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the first movie on my mind is.
'Shall we Dansu?'
Has anyone seen this 1996, japanese film? I just rented it on a friend's recomendation and was pretty dissapointed. Allow me to elaborate.
Shall we Dansu is Masayuki Suo's sweeter-than-honey urban ballroom-dancing comedy about middle-aged salaryman, Sugiyama Shohei [Koji Yakusho, of 'The Eel', 'Warm Water Under a Red Bridge', and 'Tampopo's' "erotic gangster"], who, finding "something missing from his life" decides to do something about it and secretly take dancing lessons. The paradoxic dillema that drives the comedy, we are told at the begining of the film, is that 'to the Japanese, who's elaborate social structure is based largely on quiet intuition', the very notion of guarrish displays of public affection, like dancing, is utterly humiliating.
So Sugiyama must hide his new passtime from his family, his coworkers, he looks both ways to see that nobody is watching before entering the dance class. Fair enough. Throw in requisite number of "offbeat" supporting characters, some clever references to other films, a moral about "being yourself", and we have "the new Juzo Itami".
The main problem I have with the movie is not with conception, which i think could have been, and in some ways still is very clever, but with the totally standard execution of this movie. Namely, the theme of dancing +/- fitting into society is pretty rich, and yet most of this film's narrative lies in dialogue. And not even good dialogue. Anything worthwhile about the movie, apparently, must be reiterated by some blunt, tacked on moralizing [not in the ethical sense, in the summing-up-of-life-lessons-learned sense]. A perfect example of what I'm talking about is a scene towards the end involving one of Sugiyama's coworkers, diminuative Aoki, who throughout masquerades as a wild, bold latin dancer wearing a ridiculous wig. In the middle of the decisive dance competition, his parter chides him at his disingenuous style of dance and foppish posteuring, and dares him to lose the wig. Aoki is reborn on the dance floor, sweeps the competition. Cut to the wisened old matron of the dance studio, commenting "Aoki got rid himself of more than just his wig just now." You dont say. Actually, she does say, which is unfortunate because it ruins an already pretty superficial subtext. So we have yet another film that preaches to us about "breaking out of our shells", and "being, bold, daring to be ourselves", but which at every turn falls into step with every other upbeat comic-drama.
The good with this movie is the casting and the sometimes intuitive use of the actors. In particular I think Sugiyama/Yakusho fits the part well and comes out relatively on top. To be even more specific, Yakusho, in 'Shall we Dansu?' is brought in to use his whole body to act the part of 'Sugiyama', a character who himself acts/dances primarilly with his face. So we have Yakusho spending the majority of the dance lessons building a tension between his deliberately awkward [cos Yakusho himself is pretty graceful] footork, and his face, which is constantly in our line of sight as it watches and registers the dancing of the other characters. This is a pretty rich part, I'm not sure if the writer/director was aware of this but Yakusho seems like a pretty intelligent actor and uses these scenes to create a hidden dialogue with the audience. This is Yakusho's film. This also puts him in the place of the "eye of the storm", so to speak. Interestingly, the over-the-top performances of the other characters [some of which are really enjoyable to watch] only serve to emphasize Sugiyama's quietness. Long after I've forgotten Aoki's loud latin schtick, i'll probably still remember Sugiyama's face.
2 out of 4.
Which brings me to another film starring Yakusho: 1997's Palm d'Or winning 'The Eel', directed and adapted from the novel 'On Parole' by Imamura Shohei.
Many films have casted and used water and setting as an interesting visual foil. A rare few of them have set their environment as the main character of the film, and this is one of those rare few, so is interesting right off the bat. It's also based on a novel by a writer who understands how to develop the world he is creating in relation to the characters internalized world. And by a director who is very pronounced in his use of environmental aspects, and who can deftly manipulate visual continuities and discontinuities. Add all this and you get a cinematic variation on Samuel Beckett's notion of character as a thin line between two worlds: internal and external.
Unlike 'Dansu', 'The Eel' is not a vehicle for Yakusho. The Actors in this film arent the important part. Yakusho helms the main role, another Salaryman [in the book he was a school teacher, here he appears as an accountant or some other corporate cog], named Yamash*ta Takuro. The plot, as in Yoshimura Akira's novel, starts off with Yamash*ta recieving notification - via anonymous letter - that his wife is having an adulterous affair on the frequent nights he spends fishing. This leads Yamash*ta to stage a fishing trip, from which he returns early to find the news of the letter true. His reaction, rather than getting a divorce, is to wound the man in the process of f*cking his wife, and then methodically stab her to death with a kitchen knife, before riding his bike down to the police station to turn himself in. This all occurs in the first five minutes or so, the rest of the movie takes place 8 years later when he is released on parole.
His ties with his previous life severed, Yamash*ta is given the chance to start anew. He picks an abandoned building on the rural outskirts of an anonymous city to open a barber shop, and move himself and his pet eel [who he raised in the prison court yard] into the small community, to live out the rest of his days in quiet, eventless harmony.
He makes some superficial friendships [or more accurately, some superficial friendships are made with him] with locals folks, as when one of his new "friends" takes him out on nightly eel-fishing excursions.
Finally, conflict is introduced back into his life when he finds a woman, unconscious and dying near his barbershop. He slowly and unwillingly becomes stuck in the circumstances that lead to her attempted suicide as she becomes an emotional anchor for him. All this drama, while very slow in developing, manages to be moving, easy to get sucked into, at times funny as f*ck. But this isn’t really how it plays out, and I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of these actors to Imamura’s unique cinematic vision. As an example compare it to the movie I discussed earlier and you might notice how impassively most of these characters are shot. We rarely dwell on Yakusho’s face, which was a key aspect of ‘Dansu’. Just before he murders his wife and our vision goes out as blood soaks the camera-lense, she offers a brief, exquisitely blank look that is very taunting and very memorable. That is about the extent of our emotional engagement with the characters [as actors] in this film. This might not be for everyone, but I cant complain about this aspect of the film, as it puts emphasis on something I felt was much more interesting, having to do with the use of the setting and a few key twists that blur the lines between Yamash*ta’s internal world and the world of the film. As I stated before Imamura is a director who very intimately understands continuity and discontinuity, so his direction really works to it’s fullest effect in some of these scenes. Unlike his previous masterpiece, ‘Vengeance is Mine’, which was built around the narrative confusion of extreme discontinuities of time versus unexpected and dischordant spacial continuities, In The Eel, all of it overlaps. In the wholeness and effortless simplicity of the execution here, this film resembles John Sayles’ ‘Lone Star’, which managed to blur time and memory by simply panning the camera. But there the characters were fully developed, written completely. Here the characters, Yamash*ta especially, are flat sketches, binding and interweaving between the two worlds of the film. Much of this is beautifully executed but too obvious to be worth mentioning. Yamash*ta’s hallucinations involving his pet eel and the letter that told him about his wife’s infidelity, for example. Or his fellow parolee, who deliberately crosses the boundary between the two worlds by in one scene trying to rape his woman, and in another jarring, and completely internal [and hilarious] scene later one, which I don’t want to give away. I particularly liked the seamless transition between when he finds the eel missing from it’s tank, and then dives in after the letter. After my first viewing these are the things that really stood out in my memory. I’ve since seen this movie twice more [three times in three years, ever April when the rotating collection of films brings it through my local library]. This last time I noticed plenty of other, very subtle dualities that are as incomprehensible but wonderful to me as those other ones were after the first time I saw it. Yamash*ta’s very personal discovery of the strange suicidal woman unconscious in a bed of flowers, and later her decorating his barbershop with the same flowers. Or how the film opens with a starburst of blood across the screen and closes with a similar explosion of fireworks filmed across a surface of water, still crisp in my mind.
3 out of 4 [this one is a borderline 4 of 4 for me].
I’m looking for some useful input on these two reviews, especially as I might want to refine the eel review for use on a friend’s website. Preferably from someone who has seen one or both of them. Mainly I want answers to the following questions: Did I offer a useful and comprehensible way of looking at these films? Was I simply overimpressed by sophomoric narrative masturbation? Anyone see these films or did reading these reviews make you want to see them/not want to? Any other comments are welcome as well.
'Shall we Dansu?'
Has anyone seen this 1996, japanese film? I just rented it on a friend's recomendation and was pretty dissapointed. Allow me to elaborate.
Shall we Dansu is Masayuki Suo's sweeter-than-honey urban ballroom-dancing comedy about middle-aged salaryman, Sugiyama Shohei [Koji Yakusho, of 'The Eel', 'Warm Water Under a Red Bridge', and 'Tampopo's' "erotic gangster"], who, finding "something missing from his life" decides to do something about it and secretly take dancing lessons. The paradoxic dillema that drives the comedy, we are told at the begining of the film, is that 'to the Japanese, who's elaborate social structure is based largely on quiet intuition', the very notion of guarrish displays of public affection, like dancing, is utterly humiliating.
So Sugiyama must hide his new passtime from his family, his coworkers, he looks both ways to see that nobody is watching before entering the dance class. Fair enough. Throw in requisite number of "offbeat" supporting characters, some clever references to other films, a moral about "being yourself", and we have "the new Juzo Itami".
The main problem I have with the movie is not with conception, which i think could have been, and in some ways still is very clever, but with the totally standard execution of this movie. Namely, the theme of dancing +/- fitting into society is pretty rich, and yet most of this film's narrative lies in dialogue. And not even good dialogue. Anything worthwhile about the movie, apparently, must be reiterated by some blunt, tacked on moralizing [not in the ethical sense, in the summing-up-of-life-lessons-learned sense]. A perfect example of what I'm talking about is a scene towards the end involving one of Sugiyama's coworkers, diminuative Aoki, who throughout masquerades as a wild, bold latin dancer wearing a ridiculous wig. In the middle of the decisive dance competition, his parter chides him at his disingenuous style of dance and foppish posteuring, and dares him to lose the wig. Aoki is reborn on the dance floor, sweeps the competition. Cut to the wisened old matron of the dance studio, commenting "Aoki got rid himself of more than just his wig just now." You dont say. Actually, she does say, which is unfortunate because it ruins an already pretty superficial subtext. So we have yet another film that preaches to us about "breaking out of our shells", and "being, bold, daring to be ourselves", but which at every turn falls into step with every other upbeat comic-drama.
The good with this movie is the casting and the sometimes intuitive use of the actors. In particular I think Sugiyama/Yakusho fits the part well and comes out relatively on top. To be even more specific, Yakusho, in 'Shall we Dansu?' is brought in to use his whole body to act the part of 'Sugiyama', a character who himself acts/dances primarilly with his face. So we have Yakusho spending the majority of the dance lessons building a tension between his deliberately awkward [cos Yakusho himself is pretty graceful] footork, and his face, which is constantly in our line of sight as it watches and registers the dancing of the other characters. This is a pretty rich part, I'm not sure if the writer/director was aware of this but Yakusho seems like a pretty intelligent actor and uses these scenes to create a hidden dialogue with the audience. This is Yakusho's film. This also puts him in the place of the "eye of the storm", so to speak. Interestingly, the over-the-top performances of the other characters [some of which are really enjoyable to watch] only serve to emphasize Sugiyama's quietness. Long after I've forgotten Aoki's loud latin schtick, i'll probably still remember Sugiyama's face.
2 out of 4.
Which brings me to another film starring Yakusho: 1997's Palm d'Or winning 'The Eel', directed and adapted from the novel 'On Parole' by Imamura Shohei.
Many films have casted and used water and setting as an interesting visual foil. A rare few of them have set their environment as the main character of the film, and this is one of those rare few, so is interesting right off the bat. It's also based on a novel by a writer who understands how to develop the world he is creating in relation to the characters internalized world. And by a director who is very pronounced in his use of environmental aspects, and who can deftly manipulate visual continuities and discontinuities. Add all this and you get a cinematic variation on Samuel Beckett's notion of character as a thin line between two worlds: internal and external.
Unlike 'Dansu', 'The Eel' is not a vehicle for Yakusho. The Actors in this film arent the important part. Yakusho helms the main role, another Salaryman [in the book he was a school teacher, here he appears as an accountant or some other corporate cog], named Yamash*ta Takuro. The plot, as in Yoshimura Akira's novel, starts off with Yamash*ta recieving notification - via anonymous letter - that his wife is having an adulterous affair on the frequent nights he spends fishing. This leads Yamash*ta to stage a fishing trip, from which he returns early to find the news of the letter true. His reaction, rather than getting a divorce, is to wound the man in the process of f*cking his wife, and then methodically stab her to death with a kitchen knife, before riding his bike down to the police station to turn himself in. This all occurs in the first five minutes or so, the rest of the movie takes place 8 years later when he is released on parole.
His ties with his previous life severed, Yamash*ta is given the chance to start anew. He picks an abandoned building on the rural outskirts of an anonymous city to open a barber shop, and move himself and his pet eel [who he raised in the prison court yard] into the small community, to live out the rest of his days in quiet, eventless harmony.
He makes some superficial friendships [or more accurately, some superficial friendships are made with him] with locals folks, as when one of his new "friends" takes him out on nightly eel-fishing excursions.
Finally, conflict is introduced back into his life when he finds a woman, unconscious and dying near his barbershop. He slowly and unwillingly becomes stuck in the circumstances that lead to her attempted suicide as she becomes an emotional anchor for him. All this drama, while very slow in developing, manages to be moving, easy to get sucked into, at times funny as f*ck. But this isn’t really how it plays out, and I don’t want to overemphasize the importance of these actors to Imamura’s unique cinematic vision. As an example compare it to the movie I discussed earlier and you might notice how impassively most of these characters are shot. We rarely dwell on Yakusho’s face, which was a key aspect of ‘Dansu’. Just before he murders his wife and our vision goes out as blood soaks the camera-lense, she offers a brief, exquisitely blank look that is very taunting and very memorable. That is about the extent of our emotional engagement with the characters [as actors] in this film. This might not be for everyone, but I cant complain about this aspect of the film, as it puts emphasis on something I felt was much more interesting, having to do with the use of the setting and a few key twists that blur the lines between Yamash*ta’s internal world and the world of the film. As I stated before Imamura is a director who very intimately understands continuity and discontinuity, so his direction really works to it’s fullest effect in some of these scenes. Unlike his previous masterpiece, ‘Vengeance is Mine’, which was built around the narrative confusion of extreme discontinuities of time versus unexpected and dischordant spacial continuities, In The Eel, all of it overlaps. In the wholeness and effortless simplicity of the execution here, this film resembles John Sayles’ ‘Lone Star’, which managed to blur time and memory by simply panning the camera. But there the characters were fully developed, written completely. Here the characters, Yamash*ta especially, are flat sketches, binding and interweaving between the two worlds of the film. Much of this is beautifully executed but too obvious to be worth mentioning. Yamash*ta’s hallucinations involving his pet eel and the letter that told him about his wife’s infidelity, for example. Or his fellow parolee, who deliberately crosses the boundary between the two worlds by in one scene trying to rape his woman, and in another jarring, and completely internal [and hilarious] scene later one, which I don’t want to give away. I particularly liked the seamless transition between when he finds the eel missing from it’s tank, and then dives in after the letter. After my first viewing these are the things that really stood out in my memory. I’ve since seen this movie twice more [three times in three years, ever April when the rotating collection of films brings it through my local library]. This last time I noticed plenty of other, very subtle dualities that are as incomprehensible but wonderful to me as those other ones were after the first time I saw it. Yamash*ta’s very personal discovery of the strange suicidal woman unconscious in a bed of flowers, and later her decorating his barbershop with the same flowers. Or how the film opens with a starburst of blood across the screen and closes with a similar explosion of fireworks filmed across a surface of water, still crisp in my mind.
3 out of 4 [this one is a borderline 4 of 4 for me].
I’m looking for some useful input on these two reviews, especially as I might want to refine the eel review for use on a friend’s website. Preferably from someone who has seen one or both of them. Mainly I want answers to the following questions: Did I offer a useful and comprehensible way of looking at these films? Was I simply overimpressed by sophomoric narrative masturbation? Anyone see these films or did reading these reviews make you want to see them/not want to? Any other comments are welcome as well.
Last edited by linespalsy; 04-29-04 at 01:36 PM.
