending restraint. Fed up with arguing, he lies on the floor smoking a cigarette unresponsively, half hypnotized by the wealth of purchasing possibilities and half understanding of his wife's irritation. The 1960's were a time when Western values of consumerism and idealism were slowly settling into Eastern cultures, and their mark can be witnessed in the deliberately artificialized night life scene, glowing with bright bar signs, the practice of following the baseball game on television seen early on in the film, and the Sapporo and Canada Dry beverage boxes perpetually in the crystal clear background of one of Ozu's long, poised hallway shots. But Ozu does not greet this cultural osmosis with resentment and defensiveness; rather, like all of his characters, he is open-minded and welcoming about the opportunities now afforded. His is not a critical cinema but a sensitive, forgiving one, forever pitched in the present tense for better or worse, and this is done justice to by his graceful pictorial balance and his stoic dramatic economy.

Yet by the end of An Autumn Afternoon, the pervasive sense crept up that I was moved in the same exact way - and for the same reasons - as I was with Late Spring. The formulas of the two films are frustratingly congruent: both meander in a seemingly directionless state before acquiring unexpected pathos towards the end when Ryu's characters finally decide - after a slow ping-pong of skepticism and receptiveness in the face of a slew of persuasive friends and acquaintances - that they should swallow their pride (and their undying love) and marry off their daughters, and the climactic image of both films (the daughter inevitably garbed in an elegant, suggestively decorated wedding dress after little anticipation) is cushioned by the same scenes of acceptance and subsequent loneliness. One slight ripple in An Autumn Afternoon has to do with Ozu's seeming reluctance to let melancholy get the lion's share of the emotional spectrum, ducking away from potentially tear-jerking scenes with a bouncy score that helps recall the film's more comic touches. But even the lighter elements of the film are laced with a somber air that is in this case a tad too deterministic: Shuhei's old teacher, nicknamed "The Gourd" (Eijirô Tôno), who has been reduced to somewhat of a village idiot living as a widow with his embittered daughter in an unsuccessful bar, stands as a too-perfect indicator of Shuhei's potential future if he doesn't allow his daughter to marry. While An Autumn Afternoon manages to encompass every thematic concern Ozu was delicately riffing on his entire career, it also tends to feel like a safe, lifeless reprise of them.

Differing Visions of the Geisha in Marshall and Naruse

(Like my review of The Sheltering Sky, this is a piece that was written for a class of mine. Had I been given critical freedom, this may have read a bit differently.)

Ever since its inception, the geisha has begged to be exotified. One artful, elegant Japanese woman is designed both to delight the senses and summarize the sophisticated charms of her culture. Such an illustrious figure presents a challenge to the art-makers of the world who wish to depict the life of a geisha: how does one pay respect to the beauty of her art without exploiting or overlooking the person behind it? This is a fundamental question that was surely on the minds of Rob Marshall and Mikio Naruse before they directed Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and Late Chrysanthemums (1954), two notable films about geishas. Though the two films were produced in distinct circumstances – Hollywood of the 21st century and Japan of the postwar era – they both present fascinating, if often considerably separate, visions of the geisha. Experiencing the two films provides immeasurable insights into the public perception of geishas as it varies across hemispheres and throughout history. Late Chrysanthemums views the geisha life as one that is lost and forgotten, leaving real ordinary women behind the faded makeup, whereas Memoirs of a Geisha treats the culture as one made up of larger-than-life icons whose surface appeal is worthy of endless flattery and exaltation.

In order to begin to understand these two works alongside each other, it’s important to frame them within their respective historical and cultural contexts. Memoirs of a Geisha is a big-budget modern drama prepared by the Hollywood movie industry, and as such, is instantly a product designed for maximal entertainment value to be consumed on a vast scale. Considering its exotic subject matter, the film is necessarily a vision of the East as seen through a Western gaze, and thus is highly susceptible to claims of Americanized reductionism and Orientalism, as is frequently the case with big Hollywood films that attempt to capitalize on the allure of an unfamiliar culture but end up exploiting it instead. Mikio Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums is on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, a film produced in Japan for Japanese people. It’s a film that does not attempt to exotify its own culture, indeed often presenting it in all its intimate bleakness. Inevitably, these two exclusive filmmaking scenarios bear some very dissimilar results, but the congruencies are also quite interesting.

Memoirs of a Geisha is the creation of Rob Marshall, an A-list Hollywood director with large-scale credentials, including the commercial successes Chicago (2002) and Nine (2009). He has become well known for his sweeping musicals, and although Memoirs of a Geisha takes the form of an epic melodrama, the lavish spectacle that is his forte clearly carries over. He applies this grandiose visual style to the tale of Chiyo (Ziyi Zhang), a peasant girl from a fishing village who is sold at an early age with her sister Satsu to a geisha house in the Gion district of Kyoto, Japan. Once Satsu is exiled from the house and delivered to a brothel instead, Chiyo finds herself a victim of the cruel hypocrisies and haughty authoritarianism of the older geishas, all while the antagonistic Hatsumoto (Li Gong) forms a deep jealousy towards her undeniable beauty. Chiyo is immediately a lonely soul for the first third of the film, but the broader narrative follows the entire trajectory of her young life, culminating in her widespread approval as one of Japan’s most prized, sought-after geishas. Towards the end however, Marshall documents the unexpected shattering of this lifestyle due to the onslaught of World War II, showing how it deeply affects both her personal growth and her legitimacy as an artist and entertainer.



Late Chrysanthemums essentially picks up where Memoirs of a Geisha left off chronologically, despite being made fifty years before. Mikio Naruse was a near antithesis of Rob Marshall due to what was really an unfortunate case of cultural invisibility, having been regularly overshadowed by cinematic giants like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. Regardless, his films were always sensitive treatises on the difficulties of ordinary life in the modern world, and this awareness was what made Late Chrysanthemums such an apt chronicle of the drastic societal transformations wrought by the war, with the use of geishas being an effective foil through which to evoke lamentation and nostalgia. His film investigates the everyday lives of four workaday women in Tokyo, all of whom were once fellow geishas. Central in this quartet is Kin (Haruko Sugimura), a well-off moneylender who has a financial connection with each of the supporting women: she was a lead investor in the small bar co-run by Nobu (Sadako Sawamura) and waits impatiently for long overdue payments from Tomi (Yûko Mochizuki) and Tamae (Chikako Hosokawa), who occupy the same house together. None of these women are entirely stable, either financially, emotionally, or both.

Being a Tokyo-based production, the film is quick not to gloss over any of the devastating realities of the postwar landscape, remaining aware of their dissonance from the geisha era. The troubling effects of the weak economy and job market can be felt obliquely in the personal lives of the four protagonists. Tomi and Tamae both incessantly bemoan the paths of their ungrateful children, who have married and moved away and left their mothers to sustain themselves solely on menial jobs. Kin too witnesses a severe lack of human connection despite her steady source of income, which she seems to be unable to find a purpose for. Instead, she is consumed by the fond memory of her past lover Tabe (Ken Uehara), who arrives late in the film only to prove equally miserable in the face of the hard times. This sorrowful emotional register provides a sharp contrast to the heyday of the geisha witnessed in Marshall’s film and only reminisced upon periodically by the women in Naruse’s. In one melancholy scene when Tomi is fixing up Tamae’s hair and praising her for her past beauty, the poignancy of the moment is deflated by the fact that both of them are stubbornly drunk and otherwise rambling about their estranged children. The uncertain present regularly interrupts any mentions of the idyllic past.

Memoirs of a Geisha shares the overall gloomy mood of Late Chrysanthemums, yet does so in broader, more overtly melodramatic strokes. For the entirety of the film leading up to Chiyo’s recognition as an outstanding geisha, the Gion district is literally flooded by melancholy, with nearly constant torrential rain accenting - in a rather traditional dramatic move - her troublesome encounters. The lead geishas treat her with hostility as a meager servant, and the older Hatsumoto takes every opportunity to make Chiyo look traitorous, at one point falsely exposing her as a runaway when it was really her who was causing mischief outside of the geisha house. It is not until Chiyo is discovered by Mameha (Michelle Yeoh) - Hatsumoto’s enduring rival - that she manages to transcend her rough upbringing and aim for a more significant identification as a geisha, landing her romantic sights on the upper-class Chairman in the process.

What is ultimately occurring here is a traditional dramatic format in Hollywood, a way of clearly identifying each character in accordance with one particular trait. Chiyo is the saintly protagonist rising from rags to riches, The Chairman is the object of romantic interest associated with sophistication and wealth, Mameha is the clear-cut mentor incapable of guiding Chiyo in the wrong direction, and Hatsumoto is the feverish villain responsible for much of her misery. These characters rarely make a move that would jeopardize their fully formed persona; instead, every one of their actions seems a device layered with dramatic import to help guide Chiyo’s personal journey. This kind of narrative mechanism is very writer-friendly, for it allows the assumption that each individual in the film is a pawn to be played with in order to reach an overarching significance. In the case of Memoirs of a Geisha, this significance is that everyone, like Chiyo, is in control of their own fate, that personal feelings are more reliable than the allure of external pressures, just as Rob Marshall and screenwriter Robin Swicord are the sole dictators of the path that their film will take despite being based off of an existing novel by Arthur Golden.



Late Chrysanthemums also takes literature as its source material (Fumiko Hayashi’s “Bangiku”, translated as “Late Chrysanthemums”), but it is not nearly handled as manipulatively. If Kin had existed in Memoirs of a Geisha, Marshall would likely have interpreted her money lust as an inherently negative trait, thus positioning her as the antagonist. For Naruse, this is no area for judgment. He sees it as a natural reflection of the distressing economic times, acknowledging money as something that has to be at the root of every conversation for the general welfare of society even if it means endangering human relationships in the process. Kin can be greedy and brash one moment and warm and tender the next, such as when she repeatedly turns a cherished letter from Tabe over in her hands in longing. Amidst the turmoil and loneliness, Naruse admires any act that suggests human camaraderie, explaining why even during moments of deep melancholy there is an underlying sense of earthbound comedy. The film allows for these simultaneous contradictions in character personalities and dramatic presentation to more closely approximate the flow of everyday life, in which actions are not as black and white as they are in the operatic Memoirs of a Geisha.

In this way, Naruse emerges as a social realist whereas Marshall works in more idealistic territory. His film is interested in documenting and combating the social inadequacy as it happens, literally reflecting what he sees around him in the most truthful manner possible. In a way, it works as a social critique. It matters less that these women were once geishas than it does that their realities were once grander and more luxurious. They are artifacts from a bygone era when elegance and art could be focused on because money was not an issue. While Naruse values the vitality of these women’s memories, he also suggests that in order for them to survive they must maintain a sharper focus on the present. Because Memoirs of a Geisha’s characters exist within the time of Japanese cultural prosperity, the stakes - while more lavish and dramatic - are not as high as those in Late Chrysanthemums. It is only when World War II arrives that the characters must reevaluate their means of endurance, as their previous ways of life are thoroughly shattered. One can imagine Chiyo proceeding to become Kin in Late Chrysanthemums; the final time we see her she is still wistfully connected to the Chairman, and the first time we see Kin she is still pining about her old flame with Tabe. It’s as if the war completely stripped the romanticism right away from the geisha.

This notion is reflected in the distinct visual styles of both of the films. A winner for Best Cinematography at the 78th Academy Awards, Dion Beebe’s work in Memoirs of a Geisha is undoubtedly sumptuous and elaborate, with each frame displaying careful precision by way of lighting, mise-en-scene and composition. Marshall positions each shot so that it is a visual treat unto itself. Rarely does an individual frame seem a particular point of emphasis because of the steady stream of pictorial grace. This democratic stylishness underlines the fact that this is the exotic East as seen through a Western lens. Nothing appears mundane, and everything, even the wicked women who scorn Chiyo, is fair game for beautifying. Naruse’s visual style is similarly democratic and without inflection, but in an utterly different way and for a separate purpose. The images in Late Chrysanthemums are uniformly prosaic and meant to elicit the mundane rhythms of daily life. It is a traditional formalism that does not call attention to itself, instead directing the concentration on the quietly powerful performances and the casual events of the story.



The two film’s respective modes of stylization also extend to their costume and set designs. The women’s wardrobes in Memoirs of a Geisha are remarkably ornamented, with generously embroidered kimonos, delicately applied makeup to add an aura of mystery, and wildly showy hairdos. They are walking embodiments of overstatement, and because of this their attire often cloaks their personalities, lending the film the texture of a prolonged fashion show. How much of this is an authentic replication of the kind of embellishment exercised by real-life geishas and how much is a subtle stretching of the truth remains unclear, but given Marshall’s utter lack of experience with pre-1940’s era Japan, it can be assumed that he took liberties to hyperbolize them to an extent. Everything in their proximity is equally extravagant and caressed with soft, low light, often in warm shades of red and green (a highly exotic color scheme ever since Eugene Delacroix’s Algerian paintings verified it). Even the more overtly tragic scenes remain gorgeous in both color and set design, such as in the final act when the war has ravaged the country.

The women’s clothing in Late Chrysanthemums, on the other hand, indicates something far removed from the eccentricity of the geishas that they once were. Now garbed in neutral, more commonplace kimonos, their external appearances still manage to be as telling as they were in the geisha era, only this time they hint at the repose and sorrow of their current lives. Fittingly, their homes are drab and unfurnished, which implies both emotional emptiness and a financial inability to decorate. Outside, Tokyo has become an impersonal metropolitan center filled with a new generation of women dressed in tight sweaters and trousers, a modern way that allows little room for the four old-fashioned women at the center of the story. Such a generational discord is potently felt in one of the closing scenes of the film when Tamae tries an imitation of the Marilyn Monroe gait in front of Tomi, only to immediately mock her own foolishness. Beauty in the modern world, they sadly realize, is no longer associated as closely with the geisha, but rather with the international celebrity.

All of the prominent emotion that this subtly poignant scene withholds is on display in the grim but finally sentimental resolution of Memoirs of a Geisha, when Chiyo is left largely to her own devices, with no use for the skill she has so patiently honed. Regardless of the differing levels of restraint in the two films though, they do share the same sense of lamentation and loss of the ephemeral golden age of the geisha, as well as a genuine sadness about the war that drove it out. And they both view the geisha custom as one that has a substantial impact on the individuals adhering to it, either guiding their lives unsteadily, as in the case of Chiyo, or providing unshakably fond memories for the four late chrysanthemums in Naruse’s film. Of course, Memoirs of a Geisha may continue to ring hollow as a superficial Hollywood melodrama, but the evidence it provides towards the enduring exotic impact of the geisha culture is as compelling as any of the carefully crafted scenes in the moving Late Chrysanthemums.

Rashomon (1950) A Film by Akira Kurosawa

When films become canonized - that is to say, they are raised to a mythic level that is considered irreproachable - serious criticism has the unfortunate tendency to fall by the wayside. The quintessential example is Citizen Kane, a film whose overwhelmingly positive critical consensus has made viewers feel worthless if they do anything but surrender to its majesty. The notion is that if the film is so widely considered "great", then it must be great. Any swimming against the current would, in this instance, look baffling, unintelligent, and uninformed. Yet it is normally the thumbs-up reactions which have become lazy, dispassionate, and streamlined in such instances, safe in the worst possible way because of how they undemonstratively continue a long line of recycled praise. Suffice to say, Akira Kurosawa's revolutionary, game-changing Rashomon is a film that, for me, fits perfectly into this category in that it is almost unanimously regarded as a timeless masterwork despite what I consider to be a wealth of clumsy, unappealing flaws. At the risk of deterring people from the film though, which nearly singlehandedly exposed Western audiences to the great diversity of Japanese cinema, I will keep my pronouncements gentle: Rashomon is far more interesting to learn about and to know the significance of than it is to actually see.

One of the major elements that critics and historians point to as a sign of distinctive genius is the fact that Kurosawa sanctions the idea of absolute truth being elusive and utterly indefinable. Visual or verbal information should no longer be responded to without a hint of skepticism, he implies, for there is no real authoritative truth-teller. This is clearly a weighty, respectable theme, so daring in fact that if not handled properly it could easily be a self-defeating mechanism with the potential of being boiled down to one reductive "well, why should I believe your film then?" Kurosawa orchestrates it in such a way that it does indeed work to sidestep this catch-22, but his method is so clinical, so desperately banal and specific, that it does so without making the film anything more than a monotonous riff on a thesis statement. A murder and a rape occur in the woods, and three suspects recount their experience of what exactly happened. These descriptions are told visually in flashbacks with painstaking detail. Adding another layer of falsification is the fact that these testimonies are being filtered through a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) who witnessed them from the sidelines and who is explaining these stories somberly to a commoner (Kichijirô Ueda) and a priest (Minoru Chiaki) underneath a decrepit gatehouse in the torrential rain called Rashomon.



Inevitably, in order for Kurosawa to push his point, each flashback bears little similarity. In fact, in most cases the recollections tend to contradict the others. The only thing the bandit Tajômaru (Toshirô Mifune), the murdered samurai (Masayuki Mori, whose presence exists through the use of a medium that speaks in distant, ghostly tones), and his wife (Machiko Kyô) agree upon is that the violence ensued in a grove in the woods. Whether they are tweaking their stories in the interest of saving their own backs or if it is actually how they perceived the incident is left unclear. Perception itself is untruthful however, as Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) proved brilliantly 16 years later, so it becomes blindingly clear early on what Kurosawa is getting at: objective truth does not exist in this world, and it is only through forceful, authoritarian, and often unfair final judgments that we can negotiate "right" and "wrong". Rashomon attempts to build toward this implication from the get-go, but it doesn't realize that it said all it needed to with its opening and closing sequences, which depict the priest, commoner, and woodcutter arguing about what appears to be a dissertation they are planning on writing about the complexities of human nature. This renders all of the melodramatic flashbacks redundant and inconsequential, reducible as they are to hammy displays of male bravado, confused marital loyalty, and long, goofy sword fights that feel cheaply improvised when placed aside Kurosawa's more vivacious mise-en-scene in Seven Samurai (1954).

The most screamingly salient aspect I find troubling in Rashomon is its chosen mode of acting. To think that Toshirô Mifune's performance has been praised among the greatest in motion picture history baffles me, for I find his on-screen persona comes down to a fit of histrionic giggles, flailing body movement, and village idiot stereotypes. Maybe it's just the contemporary critical preference for subtlety that guides my judgment, but whatever the case I do not find the theatrical, overemotional acting particularly moving. Even worse, I don't think it suits the story and its thematic underpinnings very well. If Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto's script suggests a study of the vagaries of human nature, the cast's unconvincing acting wipes out any semblance of verisimilitude, negating the possibility for a life-like reflection. Though Kurosawa has openly professed his admiration for classical Japanese theater acting and the expressive body language of silent cinema, his employment of these methods feels ill-suited to such delicate, ambiguous themes that would surely be better complimented by naturalistic performances. The final straw is the film's run-of-the-mill cinematography, which saves its only striking image for the closing frame. And I don't find Kurosawa's incidental pointing of the camera into the sun to be much to applaud, no less an act of genius.

Empire of Passion (Ai no borei) A Film by Nagisa Oshima (1978)

Nagisa Oshima's Empire of Passion involves a plot that could work its way into any average mystery, thriller, or melodrama (and indeed does singlehandedly with Tay Garnett's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)): Seki (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), a working-class mother, begins a doomed affair with the 26-year younger Toyoji (Tatsuya Fuji), behind the back of her humble, rickshaw-driving husband, Gisaburo (Takahiro Tamura). Themes such as guilt, passion, dishonesty, and fate almost inevitably bubble up. We expect the adulteress to be placed under suspicion by both her own husband and the people whom she is close with, and ultimately punished for her infidelity. Perhaps we anticipate some violence in one way or another. Oshima is without a doubt aware of the conventions he is working within, and though in several instances he embraces them with open arms, allowing them to guide his film instinctually, Empire of Passion is in many ways a deconstructive effort, a revisionist melodrama that takes its origins through interesting transmutations. The influence of Hollywood is coupled with an equally humble tribute to ancient Japanese folktale traditions, specifically the ghost story, or the Kwaidan. Oshima roots the film in these guidelines only to spin off of them into a stifling exploration of sexual politics, repressive social schemes, and the natural rhythms of small village life.

It is not long before the film dives into the meat of its situation. Without even spending much time on characterization (the narrow exception being a few short scenes in Seki and Gisaburo's small thatched hut, one in which Gisaburo asks her if she thinks Toyoji has eyes for her, the only instance of his suspicion shown by Oshima), we see Seki and Toyoji in the throes of a passionate affair clearly motivated by sex, with love only as an end result. Before we know it, Toyoji has cunningly convinced the gullible Seki that murdering her husband is the only way the two can truly achieve happiness and comfort together. The plan is clinically laid out by Toyoji: Seki will get Gisaburo maddeningly intoxicated on sake after his daily trip into town with the rickshaw, then, once passed out, the two will strangle him with a rope in the interest of expediency and silence. After that, he will be taken into the woods, thrown down one of the several wells that line the village's perimeter, and never be spoken of again. When asked, Seki will say Gisaburo has taken a trip to Tokyo. It's a highly specific plan that we are deliberately let in on, allowing the suspense to be heightened both in the act and in the aftermath, when the close-knit villagers whisper about the continued absence of Gisaburo. We begin to empathize with the murderous lovers without even taking into account right or wrong, because it is there viewpoint which Oshima observes.

A period of guilt and grief follows the murder for Seki, while Toyoji earnestly insists on her acceptance. She is now free from the reigns of what he perceives as an oppressive marriage, instead opened up to a new, more spontaneous manner of love. The unorthodox nature of their affair is mirrored by the extensive age gap which separates them, and also emphasized in an early scene which hints at the Oedipal slant of it; during his routine trip to present her with treats, Toyoji kneels down on the wood floor where Seki is breast-feeding her young boy and playfully ushers him aside, wondering when he gets a turn. It's an odd moment with traces of Freudian perplexity that spotlights the weird mother/son tension between the two and the inherent immaturity that accompanies Toyoji's younger age. Eventually, as years fly by and the collective chatter of the villagers regarding Gisaburo increases (the majority wonder whether he's alive or dead, while Seki indifferently brushes off these inquiries when questioned), the lovers must be extremely secretive about their meetings, even choosing to cease contact entirely at one point. This decision irks at Seki, for it was the promise of salvation and free love (however impermanent and momentary) which lead her to murder her husband. Adding to her disarray is the sudden presence of Gisaburo's sorrowful ghost, who doesn't so much actively haunt her as he does occupy the same space, quietly signaling for a comforting swig of sake in the middle of Seki's hut. However, this deeply disturbs her, so she believes that the two should meet at Toyoji's home, where he lives alone with his mentally disabled younger brother, despite the danger of being caught by one of the police officials patrolling the village, an interrogative bunch lead by the farcically portrayed Officer Hotta (Takuzo Kawatani). Therefore, contrary to the classical femme fatale, it is Toyoji who leads Seki down a troubling path towards murder based on the allure of sex.



Three quarters of the film is spent on this tense back-and-forth after the crime is committed, with Toyoji and Seki almost always disagreeing on the best steps to take to account for their safety or well-being. This erratic character interplay is guided, and perhaps fundamentally shaped, by the equally unpredictable presence of weather in the film. Oshima hardly ever maintains a natural temporal evolution between the four seasons, lingering on some longer than others, and always acknowledging their impact on the everyday lives of the villagers. Not only does this add uneasiness to the atmosphere, lending it the sense that the villagers understand their life patterns and therefore know one of their own is hiding a secret, but it also requires that we see the lovers in a distinct context each time, forced to make different decisions in different situations.

Empire of Passion's primary visual motif, a circle, seen both in the recurrent shots of Gisaburo's rickshaw wheel and the trademark images from inside the well looking up at the outside, indicates the ourobouric flow of life, that the truth is inevitably encircling the two until it is fully revealed. Yet it also seems that Oshima wants to destabilize that supposed determinacy, hence the erratic progression of the story, as if keeping alive some hope that Toyoji and Seki will be able to find redemption from their crime and transcend the limits placed upon them by the rigid, authoritarian society. And to some extent, they do towards the end when they both argue that the other should survive and therefore free themselves from the suspicious eyes of their peers, while their apparent impending suicides only fuel sexual desires. These acts of selflessness and rebellion are curious hybrids of pleasure (sex and revitalization) and pain (death), echoing an earlier scene when Toyoji begins violating Seki sexually with her son crying in the neighboring room, an action that effortlessly transforms into one that Seki finds pleasure in.

Oshima's visual sensibility is superficially naturalistic, yet a sense of manufactured artifice belies the proceedings, further cementing the influence of Hollywood. For its majority, Oshima sticks to detached, humbly attractive compositions that capture a village that seems perfectly believable: a cluster of warm brown cottages nestled inside lush vegetation and intersected by dirt roads. Once the murder is committed however and the seasons unpredictably shift, a swirling mist begins to find its way into the village. Cinematic techniques are used to emphasize this agitation of naturalism: in a wonderfully eerie scene where the ghost of Gisaburo takes Seki for a ride home on his rickshaw through a densely fogged path, and in a shot when Gisaburo's body is first dumped the well during winter, Oshima utilizes slow motion to great effect. Further pitched away from reality is Toru Takemitsu's typically moody soundtrack, which infuses even the mundane with malign purpose. These elements overwhelm the film's oddly inconsistent narration, spoken with tell-tale objectivity by an old woman, and its sometimes overly histrionic acting. Empire of Passion's fateful conclusion is punctuated by bursts of the macabre, including an especially enigmatic blindness that overcomes Seki in what appears to be a dream state. When the inescapable punishment comes and Gisaburo's corpse is revealed, it is possible that Seki can see for just a moment, forced by the ineffable hand of nature to stare directly at her mistakes.