Kenji Mizoguchi | 山椒大夫 Sanshō Dayū (Sansho the Bailiff) / 1954

to save the soul

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fuji Yahiro and Yoshikata Yoda (screenplay, based on a story by Mori Ōgai), Kenji Mizoguchi (director)  山椒大夫 Sanshō Dayū (Sansho the Bailiff) / 1954

 

Critic Anthony Lane’s comments about Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film, Sansho the Bailiff pretty much sum up my own feelings after watching this film the other day:

 

"I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal."

        Although Mizoguchi characterizes the story as a folktale, which has led some critics to describe it as a simple story, I’d argue it is deeply complex, not just in its meanings, but in its narrative pattern, and a great deal is expressed in what does not get told or said. What we can say that is simple about this work is its morality: on the one side we have the kind and merciful men such as the governor father, who at the beginning of this historical drama is exiled for refusing to punish the rebelling peasants under his rule; and on the other we have the cruel, greedy Sansho who uses hundreds of slaves to attain his notoriety and wealth. In between are most of the other figures, although it is clear that the governor’s wife, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), his daughter Anju (Kyōko Kagawa), and Sansho’s son, Tarō (Akitake Kōno) all attempt to follow the higher principles of life; but even the governor’s loving son, Zushiō (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) wavers in his commitment to the good, when, as a slave overseer, he brands a fellow slave for having attempted to escape.

        The story actually begins as a voyage by Tamaki, Zushiō and Anju years after their husband and father’s exile, as they attempt join him. In a region where they are told bandits and slavers abound, they can find no inn for the night, and are forced to camp out-of-doors. There they encounter a seemingly kind priestess who invites them into her home; but the next day, she insists that they should continue their trip by boat in order to protect them; when they meet their carriers, however, we quickly realize that they have been betrayed, as the mother is separated from her two children, she to be sold into prostitution, the children sold to Sansho as slave laborers.

      Immediately the children are set to hard work, with only the kindness of other slaves and the caring Tarō to protect them. Tarō, to whom the children finally confess their identities, cautions them they must work hard and bear the suffering so that they might later find a way to escape. Meanwhile, disgusted with his own father’s treatment of his slaves, Tarō, himself, leaves, hoping in Kyoto to find someone to hear his complaints.

      The children grow up, behaving, as I mention above, in opposing ways, Anju retaining the lessons of her father, while Zushiō submits—in a manner not so dissimilar to the Jewish capos and workers in the Nazi camps in World War II—to the orders of his other superiors.

       One day, when a new girl appears, Anju hears her singing a sad song that employs both her and Zushiō’s names; it is immediately clear that the lament has been sung by her own mother, who must, accordingly, still be alive and desperately seeking her children. She encourages her brother to escape the camp with her, but he dismisses her by questioning how they might survive without papers and money.

      Soon after, however, the two are sent out to accompany the body of a dying worker—a woman who had befriended Anju—whom they are ordered to leave in the woods to die. Anju begs the guard to let them gather wood and rushes so that they might, at least, build a small roof over her to protect her from frost. As the two work in gathering these materials, Zushiō recalls the time years earlier when they had done the same thing for their stay in the woods overnight with their mother. Suddenly he becomes determined to escape; but Anju insists that he go alone, taking the elderly woman with him, instead of her; she will provide a temporary ruse for his absence.

       With regret, Zushiō leaves for a nearby Imperial temple, while Anju, returning back to camp reveals that her brother has escaped. As Sansho’s guards rush in chase of the escapee, Anju once again leaves the camp to walk into a nearby lake and drown herself so that, if tortured, she cannot reveal her brother’s destination.

       At the temple, Zushiō discovers that the head priest is none other than Tarō. Sansho’s son. The monks give the elderly women medicine and hide the two as Shanso’s soldiers search to discover where they might have gone. Determined to travel on to Kyoto to plead to the Chief Advisor about the condition of the slaves, Zushiō begs Tarō to care for the woman; Tarō, in turn, gives him papers of identity Zushiō to the Advisor.

       Yet Zushiō is denied entrance to the Advisor’s palace, and even after slipping in undercover and confronting the administrator, is taken away and imprisoned. Only after guards discover a statuette of the god of mercy, given to him by his father, on Zushiō’s body, does the Advisor agree to meet with him, telling him that his father has died, while awarding him the governorship of Tango, the same province where Sansho lives.

       When Zushiō suggests he will outlaw slavery, however, he is reprimanded by the Advisor, and told that he has no role over personal property, only public lands.

       As Zushiō arrives in Tango, nonetheless, he announces a ban of slavery on all lands, public and private, insisting, over his assistant’s protests, that his soldiers close down Sansho’s estate.

       They are met with justified resistance—given the laws—but are defeated by Zushiō’s men. Zushiō, himself, apologizes to the old man who he had formerly punished. But he also discovers the fact that his sister has killed herself to protect him. As Zushiō and his men leave, the freed slaves burn down Sansho’s house.       

       Zushiō, having accomplished his goal, resigns his position, traveling to Sado, the island to where his mother has been taken to become a courtesan. There he finds another woman who has taken on his mother’s name, but can find no woman in the house of his mother’s age. Told that she had probably been killed in a local tsunami, he walks to the beach where she must have died.

       There he finds an old, blind woman singing the same song his sister had heard. Recognizing her as his mother, he attempts to tell her who he is, but she rejects him as a liar until he presents her with the same statuette of mercy that has saved him in the past. Zushiō reports of the deaths of both his father and Anju, as the two sadly fall into one another’s arms—too late, obviously, to redeem either of their lives.

        That is the story. But I have left everything out. Mizoguchi’s film is so beautifully, yet simply, shot that telling this tale is not as important as how it is visually represented. Along with Fumio Hayasaka’s memorable musical score, the beautiful early scenes, as the family attempt their long walk to reunite with their father, the terrible vision of the split of their family into two boats, the scenes of loving intimacy between Anju and her slave friend, Anju’s suicide by downing, the scenes which show the yearning Tamaki, and hundreds of other frames of this film literarily overwhelm the viewer with their beauty. There are very few black-and-white films that one might describe as so ravishingly beautiful: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ spring to mind. Yet Mizoguchi’s film, with its simple moral premise that there are those who abuse their fellow beings and a very few who manifest their love for the world, has never been better revealed. Those who care, obviously, lose nearly everything but their souls—souls which seem glowingly alive in Mizoguchi’s art.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2016).

            

Laura Huertas Millán | Jeny303 / 2018

elsewhere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Laura Huertas Millán (screenwriter and director) Jeny303 / 2018 [6 minutes]

 

Apparently when Laura Huertas Millán began interviewing a transsexual named Jeny, she discovered her film was accidently superimposed on the same 16mm film stock that she had used to film one of Bogotá’s architectural icons, building 303 of the University, a modernist Bauhaus structure in which her father, on the architecture faculty, had taught and had asked her to film.

     The building had also been the center of many student uprisings, and their political slogans had been registered across the walls of the former architectural wonder, a building demolished in 2015.

     By odd coincidence the ugly imitation of basically male German architecture is also rubbed out by the voice of the transsexual she had recorded, Jeny, who explains that she had gone to a party. “Passing by a bedroom, at a party, I saw people heating heroin. I wanted to try it out on my body.”

     Apparently the lesbian couple, helping each other to inject the heroin, quickly acquiesced, since Jeny became an addict who spends most of this 6-minute tape explaining how she attracted men who wanted a man looking like a woman while still displaying a penis.

     She describes the men she attracted putting their hands upon her thigh to make sure at the very moment when her boyfriend would suddenly appear, threatening them for being faggots and, with a gun, sometimes beating them as they robbed the supposed sexual assailants. In therapy, Jeny admits to her playing along in the game of sexual abuse to get more money for her and her boyfriend’s drug habit.

     The important metaphor of this film appears early in the short work, when Jeny describes her first experience with the drug: “I felt my heart beating very fast. My lips were dry, I was very thirsty. It was like being elsewhere.”

      The accident of the superimposed film image does in fact take us to that strange elsewhere, a world created out of the German experiments of the Weimar Republic from 1919-1933, imposed upon the 1960s South American Columbian city of Bogotá, which itself came to be desecrated as Hitler had the German experiment, by a later youthful generation in the architecture’s displaced location. This is a film about dislocation, the lack of the proper identity which attracts many a male, perhaps even, in a metaphoric sense, the filmmaker’s own father, precisely because it isn’t what it seems, but represents some sort of imitation.

      For all of this, however, Jeny303 is at heart a film about drug addiction, speaking only metaphorically of the transgender dysphoria. It might have been a far more interesting work if the director had been able to further explore what sexual joys Jeny, who after all was a human being with a heart and a body, not a building made of brick, felt about her male admirers, and how/if she finally grew to resent her boyfriend’s attack of those would-be sexual partners. Or might there be a far deeper story about how their abuse sexually satisfied her in revenge for her own obvious societal difference and ostracization? These are not the concerns of this far more formally concerned short cinema.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

 

 

 

 

Eric Steel | Minyan / 2020

leaving by remaining

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Steel and Daniel Pearle (screenplay, based on the story by David Bezmozgis), Eric Steel (director) Minyan / 2020

 

It is sometimes difficult for me to comprehend why a fine feature film like Minyan does virtually no business at the box office. While the film directed by Eric Steel may not be visually spectacular—although there are some very nice street and club scenes, and the couple of sexual encounters between the character David (Samuel H. Levine) and Bruno (Alex Hurt) are as hot as any non-porno out there—the narrative of this film is a nuanced and quite complex story involving religion, sexuality, politics, disease, culture, and history. Perhaps I just answered my own question, I’m afraid. Are contemporary film-goers still afraid of just those topics, particularly when they are woven together into a net so tight that they actually trap their major characters into their weave.

     Perhaps the fact that there are no true villains in Steel’s Minyan sets it apart. The viewer can be disgusted about various characters and their control over others, but gradually Steel’s and Pearle’s screenplay reveals that even the apparent controllers have been forced into their positions. There are no true heroes here; perhaps as in far too many Jewish and gay movies, there are only survivors.

     Yet the humanity of this film, which reveals nearly all its characters’ passions and flaws, is so overwhelming that one might imagine that empathy alone might have sent this film into major theaters. Perhaps today we are asked to share far too many lives of others outside of our immediate experience so that we have become numb and uncaring. I wish I might be able to wipe that sentence out with a simple backspace, but I’m afraid it may be true. Some of us, at least, seek out those experiences outside of the narrow confines of our own births, nurture, and subsequent values.

    Perhaps it’s simply the numerous seeming contradictions of the world presented in this film that kept audiences away. Steel’s landscape is, after all, the narrowly confined world of basically Russian Jewish immigrants in the 1980s Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn.

     The central character in this film is a rather typical 17-year-old boy, David (Levine) who, under the control of his somewhat embittered mother, Rachel (Brooke Bloom) and an always-straying sexist and violent father, is forced to attend a Jewish school, despite his desire to be acclimated into the new world into which they’ve entered. His mother, however, sees herself as protecting her son who she believes, unlike back in Russia, will not get daily beaten for being a Jew.

      We later discover that she was trained as a dentist, but in the US can only get a job as a dental receptionist, seeing some real clients after hours. Her husband Simon (Gera Sandler), a former boxer, is a physical therapist, using his employment mostly as an excuse to massage and pleasure willing women.

     Understandably, David, increasingly realizing the difference of his sexual desires from his friends such as Nathan (Zane Pais), gravitates to his far more open-minded, but still religious grandfather, Josef (brilliant played by Ron Rifkin). Josef is what you might describe as an intense realist, one who sees his faith as important in a larger context, but doesn’t perceive the laws of the Torah as being as confining as the Rabbis see them to be. He is for love and kindness. And when his wife dies is both saddened and relieved to move on into a smaller space that perhaps might not remind him of her more literal-minded views of life. The problem is in all of New York, how does an older man with little income to find a reasonable apartment. Even in his smaller space, David is willing to move in, just to escape his parent’s control and his father’s occasional brutality when he thinks his son is behaving as a “passive pansy.”

      Moreover, as he travels into the East Village with his friends at night, who visit the local whore houses, he is attracted to a local gay bar, Nowhere. Moreover, his grandfather allows him to enroll in a public school, where he meets up with a local teacher (Chinaza Uche) who has assigned them to read James Baldwin, and after David makes a brilliant interpretive comment about the book, quickly becomes a favorite student.

     Finally, a rabbi named Zalman (Richard Topol) who evidently controls the choice of tenants in a high-rise building has agreed to see Josef, whom David accompanies to the interview. The rabbi, barraged by a long list of possible renters, is mostly in search of religious Jews who might make up the minyan necessary to provide a religious service, and agrees to Josef’s occupation only if David moves in with him, making up the necessary 10 males they need for the ceremony.

     Next door to them are two elderly Jewish men, Herschel (Christopher McCann) and Itzik (Mark Margolis), who have been fellow soldiers together back in Russia and, having both lost their wives, have moved in together. But David soon perceives through the film’s subtle clues (their two toothbrushes sharing a small bathroom container) and the single bed they share, quickly realizes that they are actually gay, perhaps having been in love since their long-ago military service. David lovingly attends to their needs for a simple change of a kitchen light bulb and correction of their toilet. Josef, meanwhile, finds an elderly woman friend in his new building.

     In a shocking turn of events, David discovers that his best friend Nathan has just volunteered for the Israeli army and will clearly be leaving his life forever.

    He begins to seek elsewhere for his personal pleasure. He discovers the joys of sex in the local public library bathroom and, finally, after daring to visit the Nowhere bar, he begins a brief intense relationship with the bartender Bruno.

      If at first, Bruno seems a loving protector of the new kid (he also is seen to be reading James Baldwin, a rather unsubtle message that needn’t have been part of the narrative), but eventually pushes his away, warning him of the rising issues of AIDS, a subject that this film might easily have skirted, but was brave enough to embrace.

      A beautiful young girl, Alicia (Carson Meyer), who meets him in their schoolroom, also takes an interest in David, her presence in his life immensely pleasing David’s mother, who suddenly becomes almost a younger woman as she treats them to laughing gas in her after hours dental work.

      By this time, however, David has finally begun to understand who he truly is, and now finds himself as a protector of Herschel when his lover Itzik dies, after observing Itzik’s family, which includes his former bartender-lover Bruno, attempting to oust Herschel from the apartment.

    Desperate to protect Herschel, David pleads with Zalman to allow Herschel to remain, even as their apartment furniture has been mostly moved to the street or hauled off by the relatives. Only Herschel’s books remain, some of which, including the stories of Isaac Babel, he shares with the loving and caring David.

      In a final and sudden twist of the plot, we discover that the rabbi has long ago determined to let Herschel remain. As he puts it, "Thieves, adulterers, homosexuals. I take them all, without them, we would never have our minyan, but the one that I was most worried about was you.”

      It appears that David, no matter how he might wish to escape, is swept up into the very world into which he was born, a part of a community who care enough about each other to remain in their increasingly meaningless faith, while seeking temporary escape in a world outside. They are, after all, simple humans, not brilliant interpreters of the Torah or Jewish mystics.

     In the end, perhaps, it is that basically stoic view of an escape by staying put, or leaving by remaining that probably turned off some viewers and critics such as Rafaela Sales Ross, who argues that “all that is left is a nagging hunger for what could have been.” I truly and fully escaped in my personal life, but this film helps to comprehend the lives of those who remained in the worlds in which they grew up without going crazy.

 

Los Angeles, October 31, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

       

Douglas Messerli | Learning How To Speak About Love: A Trilogy by Søren Green [essay]

learning how to speak about love: a trilogy by søren green

by Douglas Messerli

 

What I have seen of the talented Danish film director Søren Green—I haven’t yet visited his recent 2024 feature, B.O.Y.—is concerned primarily with the early adolescent experiences regarding love, just prior usually to a full coming out.

     These films are filled with empty spaces as the young boys, in his most famed trilogy named Mathias and Frederik (the wonderful child actors Ulrik Windfeldt-Schmidt and Jacob Ottensten), don’t have the language of desire and sexual fulfillment that they are seeking. They talk mostly on the internet or cellphones in short phrases, querying one another and friends about emotions that they still can’t define. And that is their major problem: they haven’t yet had time to fully think out the gay sexuality to which their hormones are leading them.

      In some respects, Green’s works share a close kinship with fellow Danish director Lasse Nielsen. But then everything is different for the boys of Nielsen’s works of the 1970s, who grow up in at atmosphere of open hostility to the bourgeois worlds which they are attempting to escape. The boys of Nielsen’s works, beautifully long-haired and wildly open to same-sex relationships, perceive their adolescence as a liberating, hippie-like world of wine and roses, or even the kind of adolescent communities hinted at in William’s Golding’s earlier work, Lord of the Flies. Nielsen’s boys, even in his works of the Millenium, are much sexier and dangerous. Preteens crawl into the beds of teenagers, and they openly defy and attempt to escape the heteronormative worlds of their parent’s generation.

      Green’s boys struggle through a far more conservative era with the universal doubts of young boys coming out that, even with the greater acceptance of queer behavior in the general society, makes it all the harder to accept their sexual desires. In Green’s works there is a general confusion about how to feel, how to represent oneself in the society, and how simply to survive the years in which the boys find themselves. Although they openly gossip with their best female friends about gay sexuality, actually expressing that sexuality is often terrifying and frustrating, or at least something which still confuses them.

      Particularly in the trio of films made from 2014-2020, as well as his 2018 film October Boy, young teens such as Mathias and Frederik spend most of their time trying to gauge the feelings of one another and their reactions to their attenuated desires. No one is telling them that gay sex is wrong, they just sense that their actions go against the grain of the society in general and fear the consequences. Perhaps if they spent less time on line and spoke to one another in longer and full sentences, an older person like me can only imagine, they might resolve so much of the tension they feel.

      But Green’s children are basically loners who are unsure how to relate and mix into a society of language, art, literature, and cinema, etc. These boys come together as virgins, not just sexually but socially as well, and must make their way through a language in which they are not fluent in order to express their own emotions. The gentle touches of Mathias and Frederik in Green’s and his co-writer Tomas Lagermand Lundme’s boylove doesn’t always fully resolve these boys’ needs to speak up and out. They have no language of love, and even if they might perceive as do Nielsen’s characters that they “are not alone,” (the name of Nielsens’ most famous work is You Are Not Alone (1978)—they remain locked away in their computers and cellphones, uncertain how to openly speak to one another.

       Below I discuss the three films of Green’s trilogy, An Afternoon, An Evening, and A Night, which of course also call up the famed Richard Linklater trilogy: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).*

 

*In making this comment, I almost howled with laughter having just seen Dutch director Dennis Alink’s Out, in which a young would-be filmmaker from the provinces is invited to attend an august film school in Amsterdam. His major cinematic influences are figures such as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini whereas all of his peers can only speak of Richard Linklater. He is dismissed from the school and he moves on to make his own movies, beginning in Berlin.

But ironically, of course, Linklater’s characters do nothing but speak to one another about love and everything else on their sometimes empty minds.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October 2024).

Søren Green | En Nat (A Night) / 2020

fear without regrets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Søren Green and Tomas Lagermand Lundme (screenplay), Søren Green (director) En Nat (A Night) / 2020 [7 minutes]

 

In the third of what we can now guess as a trilogy, writers Green and Lundme reveal that in my analysis above, I was both wrong and right. There apparently was no flashback, no already resolved situation. Rather Frederik (Jacob Ottensten), just as I suggested, wasn’t quite ready for the gay sex we saw played out in their love scene, and certainly not ready to be identified as a “couple.”

      This 7-minute film is played entirely in text messages sent back and forth between the two boys in the dark of their own bedrooms.

      Mathias (Ulrik Windfeldt-Schmidt) cannot comprehend exactly what has happened, and is even more disconcerted with Frederik at first won’t even answer his messages.

      Finally Frederik, seeing how much in pain his former friend is, begins to communicate, explaining that it was the sex which has troubled him. Perhaps, he suggests, that he sees Mathias more than a friend instead of a lover.

      After all, he adds, this was his first time having sex. To which Mathias replies that it was also his first time.

      Just before watching this film, I had seen Josh Cox’s film of 4 years later, that contained basically the same scene. In this case it is Mathias evidently who asks, “Do you regret it?” Frederik answering “No.” But Green’s work goes just a bit further, with Mathias and Frederik agreeing that

at least they are happy that their first sexual experience was with one another.

      That may not fully answer Frederik’s fears about his sexuality in general and his apparent questioning of whether he wants to proceed in a gay relationship, but at least he admits that his tender partner was perhaps the best person to help him through the experience.

       We have no idea whether or not the two boys will find a way to fully come out or to accept one another as their lovers, but they at least can sleep on the fact that there is no deep hate between them, only fears.

       It will be interesting to see if Green decides to push beyond this triptych glimmer of young boy love into a clearer resolve of their feelings. It appears, however, that he feels most comfortable as a kind of sketch artist—given what we see also in his 2018 film, October Boy—in exploring the feelings of adolescents still in transition than following them into the decisions they make as young adults.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).