Yasujirō Ozu | 秋日和 (Akibiyori) (Late Autumn) / 1960, USA 1973

the oppositions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu (screenplay, based on a fiction by Ton Satomi), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 秋日和 (Akibiyori) (Late Autumn) / 1960, USA 1973

 

As in many of Japanese director Ozu's films, the story of Late Autumn is, superficially, quite simple. Commemorating the death of Akiko Miwa's husband, several of his close male friends, his wife, and daughter Ayako have gathered at a Buddhist temple. The men suffer the ceremony, commenting on the lengthy performances of the monks, but also gossiping, afterwards, about their own youthful love of Akiko (beautifully played by Setsuko Hara) and their worry over her daughter Ayako (Tōko Tsukasa) for her marriageless state. These three busybody and bungling businessmen—Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura), Marniya (Shin Saburi), and Hiriyama (Ryuji Kita)—don't even have an available candidate in mind, but are determined to intrude themselves into the Miwas' life.

     At a meeting with Ayako, one of them suggests an employee, Goto (Keiji Sada), an attractive enough man that Ayako does agree to go out with him on a date. But Ayako is quite insistent that she has no intentions of marrying; somewhat shocking all of the older generation, except perhaps her mother, the young daughter relates that "I'm happy as I am," later adding that love and marriage do not necessarily go together. 

   The director sets up what might at first seem to be a statement of generational change, accordingly, the older, more traditional generation represented by the men, unable to comprehend the younger generation. Indeed, that is precisely what these meddlers proclaim! Yet, Ozu's carefully framed scenes reveal numerous contradictions or, better yet, oppositions—not so much between generations as within the emotional attitudes of most of the film's major figures. Two of the businessmen have very happy home lives, with smart, contemporary children who still seem to be friendly with and close to their fathers and mothers. The third man, although a widower, is apparently quite happy in his newfound bachelorhood. Yet, underneath each of these individuals is nostalgia for and, at times, apparent regret for their pasts; perhaps they all would have, at one time or another, presented as a male to Akiko—the fact of which the two wives seem quite aware. Accordingly, what at first may seem as simple kind, if intrusive actions, are gradually recognized as attempts to once again make contact with Akiko and their own pasts.

     Similarly, Ayako proclaims that she is perfectly happy living with her mother, and the two do seem to enjoy each other's company, shopping together, lunching, and later, even enjoying their time together at a country retreat. In short, despite their different dress and ways of communicating with the outside world, at home they seem to be pleasantly alike, so in tune with each other that we can well comprehend Ayako's attitude towards marriage.

     At the office, however, Ayako and her friends rush at a certain hour to the roof in order to see a train, filled with brides on their way to their honeymoons, speed past. They are disappointed that another friend, evidently just married, has not waved at them with her bouquet as promised. For a woman who declares no interest in marriage, Ayako seems to have secret yearnings that she has not quite explained to herself.

     Unable to succeed in convincing Ayako to leap into the wedded state, the busy trio determine to find a companion for Akiko first, which will "allow" Ayako, as they see it, to seek out her own love. The widower among them finally realizes that he would enjoy the company of Ayako, and, after much confusion and misunderstandings (which results in a good scolding from Ayako's thoroughly modern friend Yukiko), he proposes. But instead of freeing Ayako, the idea of her

mother rewedding shocks her, as she verbally lashes out at Akiko, somewhat like the children in Douglas Sirk's melodrama All That Heaven Allows, describing it as "filthy." If she has seemed of the new generation in her attitudes toward marriage and sex, she is a strong traditionalist in terms of her mother's situation.

     As critics such as Adrian Danks have pointed out, however, there is a huge gap between the children of Sirk's film and Ayako. For ultimately, Ayako, who remains close to her mother, perceives the error of her ways, and agrees to marry Goto. It is perhaps inevitable, now that we better understand her attitudes, that she marries in the traditional Japanese wedding garb.

     At movie's end, contradictorily, Akiko determines not to remarry, deciding to remain alone with her memories of her dead husband. Her final turn to the camera with a half-smile restates all of Ozu's "oppositions," leaving the viewer with a mixed sense of joy and sorrow, as we recognize her emotions of acceptance and sadness of her future life.

    With his low-set camera and straight-on portraiture of his figures as they speak—most often over food and, particularly, drink—Ozu has helped us to realize that people are complex beings. What they often say on the surface is not what they may do in their lives and vice versa. Despite her traditional ways, Ayako has joined the new generation. But perhaps it is a generation that is not so very different, after all, from the past. For Ozu, what I have described as "oppositions," might be spoken of as a balance, a balance he displays in almost every shot of the film (for example, cases of Coca-Cola bottles placed outside a traditional Japanese bar), between the changes of the future and the values of the past. Despite Ozu’s typical horizonal depiction of the world, in this film, in fact, it is the vertical that is often featured, particularly in the 5 images I have featured above.

     If ultimately Ozu's work seems to be a profoundly conservative vision, his view also, laced with his sense of mono no aware (a recognition of the impermanence of things), accepts change.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2012).

Mike Leigh | Topsy-Turvy / 1999

the opposite of what things seem to be

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Leigh (screenwriter and director) Topsy-Turvy / 1999

 

It’s hard to even think of Mike Leigh’s thoroughly enjoyable film, Topsy-Turvy, as a biopic, even though the work centers itself on two historical figures, writer and librettist W. S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner). As with too few biopics, Leigh’s film is clearly well-researched and historically accurate, incorporating into its structure various aspects and concerns of the Victorian culture which helped to create the famous duo’s major operetta, The Mikado.

 

     If anything, Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy suffers in his attempt to stuff as many of these topical references into the work as possible, forcing his characters, at times, to participate in unlikely conversations of political issues such as the collapse of the British garrison at Khartoum, the development of the telephone (a special line connects Gilbert directly to producer D’Oyly Carte’s [Ron Cook] office), the oddity of electricity (the Savoy Theatre features electric lights, a rarity at the time), and revealing various cases of drug abuse and sexual improprieties: Sullivan’s mistress Fanny Ronalds’ (Eleanor David) avocation of women’s use of nicotine and easy embracement of an abortion; actor George Grossmith’s (Martin Savage) morphine addiction; lead soprano Leonora Braham’s (Shirley Henderson) alcoholism, drug addiction, and apparent lesbianism; Sullivan’s visitation to a French brothel; and Gilbert’s own emotional and sexual frigidity, to say nothing of his late-night trips during performances to the seediest parts of London. One has to wonder what Gilbert was seeking in those journey’s into the darker depths of the city. In Leigh’s view—and likely in reality—life upon the Victorian stage was truly wicked.

      But what most separates this work from its more typical genre types is the director’s ability to work with an ensemble cast. Accordingly, while we certainly do get to know the home lives, working difficulties, and personal frustrations of its central characters, we understand them more fully in the context of an entire world of professionals—professionals both within the movie and outside it. It’s sometimes the most mundane of scenes that reveal the depth of these characters, who are so well acted that the viewer is easily sucked into the cinematic world in which they are presented. I could spend hours just listening over and over to the gentle remonstrations of Helen Lenoir (Wendy Nottingham) and D’Oyly Carte (always, as Gilbert reminds, a man as smooth as calm waters) as they attempt to negotiate an agreement for Gilbert and Sullivan to again collaborate with one another. That it is unsuccessful, after their gentle and tender ministrations, makes the pair’s refusal to work together all the more shocking. 

     Similarly, contract negotiations between D’Oyly Carte and his actors, even ignoring the comic interruptions of the self-assured Rutland Barrington (Vincent Franklin) and Grossmith—who have consumed tainted oysters before their interviews—reveal more about the characters than any contrived plot actions might. And, as the characters begin their long series of rehearsals, costume fittings, and etiquette lessons about Japanese culture, we become so intimately acquainted with the talents, quirks, and frustrations of each figure that we begin to feel we personally know them, helping us to be thoroughly engaged with their superlative—and their performances are truly wondrous—stage actions. Just like everyone else in the cast, we are crushed when Gilbert suddenly cuts Pooh-Bah’s great solo, “A More Humane Mikado,” and we almost wish we could joy the cast members behind the screen to protest in favor of its restoration.

      So fully do we begin to fill in the lives of the large Mikado cast, that we often lose sight of the central players, Gilbert and Sullivan. We perceive how Gilbert accidently became fascinated with Japanese culture through his attendance of the Japanese exhibition of arts and crafts in Knightsbridge, but we are kept somewhat in the dark as to how that was transformed into such a sprightly comically cockamamie world. Indeed, given his dour and dark view of the universe and his inability to socially engage, how did Gilbert manage to create all of those topsy-turvy plots and, most importantly, such engagingly comic rhymes?

     His opposite, Sullivan, a man too thoroughly engaged with women, wine, and song, often seems, on the other hand, a bourgeois bore at home who might rather have spent his life composing the kind of second-rate parlour songs and symphonies that so many Victorians took to heart, rather than creating the delightful ditties for which he is now famous. While Leigh is absolutely splendid in recreating the world spinning around these artistic geniuses, we find it difficult, somehow, to understand how they came to produce their art.

 

     No matter, I suppose, since that art is so splendidly realized in this picture. Perhaps we must look to the two women in each of central figures’ lives, the vivacious and sexually advanced Fanny, in Sullivan’s case, and the sexually frustrated yet adoring and supporting “Kitty” (Lesley Manville) in Gilbert’s house. The last scenes of Leigh’s film are given over to a fascinating suggestion for a future opera scenario, based on “Kitty’s” dreams, obviously infused with Freudian imagery that reveals her desire for a child or even an occasional sexual engagement. An entire stage overridden with nannies pushing perambulators might have represented a breakthrough of enormous importance, an escape from the silly magic rings and talismans far more reaching in their surrealist possibilities than even Gilbert and Sullivan’s witty and joyful concoction, The Mikado. As the highly poised and self-contained Helen has quipped earlier in the film: “The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.”

      Perhaps Leigh’s film does not quite feel like a biopic because he realizes and demonstrates that things are often the opposite of what they seem, that the world, in short, is “topsy-turvy”: those who are at the center are never quite as interesting as those who faithfully proffer their love and support.

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2012).

Hiroshi Teshigahara | Tanin no kao (The Face of Another) / 1966, USA 1967

facing in

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kōbō Abe (screenplay, based on his novel), Hiroshi Teshigahara (director) Tanin no kao (The Face of Another) / 1966, USA 1967

 

In postwar Japan a formerly wealthy businessman, Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai), has been disfigured with burns to his face during an industrial accident.  His head completely wrapped in bandages, not unlike the James Whale's 1933 classic horror film, The Invisible Man, he lives with his wife within a now cynical relationship, where he feels tortured by her supportive comments but obviously distracted behavior and her refusal to cease motion while around him.

     She, in turn, understandably feels as if she too were a victim in this horrible accident, as he poses impossible-to-answer questions and muses on philosophical issues such as the contention that the face is the door to the soul. "Does he still have a soul?" he ponders. And “who was he before his identity disappeared to most of those around him—his partner's secretary greets him as if his face were not hidden behind bandages, while others who encounter him turn away in horror and disgust?

     But the true theme of Teshigahara's and Abe's collaboration is concerned less with "invisibility"—although it remains a subtext of this work—as it is with the definition of a human being imaged through his face, or to put it another way, the film asks the question who is the person behind his or her face. His wife attempts to explore that issue through a discussion of why women wear makeup. It is not, she declares, in order that they present an appealing look to the outsider, but, in the manner of ancient cultures and the remnants of those values in Arab culture, it is rather an attempt to hide behind the face, a kind of mask to keep the true being protected within out of a sense of humility, a reverence for the inner self.

     Okuyama gets an opportunity to test that idea out when his psychiatrist, Dr. Hira (Mikijiro Hira), who suggests that he can fashion a mask fitted to Okuyama's face—not only the facial contours, but the sweat glands, the various pores of the individual facial makeup. Encountering by accident a man in a small cafe (Hisashi Igawa) the two offer him money to borrow his face, recreating it to match the dimensions of Okuyama's facial structures.

     Unlike Abe's original fiction, Teshigahara creates a double tale—indeed his entire story is based on a series of doublings—by taking us, bit by bit, through the relationship of a Nagasaki-born woman whose beautiful face has been horribly disfigured on one side by the results of the Atomic bomb. Living with her supportive brother (Kakuya Saeki), the beautiful woman, who hides her scars behind her long hair, works in a home for World War II veterans, most of whom have lost their sanity to their wartime experiences; and she, herself, is haunted and terrorized by the possibility of a new war breaking out, fears which she and her brother extensively discuss. Unfortunately, he suggests, one only recognizes that a war exists after it has started.

     Dr. Hira has grown fearful of the possible effects of the mask he and his nurse are concocting, and demands assurances from his increasingly bitter friend, Okuyama, that he will keep the doctor abreast of all of his emotional responses to the mask. The relationship between the two—wherein the Dr. suddenly takes the role of a kind of brother, father, advisor, guide, and policeman to the increasingly dangerous Okuyama—links Teshigahara's film with Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face), where Doctor Génessier plays a kind of anguished creator-confidant to his own Frankenstein-like daughter, Christine. That the doctor and his patient's first outing after the creation of the mask takes place in a Japanese-German pub, where a chanteuse sings German songs of the loss of love and longing points out the strange war-time pairing of the two countries and the horrific results it has had upon the culture as a whole, linking the mask of Mr. Okuyama even more closely to the unmasked girl whose face has been scarred by the bomb triggered to end the War.

      Although we might have feared that Okuyama was intent, once the "face of another" had become his own, on doing violence to his own wife, we soon discover that his "plot" does not involve physical assault as much as it does a psychological revenge, entailing a plan to seduce his own spouse.

      Dr. Hira, meanwhile, has developed even more general concerns regarding the results of such a facial transformation, fears that a man might, under the influence of the face, become someone else or that, able to live without an identifiable past, might be led to commit unspeakable acts or crimes not previously thought of. 

      In some respects, all of this occurs in The Face of Another as Okuyama, having obtained two nearly identical apartments in another building—one of his bandaged self, another for the new man-in-the-mask, sets out, as a stranger, to test his wife's faithfulness. His seduction is all too easy, as within a few hours after following her, she not only accepts his sexual insinuations, but readily joins him in his second apartment for a sexual rendezvous. Disgusted by his apparent success, he confronts his wife, who quickly counters that she has known who he is all along, and thought only that it was merely an open attempt at game-playing, a kind of sexual masquerade which might bring them back into a loving relationship. The fact that he might actually have meant to deceive her, she declares, disgusts her, drawing an end to their already fraught relationship.

     Okuyama's attempts to later return to their house, where she sits, resistant to his attempts to enter, reveals that as the new "man with the mole," he can never go "home" again. He is now a new being who must act out the inner behavior of that beast.

     For, of course, with a new, seemingly unrecognizable face, he must look to whom he was perhaps all along within, not at all the socialized industrialist of old, but a horribly destroyed and psychologically altered being, a man capable of even more perverse acts.

     So too has the young woman with a scar, on vacation with her brother, come to realize that within she is not at all the beautifully demur woman hoping to hide her facial blemish, but is a passionate, lusting animal, who demands that her brother kiss her, resulting in an intense incestuous coupling in which, it quickly becomes clear, that her brother loves not her apparent beauty as much as he does her hidden scars, symbolizing the woman calling him from within. Their illicit encounter demands a kind of expiation, which she accomplishes by walking into the surrounding sea to drown, while her brother calls out to her unable to prevent the results of his acts.

    Similarly, Okuyama, now rejected by his seemingly faithful lover, looks within, resulting in an attempt to rape an unsuspecting woman. Arrested, he is saved by his psychiatrist who lies to the police, claiming that he is an escaped mental patient.

 

    Throughout the film, the director has presented the viewer with strange images and events. The many scenes in the psychiatrist's clinic in which body-parts float in diagramed positions mid-air, the bizarre behavior of the superintendent's yo-yo-loving daughter, the ever-present Western-loving affectations of the entire populace, the several near-repetitions of events  (such as Okuyama's two visits to obtain an apartment, the attempted rape of the woman with a scar and the later attempted rape by Okuyama), and Teshigahara's several cinematic devices—blurred, stopped, tilted and sped-up images) now coalescence into a kind of surrealist film, as Okuyama's mad inner self is projected onto the society at large, the busy streets filled with men and women with masks instead of faces. Finally, as in the Franju work and the later Almodóvar tribute to Franju, La piel que habito (The Skin I Love In), the victim, as Okuyama has always declared himself to be, must exact his revenge: he unflinchingly plunges a knife into his former friend's body, abandoning his being to the self he has discovered by facing in.

 

Los Angeles, May 13, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2012).

Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard | Tout va bien (All’s Well) / 1972

inventing history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard (screenplay and directors) Tout va bien (All’s Well) / 1972

 

Starring Yves Montand and the American actress Jane Fonda, Gorin and Godard’s Tout va bien has often been described, somewhat mistakenly, as Godard’s return to commercial film after his four-year involvement with the Dziga Vertov Group films, for which he created works, as J. Hoberman described them, that were “were openly tendentious in their more or less Maoist analysis of the political situation in various countries.” While clearly espousing strong leftist positions—Fonda’s journalist character even describes herself as being the authority on leftist causes—Tout va bien is also a work which questions and even mocks Godard’s own work of the past. Indeed, it begins almost cynically, arguing for a movie that might make enough money to support the endless costs (an early scene showing checks, one by one, being torn away for all the actors, sets, costumes, designers, etc.) by bringing together major stars—which, of course, is what Godard’s film features. Yes, the narrator admits, there must be a society in which the characters exist, but the central genre it proposes for itself is a “love story.” And, in the very first scene, we see Montand and Fonda, walking, hand in hand, repeating lines from the “what do you love about me” scene between Michel Piccoli and Bridgett Bardot in Contempt. And, in some senses, Tout va bien repeats the film about film tropes of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou of 1965.

 

     More importantly, Montand plays a filmmaker, formerly part of the New Wave, who has now turned to making (quite awful, if the scene we are shown is any evidence) commercials, a “more honest” way to make money. Although both husband and wife have formerly been involved in the French revolutions of the 1960s, they now speak of their involvement with some distance and questioning of their own sentiments and actions. Fonda’s journalist figure can no longer bear the “single-voiced” broadcast scripts she is forced to repeat and yet does not evidently have the ability to craft her own.

     The main action of the film is an almost accidental confrontation between the two and a group of activist laborers in a meat-packing plant, who, tired of union inaction, take over the plant, destroying files and offices on the very day that the journalist has had an appointment with the manager to speak about modern management techniques. Having locked away the manager in his own office, the plant revolutionists capture Fonda and Montand—who has inexplicably joined her for the interview—throwing them into the office with the manager.

     There the manager, in a spot-on satire of corporate managerial self-justifications, lectures the two before, out of disgust with the manager’s words, the journalist begins interviewing the holed-up workers, each of them attempting to tell her the “real” truth about working conditions and the society in which they live, while simultaneously feeling as they speak that they failed to say anything new.

     The entire factory, its outer walls pulled away, becomes a kind of stage-like set which reveals the factory’s innards as the workers tell their tales, often with Montand and Fonda seen performing the workers’ boringly repetitive acts of filling sausages and carting off carcasses of cattle. While Godard and Gorin’s Brechtian presentation may, indeed, point up social inequalities, it is also a comic representation, with no one becoming any wiser in the process. Fonda is not even sure that her studio will air what she writes (indeed, no recounting is broadcast). After three days of this “no exit”-like existence, the three are freed, the laborers brutally arrested.

     The couple has perhaps learned something in the process, and both are changed to a certain degree. The Montand figure returns to “real” filmmaking, despite financial losses; Fonda’s figure tears up the copy she is set to broadcast and is ready to leave her job. Moreover, the couple can no longer find comfort in each other, for, in an important sense, they can find no comfort in their selves. What Godard and Gorin reveal is that, despite their political affinities, the two no longer can make sense of most political acts. Did what the revolutionary laborers do help them or merely silence them further, lock them away from the society at large? Were their actions, represented in the film as both heroic and ridiculous, of any significance?

 

     The question is asked once again, as the directors show us another assignment that the journalist undertakes as she visits a large French grocer, reminding one of a kind of American Wallmart. Into this world of row after row of ringing cash registers, the activists return, challenging an old-fashioned leftist who cannot ever answer for the rhetoric in his book before filling up their shopping carts with mounds of food and other goods and, after capturing the store’s microphone, announcing to all customers that everything is free. For a few minutes, it appears, their actions have created the desired effect, as the silent shoppers suddenly fill their carts and move toward the doors without passing by the expectant clerks. But here too, the revolution ends, as the police, in full riot gear, move forward, clubs in hand, beating the customers and revolutionaries both as they proceed. Has anything been won?

      In short, the film, while espousing Godard’ politics, becomes itself an intense questioning of his and others' deep beliefs. What can alter the course of corporate greed, of a masculine-dominated marriage, of a culture that no longer seems to embrace change? And, in that sense, Tout va bien is perhaps a more moving expression of how to make films “politically” than were Godard’s Dziga Vertov films. In the end, the only answer to these questions seems to come in the notion that what is important is that each of us ask these questions, write them down and attempt to answer them, play them out in our minds, so to speak. Whatever answers we come to will be the definition of our histories, of history itself—as differently as each of us respond. For me, that is a profound realization: the fact that the most important thing is that the questions are asked and answered to the best of our abilities by each of us, not simply received from a dominating party or group.

     At film’s end, the directors even allow that the marriage between the couple might be saved— or perhaps not. But Montand returns to Fonda, Fonda to Montand. Whether their meeting again will result in good or bad, no one can say, but it is the coming together of people, a meeting of the minds, that truly matters.

     In hindsight, Tout va bien, a film that was disastrously attacked upon its first showing, seems a perfect bridge in Godard’s long and distinguished career, a work that was not afraid of questioning his own methods and direction.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2012).