Mikio Naruse | 乱れる (Midareru) (Yearning) / 1964

the shock of truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zenzo Matsuyama (screenplay), Mikio Naruse (director) 乱れる (Midareru) (Yearning) / 1964

 

Having now seen my third Mikio Naruse film, I am beginning to think that, although his subjects and themes are limited, he may be a better director than those of his generation, Ozu and Mizoguchi. This is an extreme overstatement, of course, and I have never been a critic who pits great directors against one another, although I do have some obvious preferences when it comes to French film. In this case, all three deal with trapped, yet forceful women, although Ozu’s heroines more often find solace in the family. But there is a kind of feminist strength in Naruse’s characters that makes them far more complex and interesting, leaving us, at film’s end, to want to still know them better.

      Not that the hard-working widow, Reiko Morita (Hideko Takamine) would allow herself to imagine that she is a feminist or even that she lives a complex life. For her, survival is a necessary thing, and working in a small mom and pop grocery store for 8 years after her husband’s death is simply something that she sees as her responsibility. Besides, her mother-in-law is now quite elderly, and that woman’s two other older daughters have husbands and jobs of their own. And who else would care for her husband’s younger brother Koji (Yūzō Kayama), although he has gone to college and worked for a short period at a job, is now a troublesome loafer, who prefers to drink and gamble, now and again getting into fights? 

    Reiko treats the young man as a mother might, lying for him and cooking late meals when he arrives home, sometimes after midnight. The one thing he seems to most enjoy is to eat, and we see the handsome boy several times in this film shoveling in whatever Reiko serves him.

    In any other film, particularly if it were to have been made slightly later, we might have even imagined that the morose and alcoholic brother-in-law is an unhappy gay man, but that is not what plays out in this far more complex heterosexual film.

     Reiko, from the very beginning of this film, begins to sense that something is in the wind, that despite her dedication to family and the traditions of the past, something is beginning to dreadfully change. First of all, a new supermarket has opened up in her part of town, and, as a dreadful advertising truck announces time and again, its prices are much lower than the older, smaller grocers. Consequently, she and other small store owners have begun to lose customers. One local shop owner, foreseeing financial collapse, commits suicide.

     Koji and his sisters, however, see what’s coming clearer than Reiko, and Koji becomes determined to turn his small shop into a larger supermarket. Although Reiko has been unbelievable loyal to the family, the two sisters do not wish to have her be one of the corporate heads, while argues to do so would only be just. Naruse demonstrates their lack of feeling through dozens of tiny gestures, a flip of the hand or a turn of a head, as they attempt to convince their mother that it is time for Reiko to remarry and move on.

     Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your viewpoint), Reiko is unaware of their hostility and Koji’s plans, and feels it’s still her duty to remain and keep the store going as best as she can.

    When Koji finally does tell her about selling the shop, he has also tells her another secret that finally forces her hand: he has left he job because he did not want to leaver her sine he is and always has been in love with her. This is now the kind of drama that one might imagine in US melodramatists such as Douglas Sirk, and the results are equally “over the top.”

     That confession alters the very atmosphere of the shop, as the two, Reiko and Koji circle in avoidance of one another. The only way to end the potent push and pull between them is for Reiko to go, as she suddenly determines to return to her original family home in another city.

     Many a Naruse film would end there, but this time he appears ready to take us into that new complexity of character, as Koji followers her, and the two are drawn even closer and closer together as the train moves forward into space.  

     In his intelligent review in Slant, critic Ken Uhlich captures the experience:

 

“What ensues is probably Naruse’s most brilliantly sustained sequence. As the train races on to an unspecified destination, Reiko and Koji play out a romantic, yet foreboding courtship-in-miniature. The melodramatic tensions of the second act fade away (it is as if the characters have gone beyond the movie they inhabited into entirely new surroundings) and it seems possible that the duo can build a life together. But their initial sense of excitement (one that Naruse implies could only continue if the train never stopped) eventually erodes, and with the end of the characters’ journey comes a kind of emotional atrophy.”

     As I write, there is a kind of lightness here as the two gradually move closer and closer to one another, and at one stop, where Koji leaves the train to eat, Keiko signals him to quickly return before the train leaves the station.      Perhaps these two, we might imagine, can actually find a way to break with customs relation to their age different and family internal relationships. Before they arrive at her hometown, Reiko even suggests that they spend the night in a small mountain town.

    There the air is almost white with a thick fog, intimating that she will be unable to see her way to clarity. Once more she tells Koji that his love cannot be returned, offering him, like a child, a ring made of string.

     Like so many nights in the past, Koji finds his way to a bar. Upon awakening the next morning, Reiko watches for her window men carrying a dead body they have discovered under a cliff. Observing the ring of string on the man’s finger, Reiko pulls back in horror much like Brecht’s Mother Courage, in the realization of her lack of ability to change and speak her heart has been responsible, in part, for Koji’s death.

     This is a truly powerful film, one of the best of the great tradition of Japanese cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).

Samantha Rebillet | The Suitor / 2004

the unsuitable suitor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Gordon (screenplay), Samantha Rebillet (director) The Suitor / 2004 [7 minutes]

 

Cindy Kwok (Renee Lim) is a 20-year-old woman from Hong Kong who still lives at home. She has a beautiful Australian boyfriend, Brett (Leon Ford), but her traditional parents stand opposed to that relationship, and attempt to interfere with it through the introduction of more proper suitors and refusing her late-night outings. Brett is growing frustrated with Cindy’s respectful handling of the situation, and suggests that if she cannot take a stand against her parents their love has little future.

    In the very next scene, we see her parents (Jane Shen and Harry So) introducing her to a new suitor from Hong Kong, Elton (Paul He). Elton is certainly an attractive man, but as she quickly “sets him straight” in her bedroom, she doesn’t have a broken heart, she has plenty of friends, and she doesn’t need a boyfriend because, as he pushes a photograph of Brett into his face, “I’ve already got one.”

     “He’s cute,” Elton replies. “Are you fucking him?” he unexpectedly inquires.

     Cindy turns back, startled by his question. “That’s not any of your business.”

     “Why not? If he was my man, I would every chance I got.”

     Suddenly Cindy is perfectly happy to go to the party with Elton. She seeks out Brett in the kitchen, whispers to him that Elton is gay, and suggests he introduce him to some of the partygoers.

Brett is only too happy to hook up Elton with two gay boys, as he and Cindy are now allowed to make out in complete freedom, escaping upstairs for their own entertainment.

     When they return to the dance floor, however, they see Elton in his short underpants shimmying between two cute boy’s bodies. He is also drunk.

      Together they take him back to Cindy’s room where, immediately confronted with the mother, Cindy explains that he got so drunk that she had to call Brett to help. The mother is outraged that the white boy is in her daughter’s room, but appears not at all appalled that Elton is passed out on her bed. Furious with her mother’s attitude, she insists that Brett is her boyfriend and she’s sick of her mother trying to control her life.

       “You don’t know how to choose the right man,” Mrs. Kwok insists.

       Pointing to the gay boy on the bed, Cindy inquires, “And you do?” She prepares to leave.

       Her mother shouts out, “What about him?”

       “You brought him here. You deal with him.”

     In the very next frame, we see Brett with Cindy trying to carry on a formal interview with his girlfriend’s parents. After his first question, “So, Mrs. Kwok, you mind if I call you Janice,” he is left only stuttering out words that being with the letter “J.” But presumably, this time at least, Cindy will approve of their choice.

      This charming short work by Australian director Samantha Rebillet, is now rather blurred. At least in the DVD I watched on YouTube. Rebillet, whose career included a substantial number of acting roles, of directing short works, commercials, and noted documentaries such as Butterfly Man and The Last Goodbye, and performing with her husband, the noted musician Ilan Kidron in “The Freaks in Love,” ended sadly. In 2010 she was operated on for a life-threatening brain tumor, but recovered. The couple and their children moved to Paris and then Los Angeles. But in November 2017, at age 45, she committed suicide.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Lionel Baier | Garçon stupide (Stupid Boy) / 2004

an old man interviewing himself as a young boy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lionel Baier and Laurent Guido (screenplay), Lionel Baier (director) Garçon stupide (Stupid Boy) / 2004

 

Garçon stupide (Stupid Boy) by Swiss director Lionel Baier is a film I tried hard to like. In the end, however, I simply felt that Baier’s work allowed too many illogical elements into its otherwise basically simple structure that bares a close resemblance, in parts, to Eliza Hittman’s 2017 Beach Rats: the story of a working class kid who, pulled by different forces, has difficulty in coming to terms with his full potential as a being, both sexually and intellectually.

      Both have sex with older men; but we know, at least, why Hittman’s young character has chosen such unattractive companions: he wants to be certain that his sex life is undetected by his homophobic, heterosexual friends. In Baier’s film it is never explained why the attractive Löic (Pierre Chatagny) seeks out chatroom connections with such physically unattractive men.

     True, he is nearly nymphomaniacal with regard to sex, which might encourage us to imagine that he is completely disinterested with deeper relationships with others. And we do perceive that he treats sex as an almost clinical act, immediately defining upon meeting his partners what is or is not permitted, and then snapping pictures of the man who he has fucked or has been fucked by, as if he were almost cataloging a show about the gay “species,” the kind of display the local museum in which his female friend (Natacha Koutchoumov) works might be interested in if they ever decided to turn their attention away from geological exhibits.

      Yet, that doesn’t quite explain his sexual preferences. In my younger day, at least, there were plenty of cute boys ready to jump in bed with no intentions of forming a relationship or seeking any commitment whatsoever.

     And if Löic has absolutely no interest in relationships, why does he let one elderly liaison, a man who we never see—not even in the boy’s snapshots—continue to meet with him while asking his young friend only questions, insisting that he is not interested in the boy’s thoughts, nor in his body? How to explain, moreover, the man’s seemingly pointless attraction to this rather empty-minded, certainly uneducated—he is, in some respects, truly “stupid”—young man who, at one point, even physically threatens him, pulling him into a bathroom stall to offer him the sex which Löic is convinced his elder is really seeking?

       Even if we presume that the stranger is actually a “stand in” for the man the boy has grown up to be, interviewing, as I suggest by my title, his younger self, where does this rather radical intrusion upon the otherwise basically realist plot, take us? Can an elder version of a self truly remake the younger? The impossibility of that transformation is something that has been lamented since the earliest records of mankind. Let us just describe it as a rather odd structural device from which Baier’s gentle bildungsroman never quite recovers.

      Why, moreover, is the boy refusing to eat; he suggests that he is saving money for something special, but whatever, given the limited confines of current imagination, could that possibly be? I’ll come back to that problem later. It is even more strange that he has given up eating when we soon after discover that he works for a major confectioner of Swiss chocolates, wherein his job is to lift up each large plate of stamped-out chocolates in order to make certain that the scores between the smaller chocolates are still intact. 

       Let us now return to the girl, with whom, given her largesse, he lives. One might simply describe her as what used to be called in the old days of bigoted gay parlance, a “fag hag,” a woman who stands by the man with whom she knows she will never have sex. Yet, in this case, when she appears to find a man of her age and intellect whom she might date, why does our young sexually obsessed boy grow jealous or even imagine that he might be transitioning to heterosexuality—particularly given what we have been shown is at the other end of those obsessions, the male body?

      Charting even stranger territory, the director concocts yet another compulsion for his young hero: upon reading of a new soccer player from Africa who has joined the Bulle team, Löic is not only intrigued by his new hero and his quite traditionally respectable family, but soon begins to stalk him, attending a match of the sport about which he obviously knows very little while trying to meet the new player.

      His female friend, because of his continued judgments about her own life, sends him packing, which means that he must spend his nights sleeping in the shower-room of the manufacturer for which he works.

      But then why does this confused young man later return to her apartment where he finds her, if the film’s promotional department is correct, dead after having committed suicide? Why, instead of reporting the event, does he steal her car—which she has rather unsuccessfully been attempting to teach him to drive—and spin off into the nearby mountains where he crashes it?

      Let us imagine that his encounter with the soccer player, who seems to be visiting a second home there with only his young daughter, is a fantasy arising from Löic’s head injuries as he lies upside down in the car half-way down the mountainside. Why turn those events, however, into a series of highly naturalistic conversations with his new hero that help to see that he is nothing if he does not enact his fantasies, and that to be a true sports photographer he must purchase a film camera (the previously unknown reason for the boy’s attempt to save money?). Surely no one stranded so precariously in a wreck has ever experienced such a logical progression of imagined interactions that help to define the rest of his life.

       Other questions arise: why briefly introduce his parents, who seem like a sweet if unperceptive Swiss couple, if the boy’s relationship to them is barely established. He snarls while they quietly eat, I suppose to suggest his hostility to the pair. And how does visiting an amusement park truly give our hero a true perspective about people which he might use in his later efforts of filming? All right, in that last scene I’ll even grant that Löic encounters a kind of joy he has never before known and possibly meets a young boy closer to his age who represents someone who might provide him with a different perspective of life.

      Yet, the numerous voids in this film’s narrative are never filled, and we are left with pure speculation of a truly “impressionist” vision of the world Baier is attempting to represent.

       At least this very last suggestion is hinted at in the movie itself, in which Löic overhears one of his elderly dates mentioning Impressionism and quickly looks it up in the Encyclopédique Larousse. The brief and vague definition it offers him is itself a kind of “impressionistic’ notion of what the art and literary movement represented. The boy accepts it, nonetheless, as a true definition of what he is trying to recreate with his camera, and, by film’s end, represent his future cinematic attempts.

       Perhaps the director is suggesting that the simple interplay of light and color, the vaguely defined outlines of objects and events is the only way to describe this portrait of a young (would-be) artist. Yet in the outlines of this “stupid boy’s” path into enlightenment the narrative holes the director’s camera creates might be better described as something like Alice’s drop into the rabbit hole where reality is turned on its head.

 

Los Angeles, August 2, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020)