Cannes 1995: Day 2: May 18

Sharaku, Japan, dir. Masahiro Shinoda

The Main Competition offerings today were determinedly more esoteric than the opening-night film. Souleymane Cissé's Waati was the only one of 24 Palme contenders that eluded me entirely, MIA even from this box-set of that renowned Malian director's work. I did locate the day's other Main Competition title via the website SamuraiDVD, even though it isn't a samurai film. (Technicalities.) Still, even once it's in your hand, Sharaku is such a tough nut to crack that U.S. distribution never happened.  That doesn't mean I was unseduced...

Updated: For even richer thoughts on many of the films listed below, head over to the first Jury Roundtable, where we all go into more detail about our reactions.
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CIFF 09: Air Doll

With the festival commencing this evening, I am already taking a long lead on one title that won't start showing until the second week, but whose renowned director might well prompt a run on tickets among the kinds of patrons who flock to the CIFF every year. My second review for the fortnight is thus of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll, which sadly makes a stronger bid than I had hoped for the alternate title Air Head. Shot by In the Mood for Love and Millennium Mambo cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bin, the film lacks the aesthetic heft or disciplined shape of the former and surpasses even the latter for vacuous cosmetics and patience-trying protraction. If that strikes you as an unfair thumbnail of Millennium Mambo—and Hou is definitely a filmmaker that Air Doll appears to have on its mind, such as it is—then this might be a title for you, but as my review testifies, I was quickly put off.

Air Doll plays on Saturday 10/17, Sunday 10/18, and Monday 10/19.

Films of the 00s: Spirited Away

A shame about Ponyo, which is often (surprise!) a kick to look at but is so lacking in narrative cohesion or persuasive emotion, and is so dully voiced by the dubbed cast of Anglo celebrities and, in two instances, their squealy younger siblings. Miyazaki really misses on this one, I think, even if my expectations were inevitably raised by the preceding weekend's return to Spirited Away. I have only seen Miyazaki's last three films, but isn't there a pretty general consensus that this is his masterpiece? It's not without its tiny flaws, but it's such a sumptuous work of imagination. Where you can see the demographic that he's trying to please with Ponyo, there's no way he made Spirited Away for anyone but himself, with all the weirdness and ambiguity that implies. From my new review:

"Chihiro's tasks are trickily superimposed: finding her parents and changing them back into humans, finding their way home, learning a new job, making sense of her companions and fairweather friends, assuaging the fiery Yubaba, working through a proto-attraction to the mysterious and changeable Haku. Because Miyazaki entitles each of these figures and plotlines to their own healthy measure of non-transparency, young Chihiro has an exaggerated but nonetheless a fully persuasive experience of adolescent confusion on multiple fronts. She herself is more rounded than the petulant but slightly blank and compulsory Ofelia of Pan's Labyrinth, and I appreciate that Miyazaki insists for so long and in such detail on the ornate workings of the bathhouse—has a center of relaxation ever demanded so much dizzying organization and helter-skelter commotion?—that it has a freestanding and magisterial integrity beyond its contingent role as a test of Chihiro's mettle. You have a sense that she has truly entered a perplexing, maddening, and magical world, rather than a hunch that an inventive filmmaker has devised some fancy tableaux for her to fumble through on her way to certain triumph. (keep reading...)

This Is How It's Done

As 2006 continues its quest for a great, definitive movie well into the final month of the year, why not flip back a half-century to 1954 and remember how a real, thorough-going masterpiece is supposed to look, sound, feel, and resonate? The majestic Music Box Theatre of Chicago recently hosted a one-week retrospective of restored 35mm prints of Kenji Mizoguchi's movies, and though my end-of-quarter schedule only allowed me to attend one film, Sanshô the Bailiff turned out to be a pretty unimprovable choice. I have never seen a Mizoguchi movie, partly because I was waiting for a curated opportunity just like this one. The VHS transfers of his movies, almost none of which are available on Region1 DVDs, have a besmirched reputation; furthermore, after finally introducing myself to Mizoguchi's countryman Yasujiro Ozu via the pristine Criterion DVD of his exemplary, affecting Tokyo Story, a part of me nonetheless wished that I had held out for a theatrical screening. Cinema this good deserves to be experienced at its full, shimmering size and in its intended venue.

Then again, I question my own convictions, because Sanshô the Bailiff is so dazzling that I recommend it whole-heartedly, even if a middling VHS print is the only available medium. The story is an intense, dramatic, and unpredictable reward in itself, beginning with the exile of a local governor in medieval Japan. The imperial lords have deemed this governor too sympathetic to the roiling, intensifying protests of the impoverished farmers and laborers in his region. Several years after his banishment, the governor's wife Tamaki, son Zushio, and daughter Anju are traversing Japan from its northern tip to its southern extreme, in the hopes of reuniting their family. However, in a frightful episode of deception and betrayal, marked by a horrifying score and harsh, unforgiving edits, Tamaki is separated from her children and impressed into a harem, while Zushio and Anju are sold into slavery in a distant compound, governed with an iron hand by Sanshô the Bailiff. Though the film and the age-old legend that inspired it take the name of this brutal overseer, the story emphasizes the heavy tolls on the son and daughter, as they struggle to retain the high moral principles imparted by their father and to nurture the ever-receding hope of reunion with their mother.

Mizoguchi's worldview is bleak in this picture. Corporal punishments and ethical corruption are ubiquitous in the various timeframes and locales in which the narrative unfolds, and the stark delineations of Good and Evil that one might expect in such a folkloric tale are persistently challenged. The BFI Film Classics monograph by Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh reveals that for all the consummate grace and exquisitely rendered light and framing in his movie, Mizoguchi offers a notably harsher, more daring version of the story than the one he inherited from the canonized retelling by Mori Ôgai that was a bestseller in Japan in 1915. Despite their pitiable circumstances, the grown children, Zushio and Anju, make difficult and morally debatable choices as they seek to escape a terrible destiny of unrewarded work and filial separation. They are hardly immune to the pressures of complicity and cowardice, which Mizoguchi invokes in strong but unsensationalized images of torture, suicide, and communal despair. That the film's gorgeous, fluid aesthetic of carefully composed images and thoughtful, evocative camera movements remains so constant throughout this melodramatic tale implies a mature, generous worldview that is equally informed by serenity, exploitation, pessimism, and hopefulness, and the acting, photography, soundtrack, and story structure operate in total synchronicity to tease out the psychological, political, and spiritual subtleties embedded in every scene. I am sure the film opens itself to even more layered readings for viewers better versed than I in Japanese history and religious traditions, though one need not press far into the film to detect its angry response to Japan's WW2-era militarism, or its determined separation of proud Buddhist ideals from overweening cultural separatism, or its aggrieved commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The whole country's midcentury crisis of national identity and cultural destiny registers powerfully at every register of this film, and yet Sanshô the Bailiff at no point seems beholden to any simplified political rhetoric or unilateral symbolic equivalence, and its emotional transparency is never compromised.

The single infelicity in the movie, for me, is a pivotal scene where a recovered memory of childhood and the echoing call of the longlost mother jostle the adult Zushio out of his hard-bitten attitude of selfishness and cynicism; having rewritten the Sanshô fable to emphasize naturalism over sentiment and guilty repressions over mythological contrivance, both the staging and content of this story-point struck me as overwrought and out of step with the rest of the picture. Still, the movie hardly loses its footing even at this uncertain juncture, and the depth, power, and heavily qualified optimism of the latter chapters strike me as beyond dispute. The culminating episode weds a generous indulgence of the audience's desires with a contextualizing cloud-bank of uncertainty and loss. For that reason, among others, it's almost impossible to reach the end of the tale without wanting to immerse yourself again from the beginning, in order to measure its final ramifications against its opening movements, and to trace how Mizoguchi has derived such powerful, intricate feelings and thematic assertions from what seem like such modest techniques. I haven't seen a more elegant, more fully realized movie in 2006, and I expect in 2007 to make my way even further into the Mizoguchi portfolio. The Criterion disc of Ugetsu is a logical place to start, but I know that The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums and The Life of Oharu are just as highly regarded. Recommendations are welcome. Enthusiasm is total.

(Images © 1954 Daiei Studios, reproduced from the Osaka European Film Festival webpage and this Geocities page in Japanese.)