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Frau Blücher
08-16-19
Dear Reader: I'm assuming you would never read a monograph about a film you haven't seen.

Page contents: A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) / Miss Julie (1951) / Black Narcissus (1947) / The French Dispatch (2021) / Fox and his Friends (1975) / The Worst Person in the World (2021) / In the Valley of Elah (2007) / Oleanna (1994) / Maborosi (1995)

A Time to Live and A Time to Die — (1985) — Hou

Rumble young man, rumble

This film is about the simple moments of happiness that a child collects while growing up and the inevitable disintegration of family. At the end, the house has been overrun by the three remaining males who live their lives like slightly feral bachelors before it is vacated and sold. The film opens with a final stroll through the empty house, our hero is assailed by the flood of memories that comes racing back; stopping at his father’s study he imagines him still sitting at his desk and the story begins. Even more impressive, as a child he would go out and play after school and his grandmother would be sent to fetch him home—across the vista of countless, forgotten years, he conjures up the voice of his grandmother calling him home for supper one last time.

These recollections are drawn from two time periods (essentially) when Hsaio (our hero) was growing up in a suburb of Fengshan, a small town on the southern tip of the island of Taiwan. At the outset, he is too old to be seen wandering around hand in hand with his grandmother and instead scampers off to play with his mates, so the great guava adventure when his grandmother and he set off to find their family shrine was a flashback to an earlier period when he still could believe their ancestral village (in mainland China) was just down the road and over a bridge.

The first time period one is set during the last months of primary school and the summer vacation. A radio broadcast refers to the Second Taiwan Strait crisis where Taiwan and China were openly shooting down each other’s planes, so that would make him about eleven years old there. In an early sequence, the lads and Hsaio innocently gather round and admire some electrical workers juicing up a house in the neighbourhood and watch all the copper wire falling from the sky. When enough has accumulated; they do snatch and grab then race off like bandits. They convert it into cash at the local scrap dealer then he has some spinning tops lathed at a lumber yard. Ever resourceful, Hsaio adds the metal pins in the bottom himself to make them last longer. Huilan (his big sister) mentions her hooligan brother has natural abilities that allow him to coast through life. During tests in school, he supplies the answers to the slower boys around him (in exchange for a small stipend). Although his mother no longer dusts for fingerprints when five dollars disappears from her purse, she simply shreds another fan against his backside.

His father has severe asthma and we see him wheezing every so often. When feeling fatigued, he simply leans his head back, slumps in his chair, and takes a nap. His bed is just a few steps removed from his desk, it’s almost as if the father lives quarantined from the rest of the family. His fragile health is emphasized by the fact the wall behind him is always open, a few absent minded shuffles in his chair and he would fall right out of the house and disappear.

Hsaio seems to inherit some of his father’s distance; He loves to sit and day dream beside the big window in the living room. He always chooses a window desk in school. There is a visual motif of Hsaio always looking at the world around him and the film is studded with his observed moments. During the cat-watch scene he notices the way cigarette smoke (in a non-smoking house) curls around the ceiling light. He notices how the rain always empties the street of children. His sister observes the world around her with the same intensity as he does, but she immediately applies everything into practicable knowledge. The first time Hsaio seems to do this is during the second section when he learns some broad has skipped out on a debt to a grieving family and dropped an I.O.U. in a funeral dowry. He immediately saddles up and goes a knocking, but standing in her living room and looking at the broken down shack she lives in … he gives her a pass. This is first indication in the film that he may not be destined to become a gangster; a real thug would have put the screws to her and forced her to pay regardless of the cruel burden for her.

His grandmother is already a little ditzy at the beginning of the film which nicely complements his parent’s political disorientation. Over time, the grandmother confounds her daily quest for the family shrine with the memory of the day she and Hsaio found an abandoned fruit grove together. In her later excursions (the lady loves to tramp) notice how she always returns home with a sack full of guavas. The father’s trip to Taiwan was essentially a job opportunity in another province and not permanent exile to a hostile country. The situation in China is like a bad rash that one day will simply go away and they will all return home.

This political limbo leaves one generation without a past and the other generation without a future; the generational clash becomes evident when the country comes to a complete stand still with the passing of the Vice-President (and inept war hero) Chen Cheng. The older generation stands piously at attention during the official state broadcast of his funeral; whereas, their children horse around in the background and couldn’t care less. This juvenile disrespect also extends to education, during a disciplinary meeting with the principal; Hsaio has the nerve to swipe a paper awl from his desktop right out from under his nose.

Although Hsaio says the main recollections are about his father, I think there are far more observations about his big sister and life’s unfairness towards her. He watches as she quietly becomes the family matriarch, taking on additional duties like representing the family during parent/teacher conferences, or chaperoning a visit between a woman and a potential suitor. In the first part, Huilan is already set to be married off and in the second part, her departure from the house is only signaled when she brings over her husband for some wedding mementoes in the backyard.

During an intimate mother and daughter talk, her mother reveals that she hid her first pregnancy from her grandmother and only returned home for her second one. At the birth of her younger sister, her grandmother stopped helping her for cranking out two duds in a row (boys are the only viable option) and when an unwanted male preemie became available in the district, the family immediately snatched him up. Her baby sister died shortly afterwards from a tragic case of botulism after visiting a shrine; although reading between the lines, the grandmother may have poisoned her to free up more resources for the boy.

This cruelty towards women is emphasized in a scene where her mother gently prods the oldest son forward, but Huilan is positioned between them and her mother talks through her daughter at him as if she wasn’t there. Listening to all this flowery encouragement aimed at Huilan, her grandmother finally has to put her foot down and voice her disapproval about this nonsense: girls do a little cooking; a little cleaning; and help bring in the harvest, but that’s it. A little exasperated, she turns to granny and explains that she is not telling her to follow all her heart’s desires, but encouraging her (adopted) brother to scramble after his. Ironic since she is the eldest (respect should be naturally accrue to her) and brightest child in the family but her amazing future was set aside for her far more academically challenged brothers.

It was painfully evident I was missing things during scenes where a large Chinese ideogram from a sign would peek out from behind a character: was that suggesting something relevant? I was also drawing complete blanks from the inserts of written text. His grandmother always enunciates his name as “Aha” instead of “Ah-how” which is the source of some amusement amongst his friends and the origin of his nickname. [Children can particularly lethal in zeroing in on body parts that rhyme with one’s name, yeah, I’m referring to you, Dolores.] I can’t quite make out if this was her rural mainland Chinese accent or an affectionate diminutive on her part; older family members also inflect his name (for instance “Ah-how-a”) at certain occasions.

The film left me with a list of lingering questions; for instance, there’s a scene where Hsaio intercepts and reads a letter and I can only guess this was a warning from the school telling his parents he was in danger of being expelled? A political purge on the island is obliquely referred to in the first section and the increasingly bloody clashes between the two street gangs in the second section implicitly suggest US imperialism simply exploits the island as a pawn, a forward military base to launder money to state-side corporations, and an endless opportunity to throw barricades against the Chinese with Realpolitik.

I think the essential shot in the film is when Hsaio catches his mother’s keen during the cat-watch sequence; he doesn’t quite register this depth of feeling yet, but the camera lingers on his face. At the beginning of the film, his grandmother calls for him, but he is too busy playing marbles with his friends and ignores her. There is an echo to this later in the film when his mother is going through a difficult period and some late night runners have been dispatched to bring him to a street brawl. He lends his “samurai” sword for the fight, but chooses to remain at home. In coming of age films, one rarely sees a character actually become an adult on-screen. Before returning to the living room, Hsaio composes himself in the alcove, which is a mirror image of the same shot earlier; except this time, rather than turned away and looking over his shoulder as a small child trying to fathom that emotional outburst, he now stares directly ahead, understanding what losing the love and devotion of someone close to you actually means and when he returns to the living room, he is no longer a child.

Likes? Usually a (long) establishing shot is coupled with an additional one that pushes forward into the scene and centers the action; this wonderful structural one-two device repeats through-out the film. There is a strong rectilinear feel inside the Japanese style-house from the frames within the windows and sliding wall screens. Each room is an enclosure that suggests a warm intimacy that can be pulled around you like a blanket but also a living space where secrets are paper-thin and loud, annoying, chopping from the kitchen can be heard through-out the house. The mosquito nets neatly segment the rooms into sections at night. There is a wonderful shot of Hsaio seeing his mother working by lamplight and he works his way across these ghostly barriers to talk to her. Conversely, emotional distance can be created by partially or completely shutting a screen. The sound seems to have been added with imperfect dubbing during post-production; certain sound effects are overlarge and at times, voices can be spatially removed their image. The musical motif always kicks in to remind the audience we are looking at memories.

The Fengshan of his childhood is a magical place where one can flag down any passing rickshaw and say: “take me home” and they will always return you safely to your door step—only once in the film do they cart someone away. In the second half, the rickety bamboo chair is always placed in the foreground and background during important family events, as if their father was still sitting there watching over them. There is almost a subliminal use of circles and rings in the film (the school parking lot and the pots and ladles in the kitchen) foreshadowing change. The balance wheel on his mother’s sewing machine always marks her place in the home. His grandmother has a delightful hobby of making tinsel covered coins that once minted go directly into her celestial bank account; she has amassed quite a bag full of money here on earth and she will be a very rich woman when she finally arrives in heaven.

To finish up, fate here is always a glancing blow, but one that knocks you completely off course. His father bumped into an old pal from school that lead to the lucky promotion in Taiwan. The girl of his dreams accepts his declaration of love but tells him they should hold off hooking up until after he enters university which gives him added incentive to academically apply himself, saving him from either a miserable future in the military and acquiring a violent skill set that would come in handy later as a gangster. Her gentle promise of love alters the course of his life.

A Time to Live and A Time to Die — ★★★
Last edited by thracian dawg; 07-06-23 at 03:11 PM.



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Frau Blücher
02-03-22
Miss Julie — (1951) — Sjöberg

The Lady is a tramp

There’s a great jolt of kinetic energy with all the tracking shots in the opening scenes infusing this summer holiday with a festive exuberance. The servant’s celebration is a decidedly, rowdy, ambulant affair; a kind of a continuous circuit where they dance a little, nosh a little, drink a little, then rinse and repeat throughout the evening (the more pagan individuals fall by the wayside to indulge in earthy delights while the main clutch of celebrants continues on without them) culminating in the ceremonial morning after—although this far north, the sun never really sets. The film slyly announces this is going to be all about sex by erecting a gigantic nookie symbol in a field; a phallic maypole crowned with a yonic symbol.

There are two heavy hitters in the film, the first one is the director, Alf Sjöberg; the second is the remarkably detailed screenplay he turned in; having just come off a major stage production of the one act play; he could probably recite entire back stories of the characters in his sleep. The film retains some of the great howl of pain and anguish that the original Strindberg play was; even with the representational restrictions of the period, the savage allusions just made my jaw drop.

One star goes to the seamless transitions to and from the flashbacks (and fantasies) which borders on magic realism; the action of past commingles with Lady Julie and Jean telling the memories of their traumatic childhoods in the present. The magic realism continues with the strange myopic space where characters seem pull a cloak of invisibility around them then (dis)appear right in front of other people. Characters in the foreground don’t notice individuals ducking behind a tree or openly eavesdropping on them just behind their backs. The cook Kristin, has the ability to fall into a REM sleep the moment she closes her eyes, even if she’s standing in front of a hot stove.

The walls of Count Carl’s mansion are adorned with portraits of his ancestral titans who found their financial treasure at birth with a genetic coin toss, then retired to suckle and defecate in their gilded cradle for the rest of their lives. The grounds of the estate are provocatively strewn with half-naked statuary, immortalized as enemy combatants; somnolent, sole survivors in an ancient, knock down, drag ‘em out battle of the sexes. Although 134 years later and with a distinctive po-mo take on the material, the story seems now more like a minor palace coup that fizzled. Lady Julie has decided not to celebrate the holiday with her own kind; she’s nursing a boo boo (having been just dumped by her fiancé who would be at that same party) and remains behind on the estate and partakes of servant’s festivities. Aristocrats mixing with peasantry, oh, the ignominy! A major breach in etiquette.

Although clearly in the first act, the only thing at peril is Jean’s reputation. It’s his preening vanity that’s being pricked and made to look foolish by Lady Julie’s antics. In the absence of the master: if Jean is the majordomo of the manor, then he is the one in charge of maintaining discipline and meting out punishments within the great house, even if this requires raising a stealthy hand to correct misbehaving palace brat. Speeding around like a shoeless John Maclane in the Nakatomi tower; Jean must put down this egalitarian insurrection all alone . . . besides, everyone else is too drunk to notice.

The crux of the problem is that moment Jean sits down at the table, he can’t win. He is going to down to bitter, ignominious defeat. Lady Julie (LJ) towers socially above him. She holds a never ending supply of trump cards, whenever Jean laughingly throws down a big card in their confrontation, LJ simply has to rephrase her question as statement and Jean, being of mongrel birth and questionable breeding must get down on the floor and give her boots another score with his hot tongue.

In addition to chasms between the classes, there are hierarchical strata within the servantry. When the groom (not the one who stands beside the bride, the one who works in the stable) bumps into Voila again, after their recent roll in the hay, he greets her heartily. She is with her friends this time and she gives him a verbal lash for his impudence; he is just someone who shovels manure for a living while she is drum roll please . . . LJ’s personal dresser. Later on, when the groom catches the kiss between Jean and LJ, he rushes off to divert the party towards their necking for sport and ridicule, maybe he can take some sting out of Voila’s social correction.

Voila is also a great counterpoint to LJ. Even though it is understood that Jean and Kristin are to be married sometime, in the future; Voila openly lusts after him. And when Jean doesn’t have time to attend to her, she indulges in other lovers, racking an impressive number of conquests during the holiday with little approbation or consequence. Not so with LJ; for her, sex can only be transgressive. After marrying well, her sole function in life is a successful pregnancy, assuring the smooth transfer of wealth to the next generation through the direct tribal blood lines.

LJ and Jean both relate their respective mares of social immobility. LJ has wandered to the top of a pedestal or an obelisk which is at such a great height, her only way down is to slip and fall, or jump to her death. Jean always dreams of the tree with the nests of golden eggs at the top, but the trunk is too smooth and no matter how high he hops in his dreams, that first branch remains always tantalizingly out of reach.

Likes? The evocative images of the paddling swans in certain backgrounds. In LJ’s recurring nightmare she dies and is reincarnated as a swan; so these are not symbols of love but of precursors of death. There’s a wonderful throwaway two shot of Kristin and Jean sitting at the kitchen table. Their jobs allow them certain entitlements; Jean has lost the taste for horse piss and now prefers to sip the Count’s expensive foreign wines; Kristin accepts kickbacks on the food she buys for the mansion. They hear LJ approaching outside and in a mirror image they both reflexively dive for the contraband. Indeed, there is a faint suggestion that the tryst between Jean and Viola was penciled into the margins of the holiday but the LJ question now requires his full attention.

In a film where a birch branch graces every doorway, everyone wears a garland in their hair or hat, or carries a stem of flowers (notice LJ has chosen the Midsummer’s eve motif for her bedroom wallpaper) there are two subtle flower allusions. When Jean sees Julie for the first time, even though this is a black and white film, it’s not to difficult to imagine her brilliant white stockings and her glowing, pink dress; the celestial blossom that Jean sees and the confirmation that heaven does indeed exist. Jean fetches a water lily for LJ from a stream; in Jean’s recollection of almost drowning as a child; in a visual echo from the previous sequence, his body was pulled from the water in the exact same spot where he plucked the flower.

Notice the nookie symbol from the field puts in a curious re-appearance in a church scene. Since the sermons have all the drama of an invisible troupe of angels preforming Swan Lake on the head of a pin, a few lugheads fall asleep during service. A patrolling verger is there to prod people awake, using the business end of his donation basket (the nookie symbol in miniature) before they begin to saw wood. Jean spies Julie across the church, he closes his eyes in total bliss only to get bonked on the head for his ecclesiastical excess. Notice in the morning after, Jean’s elusive first branch has snapped off in his hands and lies broken at the top of the kitchen stairs, so much for the myth of social mobility. Evocatively, the first time the Count (he will be seen in a flashbacks in Julie’s stories) appears in real time, he is sipping champagne and noshing away at a table set inside a great tree. The rich have solved the problem, they’ve built a stairway and walk up and simply harvest (Jean would be of course, stealing) the golden eggs from the top.

Asked if he really loves her, Jean says it was merely a masculine wile but there is a nice shot of Jean jogging up the rear entrance to the great house and faltering on the steps. In that instant he recalls his deepest, jagged scar from childhood; the first time he set foot inside the great house, he still flinches at the burning shame of Miss Julie shyly strolling up to him in the ballroom . . . then moonwalking away from him. Ew! You stink! For the crime of simply walking on a gravel path reserved to rich people, he was caught and thrashed within an inch of his life as a small boy. As a grown man, one can safely say he has completely internalized the capitalist ideology (peasants today are called associates) and unthinkingly defends it at the destruction of his own personal and economic interests. Even if it was true, he would never dare to speak those forbidden words aloud; he knows in his bones that trespassing is a capital offense.

The whole affair turns out to be a tempest in a tea cup; with the simple physical return of the Count to the estate, order is re-established. Jean and LJ are in the kitchen preparing to leave when they hear the two bells; the great house calling them to give instruction; notice Jean even puts on his full dress uniform just to find out what the Count wants through the speaker. The second time the Count commands; Jean who has, more of less has spend the entire film swaggering, collapses and cowers on the kitchen floor unable to crawl to the speaker to be summoned to his punishment.

The excesses of Julie’s mother was a bit of head scratcher; it’s almost as if she was slated to star as the bosomy wraith in an Italian Giallo then was unceremoniously dumped and given a few scenes in a Scandinavian costume drama as compensation. She’s a little overwrought to say the least. However once I imagined her as a personification of the intractable ravages of time, both she and the film improved. After a long period of decline and decay, everything disappears from your life—and never in a acceptable order; eventually the loss of a trifle so vexes your little heart, it forgets to keep on beating. Julie is the last of her ancestral line. The coat of arms will be broken on the Count Carl’s casket. The great house dies in the film. Yet her mother’s gloating portrait still hangs on some museum wall and the foreign bumpkins (between the hours of ten to six) shuffle past and still gawk up at her and wonder: what thing did this great lady do to be immortalized? An ironic reminder that in her knock down, take no prisoners battle to the death, she won everything.

Miss Julie — ★★★½



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02-03-22
Black Narcissus — (1947) — Powell & Pressburger

The stony path

Usually it’s a year or so between Powell and Pressburger (P&P) films. Last week I had re-watched A Matter of Life and Death and had to been struck by Kathleen Byron’s bit part as the greeter at the welcome desk; her most fetching look is lowering her chin slightly and looking up at the camera with those heavy lidded eyes . . . anyone walking up to her counter invariably fumbles with the sign-in pen and blurts out, I must be in heaven. However, when she lowers her chin another tick that same face becomes a dash demonic. I wanted to see her in something else, so I grabbed this.

Recalling bits from the earlier P&P film like the former French Aristocrat recycled as transporting escort, or the airman who leaps out of his bomber without a parachute, I was reluctant to classify those as instances of black humour. A ping pong game suspended in mid-point? Isn’t that sublimely ludicrous? No, I must be misreading this. However confronted with the same elements in this film: I began to ponder, is this a comedy of errors?

The nunnery (aka the palace of Mopu, the house of women) was originally built by a war lord from a previous generation to warehouse his overflowing bevy of booty, so it has been specifically designed to be remote and inhospitable. This is where a group of Anglican nuns have chosen to open a hot new franchise and spread the gospel. Here? This cold, drafty space on a mountain top? If they were genuinely interested in helping the local population wouldn’t they have set up the whole shebang a thousand feet below in the village? If someone breaks their leg, they are expecting them to crawl up a mountain to get their leg set?

A few of the set-ups were also transparent. It’s stated the nuns in this Anglican order only enlist at 12 month intervals (and are proud as peacocks about it) so Sister Clodagh is going to lose one of her chicks to a crisis of faith. The call to daily prayer is done by tugging at a huge bell perched at the edge of a vertiginous precipice. Without any walls, guide rails, or even signage: Ladies, that’s a serious safety code violation. Someone is going to slip on a frigging banana peel or be swept by a sudden buffet of wind over the ledge. That’s half of her team right there. So far everything in the opening ten minutes was clearly situated in the realm of absurdity. The clincher was Mr Dean riding up to the nunnery on a Shetland pony. He is probably expending more calories holding onto the beast then he would simply walking there—and look! The little pony he has his own a personal groom who jogs ahead like a linebacker knocking traffic out of the way or runs behind him the entire trip, turning into his personal human hitch post the second Mr. Dean dismounts. This is completely potty.

Likes? Percy Day's visual contribution to the film should get a mention, the gorgeous mountain ranges, snow covered peaks and the luscious green valley beneath the clanging bell are all paintings done by his team. Sister Clodagh starts a needle point of Saint Francis during the winter, but wouldn’t a icon of Saint Faith (she manifests once in the film) have been more appropriate? Their chapel is an annex with a rickety, arched passageway illustrating the clear chasm between the divine and profane worlds; although (inside joke) when the palace was originally built, and when the old man was in residence, this would have been the master bedroom and the way to heaven.

In summer, the nun’s veils suggest the distant snow covered peaks and in winter, their oatmeal colored habits mirror the entire mountain range. There is a nice visual echo of the crucifix around their necks in the diagonal lattice panels within the nunnery. A nice character tell where perspiration is always beading on Sister Ruth’s forehead; she’s not sweating because of the heat but because of her feverish over-imagination.

The romance between Kanchi and the prince was done entirely with sound and color. Kanchi spies him the exact moment he first sets foot in the nunnery. She watches him from the blue room (lingering strategically to whack him with those green eyes) and while waiting, does the dance of the pink handkerchief. When she hears Sister Clodagh approaching in the hallway, she dashes away accompanied by the sound of non-diegetic jingle bells which now becomes a his and hers motif. The next time the prince shows up, he is unconsciously mirroring her with his pink frock coat; he even attempts the dangerous handkerchief flick (almost knocking over two women) from her dance. A few scenes later, in addition to announcing the arrival of spring. the great blast of pink posies announces Sister Ruth is going native (Sister Clodagh has demanded and got her resignation; and the Prince and the beggar girl have fallen in love.

The most dazzling image in the film is that of an ancient aviary that contains nothing but discarded cages and marks the palace as a place of transformation and ultimately of emancipation. It’s telling this is the one room in the palace that undergoes the greatest renovation, Sister Clodagh establishes the main office for the convent here; the remaining bamboo perches suggest the nuns didn’t so much as take over but simply displace the older house birds; who in their great feathery voyages, only got as far as the open window and the ledge but not a step further . . . utterly bewildered by the blue of the sky. For the entertainment purposes, Sister Ruth will be made the villain of the film; but notice she is the only one who dares (becoming metaphorically insane) to fly away . At the end of the film, all the nuns are rather joyous in the heartbreak of defeat; they welcome the disciplinary lash; the black marks on their official records, the agony of demotion and the painful trammels so they can hobble forward on with even greater suffering because this is the only route to sainthood.

If Sister Clodagh really wanted the convent to thrive she would have had to deliberately ruin a lot more lives. All existing empires and generational institutions use violence and brutality to maintain their dominion; they break heads, they crush dissent, they neutralize any crazy person who dares to point out that millions of dollars annually dump trucked into their personal bank accounts is not the same as the fictional check for a zillion dollars deposited into yours. Mr. Dean likes to tweak sister Clodagh’s piety and she tussles with his impieties, but doesn’t actually engage with him as the designated enemy; a craftier opponent would boxed his ears and nobbled away his job from him. A more malicious sister would have scraped every single dancing girl from the walls, disappearing them forever. Everyone mentions their troubled sleep . . . do you think the erotic murals in their bedrooms has anything to do with it?

Although Sister Clodagh has legal deed to the land, she allows the holy man to maintain his squat, even though he’s technically the competition. Being a decent, moral person is really hard, even the unintentional trespasses can do you in. It’s simpler just to attend temple once a week, and when you leave, the holy man wipes your slate of sins clean, leaving you with an untroubled conscience . . . until next week. The holy man serves the same purpose for the locals; they bring him a little food and offerings and in the giving, absolve themselves from any worries or doubts they may have. Are the natives going to trade the cartoon cut-out in front of the sister’s clip joint for a living symbol that draws breath? Doubtful. A more loathsome ideologue would have gave the old white haired fool his walking papers the very first day and escorted him off the mountain.

Although she goes ballistic with Sister Ruth, this is only because she got off a lucky pop touching a sore spot with the suggestion that her fantasies would make even the worldly Mr. Dean turn red as a rose. By the way, I just loved the idea that nuns can spot when someone is in actual communion with God and when someone is just taking a knee and going through the motions. There’s a funny scene in the chapel where Clodagh is dreaming about a boyfriend back in Ireland and all the nuns are all politely staring at her, waiting for her to return to from her romantic reverie. The barking dogs alert her that outside, a stranger has arrived at the nunnery; but notice the hounds of love now only exist as a distant memory.

Ultimately Sister Clodagh’s Himalayan adventure wasn’t a failure, is was only a failure not to use violence, which is not a weakness but a strength. As Mr. Dean always annoyingly puts it: what would Jesus do? Clodagh’s essential decency triumphs in the end, she is not a zealot, to her great esteem. So rather than a downer, I would qualify this is as a legitimate happy ending to celebrate.

One consequence of seeing two P&P’s films so closely together, I may have discovered a missing component; before this, for some reason their films seemed always a little flat; however there is a rich vein of dry wit that runs through-out all their filmography; but the humor is never ever going to be ha ha funny, simply because they are never bother to set-up any joke for the audience; the arched eyebrow of a clever witticism or a narrative pun is enough. I think the key to enjoying their films is that you are going to have to deliberately pull out any silliness or humor when you see; it won’t be hard to spot them, there’s a multitude . Unfortunately the movie, despite the mastery of all the elements of film production and great cinematic trickery; the film retains the quaint, musty mores of a by-gone era.

Black Narcissus — ★★★
Last edited by thracian dawg; 02-16-22 at 02:40 PM.



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02-03-22
The French Dispatch (2021) — Anderson

The zounds of silence

Anderson’s half-score film takes as its central conceit, the last five articles written for an unread Sunday newspaper supplement that lined bird cages, but blossomed into a vibrant, weekly literary magazine under the stewardship of its owner/editor. The director introduces an important element in the opening story, a kind of magic realism where the past commingles with the present—or what the cycling reporter, beret boy (BB) calls the time machine of poetic licence. The 100 joke coffee house went out of business seven years ago, yet he glides over to a lamppost on a street above and watches the caffeine intoxicated spill out of the joint on a summer evening just after the golden hour. Tooling around the city in search of material to write about, BB discovers they have torn down an old market place and are replacing it with a modern shopping center; given the poetry machine available he could have simply walked around inside the multi-level after it was completed.

The film’s bubbly mise-en-scène . . . how do I express this? Analogy-wise, I would liken it to a ping pong game. I’ll point out a few of the “spins” Anderson uses in the film.

The narrative elision. The best example of this is the one that opens the film. A waiter trots up the back stairs to the fifth floor French Dispatch offices/apartments, creating immediate suspense for his destination but then takes a giant step over the body lying in an office with some clever misdirection: first, a hastily drawn caricature (it’s not an actual person but a cartoon character that had a coronary) and a shot of an unidentified corpse in a casket cropped at the bridge of the nose. The film then re-boots and returns a few days earlier with the waiter arriving as he did every morning with a tray of delights for the staff meeting. The legerdemain has been so swift the audience can be forgiven for not grasping the film ended at the 4.05 minute. Not only is Arthur Jr. dead as a door nail; he is already moldering in his grave back in Kansas.

The unreliable narrator. Here, less a sketchy character trying to sneak a deliberate agenda past the audience and more like a kind of unnoticed, subjective (dis)honesty in the reporting. In the opening article, BB declares he is going to cycle through the entire 250 year history of Ennui, but the bicycle paths only go back 90 years or so, so his historical rendition of the city is going to be an extremely truncated version.

In the last of the three main stories, Roebuck says he was jeopardy during his research for the article, but I can’t recall a live hand grenade landing at his feet and him punting it away. He declares the miraculous survival of the chef was due to his glorious cast-iron stomach inured by years of . . . haute cuisine? Truth be told, the cook saved his own skin by nibbling only a demi-portion of his poisoned radish. He pleads ignorance on just how the cops found the needle in the haystack (the lair of the kidnappers) yet everyone else refers to it as La nuit de mille beignes (the night of a thousand donuts.) Why can’t Roebuck simply enunciate the obvious? In the preceding story, everyone was unsure whether empiric reporting and neutrality was a job requirement for journalists; the editorial and ideological content of any newspaper or media outlet is always the hidden financial interests of the owner. Media conglomerates aren’t outliers to the ruling oligarchy, they belong to it.

The temporal transposition. In bio-pics they usually set up the seamless baton exchange in advance so the audience can follow the transition from precocious child actor to lead adult role. Oh, I get it, this is him older. Here, the two actors playing the same character at different ages, meet on-screen and criss-cross. The discovery of a fetching female guard in the prison has been earth shattering. Moses returns to his cell a changed man, literally. Notice he throws a work of art the first time out, the flying birds vase: the first letter of her name floats in the air like a humming bird. To weather the storm and survive, Simone will metaphorically become the living vessel in which Moses will place his hopes and dreams alive to keep his soul intact. Simply reversing the sequential order of these two scenes mutes the direct cause and effect—while flattening all the exposition contained in an earlier scene of him painting a self-portrait (there were four [or five?] different representations of his psyche) this also deepens the film.

While appearing as specific articles written for the last issue of the magazine, they all are from different epochs; only the opening and closing sequences are set in the time period. Lucinda’s article was penned seven years earlier. Astonishingly, J.K.L.’s article is a verbatim transcription of a lecture she will give in the future.

The smashes. The most potent weapon in Anderson’s arsenal are the blink-or-you’ll-miss-it dispatches where the audience doesn’t even register the information. Looping is a difficult catch. The film was meant to have a main narrator but after a single utterance, is replaced by BB (and others) reading. The bedroom scene in the girl’s dormitory between Juliette (mo-ped girl) and Z(effirelli): I’m convinced that it was Frances McDormand who whispered to him. Moses’ growling seems synthetic. Another perceptive catch are the aspect ratio changes; take note when a suggestive majesty is needed or when split scenes appear in the film.

The visual antonym. The shot of Julien and his two sons in the hold of the military cargo plane is one of fleeting mortality, both his uncles have passed away, and in time, the business will become the Cadazio Sons Fine Art gallery. The scene where Juliette steps down from a step ladder in the middle of a barricaded street and storms towards the camera in the foreground; the church begins to rear up in the background. It should be noted this medieval wonder celebrating the celestial after-life was re-tooled in the present as a prison/insane asylum, institutions of sadistic brutality and therapeutic ice baths. Juliette and her fellow students are about to get clobbered.

The andersonian hullabaloo. The suspended, live action dioramas are essentially shifts of genre. An inherently ultra violent or sanguinary scene is made farcical by the actors posing in a recreation of the moment in time captured by the camera click.

Comedy doesn’t work in a realistic setting, it has to be set in a kind of permissive environment. This is the over arching concern of the filmmakers, whenever the content strays into troublesome areas (realism), these are either dropped from the story or quickly swatted back into the casual frivolity of the tale. Although it seems counter-intuitive to avoid all the dramatic highlights contained within the film; these impede the comedic zeal and have to go, although all they linger in the film like unseen phantoms.

Which brings us to a last spin, the narrative tamp; a form of distancing. The switch to the third person (which all the articles are) is the main one used in the film. For instance—brazenly tragic scenes like the midnight taxi ride of Z’s parents; Lucinda’s transcribes the trip from her disinterested POV muting the raw grief. In the third story, the car chase sequence could have returned to live action in the police car at end, but a tearful reunion between father and son would have been too extreme. There is a funny roundabout where Mitch Mitch (MM) instead of simply explaining why he refused to do his military service; the film jumps 60 months into the future to a stage production of his hagiography, Goodbye Zeffirelli, but chooses the exact moment in the play when it leaps 61 months backwards, so a classically trained younger actor now fields the question. Throw in where the brick walls and facades suddenly pull apart and withdraw as if they were made of papier-mâché, it’s all just a play. The recurring injunction: no weeping, isn’t that a narrative tamp?

Likes? In the first story Moses is forced to do a mandatory personal introduction to his fellow craftsmen at a pottery and weaving class. He states that he is on a spiritual mission, he has to find something . . . anything, that could give meaning to the gnawing despair of dying an old man in prison. A narrative transgression, since a major character revealing to the proscenium he is about to commit suicide will alienate the audience out for a night of wholesome (with an indecent body count) entertainment, they don’t invest in self-destructive wrecks or movies without happy endings. A portion of the spectators did disengage at that precise moment, but with his genteel, apologetic line reading, Benicio del Toro convinced a major portion of the audience to stick around emotionally for the rest of the film, a nice acting save.

Moses’ way of holding four brushes at the same time, they look weapons in his ambidextrous hands . His contempt for the penal institution is limitless. He trowels his personal revolt right into the hard concrete wall and that part of the prison has to be demolished in order to hasten their escape to Kansas. The film has scores of throwaway gags.* Lucinda poses in front of a repair shop for clocks, what an exquisite metaphor, is writing repairing time?

A huge shout-out should probably go to Luc Besson’s lobbyists who hammered through some important monetary shenanigans to force the French public to subsidize his English language movies. Still on the books, Anderson has also profited handsomely from this, so the native actors in the film isn’t an artistic celebration of French culture but merely a contractual obligation.

Continuity errors are jarring and unforgiving in drama; they make the filmmakers look like either amateur hacks or openly contemptuous of the audience. Conversely, deliberately playing with the sets and the decorations should be the default setting for comedy because this comes across as whimsicality. The audience assumes the disappearing, reappearing or wandering prop was deliberate. Take the sheet gag in the last sequence of the film. In the POV shots from behind Howitzer’s desk, the sheet (too short to cover his entire body) comes down to his shoes, but exposes his head. In the reverse angles from the other side of the room, the sheet now covers his head by his legs protrude.

For definite errors in the film, I’ll point out three. In the first story, the French used to be barbaric decapitators (one of the markers of a functioning democracy is the absence of capital punishment.) There was a large permanent guillotine in Paris and a smaller one that tooled around the provinces for the road shows, so Moses strapping himself into a fully juiced, tricked out electric chair isn’t possible. In the third story, an elderly gentleman, a veteran of two wars, shuffles across the square to deliver an enigmatic note from Gigi to his father . . . unless they were referring to the Boer war, this isn’t even remotely possible, given the story took place in the winter of 1945-46. Ditto for the transit system that runs 24 hours a day.

In conclusion, the director’s static framing used to drive me to distraction in the past, but now these carefully measured compositions aren’t hiding anything. A little gravitas is pushing into the stories despite his efforts to keep them away, he seems to know the ravages of time are coming for him, like all those shots of a character bounding along a narrow vista against the gravitational pull of the vanishing point. Another bit of early misdirection is when BB divides time into the past and the present (which he mislabels as the future) whereas it would be more accurate for the current viewing audience to describe these as being the deep past and the distant past. We are talking about a literary magazine that ceased publication half a century ago; no one here is still alive. Ultimately, the light and frothy tone is the great magic trick of the film. Anderson has switched some comedic escapades with an anthology of ghost stories without the audience noticing, quite an achievement. This is the first of Anderson’s mature works.

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun — ★★★

P.S. I subtracted one star from the film because I’m unsure whether the director is a libertarian bird brain or a dangerous political reactionary. He clearly has no conceptual awareness of random police brutality, although this seems impossible given there is a violent police riot hidden within each of the main stories. Anderson clearly has law and order on the brain—just not for the wealthy, but the working poor and the dregs of humanity better learn how to crawl . . . or else.

* In his coffin, Howitzer is loaded up for the afterlife with a typewriter and a serious ream of paper—wasn’t this guy management?
In the opening story the hookers stroll la rue Zonard . . . Hooligan row.
There’s about 300 cats on the rooftops and BB is going to quiet all the meow meow with a single saucer of milk? This is the beginning of a horror film.
In the dead-end pick pocket, BB gets the seedy denizens of the underworld to pose for a group photograph without getting his skinny ass kicked, not once, but twice.
Can you imagine using the city’s transit system and getting off at Skid row or the slaughterhouse metro station?
“Ennui raises suddenly on a Monday” is that a literal description or philosophical observation?
MM did his military service during the blistering heat of summer . . . yet remembers it as taking place during winter.
Although J.K.L has numerous photographs of Moses in her personal collection, she uses his mug shot (it has more cachet) for her lecture.
Expressly warned against bringing contraband into the prison, nevertheless Maw Clampette sneaks her second Amendment into a wine and cheese party (in a foreign country) and busts a cap.
In the last story, when they finally sit down for a late dinner—to include the glamour shots, the aspect ratio changes; the workbench, now too large for the frame is replaced with a coffee table.
Last edited by thracian dawg; 06-19-23 at 02:48 PM.



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Frau Blücher
02-03-22
Fox and his Friends (1975) — Fassbinder

The edification of Franz Bieberkopf
Although the one line synopsis posits a tale about a group of people who band together to purloin a demi-millionaire’s (un)expected windfall; I didn’t see much of a conspiracy or even a heist in the film. There are too many scenes of our hapless hero simply giving away great handfuls of cash or tipping like a three legged chair—one thing about our boy Franz, he isn’t stingy.

The story has a certain sprawl to it (two years and change by Franz’s reckoning) but the run time may be closer to 21 months. It’s easy to lose your way in the film, you have to latch onto the indications of time when the characters casually mention them. After the opening carnival sequence, there is an interstice of about two or three weeks where Franz settles into a routine, becoming a part-time rent boy not out of necessity but merely to feed a compulsive gambling habit. Uncle Max spots him loitering around a public toilet and literally whisks him away Cinderella-like to an upper class milieu, making a quick pit stop at a cigar shop to allow buy his weekly lottery ticket. Then another interstice of two weeks to an afternoon gathering at Uncle Max’s house in the suburbs; Franz is now a rich man acclimating nicely to his newly won life of idle pleasure. The temporal elisions become more refined as the story progresses; for instance, his boyfriend Eugen was on a mission to educate Franz about all things opera, but he abandons (off-screen) the project.

Rainer Werner doesn’t do dramas or tragedies, he lives for melodrama and contrary to the other genres, the story improves when audience anticipates some of the (soggy) clichés. The heroines of melodrama seem to have a lack of agency; they are trapped but don’t know how to get out of a dead-end situation or worse, aware that escape is even possible.

The denizens of the Black Orchid cabaret (a blue collar bar) routinely warn Franz if he’s going to take off his water wings, he should probably stay in the shallow end of the pool. The bigger boys frolic at the other end. Franz’s gullibility makes him a passive character that suffers the machinations of the fellow with the plan, the master entrepreneur, the active character in the film. However if Eugen was a more of a prominent protagonist, then Franz would have disappeared from that story; from the villain’s perspective it would be unwatchable.

Three scenes mark Eugen’s character arc where he swishes past amused repulsion to demonstrative affection and finally to barely concealed contempt. The first one is—a couple of days after meeting Franz, his father drops a bombshell, he is going to close the family business. To weather the economic downturn, the company will need regular transfusions of cash, something he’s incapable of furnishing, so it’s better to pull the plug now while they still have a reputation. Eugen asks for a stay of execution, he would like to attempt a rescue. Fine. His father signs the company over to him (essentially worthless) and gives him the keys to the front door. But forget about the saving the silver candle sticks; Eugen sees a short cut to continue living in the manner of which he has grown accustomed and makes a bee-line for the Black Orchid cabaret.

The second key scene is when Eugen catches Franz’s vulnerable spot (other than his need to be loved). He isn’t a book worm and darn proud of his ignorance. From then on, whenever Eugen needs to deceive him, he suggests some light reading like say, a Russian novel, or maybe even the written agreement (a perverted prenup?) between them. Franz has the typical class flaw of most proletarians, they conflate tragic credulity as a sign of flag waving virility.

And the last one is when Eugen pencils in the rest of Franz’s bank account. They head to the Black Orchid to celebrate Franz both joining the family and signing a contract (notice they sit on opposite sides of an empty bar). The loss of 30,000 smackeroos that evening is particularly galling, with some annoyance he moves a few things forward in his time table before this dummy gives away whats left of his money; Eugen has become officially rapacious.

Franz always brags to his friends what a handsome, lovable scoundrel Eugen is. To his sister, he exults how important Eugen is at the company, inflating the size of it by a adding on a zero behind the actual number of people working there. Eugen however, crafts his business plan directly from Franz’s fantasies. Remembering when he spotted a portrait of his father in his apartment, Franz said he wouldn’t kick a good looking hunk like him out of bed; Eugen deliberately steps into the background at work, to feature his father as eye candy for Franz. although the old man now simply hangs around the office, tippling. When they gather at the parent’s house for a brunch, desert is a legal contract he has to eat. They are going to march him to the car and drive him to the lawyer’s office afterwards, its almost as if they are not going to allow him any chance to escape. Provocatively, both mom and dad objectify (a form of conscience suppression?) Franz as (the) fox. Once upon a time, didn’t the upper classes in England gather on the weekend and run one to ground for tonus and entertainment?

Likes? The repeated visual echo of the proscenium arch in the door jambs, or the strong framing verticals within the scenes. The arduous task of abandoning a lower economic caste for a higher one is embodied by the spiral staircases, it’s looks . . . oh so easy, but one slip and you could break your neck. I loved that the musical riffs and flourishes always accentuated the scene; the songs never detach from the story and break the fourth wall. It’s a little evocative, when you come right down to it; Eugen may be allergic to all things proletarian, with good reason. Franz . . . Biberkopf? Beaver head? Beaver hat? Once upon a time, wasn’t skinning (or having a worker do the dirty work) a buck-toothed, little damn builder and wearing its fur on your head, the sign of social refinement and excellence?

There are some touches of sly humor; some splendid nonsense near the end, where Franz haggles over the value of his roadster with a used car dealer, the punch line comes when it’s revealed Franz is using the same spiel he used on him when he originally sold it to him, only now on the buy back, the unfortunate man is pleading destitution. Franz signs a binding agreement with two investors who have no connection whatsoever with the company. Eugen’s car has been seen before in several scenes, but at the exact moment he suggests they should purchase a newer model . . . we notice the busted antenna; did Eugen actually do that on purpose?
In the margins there is a failed Pygmalion story; but had Franz’s wallet been a little thicker he would have hung around a little longer or had his wallet been impossible to fold without a vise, Eugen would have built a discrete back entrance for him at the mansion. Notice Eugen is the only one in the relationship routinely saying “Do you love me?”

There are a few missed details. It would have been a great gag remembering say, a 120 year old painting of some upper class twit, displaying all the appropriate wealth markers from his epoch in Uncle Max’s antique shop, then casually seeing the same portrait hanging on the wall in their apartment during a family dinner. Franz opening his check book is also time marker, it charts his impending doom. Although the film is missing the last scene when Franz pulls out his check book, fires up his pen, only to realize there is nothing left to sign away.

Because of Fassbinder’s torrid production pace (three and a half films for that vintage) he doesn’t have time for the seasonal transitions the story needed, for instance, they celebrate their six month anniversary with a three week vacation in Morocco . . . but wouldn’t that have meant they met during autumn? I missed the winter (twice!) the seasonal changes would have added something to the story.

The third act is difficult catch, it is represented almost entirely by Eugen withdrawing from Franz. The first crack appears when thrown together every day on vacation, they begin to snipe and sneer at each other. To protect the expensive Chinese throw rugs from his plods, Franz is the only one forced to wear slippers in the apartment. Excluded from Eugen’s nightly entertainments, Franz wanders home late at night and has to physically push Eugen back to his side and worm his way into the bed; Eugen responds by mechanically pulling out his noise reduction system from a tin under his pillow and plugging in for the night.
Ultimately I think the film is a little too intellectual, most of the themes and story arcs are too abstract or aren’t inherently visual. One sided class warfare? Who notices the glistening razor wire guarding the oligarchic sectors from the democratic sectors in society? (I’ll give you a hint, there is always a cash register, or a punch clock near the entrance or exit.) The English title (a more pointed one would have been Fox and his one false friend) was a improvement from the ridiculous German one. The first law of freedom! Civilization is just people ripping each other off; some people get away with murder and some unlucky sods suffer an unfortunate cessation of respiratory functions, there is nothing you can do about that. Although the story is one of emotional exploitation, it condones all the other ones: the endless violence the richer/stronger routinely use to feather their advantage. I have to disagree with film’s message; kindness towards others is not a wasted effort; basic human decency is not a character flaw. Being a former carny worker, Franz was well aware of the all ins and outs of the con, but he does have a rudimentary moral code: never cheat the people in your life.

Fassbinder is always worth a look; one can always find fabulous, incidental details, his inherent trade craft is always compulsive and remarkable. Take a scene in the denouement when he returns a final time to his condo. By simply adding an extraneous character; a curious on-looker hovering above him on an upper landing, it’s bad enough he was locked out of his own apartment, but that this humiliation was witnessed by someone else, is enough to reduce him to von Kantian tears. At the very end, notice Uncle Max poses Franz (in quick succession) into the crucifix and the pietà. And I have to single out the exquisite metaphor of a single prop: that splendid, three seated, brown leather tête-à-tête . . . its almost totemic.

In conclusion, even Eugen couldn’t refuse Franz a begrudging smile with the coda in the Black Orchid bar, after all of his seemingly fruitless instruction, one tiny bud bursts forth into a single magnificent flower. Franz, the blue collar slob finally passes for a refined man of culture and learning. He hits on an American G.I. who agrees to go home with him. Unfortunately, first Franz has to hand over a fist full of cash and secondly, he no longer has any home to take him to.

Fox and his friends —★★½
Last edited by thracian dawg; 06-19-23 at 02:42 PM.



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Frau Blücher
02-03-22
The worst person in the world (2021) — Trier

The things you never dare to say and do

 The film begins with a striking image; a young woman in a spaghetti strapped, little black dress stands alone on a penthouse terrace outside an elegant dinner (?) party. On a nicotine break, she is turned sideways and staring off-screen . . . at what? It’s almost as if she’s all dressed up, with no place to go.

The filmmakers stake out their thematic territory during a family retreat at the summer cottage. During one spirited, after dinner conversation, Julia, our heroine, interrupts the menfolk to say she knows all about their lives, chapter and verse, male privilege drummed into society since time immemorial: but where’s the menses? What about the other half of the sky, the simple stories of women? The film will be a portrait of the trials and tribulations of one woman’s early life. Aksel, the boyfriend, writes several graphic novels during the same time period, but we only see a single book launch, the one called Ungdom . . . Youth.

This is a Norwegian film and I enjoyed what I hope are glimpses of that Nordic society. Late in the film, Julia doesn’t go home after work but wanders around alone all night in downtown Oslo and ends up at the waterfront, she doesn’t seem at all concerned for her safety. There is a gentle moment when a miffed Julia gives her boyfriend a verbal sock in the jaw. He simply absorbs the hit and says that was hurtful and leaves the room. Yikes, in other parts on this earth, this same scene would have played out differently, mister man would have been obligated to respond to a gratuitous attack on his manhood. Hey, that’s an entire chapter in the he-man, Texas Taliban, women haters playbook. Norway appears to be a rather culturally enlightened society, and one to be emulated. Although in country, the internet doesn’t seem to work for older people. When Julia sends her father and grand-mother an e-mail link to an article she wrote, both computers go on the fritz. I suspect this was a generational thing; in their day, it was common courtesy not to talk about fellatio in mixed company. A few things did fly by me like during the Christmas season, all the downtown esplanades in Oslo are luridly decorated with spangly butt holes, I didn’t quite understand where all that was coming from.

The film appears artless and slight but there are a lot of staged rest stops and cosmetic landscaping for the audience. The narrative trade craft provides the secret hand rails within the story to keep them on the straight and narrow. During a painful confrontation, the female narrator takes over the conversation with essentially a she said, he said in staggered time. This switch to the third person is a simple way of dialing down the acrimony, rather than a shot of someone foaming at the mouth and screaming at you; the narrator purrs, he voiced a lack of approval at her choices.

The euphoric jog through the city infers an idle day dream, but I’m not so sure. The time line appears off with Sunniva’s transformation from an apolitical to an activist for indigenous people’s rights. At her first appearance in the bookshop, she is not at the end of that long journey, but at the beginning. I suspect the break-ups were a lot messier than the filmmakers are letting on, especially with this couple. The closest reference I can find to the eponymous title is when Eivind almost confesses to dumping Sunniva simply because it was becoming too exhausting living with her personal jihad. There is no infidelity in the chapter labeled cheating, but that doesn’t negate it happening in subsequent chapters. An extreme long shot of two stick figures outside a building that quietly suggests Julia jumped directly from apartment A to apartment E.

Nice details? There is some irresistible romance in the film. They even throw in the old cliché from the epic love story when two lovers, doomed to never see each again look back wistfully while parting one last time, but never catch each other’s look. Top marks goes to the editing which weaves in a fair number of deliberate visual and thematic couplets, this is almost like a motif of double beats within the story. At the wedding reception, Julia and Eivind share a bathroom together; a luminous allusion to the pee-stick moment when a young couple confirms they are pregnant. In the hospital room when Julia says she is happy, she goes to the window and turns, the light catches the button* on her blue jeans, the two sides of life stare each other down.

During the break-up scene, the sound of squealing children (are they laughing at their expense?) is heard. The audience realizes for the first time, if they were to go to Aksel’s favorite window in the apartment, the one with the unopenable, antique glass, there would be, below in the street, a playground teeming with children and guardians. When Sunniva stomps directly towards the health and well being section in the book store, Eivind sits quietly in his dinghy pulled along in her imperial wake; a nice little introductory summation of their relationship.

Two nice foreshadows: during the television interview promoting his movie, a feminista has dug up some older material, a few of his raunchier efforts from 20 years ago; an easy takedown in the era of PC mobbing. Watching the interview Julia registers the oddity; Aksel can intellectually parse anything, so how come he’s having so much trouble swatting away a simple journalistic ambush? Wow, he is really off his game. After work, while Julia is still processing a phone call about Aksel’s latest status report, the helpful crosswalk sensor times out like a heart monitor at the first traffic light.

Notice the little hiccup in the communication when Aksel—aware he is about to fall in love with an inappropriate woman, states it’s better to end the relationship, because putting a pillow over it now will be less horrible than having to do it later. Fine. Julia agrees, then does an about-face on the landing outside his apartment and returns to his door. Falling immediately into each other’s arms again, they both assume they have just extracted major concessions from the other. She thinks he has agreed put his life on hold for her, just because she is so wantonly fabulous. He thinks she has just committed to the the whole kitten caboodle, including the line of baby grands—notice the maternal ambush (his brother has four kids) at the summer cottage vacation.

The gorgeous central metaphor of the film, the euphoric run through the city has other aspects. This could also be a visual projection of her ambivalence towards motherhood; since they overlap in the story, notice the subtle allusion between a pregnancy and a cancer (for her) diagnosis. As long as Julia is without child she is incomplete as woman, and remains outside the natural cycles of life.

The city is a bustling museum with a million living masterpieces; each person knows who they are and exactly what they want out of life. They don’t do insignificance, they are not time wasters but live epic, larger than life dramas; they eat buckets of beans for breakfast and never break wind. This stands her essential dilemma on its head; at this point in her story, rather than hustling after her unique path in life, if anything, Julia would imagine herself as the forgotten statue in the park, collecting tribute from the pigeons.

During the scene when Aksel vents his disappointment with a ridiculous movie adaptation that has almost deliberately removed all the originality from his work, tellingly whenever he talks about the iconic freedom that his cartoon creation embodies, the camera is always focused on Julia. The sub-text being her struggle, she also doesn’t want to be domesticated or become a new and improved version of herself for easier consumption.

The film belongs to Renate Reinsve; this is her baby. It’s a bit heartbreaking the odds are against this actress ever having another monumental screen role. The director is unafraid to allow her to claim the character as her own creation and fully inhabit the role. All the great little character moments appear to be her own improvisations. There’s a scene when she jogs past a couple locked in a passionate embrace at the bottom of some stairs . . . spotting a mistake, she runs back and ever the budding director, places the woman’s hand in a more metaphorical location, then sets off again, shooting a wink at the real director standing with camera crew—a throwaway for the gag reel that actually made it into the final cut.

I should probably add the part-time thespian (and part-time doctor in real life) Daniel Andersen Lie in the acting accolades as Julia’s annoyingly articulate, cerebral foil. The first time she sees him in the hospital after a year or so, Aksel is Aksel; heroically flaying his fists about in a rage, pummeling mercilessly an unseen colossus . . . no wait, he has head phones on . . . he’s listening to, or rather drumming along with a rock song. This is new, when he used to do this in his underwear in their apartment, he used to sedately lay down the bass. Spotting her hesitation about her pregnancy, he already knows before she does that the boyfriend is toast. During their final break-up, Aksel was suddenly staggered by the realization that she wasn’t even saying goodbye to him. Because Julia could never get closure with her father, the old man wouldn’t even bother to show up for a scheduled intervention about his failing as a paternal presence. She turns Aksel into a surrogate and he has take all the lumps meant for him so she can move on emotionally. Clever girl. When life gives you lemons; you throw them back.

Near the end of the film I flashed on a few of Jack Nicholson’s great roles; Jack Gittes; David Locke; Randle McMurphy; and I have no hesitation in admitting Julia Pederson into this pantheon of great movie characters. But she doesn’t have to do anything extraordinary simply because living her little life is compelling enough.

Signs of progress? The flippant narrator disappears and Julia takes over the narration of her own life near the end of the film. One feels, the next man in her life will be a tailored choice; he will have to move into her life and into her apartment. In keeping with her active character arc, Julia would have ended the pregnancy herself but an unwanted miscarriage allows the filmmakers to finesse the audience into believing misfortune crashed down upon her head and gives them an excuse to pull out their hankies and commiserate with her misfortune that she only got a taste of motherhood.

The same enigmatic look that began the film ends it, an elegant bookend. Now as a professional photographer, at the end of a busy workday, she lays out all those fabulous fleeting moments she has gathered from the outside world, we leave her as she sets out on her daily euphoric run through the material, selecting the good, the bad, and the dazzling. I’m curious what wonders Julia has captured.

The Worst Person in the World —★★★ 1/2

* Depending what level of control you think the filmmakers are operating at, the button would be the same size as a five or six week old fetus.
Last edited by thracian dawg; 02-26-23 at 01:53 PM.



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Frau Blücher
02-03-22
In the Valley of Elah (2007) — Haggis

Running on empty

I had a strange, immediate recoil from the title of the film: whatever dangers are lurking in this valley or wherever its geopolitical location, it can only be the opposite of something hale and healthy.

I liked the visual cues of loss and absence in the early part of the film. The uncluttered e-mail account; the silent telephone; the Salvadoran janitor, so new to the country he flies the stars and stripes upside down. In Hank’s motel room he rolls out of bed and drops his feet next to his shined and polished shoes ready to get cracking on the day; a subtle allusion to the fallen soldier field ceremony. There was one, then two phantoms in Mike’s barracks room.

The sly set-ups: they subtly emphasize Mike’s credit card information a few times, so when the statement finally arrives on Emily’s desk near the end, She sniffs at it, then wearily drops it onto the pile of files on her desk. You are aware of it there, waiting to become important. When Hank spots Emily heading into the 24 hour laundromat, he jumps up and dashes to the dryer to put on a shirt that still needs to tumble a while longer, but it would be a little unseemly for him to be standing in front of a strange woman in only his under shirt. So later on, the decorous Hank wouldn’t have been idling in a strip club, but the story needed to plant an important eye witness.

The story is held together by two active character arcs. The first one, Emily’s relationship with her all-male co-workers at her new job; she is being hazed for being a girl. The chair next her desk is reserved for clowns. Her immediate superior, Lieutenant Burke selects all the cases with an ounce of snicker and drops them in her in-box so the boys can sit back and laugh at her expense. This situation isn’t without peril, if she can’t beat back this ribbing it could harden into prejudice; and if no one wants to work with the ditz, her future in the office could be ruined.

The latest menace to society is escorted to her desk in handcuffs: a nefarious chicken mangler is brought in still wearing his hair net. Fed up, she confronts the detectives behind her in the corner, scratching the ground and clucking like hens. A dismembered body was found last night and the entire department was dispatched; Emily gives her reading of that crime, pointing out the errors in reasoning and judgement and walks away. Their stunned, shocked silence reveals she got it right. This is the first ping in her character arc; they threw her another bean ball but this time Emily hit it out of the park.

The second ping is when Hank sits down in her clown chair, his is a murder case, so she is out of the doghouse and into major crime. Another one is when she returns from a arrest detail injured, she can be a bad ass in the field if she has to be. The final ping in her arc is when one of her tormentors stops to wish her good night before leaving, she has been accepted into the squad.

Hank, the Tennessee truck driver has the more difficult character journey, he’s going in the opposite direction. He’s in town to find his son’s sorry AWOL ass and drag him back to active duty. His immediate dramatic need: he can’t solve the case from the outside, he needs access to raw information, or at least an accomplice inside the office. It’s interesting that Hank masquerades as a disinterested observer hired by the family to look into their missing soldier. The first chink in his arc is when a manager of a strip club outs him: are you related to this punk? His momentary confusion: my son? conduct unbecoming?

Mike’s cell phone trophies of his work routine in country are frazzled and fragmentary, like the only thing he left behind in this world was his pain and his personal nightmares. Each recovered video is another drop out of his and by extension, Hank’s reputation. The monster his son had become will be the secret stone he has to carry around for the rest of his life.

There was an immediate banter and complicity between Hank and Emily. As she laboring over another boring misdemeanor at work; she sighs and lets fall her pen . . . then ambles over to the desk where the murder case is, both the glossy crime scene photos and her eyes glisten like diamonds; at the same time at the army base, Hank looks down on a meagerly dressed autopsy table while the coroner reads his report. Later that afternoon, Emily secretly “rescues” the files, before they dump unceremoniously (the military doesn’t want their help or their work product) in the garbage, taking the grisly murder case home with her, like first prize in a lottery.

I loved that Emily has a lot of street smarts and undeclared ambition. It takes balls to go to the chef and demand he claw back a homicide case for a department that has a 70% failure rate in solving them. She immediately perceives the new lay of the land that comes with the case, the old boy’s network, the glass ceiling hidden behind the office politics; they could sabotage her first case just out of pure malice, which pushes her towards Hank as an informal mentor and ally. The jurisdictional shift also works in his favor, he would have been shut out as an meddling old fart if it had it remained with the military.

There is one gorgeous shot in the film. Because Hank is incapable of putting words together to form complete sentences, he makes his wife fly all the way from Tennessee to stand in the hallway outside of a coroner’s office for a teaspoon of nothing. He gently supports her as she staggers away from the window (she wasn’t allowed inside) and down the hallway. The camera watches them until they stop in the distance and collapse into each other arms, the corridor suddenly becomes a swirling hall of mirrors where all the structures echo the child-sized coffin draped in white linen in the foreground.

Another nice scene is when Emily drives out to the spot where the body was discovered behind the David and Goliath (D & G) gun shop. She stands next to her car imaging what happened, replaying all the possible scenario’s over and over, trying to get it straight in her head. Unaware the most compelling detail is right there in front of her: the time of death, moving it forward three or four hours will change everything.

There are two wonderful film quotes. I loved the Chinatown reference with the Kitty kat bandage across Emily’s nose. Watching Hank drive up to the airport and pick up his wife, I suddenly noticed the tool box in the truck bed and immediately flashed on that old Franco Nero western, you know, the one where he lugs his ammunition locker behind him the entire film. With that coffin-like thing behind him, it was never going to be a rescue mission, Hank was always there to bring home a body.

An important catch in the film is that these are all economic wastelands. At the end of his army career Hank was a first rate investigator, but now he’s a truck driver. Emily says, I don’t have a career man, I get a pay check. The young working class (wo)men go into the military because there is nothing else. With an army base full thousands of bored, midnight warriors, entrepreneurs can make an easy score with strip clubs. Hank gets a priceless bit of information from a cocktail waitress, at her age, still shuttling between several gin joints. Also cobbling together part time jobs are family men trying to keep the family unit up and running until the end of the month; becoming in the process either literal or figurative MIA’s. But the sudden apparition of an old time patriarch brings the room to order; a little heart to heart with a father figure is enough to induce unbearable remorse in two boyish men.

Near the end of the film, during an idle chit chat with the lad who supplied him the jumper cables, there’s a poignant hold as Hank suddenly shoots Corporal Penning a piercing look of recognition, he’s found his killer. Maybe two weeks ago he would have said: soldier, is there anything you want to add? But now, his personal identity will be shattered by the answer so he holds his tongue. No glory in the finish, he lets Emily walk it into the end zone for the touchdown. Hank can’t muster the courage to ask the question . . . just yet.

Although a solid story, a few of the connections needed another turn of the screw. I thought the red herrings were a little overdone; the whole justification for the gangland angle was that Mike spoke a little Spanish, turns out he was dating a Hispanic enchilada before his deployment. Mike is killed on Halloween night and Armistice Day passes without mention. I didn’t quite know what to make of all the burn trauma and its repetition in the story, except maybe this was some obscure allusion to the ancient tribal world where the hunters made fiery offerings to the God of war seeking his benevolent protection and continued blessing.

There’s also two unfinished scenes. Hank and Emily have a last coffee together in the restaurant before he returns home. Emily says her son is now bugging her full time for a sling shot. Hank should have been at the ready, and pulled a small necklace box out of his pocket and placed it on the counter before her. What’s that? A sling shot. Both his sons now only exist in framed photographs, Hank will never play with his grandchildren or his great-grandchildren, I think that would have be compulsive on his part. Near the end of the film, Mike finds his stolen football, but they don’t dwell on it’s recovery.

All the stealth in the film is in the astonishing bedtime story. The director can’t openly confront the sacred illusions or tread on hallowed ground, he can only suggest where the truth lies. Hank can’t make heads or tails of the lavish fantasy novel the boy has given to read aloud so instead he enlightens him about his name origins. He thrusts forward two meaty paws in the telling of his tale of darkness: two mighty kings, each with a bloodthirsty army behind him are on opposing hills with a besieged city below them in the valley. Every day the one of the armies jumps into their armored trucks and drives down the hill into the city and spends the day with their imperial right of passage and no-stop caravans trying to pick a fight or even find an enemy combatant. This suggestion is as far as he can go without destroying the entertainment value or ruining the box office for the film.

To finish up, I recently read (forget about the principle) just the interest on America’s debt is now 660 billion dollars a year and climbing, it goes without saying that if that ungodly amount doesn’t make the hairs stand straight up on your head, then a trillion dollar vortex won’t crook an eyebrow either, but the party is clearly over. Without the money for bridge inspectors, the bridges collapse. Without the scratch for democratic services, they vanish. You can see this somewhat with the doberman girl; she is trying to get her husband into counseling to deal with his PTSD, unaware in this new era of disappearing budgets this means purging as many users on technicalities outright, or delaying health care for as long as possible. Both she and her husband pay for this simple lack of basic human necessities with their lives.

In the final analysis, the film is a rather grim, unflinching look ahead at a post hegemonic America. There is a recurring visual motif of a man who has grown old sitting in a chair in a hallway waiting for some official to come (who never will) and put him out of his misery. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, from here on in, everyone dies of neglect.

In the Valley of Elah —★★★★
Last edited by thracian dawg; 11-10-23 at 09:12 PM.



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07-06-23
Oleanna (1994) — Mamet

Getting schooled

The story is three consecutive meetings between a college student (having a little trouble grasping the complexities of a course) with the teacher who teaches it. So the story comes apart easily into three identifiable sections. Adapted from a stage play, the act breaks are kind of important since they signal seismic changes occurring off-screen during the intervals.

The intervals are made up of a few pillow shots; in the ones before the last meeting; the student has taken an excerpt from her official complaint and has it blown it up to the size of a bedroom wall poster and plasters it all over the college. How well she has assimilated (one of) his teachings and even surpassed the master is illustrated in that gesture. The visual origin to this is found in the framed inspirational passage he has nailed to the wall behind his desk, during formal teacher/student interviews, this would almost be a thought balloon above his head. The professor actually says that teaching is a kind of performance; perhaps taking it so far as to deliberately throw in theatrical poses and pauses in his lectures before catapulting another pull quote into the stratosphere. He considers himself a rising academic stud on campus; it doesn’t hurt that he loves the sound of his own voice and the cut of his jib.

The typical reflex when adapting a stage play is to obliterate the proscenium arch with camera motion. If the director wanted to be even more on the nose and obvious (especially during the first act) he could have simply broken the fourth wall. His office has high ceilings and the bookcase at the end of the office takes advantage of that, it has a rolling ladder. Okay professor, look directly into the camera and say . . .

“Education is a social ladder.”

A few other professorial turns somewhat course related.

“American elections have degenerated to the point where billionaires openly purchase personal political power during free market auctions.”

“As a social system, capitalism has a 99% failure rate”

But the director eases back on course load and begins moving into the sub-textual matter at hand, the nature of their relationship, or the lack of one.

During the first encounter, the professor interrupts a greatest hits summary to dash off to his desk and capture another witty aphorism before he forgets it. Looking up, the student has also recorded every mumble and stumble in her own notebook, like an acolyte. He takes it as a compliment.

“Gosh golly, She is hanging off my every word.”

An error of inattention. If you’ve ever had someone secretly record your conversation then play it back for you, your first observation is usually, good grief, what am I? A blithering idiot! If the pupil has been doing this for the entire semester, she has squirreled away quite a few fallacious gems and gestures that won’t bear up under examination.

Another convention the director takes from the theater is the animation in the symbols and props, they can change meaning depending on the act. For instance, the connecting room next to his office is a busy teacher’s lounge without any teachers during the first meeting. Then it becomes a secretive disciplinary chamber where offensive behavior is formally sanctioned. In the third act, it’s a janitorial closet where all the school’s ceremonial cups and trophies have their tarnish rubbed out and restored to a dreamy excellence, then locked behind glass cases and forgotten for another couple of years.

One key prop in the film is the telephone. It’s almost a tool for miscommunication with it’s deceptive, disruptive messaging. In the second meeting, when he dashes off to the phone, the student remembers him dumping of her during the first and no longer waits around, attending to her own business, figuratively disappearing from his office so that he has to search for her when he returns. In the last meeting, although she is standing right in front of him, any communication with him is almost hopeless. For all intents, the phone is now a symbol of alienation, she is the one phoning in the changes to his life, not because she thinks he can hear them but she needs legal confirmation that she at least has sent them, he should have the courtesy to least pick up.

If the student was to talk to the fourth wall, the one-two punch near the end of the first act belong to her. They were on the cusp of a success, they had almost succeeded in hammering out a working relationship. He had revealed a painful moment from his childhood and she is about to reciprocate with a traumatic event from her own life and reveal her own motivational matrix. But the phone rings and he hot foots it to other room, leaving her sitting alone in the darkness. When she emerges into the light of his office.

“Do I really count for so little? Have I just been discarded?”

She watches the drama playing out across the room. The real estate agent has padded the final bill and tried to sneak in a few outrageous charges. Cheater. The professor springs into action, leave it right there, get out of the house. If this little scam artist wants trouble, bring it on, baby. If you mess with the bull, you get the horns. The next time we see her, we will be in court. She is watching him deal with this crisis, one can almost see the wheels begin to turn inside her head.

“Litigation is a tried and true companion.”

His friend Jerry finally draws a picture for him. The entire afternoon has been one long running gag. They were deliberately trying to get him excited. Oh. He promptly gathers his stuff; except this time, he forgets to do the emotional repair, wrongly assuming they have a working foundational understanding. She stands on the floor next to the ladder, still waiting for the process to begin. He dashes off to his next appointment.

I loved the idea that an emotional connect is a tiny thing you make imperfect with your own hands. Since they are two wary strangers circling each other, they first have to build something together before they can use any shorthand with it. In time it may become rock solid and even develop into a real friendship, but at it’s inception, its wholly made up of suggestions of emotional tendrils; so ethereal is this clutch, the ring of a telephone may damage it.

The professor instinctively seems to know that their bond has been severed, each time he returns to the student, he has to do an emotional repair for his absence and begin the process over again.

But the suave professor was never really that to begin with, there is something underwhelming about him. There is something pretentious in making his own opus an obligatory purchase and read. The cover to his soon to be academic masterpiece: A bite of the Apple appears at the second meeting as a framed work of art. During the first meeting, while he remains mobile and erect, he repeatedly demands—sometimes sharply, for the pupil to take a seat, subconsciously maintaining her subordinate place. In the second meeting, he subconsciously slams the window and shuts the doors, barring her escape from the room; in addition to wiping his hands of this annoyance like a bearded Lady Macbeth. In the last meeting the student chooses where she wants to make a stand and he has to dance around her talking points. His questionable decorating choices: why is there a love seat in his office?

By the way, how old is this movie? There isn’t a cell phone or computer in sight. This definitely belongs to a different epoch. Being politically correct was only a nascent thing way back when this play was first penned. Digital tar and feather (+1) policing herd conformity hadn’t even been invented yet. It certainly was nowhere near the mind boggling mediocrity of our current academic world where college professors, accidentally uttering a sting word in class, can now be fired for felonious assault.

The film is sprinkled with numerous mirror moments when a character repeats a phrase or gesture from the other or ironically repeats themself. They both seem to agree that a middling student is someone who repeats verbatim what a teacher has taught but the exceptional scholar disguises the same thesis in the brillance of their own words. If the teacher wanted to set fire to her mind, maybe going so far as to give her the ability to ask the wrong questions, or having the audacity to pose them in public . . . mission accomplished. He then grumpily complains that she is nothing but a little tramp, strolling around a library with a flask of kerosene and a book of matches.

There’s a great insert during the last meeting when he’s hunting for another another smoke. He opens his desk drawer. Stuvescent cigarettes? The advertising logo for these is something along the lines of: the whole world is at your fingertips. Nine out of ten megalomaniacs prefer this brand. Or is this just the penultimate act of a condemned man?

During their first encounter, they were walking and talking in the hallway and stopped by a sign-in desk and the student picked up a paper airplane taken from a pile of the fliers on the desk. He saw it and improvised a metaphor for her. A day dreaming pilot is snapped back to reality by an alert that the flight is malfunctioning. I am stupid and I fail at everything. The pilot compounds the crisis by making it worse, now several warning alerts are going off and the plane is falling out of the sky. I am so stupid; I am going to crash my jet. If that’s what he thinks, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The marks you are getting in your classes are only descriptions of your (in)ability to assimilate scholarly dross, nothing more, they don’t define your person. Negative thinking is a recipe for failure. He hands the doomed passenger jet back to her. The secret is: you have to deliberately break the cycle by reorienting yourself towards the specific task at hand. Remember his dismissive gloat in the teacher’s lounge.

“The committee will find an index of my immorality”

This was also a painful personal recollection. Growing up, as a young man the professor had a dyslexic aim where nothing ever worked out the way he wanted it to; he was the original catastrophic kid. Then he became aware of and rejected (an astonishing personal achievement for anyone) the dysfunctional emotional paradigm of his childhood. So why did he save that flyer? Was it something extracurricular? If the metaphor is now “live” he is the one sitting in captain’s chair pushing all the wrong buttons, locking his 747 into a death spiral; is he about to plow his great accomplishment into a remote mountainside?

In conclusion, what’s up with the title? A woman’s name? She (or he) never appears in the film. A magical place from a line in a folk song? There is not a fiddle or banjo in sight. Some sort of a scam or cheat? It is never mentioned. Based on your own interpretation of the story, you have to supply the ultimate meaning. The film is brimming with confidence, the director knows his audience won’t recoil from anything in the film and they can handle the assigned chore. For me, it’s the distinct linear bruise left from the contact with a billy club, truncheon, or in this case . . . bookcase runner. I also saw this mainly as tale of transference; the two characters sort of switch places. The pupil becomes increasingly combative and dismissive; while the master looks increasingly desperate and disheveled; in the last meeting, he is maintaining several unfinished drinky-poos in the office and smokes like a chimney. Notice that he has been mortally wounded; a true pedagogue, he bleeds not, so much as drips fountain pen blue.

Near the end, the professor strikes a pose holding the black chair above his head (another tenure gift) to make a final dramatic summation, then thinks better of it. Instead he sets it on the floor and slumps down in it. Although there are only two speaking roles in the film, at the end, one can almost hear his wife pleading with her husband to come to the phone.

Oleanna —



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07-06-23
Maborosi (1995) — Kore-eda

The turning away

The set-up: Terpsichore, a young mother living in Osaka, Japan; Ikuo, her husband; and Yuichi, their three month old son. The film begins with a recurring nightmare; in a moment of inattention as a young girl, her charge wandered off during a session of elder-sitting, although she whispers the dream is about her grandmother’s escapade; watching it, it is more about meeting (still together 17 years later) the love of her life the same day.

There is an evocative cut following this sequence where the sleeping man, her beloved Ikuo, cycles home on a new bike using the same nocturnal bridge from her dreams.

I liked that the title of film either didn’t get a splashy English brand or a suitable translation was never even attempted. A definition shows up near the end of the film when hubby mentions his father, returning home one day when he still went out on the boat, spotted some hypnotic lights in the distance. It took all his strength he said to return his little fishing boat to the safety of shore and not investigate. On the open sea, the quick see the maboroshi as a premonition of death; the doomed (or the stubborn realists) are drawn towards the light like moths to a dancing flame.

Although a rare maritime phenomenon the exclusive realm of solitary sailors and fish mongers; on dry land, this is a routine urban fixture. Throbbing advertising signage is deliberately crafted to bedevil the eye and rake in all your disposable income. Warnings clang out at railway crossings; a level crossing barrier descends to keep you captive to the flashing danger. The way the rail overpasses in the neighborhood hold a spelunk of darkness before returning to the brightness of the day; the room heaters are another suggestive orb of warmth and color. When Terpsichore (a decidedly feeble attempt to find an English equivalent of her Japanese name, Yumiko) shows up early for date night at her husband’s work place, she blows on the glass outside and leaves a ethereal haiku on the window pane. One scene has her visiting mother putting her son into bed after his bath and a strange light bounces on the wall behind her, a clear sign she says that it’s time to move on and find another husband. Terp(sichore) tries her best, there is a nice shot where a few heads turn in a market place to catch the young widow cycling past on her bike, the high point of their boring bachelor days.

There is a nice dichotomy through-out the film. Before and after; Ikuo saw luminous celestial javelins hurtling across the night sky; Terp hears each roaring train shuttling the standing room only commuters towards their various destinations in the daylight, although now she seldom bothers to register them visually. The mundane to and fro of the traffic is analogous to the crashing of waves, in turn the roaring of waves on a rocky shoreline suggest indifference to fools and their tragic drama; the lapping in the launch in front of her house, something missed in the tumult of her busy day, suggesting imperceptible strokes washing her sadness and grief.

When Terp and her son leave Osaka and arrive at their new destination. A train lumbers into the distant station, an abandoned railway track in the foreground suggests she has come to the end of her journey, a dead end. After the long, exhausting trip, they shuffle into the train station’s shadowy waiting room. A second shot has them waiting patiently on a bench with a suggestion of light on the wall behind them. A third shot reveals the warm and inviting sunshine is just a stone’s throw away from the open aired waiting room. When the tardy other half dashes up to them and out of breathe, the train station celebrates the sudden creation of a new family with a loud herald. She has been spun into her new life with a three shot 180° swirl and she hasn’t even noticed.

At first Terp is a little hesitant in her new surroundings, there is a visual motif of hallway shots away from the front entrance of the house. One morning her daughter sits on the bench to slip on her shoes and says goodbye . . . in response, Terp is pulled out of the dark recesses to her natural position (as someone who watches over her loved ones) to the windowed front door and the walk outside to wish her schoolgirl a fine day.

Yuichi-chan is a nice counterpoint. He and his new grandfather immediately become thick as thieves. He thinks nothing of new adventures and ranging far and wide. One scene has a family friend finding the children on the other side of town and chauffeuring them back home. The little boy enjoys the simple pirate pleasures of claiming an abandoned boat as his own or skipping across an overcast day. He marvels how much @#\\*&?%! land there is in the countryside, his new big sister gently corrects him, the fathoms of the sea far outnumber the walks.

The new house is huge. At first I wondered how rich is this guy? Then I noticed the dining room is repurposed as the evening parlour, and the empty day room (the magic window with the endless seascapes) doubles as the master bedroom. I liked that her new home was a bit of a cipher; with all those sliding walls, it’s hard to get a read on the actual space. Another dwelling is placed in front of the house, so it is always partially obscured, save for a single establishing shot; the house is rendered as falling petals from an unseen bouquet of roses.

Although the director had done three TV documentaries before this, I feel his first theatrical film effort still has the journeyman blues. Hirokazu borrows the classic cliché of a rain splattered window reflected across a face to suggest an emotionally blocked character, but this is slightly misplaced, this happens on the way to the police station, rather than after she got the confirmation her husband was dead. The opening sequence intimates her grandmother wandered off to a horrible death; Terp is still traumatized by it years later, but no further information is forthcoming. He also missed a nice shot; when Terp and her son are out shopping in the market near the end, they stop by Tomeno’s fish stall for a chat, her son scampers off to check out the bikes at the bike shop down the lane. There should have been a shot of her reacting and turning . . . to an insert of Yuichi discovering the bell on the handle bars of an adult bike.

One sour note in the film was the old print I saw, a blu-ray version may remedy this, or even waiting for the criterion treatment to bump up your enjoyment of the film. Although the director is obviously using natural shadows and light to evoke emotional depth; there was a level of involuntary abstraction in certain scenes; take the opening dream sequence; one of the shots has Terp running off at night, but at the top of the bridge she merges into the darkness . . . did she run away and join her grandmother at her sea-side village or enter an alternate multiverse portal? No idea. There is also a scene late in the film after Terp returns pensive and brooding from a trip to Osaka. A pulsating silver line bounces up and down like a pool cue about to stroke a shot in the corner pocket of a black table, then a window shutter opens and she lets the cold winter air flood into the bedroom.

Having a little spare time on hand before her brother’s wedding in Osaka; Terp revisits the old neighborhood. She hears a bicycle ring, she involuntarily smiles and turns . . . no wait, that can’t be Iku-chan, he has disappeared. The ring quiets her steps. Visiting their little café she is told her husband stopped off that night and the proprietor remembers him as his bubbly self and going off in kind. She is sundered by the information. How could he be happy if he was going to deliberately walk in front of train ten minutes later? This becomes a unbearable marble rolling round and round in her head; was Ikuo looking forward to abandoning her and his son? Her husband notices she returns from the trip in a deep funk. She begins to withdraw to the center, the windowless evening parlour where she merely sits patiently waiting for her stragglers to return to her. Terp begins to doubt her magnificent eyes and isn’t happy about it.

I would love to declare there is an active opposing visual axis in each of the two parts of the story. The best example being the bullet trains that constantly streak past during the day and long into the night; and conversely a recurring motif of tipsy verticals (the traveling shots) in her move to the coast. The truth is it’s probably a coin toss; metropolitan Osaka (Japan’s third largest city) is a dense urban space that is almost by definition rectilinear and the countryside has an absence of straight lines . . . except for two: the hard edge where heaven and earth meets on the constant horizon and the bold broken line of the harbor break in front of her house. The best Osaka exception is the vertical interstice from her apartment; an advertising sign isn’t flush with the building, so she can spot her husband coming down the lane, this is Terp’s visual rosary and one that she checks obsessively; she is never caught unaware; she pounces on Ikuo the moment he arrives home. Terp steals a little bell of happiness from the neck of a teddy bear in their favorite café, so she bells the cat, she can also hear the jingle of his arrival. Maborosi, rather than a film to be watched, is more a film you should listen to; the music has a delightful retro 80s* feel. For some reason, I always flashed on this during the musical passages in film.


Second to last paragraph. Whatever my own wishful thinking, there is a definite synthesis of the two visual axes in the resolution, the ocean becomes an aquatic conveyance; a funeral procession (an ambulant horizontal) made up of individual vertical mourners. A slow motion echo to the commuter trains that flew past their apartment in Osaka. Plus a reverse ghost image of the story’s trauma, a lone figure walks quietly on a set of tracks about to be annihilated from behind by a luminous screaming commuter train.

Last paragraph. Kore-eda really knows his Ozu; priming the resolution is one of his patented devices. Terp waits for the bus one day; lost in day dream, she imagines her first husband cycling up to her on this lonely country road. So compelling is this fantasy, she doesn’t get on the bus but stays behind listen to this phantom ringing in her ears. Gradually she is pulled out of her dream world, the wind has been carrying the faint chimes of funeral procession, each mourner (an echo to the hand claps at her wedding reception) rings a little bell. She is almost magnetically compelled to them. Long after all the other mourners have departed the scene (notice the gorgeous metaphor where the pyre is merely a portal, the departed are cleansed by fire and merely step into the afterlife) Terp stays behind staring at the glimmering diamond on a rocky, wind swept finger, her own personal maboroshi.

Maborosi —
Last edited by thracian dawg; 07-06-23 at 03:15 PM.

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