31 Days of Cinema, Days Twenty-Nine, Thirty and Thirty-One: “Yi Yi” | “Pather Panchali” | “Winter Sleep”

The opening of Yi Yi—the three-hour swansong of the late Taiwanese New Wave master Edward Yang—had me worried: the character introductions are uneven, the musical theme is saccharine. But the film quickly recovered after that. It traces one year in which a well-off Taipei family faces crises of communication, trust, maturation, and the major transitions that we like to package into things called milestones. The father, NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), heads to Tokyo to cement two relationships: one with the Japanese software developer Ota (a tender yet serious Issei Ogata)—with whom he talks in halting English, since neither knows the other’s native tongue and English is a global force—and one with an old flame, Sherry (Su-Yun Ko). His daughter, Ting-Ting, has a crush on Fatty (Pang Chang Yu), the moody boyfriend of her best friend, Lili (Meng-Chin Lin). Her little brother, Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang)—no doubt named for the filmmaker—is precocious and wise for his age, a fact that the adults around him don’t appreciate as much as they should. NJ’s mother is comatose but back at home; doctor’s orders are to keep talking with her as if she were conscious to keep her uplifted in case she does wake up. The family can say anything they want to her yet can’t expect reward from it. She is a vessel for catharsis, and one of the film’s chief themes is whether environment, or at least an unconscious entity, can have a tone, an emotion.

Several scenes occur in an empty room or in a room into which innocuous action is filtered, with the central narrative developing offstage in the actors’ urgent voices. There is a disconnect between sight and sound, yet also an esteem for and an effort to capture urban space unfettered by human presence or perception—an artifact and a memory that will withstand the most pressing concerns of the mortals on its periphery. We’re always on the periphery with these characters, not allowed to get too involved, because we’ve got three hours to hustle through, yet we grow quite attached to them. The standard rituals that form life’s milestones—the wedding, the firstborn birth, the anniversary—are all on display here, but Yang does not use them as clichés, rather as defense mechanisms by which people stave off the stress of transition, insomuch that by the time of the funeral that concludes the film, they’re exhausted and have no walls left to burn. There’s some commentary on globalization—McDonald’s, Coco-Cola, the English language—and we wonder why such staples in society have to promote themselves so aggressively when we all know what they are already (to foist their power, of course, in particular over youths), yet Yang’s view of this urban global culture is always impartial, leaving the people there to set the mood. Fatty does collapse into cliché—as he becomes the mortality-obsessed teen turned homicidal—and I was disappointed in his arc. But the film ends strong, and Yang-Yang’s climactic speech is undeniable.

Grade: A-

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As with most though not all debut films, Pather Panchali—the world’s introduction to West Bengali master Satyajit Ray—has its shortcomings, though it was and is quite an auspicious debut, especially considering the immense poverty and dearth of resources that it was made under and depicts. Based on a novel by B. Bandhopadhyay, and kicking off the filmmaker’s Apu trilogy, the film chronicles the efforts of Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) to care for her two children, Apu (Subir Banerjee) and Durga (Runki Banerjee and Uma Dasgupta) and her aged cousin Indir—played by Chunibala Devi, in a performance so great, so minimalist and sexless and stoic, that I thought she was a man—in the absence of her husband Harihar (Kanu Banerjee), a poet who goes off to the city for work. Note that none of the Banerjees were related, yet their family unit is plausible throughout, so you could be forgiven for mistaking the coincidence. The story is built from vignettes that are connected perhaps a bit too loosely. There’s a contrast between the urban-industrial and the rural-pastoral that goes undeveloped; one scene set in a field of train tracks and power lines is supposed to suffice. I could have used more of that.

Granted, there is plenty of contrast between wealth and destitution, as is evidenced by Durga’s incessant impulse to steal fruits from the orchard of the family’s neighbor and (in a smattering of irony that I hope I am recalling correctly) once-landlord. And the vignettes host some truly beautiful moments: Apu’s introduction, which is constructed ominously enough to foretell a later death; the aforementioned train; an interaction with a candy vendor; a bathing scene; a play-within-the-play; a brutal monsoon; and an extended, impressionistic shot of a cow standing in the middle of ruins right after it. The photography is by Subrata Mitra, also debuting, and it is baffling that he had no experience with a camera before this. The film’s testament to innate talent over pedigree—to earning a living off artistic merit and not off playing to identifiable tropes, even while not everyone can succeed at that, much less use that to escape poverty—is thus very genuine. I hesitate to give away too much about the film, as it ends in tragedy (the monsoon is the least of it), and it is the sort of tragedy you must feel rather than be told about. Ray constructs this catastrophe with long takes, with set pieces of viscous silence and suspense, and the payoff is loud and vigorous. If there is one element that makes this film worth watching, however, it’s the music of Ravi Shankar. It doesn’t take long to see how he got famous. It’s stunning how broad an emotional range that man was able to create using just a handful of sitars and percussion. The soundtrack here is an aural feast.

Grade: A-

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The last three days of my July challenge saw me going west across Asia, from the Taiwan of Yi Yi to Ray’s India, finally ending with Winter Sleep in Turkey, on the cusp of Europe inasmuch as I was on the edge of the month, looking into an August in which I would not be burdened with thirty-one films. There is something sacred about an ending, something furtive and ethereal about having gone through a film—or a group of films—as a rite of passage, and emerging with the awareness of how it culminates. Spoilers cannot suffice for this feeling. Much of these emotions in fact were conjured by the Cappadocia depicted in this film, a borderland of modern buildings and houses carved into jagged, imbalanced, unstable towers of rock, a clash between nature and man, old and new, tradition and liberty. The most ostentatious of these constructions is an inn, the Hotel Othello, run by Aydin (the superb Haluk Bilginer), a retired actor who spends his days writing hot air for the local news (on his rare Mac laptop, no less), extracting rent from the villagers, and insisting to himself that he will start writing his history of the Turkish theatre very soon. Towards the beginning, he’s riding shotgun in a truck when an indignant kid chucks a stone at his window. The entire plot emanates from that single moment.

Adapted by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (who won the Palme d’Or for this, after several attempts) from some Chekhov stories, Sleep runs at over three hours and has been accused of wheel spinning. I disagree with that sentiment. The story uses as an axle two confrontations in its middle act—one between Aydin and his blasé sister Necla (Demet Akbag), the other between Aydin and his younger, more humane and simmering ex-wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen)—that are almost twenty minutes apiece. These scenes and others felt much more to me like real life than contrived cinema. People on different sides of a coin try to get their points across, things boil, they reach a détente and fall silent, then one of them can’t resist muttering a riposte, and the other’s passions grow inflamed, and it all starts up again and repeats itself…and so on. Tensions play out in the void between words, when words are calculated, as much as when they are spoken, and when they are, they aren’t always clear or accurately chosen or what ought to be said. Writing and acting scenes like that is a hundred times easier said than done, and Ceylan and his ensemble pull it off time and again. The effect is more hooking and exhilarating than one might think a three-hour gabfest should be. Throughout, the film shows awareness of time as a straggling process, but not without a pitch-black sense of humor. At one point, Aydin is told that his train is delayed by an hour, and that’s about how much of the film is left. Characters invoke Shakespeare and the tenets of Islam, with as much pretension as one may expect from artists and wordsmiths, yet the film is far from pretentious, as it exploits these references for irony and meta-commentary, which it earns. There is banal hunting scene, a use of English as a universal tongue similar to that in Yi Yi, and a climactic act of pure spite that nearly had me jumping from my seat. I’m with the Cannes jury here; this was a tremendous closer to the month.

Grade: A

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Well, folks, I’ve done it. Yes, it took me longer than I’d hoped to get the reviews finished, and yes, I abandoned my original schedule completely in the final days. Never mind. I watched all thirty-one films I said I’d watch, all within the month of July, and though the execution wasn’t perfect, the challenge was a success. There were a few duds and disappointments, but gratefully, there were no outright bad films in the bunch (except for maybe La Ciénaga), and I discovered five masterpieces (Eternity and a Day; Lore; In Vanda’s Room; Je, Tu, Il, Elle; and Open Your Eyes), several films that were close to, and several films that may grow on me in the coming weeks–which is more or less what I set out to do. Thanks to everyone who watched and read along, or who will watch and read along in the future. This challenge nabbed this blog its greatest number of readers yet (special thanks to the Robert Pattinson fans who recognized my approval of The Rover), and I will definitely do it again in the future (next January, perhaps) and am even contemplating making it an annual or twice-yearly tradition. I already have another list of films to get through. Furthermore, taking the effectiveness of this effort into account, I’m thinking of doing a similar challenge for literature, as God knows there are too many books that I need to read, so giving myself a concrete schedule of books just might do the trick. That’d have to be a yearlong endeavor, though, and the reading of each book would have to be drawn out to a week–two weeks, if it’s long. It’ll be more complicated. But it might be worth it, so don’t be surprised if you see a “52 Weeks of Literature” challenge springing up next year. In the meantime, I’m more satisfied than I’ve ever been to take a break from viewing films, and I’ll be glad to turn my focus back onto my Great Films reviews and other projects. Once again: thanks for reading!

31 Days of Cinema, Days Twenty-One, Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three: “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums” | “Nostalghia” | “Beau Travail”

In The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, an early film from Japanese legend Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the title flowers is Kikunosuke Onoe (Shotaro Hanayagi), the presumed last in a long line of kabuki actors. He works in 1880s Tokyo and is thought to be an artistic-genealogical cul-de-sac because, besides being adopted, he has no talent. The onstage performance in the opening scene and the subsequent gossip make that clear. When the family’s wet nurse Otoku (Kakuko Mori) makes an improper—perhaps romantic—advance on Onoe to encourage him to improve his acting, both are shunned from the family, and Onoe flees to Osaka to follow Otoku’s advice, and to consummate his love for her soon enough. The film is tinged with nostalgia for an era lost and an art form dying amid unspoken historical change. Theatre is very much a common man’s art, a communal experience shared between actors and audience. Cinema is more privileged for its performers, more accessible across time and space, but not as ethereal and distinct, and lacking—as Walter Benjamin reminds us—the “aura” of theatre. Mizoguchi knew that film technology risked making theatre, kabuki and otherwise, obsolete—and that risk is still present today—but he accepted film as the up-and-coming storytelling medium and used it to tell a motive story that theatre in its stasis could not. What else besides film can appropriately reveal and convey such backstage dramas, or such insights into how theatre is prepared and received? Thus, Mizoguchi expertly plays on the contrast between film and stage, and the ironies of their interaction herein. Also a source of much profundity is the ironic and tragic injection of privilege into the universe of kabuki. Another contrast occurs between the refined, popular upper-class theatre of Tokyo and the poorer, more amateur traveling troupes of Osaka. This is one of the film’s many elements that are still relevant in today’s world, in which popular stage productions are confined to our greatest urban metropolises (New York, especially) and forsaken everywhere else—an astonishing universalism, given the isolationism of Japanese culture and cinema. Paralleling this is the film’s mixture of static (i.e., theatrical) and panning (i.e., traveling) shots, which were long and impressive for the time, 1939. (My favorite part of the film was likely a juxtaposition between a search for a major character on a store-filled street and a similar search, years later, across a row of train carriages.) The long takes do get ponderous at some points, but reducing them might have diluted the impact of the ending, in which the story culminates in a classical tragedy executed to near-perfection. This was my first Mizoguchi, and a splendid introduction to his vast body of work.

Grade: A

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There’s an infographic somewhere online—I can’t find it but still hope to—showing and interpreting one still from each shot of Nostalghia, the late-career film that Russian great Andrei Tarkovsky made in Italy. The very concept of such an infographic should tell you how refined a style of filmmaking it is, to weave just a handful of long takes into one story as Tarkovsky made his specialty. With films like these, I have made it a pastime to count—or at least attempt to count—the number of shots. Here, I counted 117 shots, give or take a few, in just over two hours, making an average of just over a minute per shot; that math of course neglects to convey the story’s climactic crux, which plays out in one nine-minute-plus shot. Frequently, Tarkovsky tricks us into thinking that a particular shot will end quickly, as it starts off with some falling action—a character or two walking away; a face, place or fact being established; the camera of Giuseppe Lanci zooming out. Yet, far after these falling actions have made their points and dissipated from their pinnacles, the camera lingers, yearning for more, conjuring life beyond a constructed false end. There’s a sense of winding down to the whole project that becomes all the more poignant knowing that this was Tarkovsky’s second-to-last film. He was dead three years later, due to cancer that he contracted working nearby nuclear ruins on Stalker, which he made before Nostalghia. The plot itself is threadbare and a little bloated: a Russian biographer Andrei (Oleg Yankovsky), clearly modeled on you-know-who, and his Italian guide Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano) head to a Tuscan bathhouse where a late Russian composer whom Andrei is researching spent a brief but crucial sojourn. A local madman (Erland Josephson, a muse of Ingmar Bergman) gets involved, in ways on which I won’t elaborate. The narrative is stodgy and confused, and it’s going to take me a second viewing to comprehend it all, but the film works as a tone poem because its mood is innovative and assured and comes from a genuine, wise and palpable sense of mortality. And it is more than worth watching for two brutal scenes at the end, which involve different degrees and uses of fire. One of them is the nine-minute take I referred to, and it shows Andrei trying to make it across a bath while keeping a lighted candle aflame. It sounds banal, but trust me: when it happens, you will understand why it is happening, why Andrei is doing it, and it will be suspenseful, and you will be rooting for him to achieve his goal. What a beautiful scene.

Grade: A-

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Beau Travail was the second film in a row I watched that with a somewhat flawed body and a perfect ending—a wobbly routine that somehow sticks the landing. I hope to write more on this film later, because I want to re-view it in the context of its source, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, once I’ve read it. I’m aware it’s a loose adaptation, but it’s still a curious one. The director Claire Denis moves Melville’s tale of British naval impressment to a modern-day brigade of the French Foreign Legion being trained in Djibouti, a city-state on a strategic point of the Horn of Africa. The narrator is one Sgt. Galoup (the subtle yet versatile Denis Lavant), who for reasons unexplained develops an intense hatred for one of his group’s most popular and charismatic soldiers, Gilles (Grégoire Colin). The film is sublime as an ethnography of the Legion’s training regimen and interplay with the surrounding African color. The inclusion of Muslims into the Legion receives much focus and delivers much insight; observe their stamina in how they refuse to nourish themselves during Ramadan, even in the desert. Yet, as a psychological drama, the story feels quite vacant, too open to interpretation for its own good. Even in the hands of an actor as strong as Lavant, Galoup is all action and little if any motivation or context; he’s a muscled walking cipher, a stoic—appropriately, for the military—but a bizarre and blank one. His one-man war against Gilles comes out of nowhere yet gives the whole film its impetus. It works on the level of poetry, but how? Much is staked on the music of one Charles Henri de Pierrefeu, which samples Benjamin Britten’s opera of Billy Budd, and I worried at some points that I was being manipulated into showing interest and provocation at this thin plot.

Alas, here is my interpretation, and it is a subjective but valid one: Melville is thought to have had Asperger’s, and his works come up often in discussions of autism theory. Denis’ female gaze on the male body is said to lend the film a heavy homoerotic, homo-social subtext—a feminine takedown of masculine lust and aggression (which Kathryn Bigelow later riffed with The Hurt Locker) that bluntly uses feminine sexual interest to turn casual masculine/martial camaraderie on its head. The motif of oft-topless male bodies moving in harmony in the desert, performing grueling exercise, ought to make no secret of this, even to the layman viewer. Not to go out on a limb, but I as an Aspergerian have always felt a strong kinship with and esteem for LGBTQ persons and their human rights. That is not least because they grow up in a heteronormative world that refuses to contextualize their homosexuality, and that confuses and conditions them into a warped, dishonest heterosexuality. Not to mention, that same conservative world impelled the young me—a literal-thinking Aspergerian, too trusting of authority—to think that it was wrong to be in touch with myself on any sexual level, while everyone around me was throwing their virginities to the wind. Enough has been written about Galoup’s repressed homosexuality. Would it be fair to view him as an Aspergerian—cold, stealthy, loving of firm military routine, jealous of Gilles’ social aptitude? Or is Gilles the Aspergerian—compassionate in a tactless way, prone to abrupt violence, too obedient towards Galoup to protest his castigation? My reading of Billy Budd may decide how I answer these questions. Suffice it to say: I began this month’s challenge with The Rover, which had one abrupt use of pop music that was too jarring to work. The sudden soundtrack choice that concludes Beau Travail, on the contrary, is a stroke of genius, and wraps up the film on a big emotional high. Man, that song’s stuck in my head now.

Grade: A-

To Do: Reviews of Tsotsi and Eternity and a Day are imminent. Off to watch In the Name of the Father.