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Monday 26 August 2024

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. 

7 comments:

  1. "I have never been fond of films in which nothing happens"

    Then - if you haven't already seen it? - you might not - or perhaps even might? - like "Syndromes and a Century" [2006] by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul?

    I haven't watched it recently, but in the years after it was first made I watched it at least five times, never losing my initial impression that it was a very interesting and *playful* film.

    The following review gives a good account of the film, mostly without "spoilers", albeit I think it may have a rather different view on the film than the director's own:
    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/sep/21/worldcinema.drama

    My own view - which may be *very* different from the director's own - is it's as close as a film can get to being a wholly abstract without actually being abstract. My sort of spoiler-free summary:
    * in the longish first part a series of not unrelated incidents occur;
    * in the longish second part a series of not unrelated incidents occur, with definite references to those in the first part without repeating them exactly;
    * the short third part is, I think, actually abstract;
    * and is followed by the short fourth part, which is not abstract - but which in the context might be perceived as abstract? - and which acts as a "poppy" coda.

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  2. I thought quite a lot happened in Perfect Days. The reason we see this particular slice of this life is because an unusual number of things happen. The conflict, mystery, and drama lies in the question of how to live.

    Anyway, I revoke my previous recommendations of films by Abbas Kiarostami, and most other Iranian films that have gotten international attention. Although I am not sure a lot less happens in these films, or in Perfect Days, than in Late Spring or Tokyo Story.

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  3. Colin,
    I haven't seen that film, but I've taken a dislike of Apichatpong Weerasethakul since I saw Uncle Boonmee hahaha.

    Tom,
    Hahahaha Tom. There's a reason that it took me years to get Ozu. When I first saw Late Spring and Tokyo Story years ago, I didn't like Ozu at all.
    In the case of Perfect Days, I was clarifying my point in the blog post. The film raised, for me, all those questions, all those expectations, but nothing led to anything.
    In Ozu's films, there is dramatic interest in questions like: A woman is expected to get married, will she? To whom? These couples have marriage troubles, will they resolve them? etc. There's a beginning of an issue, there's development, there's resolution. I didn't see any of that in Perfect Days.
    I have read that critics see it as a meditation on life, so I know what you're saying about the drama lying "in the question of how to live", but that is not enough dramatic interest for me.

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  4. Just the other night I watched one of my favorite films, Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner, about an aging rodeo star's last run. It takes place in a world remote from my own, but it truly "touches something deep inside me." The number of movies that I like is endless, but Junior Bonner (a film full of obvious flaws) is one of a small number that I hopelessly love.

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    Replies
    1. That sounds good.
      Speaking of "aging", have you seen An Autumn Afternoon by Ozu?

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    2. It's humiliating to admit (but we all have those admissions - I hope), but I've never seen any Ozu. I know French and Italian cinema much better than I do Japanese, where I'm mostly limited to Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. (And - let's be honest - Godzilla.)

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    3. I know Japanese cinema is what I know the best after English-language cinema.
      If you want to check out Ozu, and I think you should, I recommend:
      An Autumn Afternoon
      The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice
      Equinox Flower
      Tokyo Story is his most famous one but I watched it years ago and haven't seen it again since.

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