A few films I watched recently

Perfect Days (2023): 

I have never been fond of films in which nothing happens. It’s got a critics’ score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and audience’s score of 89%, so it’s clearly a matter of temperament. Or maybe people are hardcore Wim Wenders fans. Or maybe they really like Japan. 

Kōji Yakusho plays a public toilet cleaner who listens to Lou Reed on cassettes, reads William Faulkner, looks at trees, takes B&W photographs, and dreams. Will something happen between him and the co-worker? Will the co-worker’s girlfriend do something? Will we discover the secret tic-tac-toe player? Will someone appear and stir up his life? Will something happen with the niece? Will we learn more about his past? Will we discover why he’s cleaning toilets? I kept wanting something to happen, but nothing did. It’s a slice-of-life of film and Kōji Yakusho is indeed very good, but it’s perhaps a matter of temperament that I want some conflict, some mystery, some dramatic interest. It has none. 

I did, however, enjoy the music. 

The Sound of the Mountain (1954): 

Why is Naruse not as well-known as Ozu or Mizoguchi outside Japan? I wondered. His name is not mentioned. His films are hard to find. I’m not comparing him to Kurosawa, the most Western of Japanese directors, influencing Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Sergio Leone, and many others, but my impression so far—I have watched this one and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs—is that at his best, Naruse isn’t inferior to Mizoguchi or Ozu. His films treat the same themes: selfish and cruel or sympathetic but ineffectual men, suffering women, generation gap, social changes, conflicts between parents and children… He has the same subtlety, the same sympathy and compassion, the same talent for getting great performances out of actors. Why then is he neglected?  

I like Naruse’s adaptation a lot more than Kawabata’s novel. Part of it is because the novel focuses on the perspective of the father—the passive, tactless, ineffectual father, who keeps thinking about breasts, even his own daughter’s—whereas the film can eschew all that and depict the sad lives of all the women in the film (it is probably for the same reason I prefer the adaptation of Woman in the Dunes to the book).

Another reason is that the characters in the book are a bit blurry—with a few exceptions, I’ve got the impression that characters in Japanese novels don’t have the same complexity and vividness as in Western novels, but tend to more blurry or more impressionistic—but that’s not the problem for the film as we all see them from the outside anyway. But at the same time, we have the actors’ performances—we see the pauses, the hesitation, the meaningful glances, the understanding smiles, the looks of reproach, the expressions of pain, and so on. This is my favourite Setsuko Hara performance: the perfect, childlike, lovable wife, who always smiles then suffers in silence. 

La chimera (2023): 

It’s been over a week and I still can’t put into words why I like this film so much. No, I don’t even know why I like it so much. Perhaps it touches something deep inside me. Perhaps it captures something—in images and music—that I can’t express in words.