Directors:
Michel Ocelot, Ermanno Olmi, Max Ophüls, Nagisa Oshima, François Ozon, Yasujirō Ozu
Ocelot, Michel
Michel Ocelot (Bio) | 19th Cascade Festival of African Films ... biography
Michel Ocelot was born on the
French Riviera and spent his childhood in Guinea and his adolescence in the Anjou
region of France. After studying art, he learned about animated films by directing
short films during his vacations with a group of friends who each used
different techniques (cartoons, puppets, etc.). Michel Ocelot also enjoyed
animating paper cut-out characters. He kept a taste for varied creations and
pared-down techniques. He directed the animated series, Les Aventures de
Gédéon (1976, based on Benjamin Rabier’s work), then used characters and
backgrounds made with lacy paper in his first professional short film, Les
Trois Inventeurs (1979). This highly original film was rewarded with a
BAFTA in London. Since this film, Michel Ocelot has written the screenplays and
done the artwork of all his creations. After this, came the following short
films: Les Filles de l’égalité (1981) which won the Special Jury Prize
at the Albi Festival, Beyond Oil (1982) and La Légende du Pauvre
Bossu (1982 – César for Best Animated Film). Michel Ocelot returned to the
TV series format with La Princesse Insensible (1986) comprising 13 x
4-minute episodes, and directed the short film Les Quatre Voeux (1987).
His third series, Ciné Si, (1989 – 8 x 12- minute episodes) was animated
with the shadow theater technique: carefully cut-out black paper silhouettes. Several
of these sequences later appeared in Princes & Princesses (2000).
He wrote the 26-minute film, Les Contes de la nuit (1992), made up of three
sequences, then embarked upon the adventure of his first feature film. In 1998,
the general public became aware of Michel Ocelot, thanks to the huge box-office
and critical success of Kirikou and the Sorceress. The film's popularity
was so
great that it led Michel Ocelot to relate more of his little hero’s adventures
in Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) which he co-directed with
Bénédicte Galup.
Azur & Asmar, minutely prepared from 2001 on, is a project full of
new experiences: Michel Ocelot worked with a live-action producer (Christophe
Rossignon, of Nord Ouest), chose to combine 3D and 2D, and brought together his
production and animation team in Paris, the town where he lives. Unlike most
other French animation productions, Azur & Asmar was made entirely
in Paris.
Michel Ocelot was also President of the ASIFA (International Animated Film
Association) from 1994 to 2000.
website dedicated to Michel Ocelot
Michel Ocelot Allocine profile page (in French) Translate this page
Michel Ocelot - Random Dance - Collaborators brief bio from Random Dance
ReAnimania profile page
Michel Ocelot - Director, Screenwriter, Production Designer ... brief bio from UniFrance
Le Palais des dessins animés: Bienvenue Michel Ocelot short films
Hidden treasure of michel ocelot short films / Masters of ... Animafest 2010
Michel Ocelot The Auteurs
GalliaWatch:
The Ocelot Syndrome Tiberge from
FILM
PICKS: Top 5 Animated Films - France Today
Newsarama.com
: Animated Shorts - A French Master and His New Film Steve Fritz feature and interview with the
director, from Newsarama,
Tips
from an animation master, Michel Ocelot « Film Parade
Imagine at Annecy - Ocelot Simon’s Blog from Imagine,
Paper Goes to the
Movies Claire Lui from Print magazine,
Interview de Michel Ocelot Interview by Orianne Charpentier (2005)
Azur and Asmar: The Prince's Quest - interview with Michel Ocelot ... Interview from The List, January 31, 2008
Sunil
Doshi » In conversation with Michel OCELOT, Director, Azur ... Sunil Doshi interview in Mumbai,
Michel Ocelot
interview Ghibli World interview, August 2008
The
Evening Class: ANIMATION: <em>AZUR & ASMAR</em>—A Few ... Michael Guillen interview from The Evening
Class,
Interview with Michel Ocelot 2009 (pdf format)
Interview with Björk and
stills from "Earth Intruders" video Michel Ocelot music video
SiouxWIRE:
Video for BJÖRK's Earth Intruders from MICHEL OCELOT on YouTube (
all cartoons animation 2d 3d
Videos - Dailymotion YouTube clips
from Daily Motion
Michel Ocelot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
KIRIKOU AND THE SORCERESS (Kirikou
et la sorcière) A 96
France Belgium Luxembourg (74 mi) 1998 (Trailer 7.5 MB Quicktime version) Official Kirikou and the Sorceress website
Kirikou
is tiny but he is mighty
A delightful, ravishingly beautiful children’s story starring a precocious young child that speaks to its mother while still in the womb. Set in a small African village where women remain naked from the waist up, and where, according to legend, the men have supposedly been eaten by the mean and evil Sorceress, who has also plugged up their water supply. Using the bright, bold colors of a sunlit culture resembling the naive tableaux style of paintings by Henri Rousseau, known for his richly colored and gorgeously detailed pictures of lush jungles, wild animals, and exotic figures set in an almost dreamlike paradise, this is one of the more beautiful animated films ever made, featuring a very clever young naked baby, Kirikou, who seems to have supernatural running ability, yet also a charmingly inquisitive nature, confounding all the adults around who have resigned themselves to accepting things the way they are. When Kirikou asks why the Sorceress is so mean, they scold him for asking such a question that small children couldn’t ever understand. Yet on the day of his birth, Kirikou demonstrates he’s remarkably clever and quite capable of outsmarting anyone.
Despite his desire to be helpful, the other children have a way of ignoring Kirikou, claiming he is too small and not worth paying attention to, even as he warns them of lurking dangers. They laugh and play without him, but at their peril, as the Sorceress devises clever means of her own to snatch up the village children. But Kirikou magically saves the day, which is followed by celebratory song and dance, as they invent a song praising the wisdom and bravery of young Kirikou. Yet just as quickly, they’re ignoring him again, insulting him and calling him names while they run off and play, once more ignoring his warnings. Not only the children, but the adults as well continue to believe what they’re used to, which is to see a world filled with rumor and prejudice, and ignore the truth behind everything.
Kirikou goes on a perilous journey where he searches for the secret behind the Sorceress’s meanness, and much of it is expressed through lavishly beautiful flowers and animals, which offer an allure, yet also a dangerous side as well. Kirikou must find his way among the many dangers while also cleverly managing to survive, which amounts to taming the natural wilderness around him and unlocking the keys to his own destiny as well. Respectful of its unique setting, the percussive rhythms and musical score by Senegalese legend Youssou N'Dour lend an authenticity to the West African landscape, offering insight into the native culture that is never exploitive or dismissive, that is driven instead by oral traditions and customs. But it’s the warmhearted humor and wit that matches the elegant look of the film, always surprising the audience with inventive storytelling and a young lead character who is magically appealing.
Not before time, the
kids are taking over. Well, grown-ups these days just don't cut it. Or if not
kids, then a kid... Neatly dovetailing with the sentiments of Whale Rider,
this animated elaboration of a Senegalese folk tale brings us (pace Rick
Moranis) surely cinema's smallest hero - Kirikou, a preternaturally walking,
talking, indefatigable newborn. Not one to beat around the bush, Kirikou
summons his own birth aloud from inside his mother in the first minute of the
film, and he's no sooner out in the world than trying to remedy it. He emerges
into a village short on gold, water and menfolk, all these and more
requisitioned by Karaba, the implacable sorceress down the way. 'Why?', Kirikou
demands to know, and not taking 'you're too young to understand' for an answer,
he quickly progresses from freeing his uncle and fellow children from the
enchantress's clutches to hatching a plan to dig beneath Karaba's encampment to
the wise man of the mountain on the other side. All this, and still the
villagers doubt his worth... At least they know how to beat the drum when
fortune favours them (music courtesy of Youssou
N'Dour). The directors animates the tale in a simple but unsparing
chromatic style, typically using two-dimensional profile perspectives. Perhaps
they've taken a lesson from the protagonist: for all the film's sense of magic,
Kirikou turns out to be a level-headed logician at heart, thinking out his
dilemmas in delightful internal monologues. It's a great package: salutary,
short (74 minutes) and sweet.
Kirikou and the Sorceress on DVD and video Sight and Sound (link lost)
Kirikou is tiny but he
is mighty" —Song from Kirikou and the Sorceress
Introducing a new
children's champion, Kirikou and the Sorceress, a magical treat.
A huge hit in France
and joint winner (along with Chicken Run) in 2002 of the British
Animation Award for best European animated feature, Kirikou and the
Sorceress is a children's animated film that is a world away from Disney.
Based on a traditional
West African folk tale, Kirikou and the Sorceress is the story of
innocence defeating evil, with a modern twist. Glittering with gold and exuding
malevolence, Karaba is a sorceress who has eaten the men-folk of the village
and dried up the spring. No-one seems able to stop her until a remarkable baby
is born. The tiny but brave Kirikou delivers himself from his mother's womb to
emerge walking and talking and undertakes a perilous journey in order to disarm
the sorceress by discovering the cause of her own pain.
Writer-director Michel
Ocelot's rich animation plunges his audience deep into the myth and
spirituality of the African bush. The animation style and setting are
unapologetically African with no attempts to westernise the people or setting.
From emerald jungles to the glowing hellfire of Karaba's lair, Kirikou's world
is a kaleidoscope of joyous colour. The drawings of plants and trees are
stylised reproductions of real tropical flora, inspired by Egyptian drawings
and the paintings of Henri Rousseau.
The soundtrack by
internationally renowned Senegalese musician Youssou N'Dour gives an authentic
pulse to what he calls "the mythical Africa of children's tales."
Kirikou and the Sorceress, the only film to attract his talents, features only
traditional African instruments. The music and voices were recorded in his
Dakar studio.
The New York Times (Elvis Mitchell) review
Mother, bring me into the world," demands Kirikou, the infant protagonist of the animated fable "Kirikou and the Sorceress." Like its tiny hero, "Kirikou" proceeds at its own pace, and that pace is a more willful and slower piece of storytelling than children are accustomed to getting from American animated films, in which emotional crises are worked out like story problems (if Buzz and Woody need to get to point A ...).
The director Michel Ocelot's belief in his film is as winning as his title character's confidence, even though "Kirikou" is probably a story more suitable for younger children than for older ones.
Kirikou tells his mother when he's ready to be born and then pops out, a rambunctious can-do charmer who's constitutionally incapable of being defeated. This fairy tale, based on a West African legend, sends its indomitable little-boy hero with a ridge of sculptured hair atop his head on his way to outwit the evil sorceress Karaba and her minions: grim, obedient fetish objects and a thirsty beast that consumes all the water in sight.
It's wonderful and rare to see an African landscape rendered for an animated film and not have any of the characters voiced by white mainstream American movie stars, or hear any Broadway approximations of African music. The rhythms of "Kirikou" are aided by the lyric pulse of Youssou N'Dour's score, which lends the story an airy exuberance. The music does some of Ocelot's work for him.
Ocelot's style of illustration often uses a regal rigidity. His characters are frequently captured in profile, rendered as if they were pictograms created by the artist Romare Bearden. It's a full-scale delivery of animation with its own cultural imperative.
This gives the movie an odd delicacy, especially in scenes when "Kirikou" is most effective, as when Karaba's fetish figures -- blockish and frightening -- charge onto the screen. This scene and shots of Karaba -- her burning amber eyes match the gold jewelry she wears, tribute she has forced villagers into surrendering -- have a haunted serenity, instead of the anarchic pop-pop-pop that even the most tepid American feature-length cartoons provide.
"Kirikou and the Sorceress" has a modesty of scale that
limits its power, even with the occasional glimpses of fairy-tale horror (with
a primal earthiness reminiscent of "Princess Mononoke") that peek
through. The formality of both the dialogue and the visuals also vaguely
suggests the earliest Japanese anime to reach
It's more a piece to admire than to be involved by, yet it's easy to imagine children hypnotized by a hero tinier than they are when "Kirikou" is continually loaded into the VCR.
Kirikou and the
Sorceress | Animation World Network
Philippe Moins
KIRIKOU
AND THE SORCERESS, Taiwanese Regionfree LE DVD ... Ard Vijn
from Screen Anarchy
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Moria - The science fiction, horror and fantasy movie review site ... Richard Scheib
10
great fairytale films | BFI
Sci-Fi Weekly
review Matthew
McGowan
Eye for
Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]
Eye for
Film (Jennie Kermode) review [3.5/5]
Movie Gazette
(Anton Bitel) dvd review [9/10]
Christian
Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review
Kirikou
and the Sorceress | Chicago Reader
Ted Shen
RFI Musique - - Manu Dibango meets Kirikou RFI Musique interviews film composer Manu Dibango, December 27, 2005
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
The Globe and Mail review [3.5/4] Liam Lacey
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
BFI list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14 - Wikipedia
PRINCES AND PRINCESSES
Variety (Eddie Cockrell)
review
Another whimsical,
deceptively simple exercise from Intl. Animated Film Society prez Michel
Ocelot, "Princes and Princesses"
might not attain the worldwide penetration of the French animator's 1998 hit, "Kirikou and the Sorceress,"
but still has the ability to charm at fests, in specialty situations and on the
tube and homevid.
Utilizing an evocative
style of black silhouetted figures against vibrant washes of color, Ocelot puts
forth the setup of a teacher urging an inquisitive boy and girl to use their
imaginations and magical machines to act out series of short tales. The stories
involve various permutations of the plucky, problem-solving title royalty. Each
begins in a proscenium frame and affords Ocelot the chance to illustrate a
different period, including an unspecified Romanesque wood, ancient Egypt,
19th-century Japan, the year 3000 and a Grimm-era tale in which kisses turn the
duo various animals (pic's funniest sequence). There's even a minute-long break
built in at the half-hour mark, presumably for discussion. Tech credits are straightforward
for the form, although the sparse visual style may keep pic from traveling
beyond animation aficionados and kiddie auds fluent in the film's simple
French.
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review
Lotte Reininger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed,
with its amazing animation of paper silhouettes, was a true revelation about
the possibilities of the medium that were already being recognized in the
1920s. Acclaimed animator Michel Ocelot tries his hand at the same style of
work (though not necessarily using the same primitive tools as Reininger).
The film tells the stories of six princes and/or princesses in various
settings. The framing story is itself a flight of imagination as two young
animators (Arlette Mirape and Philipe Cheytion), working under Yves Barsaco,
design the stories and costumes that will be involved in each. A mechanism
transforms each of them into the characters of the story, who then proceed to
act out the tales, which have a distinct fairy tale feel. The first story, The
Princess of Diamonds, is a traditional quest tale about a cursed princess
who has been frozen into place until someone comes along who can retrieve the
111 diamonds that have fallen from her necklace in the time allotted—but anyone
who fails will be turned into an ant. This episode offers some gorgeous
moments, particularly of the diamonds sparkling against the grass. Ancient
The Sorceress is an amusing tale about patience, as a king offers the
hand of his daughter to whomever can enter the impregnable castle of a
sorceress. The endless methods that the other competitors try to storm the
castle are highly creative, and the animation of flames and the like is quite
effective. The Old Lady's Coat is a story about 19th century
The final segment is Prince and Princess, a quite hilarious take on the
story of the frog prince. Reminded that a kiss turned a frog into a prince, the
princess finds out that her kiss turns a prince into a frog, and things quickly
deteriorate from there as the two progress through an ever funnier succession
of creatures as they desperately try to kiss their way back to human form. The
detail of the silhouettes here is particularly dazzling. Better than the other
segments, it captures the handmade yet incongruously baroque flavor that makes Prince
Achmed such a delight. Thoroughly enjoyable for young and old, the main
detraction for the younger set is the omission of an English language
voiceover.
DVD Talk (John Sinnott) dvd review [2/5]
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [2.5/5] Phil Hall
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
StateMaster - Encyclopedia: Princes et princesses
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson] also reviewing KIRIKOU AND THE WILD BEAST
Princes et princesses - Michel Ocelot Brian Montgomery from DVDBeaver
Princes et princesses - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
KIRIKOU AND THE WILD BEASTS (Kirikou et les Bêtês Sauvages)
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
French writer-animator
Michel Ocelot deals exclusively in fables and fairy tales, but he presents them
with a blunt directness that seems antithetical to the genre. Instead, it winds
up enhancing it. In his best-known film, 1998's phenomenal African folk tale Kirikou
And The Sorceress, the characters speak with a clipped, aggressive gravity
that becomes its own form of wry humor. They're dealing with preposterous
events—a little naked hero who speaks to his mother from inside the womb, then
crawls out, severs his own umbilical, and runs off at supersonic speeds to save
his village from a malevolent witch—but they're dismissive about mere magic,
which they take as a given part of life. Accepting their own petty natures and
learning about generosity of spirit proves far more complicated.
Ocelot's 2005
semi-sequel, Kirikou And The Wild Beast, retains the gorgeously detailed
visuals and that hilarious tonal bluntness, but loses much of the compelling
mystery, and the urgency of life-and-death situations. A series of short
stories designed to take place in the middle of the first film, it begins with
a typically straightforward introduction, as a character snaps that Kirikou
And The Sorceress was "too short," and says that he has more
Kirikou tales to tell. But those who haven't seen the first film will be lost
amid the short stories' oddities, and those who have may find it hard to drop
back to earlier points in the characters' development, and watch them
recapitulate earlier dumb mistakes, this time with pettier stakes. Wild
Beast is the Tales From Watership Down of the animation world—a
pleasant but utterly inessential adjunct to an enduring classic.
Ocelot's earlier
anthology Princes And Princesses, while less visually ambitious, is a
great deal more fun. Alone in an office, three animators—a grizzled old mentor
and two mildly egotistical assistants—devise fairy tales, then costume
themselves (via a creepily simple machine) and play out their stories onstage.
The frame story could use some development—like Wild Beast, Princes
barely tops an hour long, in spite of packaging proclaiming a longer run
time—but the stories are terrifically creative, tight little fillips, ranging
from a 19th-century Japanese fable to a far-future love story to a silly
fantasy about a prince and princess who change shapes whenever they kiss. The
animation reproduces Lotte Reiniger's pioneering silhouette style, but the
material is pure Ocelot: funny, sharp, and endearingly grounded, no matter how
fanciful the concepts get.
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review
Michel Ocelot's diminuitive Senegalese hero Kirikou returns in
this sequel to Kirikou and the Sorceress. Having outwitted the sorceress
Karaba (Awa Sene Sarr) by getting water for his village, Kirikou (Pierre Ndoffe
Sarr) thinks that he will live in happiness and peace. But as his grandfather
(Robert Liensol) recounts, his adventures are just beginning. This picture
collects four West African folk tales as the struggles of Kirikou and his
village continue against the wicked sorceress.
The story picks up right from the end of the earlier film, as Kirikou directs
water to the village's vegetable garden, which quickly thrives from his
attention and the water. But one night the garden is utterly destroyed by a
wild beast that may have been sent by Karaba to wreak havoc. Kirikou alone is
willing to discover the nature of the beast, a massive black hyena, and solve the
mystery of why such a meat-eater would disturb their vegetable garden. The
second tale shows the village attempting to earn money in order to buy food,
after the destruction of their garden. Kirikou hits upon the plan of making
pots to sell in the nearby town, and soon everyone is helping out with pottery,
which they begin to tote on their heads to the town. But when they run across a
water buffalo and decide that it will make a good beast of burden, Kirikou's
suspicions and warnings go unheeded.
The third tale is the most adventurous, as Karaba determines that the best way
to defeat Kirikou is to lure him out of the village by using his curiosity
against him. Odd bird footprints do the trick as Kirikou is soon out of the
protection of the village and finds himself surrounded by Karaba's fetish army.
In the final tale, he uses that army against Karaba. When the women of the
village, including his mother (Marie-Philomène Nga), fall ill, the cure rests
with a yellow flower found only near Karaba's compound. Kirikou decides that
the best way to save the women is to disguise himself as a fetish and make his
way in to retrieve the medicinal flowers.
Once again, the picture has gorgeous design that is harmonious with the West
African source materials. Color tends heavily towards brown and yellow, with a
turquoise sky that emphasizes the equatorial sun. Ocelot's visuals have a nice
combination of naturalism and stylization that serves the subject matter well.
Traditional costuming is on display, which means that there's National
Geographic-style nudity on display throughout, with bare-breasted women and
nude children (including little Kirikou).
Characterization is pretty well demonstrated, with small moments that reveal
much. Samples of these include the fiery temper of Karaba as she is outwitted,
or Kirikou's childish delight at tasting honey and licking it from his fingers.
He also has a nice moment of compassion as he tends to an injured ground
squirrel. His speedy movement is almost ridiculous and lends an air of
lightness to the proceedings. The wild beast of the title is suitably scary,
though it occasionally is reduced to money-saving cycling, which is a little
jarring against its otherwise naturalistic movements. But on the whole it's
quite masterfully accomplished and an interesting glimpse into traditional
Senegalese life. The running time is nearly 25 minutes shorter than the box's
claimed 95 minute running time, however.
SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
The Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
AZUR & ASMAR B 86
aka: The Prince’s Quest
A sumptuously beautiful film, as would be expected, with an underlying social theme about encountering prejudicial differences when various races, religions, or cultures mix, where, interestingly enough, the end credits list people from two dozen nations that contributed to the making of the film, adding that they “all got along well.” This strategy is overly obvious and actually detracts from the overall impact of the film. Instead, there are moments of dazzling imagery, but the storyline loses momentum by the end when it simply runs out of ideas. Two legendary Japanese directors, Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, incorporate similar human conflicts with both technology, nuclear power, global war, and the idea of living in harmony with nature, yet the quality of their filmmaking (arguably) did not suffer as a result. Not so here, as the luscious visuals are extraordinary, adding a highly decorative Arabian Nights splendor, but the cardboard characters never evolve into anything truly interesting, remaining something close to stereotypical depictions that end up dragging the entire film down. One of the problems with choosing a subject purely for what it represents to the audience, such as a light skinned or dark skinned person, a person who is good or evil, is that they can never be anything else, as they are stuck in this singular categorization.
This film feels more like a sketch or outline of a story, or perhaps the victim of serious editing to keep the length down, as entire threads are either never explained, such as the abusive behavior of the near missing father who throws them out of their original home, or how their mother, who was herself a servant, now has servants of her own and is feared by all while living like a queen in most immaculately beautiful home in the land, made scant reference to, as angry mobs are upset throughout, but other than alleged superstition and a hatred for blue eyes, we never understand what they’re so upset about and why they’d wish to kill anyone, or forgotten altogether, such as the future lies in the hands of the young princess, mentioned several times and then eventually forgotten. Using a Shakespearean Twelfth Night or Pericles template where two young boys are raised by the same woman as brothers, one Arabic speaking and dark skinned, the other English speaking, pale skinned with blue eyes, are separated at an early age, eventually finding each other as young adults years later after a long and arduous journey involving a shipwreck and a cultural disaster leaving one of the boys a stranger in a strange land. What’s interesting is that before any reunification can begin, both immediately decide to set out on yet another journey in search of the Djiin Fairy imprisoned under a cavernous mountain, a character from a song their mother used to sing to them, where their intentions are not only to rescue her, but win her hand in marriage.
While their mother’s home resembles the architectural perfection of the Alhambra, filled with the integrated harmony of birds, flowers, continually flowing water, and delicately designed Moorish mosaics, their journey takes them across vast deserts into the mountains where people inexplicably behave just as crudely and violently as the land where they began. They must endure fights against hordes of angry men, discover the clues to secret passageways, and finally make the correct choice between several possible entranceways, where the wrong choice could mean their lives. The colors and magical creatures are endlessly inventive, though the two princes, despite their bravery and nobility of spirit, are more one-dimensional and never reveal any surprises. When all is said and done, the end is nearly a mockery of an end, as it goes on and on like the mind-altering, run-on sagas of the SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965), emerging with an all too simplistic, feel good, Disney like finale. The film relies on a healthy dose of Arabic music, much of it gentle and hypnotic, but unlike KIRIKOU, it barely scratches the surface when it comes to offering an appreciation for the history and culture of the region. Also of interest, in the screening at the Film Center, there wasn’t single child in the audience, which certainly suggests one of the targeted audiences for this film is not being reached.
Azur & Asmar JR Jones from The Reader
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
French director Michel
Ocelot has reportedly spent about seven years working on this beguiling
animated fable, and the densely layered and vividly coloured images he conjures
up are like the illustrations from a much-loved children's book. In the manner
of the Thousand and One Nights, the movie tells the story of two friends, as
close as brothers: Azur and Asmar. One is the son of a nobleman, the other the
son of the north African nurse who brings them up, and enraptures them with
tales of a Djinn fairy awaiting the love of a prince to release her from an
enchantment. Harshly separated in their teens, the rich young man travels to
the Orient where he finds his friend again, and they travel onward on a mission
to find this mythical Djinn princess. It has real charm: an old-fashioned
looking movie, but with a heartfelt belief that, pace Kipling, east and west can
and should meet.
Village Voice (Michelle Orange) review
With its delicate, fairy-tale bones and layer of politically conscious muscle, Azur and Asmar is a sleek and yet slightly unwieldy animal. The fourth animated feature from French director Michel Ocelot (Kirikou and the Sorceress), Azur's hybrid appeal should be one of its strongest selling points but proves its weakest: The lessons of cultural intolerance are pitched simply enough for children to understand, yet the execution lacks the schmoozy wit and splashy visuals to keep them entertained; adults will find the elegant combination of cut-out and CGI animation bewitching but the thematics unsubtle, at best. Azur and Asmar are introduced as babes at the breast of an Arab woman (nanny of the former, mother of the latter) in an unspecified Anglo land. Raised as brothers, Azur is an Aryan wet dream, while Asmar is brown like his mum. The boys are separated by Azur's unaccountably evil father, but meet years later in an unspecified Arab land, both chasing a childhood fable that involves freeing a fairy princess. Azur is feared by the Arabs for his blue eyes, a sort of reverse racism that causes him to feign blindness, and all of the Arabic dialogue is untranslated, heightening his feeling of isolation. Aside from a visual shout-out to Jesus and a mention of madrasas and mosques, Ocelot skirts religious questions altogether, offering a moral about ethnic differences, with interracial dating as "the answer for a harmonious future."
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [4/6]
French animator
Ocelot’s style is so distinct from most American animation that it seems like
an entirely different art form. In Azur & Asmar, Ocelot takes
advantage of computer animation’s strengths (moving the point of view from,
say, a low angle looking up at a character to a God’s-eye perspective in one
gorgeous swoop), but he also mixes complex backgrounds that often look like
collages with flat planes of color for characters’ clothes, a choice that
stresses the two-dimensionality of the film. (Animation buffs will spot the
influence of Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 silhouette animation film The Adventures
of Prince Achmed.) And, with a rich use of Islamic architectural detail,
the film nearly explodes with lush detail. Have we mentioned that this thing is
gorgeous?
The plot follows Azur,
blond, blue-eyed European, and Asmar, the Arab son of Azur’s nanny. In a
loosely defined Middle Ages, the boys are raised like brothers, complete with
sibling rivalry. As adults, they meet again when both have set out on a quest
to free the djinn fairy. It may take a while to adjust to Ocelot’s slower
pacing, but once you surrender your Disney-and-Pixar-trained expectation of
wacky cuteness (like the jumbo-sloth humans who mar the second half of WALL•E),
Azur & Asmar is utterly enchanting.
We have been very
outspoken supporters of French animator Michel Ocelot in these pages for some
time now. With his deceptively simple stories that reveal layers upon
layers of meaning with repeated viewings Ocelot calls to mind master Japanese
animator Hayao Miyazaki on more than one level, a similarity that Miyazaki
himself seems to have noticed given that his Studio Ghibli has championed
Ocelot’s films throughout Japan. It is his African folk tale Kirikou and the Sorceress that first
drew serious international attention to Ocelot’s work and armed with a very
different animation style the master is returning to Africa once again - albeit
a very different part of Africa - for his latest effort, Azur and Asmar.
Playing like an
excerpt of Arabian Nights, Azur and Asmar is an Arabic based
fairy tale revolving around a pair of young men - the upper class European Azur
and the servant class Arab Asmar. Different classes they may be but the
two boys grew up together as virtual brothers with Asmar’s mother hired on to
be Azur’s wet nurse and nanny. And so, much to Azur’s father’s chagrin,
the young boy grew up with the lower class foreigner as his constant playmate
and chief rival, learned to speak Arabic in his childhood and was raised on a
steady diet of Arabic folk tales. Key among those tales, the story of the
Djinn Fairy - a magical princess imprisoned inside a mountain awaiting a brave
prince to come and save her, a prince who she would then marry.
As the boys grow the
class distinctions inevitably raise their ugly heads until, finally, Azur’s
father loses his temper with both his son and the nanny, sending the son off to
the city to learn from a proper tutor while throwing Asmar and his mother out
onto the streets with only the clothes on their backs. Though years pass
Azur never forgets the stories he learned as a child and when the time comes
that he has rown enough to be independent he declares to his father that he is
leaving home and setting off across the ocean on a quest to rescue the Djinn
Fairy from his childhood stories. And off he goes, only to be swept off
his boat and washed ashore penniless, shunned by the locals who - thanks to
superstition - fear his bright blue eyes.
Shunned and scorned
Azur clenches his eyes shut and swears to live life as a blind man. Since
arriving in the country he has seen nothing but ugliness and his eyes have
brought him nothing but pain and so he puts them away. Luckily he is ‘adopted’
by a fellow foreign beggar who offers to act as his guide and takes him to the
city to beg a living and in the city, of course, Azur is reunited with his
nanny - who has never forgotten the boy she raised as her own and welcomes him
warmly - and Asmar, who has never forgiven Azur’s family for his rough
treatment and expulsion. Unwilling allies the two young men set off on
their quest ...
A visually dazzling
film - easily the most impressive visual piece of work in Ocelot’s career - Azur and Asmar takes a bit of time to
hit its stride. The pacing in the early going is clumsy, Azur’s father a
single-note charicature and the relationship between the two boys rushed and
overly simplified. But once the film finds itself - right around the time
that Azur finds himself washed ashore penniless - it is pure magic.
Ocelot is smart enough to recognize that the power of mth and legend lies at
least partially in its simplicity and he refuses to clutter up the narrative
with unnecessary devices. The story telling is lean with minimal dialogue
serving to bolster the jaw-dropping imagery. But lean in no way implies
weak. Ocelot may not like to waste words but those he does use are used
to great effect. His regular themes of diversity and tolerance are woven
subtly throughout the film, as are issues of love and honor and family. I
don’t believe it’s an accident that Ocelot chose to make a film set in an age
where the Arab world was the most tolerant and culturally diverse in the world
in our current political climate but as much as he clearly wishes to make that
point he is also wise enough to make it subtly and not overwhelm the core
story, the story of the Djinn Fairy.
The quest for the
Fairy follows all of the classic quest motifs and does so beautifully well, a
perfect example of why quest stories still hold so much power. The two
boys learn, grow and change throughout their journies, emerging at the end as
much better and wiser men for the experience. And the journey itself is
sheer magic for all ages, the encounter between Azur and a shockingly crimson
colored lion with bright blue claws being a particular favorite. The
artwork and design is stunning, unlike anything you have seen in western
animation before, a riotous shock of color and geometry designed to showcase
both the beauty of nature and the classic patterns of Arabic design and tile
work.
The slow opening keeps
Azur and Asmar from hitting
quite as high a peak as does the first Kirikou
film but it is, nonetheless, clearly the work of a master.
Eye for
Film (Anton Bitel) review [4.5/5]
"This film was made in
You will find this message amidst the closing credits to Michel Ocelot's Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest, followed by a list of the 25 different nationalities represented by the film's cast and crew. It is not merely a piece of ethnographic trivia, but a statement that perfectly summarises a film thoroughly committed to the virtues of pluralism and multiculturalism in creating a better world.
Like Ocelot's breakthrough animated feature Kirikou And The Sorceress (1998), Azur & Asmar employs a fairytale 'quest' frame to explore humankind's twin capacity for shallow prejudice and open-minded wisdom - but where the earlier film reduced our global village to a tiny African community, this latest film is set on a much larger canvas, with a much richer, computer-generated palette. It is a tale of two races, two cultures, two continents, two languages - and of two 'princes' who achieve their regal status through worth rather than birth.
Blonde, blue-eyed baby Azur may live in the country, and the country house, of his father, a wealthy French widower, but he is brought up by his North African wet-nurse Jenane alongside her own baby boy Asmar. Jenane always treats both boys as equals, but their young years and skin-deep differences create rivalries, until eventually Azur's father removes the French boy altogether from the influence of Jenane and her son - by brusquely kicking them off his property.
Now, years later, the adult Azur has all but forgotten the Arabic taught to him by Jenane, but he still remembers her enchanting stories of a beautiful Djinn fairy imprisoned deep within a black mountain - and so he sets off on a quest to liberate and marry her. Shipwrecked on the shores of Jenane's land, mistreated by superstitious locals, and reduced to a lowly beggar, Azur almost abandons all hope from the outset and determines never to look upon the world again, until a chance encounter with his fellow countryman, the narrow-minded arch-cynic Crapoux, guides him to the nearby medina, whose many sensory pleasures Azur can appreciate even with his eyes closed.
There he is reunited with Jenane, now a rich merchant, and resumes his quest, with useful advice from the Jewish scholar Yadoa, the precocious Princess Chamsous Sabah (herself, like the Djinn fairy, held as a cloistered prisoner against her will), and even from Crapoux. But will Azur be helped or hindered by Asmar, who is also seeking to free the fairy? And will they all be able to deliver the city from its blind prejudices and tendencies towards self-destruction?
The first thing that will strike any viewer of Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest is its dazzling, painterly colours, whose ostentatious exuberance has little parallel in animation. The spice market is a mottled haven of reds, oranges and yellows, Jenane's garden is a sea of soothing greens, the Princess' palace is an Escher-like illusion of blacks and whites, while the Djinn fairy's underground chamber is an all-encompassing shadow-world that suddenly explodes into a display of every colour under the sun.
Indeed colour forms a central motif in the story, starting with the difference in the hue of the boys' skin - although when both lads are covered from head to toe in mud, Azur's racist father is unable to tell them apart, and as Jenane will later remark, "their blood is the same colour". The local Africans' superstitions focus upon blue eyes, while Crapoux is terrified of black cats. An early argument between the boys as to which is the more handsome (and whose country is superior) is followed by the vision of a rainbow in the sky. Shortly before Azur is reconciled to his long-lost 'mother' Jenane, his white garments and face are accidentally (but significantly) bespattered by a kaleidoscope of spices.
Yet even as Azur, at his lowest point, feigns blindness to avoid witnessing all the ugliness around him, Ocelot's film deploys its hyperchromatic aesthetic to suggest the very opposite: that beauty, harmony and enlightenment reside in opening one's eyes and mind to the brilliant variety that the world has to offer - including, paradoxically, ugliness itself. Crapoux may seem ridiculous when he complains that the medina's exquisite dye markets "don't have grey" - but Ocelot's egalitarian vision can happily accommodate even the perspective of so absurdly blinkered a character, and in the end revere the opinion of one "who thinks differently" alongside everyone else's. In this moral landscape, you see, the shades of grey are just as essential to the overall ideological spectrum as the most eye-goggling primary colours.
Set against such lavish backgrounds, Ocelot's characters can at times seem a little bland - an impression that is not aided by the relatively inchoate way in which they (and more particularly their costumes) have been drawn, making them two-dimensional not just in the literal sense. For some, this visual contrast between setting and person, though a familiar feature in much Japanese animation or indeed in video games, may prove a somewhat grating stylisation in what is otherwise a true feast for the eyes - but Ocelot has so captivating a story to tell that such quibbles are quickly left behind.
Though Azur and Asmar's adventures unfold in the Middle Ages, they reflect with great intelligence and sensitivity upon issues confronting today's globe: the conflicts that emerge from differences of class, sex, race and religion, and more particularly the divisions between the West and Islam. In his magical, awe-inspiring tale, Ocelot imagines a utopia where such differences might be both acknowledged and embraced in a dance of colour. He also, however, has the good sense to confine such a utopia to a land of dreams and the realms of fairytale – where perhaps, at least until we come to realise that the same fraternal and regal blood courses through all our veins, utopia will always belong.
Film Journey Doug Cummings
Fabulist of filmmaking Nigel Andrews from The Financial Times
Twitch (Ard Vijn) dvd review which also includes an interview by Peter van der Lugt GhibliWorld.com did with Michel Ocelot
Animated Shorts: Michel Ocelot's Azur and Asmar Steve Fritz frim Newsarama
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
www.european-films.net (Boyd van Hoeij) review
Animated Views » Azur & Asmar: Michel Ocelot's Quest For Tolerance
AWN Showcase - Michel Ocelot photos from Animated World Network
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
Time Out London (Derek Adams) review [4/6]
Time Out New York (Elisabeth Vincentelli) review [5/6]
'Azur & Asmar' stars the voices of Steven Kyman, Nigel Pilkington ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune
The New York Times review Nathan Lee
One Thousand and One Nights - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
O’Connor, Gavin
TUMBLEWEEDS
USA (102 mi) 1999
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Tumbleweeds (1999) Demetrios Matheou from Sight and Sound, March 2000
The Walkers are a two-unit
family: mother Mary Jo is a spirited Southerner and serial spouse who flees town
whenever a relationship breaks down; Ava is her 12-year-old daughter, an
intelligent child buffeted by her mother's erratic love life.
Following the failure of her last
relationship, Mary Jo again uproots herself and Ava and moves to Starlight
Beach, near San Diego. There she gets a job as a secretary and Ava enrols in
the local school. Mary Jo soon hooks up with Jack, a trucker. Despite a
promising beginning, the relationship soon crumbles and Mary Jo decides to
leave Starlight Beach. This time Ava, who has developed strong friendships at
school, refuses to go with her. She runs away, hiding out at the home of Dan, a
work colleague of Mary Jo. Mary Jo finally realises that it is time to put down
roots with her child. The two are reconciled. Only then does Mary Jo notice the
sensitive Dan, who has been attracted to her all along. Together, they go to
see Ava's successful performance as Romeo in a school production of Romeo
and Juliet.
Review
Sandwiched between the visceral
New York films which established his career, Mean Streets (1973)
and Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese made Alice Doesn't
Live Here Anymore. A road movie about a newly widowed woman who sets out
to find a new life with a young son in tow, the 1974 film very much comes to
mind when watching Tumbleweeds, although the allusion doesn't
necessarily favour first-time director Gavin O'Connor.
While Alice tries her hardest to
avoid men, Mary Jo's compulsive behaviour towards them is the driving force of Tumbleweeds
- responsible both for mother and daughter's nomadic lifestyle, and for the
tensions between them. In exploring this, the script is often funny, and
insightful. In particular, O'Connor and his co-screenwriter Angela Shelton (on
whose memoir this film was based) avoid the usual overwrought rationalisations
for Mary Jo's insecurities: hers is simply a banal life story, in which one
mistake leads to another, until misadventure becomes a habit.
The depiction of the parent/child
relationship is also well observed, less in the dialogue, perhaps, than in its
palpable physicality: frequent meals, food fights, farting displays; Ava's
first period; a trip to the beach wearing matching (and ill-fitting) bathing
costumes. Rather than the saccharine show one might find in a more mainstream
movie, Janet McTeer and young Kimberly J. Brown's tactile rapport offers
something infinitely more believable. Indeed, it's the rich, febrile
performance of the British actress, bringing just the right blend of charisma
and chaos to her characterisation, that lifts this essentially modest film.
Driving her Mustang as if dressed for Ascot, Mary Jo comes across as a
raunchier version of Blanche Du Bois, still reckless before tragedy has taken
its indelible hold.
The affinities with Scorsese's
film are everywhere: in the scenario; the rather naive view of men - as either
nice guys or irredeemable brutes - that one sometimes finds in female-centred
films made by male directors; and the naturalistic performances. But O'Connor's
handling of the mise en scène pales in comparison, exposing the
ordinariness of his direction.
This is epitomised by his
misguided use of the jarring 'naturalism' - the skittish, arbitrary camerawork
- of US television police dramas. Even a quiet dinner scene between mother and
child is shot as if the cameraman needs a detox. The result is as intrusive as
the writing is subtle. O'Connor also appears in the film, as the trucker Jack;
ironically, it is when he's on the road that the director, like his character,
seems most at ease.
WARRIOR B 84
While there’s nothing particularly novel about this formulaic story, a ROCKY (1976) picture with Nick Nolte in the famous Burgess Meredith role as the aging fight trainer, with the role of Rocky split between two brothers, Tom Hardy as Tommy and Joel Edgarton as Brendan, split from one another as teenagers and forced to lead very separate and distinctly different lives. Hardy plays a brooding ex-Marine, a loner with so many complications in his life he can barely utter a word, a guy carrying a grudge who turns into a horrifically brutal fighter, while his brother Brandon is a high school physics teacher, married with two children, but about to have his home foreclosed, forcing him into a state of desperation where he can pick up extra cash from the fight business. Joel Edgarton is the screenwriter of the very stylish The Postman Always Rings Twice style Australian film THE SQUARE (2008), directed by his brother Nash, and one of the criminal brothers in one of he best pictures of last year, ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010). Here he plays the older brother who got the better end of the deal, as the younger brother was forced to flee from an abusive father, taking his terminally ill mother with him, basically fending for himself at an early age, losing all contact with his family. Neither one has any use for their father, who finally after all these years is trying to get sober, but barely even registers as having a pulse with these two guys, as they’ve left him behind ages ago. Rather than playing football in Mark Wahlberg’s INVINCIBLE (2006), wrestling from Aronofsky’s THE WRESTLER (2008 ), or boxing in David O. Russell’s THE FIGHTER (2010), this movie features the latest fighting craze called the ultimate fighting championship, mixed martial arts, which allows boxing, wrestling, and various martial arts techniques where a fighter wins by points, knockouts or submission holds, where in this case, a round robin battle of 16 leads to 4 fights within 24 hours, the winner takes all, a $5 million cash prize.
While the actual narrative is familiar, but rather than
shown in an indie style picture, which is usually all character development,
this is a tense, highly stylized, Hollywood action picture that takes us
directly into the center of the ring where it becomes an adrenaline-laced fight
picture, an old-fashioned popcorn movie that stars three men who are so damaged
they are barely articulate, who haven’t spoken to one another in years, and
when they do have the opportunity, they still have next to nothing to say, so
it’s all about what happens inside the ring.
Tommy is a former undefeated high school State wrestling champion, but
his quick exit from the state curtailed his promising career, while Brendan had
a brief, fairly ordinary ultimate fighting career that also came to an abrupt
end as his wife Tess (Jennifer Morrison) couldn’t stand to see her husband get
pummeled. But both are completely off
the radar when it comes to ranking the best fighters in the world, so just
getting into this tournament is something of a stretch. However, the acting in this picture is
superb, among the best performances of the year, where they each complement one
another nicely, where Nolte is the odd man out, bruised, beaten, old and weary,
who dares to hope against all fading hope that he can reconcile his differences
with his two sons who refuse to acknowledge his existence, who spends his time
listening to a tape in his ear of a reading of Melville’s Moby Dick. Tommy went off to
Iraq and bulked up, but so little is known about him that his life is a mystery
even to himself, as he keeps everything secretly locked up inside, very much in
the mold of Stallone in FIRST BLOOD (1992), where fighting is his true release,
seen kicking the living crap out of a championship contender as a walk on
fighter in a dingy gym, which is how he earns his reputation. He’s also recognized by a soldier in
While there is a working class setting of
Andy's Film Blog [Andy Kaiser]
An angry and bitter young man (Tom Hardy) returns to the home of his alcoholic father (Nick Nolte) so he can train him to fight in a mixed martial arts tournament and nothing more. His older brother (Joel Edgerton), whom he also harbors resentment towards, is a struggling school teacher facing foreclosure and also eyes the substantive cash prize of the MMA tourney. "Warrior" is a sports movie that is rife with cliches, that is handled in such an extraordinarily powerful manner that we gladly embrace them. It's a film that transcends its genre and should appeal to everyone because it finds strength in its human story. Tom Hardy, who's star is quickly on the rise, brings a quiet ferocity to the role and Joel Edgerton is quite good as well bringing believability to his family man/scrappy underdog fighter. Then there is Nick Nolte, an actor many write off for his off screen antics, who reminds us all what a powerful presence he is. His repentant and tough as nails drunk is surely to earn him a supporting actor nod. With "Warrior", director Gavin O'Connor has taken the kind of film that holds a high mass appeal and injected with a dynamism along with a touch of humanity resulting in a work that plays like gangbusters.
The realm of mixed martial arts is still an
ephemeral one, where upstart fighters can quickly rise through the ranks if
they prove their mettle with a combination of brute strength, mental agility,
endurance and sheer insanity.
A sport that generates millions of dollars in revenue, yet
is still fighting for mainstream acceptance, is full of inherent
contradictions, and in Warrior, it acts as a metaphor for the fractured
family life of two brothers, both teetering on the edge between respectability
and oblivion.
Beginning with the arrival of broken down, AWOL Marine
Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy) at his father's (Nick Nolte)
Okay, before the eye-rolling starts, know that Warrior
is a straightforward, classically told family story with an ending that can be
spotted from the first reel, so the key with a movie like this is how it
reaches its destination. Hardy and Edgerton are both solid, bringing subtlety
where it's sorely needed to the yin-yang of two brothers torn apart. Nick Nolte
is excellent as their formerly drunken dad, adding a sad-eyed nuance to the
kind of role he was born to play, especially as he edges into to the twilight
of his career.
From his sternness to the contrition of an ex-addict to
his wild-eyed (and haired) leap off the wagon of sobriety, Nolte is a joy to
watch and master of every scene he's in. As things reach a fever pitch and our
battling brothers advance through the tournament, director Gavin O'Connor does
a good job keeping things moving at an entertaining pace, making sure the
comparatively wee Irish brothers beating down men twice their size feels at
least somewhat realistic.
Warrior is a smart film, but it's also a fairy tale
for dudes where, despite the bloody struggles, the pieces fall together neatly.
It's nearly impossible to run a new spin on the sports film, and Warrior
isn't trying to re-invent the wheel. Yet what it does with its pieces makes for
bold, gritty entertainment.
With Miracle and now Warrior, Gavin O'Conner can lay claim to being the finest sports-drama director working today. That field is, admittedly, a shallow one, yet faint praise isn't intended, as O'Conner continues to exhibit a deft knack for melding interpersonal drama with athletic competition in ways that, despite his tales' clichés, earn their melodramatic manipulations through genuine empathy for characters' plights. Whereas his prior effort about the historic real-life 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team had built-in rooting-interest, Warrior works from an original dramatic template—original, of course, except for its indebtedness to Rocky, with which it shares not only a Philadelphia setting for its rise-to-fisticuffs-glory trajectory, but a set of archetypes modeled after the Italian Stallion, Adrian, Mick, and Drago. Still, if those connections are sometimes blatant, they're also embraced as a means of acknowledging the enduring impact of its basic nobodies-make-good template, in which two long-estranged brothers, high school wrestling star and Iraq war vet Tommy (Thomas Hardy) and physics teacher and former UFC punching bag Brendan (Joel Edgerton), seek self-worth and salvation through confronting their traumatic past with recovering alcoholic father Paddy (Nick Nolte), all while vying for a $5 million purse at an Atlantic City mixed martial arts (MMA) tournament.
If Brendan is a loyal family man in a Balboa mold, battering ram Tommy is On the Waterfront's Terry Malloy, a glowering, sarcastic everyman struggling to both subsist and survive his own inner demons. Tommy and Brendan's day-to-day lives and self-esteem are wracked by contemporary concerns regarding housing foreclosures and battlefield trauma, which for Tommy is complicated by his having heroically saved comrades by literally ripping a tank's door off its hinges, but the consistently well-modulated script doesn't overstate its modern-condition concerns so much as merely couch its uplifting saga in a relatable here-and-now. As with a recurring, understated thematic subplot involving Paddy and Moby Dick, or when Paddy loftily proclaims, "The devil you know is better than the devil you don't," and Tommy deflates the sentiment with a "Yeah?," Warrior regularly finds a way to meld its more epic impulses in a convincing working-class reality. That's also true of the story's guiding moral and emotional conflicts and dilemmas, which—be it Brendan's refusal to lose his house because "we're not going backwards," or Tommy and Brendan's equally valid anger over Brendan's teenage decision to stay with his abusive dad while Tommy and their dying mother fled to the West Coast—recognize life as a thicket of complications, misunderstandings and mistakes that rarely can be assessed and resolved in cozy black-and-white terms.
The film's first half carefully considers its protagonists, with its generous spirit extending to that of Paddy, whose soul-crushing mixture of guilt is beautifully conveyed by Nolte in a performance of tremulous reserve and grace. Hardy and Edgerton are equally compelling as siblings at war with their father, each other, and themselves, providing enough polar-opposite energy to create tremendous friction during the finale, an inevitable showdown between the two that—in light of the preceding, even-handed character-centric material—is most powerful for its ability to elicit desire for dual victory. Shooting with a patina of rusty grays, blues, and blacks, O'Conner handles these segments with aplomb, and once the tale turns to the MMA cage, his action sequences deliver one visceral wallop after another. To its occasional detriment, the plot never upends expectations, ultimately hewing to a predictable happily-ever-after path. Yet on the heels of its compassionate portrait of wounded masculinity in search of stability and forgiveness, his bruising clashes—highlighted by an amazing close-up of Brendan as he attempts to fell an undefeated opponent with a submission hold, his life's fears and desires manifest in his fraught face and vein-bulging neck—prove so gripping that, even at 139 minutes, Warrior leaves you wanting even more.
Warrior Review: Two "Rocky" Movies for the Price of One | Pajiba ... Dustin Rowles
Review: Warrior gives Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton compelling ... Drew McWeeny from HitFix
The Daily Rotation [Jeremy Lebens]
Warrior (2011) : DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical Tyler Foster
Warrior movie review starring Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy, and Nick Nolte Rebecca Murray from About.com
Warrior | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Allison Willmore
DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth Row Center [Jason Bailey]
ReelViews [James Berardinelli]
We Got This Covered [Benjo Colautti]
Filmcritic.com Anthony Benigno
emanuellevy.com [Emanuel Levy]
Arrow in the Head [John Fallon]
HollywoodSoapbox.com [John Soltes]
Eye for Film : Warrior Movie Review (2011) Owen Van Spall
Warrior: movie review - CSMonitor.com - Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
FilmFracture: What's Your Time Worth? [Kathryn Schroeder]
The Critical Movie Critics [A. Pinkston]
Review: 'Warrior' is an Entertaining Cain and ... - Film School Rejects Robert Levin
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Review: 'Warrior' | KPBS.org Beth Accomando
DustinPutman.com [Dustin Putman]
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
The King Bulletin [Danny King]
Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]
advancescreenings.com [Matthew Fong]
Boxoffice Magazine [Kate Erbland
Warrior: A Family That Ultimate Fights Together ... - Village Voice Nick Pinkerton
Boom Because Our Opinions Matter
B. Fatt & Lazy [B. Fatt & Lazy]
Critic's Notebook [Martin Tsai]
Tom
Hardy: 'It's a normal human impulse to watch two people kick the hell out of
each other' Stuart Jeffries
interviews actor Tom Hardy from The
Guardian,
Entertainment Weekly [Owen Gleiberman]
The Hollywood Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]
'Warrior' movie review -- 'Warrior' showtimes - The Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'Warrior' review: Solid drama packs painful wallop Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle
Warrior - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
'Warrior,' Directed by Gavin O'Connor ... - Movies - New York Times A.O. Scott
Odar,
Baran bo
THE SILENCE (Das letzte
Schweigen) B+ 91
Not to be confused with Ingmar Bergman's THE SILENCE (1963) or Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Iranian film THE SILENCE (1998), where this film may not stand with that elite company, however the Swiss director has worked as a second unit assistant director for the Maren Ade film THE FOREST FOR THE TREES (2003), an unusual German film told in a measured and meticulously distinct, realist manner with a truly provocative final sequence. A film with no opening credits, here the opening shot surveying the gorgeous Bavarian landscape sets the scene, resembling the aerial shot in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) following a car as it makes its way down a tree-lined highway, where this homage is likely not accidental, especially considering the content of the movie. Writing, directing, and producing his first feature-length film, it also explores the unpleasant underbelly of an otherwise orderly and mainstream German society where people on the surface at least have nothing to fear, where children are often left on their own, probably resembling the quaint life in most small towns where everybody knows everybody else. Set in the pastoral heartland of Germany in 1986 with golden, waist-deep wheatfields extending to the horizon, we watch the tail end of what may be a snuff film, or at the very least, a pedophile’s sexual fantasy, where two men, Peer, Ulrich Thomsen, a Danish actor seen in Susanne Bier’s film In a Better World (2010), and Timo (Wotan Wilke Mohring) then hop into a car on the lookout for young prey, eying an 11-year old girl Pia (Helene Doppler) riding her bicycle alone down an isolated country road, where the girl is viciously raped and murdered in the wheatfields by Peer as Timo passively watches in a state of shock and horror at the outcome, her body dumped into a lake afterwards, where the killers were never caught, as Timo mysteriously disappears afterwards in a mixture of anger and personal disgust.
The film jumps ahead 23 years, introducing an entirely new set of characters, including another young girl, 13-year old Sinikka (Anna Lena Klenke) who storms out of her parent’s house in a furious rage after a perceived invasion of her privacy, never to be seen or heard from again, as she becomes the victim of a copycat killing at the exact same location, where the police are again without a suspect for the crime. The community is in an uproar, where the police have no answers for a seethingly angry public, but we also see the stunned reactions of the parents, including Elena (Katrin Saß) the mother of the first girl, Pia, who lives only a few hundred yards away from the murder site and has to undergo the experience all over again, where people are dumfounded and shocked at the gruesome similarities. While only the audience sees the original perpetrators, everyone remains clueless about both crimes, where the community is aghast at having to re-live through this same horrible ordeal again. Adapted by the director from the second of three Jan Costin Wagner novels, Das Schweigen (2007), all of which take place in Finland featuring the same lead character, Detective Kimmo Joentaa, a rather frumpy and hapless looking detective who in the movie becomes David Jahn (Sebastian Blomberg), a damaged soul still mourning the death of his wife from cancer, which happens in the first novel, Ice Moon (2003). Perhaps because of his own personal experience, Detective Jahn, along with the steadfast help of his devoted partner, Jule Böwe as the pregnant detective Jana Gläser, they are the only ones in law enforcement who see this as more than a case to dispose of to make the public get off their backs, as there are larger implications that are routinely being ignored. What is truly exceptional here is rather than invest energy attempting to solve the crime, the director is more interested in examining a cross section of people affected by the crime, where their response becomes the dramatic focus of the picture.
The director doesn’t forget Peer and Timo, much older now and barely recognizable, where Peer remains at the same apartment complex working as the maintenance worker, where the audience immediately senses the obvious, the presence of a pedophile literally surrounded by unsuspecting children playing in the yard area that he maintains. Timo on the other hand has moved to another city and is married with two children, where his wife Julia (Claudia Michelson) believes he’s an architect away from home for a few days inspecting a site location, while in fact he’s gone to visit Peer after the second murder, suspecting from the similarities that he’s involved. Timo remains conflicted about the visit, still feeling guilty about the original incident that Peer has long since forgotten, yet their meeting together is the Macbethian stain from which all tragedy occurs, where countless more characters are still having to deal with the ugly ramifications of their actions. The film is reminiscent of Tony Hillerman detective stories, where the overwhelming prominence of the natural environment affects each and every one of the characters, where the beautiful and tranquil landscape shots here are a stark contrast to the mental anguish and torment felt by entire community, much like the overriding grief felt throughout David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990 – 91), where the small town police work is really more of an excuse to reconnect several of the characters, alternately shifting various points of view, keeping the audience off balance while brilliantly interweaving the piano and violin in the stylishly original music of Michael Kamm and Kris Steininger as Pas de Deux. While Wagner’s book is more like INSOMNIA (1997), a Nordic noir murder mystery that takes place in the Scandinavian summer heat under the perpetual midnight sun, introducing a dreamy, almost unreal quality to it, this movie is more interested in exploring and exposing the depths of human anguish, reconnecting people’s lives to deep seeded feelings that were long thought dormant, becoming a sad and sorrowful elegy for the dead. Like Egoyan’s THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1997), the film is an accomplished expression of community despair, somewhat disguised as a detective whodunit story, but instead becomes a complex study of grief, remorse, obsession, and the persistence of long pent-up guilt.
Jigsaw Lounge [Sheila Seacroft] Cluj film-festival report
Two murders, apparently identical, with 23 years between, form the centre of this slow-burning, intelligent thriller which circles round the perpetrators, the police, the victims and their families. Beginning with a bang with the almost dialogue-free rape and murder of teenager Pia, and witnessing the effect on Timo (Wotan Wilke Mohring), the shocked accomplice, we move swiftly to the present, where another girl of similar age, Sinikka, is killed on the same spot on the same date 23 years later. The police who were involved and failed to solve the crime eagerly take up the trail – recently retired Krischan (Burghart Klaußner)and the disturbed David (Sebastian Blomberg) whose wife has just died, the former seen by his ex-colleagues as a bit of an old duffer, the latter as a neurotic liability (who surely would have been firmly sent home on indefinite sickness leave by any real police force). For the first victim’s mother it is an ordeal she must revisit, and for the parents of Sinikka the nightmare is just beginning .Timo has moved away from his previous life and become a successful and happy family man. The tension builds simultaneously on the police’s official and unofficial investigations and on the question whether the guilt and knowledge of the identity of the murderer will drive Timo out of his new life to confess. Meanwhile Ulrich Thomson as the enigmatic murderer Peer, now seemingly a kindly caretaker, sends shivers down the spine as he sits by the children’s swing park and helps out old ladies. No crime is, maybe, as straightforward as it looks, and what has been thought of as a serial killing turns out to be more complicated, and the idyllic cornfield in which the two murders take place becomes a kind of timeless pivot for the action. Great beginning and end are rather let down by a long central section of overlong meanderings in regret, guilt and grief, but overall it’s a good mix of suspense and serious meditation on the many aspects of a crime.
The Silence | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Mike D’Angelo
On
More than two decades later, another teenage girl disappears, on the same date and in the same spot, her bicycle found just a few feet from the previous victim’s grave marker. Someone’s trying to send a message, it seems. The Silence takes its time in revealing who’s responsible for this second crime, and why it’s happened again, yet writer-director Baran bo Odar (adapting a novel by Jan Costin Wagner) isn’t as interested in solving a mystery as he is in examining the community’s response to this re-opening of an old wound. From the detective who failed to solve the ’86 murder (Burghart Klaussner) to the victim’s still-grieving mother (Katrin Sass), people who thought they’d put the tragedy well behind them are drawn back into emotional states they’d long forgotten. That goes double for Möhring, now a respectable husband and father living in another city, who heads back to confront his ugly legacy and his old friend.
From moment to moment, The Silence can feel a bit pokey, as it divides its attention among a host of characters and never builds up much urgency about the fate of the second victim, whose body hasn’t been found. The film’s provocative nature only becomes fully apparent with the final scene—not due to some unexpected twist (by that point, all has been revealed), but via a sudden, head-spinning shift in perspective. What had seemed like a lackluster ensemble piece turns out to be an exercise in empathy, inviting viewers to recognize the pain of an otherwise reprehensible character by enfolding him into a huge tapestry of mutual anguish. That tactic might genuinely piss some people off were it not accomplished so quietly and subtly, and while the movie’s plodding journey to this destination isn’t ideal, there’s a sense in which it almost needs to be that TV-drama-ish, in order to lower the viewer’s defenses. (There’s no rationalization for Thomsen and Möhring looking the same age in scenes set 23 years apart, however. Shaggy wigs don’t cut it.) Even for the irredeemable, The Silence audaciously suggests, loneliness is loneliness.
The Silence | Film Review |
Tiny Mix Tapes Alan Pyke
The ugliest parts of human behavior are often on display in cinema. Artists and audiences alike — though perhaps more the former than the latter, to look at box office returns — feel drawn by the worst in us. Safe in dark theaters, we contemplate horrors and root for the heroes caught up in them. And we hope for directors who can use striking visual language to build some meaningful commentary on the most rotten moral foundations. You have to be an absolute believer in the communicative and political power of cinema to watch a movie about murdered children and sift its frames for something more than macabre titillation.
That requirement is more critical than usual for Baran bo Odar’s The Silence. The Swiss writer-director’s film is beautifully executed, but punishing in its every detail. Twenty-three years after a girl was killed, another abandoned bicycle appears in the same spot in the same field, another pair of parents are left to agonize, and another set of cops set about the hunt. There is little physical violence in the film, but an inexhaustible supply of emotional carnage. “Depressing” ain’t the half of it.
The Silence opens with a still shot of a residential balcony, all tans and blues and right angles, with a massive, distorted, deep electronic sound putting the viewer instantly on edge. Cinematographer Nikolaus Summerer’s camera zooms slowly in on the sharp metal corners of the mail slot, before Odar cuts to the interior of the apartment. Two men are watching a projector showing a young, frightened girl. Suddenly the cuts become rapid, the shots come at hard angles to one another, and you sense that you should be grateful for the sudden distortion of time and space. Filled with dark energy, the two men depart (shown in a straight-down shot of their red car backing out of a garage into a cramped driveway, the shot full of the same harsh, square geometry).
Later, they separate, the passenger horrified at what he’s just watched and encouraged the driver to do. And 23 years later, young Sinikka Weghamm (Anna-Lena Klenke) meets the same fate, in the same field, after fighting with her parents and being stood up by friends and deciding to bike back home. If The Silence were a grindhouse flick, the implications of the fight with her parents would be unacceptably regressive: Sinikka tells her father to “fuck off,” he starts after her, and her mother stops him. But Odar’s movie isn’t about the kind of simplistic moral calculus that B horror flicks use to frame their gore as judgment. It’s about how appearances deceive, and how good intentions are insufficient for the righting of wrongs.
The visual language Odar and Summerer employ is unmistakable: characters and places are defined either with rigorously angular, boxy shapes in the frames around them, or by the messiness of their personal presentation. By and by, the filmmakers elaborate upon the suggestion in the opening sequence that the squared-away order in which central antagonist Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) lives is a mask. Elena (Katrin Sass), the mother of the first victim, has preserved her daughter’s bedroom exactly as it was when she disappeared. It is fastidious, and Elena’s relationship with this organic shrine to her dead girl’s prim, organized, angular goodness is complicated and painful. Sinikka’s home is shown first in interiors, with the same scheme of corners and blunt geometry, and it’s only after she’s disappeared that we see the house from outside: It sits, for all its rectangles and clean lines, beside a mini-mountain of torn dirt, and a yard full of haphazard construction equipment.
Another thing you might have to believe to enjoy The Silence: Hope and uplift in such stories is just a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. There is little of either to be had in the detectives’ pursuit of the killer, although some seems to come by way of Peer’s one-time accomplice Timo (Wotan Wilke Mohring). His fierce internal wrestling after Peer’s message to his lost “friend” — delivered via news footage of Sinikka’s disappearance in that familiar field — shakes up the family and life he’s made for himself 23 years on. But Timo’s response is a poor excuse for redemption. Odar executes that internal struggle wonderfully, and Mohring does excellent, haunted work. So, too, does Sebastian Blomberg, as Inspector David Jahn, a widowed, sweat-soaked, unshaven ghost of a man who is alone among his colleagues in being more interested in getting the case right than in getting it off the books. Odar introduces these several sets of initially disparate characters — mothers and cops and killers — and braids them together gracefully. But he uses the resulting rope not to pull his audience up out of the darkness, but to strangle us in it.
“The Silence”: A serial killer is on the loose in this twisty ... - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Review: 'The Silence' An Effectively Moody Murder Mystery | The ... Gabe Toro from The indieWIRE Playlist
Paste Magazine [Jonah Flicker]
Electric Sheep Magazine [John A. Riley]
Film School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
Screenjabber.com Charles Whitting
'The Silence' review: Getting into the minds of those ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
The Silence :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews Jim Emerson
The Silence - Movies - The New York Times A.O. Scott
Odoul,
Damien
DEEP BREATH (Le Souffle) A- 93
France (77 mi) 2002
A terrific mix of reality and fantasy blended together in one day in the life of a teenager on the verge of manhood, shot in stunning b & w, some scenes are truly amazing, terrific performance by the boy, Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc, and a very tight, well written script, coming in at 77 mi, winner of Venice Film Fest FIPRESCI award
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Le Souffle (2001)
Ryan Gilbey from Sight and Sound, May 2003
Le Souffle is a portrait of an angry young man
almost too painful to watch
The coming-of-age movie, with its
insistence that nothing will ever be the same again after that summer, can be
maddeningly simplistic. It typically depends for its impact on the
transformative effect of a single plot point, and for its illumination on
hindsight softened by nostalgia. Even if first-time director Damien Odoul had
not mounted in Le Souffle a string of poetic visual coups that
might have made Cocteau swoon, it would still be possible to marvel at how
nimbly he sidesteps the traps of the genre to which his film has some tentative
allegiance.
With its combination of savage
rustic imagery and a bare-bones narrative sketching one boy's stumble towards
manhood, Le Souffle could be described as a sheep in wolf's
clothing. Shots of animals being culled or dissected prime us, slightly misleadingly,
for an essay of the utmost seriousness, such sights being a staple part of the
arthouse diet Godard's Week-End, Haneke's Benny's Video,
Delphine Gleize's upcoming Carnages. In the absence of plot, here
it's often the bodies that tell the story: a boy's belly-button spirals in on
itself in close-up like a mysterious seashell, a girl's never-ending legs are
as pure and white as a mile of uncrossed beach. The performances, too, have an
almost embarrassing naturalism. As the half-surly, half-frolicsome adolescent
David, Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc is so fine he makes you want to avert your
eyes; his convulsive dances and tantrums, his boastful incantations ("I
represent all the bad boys!"; "I am a wolf!") are too near the
knuckle for anyone who has been, known or lived on the same planet as an angry
young man.
But the rites of passage in
David's story are not forthcoming. Even now, having watched the film twice, I'm
not certain he makes it across the border into the adult world. Is there a name
for a coming-of-age film which manifestly fails to make good on the genre's one
stipulation?
Stranded on his uncles' farm in
the remote Limousin region of France, David might well be undergoing a
life-altering experience during the balmy day charted by the film. But we are
no wiser by the end of it than he appears to be; like David himself, Le
Souffle is breathtakingly pretty but largely inscrutable. Repeatedly a
chance presents itself for catharsis or epiphany notably in David's interaction
with Stef, the wisest and least brutish of the men gathered on the farm for a
barbecue that grows closer, with each revolution of the spit, to a sacrificial
ceremony. Repeatedly such opportunities go unexploited.
Odoul may even be baiting
film-makers who have stuck to the straight and narrow in their journey through
the treacherous forest of adolescence. It can be no coincidence that the
closest thing the film has to conventional action comes when David looms over a
boy's body beside a railway line, just as his American peers did in Stand
by Me. The obvious difference is that whereas River Phoenix and chums
were related to that body only as spectators, and had their progression into
adulthood flagged by setting eyes on it, David is complicit in his discovery
the boy is his friend Paul, whom he had shot in the back seconds earlier. Even
more radical is the film's denial, or at least suppression, of motive or
consequences. David sheds a few tears for his injured friend, but more out of
frustration at not being able to hoist Paul on to his disobedient horse.
Even with so much beauty to
please the eye, a person will eventually question the purpose of a film in
which violence engenders in its perpetrator no apparent emotion, not even
pleasure. Is this another River's Edge, another Fun,
in which the blank doling out of brutality becomes a symptom of youthful
alienation? Not likely. David rips the tailfeathers from a cockerel and lobs
stones at a forlorn donkey who might reasonably be wondering if Au hasard
Balthazar wasn't punishment enough for his species. The root of the violence,
though, is to be found not in David's languid aggression but in the farm's
stone banquet room, where the men eat, sweat, lug each other around like dolls
and rake over their lives without insight.
Who can predict whether David
will be the exception? The film isn't saying. It's pregnant with images of
birth and rebirth that point to a maturation process not discernible in his
face. In fantasy excerpts, he is naked and dirty, as though he has just tumbled
out of the womb. Early on he has his scalp shorn while a sheep's severed head
looks on, flies dancing about its grisly grin. This is the only moment in which
he looks truly contented, oblivious as he is to the ritualistic connotations of
his uncomplicated crop. Of course, we have just witnessed the killing of that
sheep, its black blood dribbling noisily into a bucket, as well as the brisk
unwrapping of a dead pig whose intestines almost uncoil into our laps. We are,
then, better placed to comprehend that David is being primed for sacrifice.
While he is not actually
slaughtered by the corpulent farmers, there remains a jabbing, malevolent
quality to the day's celebrations that gives the film its sinister kick. You
might suspect that the men are nudging their young charge towards intoxication
in order to have their wicked way with him, but the scenario is all the more
disturbing for its absence of sexual danger. True, there is a scene in which
David is jolted out of his stupor with a cup of salty coffee, before being sprayed
with a hose. Odoul throws in cut-aways to his tormentors a hairy, distended
belly ballooning over a man's trousers; a gummy mouth twisted in laughter; a
mutt's leathery tongue unspooling obscenely. It's a horrifying scene: a rape
scene, in fact, in all but the letter of the script. But sex very quickly leaks
out of the movie. It's almost as though Odoul needed that shocking episode to
clear sensationalist thoughts from our minds.
What he saddles us with is
something more amorphous and pervasive. If these ghouls were just after David's
cherry, their threat to him could be routinely quantified. What they actually
want is to make him a man. He is to be inducted into their cannibalistic circle
of martyred sons who are regurgitated into irresponsible fathers. One man,
Jean-Claude, was shot in the head by his dad. "Ah, memories," he
sighs. Pierrot, who is plotting to leave his wife and children, warns David:
"Get this into your skull fathers always abandon their sons." David,
who is fatherless since his parents' divorce, pastes fond photographs of female
relatives by his bed, alternated with snaps of dead animals. But there are no
women present in his life here, unless you count the fantasy sequence in which
he visits the fairytale house of his supposed girlfriend long enough to enjoy a
brief clinch and to cradle his head mournfully in his hands at the sound of her
mother's angelic singing, before fleeing through the window of her Rapunzel
tower. In a landscape drained of all female influence, it is hardly surprising
that the oak tree cleaved into an unambiguously vaginal V comes to seem like
the only positive influence in this boy's life.
VENICE 2001 REVIEW: 400 Breaths; Odoul’s Spellbinding Debut “Deep Breath” Patrick Z. McGavin from indieWIRE, also seen here: NYFF 2001 REVIEW: 400 Breaths; Odoul’s Spellbinding Debut “Deep Breath”
Ogigami, Naoko
MEGANE (Glasses)
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [2/6]
A foreign film for those who think cute is the highest
compliment, this painfully po-faced story about an oddball hotel poses a
question: If you tune a fish-out-of-water premise down to the lowest key
possible, are you still left with nothing but formulaic tripe? It’s a given that
the uptight visitor (Kobayashi) who arrives at the movie’s spare beach resort
will find the let-it-flow attitude of the proprietor (Mitsuishi) to be irksome,
and the strange, smiling geriatric (Motai) who serves shaved ice to be
maddeningly inscrutable. We also know what will inevitably happen next: The
longer this city dweller is around her deadpan-kooky fellow travelers, the more
those nightly bouts of “twilighting”—a fancy way of saying you’re staring off
into space—will seem deeply profound.
The real lesson: Just because a predictable narrative comes
laden with pretty pictures and Zen quirk, that doesn’t make its platitudinous
ideology any less grating. Director Naoko
Ogigami may have a keen eye for placing characters in clean, uncluttered
space, but her ear for dialogue (“I just spend my time waiting…for time to
pass, I guess.”) suggests she’s digested a steady diet of New Age blather.
Megane isn’t interested in spiritual enlightenment; it’s the cinematic
equivalent of a rock-garden tchotchke sold as exotica to tourists.
Village Voice (Scott Foundas) review (Excerpt)
I first saw Tôkyô Sonata at last year's Sydney Film Festival. On the flight back, after learning that my father had died in Florida, I saw writer-director Naoko Ogigami's delightful Megane (Glasses), another Japanese film that begins with the blowing of a gentle spring breeze. The breeze heralds the arrival of Sakura-san (Masako Motai), a grandmotherly Mary Poppins in simple dress and pulled-back hair who seems to materialize out of the ether with the start of the season at Hamada, a secluded beach resort. This particular year, her appearance is followed closely by that of Taeko (Satomi Kobayashi), a buttoned-up professor on holiday who has chosen Hamada (where she seems to be the only other guest) for its lack of cell phone reception. She has "the talent to be here," says the resort's kindly manager (Ken Mitsuishi) upon realizing that Taeko is the first guest in three years to find her way without getting lost. Less pleased with the arrangements is Taeko herself, who discovers that the only sightseeing in the area involves sitting on the beach and staring fixedly off into the distance—a form of r&r dubbed "twilighting" by the locals. Nor does she take too kindly to Sakura-san's daily in-person wake-up calls and incessant offers of homemade shaved ice. At one point, she makes an ill-fated break for it, packing her overstuffed suitcase and heading for a nearby resort—the Marine Palace—that turns out to be something of a Marxist Café Med, with morning collective farming followed by afternoon study sessions.
An exceptionally subtle comedy of manners and observation, Megane screened last year at Sundance and New Directors/New Films, but inexplicably remains without a U.S. distributor. (MOMA has booked it for a week-long run as part of the museum's ongoing ContemporAsian film series.) When I saw Ogigiami's film in-flight, I felt almost giddy with joy; revisiting it nine months later, I realized the credit is entirely the movie's and not the unusual circumstances under which I viewed it. The people in Megane do not ask much of one another, content to bask in the pleasure of their own company while listening to the lapping of the waves and watching the sun recede into the horizon. Never do we even learn just who Sakura-san is or where she comes from—she may be a yoga teacher from Tibet or an opera teacher from Prague, or both, or neither. "I wonder," says one character, allowing her wonder to linger, taking pleasure in not knowing. Eventually, spring breezes give way to summer rains, Sakura-san vanishes as quickly as she appeared, and Taeko must contemplate a return to the world of cell phone signals. So, this, too, shall pass, and yet Megane leaves us suffused not with loss but possibility and the feeling of an imminent return—to Hamada or someplace like it.
The House Next Door [Steven Boone]
The L Magazine [Henry Stewart]
Slant
Magazine review
Nick Schager
The Hollywood Reporter review Maggie Lee
Variety (John Anderson) review
The Japan Times [Mark Schilling]
Oguri, Kôhei
THE BURIED FOREST C+ 76
A film that will put many viewers to sleep, as it has a dreamy, somnambulistic quality that feels as if the storyline is interweaving various bedtime stories. Three high school girls in a rural mountain village decide to tell each other stories, where they each elaborate on what they’ve heard so far, creating a kind of chain letter effect. While in theory, this may sound interesting, onscreen it never had a cohesive theme or developed any kind of structure to hold our interest, weaving in and out of reality like there is no reality, creating dream-like landscapes, much of the film photographed in extremely dim light, nearly always in the dark, so the few times daytime is seen, it feels ultra-expressively bright and colorful. I did enjoy the whale theme, describing the effects of a whale washed ashore, not responding to any of the human efforts to help or revive it, which is followed by a giant truck driving by with a bright blue picture on the side of a whale riding a wave, likely an advertisement for a refreshing drink, but it continues to be seen in gorgeously odd situations. Much of the film is lush and has moments of rare beauty, has an excessively slow pace, occasionally accentuated by the dense, hauntingly mysterious and somber tones of Arvo Pärt’s “Silouan’s Song,” but the overall tone of the film is without energy or vibrancy, as if none of this really matters to anyone, as if the characters in the film are a bunch of bored people that got together to try to amuse themselves at our expense, and nothing really holds our interest except, perhaps, the “look” of the film.
Okazaki, Steven
About Steven Okazaki
biography from film website
Steven Okazaki's subjects range from heroin addicts to dairy
princesses to
Steven started in children's programming in 1976, producing
dramatic shorts and documentaries for Churchill Films in
With a fellowship from the American Film Institute, he moved in a different direction with Living on Tokyo Time, a comedy about a Japanese dishwasher and her deadbeat green card husband. It premiered at Sundance and was released theatrically by Skouras Pictures in 1987.
In 1991, he won an Oscar® for Days of Waiting, the story of artist Estelle Ishigo, one of the few Caucasians to be interned with the Japanese Americans during World War II. Other PBS documentaries include: Hunting Tigers (1989) a comic look at Tokyo pop culture featuring Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe; Troubled Paradise (1992), about native Hawaiian activism; American Sons (1994) about how the lives of Asian American men are shaped by racism; and The Fair (2001), a quirky celebration of the Minnesota State Fair.
From 1994 to 1996, he worked with NHK Hi-Vision, producing some of the earliest HD-TV programming. Two films, Alone Together: Young Adults Living with HIV and Life Was Good: The Claudia Peterson Story, about a family living next to the Nevada Test Site, won UNESCO Awards.
In the last ten years, much of his work has been with HBO
Documentary Films. In 2000, HBO premiered the powerful Black Tar Heroin,
a cinema-verite chronicle of the lives of five young heroin addicts.
It was nominated for an Emmy and was one of HBO's highest rated documentaries
that year. In 2005, he produced Rehab, a disturbing look at drug
treatment, which won the prestigious Nancy Dickerson Whitehead Award, honoring
journalists who have "demonstrated the highest standards of reporting on
drug issues." In 2006, he received his third Oscar® nomination for The Mushroom Club,
a personal reflection on the 60th anniversary of the
Segments from his films have been featured on "The CBS
Evening News," "The NBC Nightly News," ABC News
"Nightline," CNN and "Oprah." Steven was born in 1952 and
grew up in
Steven Okazaki | IFFR brief bio
MetroActive
Movies | Director Steven Okazaki Director Steven Okazaki documents young SF
junkies, by Michelle Goldberg, April 12, 1999
A-bomb legacy fading: filmmaker | The Japan Times A-bomb Legacy Fading: Steven Okazaki films hibakusha stories for future generations, by Mandy Willingham, April 15, 2006
Berkeley
filmmaker pays tribute to Toshiro Mifune - San Francisco ... G. Allen Johnson from The San Francisco Chronicle, December 1, 2016
PARK
CITY '07 INTERVIEW | Steven Okazaki: “It is an extraordinary ... interview from indieWIRE, January 27, 2007
WHITE LIGHT BLACK RAIN—Interview With Steven Okazaki Michael Guillen interview from Screen Anarchy, August 2, 2007
Conversations: Steven Okazaki -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
interview, August 6, 2007
Asian
Icon: Steven Okazaki explores the career of Japan's magnetic ... Asian Icon: Steven Okazaki explores the
career of Japan's magnetic Toshiro Mifune, interview by Film Journal,
November 23, 2016
Conversation
With Steve Okazaki Director of “Mifune: The Last ... Masha Leon interview from Forward, November 29, 2016
Steven Okazaki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DAYS OF WAITING
Academy award winning short about a white wife of a Japanese-American who refused to be separated from her husband, becoming one of the few whites sent to an internment camp during WWII, based on the story of Estelle Ishigo and her novel Lone Heart Mountain.
WHITE LIGHT/BLACK RAIN: THE
DESTRUCTION OF HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI
USA
A powerfully disturbingly documentary shown initially on HBO
TV that provides raw and graphic evidence of the effects left on the only
survivors of a nuclear attack. Like
Holocaust survivors, many have refused to discuss this issue their entire lives
as they have been shamefully ostracized within their own society due to their
overt scars and physical disfigurements, a reminder of a distant past the
Japanese society has been in a rush to forget.
The film opens by asking typical Japanese teenage kids in
Perhaps the most remarkable footage was shot by Americans
who arrived on the scene shortly after the Japanese surrender, bringing in
medical teams who were ill equipped to understand at that time the far-ranging
effects of radiation poisoning. So when
patients who were supposed to get better didn’t, they had no treatment plan whatsoever
to offer, so the survivors were photographed, like some sort of hideous guinea
pigs put on display for the world to see.
Unbelievably, one of those photographed as a grotesque child was now
speaking to the cameras in this film as an adult. That transition is mind boggling. The population of
The film makes unusual use of drawings and paintings by the
survivors, which add a childlike innocence to the gruesome depictions, many of
which may be seen here: http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whitelightblackrain/slideshow.html. The American pilots who flew the mission to
drop the bombs were also interviewed, maintaining a detached distance
throughout, claiming they were just carrying out their mission
successfully. Most Americans were
thankful the war was over, but for the Japanese, it was something else
altogether, as nothing in the history of the world has compared to the aftermath
of an atomic blast. In a surreal event
that actually happened, there’s an extended sequence of Edward R. Murrow on the
TV show This Is Your Life, where Reverend
Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Japanese activist is on the show attempting to raise money
to assist atomic blast survivors, where the pilot of one of the planes that
dropped the bomb suddenly appears from behind the curtain to shake his hand and
make the first donation, while other survivors are so disfigured they remain
silhouetted safely behind a curtain—only
in America. One wonders why Americans
brought a special plane just to film the pilots dropping the bombs, as if they
were somehow proud to show off their latest military weaponry. Certainly this was the mindset at the
time. In the aftermath,
Facets
: Cinémathèque: 2008 Human Rights Watch Film Fest
As global tensions
rise, the unthinkable now seems possible. The threat that nuclear "weapons
of mass destruction" will be used is more real and more frightening than
at any time since the height of the Cold War, perhaps since 1945. White
Light/Black Rain, an extraordinary new film by Academy Award-winning
filmmaker Steven Okazaki, puts a human face on what we're really talking about.
Even after 60 years, the atomic bombings of
Vet documentarian Steven
Okazaki's "White Light/Black Rain" provides a concise, often
powerfully unpleasant account of the atomic bomb drops on Japan that ended
WWII. Extensive survivor interviews and some hard-to-watch archival footage
make this an important document. Brief specialized theatrical play is possible
before the pic makes its HBO debut on the Hiroshima anniversary date, Aug. 6.
While the film will primarily be an educational broadcast and classroom
perennial, it should also be required viewing for advocates of the "Just
nuke 'em" school of conflict resolution.
After briefly sketching the historical context and development of the bomb, Okazaki speaks with U.S. military and scientific personnel who were a part of the top-secret 1945 mission.
Interviewed Japanese, who ranged
in age from 3-20 at the time, tell very different stories of the blast,
subsequent hurricane-force wind and enveloping fire. Many were left disfigured,
lost entire families and/or developed lifelong illnesses from radiation
poisoning. This section is illustrated via art made by survivors, much of it
simple and childlike yet extremely disturbing, a la Edvard Munch's "The
Scream."
But that's nothing compared with
what follows: First-person recollections of the final segment,
"Aftermath," are accompanied by horrific color archival footage of
the dead, dying and hospitalized. Many children were among the latter, in such
pain that some purportedly begged to be put out of their misery. Even those who
survived often lived out their lives as a new form of leper, pitied but
generally shunned by mainstream society.
Film's sobering impact lets the
images and witnesses' words speak for themselves. Editing is airtight, other
aspects solid.
An end title notes that world
powers hold the nuclear capability to re-create Hiroshima 400,000 times over.
Beyond the Multiplex -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir (excerpt), including
an August 6, 2007 interview with
Possibly even tougher to watch (though it's a close race) is
Steven Okazaki's "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki," which will be shown on HBO in August and may also get a
theatrical release. Of course we know about the atomic bombs dropped on
As
For all the talk in recent years about “weapons of mass destruction”—most particularly nuclear armaments—only two such devices have ever been employed in actual warfare: The atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, which killed 140,000 people, and the one dropped on Nagasaki three days later, which killed 70,000. Another 160,000 survivors of both blasts died later of radiation-related illnesses.
Oscar-winning
documentarian Steven Okazaki goes well beyond the hard facts and cold figures
in White Light/Black
Rain, a comprehensive look at the two nuclear explosions that ended
World War II (the Japanese surrendered a few days after the bombing of
Okazaki
structures White
Light/Black Rain for maximum impact, beginning with newsreel footage of
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other events leading up to July 16,
1945, when the first atomic bomb was tested. He then shows street scenes of
modern-day
From there, much of the story is told through interviews with survivors of the explosions, like Kiyoko Imori, who was three blocks from Ground Zero in Hiroshima and somehow wasn’t incinerated, even though her family and classmates were killed (she tearfully states her belief that she was spared so she could “tell people what happened, so they’ll understand”); Keiji Nakazawa, whose experiences were turned first into a series of graphic novels (Barefoot Gen), which was later as a pair of animated movies; and a doctor who viewed the explosion over Nagasaki and notes that the mushroom cloud was actually “a pillar of fire.”
Some survivors have physical scars; one woman has facial burns and gnarled hands, while a man had flesh fused to bone on his chest (“You can see my heart beating between the ribs”). All of the survivors have emotional scars, having watched their families, city and way of life taken from them in a literal flash. “My siblings never got to try chocolate, and the other wonderful things of life,” one survivor laments.
There are also interviews with Americans who helped build and deliver the bombs. They express surprise at how powerful the bombs, dubbed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” really were—one points out that anyone suggesting dropping a nuclear bomb on Iraq has no clue what they’re talking about—but also put their actions in the context of combat: The bomb “did what war does—it destroys people.”
There
is remarkably little anger expressed toward
Okazaki uses drawings and painting by A-bomb survivors to illustrate many of the stories, but eventually he shows still photos of Nagasaki the day after it was bombed, with charred bodies lying on what once were bustling streets, and U.S. Army footage of hospital patients (including one of the present-day interviewees) with terrible burns and infections.
These
images are horrific, but
But in a world where the youth don’t know
what happened in August of 1945 and where enough nuclear weapons exist to
reenact
World Socialist Web Site C.W. Rogers
Time
Is Standing Still: White Light/Black Rain | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
'Nanking'
& 'White Light/Black Rain': World War II Horrors - Alt Film Guide Andre Soares
Sundance
review on indiewire Steve Ramos
White
Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Culture Unplugged
A
Fool for Hiroshima | HuffPost Dennis
Perrin, August 13, 2007
Film Threat Phil Hall
Bullz-Eye.com Jeff Giles
White
Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and ... - DVD Talk Randy Miller III
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn
Johanson]
Movie Picture Film (Scott Hoffman)
An
interview with Steven Okazaki, director of White ... - kamera.co.uk by Antonio Pasolini, July
31, 2007
WHITE LIGHT BLACK RAIN—Interview With Steven Okazaki Michael Guillen interview from Screen Anarchy, August 2, 2007
Women
In World Cinema: An Interview with Steven
Okazaki, Director by Cathleen
Rountree August 5, 2007
Conversations: Steven Okazaki -
Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
interview, August 6, 2007
White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... Variety
New York Times Chilling Details, 62
Years Later, of the Ground Zero in Japan, by Neil
Genzlinger, August 6, 2007
White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... Wikipedia
FILM
HIROSHIMA-NAGA SAKI WHITE LIGHT BLACK RAIN YouTube interview with Okazaki July 5,
2007 (10:06)
YouTube - Interview with
director Steven Okazaki by Asia
Pacific Arts, Aug 1, 2007
(7:33 ), also here: Interview
with Steven Okazaki - Brightcove
Okuda, Eiji
SHOUJYO: AN ADOLESCENT B 87
aka: AN ADOLESCENT
aka: Shôjo
First of all, this kind of film could never be made in the
Using an overly exaggerated theatrical acting style, very much like Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO, where everyone acts overly foolish, we meet Eiji Okuda, a character actor in at least 25 previous films, but here directing his first feature film, who plays an oafish cop who sleeps on the job, horses around with his fellow officers, drinks and steals women’s pets, then returns them in exchange for sexual favors. One day as he is drinking alone off in a corner booth, he is approached by a beautiful young girl, Mayu Ozawa, who propositions him and follows him to a hotel room, but vanishes mysteriously afterwards. Thinking she’s a high school girl, he harasses all the girls he can find searching for her, but to no avail, as the girl has disappeared. Yet we see her erotically aroused by a photo of a male one-winged bird which is tattooed on the policeman’s back, and to literary references to Japanese mythology which suggests on earth, the bird can’t fly, yet in heaven, it joins its mate and flies freely. Out of the blue, as he is attending a gangster’s funeral, he sees the girl dressing up the body, and the two become instant lovers. Her name is Yoko, she’s 15 and not even old enough to attend high school yet, but she knows by the tattoo on his back that they are destined lovers, and they are then seen as inseparable, riding together on a single bicycle while, oddly, a lilting French love song plays, "Le Courage d'Aimer" sung by Pierre Barouh. It was only at this point that the film captured my attention. There is extraordinary music by Wong Kar-wai’s musical composer Shigeru Umebayashi that prevails throughout the film, establishing a fragile underlying layer of beauty. The policeman joins her family, which includes her physically imposing retarded brother and her grandfather, the man who gave the cop his tattoo. Yoko suggests she might wish to get a female one-winged bird tattooed on her back, so the two of them could be united forever. The myth, however, suggests this only happens in heaven, not on earth, so we are forewarned.
All is well until the brother sees them having sex, which sets off a flashpoint in his mind, as he witnessed his mother having sex at an early age and grows violent at the sight, comparing it to dogs copulating, which triggers an impulse in his head to shoot them. But as this is his sister, someone he doesn’t wish to harm, he crawls up on top of a giant smokestack and sleeps off the night, an apt image for his perceived isolation. The grandfather orders the policeman to leave Yoko alone, and for the sake of his brother, the policeman agrees. But this can’t last. Love finds a way. Yoko decides to get her tattoo after all, but the grandfather calls for the policeman, needing to see his back to compare the colors, but grows too weary to complete the task, requiring the policeman’s help to finish the job. In this manner, the family is reunited, and again, all appears to be reconciled, with images of a happy couple riding off together in marriage wearing white, as if the birds are flying freely at last, where the camera pans up into the white sky, an image of innocence, panning back down to earth where the screen turns black and we hear the sound of a gunshot – the end of innocence, reality sets in, very much like the slap in the face, or the whack on the butt for a newborn baby as it is welcomed out of the womb. There is no way society could ever accept this couple, as they would always be seen as an example of something culturally taboo, irregardless of their professed love. Icarus was not allowed to fly too close to the sun. When he did, he would fall.
RUNIN D 61
aka: BANISHED
RUNIN didn't really work for me, I preferred his first film, but the style and subject matter were interesting, with some gorgeous compositions. An over the top, overly melodramatic film about doomed love featuring prisoners exiled to a Devils Island in the 1830’s off the coast of Japan, where the recurring dream is to get back to Edo and see the cherry blossoms in the spring, a reference to being free. While the cinematography is first rate and the island locale is gorgeous, the filmmaking itself is mired in miserablism, taking us from one wretched disaster to the next, each more dreary than the last, where the human spirit is literally sucked out of each of these human souls, opening with men placed in large straw balls that are then rolled down the side of a mountain into the ocean, a man dressed as a geisha who services male sexual needs, but clings to a female geisha, a former red lantern geisha who services everyone else on the island, so the two are a gloomy pair, a newly arrived prisoner who sits atop a hilltop and studies the tidal patterns dreaming of escape. Young women are victimized, tortured and murdered, a man goes blind, the island suffers from famine and bouts of starvation where hundreds die, prisoners trying to escape are shot or rolled down the mountain, each step on their path grows more pathetic until eventually, as a viewer, you’ve had your fill and it becomes ridiculous after awhile. My favorite scene was an attempted suicide by drowning in the ocean, shown with gorgeous underwater photography, as the man ties himself to a stone and sinks. Eventually, he changes his mind and decides to cut himself free, as we see the sun and floating jellyfish above. Hard to see what others may like about this kind of costumed historical drama steeped in sex and violence, perhaps attempting to resemble the intimate sensuality of Nagisa Oshima’s doomed lovers in IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES, but the mood here is overly solemn and self-pitying, accentuating their futility as prisoners with a sadistic flair, each person overly absorbed in the dispirited gloom of their unending captivity, languishing in the hell of eternal doom.
Oldham , Gary
NIL BY MOUTH A- 93
A film dedicated to the memory of the first time director’s
father, an in-your-face, frenetically paced film filled with profanity, set in
a working class district in
He is the abuser, a brutal alcoholic who also snorts coke,
he literally bites part of the nose off of Billy, a junkie who steals from
everyone. The camera follows his step by
step ritual of making a score followed by an immediate fix. One scene is haunted by his mother’s gaze,
played beautifully by
Olivera, Héctor
NIGHT OF THE PENCILS (La noche de los lápices)
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
The power and value of this docudrama--about the kidnapping,
imprisonment, and torture of half a dozen high school activists by
The Tech
(MIT) (Manavendra K. Thakur) review
MUCH AS THE
Héctor Olivera's notable new film La Noche de los Lapices ("The Night of the Pencils"), however, tells the story of a group of six high school children who did not survive. Their sole crime was their participation in a student protest for free bus passes. But the military junta saw them as subversives, and in September 1976 the homes of six students were raided in pre-dawn darkness. The students -- all of whom were less than 18 years old -- were brutally arrested and dumped in prison. The raid came be to known as the "night of the pencils." The film follows the story from the student protests in 1975 to November 1980 when the only student to survive the ordeal was finally released.
Clearly, this material could have easily degenerated into an Argentinian television movie of the week in the wrong hands. Fortunately, director Olivera seems to have kept his integrity mostly intact. He does not shy away from disturbing realities, and he draws a surprisingly complex portrait of the students, their captors, and the students' parents. The film's accomplishment in this regard is considerable and therefore worthy of serious attention.
This is especially true of the film's second half, which depicts the oppressive internment, harsh interrogation, and outright torture that await the students. The film does more than just dab grime and dirt on the actors' faces to create sympathy. It manages to create a genuinely moving and convincing picture of the ordeal these students went through. By describing everything from the small details that substitute for survival to the constant battle to maintain hope, Olivera recreates a nightmarish experience in very accessible and potent terms.
While the validity of that accomplishment is not open to question, the film does suffer from limitations. Paradoxically, the same qualities that enable Olivera to escape the standard television cliché's are the same qualities that prevent the film from rising above its limitations.
The film's major success is that it closes in and focuses intently on the experience of six individual people undergoing a terrible ordeal. However, that very fact is what causes the film to begin losing its social and political resonance: this could have been the story of any six young prisoners in any country around the world. The specific links between these individuals and the Argentine experience in the late 1970s start to come unraveled.
Ordinarily, one would applaud any effort to impart a universal
value to a fairly specific story. However, in this particular case, the the
tactic seems to have backfired. Ultimately, the film is not about politics or
A truly visionary director might have been able to resolve the
difficulties and transcend this limitation. In fact, one has come very close to
doing just that -- Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket (1987). That
film, which treated its characters and viewers with equal brutality, was an
intensely clinical dissection of a hellish environment and the resultant
pressures toward madness. At the same time, the film captured the paradoxes and
absurdities that surrounded the American war in
Still, the film does have enough good qualities that deserve recognition. La Noche de los Lapices succeeds enough that it will undoubtedly be remembered when film historians begin to chronicle the current Argentinian film renaissance. And in an increasingly commercialized filmmaking environment, that is no small achievement indeed.
The New York Times (Caryn James) review
Olmi, Ermanno
“Work
is man’s chance to express himself, the average person’s opportunity to be
creative...What I am against is the relationship man has today with the world
in which he works.”
—Ermanno Olmi
Ermanno Olmi | Biography, Movie Highlights and Photos | AllMovie Sandra Brennan
Though not among
Labor Relations Ara H.
Merjian from Artforum magazine,
September 29, 2009
IN ONE OF THE MANY CLOSE-UPS in Ermanno
Olmi’s Il posto (1961), audiences come face-to-face with the
film’s young, wide-eyed protagonist, Domenico, who is seated at the desk of his
new big-city position (the “posto” in question), staring at a mimeograph
machine as his colleague’s arm works the machine’s rotating plates. The boy’s
glazed look registers the rote ceremony with a kind of detached horror. We
watch as this aspiring office worker—recently arrived in
As part of what film scholar P. Adams Sitney once dubbed “New Wave Neorealism,” Il posto rode the resurgence of Italy’s postwar cinema scene, which had crested a year earlier with Fellini’s La dolce vita, Antonioni’s L’avventura, and Visconti’s Rocco e i sue fratelli. Like these directors, the young Olmi used the recent lessons of Neorealist film to forge his own, somewhat more auteurist vision—though one still rooted in a basic concern with ordinary subjects and featuring nonprofessional actors. If any single leitmotif links together the works in Olmi’s expansive oeuvre, which has evolved over several generations and countless governments, it is the theme of work. Whether as a dehumanizing atomization of individual plight or a redemptive source of intimacy and solidarity, the labor trope threads together films as disparate in setting and subject as Il posto, One Fine Day (1969), and The Scavengers (1970).
In ways comparable to his contemporary Pier Paolo Pasolini, Olmi fetishized certain aspects of
premodern society and culture, using them as counterpoints to the alienated
(and alienating) conditions that subtended
In Terra madre (2009), a documentary released this year
that focuses on
On
Earth as it is in Heaven: Ermanno Olmi - Film Comment Deborah Young, March/April 2001
It's strange that so few directors in Italy are religious, at least in the sense that their films are imbued with signs of their faith. Though they share real estate with the Vatican—or maybe because of its very proximity, on the theory that familiarity breeds contempt—Italian filmmakers are much better known for political militancy than religious fervor. Among the few exceptions are Roberto Rossellini and, in a complex way, Pier Paolo Pasolini. And most emphatically, Ermanno Olmi.
When we met in Rome to talk about his films, it was the Epiphany, the last of the Christmas holidays. The 69-year-old director and his wife, Loredana, had just dragged themselves back to their hotel from the end-of-Jubilee closing of the Holy Door at the Vatican, where millions had stood in line for hours to receive an indulgence. As the director of a papal biopic, he was on familiar turf.
The sacredness of life, the dignity of work, and man’s search for the highest spiritual values are themes that deeply color his 14 features and later documentaries. It’s as impossible to look at Olmi’s films without taking his Christianity into account as it would be to rub religion from the work of Krzysztof Zanussi, his Polish contemporary and friend. Note, he’s also far from the mystical-supernatural current of films like Breaking the Waves and American Beauty. Olmi has the earthy consciousness of an organic farmer, one who disdains pesticides, plants by the moon, and thanks Providence for an abundant harvest. There is nothing mystical about his brand of callus-handed Christianity, with its love for all creatures great and small and particularly man in all his defects.
In this and other ways, Olmi’s whole career is an anomaly on the Italian scene. Living in self-imposed isolation in the Dolomites high on the Asiago plateau, not far from his native Bergamo, he remains deliberately outside the ebb and flow of Italian film culture (admittedly not the most exalted in recent decades). A family man and hermit who, like Lars von Trier, shudders at the idea of setting foot in a plane, he keeps no videocassettes of his films, no set photos, and begins rare interviews with the disclaimer: “Cinema is not my life. Living is.”
His new film, The Profession of Arms, will be released in Italy in March. A bloodcurdling historical epic about the invention of the cannon, it is vehemently anti-war. Ipotesi Cinema, the utopian film school based on alternative production methods that he founded in the mountain town of Bassano del Grappa and has directed since 1982, is taking new directions, but its many alumni—including directors Francesca Archibugi, Giacomo Campiotti, Maurizio Zaccaro, and Isabella Sandri—still call on him like “a father” to keep him abreast of their new projects.
In Italy, the critics have begrudgingly admitted that Olmi is a major director of his generation, adding points for his supposed “peasant” origins, and subtracting them whenever his faith became explicit. The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (78) was flogged for its Catholic-populist vision, which supposedly idealizes resigned humility in the face of oppressive power. One admirer of The Legend of the Holy Drinker (88) couldn’t help holding his nose at “the smell of the sacristy” it exuded. But this is a nation chock-full of religious complexes.
It’s not that Olmi is seen as a director who lacks a social conscience; it’s that his films resolutely sidestepped social outrage and analysis when all around him filmmakers were waving flags from the front line of social commitment. True, two of his least successful pictures take religion as their subject, A Man Named John (65), a dutiful biography of Pope John XXIII narrated by Rod Steiger, and Keep Walking (Cammina Cammina, 83), an uninspired view of the Three Wise Men on their way to Bethlehem. But once he steps away from recounting Christianity and allows it to function in the background as unverbalized metaphor, he hits his stride.
The early documentaries, made in-house for the electric company Edison Volta, reveal how intimately familiar Olmi was with working-class life in the Fifties. He captures the spirit of transformation that was shaking the country as it walked the path to industrialization. This becomes a key theme in films like One Fine Day (68), where the values of rural society disintegrate in his portrait of a Lombard industrialist who accidentally runs over a man in his car, and The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, which poignantly sings the swan song of an Eden-like harmony between man and nature.
The pleasure to be found in watching Olmi’s work today lies in its undiminished depth and mystery. In his never-ending effort to get under his characters’ skins, Olmi recalls Nana’s instructions in Vivre sa vie: “A chicken is an animal composed of an inside and an outside. Take away the outside and you get the inside. Take away the inside and you get the soul.” Olmi is out to photograph that soul.
Those Olmi faces. They remain unforgettable, even years after seeing them: the Kafkaesque victimhood of the office boy in Il Posto (The Job, 61), the angelic roundness of the peasant-bride in The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, the petrified mask of evil of the Lady in Long Live the Lady! The Legend of the Holy Drinker. He has always preferred non-professional actors. Their unguarded gazes and non-acting, at least in his hands, allow a clearer view into their inner nature.
From the beginning, Olmi made observation into a moral principle. For a feature-length documentary Edison Volta designed to plug the efficiency of the company’s guards at its big mountain dams turned into his first fiction film. Time Stood Still (59) is the first of a trio of black-and-white pictures that remain among his finest work. Time Stood Still is the purest of them all and the one most strongly influenced by neorealism. Time loses its workaday connotations up in the mountains, where it’s just man and nature, immortalized in the image of a boy tossing himself playfully into a heavy snowdrift and leaving cookie-cutter outlines in the snow.
But eventually even Olmi’s characters have to face up to city traffic and a day at the office. Il Posto is a definitive look at the plight of office workers, lambasting their busy do-nothingness with killing comprehension. As wistfully comic in its straight-faced way as Chaplin’s Modern Times, it foretells the inhuman new world being ushered in by the economic boom of the Sixties.
At 15, bashful Domenico ventures from his family’s semi-rural home on the outskirts of Milan to try out for a job with a large, impersonal firm in the city, his mother wishing him “a secure job for the rest of his life.” Ugh. He drags himself past a horse-drawn cart and farm equipment, almost missing the train for his big interview. There, in the company of 20 other hopefuls, he submits to an excruciating but hilarious “psycho-technical exam” that includes demonstrating a knowledge of arithmetic and an ability to flex the knees.
Doing his own camerawork, Olmi crisply conveys the spic-and-span shine of bureaucratic glass and the pompous medical-educational atmosphere spun like a web around the applicants. With his farm boy naivete, the preternaturally serious Domenico is a fish out of water (a metaphor visualized in the film) who throws himself into adapting to his “exciting” new environment. As spectators we see through the company’s phony paternalism; why, then, do we find ourselves cheering for the assistant doorman’s promotion to a pool of paper-pushers?
After courting a pretty girl who applies with him, then losing sight of her because the company assigns them to different buildings and different shifts, Domenico watches his love life definitively collapse at the company’s New Year’s Eve party, a climax of horror that makes The Fireman’s Ball look like a Hollywood bash. Tempering Forman’s cruelty, Olmi ends the interminable evening with his characteres truly enjoying themselves. Talk about turning a scene around! This is very slow cinema, one of the director’s most demanding traits; but for those who can sit through it, its ruthless portrayal of life in the tortoise lane is devastating.
By his third film, The Fiancés (63), Olmi begins to pull away from a head-on documentary look. The editing is much less linear, looking forward to the smoother use of fragmented structure in The Circumstance (74), where parallel stories reflect a family’s disintegration. Stuffed with flashbacks, flashforwards, dreams, and memories, The Fiancés is curiously disjointed, as though Olmi still had misgivings about introducing characters, acting, and a story line.
Through Giovanni’s eyes, we see the sunbaked Sicilian world and its local customs. Olmi contrasts the inhuman scale of the steel plant, typically shot from high cranes, to soulful snatches of nature: windmills, the sea, fields stacked with cones of salt, a sudden storm.
Not surprisingly, the film champions the rhythms of nature and man over the artificial work-time imposed by heavy industry. The last shots, showing children staring in awe at a downpour while Giovanni regrets having to go to work on such a day (it’s even Sunday, so the Lord’s agin’ it, too), flash us forward to The Tree of the Wooden Clogs and its peasant wisdom that outlaws work when it’s raining.
Ironically, The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, Olmi’s international breakthrough, was originally made as a three-hour, three-part TV series, but went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978. This tale of peasant survival in late-l9th-century Lombardy is understandably considered his masterpiece. It is certainly a case of the right director meeting the right material, over which he had nearly total control (as in his previous work, Olmi also shot, edited, and wrote the film).
The illusion of recapturing lost time—here, the misery, hard labor, simple joys, and natural rhythms of the peasant, world—has rarely been more convincing. We watch the opening hour for the sheer beauty of the shots, its simplicity, humility, and quietude. Returning to the documentary techniques he used to such great effect in his first three films, Olmi virtually eliminates characters and dialogue. His camera darts randomly among four families who live in a sprawling farmhouse belonging to a rich landowner. Little better than serfs, they till his fields and raise his livestock, and hand him two-thirds of every lira they earn. We watch them doing the field work, singing songs, killing a goose, butchering a hog, husking corn, and washing clothes in the river as babies wail in the background.
Where in 1900, Bertolucci gave the padroni the familiar faces of Robert De Niro and Dominque Sanda, in Tree we barely glimpse the man who holds the power of life and death over these sons of the earth. Olmi’s maximum comment on the landowners is to associate them with opera and chamber music; the peasants he identifies with the sublime J.S. Bach. The fast cutting and initial lack of close-ups keeps them from emerging as individuals until the film is well advanced. They are literally part of the landscape. We feel their closeness to nature—the moon, snow, rain, the earth, the changing seasons. Even a boy’s chaste courtship of a girl takes place on the road, in the midst of nature. When he asks for a kiss, she tells him they must “wait for their time.”
Tree exalts two social institutions, the family and the church, as the containers of moral values. Like Bach’s music, the bells that ring throughout Olmi’s film seem to come directly from heaven. God is watching over these simple folk. Viewers allergic to Christianity are advised to review Breaking the Waves.
The film’s great and undeniable religious intensity was considered “reactionary” and “mystifying” by some Italian left-wing critics. They accused Olmi of being an apologist for an unchanging natural world and an enemy of modernity, but I think that, whether the director intended to or not, the film makes us understand why that natural life had to end. The offscreen cruelty of the final scene forces the viewer to supply the missing piece. What in the world is going to happen to the displaced family of Minek, the boy with the wooden clogs who dared to go to school? Good-bye farm idyll; we want a revolution and we want it now!
Great social uprisings hover in the background of Maddalena and Stefano’s wedding trip to Milan. A ripple of fear empties the street and for a moment we think they’ll be trampled underfoot by the Italian army, busy repressing popular unrest. Instead, Olmi leaves this future shock off-screen, noting its presence but perhaps unwilling to face it himself. The two innocents spend their wedding night in a convent, where they receive a gift of Providence: a baby orphan whose annual endowment will save them from poverty. This wild narrative invention, a throwback to penny novels (or to classical Lombard novelist Alessandro Manzoni), is one of the most spookily moving scenes in all of Italian cinema.
Gifts of Providence return in The Legend of the Holy Drinker, based on a marvelously concise novel by Austrian writer and renowned alcoholic Joseph Roth. Olmi stretches the story into a rosy-hued, over-long, but still captivating movie. It is the closest he has come to making a card-carrying European art film. Part of the explanation for its less artisanal look is health-related: a chronic viral infection that first struck him in 1984 and which has made it increasingly difficult for him to continue working as a one-man film crew. In Drinker for the first time he uses a professional actor and hands the camerawork over to Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti.
Though it shamelessly tugs on the heartstrings, the story is so mysterious that it delves beyond surface emotion to something deeper. Andreas, an alcoholic Polish miner who sleeps under the bridges of the Seine, one day receives a gift of 200 francs from a mysterious benefactor. He asks only that Andreas repay it, when he can, to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the “little saint” whose church is Holy Mary of the Batignolles. Andreas may be a bum, but he is a man of honor and insists he will repay his debt. Circumstances, and his own weak will, keep preventing this from happening.
The pleasures of the film are many. They include the slow reach of hands for money (Olmi has never been more confident in letting images tell the story instead of words), a ballroom shot like a cathedral, a heady succession of miracles, Hauer’s dignified, all-too-human drunk, and an uncanny use of Stravinsky’s music to give the story a thousand different moods. The film also contains what arguably may be the best representation of a saint on celluloid. Ambiguity is naturally the keyword: is all this really happening?
The film ends with Roth’s inscrutable epitaph: “God grant all of us drinkers such a fine and easy death.” As Olmi glosses it, “If I think of the moment when I, like everyone else, will have to add up the credits and debits in my ledger, I’d like that moment to be so sweet and easy that I don’t even notice I’ve paid my debt.”
In Olmi’s world, that debt is love, and those who give a gift of love are saved. The forms of love—friendly, maternal, sentimental, erotic, platonic, spiritual—blend into a single sacred thread run- ning through all his characters. It is the give-and-take by which they relate to each other and reach out, upconsciously, for their salvation. From the plucky student in Time Stood Still to Johannes De Medici, the noble warrior in The Profession of Arms, it girds them with a core of values that no landlord, employer, or war can shake. It’s what makes them human and, in the last analysis, invincible.
Reflecting
Reality. ERMANNO OLMI - Documents
Reflecting Reality--and Mystery: An Interview
with Ermanno Olmi, Bert Cardullo interviews Olmi in English language from Cineaste magazine, August 2008
Although thematically he inverts neorealism by studying the human accommodation to difficult external circumstances, Ermanno Olmi (born 1931) is perhaps the best exemplar after neorealism of the neorealist style, with its disdain (in theory if not always in practice) for dramatic contrivance and fictive invention. His films offer slices of life “of ordinary people’s unspectacular lives” with indefinite or inconclusive endings; they simulate documentary methods in staging and photography, as they are all shot in actual locations and almost all of them feature non-actors; and they aspire not to proposition or evocation but only toward accurate representation. Olmi’s later works depart from the neorealist style of Il posto (1961) and I fidanzati (1963), his second and third pictures, but even they are characterized by a kind of non-discursiveness. As befits a master filmmaker, Ermanno Olmi is reluctant to give interviews; he prefers to let his films speak for themselves. Ever a shy, self-effacing man, Olmi was especially sparse with words when awarded the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice festival for The Legend of the Holy Drinker, as well as the Golden Palm at the 1978 Cannes festival for The Tree of Wooden Clogs. And there hasn’t been a published interview with Olmi for quite some time. One reason for the reticence is his embarrassment at having to answer those all too frequent, nagging “how are you?” and “what have you been doing?” questions. For between the Cannes premieres of The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Keep Walking (1983) lay five years of inactivity, then another four years until Long Live the Lady! (1987) won the Silver Lion at Venice. During much of this time, he had been wrestling with a long and sometimes paralyzing illness, from which he has since recovered; still, several years of inactivity continue to separate his feature films.
Before proper introductions could be made between us, Olmi queried why I had bothered to come to interview him at all: “You know my answers as well as your questions, so what’s the sense of it?” Nonetheless, speaking in rounded phrases with a sonorous voice, he began to muse philosophically in his Lombardy dialect about his profession, about how he seldom needed to go far from home to film a story that was “part of me,” about how the only measure of a film’s importance is its ability to reflect the human common denominator,”or the need for spiritual values, for mystical tenderness between human beings, in a cold world. Genesis: The Creation and the Flood (1994), for example, is “about us,” not an homage to a distant deity in some picture-book. Like all his masterpieces, this portion of The Bible (produced by Lux), his feature-length episode in the series made for Raiuno and Lube-Beta Film, is meant to be a personal encounter, a film carved with a storyteller’s imagination from handed-down oral tradition that can enchant the hearts as well as minds of an audience. In the same room with us sat Loredana Detto, Olmi’s wife, taking it all in with the same wistful charm and anchoring attention that captured the heart of the youth Domenico in Il posto, perhaps this director’s most important film. Il Posto is the story of a Lombard peasant boy who applies for an available office job in a large Milan company, and at the same time falls shyly in love with a young secretary, Magali (Loredana Detto). The core of the film is a reflection on work,”a reflection in this case drawn from Olmi’s own recollections of himself as an eighteen-year-old looking for and finding employment at the Edison volta company. (The Tree of Wooden Clogs is also autobiographical, in the sense that it was drawn from stories about country people told to him by his grandfather.)
The following interview took place in August 2008 at Ermanno Olmi’s home in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, northeast of Milan. My plan was to get the director to open up a little more than usual both by avoiding the subject of his individual films themselves,”the circumstances surrounding their making, the people in them, the amount of money they made, their critical reception, etc.,”and by scrupulously avoiding questions about his personal life. In order to accommodate me, Olmi spoke in high Italian (as opposed to his native Lombardy dialect) as much as possible.
Cineaste: I’d like to focus today, Signor Olmi, on a general or theoretical discussion of the cinema, of your cinema, as opposed to a specific discussion of your individual films themselves. Is this acceptable to you?
Ermanno Olmi: Yes, that’s fine. It also makes for a nice change of pace.
Cineaste: Nothing much happens in an Olmi film – that is, if you require the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride with all the requisite thrills and chills. Instead of giving your audience a boldly defined series of actions moving the story along at a furious pace, you share with the audience small moments that gradually build into the powerful understanding – emotional as well as cognitive – of an experience. Using real people instead of actors, you follow your subjects as they live in real time, gently shaping their lives into fiction with your authorial hand. Why do you work in this way?
Olmi: Shooting freely with a handheld camera, never selecting anything in advance, I find that everything happens almost spontaneously. It doesn’t happen by design, by planning. Why do I work in this way? Because it is important that the operative technical moment be enveloped in the many emotions that are in the air at the moment one lives in the scene. There must always be a participation, a collision with the moment; this is what determines the choice of image. Otherwise, it’s like going up to a loved one and first thinking, “When we meet, I’ll touch her hand, and then kiss her like this, then say these words . . .”
Cineaste: Working in such a way, do you get frustrated by the limitations of the frame?
Olmi: The frame is not a frustration to me, perhaps also because I work without pre-planned shots. The frame becomes a way of focusing, not a composition in itself, because it corresponds to the things I want to look at in a particular moment. It’s good that there is, outside the frame, a discussion that continues – as it were – something I can imagine and even desire. The same is true in literature, where there are phrases that let you think of an infinity of other words which are even more beautiful because they aren’t said.
Cineaste: In pre-packaged movies of the Hollywood kind – which are planned by the art director and all the technical staff – the camera merely establishes a framing angle selected in advance, and all the things written in the script occur within this fixed frame.
Olmi: My own procedure, as you know, is different. At the beginning, I don’t think about the camera. I think about the ambience and all the events that are to be presented: place, lighting, people, color. I construct the fiction I need. When I feel that this fiction corresponds to my needs, then I go to the camera and let myself be dragged along by the event without establishing beforehand that “here” I’ll do a close-up, a long shot, or a camera movement. With each shot I participate in the event almost instinctively, gathering up what happens and responding accordingly. It’s rare that I decide anything in advance. I invent the action at the moment it takes place. I almost always work with a handheld camera and, having to get direct sound when there is dialogue, I need a very heavy camera since I shoot in 35mm and therefore have to put it on a tripod with wheels. I never do dolly shots or tracks; I never put the camera at a level higher or lower than a horizontal line drawn at eye-level, though sometimes I go out on a balcony or shoot through a window. The camera is on this wheeled tripod, but I move it as if it were part of me, and always at my own height. I always use the camera in this objective way.
Cineaste: What’s the difference between your method of filming and the one used in documentaries?
Olmi: The difference from the documentary isn’t so much in the techniques of shooting because, for example, as in my films, in a documentary there isn’t any elaborate lighting, to name just one technical element. For me, the technique of shooting is almost the same. The difference is that in a documentary I shoot a reality from outside my will; thus my critical participation in the event lies only in choosing with the camera the image that, at that moment, I find most interesting in a documentation of the event. In the case of a fiction film, reality doesn’t happen outside my will, but is organized within me, inside my consciousness. Thus, my critical judgment and my suggestion of content lie above all in the organization of the event. As for my approach to the shooting, I do it just as in a documentary, such that I do not deceive the viewer with a suggestion made through certain acrobatics of the camera or through the use of a redundant little touch in the lights or the atmosphere. In sum, even when the camera is objective in this way, the subjectivity is my own.
Cineaste: Doesn’t this make you feel all alone, as if you are creating a world to the exclusion of everyone else?
Olmi: I never feel alone. I’m convinced that participating with me in the action, in this event, are many others. It’s not my personal point of view. Certainly it is, in the sense that I decide. However, the sensation I have is that these choices of mine are not only mine but that others have them, too. I really don’t feel exclusive, that I exclude anybody. There is a certain type of intellectual who, either out of presumption towards himself or contempt towards others – which is the same thing – has the ambition to be so subjective, to be the only one, to observe life and events from such an isolated perspective. My ambition, instead – perhaps because of my peasant/worker extraction – is to look at the world with others, not as an aristocratic intellectual, an elitist, but as someone who mixes with other people as much as possible.
Cineaste: But there are excellent directors who, unlike you, work with camera operators. As you have been saying, you yourself are behind the camera.
Olmi: Well, everyone
makes love the way they want to, in the way that they themselves feel. Again,
conventional shooting is like going up to a loved one and first thinking, “When
we meet, I’ll touch her
hand, and then kiss her like this, then utter these words . . .” Certainly we go to this
intimate meeting with a whole series of motives, but it is only during the
meeting itself that these motives assume their final expressive physiognomy.
There is another reason I am behind the camera. Because otherwise it would be
like going up to a girl and saying, “I love you but now he’s going to kiss you for me.”
Cineaste: Why do you use non-professional actors in your films?
Olmi: I use non-professionals for more or less the same reasons I choose a real landscape over one reconstructed in the studio. For Barry Lyndon, for example, Stanley Kubrick looked all over Europe to find the pastoral landscape and atmosphere that corresponded to his expressive needs. Onto this countryside – this choice that he made from the real – he grafted his professional actors. I prefer to continue such a relationship with reality, but not with professional actors. The real tree is continuously creative; the artificial tree isn’t. The fake tree responds to the creative needs of a fact (let us call it) already laid out and defined, and stops there. The real tree has continuing virtues: it responds to and reflects light in ever new ways. When you shoot in the studio, you’ve set up the lighting in advance; the lights are the same from beginning to end. You can shoot the same shot a hundred times and it will be the same. The real tree, on the other hand, is in continual evolution, modifying itself inside the situation, so much so that you become anxious lest you not be able to capture a particular moment when the light is changing. This, too, is very beautiful, because between the first shot and the fourth and the fifth there are variations – the shot is continually palpitating, in a manner of speaking. Thus it goes with actors, as well.
Cineaste: So you’re saying that you can never get this same effect – of palpitation – from a professional actor.
Olmi: I have always felt in professional actors a bit of cardboard with respect to the great palpitating authenticity of the real character, who was not chosen, as professionals are, for their beautiful looks, or because they characterize a certain type. For instance, in a film about peasants I choose the actors from the peasant world. I don’t use a fig to make a pear. These people, these characters, bring to the film a weight, really a constitution of truth, which, provoked by the situations in which the characters find themselves, creates palpitations – those vibrations so right, so real, so believable, and therefore not repeatable. At the twentieth take the professional actor still cries. The real actor, the character taken from life, won’t do more than four repetitions. It’s like capturing a light: either you get it at that moment or you don’t get it at all. But it isn’t that he exhausts himself; he becomes something else. And my emotion lies also in following these things, at the moment they occur.
Cineaste: What’s the relationship of your non-professional performer to the reality from which he is drawn?
Olmi: Since all manifestations of life are life, it’s not that there is more life in a man, in one of my non-professionals, than in a frog or a tree. Life is life represented in all forms of expression. It’s so extraordinary and mysterious that we cannot know all these forms of life. Truth is the same thing. It’s not true, for example, that there is more truth in dialogue between real persons than in a poem or a piece of fiction. This depends on the presuppositions that have generated the words or the dialogue, the truth of one’s authentic emotions. False emotions are always discovered for what they are. Some would say that the raw material of film is the image, but it’s not just the image. Today we have the image, sound, rhythm. All that is so simple, and at the same time it is complex, just like the unwinding or playing out of life itself. While sound is one moment here, and the image there, cinema is this extraordinary instrument that allows you to reproduce, but ‘reproduce’ isn’t the exact word, to repropose some of those moments, some of the fractions of life, to select and compose them into a new mosaic through the editing. This operation consists of choice, image, sound, rhythm, synthesis. In the case of my films, they contain a reality that is entirely taken from the real. Within this reality there is the echo of the documentary, but this is documentation that is critically penetrated and put at the service of the content presented.
Cineaste: Unlike many commercial directors, then, you see the cinema as a whole art, as an art unto itself.
Olmi: Yes, for in a certain sense, it’s a contradiction to use cinema as a substitute for literature, for music, for the theater. Even when we want to make a film full of conceptual ideas, it’s obvious we must make choices of representation from life – choices embodied in image, sound, and rhythm – to express those ideas. This means that the image, the music, the action aren’t by themselves sufficient vehicles to express a concept. They become significant, if at all, all together. And this is why I must express a concept or an idea through the dialogue between the main characters, shots of their faces, shots of how they move, in what situations, in what light, with what rhythm. It’s not that one element repeats the other; but, just as in literature I choose this word rather than one that closely resembles it, so too in film I choose precisely that word because only that word can express the particular thing I want. Then I choose this image because it can say something better than anything else, and that sound because . . . You see? It’s as if the cinema were a language that, instead of having only words, has words, images, sounds – a language, in short, that is the language of life itself. We speak with gestures, with looks, with the very sound of the word as well as with its meaning. If I say “Good evening” to you in three different ways, the sound is different each time, as is the facial expression and therefore the meaning. This is cinema: nouns, adjectives, parts of sentences that belong to a special syntax and organization.
Cineaste: How does lighting figure in everything you’ve said so far, in your approach to the filming of reality?
Olmi: Beauty, emotions, must be revealed by indications that most resemble reality, not by artificial ones; and this certainly includes lighting. Why? So that the viewer’s approach to the screen isn’t protected or even deceived by devices, but that instead he succeeds in discovering by himself certain values, certain atmospheres, certain states of mind, through indications on the screen that are more those of life than those of theatricality, in the sense of spectacle. When I do use artificial illumination, it’s because such illumination is necessary for the effects of the film stock; otherwise, sometimes the light doesn’t reach the film. But I also do this at the same time that I respect the natural environment as much as possible.
Cineaste: What about filters?
Olmi: I never use special filters to alter or in some way modify the tonalities of the natural atmosphere. For instance, when I shoot a close-up of the female lead in a romantic situation, I don’t use filters that normally a script would call for in order to make her seem commercially beautiful or alluring. To give you a technical example from shooting, when I film in a particular place, I don’t set up the framing and then, on the basis of that framing, establish the lighting. I first set up the kind of lighting that will allow me to shoot anywhere in that location. Since I do the camerawork myself – again, I operate the camera, which is not the same thing as doing the lighting, for that is the job of my cinematographer – I know exactly what I have shot, so much so that often I don’t even have to look at the developed film, the rushes or the dailies; I just call the developer and if he says the negative is okay, it’s fine for me.
Cineaste: I am assuming you do your own editing.
Olmi: Of course. I am one who still works a great deal at the Movieola. For The Tree of Wooden Clogs, I was there for a whole year. The editing is the moment when all the emotions I felt when I began to think about the film, to conceive it, to choose the locations, the faces – all these things – the editing is the moment when everything comes together. You could say that during this time, I total my bill, I work out this choice or that synthesis, I sum up the emotion of all my emotions concerning this particular film. It’s not administrative work in the sense that I look at the script and say, “Okay, for this scene we need such-and-such a cut. And for that scene a close-up is required.” It’s a new creative moment, an extraordinary moment. This is because I rarely write systematic, organized screenplays; instead, I scribble lots of notes. When I’m shooting, I arrive on the set with all these notes – little pieces of paper filled with jottings about dialogue, atmosphere, faces – and there, on the set, I begin a new critical-creative phase – not critical-executive – as I think about the shots I want to take. The editing, naturally, is a continuation of this critical-creative process.
Cineaste: Where, or how, does you writing begin?
Olmi: First I write down the suggestion or indication of a subject or a story, then I divide it up into many chapters, many moments, like the movements of a concerto. And everything that comes into my mind regarding one of these chapters – at any moment when I am scouting locations or the like; I write down on pieces of paper and incorporate them into the chapter in question. Then, when it comes time to shoot, I organize the fraction of the story I am shooting in the most specific way possible. But when I’m there, shooting, I am often, let’s not say ready to change everything, but to add or to subtract as I see fit. That’s why I never have a “completed” script. This is how I like to shoot, how I frame my shots and film the action. When I’m at the Movieola, I don’t look at any of the written stuff again. It’s a new event that is occurring at the editing table. So artistic creation, like romantic love, is always in the act of becoming; it’s always in motion, with no real stops. For when there are stops, one isn’t making love.
Cineaste: What do you think of the manipulative aspect of filmmaking, of how movies manipulate their audiences; all movies, possibly including your own?
Olmi: Everything is manipulated in a sense, everything: not only the cinema but the economy, religion, any of man’s activities can be corrupting – or saving. It really depends on the moral basis upon which you do these things, both in producing and in consuming them. Even the automobile can be corrupting or saving. If we use it to dangerously pass others, to give us a sense of power through the engine’s horsepower instead of through the horsepower of our own minds and imaginations, then the automobile can be a negative thing. For example, even neorealism degenerated at a certain point because it had become a fad, a fashion, a slick operation, and suddenly it was enough to qualify as a “neorealistic” director if you made a certain type of film, in a certain way – never mind its substance. This also happened to the French New Wave after a while, where if you didn’t make the camera jiggle when you were shooting a subject, somehow it didn’t seem “real.” But it’s real if you are real in front of what you are shooting, if the things that you are filming have an authenticity of their own. If not, you may as well work in the theater, which has its own aesthetic and reason for being apart from those of the cinema. So unmasking the illusion is fine, if that’s what it takes to keep realism from degenerating into artifice. For, clearly, resemblance to reality is not reality. This is obvious – or it should be.
Cineaste: You are beginning to sound like a Brechtian in the cinema.
Olmi: Yes, but sometimes, even in Brecht’s aesthetic, this attempt to “disenchant” the spectator, to remind him that what he is seeing is theater, in itself reinforces the magical component of theater. When the grandmother tells her grandson a fairy tale, the story of Little Red Riding Hood with all the emotions inherent in it – the girl, the woods, the wolf – the grandmother’s face continually reminds the grandson that between the reality of the fairy tale and himself there is always his grandmother’s face. Nonetheless, sometimes the grandmother increases, by her very tone and expression, the fairy tale’s power of suggestion, its forcefulness. So this attempt to mediate between the magic of theatricality, or the illusion of reality, and the experience of the spectator – to disenchant or distance – can be reinforcing instead of the opposite. In my opinion, however, neither takes away from or adds very much to the need man has to experience both the emotion of fear, at a child’s level, and the satisfaction of recognition, at an adult level, through the telling of the fairy tale. This is because we all want to share the feeling of not risking our safety, of not being in direct contact with the frightful event, but instead in the comforting arms of Grandmother, in the armchair at the cinema, or in our living rooms in front of the television set, which protects us and guarantees our safety. We even protect ourselves to the point that sometimes authentic reality – television news or documentary film, for instance – becomes transformed, in the safety of our homes, into its own kind of fairy tale, by means of which we see real events far removed from our consciences and our responsibility. In such a fairy-tale atmosphere, these events do not touch us physically or morally; we participate in them neither in body nor in soul. What we see “enchants” us, and we want to see it in the context of this enchantment. Indeed, we enjoy the fact that, yes, theater and cinema – especially the cinema – remind us of reality, but they remind us even more of the fairy tale. This is why we can watch with total concentration and excitement as people fight and kill each other on the screen, at the same time as we self-assuredly stir our coffee or eat our popcorn.
Cineaste: These things are hard to talk about in terms of classifications or designations – fairy tale, reality, disenchantment, empathy, etc. – this is something I have learned.
Olmi: Yes, and let’s take Brecht again as an instance. What does Brecht try to do? To “disenchant” us so that our critical faculty is always active. Thus he says, “Don’t be taken in by this. Be careful, I am acting; watch carefully so that you won’t be taken in.” I understand this critical distance. The spectator in the cinema or the theater feels fear; he tells himself that what he’s seeing is not real so that he can feel defended against it; and then he returns back to his fear. Such critical distancing is like Grandmother’s face: it’s Grandmother who is telling the story, and this is why her grandson can comfortably feel his fear. Such a theory as Brecht’s is important for the viewer, but what happens? Brecht doesn’t always achieve the result that he intended – in fact, he rarely does. Why? Because if you come with your own ability to critically distance yourself from an aesthetic event, to analyze it by yourself, sometimes you can be disturbed by someone who wants to “cue” your distancing or to distance you from what you’re seeing even more than you ordinarily would be. If, on the other hand, you don’t have any ability, on your own, to critically distance yourself from an aesthetic event – if you are over-emotional, let us say, and feel immediately stirred just by the exterior aspect of characters kissing or horses galloping – you can feel equally disenfranchised by someone who wants to pull you back from what you are seeing. Or the opposite: an emotional spectator can take the distancing devices so seriously that he becomes nothing but distanced from the artistic event, to the point that he has completely, and misguidedly, suppressed his emotional involvement in that event. Participation in an artistic event, in short, is many-sided and more complex than most theorists make it out to be. One can participate in an emotion, for example, but, at the same time, one can force a series of “postponents” on one’s emotions that cannot be seen with the eyes and may not even be acknowledged by the conscious mind. People are different, and so is the camera: the same camera in the hands of ten different people shooting the same picture will, without question, take ten different pictures.
Cineaste: Could you speak a bit now about your early experiences of the cinema and your contact with American movies?
Olmi: I would very much like to do so. When, as a child, I went out to the cinema, I always felt good, and I felt especially good when I started seeing the differences between Hollywood cinema – global Hollywood cinema, if you will, not just the American variety – and the cinema of Italian neorealism, particularly the first films of Roberto Rossellini. I was between fifteen and seventeen years old at the time, and in those years I passed from the loving arms of my grandmother, who told me wonderfully suggestive fairy tales, to the bitter embrace of my father, who began to introduce me to life’s complexities and disappointments. The films of Rossellini mark this turning point for me. I remember leaving a screening of Paisan; there were only seven or eight of us in the audience, although the cinemas were always packed when they showed popular American movies like I’ll Be Yours or The Man I Love. I went to see Paisan probably because I had already seen all the other movies around. And strangely enough, this picture made me realize that it was time to tear myself way from my grandmother’s bosom. Leaving the movie theater after Paisan, I continued to experience the strong emotions I had felt while watching this film, because it was life that I had seen up on the screen – not movie formulas. And the cinema began to fascinate me, the idea of making films from a unique perspective but always in collaboration with others. Film, for me, is a way of being together with other people, both when I make films and when my films are in the company of their audience, the viewers. I loved Hollywood movies very much at the time, but if today my grandmother came back and wanted to take me on her knee and tell me the story of Little Red Riding Hood, I wouldn’t like it, of course. This is what we call becoming an adult viewer.
Cineaste: I guess television didn’t enter into the picture for you in the late 1940s.
Olmi: No, not at all: I was too young and the medium was too young. But I do think that if people today would turn off their own television sets, film could still hold great value for them. In fact, if it weren’t for the cinema, contemporary society would be very disorganized. The cinema is a kind of comfort, especially when it’s a false mirror like that of Snow White’s grandmother. We want the cinema, that representation of ourselves which somehow says we are all fine and good, even when it presents the negative aspects of life. We are saved, you could say, by this filmic mirror that continually deceives us; we are its ultimate beneficiaries, we as a society, as a people, as individual human beings. As far as I am concerned, however, I could live without cinema if they took it away from me. But I couldn’t live without my wife, my children, my friends – without people, especially those near and dear to me. This may seem like an infantile choice – your family or the flicks! (as you Americans like to call the movies) – but it’s worth keeping in mind in an era where much writing about film, and many movies themselves, seem to have less and less to do with human life as most of us experience it from day to day.
Cineaste: Well, there are a lot of businessmen who would disagree with your choice of family and friends over the cinema.
Olmi: Naturally. Since ours is a society – a global or international one at this point – that strains to achieve certain objectives, among which profit towers above all others, it’s obvious that the cinema as a mass medium, as a means of popular communication, is strongly and even intensely utilized to such an end: the attainment of profit, which need not be of the exclusively monetary kind. It could be ideological “profit” as well. Whole economies themselves initiate their own strategies for profit, by means of which the masses, within a grand design constructed by just a few, fall into a financial trap. But there comes a time when the economy revolts and turns against not only its protagonists, the industrial giants, but also against the workers themselves. Then there must be some kind of reckoning, some taking into account, if not a revolt itself, and this must involve everyone, including the “organizers of profit.” So it is with the cinema. At the beginning, when the audience saw a train on the screen rushing towards them, they hid under their seats; they were afraid, given film’s power of visualization. Today, to give only an inkling of what has happened since, you have to stab a man in the stomach nine times to get the same effect. And everyone is paying a very high price, figuratively as well as literally, for this kind of exploitation. But I think that any event – social, political, economic, or artistic – produces certain negative effects that were meant to be produced by betraying certain ideas or principles. The only question is how long it will take for a revolt on the part of those who produce as well as those who consume such cinema. I am not an optimist at all costs, but I do believe in the will to survive of life itself, and that when we have come to the end of our cunning and cleverness to trick the good earth, and with it Saint Cinema, into producing more and more, the both of them will rebel against us. Film art – cinematographic suggestion, if you like – will refuse at a certain point to participate in its own corruption and even prostitution. This is not just a discussion involving the cinema, however, as I have tried to make clear, because the cinema is only one element in the general economic noise that surrounds us.
Cineaste: It is certainly true today that many an auteur – one who has the talent to make quality films – is strongly influenced by an anxiety for commercial success.
Olmi: Yes. For example, if their film doesn’t make millions more than another movie released at the same time, lots of directors feel inferior and even disconsolate – so much are they influenced by this logic of exaggerated profit. But the moment will come when we become so pained by the economic and artistic choices we have made that we will go back to looking at ourselves in the mirror, to looking into each other’s eyes sincerely, and finding there the reality we have sacrificed to the bitch-goddess of capitalistic success.
Ermanno Olmi | Italian
director | Britannica.com biography
Overview
for Ermanno Olmi - TCM.com
biography and profile page
Ermanno Olmi - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films ... P. Adams Sitney from Film Reference
Milano Film Festival The Complete Olmi, introductory biography and filmography, 2009 Fest
Ermanno Olmi - Art Director, Cinematographer, Co-Producer ... bio and filmography from Variety
Ermanno Olmi: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article brief bio
Ermanno Olmi - Overview - MSN Movies profile page
Ermanno Olmi bio from World Lingo
Ermanno Olmi profile page from NNDB
MISSING DIRECTOR'S CHECKLIST SERIES - Volume #4 - The Films of ... complete filmography
Italian Directors - Ermanno Olmi various Olmi films for purchase, with brief descriptions
Olmi, Ermanno - Facets more films for purchase
From Banal to Beautiful: Ermanno Olmi’s Modernist Cinema – Nussberg Film Analysis Excellent analysis of his work (2011?) (Undated)
at the walter reade theater: salt of the earth: the cinema of ... The Cinema of Ermanno Olmi, restrespective intro and films, March 21 – April 12, 2001
Architecture as Social Commentary: The Absurdities of Il Posto - Bright ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2004
Olmi, Ermanno Gerald Peary from The Boston Phoenix, August 2004
Olmi wins lifetime award at Venice film festival - Entertainment ... English SINA, September 6, 2008
Moving
Pictures: Work in All its Nobility and Drudgery: The Films ... Justin DeFreitas,
Life's Work: The Cinema of Ermanno Olmi - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Life’s Work: The Cinema of Ermanno Olmi, by Jason Sanders from BAMPFA, September 25 – October 30, 2009
KONANGAL:
11th Oct 2009; Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto
Olmi biography and Il Posto
review, from Konangal,
Problems
of Classification: A Few Traits in Four Films by Ermanno Olmi Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally published May
2012
MoMA | Tag: Ermanno Olmi Charles Silver, September 24, 2013
Ermanno Olmi | ARTnews Moving
a Montegna, by Nicholas Fox Weber from Art
News, September 23, 2014
Five reasons to watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs – Ermanno Olmi's ... David Parkinson from BFI Screen Online, July 6, 2017
TSPDT - Ermanno Olmi They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Film makers on film: Mike Leigh - Telegraph Mark Monahan talks to director Mike Leigh about Tree of Wooden Clogs, from The Telegraph, October 19, 2002
Cineuropa - Interviews - Ermanno Olmi Luciana Castellina interview from Cineuropa, November 27, 2002
Reflecting
Reality. ERMANNO OLMI - Documents
Reflecting Reality--and Mystery: An
Interview with Ermanno Olmi, Bert Cardullo interviews Olmi in English language
from Cineaste magazine, August 2008
501 Movie Directors: A
Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Ermanno Olmi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Ermanno Olmi
TRE FILI FINO A MILANO
(short) B 89
Italy (18 mi) 1958
ICE ON THE DAM (short) A- 94
Italy 1958
superb documentaries well worth seeing
Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule
review
Italian director
Ermanno Olmi's valentine to his adopted city of Milan (1983, 62 min.) begins
with a long scene of a Verdi opera being performed for the elite at La Scala,
then moves into the streets where a maintenance crew is readying the piazza for
a new day, right before Christmas. What follows is a series of impressionistic
montages—snapshots of ordinary people, young and old; personal ads being read
in a cacophony of voice-overs—that evokes the loneliness and impersonality of a
metropolis teeming with alienated workers. Some of the sequences get tedious,
but Olmi has deftly edited in time with his selections of opera, jazz, and pop.
Also on the program is Tre fili fino a Milano (1958, 18 min.), one of
the many documentaries Olmi made in the 50s while employed by the electric
company Edison Volta. It's a simple visual poem that celebrates the hard work
and joy of a crew putting up cables and electrical towers in the mountains.
Both films are in Italian with subtitles.
TIME STOOD STILL (Il
tempo si è fermato) A- 93
Italy (83 mi) 1958 ‘Scope
documentary (Ice On the Dam) turned into feature story, nice pacing, interesting humor and use of music, striking imagery
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca
(italiangerry@gmail.com) from
IL TEMPO SI E' FERMATO (TIME STOOD STILL) is a sensitive little story and Olmi's first feature film. It is set in a mountain hydroelectric station in wintertime. A young man assigned to work there gets to know and appreciate the older caretaker whose ways are so different from his own. The film is very visual and has hardly any dialog. It achieves, as do so many of Ermanno Olmi's later films like IL POSTO, THE FIANCES, THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, and CAMMINA CAMMINA a sense of "mystical humanity", whereby mundane events reverberate with a kind of luminous dignity.
User comments from imdb Author: (djh27@columbia.edu)
from
A little known masterpiece and Olmi's first feature, the film
takes place in the snowy mountains of northern
IL POSTO A 96
aka: The Sound of Trumpets
Italy (93 mi) 1961
As in all Olmi films, filled with a gentle humanism, similar to Kurosawa's IKIRU, deeply felt, unsentimental, beautifully told story about a young man's search for a steady job, the attention to detail is fabulous
Il Posto Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
Shot in the very office building where he'd toiled before breaking into
the movies, Olmi's low-key comedy of mauvais travail (the film's title
translates as The Job, though it was originally released in the
Il Posto, directed by Ermanno Olmi | Film review - Time Out
Olmi's modern classic, his second feature, has a
hero of Keatonesque ingenuousness - a Candide loosed on the big city (Milan),
and surviving in spite of the roaring alienation and enclaves of privilege
apparently designed to defeat him. Olmi keeps the scenario firmly anchored in a
humane realism, and builds a comedy of feeling based upon the implicit
observation of the minutest detail, the subtle shifts of emotion on the human
face, the shared memories of adolescent embarrassment. If exercises in applied
sadism like 10 pall, go and see a genuine master extract as much sexual
charge from the sharing of a coffee spoon, and then real humour from the
problem of how to dispose of the cups. A delight, no less acute for being
gentle.
Film at 11 Adam
The unassuming grace
of Ermanno Olmi’s early ‘60s feature, Il Posto (The Job), becomes even
more apparent in the era of high concepts, expensive stars, and special
effects. Employing amateurs and real citizens as extras, as well as filming in
only actual locations, Olmi was able to elicit natural (not naturalistic)
performances and involve the viewer in everyday life and struggles. If this
concept seems slight or dull, especially when used to highlight a young man’s
entry into a Kafkaesque office workforce, it is Olmi’s use of space and editing
that imbues realism with the substance of art.
Il Posto is unabashedly autobiographical but strongly universal. It
tells the story of Domenico (Sandro Panseri), a soulfully sad Italian youth
from the suburbs applying for a big city career. He is subjected to simple
psychological, physical, and mathematical exams, yet is degraded by literally
competing beside a host of applicants of varying ages and expressions. The only
saving grace is the presence of pretty Antonietta (Loredana Detto), the only
other applicant of Domenico’s age group. She’s bright and assured where he’s
uncertain and reticent. Olmi counterpoints their quietly budding relationship
with the cul-de-sac existence of the office workers. While the employees have
been hammered over the years into finding the office building as their primary
place of life and existence, Domenico sees Antonietta as a new opportunity
brought by the job. When they are separated by differing departments, Domenico,
now an assistant mail worker, still tries to find chances to meet her. A New
Year’s office party proves fruitless in his quest to make more of their
relationship, but he still finds fun and excitement, however minor and
short-lived, among his fellow drones. A clerk dies soon after, and Domenico
obtains this position, providing an ambiguous end to the film and beginning to
his office life.
Olmi’s strengths as a filmmaker lie in realism, performance, and sympathy. A
true humanist, he finds the strengths and weaknesses of his characters as
facets in the same raw gem. His cuts between the faces of Domenico and
Antonietta, greatly enhanced by the unpolished beauty of Panseri and Detto,
reveal more about their personalities than any number of pages of dialogue ever
could. The darting of eyes, the pursing of lips...it is these facial tics that
show the true nature of human beings, and Olmi captures them without force or
urgency. But the director is not simply about close-ups; he also frames the
crowded applicants like cattle in a pen, or a lone clerk engulfed by spacious,
labyrinthine hallways. For all of the inherent social and economic commentary,
there is much more importance weighted on people, relationships, and community.
This is where Ermanno Olmi’s true allegiance and interests lie, not with
observations only on the sordid state of the postwar world, but in the simple,
uncertain, yet undeniably dramatic lives of everyday citizens.
Minority View: Il Posto by Ermanno Olmi | Dearcinema.com
Ermano Olmi is a
filmmaker who remained true to the tenets of neo-realism (as defined by their
ideologue Zavattini) long after the more celebrated adherents to the creed -
Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and Luchino Visconti had abandoned it.
Rossellini went on to make films like The Rise of Louis XIV (1966), De
Sica to make social comedies like Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963)
and Visconti into operatic excesses like The Damned (1969). Neo-realism
had set out to portray the lives of ordinary people - even when devoid of drama
- but the best-known works of the movement are often highly dramatic in their
choice of subject matter. Olmi came a little latter and first received
recognition for Il Posto (1961), a film that shows his ‘˜documentary'
methods exceedingly well. Olmi is intent on capturing a way of life with all its
nuances and this is perhaps better facilitated by subject matter that is not
inherently dramatic - perhaps because high drama has the tendency to overwhelm
and obscure the smaller emotions.
Il Posto is about young Domenico Cantoni, living
with his family in a village close to Milan, who tries to find work in the
city, finds it and enters the corporate hierarchy as a messenger, to be
promoted to clerk in quick time. Domenico meets a pretty girl named Antoinetta
Masseti, becomes friendly with her for a brief while until the physical
distance between the two (within the same office) undoes the relationship. The
high point of the film is a New Year party for company employees that Domenico
attends and that Antoinetta, unexpectedly, does not.
One is tempted, while
describing something as ‘˜insubstantial' as Il Posto to word one's
description in dramatic language. IMDB, for instance describes the film as
being about ‘˜a young man's initiation into adulthood,' which makes it sound
like a tale of seduction by an older woman! The problem, I think, is that we
expect ‘˜high art' to have implications that will transformational and the
sensations of a young man's first few weeks in a company office simply do not
carry enough weight.
To describe the best
moments in the film - and there are several wonderful moments - Domenico
attends a New Year party just after he has joined the company as a messenger.
Antoinetta has told him that she will be there and Domenico is anxious to spend
an evening with her. Domenico arrives a half hour too early and has therefore
to spend several excruciating minutes at a table alone, with a bottle of
champagne in front of him. His acute discomfort is being noticed although the
others are too kind to look upon him as a figure of fun. Antoinetta does not
show up and we never see her again because our attention has now been drawn to
the next great moment in Domenico's life - when he will become a privileged
clerk instead of a mere messenger. There is high drama in this moment because a
myopic clerk has just passed away. The clerk was engaged - after office hours -
in remaining at his desk and working on a novel. The clerk's novel is
incomplete but his papers have to be sorted out - into personal and official -
before another person occupies his chair. Another irony is that the people in
the room are all clerks but there is an implicit hierarchy in the way the desks
are arranged. The senior-most clerks sit closest to the accountant and the fact
that a desk half way to the accountant is occupied by a junior like Domenico
can cause much resentment among the others.
The purpose of great
cinema is not always to disturb us or offer prognoses about the state of the
world. There is a more modest kind of cinema that is simply preoccupied
recreating sensations for us - sensations that in our everyday anxieties we
have ignored or simply forgotten. The major emotions (our triumphs and
tragedies) are the ones we choose to retain perhaps because they justify us in
a way that the small sensations do not. Few of us remember (or care to
remember) the discomforts in our earliest triumphs, the small embarrassments we
pushed under the carpet and the joys too slight to be even admitted to
ourselves.
If Il Posto is
not about the ‘˜dehumanizing effect of the large corporation' (we don't see
Domenico becoming ‘˜inhuman'), if you don't want to scream at him, ‘˜get out
while you can,' (the emotions of another IMDB critic), where does the value of Il
Posto reside? Its value rests, I suggest, in bringing alive to us - in all
their vividness - the moments in our own lives that we misplaced because the
emotions they generated were too fleeting, too fragile to be retained. In
providing a dispassionate but acutely perceptive look at urban life and its
ironies, the film touches upon sensations that realist cinema has rarely
acknowledged.
Il Posto: Handcrafted Cinema Criterion essay by Kent Jones
Il Posto (1961) - The Criterion Collection
The Film Sufi: "Il Posto" - Ermanno Olmi (1961)
Architecture as Social Commentary: The Absurdities of Il Posto - Bright ... Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, January 31, 2004
Problems
of Classification: A Few Traits in Four Films by Ermanno Olmi Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally published May
2012
Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 937. Il Posto / The Job ... Kevin B. Lee from Also Life Like
not coming to a
theater near you (Matt Bailey) review
Criterion
Reflections [David Blakeslee]
CriterionConfessions.com
[Jamie S. Rich]
Human Resources | Village Voice Dennis Lim, December 17, 2002
Il Posto / I Fidanzati
(1961/1962) | PopMatters David
Sanjek
Il Posto
(1961) - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
Il
Posto (1961) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Brian
Cady
KONANGAL:
11th Oct 2009; Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto
Olmi biography and Il Posto
review, from Konangal,
The History of Cinema.
Ermanno Olmi: biography, reviews, links Piero Scaruffi review for Il Posto is in English
The Digital Fix [Anthony Nield]
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
The DVD Journal Kim Morgan, Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [4/5] [Criterion Collection]
DVD Verdict
(Barrie Maxwell) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection
Il Posto Peter Nellhaus from Coffee Coffee and More Coffee
sixmartinis and the seventh art Shahn reviews the architecture in IL POSTO, August 20, 2007
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3.5/5]
User
comments from imdb Author: Asa_Nisi_Masa2 from Rome, Italy
User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York
The Aspect Ratio Best Films of the 60’s by Ari, Brian, and Pete
CultureCartel.com - Ermanno Olmi - 2003 - Il Posto (1961)/I ... Keith Uhlrich reviews both Il POSTO and I FIDANZATI
PopMatters David Sanjek reviews both Il POSTO and I FIDANZATI
DVD Review - Ermanno Olmi's "Il Posto" and "I Fidanzati" Jürgen Fauth reviews both Il POSTO and I FIDANZATI
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
Shooting Down Pictures
#937: Il Posto - Intro on YouTube
(6:51)
THE FIANCÉS (I Fidanzati)
A 95
Italy (77 mi) 1963
another tender portrait with acute attention to small details, deeply felt humanism
THE FIANCÉS (Ermanno Olmi, 1962) « Dennis Grunes
One of the most
remarkable films ever made about the Italian working class, Ermanno Olmi’s The
Fiancés (I fidanzati) is also a love story of sorts. More
particularly, it’s about the strain placed on an engaged couple by their
separation once the man, Giovanni, relocates from Milan, where he works as a
welder in a petrochemical factory, to his new job, at the company’s new plant,
in Sicily. Giovanni is taking his and Liliana’s future with him, as it were,
for the better pay and greater opportunities for career advancement that,
theoretically at least, will also advance the date of their marriage and help
strengthen their financial foundation. Things do not work out that way,
however; there’s no coming together of north and south. In reality, and with
great feeling and brilliant black-and-white imagery, Olmi clarifies the extent
to which work dictates the course of working-class lives. Including love, it
seems. The Fiancés is a devastating film.
The opening movement
consists of two parts. The setting is industrial Milan in the ravishing dark of
night: the time for those who are hard at work during the day to squeeze in
some social life. Specifically, a club-dance hall is being readied for the
evening’s working-class patrons. People file in; in the dark, patrons are
already sitting, waiting; the floor is sprinkled with (I’m guessing) rosin; the
musicians take their places and ready their instruments. Usually in a film such
preparations are taken for granted; they aren’t shown. But as this is a film
specifically about workers, Olmi is reminding us that these people also are
laborers, part of the same working-class community. This “silent”
overture—there is no dialogue—is as engrossing as it is affectionate, and it
establishes the film’s participation in the Italian neorealist tradition
bringing documentary realism to fiction. Its last two features find the lights
at last coming on and the floor coming to life with couples.
The second part of the
opening is more complex. Giovanni and Liliana are one of the couples in the
hall. They are seated at a small table, but they aren’t facing one another;
there’s tension between them. “Well?” Giovanni asks, inviting Liliana to dance
in an anything-but-romantic or even cordial way. Liliana, upset, will not dance
with Giovanni, who eventually leaves her to ask someone else across the hall.
Before the two do end up dancing together, around and around and around almost
mechanically, Liliana will rise to the bait of Giovanni’s desertion by also
dancing with someone else, playing tit for tat. Spliced into all this are
scenes at the factory, from earlier in the day, that explain the source of
Liliana’s unhappiness. In bits and pieces we see Giovanni’s being offered the
new job and accepting, which will mean his moving to Sicily, leaving behind, in
Milan, Liliana as well as his father. (The “new job”—to me, it seems a ruse:
something expediently offered that won’t, finally, accrue to Giovanni’s
benefit—is as part of the team constructing the new plant.) We see Giovanni
tell his bosses that he isn’t married—the truth, but also a bit of a lie, since
he is engaged to be married and hence not as “free” to move as he
pretends. Indeed, we also see him arrange for his 70-year-old father, who has
been living with him, to be put into a group “home” in his absence. Giovanni is
all that assuages Liliana’s loneliness in life, and it will take time before
they can reunite. It’s a company promotion for Giovanni; it almost seems like a
death sentence for Liliana. Giovanni’s flight to Sicily occurs the next day.
The editing is the
key. The shafts of workday “explanation” penetrating the nighttime social scene
between Giovanni and Liliana is visual irony, since it’s the edited-in bits—work—that
controls the social, private life of the engaged couple (and Giovanni’s father’s
current situation), not vice versa. Moreover, the compound suggests the
fragmentation of their lives that their work-enforced separation will impose.
What a marvelous example of form expressing thematic content.
Giovanni’s plane takes
off in daylight and lands in Sicily at night; Giovanni has probably never flown
in an airplane before. While the work site is spectacular, Giovanni must first
contend with unpleasant hotel accommodations—the cramped space of his room, the
sterile corridor, and the almost desolate nature of the restaurant downstairs,
especially when compared to the Milanese dance hall. (When Giovanni is finally
settled in his own apartment, the effect is no different, and Olmi stresses the
exploitation of imported workers from another angle: the ridiculously expensive
nature of the tiny, threadbare accommodations available to them.) Thus begins
Giovanni’s terribly lonely stay in Sicily—on a realistic level, the separation
from all that’s familiar to him, including Milan, Liliana, his father, his
co-workers; metaphorically, an encapsulation of his welding work itself, but
for the first time unmitigated in its alienating quality by any family or
social life away from work. We, at least, are compelled by what we see to
address the nature of Giovanni’s workday life apart from the normal context of
the rest of his life that makes his labor bearable. By extension, we are moved
to reflect on hard or monotonous labor in a more general sense, to consider the
plight of workers from two opposite ends: what might reduce the alienating
nature of their labor (for instance, reduced work hours, alternating work days,
and vacations); the level of compensation and benefits that’s appropriate given
the sacrifices that workers must make and the torture, or near torture, that
they must endure. This is a far more subtle because indirect, more original and
complex, though no less powerful, description of the alienating nature of labor
than Jean-Luc Godard would present in both British Sounds (released in
the U.S. as See You at Mao) and Pravda (both 1969), in one of
which a slow tracking shot through a factory discloses different persons
engaged in monotonous, and monotonously similar, work, and in the other of
which the same idea is conveyed by a fixed camera showing a single soul engaged
in grindingly repetitive work.
In this regard,
something must be said about the single most celebrated image in The Fiancés—one
of the most fantastically beautiful shots in all of cinema: like Roman candles
or a herd of shooting stars against the dark sky, showers of sparks falling
from the worksite. For me, the image is sorely ironic. The beauty is something
that we see while the workers who are inadvertently creating it do not.
While the workers are in the scene, hence in no position even to notice
the spectacle, we have the benefit of Olmi’s long-shot. There’s another such
image in the film, of mounds of salt. Olmi doesn’t show us the labor that went
into raking these up; he shows us the outcome. What we see is eerily lovely,
but because of the context that this film provides we find irony here also, on
two fronts. One, the visual beauty is for us, but the workers who inadvertently
and laboriously created it are exempt from the pleasure we find in the sight;
for them, the mounds of salt encapsulate the backbreaking nature of their
labor. In addition, these rows of salt mounds on a stretch of almost
depressingly flat land perfectly project the loneliness, isolation,
dehumanization and disconnection from all that’s familiar to them that Giovanni
and other workers there must feel. Again, Olmi’s distancing strategy sets our
minds on an analytical course.
Giovanni’s off-work
wanderings through a bleak landscape, especially given the theme of alienation,
reveal the influence of Michelangelo Antonioni. This foot travel is also
another example of Olmi’s distancing, thought-provoking use of irony. On one
level, it’s simply the case that, disconnected from Milan and all that’s
familiar to him, Giovanni in these new surroundings has no place to go. Hence,
he drifts; he wanders. However, the irony lies elsewhere; for again we see this
fish out of water in a way that describes and defines the “water” he is
normally in. Whether in Milan or down south, Giovanni is “going nowhere.” In
Milan, his social and familial entanglements may have obscured this from our
view; in Sicily, where Giovanni is on his own, we confront this in the visual
metaphor for it that Olmi has conjured. We may infer in this instance that what
we see is correlative to what Giovanni himself may be feeling, now that caring
for his father and looking forward to marrying Liliana no longer distract his
capacity for reflection.
Needless to say, the
relationship between Giovanni and Liliana takes a terrible beating. Letters
unanswered, the separation itself, the wayward thoughts that seize the agitated
imagination: all these help to make Liliana feel that she is “losing” Giovanni.
It should be noted, too, that Giovanni succumbs to his loneliness to the
detriment of his bond with his fiancée. Absence makes the heart grow fickle—or,
by way of compensation in Liliana’s case, fearful and desperate. Again, the
context that Olmi’s film provides takes these events out of the realm of
moralistic or primarily psychological consideration; again, what we see in
these two individual lives, and in their relationship, is the extent to which
Giovanni’s work determines their rocky course. To be sure, in the imagined
face-to-face encounters that accompany their eventual stream of back-and-forth
letters, Liliana imputes to their separation a greater closeness between the
two; but in the context of the film’s use of irony, this matches Giovanni’s
guilty wishfulness and Liliana’s unhappiness, suggested here by her too great
insistence on unmitigated joy. It’s decisive to my reading of the film that the
two end in this fantasy domain; they never really reunite. Liliana’s worry that
Giovanni would “disappear” has materialized.
There’s another way to
approach The Fiancés, and I at least must make note of it. This film is very
much a companion-piece to Olmi’s previous and more famous film, Il posto
(The Job—released in the U.S. as The Sound of Trumpets, 1961),
about a suburban boy’s first work experiences—finally, a desk job in a large
corporation in the city, in a room of rows of similarly occupied
desks—following high school graduation. Domenico’s “job” implies both his
reduction and imprisonment. At first, The Fiancés almost seems like a
continuation of Il posto, which ends in a dance hall much as The
Fiancés begins in one. However, surrealistic elements, befitting Domenico’s
still adventurous young mind, make Il posto a different kind of film
than The Fiancés. In retrospect, the one-year-later film implies the
numbing of the human mind that Giovanni’s years of labor have induced.
Olmi wrote and
directed The Fiancés, and Lamberto Caimi cinematographed—though not so
gorgeously as the foolishly enhanced DVD suggests. Carlo Cabrini is faultless
as Giovanni. However, in her richer role as Liliana, Anna Canzi is even better.
It is absolutely necessary for Olmi’s intentions that, for all her anxiety,
lack of self-confidence regarding her relationship with Giovanni, and
pleadings, Liliana must not seem to be a nag, even in the slightest degree; if
she had seemed a nag, the viewer’s attention might shift from the socioeconomic
and political realm, where Olmi wishes to keep it, to the moralistic and
primarily psychological. Tall order; yet Canzi, while projecting Liliana’s
feelings to the full, somehow avoids all the lurking pitfalls that might have
wobbled Olmi’s intent. She is superb.
The Fiancés won the Catholic Film Office Award (OCIC)
at Cannes. And, of course, it ought to have won the prize, as its humanity is
unassailable.
More than fifteen
years later, Olmi would find art-house success with the peasant epic Tree of
Wooden Clogs (1978), which I once slandered and dismissed with this
too-clever summation: “De Sica, and ye shall find.” My appreciation of Olmi’s Tree,
to say the least, has grown over the years. Nevertheless, The Fiancés is
trimmer (a mere 77 minutes), tauter, and fuller besides; The Tree of Wooden
Clogs, more diffuse. The Fiancés is a masterpiece.
I fidanzati: Rhapsody in the Rain Criterion essay by Kent Jones, June 23, 2003
Under
the Influence: Mike Mills on Ermanno Olmi Video, December 22, 2016 (5:11)
I fidanzati (1962) - The Criterion Collection
The
Film Sufi: "The Fiances" - Ermanno Olmi (1963)
Problems
of Classification: A Few Traits in Four Films by Ermanno Olmi Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally published May
2012
Criterion Reflections [David Blakeslee]
CriterionConfessions.com [Jamie S. Rich]
Il Posto / I Fidanzati (1961/1962) | PopMatters David Sanjek
I
Fidanzati Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Brian
Cady, Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Mark Zimmer) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Journal D.K. Holm, Criterion Collection
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
DVD Review - Ermanno Olmi's "Il Posto" and "I Fidanzati" Jürgen Fauth reviews both Il POSTO and I FIDANZATI
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
ERMANNO OLMI - DANCING 1 (da
I FIDANZATI) on YouTube (5:10)
YouTube
- ERMANNO OLMI - DANCING 2 (da I FIDANZATI)
(
ERMANNO OLMI - DANCING 3 (
da I FIDANZATI) (2:43)
I FIDANZATI, 1962...I (5:53)
A MAN NAMED JOHN (E venne un
uomo)
aka: There Came a Man
Italy (90 mi) 1965
Time Out review Tom Milne
Not so much a
biography of Angelo Roncalli as an attempt to evoke the aura of his life and
the paths that led to his becoming the much-loved Pope John XXIII, Olmi's film
uses Rod
Steiger as a 'mediator'. Steiger, in other words, lends his presence as
commentator, occasionally stands in for the Pope, gazes benignly at the small
boy who represents the pontiff as a small boy. With Steiger reflecting a sort
of conventional awe, it is perhaps small surprise that what emerges from this
jigsaw portrait is pretty much a pious homage. Olmi's quirkish hand and eye as
a film-maker are really evident only in the early sequences, shot in delicate
colours almost like fairytale illustrations, which conjure the quaintly rustic
surroundings in which the future Pope grew up.
Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule
review
Ermanno Olmi uses the writings of Angelo Roncalli (1881-1963) to
narrate episodes from his life, following him from early childhood to his
investiture as Pope John XXIII, but this 1965 film gives little sense of why he
became a major reformer. Much of what we learn is unsurprising: John admires
the “simplicity” of Jesus's teachings, thinks the purpose of being a priest is
to help the poor, and avoids looking at street posters “where indecency might
be found.” As the main character, Rod Steiger is less an actor than a stand-in,
hanging around
LA COTTA (The Crush) – made
for TV
Italy (49 mi) 1967
User comments from imdb Author: Darren O'Shaughnessy (darren
shan) from
Fun, sweet featurette (49 minutes) about a 15 year old ("let's say
16") boy who likes to take an industrial approach to courting. His plan
for making the most of time at a party is to draw up a list of all the boys,
then ask each girl to pick the boy they want to make out with! But when a new
girl enters his life, industry is forgotten and he finds himself dreaming
romantically, especially in the lead-up to New Year's Eve. But, this being an
Olmi movie, happiness isn't quite as straightforward as it seems ...
A worthy short film from one of
“LA COTTA” (Ermanno Olmi, 1967) « Dennis Grunes
“I’d like to give you the first kiss again.”
Charming is the
adjective most often applied to writer-director Ermanno Olmi’s 49-minute “The
Crush”; however, I also find the film close to devastating. Perhaps it is the
low, crestfallen voice that seemingly on-top-of-everything 15-year-old Andreà
slips into when Jeanine, his girlfriend of ten days and presumed soul-mate,
stands him up for their planned New Year’s Eve date. Andreà ends up spending
the majority of his time with two individuals: a cab driver, who takes forever
delivering him to the address of the party that Jeanine’s grandmother
mistakenly believed that her granddaughter would be attending; the older sister
of the girl throwing this Jeanineless party, who tries to get Andreà another
cab and in the meantime ministers to his fragile ego—with kindness and honesty,
not sex, although the dumped boy is suddenly smitten with her, too. We never
learn this young woman’s name, but it hardly matters; we are assured that for
Andreà there would be other crushes to come.
This is a wonderfully
exacting filmlet, originally made for Italian television, unified by a sharp
theme: the reality of raw human feelings, but the unreality of much of the rest
of reality due to the profound fog into which subjectivism—our interpretations,
coping strategies, alternate in-the-moment imaginings and imperfect
recollections later on—plunges it. Olmi’s opening description perfectly suits
this elusive material: “A true story that could be a fairy tale.” Moreover,
Olmi’s style creates a fluid blend of fiction and documentary, adolescent
selfconsciousness (expressed briefly by amateur filmmaking-within-the-film) and
naturalism.
I wish I could give
you the names of the marvelous (nonprofessional?) actors who play the
bespectacled Andreà—he somewhat resembles Woody Allen—and the anonymous young
woman; but I cannot locate a cast listing.*
* Marcella Di Palo
Jost, bless her, found the information. The boy is played by Luciano
Piergiovanni; the woman, by Giovanna Claudia Mongino.
THE SCAVENGERS (I
recuperanti)
Time Out review Tom Milne
A curiously exact echo of Olmi's first feature, Time Stood Still, with its quietly funny exploration of the relationship between two men, one young and one old, who have nothing in common but their work. High up in the mountains, amid past battlefields, they scavenge for old shells and hidden ammunition dumps, dreaming of the day of El Dorado when they will find the armoured car which supposedly lies buried somewhere, lost and forgotten. Shot in documentary style, with amateur actors and a minimum of plot, it may not sound too enticing; but one has to reckon with Olmi's extraordinary ability to make bricks without straw, and here he constructs an entire drama out of the conflict between two lifestyles. Deceptively simple, it speaks volumes about our rat-race civilisation in its vivid, quizzically funny way.
ONE FINE DAY (Un certo
giorno)
New York Times [Vincent Canby] (registration req'd)
"ONE FINE DAY" everything goes sour for the
self-assured, middle-aged director of a Milanese advertising agency that is
controlled from
You may have heard this one before. If you haven't, it doesn't
make much difference because Ermanno Olmi, the Italian director, makes sure you
get the point, long before the ad man does. "One Fine Day" was shown
at the New York Film Festival last night and will be repeated today at
In his first two fiction features, Olmi, who began as a documentary filmmaker, remained at a sociologist's distance from his characters, whom he saw with a poet's eye. As the young clerk of "The Sound of Trumpets" (1961) slipped slowly into the great machine that is the new Italian industrial society, it was Olmi, not his protagonist, who expressed a rueful sadness. The director took a somewhat more personal view of the young couple in "The Fiances," but the film still was the sort of socially conscious cinema that by definition, peers down on its characters as it also surveys the surrounding landscape.
At the end of "One Fine Day," the advertising executive, who has won acquittal, says simply: "Now things will return to normal—as they were before." But he knows, as you and Olmi know, things can never quite be the same again. Although the new film is about people who are more aware of themselves than were the clerks and welders in the earlier films, Olmi is still very much in evidence directing our attention to the sadness and banality of it all.
Olmi often does this very skillfully, as when one of the ad man's superiors says of an employe who has suffered a heart attack: "According to our plans, he should have lasted longer."
Olmi's details are fine. You know the milieu immediately when you see a successful lady executive who wears fine furs and elaborate hairdos, and whose eyes are exhausted.
The performances also are first-rate, especially Brunette
Olmi, however, is a director who likes to compose individual images for beauty's sake. There seems to be much photographing of characters through glass, as well as a pan horizontally across exteriors and interiors to pick up people who are arbitrarily off-screen when the scenes begin. This is fancy filmmaking and it is finally as tiresome as the title is heavily ironic.
DURING THE SUMMER (Durante
l'estate)
Time Out review Tom Milne
The marvellously
quaint and funny tale of a timid, unprepossessing little man - self-styled as
The Professor - who busies himself with designing coats-of-arms, and presenting
them to anyone who matches up to his private assessment of nobility. Recipients
include an old man patiently waiting on a railway station for the son who
doesn't turn up, a hall porter who brings a cup of coffee when he hurts his
leg, a girl with whom he embarks on a sidelong little romance, and who proves
that she deserves his accolade of 'Princess' when the law finally catches up
and he is jailed for his 'malpractices'. Stunningly shot in colour, with a
non-professional cast and very much the same wryly observant sense of humour as
Il Posto, it has a touch of real Olmi magic to it.
Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones) capsule
review
With films such as The Secret of Old Woods and The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Italian director Ermanno Olmi may be identified with people of the soil, but in this charming and rarely screened 1971 comedy he successfully transposes his profound humanity to a cast of literate urbanites. An aging academic (Renato Parracchi) earns a modest living as a cartographer and in his spare time pursues an interest in heraldry, persuading strangers that they're descended from nobles and selling them hand-drawn coats of arms. Lonely and idealistic, he visits a former student who's become a wealthy architect, but he's nauseated by the man's swinging friends and nightmarishly modern home. Closer to his heart is the drifting hippie (Rosanna Callegari) he befriends after a series of chance encounters on the street: “Perhaps you don't know it,” he tells her, “but you may be a princess.” Olmi's trust in the inherent nobility of common people would be cloying if it weren't so obviously sincere, and the film's closing shot is just bitter enough to qualify as Chaplinesque. In Italian with subtitles. 105 min.
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review
THE CIRCUMSTANCE (La
circostanza)
The bourgeois family Olmi observes here is caught in a process of disintegration that hardly requires the promptings of a languid summer's minor crisis. A motorcycle crash, a business reorganisation seminar and a childbirth represent the unlikely-seeming dramatic punctuation in Olmi's mosaic portrait of minimal domestic communication; while the director himself adopts an uncharacteristically elliptical structure and a rare stridency to capture both the frenetic tail-chasing and tentative adaptations to change which criss-cross the dead institutional centre. If the criticism is muted, it's because for Olmi, every new circumstance offers at least a new option.
Chicago Reader (Fred Camper) capsule
review
In this 1973 portrait
of a wealthy Milanese family, director Ermanno Olmi intercuts narrative
fragments about each member, the disjunction between them conveying the
characters' separation from one another. The patriarch is threatened by
downsizing at his company, whose managers fear for their careers even as they
chatter in business jargon, while his daughter resists but then succumbs to her
boyfriend's advances. The members seem less a family than a group of casual
friends, brought together only by shared crises. Olmi closely observes the
details and rhythms of their daily life—which makes the storm that accompanies
a childbirth seem highly artificial. In Italian with subtitles. 96 min.
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS
(L'albero degli zoccoli) A 99
Italy (186 mi) 1978
What an intensely personal film, if ever you question your own faith, whatever it may be, see this film, it's worth every accolade it ever received
Ermanno Olmi's
185-minute study of peasant life in turn-of-the-century Italy (1978) is rich
with incident but thin on ideas—less an advance over the standard film festival
peasant epic than an unusually accomplished rendition of it. The characters and
situations are oppressively familiar; Olmi's wide-eyed, wondering point of view
helps to freshen them, but not enough to overcome completely the Marxist
sentimentalism inherent in the concept. I found the film most successful when
it left its tenant farm setting for a lovely, lyrical boat trip to the big
city, the one moment of expansiveness in Olmi's otherwise hermetic narration.
Still, the film is consistently engaging and suggestive, though it never explodes
into the masterpiece it's clearly intended to be. In Italian with subtitles.
Olmi's uncompromising
reconstruction of peasant life in turn-of-the-century Lombardy marks a return
to his origins in neo-realism and non-professional casts. Choreographed as an
ensemble work that admits no star performers, his film takes its unhurried pace
from the lives of the dirt farmers it observes - lives of repetitive drudgery
punctuated by cautious moments of felicity. Its gently muted colour camerawork
succeeds in covering the exquisite landscape with a thin patina of mud, while
for two of its three hours the changing of the seasons is the closest the film
comes to a dramatic event. By showing peasant exploitation as neither
triumphant Calvary nor action-packed drama, Olmi refutes both 1900 and Padre
Padrone, and creates a near-perfect hermetic universe, punctured only in
those rare moments when, as tautologous as the film's English title, he dots
the 'i's on the amply demonstrated Marxist message. Still, a near faultless and
major film.
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca
(italiangerry@gmail.com) from
If there were any reason for dropping out of normal life and dedicating
oneself entirely to watching Italian films, this might be it! The majestic
simplicity and dignity of this film make even the best contemporary films seem
trivial and stillborn by comparison. Loved by sensitive audiences and critics
alike, Ermanno Olmi's movie describes incidents in the lives of four families
sharecropping in
The most authentic version on this film has the original Bergamasco dialect
track. The newer DVDs from
VideoVista
review Gary
Couzens
Ermanno Olmi made his name with small-scale films such as 1961's
Il Posto, about the life of a postal clerk. The Tree Of Wooden Clogs (aka:
L'Albero degli zoccoli) is his best-known film; it won the Palme d'Or at the
1978
Olmi follows in the neo-realist tradition of realistic settings and un-showy
camerawork, with non-professional actors. (Holy Drinker, which starred Rutger
Hauer, is an exception.) The Tree Of Wooden Clogs, shot in 16mm and originally
made for Italian television with a cast of local villagers, is a three-hour
study of a year in the life of a
Olmi, a practising Catholic, sees a spiritual dimension to all this, often
'ennobling' the onscreen events by the use of Bach on the soundtrack. There's
no plot as such and the village itself is the central character rather than
anyone in it. There's a lot of incident and plenty to admire, but the film's
length and steady pacing means that many will find this heavy going. Squeamish
viewers should beware a goose being beheaded and a pig being killed and gutted,
but these scenes are as much a part of village life as anything else.
Derek
Malcolm's Century of Films: The Tree of Wooden Clogs The Guardian,
No other Italian
film-maker of world stature has been as neglected as Ermanno Olmi, possibly
because his quiet mastery is unfashionable but also because a serious illness
has limited him in recent years. The last time he came into prominence was in
1978 when he won the Palme D'Or at Cannes with The Tree of Wooden Clogs.
Many think this
three-hour epic about the lives of peasants in turn-of-the-century Bergamo is
his masterwork. It may be, but other classics include Il Posto (The Job), Un
Certo Giorno (One Fine Day) and La Circonstanza (The Circumstance). His films
may not have the virtuosity of Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini and Bertolucci. But
time will prove that they are of equal value.
The Tree of Wooden
Clogs was taken from stories Olmi's grandmother told him. Using peasants from
the area as actors, it was made with direct sound (very unusual in Italy). It
was even spoken not in Italian but in Bergomesque. The film attempted not only
an attack on an outmoded social system - the peasants have to beg land and the
wherewithal for a basic education from the local landlord - but an almost
mystical affirmation of the relationship of man to nature.
Olmi was a Catholic as
well as a Marxist so the film isn't as angry, and is far more beautiful, than
that other masterpiece of the same genre from Latin America, Nelson Pereira Dos
Santos's Barren Lives.
Its strength lies not
just in its ravishing depiction of the changing seasons in a stunning part of
Lombardy nor in its human sympathies, which are never patronising to the
ordinary people he finds so unordinary, but in its measured, cumulative
approach to the hard life of those close to penury and exploited by the
powerful. For instance, the tree of the title is cut down by a father to make a
pair of clogs for his son to reach school. For which he pays a terrible price.
There are several
other stunning sequences, such as when a secretive old man finally tells his
granddaughter how he has managed to grow his tomato crop so early each year
that he can be the first to sell in the market. Even better is the honeymoon
trip on an old barge to Milan. This is a documentary that isn't a documentary,
perhaps a trifle nostalgic for times past but never averse to pointing out the
viciousness of the old system and the bleak fight that has to be fought against
the natural world.
Olmi's other films are
very different, though inhabiting the same humanist space. The Job has a young
man triumphantly finding a clerking job but thereby condemned to drudgery for
the rest of his life. One Fine Day is about a middle-aged businessman who
causes an accident in which a farmworker dies, which forces him to re-examine
his whole empty life. "Work," said Olmi, "is not a damnation for
man. It is his chance to express himself. But work as it is organised by
society often becomes a condemnation. It annuls man. We are conditioned, but we
are also guilty of letting it happen."
His precise and
tactful films never over-dramatise. They seem to exist naturally, setting his
characters against an equally authentic background so that you forget the skill
with which they are made. It is good to know that many of the best of present
day Italian film-makers regard his work as a model.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs: The
Sacredness of Life as Understatement Criterion essay by Deborah Young, February
13, 2017
Ermanno
Olmi on the Whisper of the Generations Video, February 16, 2017 (2:42)
The Tree
of Wooden Clogs (1978) - The Criterion Collection
The
Tree of Wooden Clogs archive review: a picture of man and God ... John Pym from BFI Sight and Sound, originally published in 1979
Problems of Classification: A Few Traits in Four Films by Ermanno Olmi Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally published May 2012
Decent
Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review
[A] also one of 15 films listed in the
category "Values" on the Vatican
film list
Reverse Shot: Kristi Mitsuda August 09, 2010
'The Tree of Wooden Clogs' Is Extraordinary in Its ... - PopMatters Sarah Boslaugh, March 7, 2017
MUBI's Notebook: Duncan Gray November 17, 2012
150
Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
L'Albero Degli Zoccoli - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Elaine Mancini from Film Reference
Five reasons to watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs – Ermanno Olmi's ... David Parkinson from BFI Screen Online, July 6, 2017
Scott Reviews Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs [Criterion ... Scott Nye from Criterion Cast
Criterion Blu-ray review: Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs ... Kenneth George Godwin from Cagey Films
Blu-ray
Review: THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, Far From a ... Jim Tudor from Screen Anarchy
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri December 16, 2016
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) Glenn Heath Jr. from Little White Lies
THE
TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS (Ermanno Olmi, 1978) | Dennis ... Dennis Grunes
Ermanno Olmi: The Tree of Wooden Clogs – The Mookse and the Gripes
Flashback: The Tree of Wooden Clogs – Ermanno Olmi's 1978 tale of ... Richard James Havis from Post magazine, April 8, 2017
DVD Savant Review: The Tree of Wooden Clogs - DVD Talk Glenn Erickson, also seen here: The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd
review [3/5]
DVD
Verdict (Bill Treadway) dvd review
The Tree of
Wooden Clogs (1978) Michael DVD
The Tree of Wooden Clogs Blu-ray - Blu-ray.com
The Tree
of Wooden Clogs (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray Neil Lumbard
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Blu-ray) > DVD Verdict: A Class Action ... Gordon Sullivan
The Tree of Wooden Clogs | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Clayton Dillard
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[4.5/5]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann
Brussat) review
I Shoot The Pictures: The Tree Of Wooden Clogs (1978), Recommended ... Michael Troutman
AvaxHome
-> Ermanno Olmi-L'Albero degli zoccoli (1978) brief comments, also photos attached
Tree of Wooden Clogs, 1978 - Top 10 Cannes Film Festival Movies - TIME Richard Corliss (capsule review)
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4.5/5]
The Tree of Wooden Clogs review – Olmi's neorealist masterpiece ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, July 7, 2017
Philip French's DVD club: No 93: The Tree of Wooden Clogs | Film ... Philip French from The Guardian, November 18, 2007
Film makers on film: Mike Leigh - Telegraph Mark Monahan talks to director Mike Leigh about Tree of Wooden Clogs, from The Telegraph, October 19, 2002
Cleveland
Press (Tony Mastroianni) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gregory Meshman
The Tree of Wooden Clogs Blu-ray - Luigi Ornaghi - DVD Beaver
The Tree of Wooden Clogs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for The tree of wooden clogs
KEEP WALKING (Cammina,
Cammina)
Directed, produced, written, photographed and edited all by Ermanno Olmi, this vast film follows the ramblings of a ragged caravan across an Africa that looks suspiciously like Lower Tuscany. After a deal of time it becomes apparent that these are the Magi, following yonder star, while clad in ethnic sacking. Olmi treats the whole escapade with a delightful irreverence, which apparently has not amused the Vatican.
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca
(italiangerry@gmail.com) from
In CAMMINA CAMMINA ("Keep on Walking") Ermanno Olmi has recreated
the journey of the Magi as it might have been enacted by a village full of
Italian peasants. Some refuse to make the trip; some drop out grumbling along
the way; some persevere in search of a miracle - and all for the best of reasons.
Olmi knows the strengths and limitations of the human spirit, ancient or
contemporary, and fills his sublime and haunting pageant with suspense, gentle
comedy, and ironic climax. This is a biblical story for our time, etched in a
visual style as clear and mysterious as faith itself. What a tragedy that this
towering film is virtually unknown in the
Chicago Reader (J.R. Jones) capsule
review
Emboldened by the
critical and commercial success of The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Italian
director Ermanno Olmi indulged himself with this 1982 epic about the journey of
the Magi to witness the birth of Christ. Like the earlier film, it was shot in
Olmi's native Lombardy and cast entirely from the local peasantry, and the
opening sequence shows the players preparing for a religious pageant as an
announcer explains the film's naturalistic premise over a public-address system
(shades of Altman's M*A*S*H). But here the combination of rural
authenticity and minimal narrative, so effective in Olmi's best work,
backfires: centuries removed from the story, the amateurs playing the three
wise men and their followers become more a burden than an asset, and the long
march to Bethlehem bogs down in a series of trials that test the pilgrims'
faith—and the audience's patience. The script offers provocative flashes (when
the pilgrims return home, leaving Jesus unprotected from Herod's slaughter, one
of them tells a magus, “From now on in your temples you'll celebrate only his
death!”), but they're overwhelmed by Olmi's piety. In Italian with subtitles.
150 min.
Spirituality & Practice (Frederic and Mary Ann
Brussat) review
MILANO 83 A- 94
Italy (65 mi) 1983
Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule
review
Italian director
Ermanno Olmi's valentine to his adopted city of Milan (1983, 62 min.) begins
with a long scene of a Verdi opera being performed for the elite at La Scala,
then moves into the streets where a maintenance crew is readying the piazza for
a new day, right before Christmas. What follows is a series of impressionistic
montages—snapshots of ordinary people, young and old; personal ads being read
in a cacophony of voice-overs—that evokes the loneliness and impersonality of a
metropolis teeming with alienated workers. Some of the sequences get tedious,
but Olmi has deftly edited in time with his selections of opera, jazz, and pop.
Also on the program is Tre fili fino a Milano (1958, 18 min.), one of
the many documentaries Olmi made in the 50s while employed by the electric
company Edison Volta. It's a simple visual poem that celebrates the hard work
and joy of a crew putting up cables and electrical towers in the mountains.
Both films are in Italian with subtitles.
LONG LIVE THE LADY! (Lunga vita alla signora!)
Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule
review
A village boy, hired as a waiter for a lavish banquet in a medieval castle, observes the rituals of the upper crust in this whimsical 1987 comedy by Italian writer-director Ermanno Olmi. The first half of the film seems like a documentary, meticulously recording the meal's preparation and the youngsters' reaction to “downstairs” protocols. At the dinner, presided over by a feeble dowager, an international cast of jet-setters partake of an exotic menu capped by a giant fish, their elegant but joyless gathering countered on the sound track by Telemann's festive Table Music. Olmi mercilessly exposes the fatuity of the guests, the yawn behind the smile, but after his stinging critique the film ends with a shrug. In Italian with subtitles. 115 min.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A slight but charming
comedy set in a remote chateau, to which come six catering-school teenagers to
wait at a banquet. Seen largely through the watchful eyes of shy, solemn
Libenzio (Esposito), the absurdly militaristic preparations, the meal, and the
post-prandial relaxation away from the silent stare of the stern, cadaverous
hostess, become as magically tantalising and dreamily sinister as the
transition from childhood to adulthood. The often unpredictable, faintly
surreal satire is distinguished by Olmi's subtle eye for detail; while the
exact significance of relationships and events is left intriguingly ambiguous,
a wealth of emotion is conveyed not by the remarkably sparse dialogue but by
faces, glances and gestures momentarily caught by the camera's serene and
tender gaze.
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca
(italiangerry@gmail.com) from
Made by the great director of TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, IL POSTO , and CAMMINA CAMMINA, this movie is a contemporary comedy-allegory set mostly in an "enchanted" castle. The central character is Libenzio, a naive young apprentice waiter. Along with a group of other young people he is brought to the castle to assist in serving a gargantuan dinner of esoteric food. It is a gastronomic variation on the sado/sexual story of Pasolini's SALO'. The dinner is put on to honor a decrepit old woman who heads some mysterious multi-national conglomerate. It is part of an annual ritual attended by a crypto-Wagnerian elite. The jaded character of the guests is meant to contrast with the purer natures of the peasant youth who serve the meal. This is a strange and intriguing work which combines gothic black comedy with some lyrical counterpoint.
Channel
4 Film capsule review
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THE LEGEND OF HOLY DRINKER (La
leggenda del santo bevitore)
A- 94
Italy France (127 mi) 1988
remarkably photographed in color, somewhat reminiscent of Leos Carax, but the deeply felt humanism is all Olmi
Chicago Reader (Ted Shen) capsule
review
Rutger Hauer portrays
a downtrodden alcoholic who gets a chance for redemption in this 1988 drama,
one of Italian director Ermanno Olmi's few studio ventures, adapted from the
last novella by Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. Andreas (Hauer), a bum who
sleeps under the bridges of the Seine, is given 200 francs one day by a
mysterious old man (Anthony Quayle) who asks only that he put the same amount
in the poor box of a local chapel as soon as he can afford to. Andreas finds
temporary work, then sets out to return the money, only to be sidetracked by
assorted temptations and memories of his tormented past as a miner in Poland.
Yet his wallet is always miraculously replenished. Olmi charts this inebriated
pilgrim's progress with excruciating detail that borders on the oppressive. The
storytelling is laconic, relying on hallucinatory images (courtesy of
cinematographer Dante Spinotti), Stravinsky's piquant music, and close-ups of
Hauer's befuddled yet dignified face, all of which create a despairing, morose
mood that's only dispelled at the end. In Italian and French with subtitles.
125 min.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
A tramp, exiled in
Paris and haunted by a criminal past, sees no way out of his predicament until,
almost miraculously, he is offered 200 francs by a wealthy stranger whose only
request is that, when he can afford it, he return the money to a chapel
dedicated to St. Thérèse. A man of honour but weak will, the derelict takes the
chance to rejoin a world to which he had become a stranger, finding work,
keeping company with women, dining out and sleeping in beds; such luxuries,
however, distract him from his obligation... Olmi's adaptation of Joseph Roth's
novella is faithful and charming, filmed with a simplicity that mirrors the
original's economy. As the alcoholic, though a tad too clean, Rutger Hauer
effortlessly suggests the character's blend of pride, dignity and vunerability,
while Olmi eschews prosaic realism in his evocation of Paris, seen as an oddly
timeless, universal city; the lyricism matches the almost magical coincidences
of the plot. Indeed the film has the resonance and innocence of a parable, its
religious elements widely subordinated to a story that is told with a minimum
of fuss and explanatory dialogue. Quite why the film is so affecting is hard to
hard to pin down: maybe it's because Olmi is so sure of his gentle, generous
touch that he feels no need for overstatement.
THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER (Ermanno Olmi,
1988) Dennis Grunes
Because it has an air
of fable or legend about it, La leggenda del santo bevitore somewhat
resembles Orson Welles’s The Immortal Story (1968) or Roberto Benigni’s Life
Is Beautiful (1997). Some may even be reminded of Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle
in Milan (1951).
Written, directed and
edited by Ermanno Olmi, the film derives from Joseph Roth’s 1939 novella, his
last work. Roth was an Austrian Jew who exiled himself to Paris with the rise
of Hitler in 1933. Roth, who wrote about Jewish life (for instance, in Job,
1930), suffered from chronic alcoholism, like Andreas Kartak (Rutger Hauer,
beautiful), the protagonist of Legend, who, impoverished and homeless,
sleeps under bridges in Paris in 1934. One day a stranger gifts Andreas in the
street with 200 francs, explaining a debt he (the stranger) owes to St. Thérèse
of Lisieux, and Andreas promises to repay the 200 francs, when he is able, to a
nearby church. But each Sunday something comes up, including pleasant
distractions or shards of painful memory from his haunting past; and, even
though the 200 francs lead to more and more money coming his way, Andreas
doesn’t repay the debt he owes. Olmi’s enchanting film is a study of loss, shame,
perseverence and redemption.
In the opening shot,
the solidity of the outdoor stairs down which Andreas walks is wobbled by
falling leaves, which evoke transience. The whole “legend” that unfolds may be
Andreas’s dying fantasy; doubtless, much of what Andreas “sees” are apparitions
or delusions induced by chronic drinking. Holding the pocket watch they gave
him years earlier when he set out on his own, Andreas “sees” his parents in a
bar. He passes out at table; when he awakes, the elderly couple are gone.
Everything evaporates.
Problems
of Classification: A Few Traits in Four Films by Ermanno Olmi Jonathan Rosenbaum, originally published May
2012
THE SECRET OF THE OLD WOODS
(Il segreto del bosco vecchio)
A- 93
Italy (134 mi) 1993
A somewhat surrealist view of a magical woods that seems to have a mind of its own, just a baffling change of pace from Olmi's ultra-realism
User comments from imdb Author: maple-2 from
This Ecological Fairy Tale, with live actors and talking animals tells the story of a colonel (Paolo Villaggio) who is entrusted with a large estate of woodlands until his schoolboy nephew comes of age. Disregarding local tradition and the practice of his esteemed deceased brother, the military man decides to selectively cut the old growth timber. He is confronted with the protestations of the tree spirits (Giulio Brogi) and the local townsfolk, to no avail. Over their objection he releases the unpredictable wind from the cave to which it has been confined, and even wishes for the early demise of his nephew so he can own the woods outright. But he comes to value human contact more, starts to come to terms with most of the spirits, and reverses some plots to get rid of his nephew. A bit like a live action Hayan Miyazaki tale such as Princess Mononoke, but not so violent.
GENESIS: THE CREATION AND THE FLOOD (Genesi: La
creazione e il diluvio) – Made for TV
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca
(italiangerry@gmail.com) from
I was very moved by the images in this lyric evocation of the Book of Genesis
by the great Italian director Ermanno Olmi, whose TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS is one
of my favorite films of all time.
Through a series of painterly images, and the calming, soothing narration of
Omero Antonutti (Paul Scofield in the English version,) we are hand-led from
the creation of man (in simple, elemental, but effective brush-strokes) to the
fall of man, to what constitutes the longest segment of the film, Noah's
construction of the ark, and the first of mankind's redemptions. Omero
Antonutti plays the old man, the prophet-vessel of God himself as his boat is
the vessel of a new humanity. The loading of the animals, the sense among
Noah's extended family during the voyage that they are part of something
greater than themselves, the dove at Ararat with the olive branch in its mouth,
the vista of a subsiding ocean, all create, with the simplest of means, an
impression that can be sublimely moving. And we ask ourselves why. What special
gift can make a film director convert images, words, and sounds into the
sacramental?
The music and musical selections by Ennio Morricone (with a great deal of
Bulgarian women's chants incorporated) create a haunting impression as well.
One does not have to be a great believer or even a believer at all, to be
swayed by this work of wondrous poetry.
THE PROFESSION OF ARMS (Il mestiere delle armi)
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
To follow the first
half of Olmi's dense narrative - charting developments in the 16th century war
between the Papal army and an invading German force - it'd be wise to do some
historical research beforehand: so swiftly and persistently are we bombarded by
names, dates, facts and figures, that the only theme to emerge with any clarity
is that of war, the world and our view of life and our fellow men having been
transformed (for the worse, naturally) by the development of firearms.
Thereafter, however, things slow down to focus more closely on the heroic
captain Giovanni de' Medici, wounded by a cannonball and bravely facing
amputation; here, Olmi's historical rigour still pertains, but, in being
applied to an individual's experiences, rather than that of society at large, allows
for a more accessible meditation on courage, mortality, love and loyalty. A
very fine film, then, but also, for a while, extremely, even excessively
demanding.
User comments from imdb Author: Viator Veritatis from
Italy
This is an absolute must for anybody interested in Olmi's work or in the
Italian Renaissance. One of the best Italian productions in years.
As usual, Olmi concentrates on the grey landscapes of his native Padana plains,
engulfed in a swirling fog dominating the human figures which move through it,
in an atmosphere of timeless melancholiness. As in its masterpiece,
"L'albero degli zoccoli", Olmi successfully tries to paint a picture
of the characters' feelings and strivings through the pitfalls of a difficult
existence, devoid of any intrinsec meaning.
Do not misunderstand me - this is none of the pacifist crap fashionable amongst
trendy critics and intellectuals. Neither it is a convoluted attempt to convey
"profound" sociological or psychoanalytical concepts. That's why it
didn't win the prize it deserved at
The Generals of both armies are no heroes, but rather human beings endowed with
very human needs - Giovanni writes his loving wife to send him underpants, and
his far less loving uncle, the Pope, to send him some money to pay his men.
These are poor and humiliated men, fighting in the pope's behalf, and receiving
blessings (instead of money) in exchange. Their one solace through religion
consists in the act of burning churches and crosses to warm themselves a little
- "That's the Christ of us poor people, he will help us", they say
finding a huge wooden crucifix, and the face of the Christ being burnt is a
testimony to their grieves. But the leader of the German Landsknechten, famous
von Freundsberg, is also an old man who, for all his vain ferocity, is forced
to go back to
The peasants fleeing through the fog, or hung by the German troopers, are
wistful - more than tragic - elements of an unmoving landscape, mute testimony
to the eternal cycles of war, of suffering, of pathetic strives to win
victories that will be forgotten one day or week or month later, as new puppets
will "strut and fret their hours upon the stage, and then will be heard no
more" (from the famous monologue of Macbeth).
A masterpiece from Ermanno Olmi. A film worth seeing wherever you live.
A rigorous account of
the final days in the life of Giovanni De Medici, who embraced his role as a
soldier with an almost religious devotion and fervor, "The Profession of
Arms" is veteran Italian director Ermanno Olmi's most accomplished and
cogent work in years. Demanding, difficult and almost impenetrable at first due
to its dense salvo of historical figures and events, this atmospheric drama
slowly evolves into a fascinating character portrait and a deeply humanistic
meditation on war and death. Olmi's eloquent Renaissance apologia for gun
control is unlikely to make Charlton Heston's top 10 and is too inaccessible even
for the normal foreign film crowd, but might find admirers at the extreme high
end of the arthouse niche.
A legendary warrior
despite his young age, renowned for his valor and good fortune in battle,
Giovanni (referred to here in old Italian as Joanni) had his troops blacken
their armor to advance unseen on the enemy by night, earning them the name of
the Black Band. Opening with the funeral in 1526 of 28-year-old Giovanni
(Bulgarian newcomer Hristo Jivkov), the drama backtracks one week to chronicle his
mission as leader of the Papal mercenary army that provided the final
protective barrier between his uncle, Pope Clement VII, and the advancing
German lansquenet forces of Charles V.
With Italian liberty
careening toward an end, political confusion was accelerating and loyalties
were severely compromised, prompting the Papal hierarchy in Rome and the
country's noblemen to secure whatever personal gains they could from a rapidly
deteriorating situation. As a result of this chaos, Giovanni's call for reinforcements
and weapons fell on deaf ears.
Olmi's backgrounding
of this chronicle is limited largely to identifying the extended gallery of
characters with onscreen titles. In Italy, where most audiences have some
knowledge of historical figures such as the Medicis and Gonzagas and
geographical familiarity with the Northern countryside along the Po River where
the events take place, the minimal exposition may not present a problem.
Foreign audiences likely will have great difficulty distinguishing who's who and
where their allegiances lie. In this respect, however, the film may benefit
from having its wordy old-Italian text condensed into more concise, easily
comprehensible subtitles.
But just as Olmi,
while reflecting on the futility of war, displays only a finite interest in the
spectacle of battle, so his aim is less to document particular historical
events than to use them as a spiritual springboard for his examination of the
human soul and, most importantly, the process of facing death with dignity.
That aim is underlined
by an approach that distances itself from the detached documentary feel of
Olmi's best-known work, such as 1978 Palme d'Or-winner "Tree of Wooden
Clogs," adopting instead a more impressionistic style that steadily builds
depth and nuance. Also a departure is the lean editing and use of short pithy
scenes here, whereas Olmi's films frequently have tended toward dull
longwindedness. (Shooting script reportedly ran much longer and was
considerably modified during post.)
While the first half
of the film focuses on Giovanni's courage and dedication to his task as soldier
and protector, the second half portrays him bringing that same sense of bravery
and calm acceptance to the days of suffering that precede his death.
His downfall comes
during a clash with the Germans, who, thanks to self-serving Gonzaga, Marquis
of Mantua (Sergio Grammatico) and the Duke of Ferrara (Giancarlo Belelli), have
come into possession of four newly introduced light cannons known as falconets.
Seriously wounded in the upper leg, Giovanni endures the amputation of his
gangrenous limb and a final four days of agony. A closing quotation from the
period, advocating an end to the use of firearms, encapsulates Olmi's pacifist
message.
It's in the powerful,
remarkably sustained account of Giovanni's deathbed torment that Olmi
masterfully expands the scope of his erudite character study.
Shifting between
lucidity and mild delirium, surrounded by the men who have betrayed and
supported him and by mocking, carnal frescos, Giovanni reflects on his life and
work, his dutiful wife (Dessy Tenekedjieva) and his mistress (Sandra
Ceccarelli), a noblewoman from Mantua carrying his child. What emerges is a
quietly stirring portrait of the martyrdom of a man of unshakable faith and courage,
an expert in the art of war tainted by human weaknesses but fueled by firm
convictions and oddly noble sentiments.
Olmi's ultra-Catholic
ideology and sermonizing on Christian values have contributed to distance many
critics from his work over the past twenty years. But here those beliefs are
employed with uncharacteristic moderation and intelligence. This is especially
notable in a scene in which Giovanni's ruffian soldiers are reprimanded by
their leader as they destroy a plundered crucifix for firewood.
More than a history
lesson, this is an atmosphere-driven drama. Lensing by the director's son Fabio
Olmi could perhaps have benefited from the enhanced visual sweep of widescreen
rather than standard 35mm. But the choice of shooting the austere castles and
Po River settings (Bulgarian locations stood in for the majority) in gloomy
candlelight or through mist, sleet and snow adds a rich texture to the film's
formal beauty and the painterly composition of almost every frame. Composer
Fabio Vacchi's fretful strings and melancholy choral arrangements also are
effective.
Continuing his
preference for using mainly little-known or non-professional actors, Olmi has
assembled a mixed cast of Italians and Central Europeans, and while the
post-synched dialogue imposes a slightly flat studio sound, the expressive
faces, free from actorish mannerisms, contribute greatly to the film's
arresting solemnity.
FilmFestivals.com review Ron Holloway
SINGING BEHIND SCREENS (Cantando dietro i paraventi)
User comments from imdb Author: frippertronic81 from
"Cantando dietro i paraventi" tells the story of a woman who takes
the leadership of a group of pirates which was once at the orders of her dead
husband. Olmi got us used to the mix of epic fable and historical tale but this
time he also expresses his personal views on storytelling through an explicit
use of a theatrical representation. All aspects of cinematography are at very
high levels in this movie: excellent photography (the hands of Fabio Olmi are a
big promise for Italian cinema), beautiful sounds and striking dialogs even
though in the Italian version the Chinese actors are not superbly dubbed.
Everything is very well mixed together and the spectator truly has the feeling to
live in one of those ancient oriental fables. I personally think this title
doesn't achieve the formal perfection of "Il Mestiere delle armi" or
"L'albero degli zoccoli" but is still very enjoyable and well made
reminding me the more poetic version of Olmi that we've seen in "Il
segreto
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
Jettisoning all traces of his realist style, veteran
helmer Ermanno Olmi has crafted his most complex and sumptuous work to date
with "Singing Behind Screens." This Chinese folktale, partly staged
in a brothel, is the product of a mature director confident with the range of
techniques at his command. Arthouse auds familiar with the Olmi name and
sympathetic to Chinese period tales may help to defray, or even cover, pic's 10
million euro pricetag. Stateside, Miramax has already picked up pic as part of
a package deal.
Olmi himself sees the film as a follow-up to his anti-war "The
Profession of Arms," but the multi-layered construction and ravishing
imagery combine to make it more like a fairytale.
A young man (Davide Dragonetti), in what looks like 1930s urban China, gets
lost and mistakenly enters a Chinese brothel. Though visibly uncomfortable, he
becomes attracted not only to the sexual situations but even more to the staged
narration of a Chinese folktale about a female pirate.
Pic initially crosscuts between the start of the staging and the young man's
entrance. Though it occasionally returns to this character, for the most part
the film moves between the highly theatrical staging of the story in the
brothel and the "opened-out" scenes in actual locations.
Fable is narrated by an old captain (Bud Spencer) from the deck of a large
Chinese junk that fills one end of a huge room. The brothel's clients, in
little reed huts arranged with a view of the stage, can either watch the show
or indulge in other pleasures.
Initially only the narrator's voice is heard, and the action is performed
as a dance. However, at the moment the young man succumbs to the charms of a
hooker, the pic cuts to a real lake where pirate junks are firing on a
shoreside village.
Leader of the pirates is Admiral Ching (Makoto Kobayashi), who's backed by
a consortium of profiteers. To calm things down, the Emperor (Xuwu Chen) offers
Ching a high title if he'll give up his pillaging. However, Ching's backers,
unwilling to lose their income, murder the pirate first with a poisoned carp.
Ching's widow (Jun Ichikawa) seeks vengeance, pillaging villages and
vessels and becoming the most feared corsair of the coast. When the old emperor
dies and his heir (Sultan Temir Omarov) ascends the throne, the new ruler
personally goes out to capture the widow.
Olmi has worked with fairytales and fantasy before, from the sweet
simplicity of "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" to the childish
misfire of "The Secret of the Old Wood." But "Singing" is a
more complex realization of the director's liking for creating multiple worlds
that work both in the imagination and in real terms, somewhat a la Peter
Greenaway. Auds expecting a swashbuckling tale or an anti-war tract will be
disappointed: Skirmishes and pillaging are kept to a minimum, and the pirate
figure is sympathetic, so it's hard to perceive any pacifist theme here.
Rights problems prevented screen credit being given to Jorge Luis Borges'
story "The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate" from his "A Universal
History of Infamy." (In fact, Borges took the plot from a 19th-century
Chinese work, and the tale may well go back further than that.) Olmi adds the
framing device of the brothel, using the staged play-within-a-play to reveal
what is seen as the essence of truth. The plot boils down to a tale of fury
appeased by forgiveness; the opulent staging gives a sense of depth to the
material.
Glorious lensing by Olmi's son, Fabio, makes the stunning vistas of Lake
Scutari in Montenegro completely convince as a Chinese coast, with majestic,
painterly mountains. Where "The Profession of Arms" (also shot by
Fabio), was memorable for its icy blues and smoky whites of a frozen landscape,
here the dominant tones are opulent blues, rich reds and vibrant yellows, all
redolent of the Far East.
Music mirrors the striking settings, with generous chunks of Stravinsky,
Berlioz and Ravel.
Thesps take a back seat to the visual compositions. As often, Olmi gathers
a cast of mostly unknowns, headlined by female dancer Jun Ichikawa (not to be
confused with the male Japanese helmer), whose calm, at times hard exterior
occasionally slips to reveal the jumble of emotions that thrust her into
pirating. Seasoned vet Bud Spencer (aka Carlo Pedersoli) brings flair to the
narrator's theatrical recitation, and finds humor in the role without straying
into Robert Newton-like excesses.
Film's title comes from a Chinese poem, in which the sign of a contented
home is said to be the sound of a woman singing within its walls.
d+kaz . intelligent
movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]
TICKETS
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Most anthology films
present a handful of directors doing less than their best work, but Tickets—a
three-way collaboration between Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami, and Ken
Loach—not only contains some fine filmmaking, it works as a unified piece. Tickets'
three parts take place on the same train on the same day. Veteran Italian
neo-realist Olmi tracks a professor who's having trouble enjoying the meal in
his first-class dining car because he's preoccupied by thoughts of his
beautiful personal assistant, and by a poor refugee family he can see just
beyond the glass coach door. Kiarostami follows Olmi with a sketch of the
strange relationship between a domineering older woman and the handsome young
man who reluctantly looks after her. And Loach brings up the rear with the most
plot-driven film, about three Scottish soccer fans who encounter Olmi's refugee
family and have to make a decision about whether they can help.
All three films focus
on how small gestures get magnified in a cramped, noisy space. If someone loses
a ticket or won't stop crying, the hassle grows exponentially. Taken as a
complete film, Tickets uses a traveler's discomfort as a metaphor for
how Europe is dealing with its immigration problem. To refugees, their plight
is the single most important thing happening. To everyone else, they're an
inconvenience, spoiling an otherwise pleasant trip.
More vital than Tickets'
theme is how each filmmaker approaches it. Loach goes after it head-on,
dropping his trio of well-meaning working-class knuckleheads into a naturalistic
film heavy on improvised dialogue and tense yelling matches. Olmi tackles the
theme more artfully, in a beautifully lit, elegantly structured film that
flashes backward and forward to show how one man's consciousness wanders,
unable to hold one thought. But Kiarostami's film is the most remarkable,
mainly for how it breaks free of the fixed-camera experiments he's been
dabbling with lately, and uses a style that could almost pass for conventional,
if not for the long, hypnotic shots of clouds and rolling countryside reflected
off multiple windows. As for Kiarostami's story, it's about an obnoxious,
overweight woman who sits where she wants and bickers with everyone, and the
wonder of the film is that she equally represents old-world Europe and its changing
face.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Film of the Month: Tickets (2005) Roger Clarke from Sight and Sound, December 2005
Abbas Kiarostami, Ken
Loach and Ermanno Olmi chart the emotional odyssey of six characters over the
course of a railway journey from Austria to Rome.
The idea for Tickets
originated in an informal conversation between producers Carlo Cresto-Dina and
Babak Karimi. But it wasn't until Abbas Kiarostami met his chosen collaborators
Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi that the film's form and narrative premise fell into
place. Though it's tempting to see Loach and Olmi's contributions as mere wings
to the triptych's central piece (indeed, one famous critic ostentatiously left
the screening I attended the minute Kiarostami's section finished), it was Olmi
who came up with the conceit of the train journey, and it's his lustrous and
extraordinarily textured first section that opens the film.
Carlo Delle Piane, a regular in
the films of Olmi's compatriot Pupi Avati, plays an elderly pharmacist
(anonymously dubbed "the professor") experiencing travel chaos in
Austria. He's been away on business but is expected back home in Rome for the
birthday party of his grandson. His scheduled flight has run into problems, but
Valéria Bruni Tedeschi's angel of an Austrian PA (she has golden hair and
appears almost to be floating) has found him a ticket for an intercity train.
He's impressed that she has booked him for two meal sittings in the dining car
so he will be assured a seat for the duration of the journey. Yet some kind of
security crisis seems to be affecting the train. In a scene chillingly
reminiscent of countless World War II-set scenarios, before the journey begins
soldiers and police patrol the station concourse as Tannoys bark German and
German Shepherd dogs nose around. The passengers look confused, intimidated and
a little frightened. There's a scent of madness in the air.
Delle Piane's character bears
precious little resemblance to that other Italian chemist, Primo Levi. With his
fashionable flat cap, neat white beard, rimless spectacles and indignation at
being asked for identity papers by a passing policeman, there's something
absurd about him. And there's a whisper of Visconti's late movies about ageing
and memory in the way he descends into reveries about ethereal blondes. As
Chopin is played in the carriage (a fellow passenger cannot get his CD player
earpiece to operate) the professor tries to write a letter of thanks to Bruni
Tedeschi's PA, which elides, via memories of childhood experiences of music,
into fantastical confessions of romantic attraction. The more he dreams of
girls playing pianos and candlelit dinners with his angel, the more he is given
to little whimsical skips and euphoric gambols. His dainty rejection and then
acceptance of an aperitif is in some sense the 'strawberry moment' of Death
in Venice. The professor confesses in voiceover, to be "daydreaming
like a teenager". Yet here is a man facing old age who cannot even decide
on the way to address his correspondent, relentlessly writing and rewriting his
opening sentence.
What's especially noticeable
about this first section is how Olmi uses sound - the boom of station noise,
overheard music and conversations, babies squalling in corridors, the sometimes
deafening rattle of the train fading in and out of muffled private moments - to
get around the restrictions of space imposed by the train location. But try as
he might, the professor can't help but be drawn back to the reality of the
carriage's night-mirrored window and the army officer (who looks oddly like
Jean-Claude Van Damme, but isn't) sitting scowling opposite him. The soldier
speaks only accented English - the new voice of international imperialism, we
must understand - but his greatest crime is causing a mother to spill her
baby's milk as she hunkers down to feed the child in the crowded corridor
between carriages. As the professor asks the waiter to bring him some warm milk
so he can take it to the mother, and the train staff mop up the spillage, which
looks so much like a puddle of blood, the moment of final resignation comes:
the sleep of old age and the old grown helpless like babies again.
From St. Jerome to the rampaging
rhinocerine Madonna of Kiarostami's central section, which is shot in daylight.
A woman in late middle-age, with white hair and a string of pearls, boards the
train with a host of suitcases gamely carried by a young assistant. She treats
him as a lover, a toyboy, a kept man; but it later transpires that he appears
to be on some form of national service, and that she is a widow on the way to a
memorial service for her army-general husband. Silvana De Santis plays the
woman with sweaty, angry energy; nothing will stand in her way and she will
co-operate with no one she considers beneath her. The young man, played by
Filippo Trojano, has a sad expression and beautiful eyes, which are later
accentuated by the flat lighting Kiarostami deploys when the man is talking to
a young friend of his sister whom he meets in the corridor (and of whom De
Santis' character is jealous). This frontality, this sense of painted
iconography, is homage enough to Kiarostami's late friend Pier Paolo Pasolini
(Kiarostami's charcoal sketch of Pasolini hung in the bedroom of the Rome flat
of the Italian director's muse, Laura Betti, until her death last year).
By the conclusion of this second
segment De Santis and Trojano's characters have rowed and separated. She leaves
the train alone and unaided, but not before one of the best sequences in the
film, which harks back to one of the Iranian director's longstanding obsessions
and involves an argument over mobile phones (Kiarostami considers them a curse
of modernity). The performances in this section are generally the best in the movie,
and the final bust-up between Kiarostami's characters, shot through Venetian
blinds with the reflection of the countryside rushing past, is quite beautiful.
And so to Ken Loach. His section
does little with the space or the noise of the environment, and concentrates
squarely on character - with a touch of comedy thrown in. His protagonists are
fans of Celtic Football Club: three of them, all young men, travelling to Rome,
like Chaucerian pilgrims, for a Champions League match. They've brought a huge bag
of sandwiches from their Asda workplace to feed themselves along the way. After
one of them gives a sandwich to a young Albanian boy they discover the lad has
stolen a train ticket from them. There is then a moral struggle as the Scots
talk to the family of the boy and have to make a quick decision about letting
them keep the ticket. Is the family genuinely in need, or are they crooks? With
Loach we always know the wisdom of the working man will shine through, and so
it does. The Celtic fans make the right call, and the fraternity of football
fandom gathered at the station in Rome helps the seemingly fare-dodging trio to
evade the police. If Loach delivers easily the least rich and imaginative
section of the film, it's a satisfyingly light conclusion to Olmi's frightening
opening gambit and a welcome return to normality.
DVD Times
Noel Megahey
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also seen here: Turner Classic Movies
Floatation Suite [Sheila Seacroft]
Eye for
Film (Anton Bitel) review [3/5]
Stylus Magazine
[Sandro Matosevic]
Slant Magazine
[Fernando F. Croce]
Kamera.co.uk Antonio
Pasolini
DVD Outsider
Slarek
The Lumière Reader
Tim Wong
DVD Talk
(David Cornelius) dvd review [4/5] also seen
here: eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius) review [5/5]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Tickets British Film catalogue
Empire Magazine [UK] review [4/5]
Variety (Deborah Young) review
BBCi -
Films Matthew Leyland
Time
Out London review Geoff Andrew
The Observer (Philip French) review
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
DVDBeaver.com [Per-olaf Strandberg]
ONE HUNDRED NAILS (Centochiodi)
Time Out London (Geoff Andrew) review
Patience! Olmi’s little seen, much misunderstood film – purportedly his last feature – is a bizarre, elegant gem shifting surprisingly but seamlessly from a faintly noir, semi-satirical look at a university library’s desecration – fuelling fears of religious/political terrorism – to a pastoral fable about the priestlike culprit’s redemptive refuge in the Po valley. Who is this man, violently abandoning book-learning? A saviour to folks facing environmental exploitation? Not unlike a latterday, more effective ‘Miracle in Milan’, this profoundly Catholic, profoundly personal fable veers, like many Olmi films, between the seemingly inept and the spellbindingly innocent, magical in its tenderness, its striking visuals and its unpredictability. Don’t miss – but give it time.
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
All the books in the
world aren't nearly as valuable as a single cup of coffee with a friend -- so
says "One Hundred Nails," Ermanno Olmi's disappointing follow-up to
his luminous "Singing Behind Screens" (2003). Helmer, now 75, has
declared this his last fiction feature, a double-blow for those who felt he'd
just reached his most fruitful period -- until now. Following a professor's
epiphany from jaded scholar to messiah-like neighbor, unconvincing tale may be
screened at offshore Italo fests and retros. But given that Olmi's last two
(superior) pics were shelved internationally, it's doubtful "Nails"
will find takers.
Unsparingly religious
in tone, despite the ad line "Religions have never saved the world," film
opens with a scene redolent of "The Da Vinci Code," as tremulous
strings accompany a caretaker's horrified shouts from a library's locked gate.
When the cops arrive, the cause of his agitation is clear: Someone has nailed
100 precious manuscripts into the floor. Not just normal nails, but big ones,
like the kind used to hammer Jesus onto the cross.
While police try to
identify the perp, a flashback to the day before shows a professor of
philosophy (Raz Degan), whose name Olmi deliberately withholds, bidding
farewell to students at semester's end. Of special significance is an Indian
student (Amina Syed), completing her thesis on women and religion, who explains
that religion is the one certainty in her people's lives.
Suddenly, off goes the
prof in his BMW convertible, which he abandons before heading to the banks of
the Po River and a ruined peasant house. Venturing into town, he's taken aback
by the friendliness of the people, so unlike the bookish cityfolk back at
Bologna U. Flirtations develop, neighbors help him fix up the ruins, and
everyone turns to the charismatic newcomer for help when their illegally built
community center is threatened with demolition.
How the professor
turns into a Christlike figure, or indeed why they need him at all, remains a
mystery -- Olmi's sympathetic yet simplistic view of the rural population
displays a surprisingly (for him) patronizing attitude, as if they somehow need
this intellectual outsider in order to survive. Final shot of candles lit along
the road in anticipation of the prof's return reinforces the sense of
deification.
Olmi's stated aim is
to depict a figure exhibiting the humanity of Christ -- not the Son of God, but
the Son of Man. However, this still begs the question: Would Jesus damage
precious manuscripts to make a facile and wrong-headed point? Olmi sets up a
questionable dichotomy between an elderly, dried-up Monsignor with one milky
eye, seen as the rep of the Church and all things bookish, and the handsome
professor who's turned his back on everything but human contact.
In many ways,
"One Hundred Nails" harks back to Olmi's earliest films, with a touch
of Pasolini, evident not only in the locations but also the largely nonpro
cast. Fabio Olmi's lensing repeatedly returns to the river's calm, presenting a
timeless land of purer values than those of the city, though lacking the
richness of his last two pics with father Ermanno. Music forms a key element,
not only Fabio Vacchi's post-Stravinsky strings, but also Ravel and traditional
tunes turned into sacred chorales.
One Hundred Nails (Centochiodi) | Review | Screen Lee Marshall from Screendaily
Veteran Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi is a devout Catholic, and
his work has long had a spiritual agenda. But even in such obvious parables as The
Legend Of The Holy Drinker (which won a Golden Lion in
It's a shame that in One
Hundred Nails, which the director has announced is to be his last feature,
Olmi gives in to the temptations of overt Biblical symbolism in a film that has
neither the dramatic sinew nor the charismatic central performance to support
the weight.
Italian audiences have
given it a respectful reception after it opened on 30 March: Olmi's signature
still has authority among older cineastes. Younger audiences may be drawn by
the presence of Israeli-born, Italian-based poster boy Raz Degan in the
headline role, though the latter's fitful movie career (he was last seen as
Darius in Alexander) has hardly helped to keep him in the public eye.
Festival action is by no
means a given for this fragile swansong, and it is difficult seeing One
Hundred Nails drumming up much interest from distributors outside of
With its story of a
university theology professor (played by Degan) who escapes to a rural idyll by
the banks of the
But two things undermine
the authority of the film's pastoral dream. The first is the absurdity of its
initial premise, which takes us into the territory of a Da Vinci Code reimagined
by Dario Argento.
Early one morning, a
custodian discovers that a hundred precious manuscripts have been nailed to the
floors and desks of a university library with thick, crucifix-style iron nails.
This whole opening
sequence, with its clunky dialogue and theatrical lighting and music effects,
seems deliberately pitched in B-movie mode; only the disorienting syntax
created by the overlapping and interleaving of scenes hints that we are in the
hands of an auteur.
The mystery stays a
mystery for no more than 10 minutes; the culprit is the intense 'professorino'
(young professor) played by Raz Degan; his motive, clear from the start but
hammered home (just in case we missed it) at the end, is the sudden realisation
that book-learning has cut him off from real life: "all the books in the
world", he preaches to a compliant carabaniere, "are not worth a
coffee with a friend".
And here One Hundred
Nails' other main problem is spotlighted: the hobo Christ that Degan
becomes when he flees academia, and his fast car, for a tumbledown hovel by the
Po, is a humourless hermit whose Son-of-God credentials are overplayed by the
script (which, among other things, refuses to give 'il professorino' a name)
and by Degan himself.
We're consoled, though, by
warm performances from the cast of mostly non-professionals who play the
villagers that adopt Degan's character and help him fix up his panoramic hovel.
Olmi's nostalgic affection for the earthy rhythms and grounded good-humour of
rural life comes through as strongly as it did in one of the director's most
celebrated works, The Tree Of Wooden Clogs (1978).
All is simpler in this
tight-knit but generous community, and people engage in more wholesome
activities than those stressed city folk. Degan's love interest – a gawky,
freckled Mary Magdalen – works in a bakery; the young 'disciple' he befriends
is a postman who used to work as a builder; the oldies who come to drink and
dance at the riverside bar and social club paint, or recite poems, or sing: all
is pre-technological, and il professorino is the only one who seems to know how
to use a computer.
But as the bulldozers of
those we take to be the modern-day Pharisees threaten this pastoral enclave,
the Biblical symbolism is forced down our throats more insistently (there are
references to Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, the Resurrection, and many other
canonical moments), and the ironic spark of il professorino's rural hosts is
doused so that they can sit around the table, wide-eyed and admiring, while he
does his Jesus act.
Just as we never really
believe that Degan's character would have hammered all those nails into all
those medieval manuscripts, so we never really buy the villagers' capitulation
to this Donovan-like Christ who appears in their midst with no apparent
backstory.
Olmi clearly wanted to use
his final feature to make a sort of spiritual summa of his career so far; but
the medium is too slender for the message.
Still, the elegaic mood is
underlined by the impressionistic nature shots of cinematographer Fabio Olmi,
the director's son, who does wonders with natural lighting effects; and by
Fabio Vacchi's moody score, which plays insistently with a couple of melancholy
thirties songs rearranged by Sardinian jazz musician Paolo Fresu. Olmi is a
master at texturing sound and image to create atmosphere.
CineScene.com
(Howard Schumann) review
The Lumière Reader Joe Sheppard
Moving
Pictures - On Fest & Film blog : One Hundred Nails ... Ron Holloway
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
2007 Toronto International Film
Festival Journal Ken Rudolph’s Movie
Site
TERRA MADRE
User comments from imdb Author: howiemac from Scotland
Terra Madre (Mother Earth) is a bi-annual multi-language conference hosted
in
This film starts out like a documentary of the 2008 Terra Madre conference in
An unforgettable and thought provoking experience: this film seems to move
beyond the normal boundaries of the documentary format. I, for one, will not
forget its message, nor its beautiful imagery.
Terra Madre, a documentary by Ermanno Olmi - Home - TerraMadre ...
In his new documentary Terra Madre, inspired by the Terra Madre network of food communities, internationally renowned Italian director Ermanno Olmi delivers a powerful message about the critical issue of food, and its economic, environmental and social implications.
Terra Madre was conceived in 2006 by Ermanno Olmi and Slow
Food president Carlo Petrini, united by their passion for the work and values
of the farmers and others gathered at the international Terra Madre gathering
in
‘Only Ermanno Olmi’s sensitivity could express the ethical value of this
extraordinary gathering, Terra Madre,’ said Carlo Petrini. ‘This is a global
network made up of a rich diversity of people, professions, and cultures and
beliefs, which stretches to 153 countries across the world. It sows and
cultivates positive ideas for the protection of biodiversity, respect for the
environment and the dignity of food, for a future of peace and harmony with
nature’.
Shooting commenced at the meeting in 2006, following which Olmi embarked upon
an in-depth exploration that culminated in Autumn 2008, prior to the following
edition of Terra Madre. The documentary includes moments from the international
gathering, and follows some of the participants on returning to their
homelands, interweaving their stories with the director’s own vision and ideas,
to create a foretelling, political piece.
‘At the Terra Madre meeting I recognized the peasants who used to live in my countryside,
at the time of my childhood’, states Ermanno Olmi. ‘Their faces look alike, no
matter which corner of the world they come from. On those faces I could see the
same marks, those that remind you of the landscape of ploughed fields, the rows
of trees, the pastures. Today that world is besieged by big business, which
only aims at profits. The peasants also want to have a profit, but their
attachment to the land is also an act of love: this feeling harbours the
respect for nature.’
The world premiere of Terra Madre was held on February 6 at Cinema Paris
in the festival’s Berlinale Special section. A second showing of the
documentary was made on February 12 in the festival’s Kulinarisches Kino
(Culinary Cinema) section. The documentary was also previewed during the Slow
Food on Film festival in
Film
Review: Terra Madre Peter Brunette from The
BERLIN -- Ever since 1978 when he burst into full view on the
international scene with the magnificent "Tree of the Wooden Clogs,"
77-year-old Italian auteur Ermanno Olmi has been known as the enraptured
cinematic poet of peasant life, life lived close to, and in harmony with, the
earth.
In this new documentary centered around the international Slow Food movement,
which began in Italy, Olmi shows that he has lost none of his passion or
poetry.
While prospects for theatrical release seem remote, the film is a must-see for
festival programrs concerned in any way with issues of globalization and
sustainability. It should also have a healthy life in ancillary markets,
especially DVD.
The documentary is loosely structured around two gigantic events called
"Terra Madre," hosted by the Slow Food movement, in 2006 and 2008.
More than 6,000 cooks, farmers, shepherds, and fishermen from more than 130
countries gathered to celebrate what has become an impassioned, worldwide
movement away from globalized, destructive corporate farming back to the local
variety that bolsters the earth's productivity rather than merely exploiting
and denuding it.
Most of the first half of the film is interspersed with clips from various
speeches and local ethnic performances given during the two events, with Olmi's
crew following up on the specifics of various fascinating initiatives, such as
the International Seed Bank that has been established deep inside an island
north of Norway to protect more than 4 million seed samples. Poetic interludes
intoned on the soundtrack by Italian actor Omero Antonutti give a pleasing
mythic aspect to the whole.
We move around various places in
The last part of the film is the strongest, though some impatient viewers may
find themselves squirming a bit. Here, after having established the economic
and political context of food, the substance that unites us all, Olmi leaves
behind all dialogue in a lengthy and gorgeous paean to the earth and its
potential plenty, as he wordlessly follows the days of a peasant from the
preparation of the earth to the lusty enjoyment of what he has grown himself.
The myriad close-ups of birds and fruit and bees and sprouting seeds, and
finally the heavens themselves, is pure Terrence Malick at his best, and here
"Terra Madre" soars.
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Jennie Kermode]
Variety (Jay Weissberg) review
Olmos, Edward James
AMERICAN ME
Washington Post (Rita Kempley) review
“American Me,” a stomach-turning prison drama with James Edward Olmos, doesn't mean to glorify gangsterism, but it does in its own bullheaded way. Set behind the bars of Folsom State Prison, this cruddy, K-Y-jelly-coated look inside the big house depicts the downs of doing time, but it also dignifies the strivings of a self-made crime lord. A eulogy to this Chicano strongman, it often seems more of a primer on ruthless ingenuity than it does a caution against a life of crime.
Olmos, both as director and star, finds a tragic grandeur in the
rise and ruin of Santana, a teenager who comes of age inside the
Santana, a thinker, poet and advocate of Chicano rights, realizes
that his organization has become ethnically cannibalistic, that it finds both
fresh soldiers and new clientele in the barrios of
Though this is a well-intentioned, well-made movie, it's hard to imagine why a person of sound mind would subject himself to this unrelentingly sordid polemic. For those who have ever wondered how drugs are smuggled into prisons, "American Me" spares few of the anatomical details. The same goes for gang rape and assorted other extracurricular activities, including burning friends alive and strangling relatives. Gross as it is, Olmos the director makes the alternative, a self-sacrificing life on the outside, seem impossibly bland. The scenes inside Folsom are pulsing with a terrible energy that subsides with Santana's return to the domesticity of barrio life.
That's not to say that the conclusions of screenwriters Floyd Mutrux and Desmon Nakano lack validity. It's pathetic, for instance, that Santana cannot consummate a romantic relationship with a neighbor (Evelina Fernandez) because he has no experience whatsoever with women. Unfortunately Olmos, as a first-time director, seems equally ill-equipped at conveying intimacy.
American Me Despair in the Barrio, by Carmen Huaco-Nuzum from Jump Cut, June 1993
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
DVD
Town (Dean Winkelspecht) dvd review
[HD-DVD Version]
DVD Talk
(Matthew Hinkley) dvd review [2/5] [HD-DVD Version]
Fulvue Drive-in dvd review [HD-DVD
Version] Nicholas Sheffo
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3.5/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Yunda Eddie Feng
Omirbayev, Darezgan
STUDENT
Crime
and punishment in Kazakhstan: Student first-look review | Sight ... Geoff Andrew at Sight & Sound, May 15, 2012
After A Prophet, you might justifiably have expected
Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone to have been the most impressive film of
the second day of
It’s more than a decade since the Kazakhstani director’s The Road (also in the Un Certain Regard strand) met with a warm reception from the Cannes critics, but the new film shows he hasn’t lost his capacity to combine simplicity of method with subtlety of resonance. Inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it’s just as much concerned with redemption as the Audiard movie, but in its own quiet way is rather more persuasive. About an impoverished, lonely and almost catatonically shy philosophy student who commits a fatal robbery and only gradually comes to see the full error of his ways, the film is often reminiscent (in its lighting, colour schemes, low-key acting style and pacing) of Aki Kaurismäki’s version of the same novel, though for the most part without the Finn’s trademark deadpan humour.
Indeed, with its pared-back, taciturn, almost Bressonian directness, Student might even seem like a rather naïve take on the Dostoyevsky theme, were it not for Omirbayev using a couple of scenes of philosophy lectures and some judiciously chosen clips playing on the student’s landlady’s television to add depth to the theme of responsibility and ethics; how are we to regard the student’s actions given the nature/nurture debate and the changes that have overtaken Kazakhstan in recent times? Such considerations are mercifully never hammered home but simply included as part of the film’s overall fabric, as material for us to think about should we wish.
While it would undoubtedly be wrong to make great claims for Omirbayev’s film, it certainly doesn’t outlast its welcome and fulfils its admittedly modest ambitions. That’s surely quite enough to be going on with, and more than could be said for Lou Ye’s Mystery, the somewhat murky tale of marital infidelity and suspicious death that served as the opening film for the Un Certain Regard strand.
Cannes 2012. Darezhan Omirbaev's "Student" Daniel Kasman at Mubi, May 19, 2012
You cannot look away from Darezhan Omirbaev's Student, as you can't look away from any of the Kazakh director's films, for each and every shot is quietly but powerfully charged. It always seems a minute charge until a simple shot's condensation of narrative expression and emotional nuance sneaks up on you. In this new film, liberally yet efficiently adapted from Crime and Punishment, the titular student, very poor, very dejected, rides a bus through town; later that afternoon he spontaneously gives away money to the family of an unemployed poet; finally, we see him walking through the rain, and suddenly: ah! he is so poor that he gave away even his bus fare. It is not a chain of this-and-then-that, but a quiet movement, elliptical and quotidean, asking the audience to read how a nominally unimportant action or insert is, in fact, crucially telling to what's going on in someone's mind, in their life, in the connection between scenes.
Like how 2009's Shuga adapted Anna Karinina down to
ninety minutes, Student pares away its source and the world until all
that's left is the everyday that speaks volumes, volumes materially,
narratively and emotionally. As with Kaïrat, Killer, The
Road and Shuga, Omirbayev sees how contemporary social, political
and economic life in
His recent move to adapting Tolstoy, Chekhov (for a Jeonju digital short) and here Dostoyevsky sees him move from genre to literature, taking the central conflicts of these stories and rooting them directly in the now of Kazakhstan, a strange and almost surreal (if not dream-like, as the director's films always are fully integrated with his characters' dreams) way of charting on-going progress by calling back to the past for stories of classic, age-old construct. While Killer saw its hero's downward spiral towards violence as the result of new applications of capitalization in the post-Soviet country—a narrative of the individual losing control in a new world—Student charts the opposite. Its hero isn't finding his way in a new society, he's lamentably stuck in his way, an improverished and seemingly ineffectual youth who begins to feel the new need to act as an individual in what has become an unfair world of gross class-wealth disparity between individuals. In response to the bankers and playboys roaming the streets in Range Rovers adorned with gorgeous female passengers and pumping club music while he sleeps in a cramped basement apartment, cannot afford the rent and is lectured to on social Darwinism at school, the student decides to act upon the world violently. There is no policeman in this adaptation; the stone-faced student is the film's center and renders it the most desolate and anguished of Omirbaev's works, intent on the anguish of the young man who sees action against the world as the only valid response to social, material impotence.
Yet, in a typically surprising revelation from the director, after the boy's mother appears in a dream she actually shows up at his apartment, friendly and warm, and we see, for a moment, that the clouded view of his life up til now was but a small picture, subjectively honed down from a more complex reality. These surprises are common in Student, in which nominally incidental elements in another film, like a head laid on a pillow, a bus ride past office buildings, or the reaching into a purse, tremble with longing, suspense and mystery. For the first time in Omirbaev's films dissolves separate scenes, which, along with his characteristic dream sequences—which are dream-like but not dreamy, so they resemble the look and feel of the rest of the film, until a detail gives away the irreality—subjectivize the film's rich but shy emotional core, which seems to count grievances fit to burst, only to tread a path, uphill, collecting more everyday actions and appearances—like the poet's daughter, and the student's mother—that shine a light from the world outside the student's head.
This "outside" is perhaps triumphant over all, as it is what contains the poetry, pith and surprises of the narrative's clean path following the student. The world of the film is not limited to his vision, only interpreted and impaired by it; this materialist filmmaker, whose cinema is always rooted in the reality of the filming, objects and locations, the importance of where people live, work, drive, grow up, nevertheless makes his films so much about perception of this same world, and perception's limits, expanses and reveries. For a long time, Student is nearly a nightmare, sometimes dryly funny (everyone's television seems either to be playing popular garbage or images of conflict, including the assassination of JFK; when a Kazakh documentary comes on television, no one is watching it) before the hero inadvertently realizes there's a difference between acting upon and acting for, taking something on himself instead of putting it to others. And here, marvelously, at the end, dream and the reality of the narrative overlap and never are clarified, creating a profoundly moving ending of questioning, at once hopeful and despairing, one that sees a tremendous significant even in small dreams, if that is all one has for now.
***
Two of Omirbaev's features are playing worldwide on MUBI and are highly recommended: Killer (1998) and The Road (2001).
Budd Wilkins at
DAILY
| Cannes 2012 | Darezhan Omirbayev’s STUDENT David Hudson at
Stephen Dalton at
Leslie Felperin at
Ophuls, Marcel
Marcel Ophüls - Harvard Film Archive (excerpt)
A master of the grand-scale documentary, Marcel Ophüls has
crafted a compelling body of work that questions the nature of truth, history,
and testimony. The German-born Ophüls came as a youth to
All-Movie
Guide Sandra Brennan
German director Marcel Ophuls, the son of famed director Max Ophuls, has continued his father's legacy
of films centering on oppression and prejudice. Recognized for his hard-hitting
documentaries, Ophuls is best known for his internationally-acclaimed,
award-winning film The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), a
provocative French film that chronicled events in Nazi occupied
Writings
and interviews with Marcel Ophuls
Marcel Ophuls - Alchetron,
The Free Social Encyclopedia
"Marcel
Ophuls" profile by the Austrian
Film Museum
Marcel
Ophuls — MacArthur Foundation bio
Marcel Ophüls NNDB bio
Marcel Ophüls - Overview - MSN Movies bio page
Marcel Ophüls - Movies, Bio and
Lists on MUBI
Personal
Histories, Collective Shame | News | The Harvard Crimson Alan Heppel, October 20, 1972
The
French Occupation and the Jews | News | The Harvard Crimson Jonathan Zeitlin, May 23, 1975
'The
Memory of Justice': An Exchange | by Marcel Ophuls | The New ... Letter
to the Editors of The
THE
OBSESSION OF MARCEL OPHULS - The Washington Post March
15, 1987
"Marcel
Ophuls on Barbie: Reopening Wounds of War"
James M. Markham from The
New York Times, October 2, 1988
VERTIGO
| The Troubles We've Seen - Close-Up Film Centre James Leahy, Winter 1994
1995
IDA Career Achievement Award: Marcel Ophuls | International ... Jon
Hofferman from The International Documentary Association, November 1, 1995
The Sorrow
and the Pity | The Nation Robert
Hatch, January 9, 2009
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD: Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of ... Nick James from BFI Sight and Sound, January 2011
Dialogues
on the Cinema | The New Yorker On
a recent book release, “Dialogues sur le cinema,” about two dialogues, one from
2002, the other from 2009—between Jean-Luc Godard and Marcel Ophüls, by Richard
Brody, January 29, 2012
Marcel
Ophüls and Jean-Luc Godard: The St-Gervais Meeting ...
Talking Pictures, May 4, 2012
ARTIST IN FOCUS: Marcel
Ophuls | Diagonal Thoughts March 30, 2013
Cannes
review: Marcel Ophüls puts his memoirs on film in "Ain't ... Ben
Kenigsberg from the Ebert site, May 17, 2013
Marcel
Ophüls: Ain't Misbehavin'? – Point of View Magazine Martin Delisle, November 11, 2013
Marcel
Ophuls and the Great Big Blank: Montreal International ...
Lesley Chow from The Bright Lights
Film Journal, February 3, 2014
'Ain't
Misbehavin” Review: Marcel Ophuls on Himself | Variety Ronnie Scheib, February 17, 2014
Marcel
Ophuls, Director of 'The Sorrow and the Pity,' Wants to Tell ... Marcel Ophuls, Director of
‘The Sorrow and the Pity,’ Wants to Tell Israelis Some ‘Unpleasant Truths,’ by Robert Mackey from The New York
Times, December 10, 2014
'Racist,
fascist bullshit'-- Marcel Ophuls exposes Islamophobia in Israel Philip Weiss from MondoWeiss, December 11,
2014
Marcel
Ophüls' Memory of Justice and other documentaries - World ... Hiram
Lee from The World Socialist Web Site,
February 21, 2015
Famed Holocaust documentarian
tackles the occupation in new film ... Lisa
Alcalay Klug from Haaretz, November
19, 2015
some
old pictures I took: Marcel Ophuls Rick
McGinnis, March 6, 2017
THE
MEMORY OF JUSTICE DEBUTS MONDAY, APRIL 24 ON HBO HBO, March 15, 2017
Marcel Ophuls | Jewish
Currents Lawrence Bush, March 25,
2017
Some
Came Running: Some scattered and possibly not very useful ... Glenn Kenny, April 20, 2017
Marcel
Ophuls's 'Memory of Justice,' No Longer Just a Memory - The ... The New York Times, April 21, 2017
The
four-and-a-half-hour Nazi documentary you can't afford to miss ... Jordan Hoffman from The Times of Israel, April 23, 2017
Two
Prescient Films About the Memory of the Holocaust | The New ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker, April 24, 2017
Film
festival to honor documentarian Marcel Ophuls — Jewish Journal Avishay Artsy, May 24, 2017
THE SORROW AND THE PITY
(1969) • Frame Rated David Bedwell,
June 26, 2017
TSPDT - Marcel Ophuls They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Gerald Peary -
interviews - Marcel Ophuls September, 2000
'Patriotism
is a lie' | Film | The Guardian Stuart Jeffries
interview from The Guardian, May 23,
2004
REVISITING
THE SORROW AND THE PITY: AN INTERVIEW WITH ... Andrew Sobanet interview, May 26, 2005 (pdf)
Marcel
Ophuls, Ain't Misbehavin | Features | Screen Andreas
Wiseman interview from Screendaily,
May 17, 2013
Guest:
Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert - "Ophüls: Thoughts on Filmmaking ... interview with Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert, grandson
of Marcel Ophüls, and great grandson of Max Ophüls, from LA Ciné Salon, March
15, 2015
501 Movie Directors: A
Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Marcel Ophüls - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PEAU DE BANANE (Banana Peel)
Peau de banane
(1963) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Cathy, a seductive young woman, decides to take revenge on two
crooks, Bontemps and Lachard. These two are responsible for the bankruptcy and
ruin of her father, and so she asks Michel, her ex-husband, to give her a
helping hand. There is no other solution for them than to become crooks
themselves, so they conceive a shady deal with Bontemps on a island in
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
The director of The
Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus isn't exactly known for his
lightness of touch, and this 1963 curiosity will cause no one to lament that
Marcel Ophüls gave up a career in featherweight crime thrillers for Holocaust
documentaries. With Jean-Paul Belmondo as a raffish con artist and Jeanne
Moreau as a wronged woman out to avenge her father's death, Ophüls' lumpy
souffle shares a bloodline with the French New Wave, but the movie's desperate
gear-shifting is more frantic than antic. Three years after Breathless,
Belmondo is already coasting on ossified cool, walking through his scenes as if
he's left a cigar burning in the wings. Whether he's cooking with a jazz combo
or posing as a German scientist, he never alters his permanent sneer. Moreau
isn't much better; it's hard to believe Peel hails from the same era as Jules
and Jim and Bay of Angels.
Then again, what could
they have done? Ophüls' main interest seems to be reinforcing his stars'
effortless coolness, throwing them into a series of absurd schemes just so they
can look unfazed by them. It's like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with
the cast of thousands whittled down to two. Ophüls does his desperate best to
inject laughs — at one point, Moreau's henchmen fool a mark into thinking
they're calling from a construction site by thumping on a nearby radiator — but
the movie's as light as lead.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE SORROW AND THE PITY (Le chagrin et la pitié) A 100
“One
who has not suffered the horrors of an occupying power has no right to judge a
nation that has.”
—Sir Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill’s Foreign Secretary,
1940-1945, Prime Minister, Great Britain, 1955-1957
An account of the Nazi
occupation of France, with particular reference to the town of Clermont-Ferrand,
this is an orthodox mixture of contemporary newsreels and present-day
interviews. Those questioned include politicians, collaborators, résistants,
a French admiral, a Wehrmacht captain, a British secret agent - and of course
the man and woman in the street who concentrated on just getting through the
thing. The mosaic is comprehensive, the documentation overwhelming,
particularly regarding the nature and extent of collaboration. In France, of
course, the film was dynamite. Other countries, other generations may - or may
not - be in sympathy with Anthony Eden, as he firmly declines to condemn those
placed in a predicament which he and his compatriots were spared.
User comments from imdb Author: Gerald A. DeLuca
(italiangerry@gmail.com) from
How truly compelling is "The Sorrow and the Pity," a monumental 4 ½-hour documentary about one of the saddest realities of World War II: the almost placid collaboration of the French with their occupying German conquerors. The movie was created by Marcel Ophüls (son of the great Max Ophüls) and portrays a devastating picture of the collective compromise of morality under duress. We are brought into intimate contact with the times by way of newsreel footage and interviews with present-day survivors of all persuasions as they recall the events of the past, corroborate or contradict others or even themselves. We see the danger that comes with historical amnesia and the refusal to see that there is a potential for great evil as well as great good in all of us. This is a profound movie, and a profoundly disquieting one. It does not substitute facile attitudinizing for intelligence and integrity. It demands that we push the limits of our vision beyond the borders of the screen masking in the theatre. It would be a sorrow and a pity not to see it…and think about its implications for all of us.
Le
Chagrin et la pitie - The Sorrow and the Pity - Marcel Ophuls - 1969 ... James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
By any standards, Le Chagrin et la pitié is a monumental
piece of film documentary. For one thing, it dares to make an objective
assessment of one of the most difficult periods in
The film combines shockingly frank interviews with players in the
drama with archive footage (mainly newsreel excerpts). Although the film
is nominally centred around the town of
The film was directed by Marcel Ophuls (son of the great German film director Max Ophuls) whose investigative documentaries earned him international acclaim. It was originally commissioned by the French television channel, ORTF, as part of a series of three films about recent French history. When its producers André Harris and Alain de Sédouy were dismissed from the channel for participating in the political uprisings of May-June 1968, Marcel Ophuls had to turn to a German television company to finish the film. Ironically, it was with German money that Le Chagrin et la pitié was completed.
When the ORTF refused to broadcast the film, its first public airing was in a small Parisian cinema in April 1971. The film immediately unleashed a storm of controversy and was condemned vociferously as being unpatriotic. In particular, many saw it as a direct assault on the government of General de Gaulle, since it significantly diminished the role of the general during World War II. The film continued to be shown at specialist cinemas and film festivals throughout the world and was nominated for an Academy Award (in the "best feature documentary" category) at the 1972 Oscars. It was not until 1981 that the film was shown on French television, when it attracted an audience of 15 million viewers.
Le Chagrin et la pitié is a film in two parts. The
first part (L’Effondrement ) shows how a
In the second part of the film (Le Choix), which looks at
the last two years of the Occupation, we see how growing distrust and
resentment germinated into opposition and created a growing resistance
movement. Whilst scores of French men and women risked their lives
to free their country, others became ever more complicit in Nazi activity,
denouncing their own neighbours, supporting the anti-Jewish purge and enlisting
in the German army.
Most of the material in the film consists of interviews (most of which were
conducted by Ophuls), making this a very personal and vivid account of the
Occupation. The recollections of the film’s contributors are
obviously tainted by their experiences and, for many, it is apparent that the
wounds have yet to heal – in spite of the fact they are recounting events which
took place almost thirty years before. As the accounts are sometimes
contradictory and often have a strong personal bias, this patchwork quilt of
revelations forms a very complex picture, suggesting that any simple assessment
of the Occupation would be both both flawed and unjust. In an archive
clip, Anthony Eden (British Prime Miniser after the war) eloquently states that
no one who has not been confronted with the threat of invasion from an
overwhelming enemy can condemn the French for their capitulation.
However, it is hard not to be moved by the testimony of some of the film’s
contributors and we are ultimately led to cast judgement – not on the French
nation as a whole, but on individual men and women who were galvanised to
perform acts of great evil, or great good.
By allowing the villains and heroes of the piece to speak freely, the film gives a more graphic and forceful account of events than will ever be divined in any history book or wartime drama. The film begins with a stomach-churning interview with a high-ranking Nazi officer, who apparently still sees himself as a member of the Super Race and has no qualms of his participation in the Holocaust (to the point of not understanding why his fellow countrymen have such misgivings about the period). In another chilling interview, aristocrat Christian de la Mazière candidly tells André Harris how, as a young man, he was seduced by fascism and became one of the 7000 Frenchmen to sign up for the Charlemagne division, a special SS unit assigned to the Eastern Front.
On the side of the heroes, a farmer, Louis Grave, gives a solemn
personal account of the work he and his brother did for the resistance.
Grave was denounced by a neighbour and ended up in a concentration camp; his
bitterness is still apparent 25 years on. A British spy, Denis Rake,
movingly recounts the extreme generosity of ordinary French people he saw
whilst he was serving in
Surprisingly, there is very little mention of De Gaulle’s
movement, La France Libre, which took control of
The film ends with an archive extract in which popular singer
Maurice Chevalier attempts to justify a concert he gave in Nazi Germany.
He claims, in English, and without a great deal of conviction, that he was
there not for the benefit of German troops but merely to entertain French
prisoners of war. With brutal irony, this sequence succinctly sums
up how much of the French nation must have felt about the Occupation – an
overwhelming sense of guilt, self-admonishment and naïve optimism that it could
be put behind them and forgotten. The fact that the many contributors in
the film still felt so strongly about events which took place nearly thirty
years in the past suggests that the incident could not be so easily swept under
the carpet. It is evident that the wound would take many more decades to
heal and, even then, a unpleasant stain would remain, etched into
The Sorrow
and the Pity | The Nation Robert
Hatch, January 9, 2009
Marcel Ophuls documents Vichy France’s shameful collaboration with Nazi Germany.
To attend on succeeding days The Godfather and Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity is to leap from sprawling triviality to splendor. Ophuls’ picture is opportune—it gives reasonable ground to expect the survival of the often compromised but hitherto persistent spirit of human independence. It is a flame, not a conflagration, because not enough people will fight for it; but once in the recent past, a really determined effort was made to stifle it in circumstances and among people where it did not seem to be very ardently cherished, and yet it survived. That’s a reason for hope.
The film will also probably grow more valuable as the decades pass, because it is a stern, unsparing, but in the end compassionate record of how men and women of three countries, and of the widest possible spectrums of principle and attainment, recalled, after thirty years, a great common experience. The subtitle of the picture is Chronicle of a Town During the Occupation. The town, really a small city, is Clermont-Ferrand in the Massif Central; it was under Fascist domination, first indirectly through Vichy, then by German occupation, from 1939 to 1944. Many citizens of Clermont-Ferrand collaborated; many more merely endured; the Resistance began in the surrounding Auvergne countryside. Now Ophuls and his company of interrogators (they are all of that) persuade these survivors of Hitler’s New Europe to recall what it was like, to reveal what they did, and to judge their much younger selves across a considerable ravine of time.
The honesty is astonishing; the courage even more so—I don’t refer here particularly to the courage of the brave, though it is tonic, but of those who were weak or indifferent or worse, and who now, under the stimulus of this project, have the resolution to define themselves. The film unit travels widely. It visits a German wedding breakfast, the father of the bride, Helmuth Tausend, having been a Wehrmacht captain in Clermont-Ferrand. Herr Tausend comes off badly, though it is not at all certain that he knows it. I get the impression that he was an adequate soldier and decent man when he was intruding on France; but the years have not endowed him with sensitivity. He seems to have thought it a pleasant idea to invite the Frenchmen to the family celebration, and regale them with his memories of himself as a gallant, correct warrior. He talks far too much and no one cuts him oil; it is not merciful, but you feel it is just.
In England the crew talks to a flier who was shot down over Clermont-Ferrand (he remembers that his host got him twenty Gauloise cigarettes a day, and it wasn’t until almost the end of his stay that he found him collecting the butts from the ashtrays at night) and it talks to Anthony Eden. Churchill’s Foreign Secretary explains how events looked at the command level—why, for example, it was thought necessary to destroy a unit of the French fleet, a destruction of men and ships that still occasions incredulity in the cafes of Clermont-Ferrand. He speaks candidly of British shortcomings, but cannot be drawn into a discussion of the behavior of the French. “We were not invaded,” he says, “and we don’t know what it was like.”
The film interpolates war footage (bombing raids, Jewish roundups, Hitler gleeful in Paris) and propaganda (excerpts from few Siiss, contrasts between the “degenerate” French and the “noble” German folk) but always it returns to Clermont-Ferrand and the present. Alexis and Louis Grave are farmers, shrewd, prosperous, caps pulled low over their foreheads and with a look of suppressed amusement on their fat faces. They were Resistance fighters and one of them was shipped to Buchenwald, having been denounced by a neighbor. “What did you think about in the camp,” he is asked. “Food,” he replies. “People who thought about anything else didn’t survive.” He grins. Then he is asked whether he ever looked up that neighbor. “What for?” he replies, and grins again. I think the Grave brothers take it as a great joke that Hitler and his collaborators should have tried to get the better of them; it has kept them in good humor ever since. Most of the men who were in the Resistance seem to have had much the same idea; one of them, asked why he joined the Maquis, says approximately, “The situation was not satisfactory.”
Enough—though I am not gutting the picture; it goes on for better than four hours and I cannot begin to cover the detail. There is Christian de la Mazière, who joined the Waffen SS, fought in Russia and will not let his inquisitor goad him into either apology or anger. I doubt that I would appreciate M. Mazière’s views even today, but I salute him. Emmanuel d’Astier d la Vigerie has a face and hands like those of Cocteau and was a founder of the “Liberation” movement. He was a black sheep anyhow, he says, so it wasn’t so hard. Marcel Verdier is a pharmacist. Like Herr Tansend, he talks a great deal; perhaps because he did so little. But he is a puzzled man, not a complacent one; how did all ,that happen around him, and he took such small notice? A surprising number of the people in Clermont-Ferrand seen to feel that way—I recall particularly two schoolteachers—not guilty, but cheated.
I must stop, but readers will experience this sane compulsion to relive the film; it is not a long picture, for all its hours—it is mesmeric. And that happens partly because of its content, partly because of its artistry. It is a masterpiece of editing, cutting back and forth from country to country, among groups and individuals, to weave a tight-grained and marvelously animated tapestry of an event that holds utterly different people in the meshes of a single experience. Pierre Mendès-France, who was jailed in Clermont-Ferrand until he went over the wall and joined the Free French in London, is in a sense the spokesman for the whole work. His wit, his intelligence, his powers of discrimination and his forbearance accept and hold together all the colors of the fabric. He is a man without illusions or despair; he does not forgive and he does not condemn. He gets on with the present, strengthened by the past, and the French are crazy not to make full use of him.
If there is a message, a theme, in the picture, my mind is not sufficiently synoptic to define it. Ophuls is driven y the hunger of a good reporter to master the facts of a most complex event and present them so that we who were not there can read it intelligently. He is neutral, with one proviso: he insists that you acknowledge the importance of the individual, every individual. It is not a matter of praise or blame, but of recognition. That is why The Sorrow and the Pity, whose dark base, after all, is set in suffering and death, is nevertheless a celebration of life.
About the English-language print—I saw the picture first in Paris and said that it could not be done; impossible to subtitle a film that contains thousands of words of conversation, and dubbing would destroy the authenticity. I was wrong. The producers use some titles, but principally they employ the “voice over” technique familiar to anyone who has heard a UN debate on television. However, these voices are chosen tactfully and with the most accurate ear for personality, to accord with the appearance and quality of the person speaking: The “match” is so excellent that you come from the theatre under the impression that by some miracle you suddenly understand the most rapid and colloquial French and German. I cannot estimate what hours of search and rehearsal went into these entirely “natural” graftings; they are a technical achievement worthy of Ophuls’ stupendous work.
The
Sorrow and the Pity - OoCities
28-page film profile (pdf)
On
“The Sorrow and the Pity” | commentary
Stanley Hoffman, September 1, 1972
Personal
Histories, Collective Shame | News | The Harvard Crimson Alan Heppel, October 20, 1972
The
French Occupation and the Jews | News | The Harvard Crimson Jonathan Zeitlin, May 23, 1975
Truth and Consequences
- footenotes Time magazine review by Timothy Foote,
March 27, 1972
Marcel
Ophuls and the Great Big Blank: Montreal International ...
Lesley Chow from The Bright Lights
Film Journal, February 3, 2014
World Socialist Web Site Richard Phillips
The Sorrow and
the Pity Review | CultureVulture Tom Block
Electric Sheep Magazine [Peter Momtchiloff]
The Sorrow
and the Pity | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
The
Anatomy of Memory | Village Voice
Leslie Camhill, May 9, 2000
Le
Chagrin et la Pitie - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Roy Armes from Film Reference
THE SORROW AND THE PITY
(1969) • Frame Rated David Bedwell,
June 26, 2017
Blueprint:
Review [David Brook]
The
Sorrow and the Pity, Part 1 - TCM.com
Felicea Feaster, also an identical article is seen here: The
Sorrow and the Pity, Part 2 - TCM.com
The
Sorrow and the Pity | Film at The Digital Fix Gary Couzens
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
digitallyobsessed - DVD review Dale Dobson
The DVD
Journal: The Sorrow and the Pity
DK Holm
The
Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969) - Blu-ray review by ... Dave Lancaster from Cinemas Online
SBCC Film Reviews » Blog Archive » The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel ... Byron Potau
Review: Le Chagrin et la Pitie by
Marcel Ophuls | Film Quarterly
only first page available, by Michael Silvermanm, Summer 1972
User comments from imdb Author: Steven Rubio from
REVISITING
THE SORROW AND THE PITY: AN INTERVIEW WITH ... Andrew Sobanet interview, May 26, 2005 (pdf)
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
The Sorrow and the Pity | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film Xan Brooks, May 21, 2004
Top
10 documentaries | Film | The Guardian Listed at #5, November 12, 2013
A Look at
'The Sorrow and the Pity' of France in World War II - latimes Donald Liebenson
The
Sorrow and the Pity Movie Review (1972) | Roger Ebert
FILM;
The Long Shadow of 'The Sorrow and the Pity' - The New York ... A.H. Weiler from The New York Times
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Marcel Ophuls's four-and-a-half-hour documentary (1976) uses the Nuremberg trials as a starting point for an investigation of the ideals of justice and the failures of their execution—abstract ideas that Ophuls makes vital through his remarkable montage technique, intercutting newsreel footage and contemporary interviews. Ophuls abandons the usual voice-of-God stance of the documentarian; this is a personal search for meaning, with the author insisting on his own failures of understanding. An intense, demanding experience.
The Memory of
Justice, directed by Marcel Ophüls | Film review Time
Out
An investigation of the impact of the Nuremberg trials on the German conscience, and a study of the implications of the moral and legal principles established there for events like Hiroshima and Vietnam, The Memory of Justice operates by steadily drawing the viewer into a situation that is forever expanding, as new ramifications and contexts are found by Ophüls in the course of his interviews and in the use he makes of library footage. The film is, accordingly, as important for its method of investigation as for the facts it reveals. In contrast to the tight narrative and fixed viewpoint of the run-of-the-mill TV documentary, Ophüls' film is so structured as to force the viewer to involve himself in the arguments presented in the actual process of watching the film, thus transforming a passive viewing into an active reading. (Originally broadcast in two parts, 'Nuremberg and the Germans' and 'Nuremberg and Other Places'.
Festivals:
New York 1976 - Film Comment
James McCourt, November/December 1976
A masterpiece, and a triumph as well, apparently, of guts over treachery in the industry: appropriate happenstance. This film tackles thematic material of familiar enormity which has been routinely, politely, civilly neglected for too long. Encountered and restructured by an artist of such patience and methodical urgency as Marcel Ophuls is, this material—the congruence between the routine institutionalized evil of the last two successive political generations of Western mankind—is now a matter of urgent concern in the public record, and demands to be viewed and reviewed. Sentient persons who avoid the task (of sitting and looking for four saturated hours at pity, terror, valor, despair, outrage, courage, and torment,) are to be counseled. Two moments out of the four hours:
Marie-Claude Vaillany-Couturier, now a French senator, recalling her testimony at Nuremberg, given as a witness-survivor of Auschwitz. The footage of the testimony. The freeze at the moment when, leaving the witness stand, she turns to face the authors of her torment and the torment of those millions she represented. The realization, recalled thirty years later, that they looked like rather ordinary men. (“I really don’t know what I expected.”)
Louise and Robert Ransom, two American parents, recalling their son’s death in Vietnam, and re-creating on camera, in interview, the dawning of their realization that that death was futile and brought no honor.
In each of these moments, as again and again throughout the film, Ophuls shows people becoming actors in the noblest sense. They are playing themselves as instruments, carrying themselves beyond themselves, enlarging momentarily, becoming, without a trace of self-regard, significant. It is because Ophuls is pensive rather than aggressive in his approach, and has edited in the small silences between the great statements, that these actors become all mankind. The tormentors and the tormented, equally attended, are here in the flesh as never before since the furious events depicted occurred.
Festivals:
Il Cinema Ritrovato - Film Comment Genevieve Yue, July 20, 2015
Marcel Ophüls deals with the issue of legacy in ways both personal and political in The Memory of Justice (75), a sprawling four-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Nuremberg Trials, shown in a restored digital version. The film is engrossing, unpredictable and even at times punchy. For his interviews, Ophüls aimed both high and low, balancing footage of several high-profile Nazis that had been on trial, various lawyers, and concentration camp inmates who testified, with man-on-the-street questions as to the whereabouts of the convicted Nazi doctor Herta Oberhauer, and a discussion about the Holocaust among the fleshy patrons of a German sauna. At its best, the film produces a compelling sense of history, establishing a provocative link between WWII and the then-contemporary Vietnam War, two major events not usually conceived alongside each other, despite their historical proximity. The second part stresses this point, which is crystallized in one mind-boggling scene where Telford Taylor, the Chief Council for the US prosecution team at Nuremberg, stands next to Joan Baez in Hanoi, responding to a reporter’s questions about the bombing of a hospital. Through editing, Ophüls stages a number of memorable confrontations: between Taylor and Daniel Ellsberg, between the circumspect parents of a deceased Vietnam deserter and a stridently patriotic widow, between a German mother and her radicalized daughter, the Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld. Most powerful is the pairing of archival footage from the Nuremberg Trials with the account of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a French resistance fighter interned at Auschwitz, who, after testifying, stared down Karl Dönitz, Albert Speer, and Hermann Göring as she walked past them. Despite the graininess of the black-and-white footage, the defiance of the then-young woman is electrifying.
Ambition unfortunately gets the better of Ophüls—there’s simply too much to tell, and the film’s focus loses coherence when it veers into the history of Native American extermination or the Algerian War. Some footage seems included only because Ophüls couldn’t resist a great story, as when we hear the admittedly amazing account by a French deserter about a six-day journey across the desert with an escaped prisoner. As a record of its own time, The Memory of Justice depicts a moment when all historical events seemed alive and connected, and Ophüls himself is right there, bespeckled and balding, eager to document it all. He was, unfortunately, unable to make it to Bologna for the screening. During the film’s introduction, programmer Cecilia Cenciarelli explained that she received a fax from him describing how he had gotten in his car with his dog and begun the drive to Italy. Then another fax came in: it was “too bloody hot” and he had turned around. “Maybe next year,” he said.
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4.5/5]
Marcel Ophuls's THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is a massive, confounding, but transfixing consideration of the definitions (or indefiniteness) of justice and responsibility in the post-Holocaust world.
The film is divided into two parts. "Part One:
Ophuls also interviews leading German figures of the Nazi era,
including Albert Speer and Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. While Doenitz denies
knowledge of atrocities, Speer, when confronted by Ophuls with hs own
statements of the time, coldly acknowledges his complicity. An American
psychologist who tested the defendants (among them Hermann Goering and Rudolf
Hess) is also interviewed. He describes their contempt for the trials and
complete lack of remorse for their actions. In other interviews, German
civilians who lived during the period, express either indifference, denial, or
guilt. An elderly fisherman expresses nostalgia for the era. A concentration
camp survivor who testified at the trials recalls the shock of coming to a
war-ravaged
The first section of "Part Two:
The acceptance of Nazism by Germans is analyzed, viewed as having
resulted from economic devastation and inequitable distribution of wealth. The
importance of anti-Semitism in the rise of the Nazis is also examined, Speer
confirming that he felt there were "problems with Jewish influence"
on
The
Violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who is Jewish and chooses to play in
contemporary
A monumental, frustrating, and often brilliant work, THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is at once a comprehensive historical text and a very personal piece of filmmaking. From the precredit sequence onward, there's no doubting that this exhaustively researched and highly informative documentary is the work of Marcel Ophuls. Coming off the success of THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1971), Ophuls seems to have wanted to go further, to get beyond an examination of how people behave in times of crisis and into an analysis of what is learned from those times. If possible, THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is more ambitious than THE SORROW AND THE PITY, and while it is less trenchant and probably less successful overall, it is no less remarkable an undertaking.
The cinematic equivalent of a thesis, THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE
begins by putting forth the proposition that atrocities such as those committed
under the Third Reich could occur again, in any place, despite the avowals from
"responsible" nations at
Taken collectively, the interviews, as Ophuls has conducted and
arranged them, are the basis of a compelling and reasoned analysis. In working
to verify his hypothesis, Ophuls offers strong evidence that the lessons of
Sometimes, Ophuls makes his points through rich irony. For
example, Hartley Shawcross, who believes steadfastly that
In attempting to cover such vast intellectual terrain, however, Ophuls lets the film go afield at times. Some of the interviews seem superfluous, and have the effect of diluting rather than strengthening Ophuls's speculations. Sections of the film that address events in Vietnam, for example, include commentary from Daniel Ellsberg (of The Pentagon Papers fame) which adds virtually nothing to the intelligent discourse generated from interviews with Taylor, witnesses to American war crimes, and other people whose relevance is clear. The film also loses focus with the inclusion of seemingly extraneous material, such as Joan Baez singing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" in German, or a sequence in which a small group of contemporary Germans--among them Jews--lounge naked inside a sauna. These digressive elements unnecessarily cloud an already very complicated film.
While the density of THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE may prove frustrating, this cannot, given Ophuls's intent, be considered a flaw. Nor can the fact that Ophuls finds no concrete answers to many questions he raises. The film is undeniably ponderous at times, but one can only admire Ophuls for sacrificing facility to intellectual integrity. In seeking to make sense of why terror continues to be inflicted in the name of imposing "principles" (as Taylor terms it), Ophuls has put together a study that is as fascinating as it is challenging. THE MEMORY OF JUSTICE is persuasive as argument, and extraordinary as filmmaking. (Extensive nudity, adult situations.)
The
Memory of Justice | commentary
Marcel Ophüls letter to
the editor, with replies, March 1, 1977
'The
Memory of Justice': An Exchange | by Marcel Ophuls | The New ... Letter
to the Editors of The
The
Holocaust | commentary - Commentary Magazine Claire Huchet-Bishop letter to editor, May 1, 1977
Marcel
Ophüls' Memory of Justice and other documentaries - World ... Hiram
Lee from The World Socialist Web Site,
February 21, 2015
The
four-and-a-half-hour Nazi documentary you can't afford to miss ... Jordan Hoffman from The Times of Israel, April 23, 2017
Two
Prescient Films About the Memory of the Holocaust | The New ... Richard Brody from The New Yorker, April 24, 2017
Some
Came Running: Some scattered and possibly not very useful ... Glenn Kenny, April 20, 2017
The Brooklyn Rail: Steve Macfarlane October 05, 2015
Buy
cinema tickets for The Memory of Justice | 2015 BFI London Film ...
Marcel
Ophüls' war crimes doc 'The Memory of Justice' gets new life ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times, April 13, 2017
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Marcel
Ophuls's 'Memory of Justice,' No Longer Just a Memory - The ... The New York Times, April 21, 2017
HÔTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE
Ophuls' documentary about the Nazi war criminal, expelled from Bolivia and returned to France for trial, is a mass of interview and newsreel spliced and juxtaposed to produce a narrative which is also a moral and historical record which is also a set of questions which can be reduced here to two crunchers: who are you to judge? what would you have done? The film rarely flags, despite copious location shifts and languages and subtitles which run the gamut and the gauntlet. From wartime France to fascist Bolivia, from boyhood admirers to aggrieved business partners and victims of the Nazis' butchery turning almost as much upon each other as their persecutor, the film is as much about selective memory and the vagaries of moral responsibility as a story of one man who affected so many, and who managed to work for not only the SS but also the Allies, the Bolivian arms runners and the romantically conceived Bolivian navy, and return to Lyons at the age of 71 more sprightly and confident than most of the people whose lives he wrecked. Superb.
HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE slowly but surely indicts the international community of complying with WWII criminals. Director Marcel Ophuls uses the charmed existence of the shrewd but sociopathic Nazi Barbie as a focus for his stinging documentary-essay.
During the war, Klaus Barbie became known as the "Butcher of
Lyon" for the cruel and ruthless terror he inflicted upon his victims,
mostly French Jews. During Barbie's belated 1984 trial for war crimes, Ophuls
interviews dozens of people who remember the man and the monster. In
Through interviews with French Resistance leaders, Nazi leaders,
and war historians, Ophuls establishes that Barbie, as head Gestapo agent in
The second half of the film concentrates on Barbie's life in
Following a government coup, Barbie moved from
Like the landmark SORROW AND THE PITY (1970), HOTEL TERMINUS: THE
LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE clearly establishes a pervasive guilt about the
Holocaust. There are "good guys," but they are not the people usually
depicted in the war film genre--e.g., the French Resistance fighters, the
American soldiers and politicians; rather, the "good guys" (like
American agent Erhard Darbringhaus and French Resistance members Lucie and
Raymond Aubrac) are those few who have been willing to speak out against Barbie
and his cohorts. Otherwise, most of the supposed Allies represented here either
barely remember events (like feeble ex-US intelligence officer Benjamin Shute),
or protest Barbie's trial (like Albert Rossett, a slick Jean-Marie Le Pen
"National Front" supporter), or outright apologize for protecting him
through the years (like seedy American agent Eugene Kolb). Even some of the
intellectuals, like
Unlike his approach in THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1972), however, Ophuls places himself much more often into the frame as the interviewer/interrogator, making HOTEL TERMINUS a more personal work. His frustrations with the lies and nonanswers--especially the refrain that the war was "over 40 years ago"--are recorded onscreen, and he even shows his bitter sense of humor, in scenes alone where he mocks his less cooperative interview subjects (interestingly, he also shakes hands with thuggish Barbie aide Alvaro De Castro, forcing one to wonder if he would also shake hands with Barbie, if he had had the chance to interview him). The personal becomes political for Ophuls in his dismaying discovery that Barbie's lawyer, Jacques Verges, an advocate for left-wing causes, was really a sly politician, paid off by an anti-Semitic financier.
If anything, Ophuls perfects the interview and editing techniques of THE SORROW AND THE PITY, while building his case deliberately but forcefully, as was also the case in Claude Lanzmann's SHOAH (1985). (Appropriately, Ophuls interviews Lanzmann, though only briefly.) While Ophuls privileges the victims and eyewitnesses to Barbie's atrocities, he refuses to romanticize their suffering (a la typical Holocaust melodramas), and he neatly reinforces their accounts by crosscutting their poignant and believable testimony with the evasive and hypocritical words of Barbie's apologists. Thus, lively debates occur between individuals who never meet (or would ever want to meet): Lise Lesevre, a torture victim, and one of Barbie's friends, a Peruvian neighbor; the cowardly Sgt. Robert Taylor, who hired Barbie for the CIC, and the heroic Erhard Darbringhaus, who exposed him; Ivo Omrcamin, who helped many a Nazi move to South America, and Elizabeth Holtzman, the US prosecutor of Nazi war criminals; and Francois Hemmerle, a French Resistance turncoat who exploited Jews, and Rene Tavernier, the French poet.
As the film's title suggests, Ophuls is more attuned than ever to dark irony: several of his subjects condone Barbie while sitting in front of Christmas trees (during the Kolb interview, he cuts to the angels on the trees); and just as the phantom image of the elusive and rarely seen Barbie pervades the lengthy film, so does Ophuls's use of a German youth chorus song, which is eerie in its sweetness and light. The rough cinema verite approach (and the occasional "60 Minutes"-style ambush interview) masks a highly sophisticated-- albeit world-weary--understanding of the people and events. Ophuls errs only in not providing the uninitiated viewer with more facts about the war itself before plunging into details about Barbie's involvement. Still, one can only be grateful that Ophuls got what he did on film and presented it in such a profound way. (Adult situations.)
Marcel Ophuls and the Great Big Blank: Montreal International ... Lesley Chow from The Bright Lights Film Journal, February 3, 2014
BFI | Sight & Sound
| DVD: Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of ... Nick James from BFI Sight and Sound, January 2011
reelingback.com [Michael Walsh]
ColeSmithey.com [Cole Smithey]
Battleship
Pretension [Kyle Anderson]
User comments from imdb Author: manuel-pestalozzi from Zurich, Switzerland
User comments from imdb Author: Robert J. Maxwell (rmax304823@yahoo.com) from Deming, New Mexico
The Tech (MIT) [Manavendra K. Thakur]
eFilmCritic Reviews Teen Movie Critic
Infernal Cinema [James Simpson]
Documentary Starts Here: Marcel Ophüls
CineScene.com [Chris Dashiell] (capsule review)
Deseret News, Salt Lake City [Chris Hicks]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Siskel & Ebert (video)
New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby, also seen here: New York Times
"Marcel Ophuls on Barbie: Reopening Wounds of War" James M. Markham from The New York Times, October 2, 1988
THE TROUBLES WE’VE SEEN: A HISTORY OF JOURNALISM IN WARTIME (Veillées d'armes)
'The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime ... Nathan Lee from The Village Voice, November 7, 2006
The perilous symbiosis of war and the media undergoes merciless scrutiny in The Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime.As penetrating as it is far-ranging, this documentary astonishment by the legendary Marcel Ophüls ( The Sorrow and the Pity, Hôtel Terminus) surveys the Bosnian war through the lens of the international press corp. Christiane Amanpour of CNN, John Burns of The New York Times, famed war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and dozens of others provide grist for the ethical mill, while Ophüls provides the omnivorous intelligence required to sustain nearly four hours of riveting inquiry. Original footage is poised against film clips ( Only Angels Have Wings, Papa's Lola Montés) selected for maximum irony and structural dynamism. Screening five times this week at Anthology Film Archives, Veillées d'armes, as it's known in original French, will be available spring 2007 as a less butt-busting experience on DVD through Milestone Films.
by Jerry White The Troubles We’ve Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime, from Cinema Scope
None of Marcel Ophuls’ films have ever been very easy to see, but for many
years The Troubles We’ve Seen (1994) has had a special mystique. To my
knowledge it played only twice in
There is a moment in Troubles—which is ostensibly about the coverage of the
war in
Indeed, while Troubles is more or less about
Furthermore, this film is very much about the idea of
The film’s other “star” is Alain Finkielkraut, a philosopher who, like
Ophuls, has been a thorny presence in French intellectual life. He’s written
extensively about the war in the former
We get a good sense of this in his L’ingratitude: Conversation sur notre
temps (1996), a book-length interview with Québécois journalist Antoine
Robitaille, where Finkielkraut challenges an overly romantic vision of Sarajevo
as a symbol of cosmopolitan Europe under siege by a dying nationalism; he
writes that “An authentically plural city, a vertiginous tangle of confessions,
calendars, ceremonies and architectures, that doesn’t mean that Sarajevo was
ever constituted as the little New-Yorkish approximation run aground in the
Balkans, that some, emotionally, wanted to discover.” This aligns nicely with
his critique of sentimental multiculturalism in 1987’s La défaite de la pensée
(available in English as The Defeat of the Mind). Frustrated by the
tone-deafness of both romantic (as in through-rose-coloured-glasses-viewing)
advocates and Romantic (as in dirt-worshipping, Wagner-apologizing, non-Christian-disliking
reactionary) opponents of multiculturalism, Finkielkraut wrote that “the two
camps profess the same relativism. The credos are opposed, but not the visions
of the world: both perceive cultures as enveloping totalities, and give the last
word to their multiplicity.” Finkielkraut has contrasted the notion of an
ethnic state—which he sees as a German invention—with the French idea of a
political state. In L’Ingratitude he writes that “France, in short, gave
to the world a definition of the nation that was political, and not cultural”;
in La défaite de la pensée he writes that “In the century of nationalisms,
France—and was its merit and its originality—refused the racializing of the
spirit,” which he contrasts to “la bêtise haineuse du Volksgeist,” or, to
channel George Burns via Bart Simpson, the hideous bitch-goddess of the
“national spirit.” Finkielkraut still believes in the viability of culture
as a category (he’s proud of
Finkielkraut wants culture to make demands instead of offering easy comfort,
and this, of course, is the vision of
VERTIGO | The Troubles We've Seen - Close-Up Film Centre James Leahy, Winter 1994
THE TROUBLES WE'VE SEEN: A HISTORY OF JOURNALISM IN ... Eric Monder from Film Journal
Veillées
d'armes (The Troubles We've Seen) | Courtisane
The
Troubles We've Seen: A History of Journalism in Wartime | Variety Lisa Nesselson
Ophüls, Max
The Films of Max Ophuls Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and
Television
Max Ophuls directed films in
Here is a checklist of features that occur in many of Ophuls' films:
- Elaborate
camera movement, often lateral.
- Back and
forth camera movements along a path.
- Staircases.
- Sets on
multiple levels.
- Episodic
and sectional construction of stories.
- Avant-garde
narrative techniques.
- Love
stories.
- Sophisticated
subject matter.
- Fallen
women.
- Men who buy
women's sexual favors.
- Historical
recreations of continental eras and societies.
- Entertainment
spectacles: fairs, circuses, merry-go-rounds, the carriage ride with
unrolling pictures in Letter From an Unknown Woman.
- Scenes at
opera houses.
- Dance
scenes.
- The
presence of tradesmen and servants as supporting players in camera movements.
- A playful
quality.
- Complex
direction of actors, expressing nuances of character and romantic feeling.
- Irony.
- Persistent,
symbolic objects.
Naturally, these do not all occur in every Ophuls film.
Film
Reference Robin Wood
Max Ophüls' work falls
neatly into three periods, marked by geographical locations and diverse
production conditions, yet linked by common thematic concerns and
stylistic/formal procedures: the pre-Second World War European period (during
which he made films in four countries and four languages); the four Hollywood
films of the late 1940s (to which one might add the remarkable Howard
Hughes-produced Vendetta , on which he worked extensively in its early
preproduction phases and which bears many identifiable Ophülsian traces, both
thematic and stylistic); and the four films made in France in the 1950s. It is
these 1950s films on which Ophüls' current reputation chiefly rests, and in
which certain stylistic traits (notably the long take with elaborately mobile
camera) are carried to their logical culmination.
Critical estimation of
Ophüls soared during the late twentieth century; prior to that, the prevailing
attitude was disparaging (or at best condescending), and the reasons for this
now seem highly significant, reflecting far more on the limitations of the
critics than of the films. The general consensus was that Ophüls' work had
distinctive qualities (indeed, this would be difficult to deny), but was overly
preoccupied with "style" (regarded as a kind of spurious, slightly
decadent ornamentation) and given over to trivial or frivolous subjects quite
alien to the "social" concerns considered to characterize
"serious" cinema. In those days, the oppression of women within the
patriarchal order was not identified as a "social concern"—especially
within the overwhelmingly male-dominated field of film criticism. Two
developments have contributed to the revaluation of Ophüls: the growth of auteur
criticism in the 1960s and of feminist awareness, and I shall consider his
work in relation to these phenomena.
1. Ophüls and
auteurism. One of the first aims of auteur criticism was to dethrone the
"subject" as the prime guarantee of a film's quality, in favor of
style, mise-en-scène , the discernible presence of a defined directorial
"voice": in Andrew Sarris's terms, the "how" was given
supremacy over the "what." "Subject," in fact, was
effectively redefined as what the auteur's mise-en-scène created. Ophüls was a
perfect rallying-point for such a reformulation of critical theory. For a
start, he offered one of the most highly developed and unmistakable styles in
world cinema, consistent through all changes of time and place (though
inevitably modified in the last two Hollywood melodramas, Caught and The
Reckless Moment ). Ophüls' works were marked by elaborate
tracking-and-craning camera movements, ornate décor, the glitter of glass and
mirrors, objects intervening in the foreground of the image between characters
and camera. His style can be read in itself as implying a meaning, a metaphysic
of entrapment in movement, time, and destiny. Further, this style could be seen
as developing, steadily gaining in assurance and definition, through the
various changes in cultural background and circumstances of production—from,
say, Liebelei through Letter from an Unknown Woman to Madame
de . . . Ophüls could be claimed (with partial justice) as a major creative
artist whose personal vision transcended the most extreme changes of time and
place.
The stylistic
consistency was underlined by an equally striking thematic consistency. For
example, the same three films mentioned above, though adapted from works by
fairly reputable literary figures (respectively, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan
Zweig, and Louise de Vilmorin), all reveal strong affinities in
narrative/thematic structure: all are centered on romantic love, which is at
once celebrated and regarded with a certain irony. Similarly, all three works
move towards a climactic duel in which the male lover is destroyed by an
avenging patriarch, an offended husband. All three films also feature
patriarchal authority embodied in military figures. Finally, style and theme
were perceived as bound together by a complicated set of visual motifs recurring
from period to period. The eponymous protagonist of Ophüls' last film, Lola
Montès , declares "For me, life is movement"; throughout his
work, key scenes take place in vehicles of travel and places of transition
(carriages, trains, staircases, and railway stations figure prominently in many
of the films). Even a superficially atypical work like The Reckless Moment (set
in modern California rather than the preferred "Vienna, 1900" or its
equivalent) contains crucial scenes on the staircase, in moving cars, on a
ferry, at a bus station. Above all, the dance was recognized as a central
Ophülsian motif, acquiring complex significance from film to film. The
romantic/ironic waltz scene in Letter from an Unknown Woman , the fluid
yet circumscribed dances of Madame de . . . , the hectic and
claustrophobic palais de danse of Le Plaisir , the constricted
modern dance floor of Caught , and the moment in De Mayerling à
Sarajevo where the lovers are prevented from attending the ball: all
of the above scens are reminders that "life is movement" is not the
simple proposition it may at first appear.
There is no doubt that
the development of auteur theory enormously encouraged and extended the
appreciation of Ophüls' work. In its pure form (the celebration of the individual
artist), however, auteurism tends towards a dangerous imbalance in the
evaluation of specific films: a tendency, for example, to prefer the
"typical" but slight La Ronde (perhaps the film that most
nearly corresponds to the "primitive" account of Ophüls) to a
masterpiece like The Reckless Moment , in which Ophüls' engagement with
the structural and thematic materials of the Hollywood melodrama results in an
amazingly rich and radical investigation of ideological assumptions.
2. Ophüls and
Feminism. Nearly all of Ophüls' films are centered on a female
consciousness. Before the 1960s this tended merely to confirm the diagnosis of
them as decorative, sentimental, and essentially frivolous: the social concerns
with which "serious" cinema should be engaged were those which could
be resolved within the patriarchal order, and more fundamental social concerns
that threatened to undermine the order itself simply could not be recognized.
The films belong, of course, to a period long before the eruption of what we
now know as radical feminism; they do not (and could not be expected to)
explicitly engage with a feminist politics, and they are certainly not free of
a tendency to mythologize women. In retrospect, however, from the standpoint of
the feminist theory and consciousness that evolved in the 1970s, they assume a
quite extraordinary significance: an incomparably comprehensive, sensitive, and
perceptive analysis of the position of women (subject to oppression) within
patriarchal society. The films repeatedly present and examine the options
traditionally available to women within our culture—marriage, prostitution (in
both the literal and the looser sense), romantic love—and the relationship
between those options. Letter from an Unknown Woman , for example, dramatizes
marriage (Lisa's to von Stauffer, her mother's to the "military
tailor") and prostitution ("modelling") as opposite cultural
poles, then goes on to show that they really amount to the same thing: in both
cases, the women are selling themselves (this opposition/parallel is
brilliantly developed through the three episodes of Le Plaisir ).
Essentially, Letter from an Unknown Woman is an enquiry into the
validity of romantic love as the only possible means of transcending this
illusory dichotomy. Clearly, Ophüls is emotionally committed to Lisa and her
vision; the extraordinry complexity and intelligence of the film lies in its
simultaneous acknowledgement that romantic love can only exist as narcissistic
fantasy and is ultimately both destructive and self-destructive.
Far from being
incompatible, the auteurist and feminist approaches to Ophüls demand to be
synthesized. The identification with a female consciousness and the female
predicament is the supreme characteristic of the Ophülsian thematic; at the
same time, the Ophüls style—the commitment to grace, beauty,
sensitivity—amounts to a celebration of what our culture defines as
"femininity," combined with the force of authority, the drive, the
organizational (directorial) abilities construed as masculine. In short, the
supreme achievement of Ophüls' work is its concrete and convincing embodiment
of the collapsibility of our culture's barriers of sexual difference.
Max Ophüls biography from Turner Classic Movies
Plaisir d'amour - The Films of Max Ophuls - Harvard Film Archive biography by Laura Mulvey and retrospective film comments
Max Ophüls > Overview - AllMovie biography
Max Ophüls Biography Hal Erickson from All Movie Guide
Max Ophüls - filmportal.de biography
Max Ophuls from Lola Montes - at Film.com biography
MAX
OPHULS biography
and film comments from Film Forum (pdf)
Max Ophüls NNDB
bio page
Max Ophls - MSN Encarta bio page
Madman Entertainment biography
Max Ophuls The Auteurs
Max Ophüls - Director by Film Rank 9 most notable films
Truffaut’s homage to Ophüls and Lola in Shoot the Piano Player Lola Montès tribute from Film Forum on YouTube video
Excerpt from 1955 essay on Lola Montès François Truffaut 1955 essay, from Film Forum (pdf format)
Letter from Max Ophuls to Francois Truffaut
Bright
Lights Film Journal Fifteen Years of French Cinema by André Bazin, initially a lecture in
Warsaw,
Trapped
in a Tomb of Their Own Making: Max Ophuls's the Reckless ... Trapped in a Tomb of Their Own Making: Max Ophüls's The Reckless Moment
and Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow, by Amy Lawrence
from Film Criticism, 1999 (excerpt)
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Boston
Phoenix Article (2000) Movies to the Max: Nine Films by Max Ophüls,
by Chris Fujiwara from The Boston
Phoenix, February 24 –
Inside
Out Film Article Max Who? Nic
O offers reasons why an Ophüls retrospective is overdue, by Nicola Osbourne (2000), also seen here: Eye For Film: Max Who? -
"Max
Ophuls: A New Art -- But Who Notices?" Tag Gallagher from Senses of Cinema (2002)
max
ophuls - filmmaker profile at videovista.net Max Ophüls: Bitter & Sweet, by Gary
Couzens from Video
Master of
Ceremonies : The New Yorker The Films of Max Ophüls, by
Max
Ophuls's Adaptation to and Subversion of Classical Hollywood ... Max
Ophuls's Adaptation to and Subversion of Classical Hollywood Cinema and Their
Effect on his European Filmmaking, by Lutz Bacher
from Fipresci (2006, originally
published in 2003)
“… Only Superficially
Superficial”: The Tragedy of ... - Senses of Cinema Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, March 21, 2003
Ophuls
Conducting: Music and Musicality in Letter ... - Senses of Cinema Alexander Dhoest from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2003
Rushdie's Receding Talent Lee Siegel references Ophüls in Shalimar the Clown from The Nation, September 15, 2005
Max Ophuls: A
New Art – But Who Notices? • Senses of Cinema Tad Gallagher, October 4, 2002
Salman
Rushdie : The Enchantress of Florence : Shalimar the Clown ... Mary Whipple from Mostly Fiction,
Liebelei
• Senses of Cinema Jesús Cortés from Senses of Cinema, March 2006
The Exile • Senses of Cinema Robert Keser from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
Letter from an Unknown Woman • Senses of Cinema Carla Marcantonio from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
Lola Montès • Senses of
Cinema Rodney Hill from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
"Max
Ophuls's Adaptation to and Subversion of Classical Hollywood Cinema and Their
Effect on his European Filmmaking"
Lutz Bacher from Fipresci, November 2006
Max Ophüls, The
Earrings of Madame de... - Film - New York Times Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
The Greatest
Film of All Time: Ophüls’ Madame de … Is Coming Back to Town Andrew Sarris from The NY Observer,
Andrew Sarris & Lola Montès: A Brief History Film Forum, where Sarris also claims Lola Montès is the greatest film of all time (pdf)
The Earrings of Madame de . . . :The Cost of Living Criterion essay claiming greatest film of all time by Molly Haskell, wife of Andrew Sarris
The Ophuls
Maneuver: The Earrings of Madame De... :: Stop Smiling ... James Hughes from Stop Smiling magazine,
Max Ophuls: Motion
and Emotion - BAM/PFA - Film Programs
Ophüls Retrospective,
July 20 –
Moving Pictures: the European Films of Max Ophuls Ophüls Retrospective, September – December, 2007
Cinematheque Ontario - Programmes - THE PLEASURE OF SEEING: THE ... The Pleasure of Seeing: The Sublime Cinema of Max Ophüls, including 19 film reviews, October 19 – December 9, 2007
Eye
Weekly [Jason Anderson] Maximum Ophuls, by Jason Anderson from Eye Weekly,
From the Cheap Seats… » Showing Soon; The Best of The Rest… John Hodson, July 17, 2008
Why you should watch Max Ophuls this weekend. - By Dana Stevens ... Dana Stevens from Slate, September 19, 2008
Heart-Shaped World: “The Earrings of Madame de…” Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, September 20, 2008
Ophüls Proves Prophet With Prodigious <i>Lola Montès</i> | The New ... Andrew Sarris from The NY Observer, October 7, 2008
Los Angeles Film+TV - Lola Montes: Revered and Reviled, Max Ophuls ... J. Hoberman from LA Weekly, October 8, 2008
Michael Wood
reviews Max Ophuls · LRB 9 October 2008
Michael Wood from The
La Ronde, Le Plaisir and Earrings of Madame de... :: Movies ... Andy Beta from Paste magazine, October 10, 2008
The man who made the camera move - The Boston Globe Mark Feeney from The Boston Globe, October 19, 2008
Carousels, Circuses And Cathedrals: The Film Art of Max Ophuls Kathleen Murphy from Parallax View, October 19, 2008
projectfilmschool.org » 2008 » October October 27, 2008
The Phoenix > Features > Max Ophüls at the Harvard Film Archive Steve Vineberg from The Boston Phoenix, January 20, 2009
The Films of Max Ophüls series - AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural ... February 1 – March 5, 2009
The Reckless Moment: Max Ophuls’ Masterpiece of Middle Class America Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, September 28, 2009
Max Ophuls Meets Nietzsche: Ophuls' Philosophical Interest in ... Grace Troje from Suite 101, October 5, 2009
Max Ophuls' Femme Fatales: Dangerous Beautiful Women and Their ... Grace Troje from Suite 101, October 6, 2009
Guest: Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert - "Ophüls: Thoughts on Filmmaking ... interview with Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert, grandson of Marcel Ophüls, and great grandson of Max Ophüls, from LA Ciné Salon, March 15, 2015
Ophüls, Max They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Sarah Palin is the New Lola Montes: A Conversation with Andrew Sarris Nathan Lee interview on WNYC, September 30, 2008, also heard here: released at Film Forum
Links for the Day (October 1st, 2008) The House Next Door
Irene Bignardi's 5 Best Directors
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
100 FILMS - [Cahiers du cinéma]
The Cinematheque - 1000 Greatest Films Quest
Max Ophüls - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Max Ophüls - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE COMPANY’S IN LOVE (Die verliebte Firma)
User comments from imdb Author: stoni100 (dagmar.michael@t-online.de)
from
The first long-playing movie of Max Ophüls has not enough singing to be
really an operetta, but both songs "Ich wär so gern richtig verliebt"
and "Ist dein Herz noch ledig, schick es nach Vendig" are reprised
several times. So sometime it looks like an operetta.
For sound track hunters (like me) there wasn´t any real loot, because all
singing parts were very short and noisy.
An interesting scene was in a ´wave bath´, because I did not know that this
kind of bath was already existing in 1932. (excuse my school-english)
THE BARTERED BRIDE (Die verkaufte Braut)
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Only his second film, THE BARTERED BRIDE confirmed Ophuls as an visual artist to be reckoned with. BRIDE is set in a Bohemian village, in the mid-1800s, where Marie (Jarmila Novotna) is "bartered" off in marriage to pay her parents' debts. Hans, the man she really loves (Willy Domgraf-Fassbaender), promises the marriage broker not to interfere with the wedding in return for some gelt--but the story takes a happy turn into the world of the circus in the end. In this Ophulsian musical--featuring spoken dialogue interspersed with songs from Smetana's opera--money makes the world go round...not necessarily to the detriment of true love.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Smetana comic opera, with all its expansive earthiness played
like a piccolo for the earliest traces of Max Ophüls' rhapsodic lilt. The Czech
village of the libretto is erected around
LIEBELEI (Flirtation)
'What is eternity?' a
young girl asks her soldier lover. What indeed? As in Ophüls' Lola Montès,
La Ronde and Madame de... this early German melodrama - which treats
the passionate, whirlwind love affair between a young lieutenant and a shy
sensitive fräulein - acknowledges both the liberating joy of love and its sad
transience. For humans are never entirely free of their past, and young Fritz
has a skeleton in his closet that makes a mockery of the pair's vows of undying
love. Most similar to Madame de..., the film may be a little slow and
ragged at times, but its final emotional power is undeniably immense.
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
In turn-of-the-century
User comments from imdb Author: zolaaar from
The camera of Franz Planer follows the protagonists in long tracking shots,
observes precisely the development of an affection and later deep love between
Fritz (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) and Christine (Magda Schneider) during the nightly
walk through the sleeping city and their endless swings of waltzing through the
empty coffee bar. It is also great how Ophüls exemplarily trusts in the
viewer's imagination to make things visible. The couple has forgotten the world
around them, being only close together, overwhelmed by the feelings, which
suddenly arise in them. The slow waltz resembles a soft hug, but the melancholy
in this dance is perceptible and especially Fritz, who has a secret tête-à-tête
with a bored baroness, seems to fear, that the love for Christine might not
have a happy ending.
And last but not least some words about Gustaf Gründgens who plays the cheated
baron: In the scenes, he is acting mainly only with looks, with stringent,
frigid looks, that whoosh across the room like bullets. The precision of his
performance is masterful and probably the best in this film.
LIEBELEI (Max Ophüls, 1932) « Dennis Grunes
From a play by Arthur
Schnitzler, Max Ophüls’s Liebelei was released in Germany in 1933, about
a month after Hitler became chancellor, without the director’s or playwright’s
name in the credits. Both men were Jewish. (Schnitzler had died the previous
year.) By this time, Ophüls had fled to France. After the war, the Allies
banned Liebelei, which is anti-militaristic and whose heroine commits
suicide after the boy she loves, a young army lieutenant named Wolfgang, is
killed in a duel.
Like Letter from an
Unknown Woman (1948), Liebelei takes place in Vienna at the turn of
the century; and, like that later Ophüls film, it enmeshes a vulnerable girl’s
aching love in the web of the time’s militaristic code of honor. The delay of
Christine’s appearance in Liebelei reflects her insignificance in the
male- and military-minded scheme of things. By contrast, she matters most to us
because of Ophüls’s own feelings toward her and the poignancy of her enactment
by Magda Schneider, Romy’s mother.
Structurally,
Wolfgang’s military drills and related military obligations literally interrupt
the course of his deepening romance with Christine. As a result, their
encounters—their walk together at night, their dance, their sleigh ride—seem
like stolen moments. Yet these are the most important moments of their lives
and of their briefly shared life. (We see their dance trebly: directly; in a
mirror; as wall shadows. We also see the boy dance with his mistress, whose
husband will kill him when he no longer has any romantic connection to the
man’s wife.)
Christine’s death,
rendered by an expressive camera movement, remains one of the most
heartbreaking moments in cinema.
User comments from imdb Author: jan onderwater from
Some films cannot be sufficiently qualified by superlatives, and this
superb, tranquil, poetic masterpiece is one of them. This film is not just to
be watched and enjoyed, but to be felt with all the senses.
Without ever becoming sentimental it tells a very moving love story, but there
is a deeper meaning in it (of course already conceived by Arthur Schitzler). We
see an artificial
This "misplaced honour" is shown through various male characters, but
the most devilish of them is Gustaf Gründgens (absolutely brilliant): was there
ever a cigarette smoked as by Gründgens, concentrating all his anger and hate
in his smoking. And here we have only one example of Ophüls' idea of letting
the image speak, not by dialogue alone (sometimes unintelligible, but this is
on purpose!), but by body and camera movement, lightning, editing, sets, the
meaning of a scene is told.
This film is superb on all levels, but this is not the place to analyze further
(and there are people who are much more capable to do that than I am). I just
want to refer to the final sequence (starting with Beethoven's 5th): see how
Ophüls, just by perfectly arranging Ullrich, Eichberger and Hörbiger opposite
Schneider, gets an image that shows emotional desolation: the party is over,
life is over (one must have seen the film to understand this remark). This
culminates in the long, extreme close up of Magda Schneider realizing and
trying to come to terms with what has happened; one must have a heart of stone
not to get tears into one's eyes or at least a lump in the throat, when seeing
this scene. This scene was her moment of triumph; was she ever again as
outstanding as in this scene?
Liebelei premiered after the Nazi take-over; it was banned, then - by popular
demand - quickly showing was allowed again but only after the names of the
Jewish contributors were removed. It amazes to know that in 1945 it was banned
by the Allies.
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A-]
I was initially worried after seeing La Signora di tutti
(Italy, 1934) that Ophüls’ earlier films would be as unconvincing as that was,
all incredibly inspired camerawork and staging, but all sadly foiled by
inadequate acting and a storytelling not up to the level of sophistication as
the director’s mysterious flashback structures. Thankfully Liebelei, the
director’s German film of 1933, is almost up to the level of Ophüls’ acclaimed
post-Hollywood films, a film intoxicated by romance and by its loss, rendered
with an enamored lilt and a refined sadness.
A philandering lieutenant (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) in—where else?—1900 Vienna,
already garnering a reputation of unsavory sexual liaisons in the barracks,
decides to forgo adultery after meeting a young, innocent girl (Magda
Schneider). Ophüls devilishly directs their pseudo-first date, the lieutenant
walking the girl home after his buddy and her friend obviously head off to
spend an evening together, as a silent and self-absorbed walk home in the snow,
with little crackle and chemistry between the two. Yet they are smitten, and
soon reveal their love to each other, especially during a glorious sleigh ride
through a landscape positively bowed under a dense blanket of snow—miraculously
shot on location and not faked by this director who so loves artifice in the
drama! Yet such idylls are not meant to last in the work of this most fateful
of directors, and the offended husband of the lieutenant’s early conquest
figures out what’s going on right as the young officer is calling off that
flimsy relationship for something more pure. As is the custom, a duel is
demanded, and the outlook for the couple dims in the last act as death may keep
each lover apart from the other.
Liebelei generally forgoes the overly elaborate camerawork and shocking
long takes of La Signorra di tutti, but exchanges them for a grander mise-en-scène,
a film-world more in touch with emotional assuredness and expression.
Stylistically, Ophüls does this through very slow dollies into key scenes
(almost as slow as that famous near-final shot in Antonioni’s The Passenger!)
and keeping certain information off-screen, most notably that fateful duel
between the lieutenant and his offended Baron, and most devastatingly during
the admission of a lover’s death. At this climax the camera hangs onto the
reaction of the survivor with a sublime empathy and dedication, as she hears
and responds to the news delivered off-camera. A multitude of other sophistications
are to be found in the film (certainly noteworthy and unusual, the carryover of
real classical music, here Beethoven, from a scene where it is diegetic, being
played by a symphony on-camera, to overlaying the drama of the following scenes
as soundtrack music), but enumerating them probably won’t express the film’s
lovingly insular, fated romantic atmosphere. Gustaf Gründgens, in a mostly
silent role as the justly angry Baron is particularly spectacular; a quote from
an IMDb reviewer is too good to not end this post on: “he is acting mainly only
with looks, with stringent, frigid looks, that whoosh across the room like
bullets.” Indeed, and Schneider’s looks of love, ones so potent that they can
only foreshadow the dedication of such a pure lover, foreshadow actions that,
like in a Frank Borzage film, will hopefully unite lovers wrested apart by the
outside world.
Liebelei • Senses of Cinema Jesús Cortés from Senses of Cinema, March 2006
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LAUGHING HEIRS (Lachende Erben)
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A comedy of errors in which a young man must seemingly sin to find salvation, his greatest happiness and profit. Peter Frank can inherit his winemaker uncle's estate only if he refrains from drinking for a whole month...and finds a way to end longterm competion with another company. A series of accidents and surprise twists bring Peter and the lovely Gina together, and in order to prove his selfless affection, the prospective heir imbibes the forbidden wine. But, as is often true in Ophuls' world, breaking socio-economic rules may not mark the end of the world--but rather the winning of a new one.
User comments from imdb Author: jan onderwater from
To Max Ophüls this was an assignment (from the
Having Ophüls in mind the film can also be considered a celebration of
happy-go-lucky life: contrasted are those who live an easy going, wine and dine
life with those whose narrow-minded life is based on punctuality and mineral
water. Maybe that is why the film was banned in 1937: it was considered a film
that could endanger public order and national-socialist feelings.
Good cast with Heinz Rühmann who shows his natural comic talent at best and Max
Adalbert who is very good as the grumpy uncle; supporting cast good as well.
Chauvinism makes me want to point out Lien Deyers (as Gina), a fine, charming
and attractive actress from The Netherlands who had a successful career in
German cinema.
The New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review
Lien Deyers, the charming Dutch screen actress favorably known by patrons of German-language films here, is the animated centre of attraction in "Lachende Erben" ("Laughing Heirs"), a highly entertaining comedy now at the Seventy-ninth Street Theatre.
As the action of this picture is concerned with the fate of the
estate of a famous wine grower in the
The actors are all excellent, the photography and sound
reproduction are clear, the music and jokes are pleasing and the views of the
broadcastellan: Beyond M: Max Ophüls's Lachende Erben (1933) Harry Heuser
EVERYBODY’S WOMAN (La Signora di Tutti)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Ophuls' only Italian film, in which once again his subject is female sexuality - as a 'danger' or threat, as a source of beauty, as a marketable commodity. The film star Gaby Doriot (Miranda) attempts suicide, and under anaesthetic she recalls the events that shaped her life. Commerce, industry and high finance are viewed with sharp irony throughout, but the melodrama centres on a seductive ambiguity: is Gaby a victim of those around her, or their willing accomplice? As ever, Ophuls' highly mobile camera shows rather than tells, emotionally sensitising all it lights upon.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Max Ophuls made this
melodrama in Italy in 1934, following his flight from Germany. With its
large-scale, operatic effects and aggressively experimental style, it is
clearly a young man's film, yet contains more of the mature Ophuls than any
early work of his I have seen: the elaborate flashback structure employed to
tell this tale of a movie star's romantic entanglements anticipates Lola
Montes, and the cold, static beauty of lead actress Isa Miranda suggests
the sublime emptiness of Danielle Darrieux' Madame de. Ophuls's camera
glides and glides, as it always would, yet at this early point the camera
movements don't have quite the emotional refinement they would acquire later
on. Technique, in Ophuls's case, seems to precede specific meaning, but the
emotional outlines are clear.
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Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
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Adapted from a then-popular novel by Salvatore Gotta, LA SIGNORA
DI TUTTI (EVERYBODY'S LADY) weaves--as Andrew Sarris notes, by means of
"intricate flashbacks and symbolic ellipses"--the eventful lifestory
of movie star Gaby Doriot (Isa Miranda), triumphant as a performer, personally
despairing. Triggered by a suicide attempt and subsequent emergency treatment,
we are propelled into the actress' past history / memory to re-experience with
her the (almost musical) patterns of narcissism, love and heartbreak that have
brought her to the present sad state of affairs. LA SIGNORA, says Sarris,
"rises to the heights of tragic self-realization so typical of the
greatest Ophulsian heroines; and Miranda's Gaby Doriot is indeed one of the
greatest of these tragic creatures." It certainly prefigures--in form and
content--Ophuls' masterpiece LOLA MONTÈS.
Eye for
Film (Nicola Osborne) review [2.5/5]
Truly an extended exercise in soap opera, La Signora Di Tutti tells the tale of Gaby, the daughter of a military man who has lived a life of scandal before becoming a successful movie actress. Her life story is told through flashback as she undergoes medical treatment for a suicide attempt that has taken place before her big comeback tour.
Typically, Ophuls is very visual, with the early medical scenes taking on an almost sci-fi feel, however, the film quality and camera work show their age and the clever touches Ophuls brings to his later work barely feature, though he uses as many novelty cutting techniques as he can (fading in and out of shots is a particular favourite of his here).
The story is true hokum... our poor heroine finds that men simply keep falling in love with her, with destructive consequences.
The main portion of the film is dedicated to showing how each member of a family falls for her starting with the intoxication of the son, but gradually affecting both his mother and father as well. Yup... it's all very torrid stuff with Isa Miranda looking beautiful, slightly bewildered and not a little dangerous in the lead role.
Not the greatest of the director's work this is one for romantics and fans of tragic love affairs.
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]
La Signora di tutti (1934), a film Max Ophüls made in
Strangely enough, it is not Ophüls’ extreme stylization that has this awkward
result. It is a marvel to see this early Ophüls and realize his audacious
camerawork and ornate set design was already apparent in 1934! His techniques
here includes but are not limited to: long takes, long tracking shots,
single-take sequences, 360-degree camera panning, shot/reverse-shot cutting
through dissolves, triple cross fades (a shot dissolving into a second which
dissolves into a third, meaning three separate moving images overlapping at the
same time), and, perhaps most impressively, a shot/reverse-shot conversation
that takes place between a man driving a moving car and Gaby rowing a moving
boat! Ophüls really gives precedence to the ability of the camera; to first and
foremost let it, through movement, express impressionistically a kind of
combination of emotion and subjectivity. It is this latter quality that is
perhaps most important, as Gaby, like Joan Fontaine’s character in Letter to an
Unknown Woman may be qualified not only as a bit mad but also more than a
little responsible for her own elaborate downfall, and therefore the moving
camera helps explain a psychology that the drama does not.
And this drama does not. Rarely have I seen a film that feels so much contempt
for linking things together, linking in terms of everything ranging from how
one scene or event leads into the next to how one character changes from shot
to shot. Isa Miranda, as the ill-fated heroine who seems to attract scandal
like a magnet, and who also delivers one of the most supremely mediocre
on-screen performances I have ever seen, seems to simply be fed lines culled
from whatever dime-store romance was laying around the set that day. The movie
literally goes from a scene where she denies a kiss to the old husband of the
infirmed rich woman Gaby has befriended and been taken in by, to admitting
(with no between scene or transition of mind or emotion) that she loves and
desires to run away with him! The whole film is built on sudden, unexplained
changes like this. And as interesting as it is to have a questionably
intelligent/sane narrator combined with a curious framing device (flashback
while under the knife!), neither the actress nor the script nor even the
direction is strong enough to use these discrepancies or point them somewhere,
as Ophüls so successfully does in later films.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
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DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
DIVINE
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Colette collaborated on DIVINE's script, in which a country girl
(Simone Berriau) finds work as a chorus girl in
An
uncharacteristically flawed film from La Ronde maestro Max Ophüls. A naïve
country girl takes centre stage in a seedy theatre in Paris, only to be
horrified by the sexual demands put on her. While her unwitting involvement in
the cast's drug dealing never rings true, her romance with a milkman convinces
and brings some much-needed humour and pace into the somewhat directionless
plot. Overall Ophüls seems too entranced by his seedy settings to pay his
usually close attention to the plot. The surprise ending will shock fans of his
work, and while it may be initially gratifying, on reflection it just adds to
the overall disappointment.
iofilm
review Lee
WITH just two prints still in existence this is a rarely seen early work of Ophuls. It's a forgettable look at a woman out of synch with the world around her.
Simone Berriau is the simple country girl who is encouraged to go
to
It has none of the stunning images of La Signora di Tutti (made a year earlier) to help lift it from the realms of cheap melodrama. The screenplay, written by French author Colette, contains some surprising subjects for the time but still the whole thing seems very jaded.
VALSE BRILLIANTE DE CHOPIN
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
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Ophuls echoed his compositions of pianist Alexander Brailowsky in this performance short whenever Stefan (Louis Jourdan) played piano in LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN a decade later.
THE TENDER ENEMY (La tendre ennemie)
Antoine's source play
was called The Enemy, but the tenderness is all Ophuls'. Three ghosts
who were put in their graves by their 'enemy' (Berriau) foregather at the
wedding of her daughter - to reminisce and to see that history doesn't repeat
itself. This is quintessential Ophuls: catastrophes of the affections viewed
warmly, ironically and non-judgmentally; the preoccupation with time; the speed
and fluency of the storytelling. Small-scale (by Ophuls' standards) perfection.
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
This rarely seen comic fantasy is set in Ophulsian motion by a mother's thwarting of her daughter's elopement with the man she loves. The girl (Simone Berriau) is then buried in a marriage made for financial security. When her daughter (Jacqueline Daix) grows up, it looks as though she will be the third generation to opt for money over love. But the spirits of three men who died--in one way or another--for love of her mother, their "tender enemy," make a trip back to earth in the nick of time, to warn her off such a sad destiny by showing her, in flashback, her trapped mother's experiences and to introduce her to "the right man." Ophuls adapted this lovely roundelay of mothers, lovers, and "ectoplasms" from a rather nasty play by André-Paul Antoine."Funny, stylish, cynical, THE TENDER ENEMY has a certain downscale strangeness--the ghosts are wrapped in cellophane, and the flashbacks are staged against spare, stylized sets floating in washes of dappled light." -- Magill's Survey of Cinema
AVE MARIA DI SCHUBERT
max ophuls Tracking
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Ophuls' second contribution to a series entitled "Music and Cinema," which included works by a number of well-known directors. Ophuls' shorts were photographed by Franz Planer.
THE TROUBLE WITH MONEY (Komedie om geld)
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Ophuls' only Dutch film follows the extremely complex adventures
of a bank clerk named Brand who loses and ultimately rediscovers a large
deposit. An original story, KOMEDIE is the director's most
"Brechtian" film in its use of a master of ceremonies or directorial
alter ego who tells the tale of money that moves the world: "Money which
is mute, which straightens what's bent, which is worshipped, which he desired
until it taught him to despise it...." It's not a great stretch to see
Komedie's currency as an early version of THE EARRINGS OF
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
A minor film from Max Ophuls, but minor Ophuls still has so much filmmaking energy that it makes even the major work of figures like Spielberg and De Palma shrink to virtual nothingness. Ophuls was effectively imported to Holland to make this 1936 feature and thereby beef up the lackluster Dutch film industry. Based on an original Ophuls story (and coscripted by Walter Schlee, Alex de Haan, and Christine van Meeteren) and featuring songs and commentary from a neo-Brechtian clown who stands outside the plot, the film describes the misadventures of a bank courier (Herman Bouber) who is robbed of bank funds and fired, only to be appointed as head of a finance company by crooked businessmen who believe that he has the stolen money. Rather light and on the cutesy side as narrative, this comedy is worth seeing mainly for the inventive mise en scene (with the great Eugen Schufftan as cinematographer); it's full of unexpected camera angles and Ophuls's usual delight in camera movement (watch for an especially giddy dream sequence). With Rini Otte and Cor Ruys.
YOSHIWARA
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Just before the Sino-Japanese War, the beautiful aristocrat Kohana (Michiko Tanaka) is brought low into geishahood by her parents' bankruptcy and suicide. A coolie who is also a painter (matinee idol Sessue Hayakawa) falls deeply in love with the innocent girl as he transports her to her new home in a brothel. Eventually wooed and symbolically wedded by a Russian naval officer (Pierre-Richard Willm), Kohana remains the heart's desire of her coolie. An Ophulsian Madame Butterfly with moments that anticipate LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN.
THERE’S NO TOMORROW (Sans lendemain)
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
A variation on Ophuls' film noir THE RECKLESS MOMENT (1949), NO TOMORROW is the story of a once-respectable woman who re-encounters her first love, now a successful doctor. Reduced to nude-dancing in a sleazy dive, with a son to support, Evelyne (Edwige Feuillère) borrows money at an outrageous interest rate in order to create a facade of respectability--and, it goes without saying, Georges falls in love with her all over again. But how can Evelyne maintain her bourgeois value and save son and "father" from the consequences of her fall?
WERTHER (Le roman de Werther)
max ophuls Tracking
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From Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Ophuls' version
moves from the 18th to the 19th century, and transforms the dramatic tale of a
doomed young man's loss of his true love (Annie Vernay) to a friend (Jean
Galland) into a romantic tragedy that focusses--in typically Ophulsian
style--on the sorrows of the woman the poet Werther (Pierre-Richard Willm)
cannot seduce away from her strait-laced judge-fiancé. In
FROM MAYERLING TO SARAJEVO
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
"One of the finest and most misunderstood of all Ophuls'
films," according to Robin Wood,
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
THE EXILE
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
THE EXILE is the one swashbuckler in the history of that robust genre that demands to be called exquisite. Or Dutch: it's a fictional account of Prince Charles Stuart hiding out in Holland, evading pesky Roundhead spies and genteelly romancing a lovely innkeeper (Paule Croset / Paula Corday) while waiting to be restored to the English throne. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who wrote the script and produced as well as giving a droll stellar performance, set the capstone on his enterprise by hiring Ophuls (restyled Opuls for U.S. consumption) to direct. The results are variously delicate, cosmopolitan, and finally ecstatic as Max and Doug have a field day staging an epic swordfight up and down sundry windmills. With Henry Daniell a superb Cromwellian death's-head, plus Nigel Bruce, Robert Coote, and oh yes, Maria Montez!
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., wrote, produced, and starred in this Anglophilic imagining (based on Cosmo Hamilton’s novel His Majesty, the King) of king Charles Stuart II’s life in exile before the Restoration in 1660. The plot focuses primarily on Stuart’s (fictional) romance with a Dutch girl (Corday), and, ultimately, his dilemma over whether to maintain his blissful working class existence with her, or return to the throne of England to serve his “larger” purpose in life. In the meantime, the indomitable Charles is pursued by Oliver Cromwell’s supporters (embodied primarily by the bloodthirsty character of black-hatted Colonel Ingram — a perfectly cast Henry Daniell), and must persuade Corday that a former flame (Maria Montez) no longer holds any sway over his heart. [Montez is simply delightful -- and typically over-the-top -- in her few shorts scenes midway through the film.] Fortunately, director Max Ophuls (in his first American production) adds his inimitable touch to the proceedings, elevating what would otherwise be a mundane historical drama into something slightly more involving; by the end of the film, we can’t help caring about Charles and the fate of his country.
One Response to “Exile,
The (1947)”
writer93_99, on January
19th, 2009 at 9:13 pm Said:
Agreed, not a must - but certainly an engaging introduction to the work of director Ophuls, whose most famous films trailed this one. As stated, this is a much better work with Ophuls (and esp. his sweeping camera) at the helm. Without him, it would have the look and feel of a number of respectable but dull historical biopics. I can’t say ‘The Exile’ itself would have been “mundane” without Ophuls directing, but it would certainly be a lesser film.
The film sports a fine cast overall. Corday is rather pleasant
throughout, but the more memorable turns are handed in by Nigel Bruce, the
deliciously vile Daniell and, of course, Ms. Montez. La Montez actually seems
to exit the film about four or five times - and the feeling is that she can’t
quite bring herself to leave the screen and has asked
This is definitely one that TCM should (re?-) discover and make available to ffs. Not wildly memorable perhaps but, as stated, worth a look.
The Exile • Senses of Cinema Robert Keser from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
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Eye for
Film (Nicola Osborne) review [3/5]
The New York Times review A.W.
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Of all the cinema's fables of doomed love, none is more piercing than this. Fontaine nurses an undeclared childhood crush on her next-door neighbour, a concert pianist (Jourdan); much later, he adds her to his long list of conquests, makes her pregnant - and forgets all about her. Ophüls' endlessly elaborate camera movements, forever circling the characters or co-opting them into larger designs, expose the impasse with hallucinatory clarity: we see how these people see each other and why they are hopelessly, inextricably stuck.
max ophuls Tracking
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In this paradigm of romantic filmmaking, Joan Fontaine's love for concert pianist Louis Jourdan blossoms when she's just a teenager, and continues to thrive through his seduction and abandonment (of her and an unborn child). Out of this familiar storyline Ophuls delivers a remarkable heroine so spiritually self-sufficient her adoration takes on a life and power that transcends its unworthy object--Molly Haskell rightly calls Fontaine "a militarist of love." Another "perfect" film, according to David Thomson, who writes that "in its melolodic variations on staircases, carriages, rooms, glances, and meetings, [Letter] is about forgetfulness and the inescapable rhyming of separate times. No one had more sympathy for love than Ophuls, but no one knew so well how lovers remained unknown, strangers."
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ben Sachs
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN deserves to be considered alongside
Max Ophuls' final French masterpieces (LA RONDE through LOLA MONTES), with
which it shares extended tracking shots, romantic nostalgia for
turn-of-the-century Europe, and a profound understanding of human affairs. The
film takes its title and structure from a letter received by an aging concert
pianist/playboy that recounts a bourgeois girl's lifelong infatuation with him;
in an inspired Ophulsian irony, he hardly remembers their one-night fling from
years before. In the words of Judy Bloch, "Lisa's life is like the
carnival ride that takes the couple, on their only night together, through the
countries of Europe, a fantasy of movement that is really a circular stasis,
propelled by a bemused pedaler/director." This may be so, but to
characterize Ophuls as simply bemused fails to capture the full power of
his art: Few filmmakers have been able to suggest such genuine euphoria amidst
obvious recreation. (Vincente Minnelli is another.) No matter how compromised
Ophuls' characters are revealed to be, the sheer beauty of his form—which can
suggest both architecture and choreography—always finds value in their passion.
FilmExposed
dvd review Tom
Huddleston
In
Max Ophuls’ Letter From An Unknown Woman is probably the best unrequited
love story ever committed to celluloid. It tells the story of Lisa Berndl
(Fontaine) and her magnificent obsession with dashing concert pianist Stefan
(Jourdan), the true and only love of her life. Told in flashback as a series of
confessions scribbled down by the dying Lisa to her unwitting paramour, the
film charts her progression from secret admirer to notch on the bedpost, to
unwed mother and finally to society dame, always tortured by the memory of her
love for Stefan and the knowledge of what might have been.
It’s hard to say which of these characters is the more selfish; Ophuls and his
writers spare them no indignity, from Stefan’s creative narcissism to Lisa’s
blind, self-flagellating passion. But somehow, they remain loveable, trapped
and defenceless like children against the emotional forces which control them.
Even when Lisa considers abandoning her kind, supportive husband for one night
with the unreliable Stefan, it is her pain we feel, her confusion.
There is perhaps an element of social critique in Ophuls’ depiction of the
affair. Avoiding all direct historical reference (despite the political
upheavals of the time and place: turn of the century
Visually the film is glorious, Ophuls’ camera gliding and swooning through the
sumptuous sets, a shimmering monochrome ballet. The music (by the wonderfully
named Daniele Amfitheatrof) is equally majestic, orchestral swells accompanying
each emotional crescendo. And the writing is note perfect, Lisa’s profound but
dreamlike voiceover serving to heighten yet further the sense of poetic tragedy
in which the film is steeped.
Letter From An Unknown Woman is a unique and precious work of art.
Emotionally overwrought but still detached and incisive, managing to find
sympathy for its characters even in the depths of their grandiose
self-absorption. It is a film about pity and longing, beauty and ignorance, a
heartbreaking study of regret, an otherworldly missive from a lost era of epic
tragedy and romance.
Letter
From An Unknown Woman (1948, Max Ophuls, US... Kevin Wilson from
Thirty Frames a Second
Max Ophuls' brief sojourn into
Set in
Over the next two decades or so, they meet now and again as she pursues Stefan
and her dream of them having a life together. He never recognises her, she does
of course. His intentions every time seem honourable enough - it's not as if he
treats her as a one night stand, but we realise that Stefan is incapable of
settling down with any one woman. His and Lisa's motivations are always
completely different, and whilst their fates are inextricably linked forever,
they can never have what either of them want. He says to her during their first
affair; "promise me you won't vanish", to which she responds "I
won't be the one who vanishes". It's as if she knows what his behaviour is
like and how he treats women and that his promises are hollow, but this doesn't
dissuade her at all. Her attraction and feelings overwhelm any common sense.
Lisa fell pregnant after their first fling, and she had since managed to
achieve respectability by marrying a man with wealth and status, yet she
jeapordises this by conducting another affair with him. The consequences of
this were not only her husband's rejection but also her son's death as he
contracted typhus when she was with Stefan and he did not reach the doctors in
time. This might not directly be a moral judgement on her behaviour and
rejection of respectability, but it's interesting how one's sympathies don't
directly lie with Lisa and make us totally condemn the irresponsible Stefan. In
many ways, they are equally weak-willed and motivated by hopeless dreams.
However, their mutual attraction proves ultimately fatal and the final irony is
the fact that Stefan's mute servant was aware all along that the girl who
Stefan conducted two brief affairs with were in fact the same woman.
Ophuls would further develop his interest in romances determined by fate in 'La
Ronde' and 'Madame de...'. His two following
Ophuls
Conducting: Music and Musicality in Letter ... - Senses of Cinema Alexander Dhoest from Senses of Cinema, October 5, 2003
Letter from an
Unknown Woman • Senses of Cinema Carla Marcantonio from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
The Greatest Films
(Tim Dirks) recommendation [spoilers]
User
comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from United States
Goatdog's
Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review
[5/5]
Long Pauses Darren Hughes
Letter From an Unknown Woman Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, USA 1948) CeltoSlavica
AvaxHome -> Max Ophüls - Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) (Repost)
Eye for Film (Nicola Osborne) review [3/5]
Eye for
Film ("Chris") review
[5/5] Chris
Docker
What's
Old: Letter From an Unknown Woman JR
Jones from The Reader Blog,
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
User
comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Galina from
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [6/6]
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
CAUGHT C 75
A somewhat downbeat and dreary take on the American Dream, filled with a nightmarish pessimism about the corrupting influence of money, and considering when this was made, it’s a prescient comment on the otherwise sunny decade of the 50’s in America, a decade of supposed optimism and promise, an era when Americans pulled themselves out of the doldrums of the post-war trauma of the 40’s and moved to the suburbs, building new lives for themselves and their Baby Boomer children. Clashes between Communism and Capitalism were just beginning, and German director Max Ophüls was driven out of Europe by the Nazi’s, emigrating to the United States where he was fired from his first job by Howard Hughes. This film may be the director’s revenge, taking aim at the huge ego and tyrannical style of Hughes who surrounded himself with Yes men, throwing around directives and always telling others what to do, but leaving himself isolated and alone in the process, much like Charles Foster Kane living alone in his massive estate of Xanadu at the end of CITIZEN KANE (1941). After Kirk Douglas and Ginger Rogers dropped out for what were considered script differences, Robert Ryan and Barbara Bel Geddes were borrowed from RKO to make this picture, where Ryan as international business tycoon Smith Ohlrig (modeled after Hughes) is a ruthlessly impatient man used to getting his way, but also subject to heart ailments when he doesn’t, momentarily turning him into a panicked weakling in desperate need of his life saving emergency medicine. But this is a starring vehicle for Bel Geddes as Leonora, who is seen initially in her cramped apartment paging through magazines, picking out extravagant jewels and minks that in her eyes define success. Saving her money to attend a charm school learning manners and etiquette, her idea of femininity is modeling fur coats in a department store, hoping to catch the eye of a rich millionaire who will sweep her off her feet at the perfume counter. For many women in the 50’s this aptly describes the American Dream, as going to college and choosing a career was never the first option, which always remained finding a wealthy husband.
Despite receiving an invitation to an exclusive party on
Ohlrig’s yacht, Leonora spends most of the day pouting instead of primping,
ending up going at the last minute where she misses the ride, left alone at the
pier waiting in the darkness for someone to pick her up. When a man arrives from the yacht, she asks
for a ride, but he has important business to take care of, but brings her
along, eventually driving her to his mammoth estate on
Making a new life for herself, she finds another small,
cramped room and a job as a receptionist for a pair of young doctors serving
mostly poor kids, which is where she meets James Mason (in his first American
picture) as Dr. Larry Quinada, who hires her, though after a few weeks he
questions her disorganization, as her desk is a mess, and she continues to hold
onto her idealistic views on marriage, advising women patients in the waiting
room on the art of marrying a rich husband, even after discovering what a sham
her own life has become. But instead of
motivating her to improve her skills and make better choices, Leonora ends up
running away in shame, where Ohlrig sweet talks her back to the mansion, but
she quickly discovers ulterior motives behind his actions, as he’s already
orchestrating her life again as if nothing’s changed. Running back to the good doctor, things improve
momentarily, expressed in a dizzyingly choreographed dinner sequence between
the two of them as they end up doing the waltz on a crowded dance floor, where
Lee Garmes’ camera swoops around walls peering in and out of the rooms,
creating an idyllic moment when he asks her to marry him. Complications ensue, however, as she’s
already married and pregnant, and neither one to the good doctor, so rather
than tell him, she again drops out of sight until the doctor tracks her down,
where Mason and Ryan have a mano a mano talk, as Ryan lowers the hammer and
sadistically reveals the facts of life.
Despite the conservative nature of the times, being cooped up in the
mansion of a man who has no interest in her, who in fact openly despises her,
does not seem to be the right environment to live or have a baby, especially
when she’s met someone who actually cares about her. But in this film, that’s
not an option, where instead there’s a contrived ending, where Mason gives a
long involved speech to Bel Geddes in the back of an ambulance, an ominous
picture of melodramatic destiny and gloom, where one finds freedom and hope in
the ultimate tragedy of their lives, pulling success out of failure, which may
as well be an answered prayer to “lead us not into temptation (money), but deliver
us from evil (corrupted power).”
A key American melodrama: draw a line between Citizen Kane and Written on the Wind, and you'll find Ophuls' noir classic at the heady mid-point. A car-hop Cinderella (Bel Geddes) chases a fashion-plate, charm-school dream; a childishly megalomaniac millionaire (Ryan) marries her to spite his analyst. Ophuls holds back his camera to frame the sour domestic nightmare, but gloriously equates motion with emotion when Bel Geddes takes solace with James Mason's virtuous doctor. The alluring web of hearts and dollars has rarely looked so deadly, and only the studio spared us the sight of the kill.
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Variously dubbed a woman's film and a film noir, CAUGHT is an extraordinarily intense examination of a love triangle involving a blonde "nice girl" who dreams of bettering herself (Barbara Bel Geddes); a destructively neurotic, charismatic millionaire (Robert Ryan); and a good doctor with his feet firmly planted on the ground (James Mason). Kin to Madame de's husband (Charles Boyer), Ryan's Smith Ohlrig is a dark coil of complexity. Abusive and neglectful of the woman he truly adores, but mistakes as just another gold-digger, this demon lover's passions run very deep. Ophuls designs each frame and camera movement to express existential / emotional / economic traps and revivifying kinesis. Photographed in strongly contrasting light and shadow by the legendary Lee Garmes.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs
Max Ophuls made two films with James Mason,
who may have been the director's ideal leading man in
Caught
(1949, US, Max Ophuls) Kevin Wilson from
Thirty Frames a Second
Recently, I reviewed 'Letter From An Unknown Woman', a superior melodrama which remains probably the best of the four Ophuls films that I have seen. Made just a year after, 'Caught' was Ophuls' first attempt at making a contemporary American film. This too is another melodrama, but one that also acts as a scathing attack on certain American values of the era (materialism, ambition, success). Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes), Caught's heroine starts as a rather shallow young woman about to enter charm/finishing school, with the sole intention of developing the refined habits and behaviour that will snare her a rich, successful husband. She reads fashion magazines, and romantically yearns for the good life. Naturally, her dreams becomes more of a nightmare.
Leonora meets and falls in love with Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), a ruthless businessman with emotional and physical health issues. He's not so keen, but just to spite his psychoanalyst, he marries her regardless. Marriage isn't what Leonora expected it to be. Her charm school education is no use to her now. A man used to winning (who has heart palpitations when his superiority is threatened), Smith humiliates her in front of their friends/colleagues and wants to do his best to ruin her, ruling over her like a tyrant.
Escaping his clutches, she takes a job as a receptionist for the kind and self-sacrificing Dr Quinada (James Mason), and their attraction is mutual. However, when Smith finds her and wants her back (he can't accept losing her), Leonora is torn between the two men. Her yearning for a good life, for wealth, security and status take priority over love, though the crucial aspect is the fact she's pregnant with Smith's child and that Smith threatens a divorce citing adultery, giving him custody of their child, so perhaps Leonora is learning that her shallow ideals aren't what they're cracked up to be. Her eventual freedom is obtained in the most ironic of fashions, though not without a huge degree of tragedy, and what there is resembling a "happy ending" is incredibly subdued.
Like his fellow German, Douglas Sirk, Ophuls utilises the melodrama genre to raise significant and salient points about typically American values, increasingly held by many during a period of economic prosperity. Smith, unrestrained capitalism in human form is a cruel and merciless creature, who can't accept defeat and who must master others. Leonora's desire of Smith's world and her idealised notions of success and wealth display a sense of ambition that becomes her downfall. Only with the compassionate Quinada does Leonora find happiness, which refutes every ideal she previously held, although she struggles to let go of Smith's world. One wonders though, whether like Sirk's films, the satirical angle of 'Caught' was obviously noticed by its audience or whether it was just treated as a domestic nightmare and nothing more. Ophuls, who uses camera movement better and more interestingly than most, uses his technical gifts to show Leonora's world of peril - look at his use of lighting too when Leonora is faced with the moral dilemma of saving Smith's life when he has a heart attack. It would be so easy to let him die so she can be free and the contempt on her face is obvious, but Ophuls rejects such simple plot developments. 'The Reckless Moment' was made the same year, and should be considered together as incredibly pertinent dissections of contemporary American mores.
User comments from imdb Author: theowinthrop from
This film is a nice little melodrama about a marriage that should not have
occurred. Barbara Bel Geddes is a "hostess" who was going to be on a
yacht during a party. She is delayed, and when wondering how to get to the
party she runs into a young man, Robert Ryan. He offers her a ride, and the two
actually have a relaxed good evening together. In fact it turns out to be more
promising than Bel Geddes can hope for. She wants to marry well, and she
discovers that Ryan is a multi-millionaire named Smith Ohlrig. When he proposes
she accepts. Lucky girl? Not quite.
Ryan is one of those fascinating actors who was good enough to handle the
juiciest villains and the most compelling of sympathetic types. The same year
as CAUGHT he made THE SET-UP, as a boxer in decline, who unwittingly
double-crosses a mobster by winning a fight he should have thrown. In future
films he would threaten Spencer Tracy in BAD DAY AT BLACKROCK, would by Ty-Ty
the deluded farmer and gold seeker in GOD'S LITTLE ACRE, and would be Claggart,
BILLY BUDD's evil victim. It was quite a remarkable career. Most people
remember his brooding villains more than his good guys. Curiously enough, in
real life he was not the clone of his anti-Semitic murderer in CROSSFIRE but a
lifelong fighter for civil liberties. He also was a man with a sense of humor.
When warned about black listing for his liberalism he laughed and dismissed it,
suggesting that J.Edgar Hoover would not go after him - Ryan pointed out he was
a good Roman Catholic and a war hero.
Ohlrig has a psychosis that makes him go after anything that initially he can't
get. If he doesn't get it he has panic attacks where he collapses and can
barely breath. Initially Bel Geddes rejects him, but he perseveres and she
makes the mistake of saying yes. Once he has her he treats her like an adjunct
to his various properties and corporations. She does break away for awhile,
aided by her new romance (James Mason), but she weakens because she finds
herself pregnant. Ohlrig now has her and her child in his sights as his
property.
If the film was one sided (as my synopsis suggests) it would not quite as good
as it is. Ryan does show other points about Ohlrig. He is showing a film of a
business project to some of his executives at his mansion, and Bel Geddes is
bored. She makes no effort to take an interest in the film - and Ryan pointedly
lectures her that if she would just be quiet and watch she might learn
something. Although such moments are rarely revealed in the script, it does
suggest that a bit more work by Bel Geddes might have made the relationship
somewhat more tolerable.
The film conclusion has been somewhat dismissed as too pat. Trapped by her
husband's wealth and power, Bel Geddes is left as a weak, pathetic type,
pregnant but non-comprehending what is around her. But Ryan has an argument
with his factotum, played by Curt Bois. Bois has been a sleazy underling -
quite slick and greasy in his rapid patter speech (with "darling"
frequently thrown out towards Bel Geddes to get her to do what Ohlrig wants to
do). But Ryan basically insults the man for no good reason. Bois suddenly turns
on him in a quiet and effective manner. He says that he thinks he'd prefer
returning to his old job as a maitre-d at a restaurant than continue working
for Ryan. He also says that no matter what Ryan can do, he'll never win Bel
Geddes' affections. It is this blow to Ryan's psyche that leads to his final
collapse at the close of the film, and to Bel Geddes' release from the marriage
she should have avoided.
Caught -
TCM.com Felicia Feaster
Revenge on a
control freak Charles Taylor from Salon, July 26, 1999, also seen here: Salon.com
Review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Lonelyheart on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman on Robert Ryan
The Films of Max Ophuls [Michael E. Grost] also seen here: Caught
Eye for
Film (Emma Slawinski) review [3.5/5]
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Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Caught (Max Ophüls, USA 1948) CeltoSlavica
The New Yorker [Pauline Kael] (pdf format)
Caught (1949) - Notes - TCM.com
Eye for Film (Nicola Osborne) review [3/5]
The Ottawa Citizen [C.E.C.] (pdf format)
The
Sydney Morning Herald (pdf)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review also seen here: NY Times Original Review
THE RECKLESS MOMENT
Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
This 1949 melodrama from Max Ophuls's postwar
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) valiantly tries to help her daughter
(Geraldine Brooks) get out of a blackmailing scheme perpetrated by her slimy
boyfriend (Sheppard Strudwick), before things go from very bad to absolute
worst. Suddenly, a dark angel arrives in the person of James Mason's Martin
Donnelly, one of the moodiest and most perfectly controlled performances of
this magnificent actor's career. One of the many excellent films produced by
Bennett's husband Walter Wanger, The Reckless Moment began life as a Jean
Renoir project, and its story has some of the feel of his late-30s work. In
what may be his most underrated film, Ophuls concentrated on the sad, oddly
romantic interaction between Mason and Bennett, and offered just as controlled
and moving a vision of suppressed emotion as distinguished his European work,
with a pitch-perfect rendering of southern
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Having concealed her
daughter's accidental killing of her seedy older lover, upper middle class
housewife Bennett finds herself being blackmailed by a loan shark; fortunately
for her, the man he sends - small-time crook and loner Mason - becomes
infatuated with Bennett, and ends up killling his partner. Ophüls' noir
melodrama, like his previous film, Caught, can be seen as a subtle,
subversive critique of American ambitions and class-structures: in committing
the moral and legal transgression of concealing a corpse, Bennett is merely
protecting the comfort and respectability of her family life, and the irony is
that Mason's self-sacrifice, made on her behalf, simply serves to preserve the
status quo that has relegated him to the role of social outcast. This sense of
waste, however, is implied rather than emphasised by Ophüls' elegant, low key
direction, which counterpoints the stylisation of Burnett
Guffey's shadowy photography with long, mobile takes that stress the
everyday reality of the milieu. A marvellous, tantalising thriller, it also
features never-better performances from Mason and Bennett.
FilmExposed dvd review Tom Huddleston
When the opening titles credit a film as adapted from a short
story in the Woman’s Home Journal, you know you’re onto a good thing. The
Reckless Moment doesn’t disappoint. Max Ophuls’ last American film is a
women’s picture in the grand tradition of Mildred Pierce (1945) - dark
edged and melodramatic, and dripping with moral ambiguities.
Like Mildred, Lucia Harper (Bennett) is a practical, determined housewife
attempting to hold her family together against ever-increasing odds. When her
wayward teenage daughter accidentally murders her crooked older lover in the
boathouse, Lucia hides the body and attempts to go on with her life. But
trouble arrives in the form of Donnelly (Mason), an emotionally vulnerable
Irish mobster sent by his superior, the mysterious Nagle, to blackmail the
Harper family to the tune of $5000. But while Lucia scrambles to raise the
money in her husband’s absence, Donnelly begins to develop powerful feelings
for his intended victim.
The power of The Reckless Moment lies in a subtle subversion of
established cliché. The plot is straightforward, even predictable, and at first
glance, the characters seem much the same: the straight-laced mother, the
selfish, petulant daughter and her sleaze ball boyfriend, the scrappy teenage
son and grizzled grandfather, the sassy black maid with a heart of gold. But
gradually our perceptions begin to shift, as hidden depths are revealed through
the characters’ interactions with one another. Donnelly is introduced and
immediately feels out of place. He’s placid, reasonable, completely
unthreatening, polite and accommodating to Lucia and her family, far from the
typical
Lucia and Donnelly’s relationship never develops beyond the platonic. In his
introduction, Todd Haynes discusses how the filmmakers took their lead from Brief
Encounter (1945), placing emphasis on passionate restraint over torrid
bursts of emotion. And it’s an odd relationship. We get the feeling Lucia is
quite a bit older than Donnelly, more experienced and capable, a mother figure
as much as a lust object. While her feelings for him are born out of gratitude
and remorse rather than desire, her dedication to her absentee husband is never
called into question.
It is only at the end that Lucia’s icy mask begins to crack, and here Ophuls
pulls off his final act of subversion. After doggedly resisting all attempts at
support, whether from her family members or from Donnelly himself, Lucia
finally accepts the assistance of the black maid Sybil, whose domestic
servility is swept away as she assumes the dominant role, watching over Lucia
in her hour of need. It’s a fitting end to a strange but moving film, small but
perfectly formed, and a welcome rediscovery on DVD.
The Big House
Film Society Roger Westcombe
The Reckless Moment makes an interesting entrant in the postwar ‘suburban threat’ stratum of thrillers. Put simply, the emergence of suburbia and ‘white flight’ from the cities after the war intermingled anxieties that many thrillers were quick to exploit, from as early as Shadow of A Doubt (1943) to Cape Fear (1955) at the extremes, to numerous ‘B’ and ‘A-pictures’ inbetween, especially around the turn of the decade.
The interesting wrinkle The Reckless Moment brings to this strand of thriller is The Absent Male and its corollary of the (in effect) single mother. This being almost the 1950s there must be a father figure, but the husband of Joan Bennett’s Lucia Harper character is never seen nor heard in The Reckless Moment, nor does he exert any influence, as ghosts in the machine sometimes can.
No, this is Lucia’s show, and she proves mighty competent at extricating her
daughter from extortion, throwing the cops off the scent when the family is
threatened by a murder investigation, thwarting blackmail and all the while
keeping three squares on the table for demanding teen son David and his
ineffectual granddad! (By
Without revealing why this is a plot twist, Mason’s gradual melting is the film’s weak link and more convincingly portrayed in the 2001 remake (The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton – an unusually good contempo Hollywood thriller). Mason’s Martin Donnelly character continually complains to Lucia that the family is smothering her, but the reality is it’s just normal life – the usual static and burr-in-the-saddle stuff without which we feel alone. It’s convincingly portrayed too.
Interestingly we can see a link between the family scenes with their hassles and distractions and the similarly bumpy ride of the street scenes in the tenderloin district into which Lucia must descend later in the picture. The contrast from the fluffy cloud-filled sky of her middle class normalcy to the murky grime of pawnshops and tenements is stark - the different classes even get different weather!
Ophuls (streamlined inexplicably by
A shot that does not call for tracks, Is agony
for poor dear Max
Who separated from his dolly, Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.
So European is the cinematic grammar and overall look of The Reckless
Moment it is easy to imagine viewing it with subtitles. Like Lubitsch,
Ophuls was, as
The
Reckless Moment: Max Ophuls' Masterpiece of Middle Class ... Sean Axmaker from Parallax View,
The Reckless Moment (1949, Max Ophuls) Kevin B. Lee from Shooting Down Pictures
For
Criticism (Again): Movie Love in the Fifties by James Harvey ... book review by William D. Routt for Senses
of Cinema, July 6, 2004
DVD Times review Gary Couzens
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [A-]
neumu [ continuity error ] The
How of Desire, by Kevin Johns from Continuity Error
Noir of the Week Paulcito
The Reckless Moment (1949) - Max Ophüls Cinematic Sojourns, also here: Cinematic Sojourns: The Reckless Moment (1949) - Max Ophüls
pseudopodium: Karen Joy Fowler
The
Reckless Moment - TCM.com
Michael Atkinson
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]
Movie
Magazine International review Monica Sullivan
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
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THE RECKLESS MOMENT DVD [Max Ophuls] Xploited Cinema
Cinematography of the Holocaust detailed credits
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVD Beaver
LA RONDE
La ronde Don Druker from The Reader
Max Ophuls's witty version (1950) of Arthur Schnitzler's play
showing love as a bitterly comic merry-go-round. Going less for the darker
feelings in Schnitzler than for the surface gloss, Ophuls displays dazzling
technical virtuosity and a cinematic elegance we're not likely to see again.
Anton Walbrook acts as master of ceremonies and narrator as one love affair
intertwines with another and love's roundabout carries Simone Signoret,
Danielle Darrieux, and Jean-Louis Barrault full circle. The movement toward
Ophuls's baroque masterpiece Lola Montes is unmistakable. In French with
subtitles. 97 min.
Not one of the
director's very greatest films on desire (see Letter from an Unknown Woman
and Lola Montès for those), Ophüls' circular chain of love and seduction
in 19th century Vienna is still irresistible. Embellishing Arthur Schnitzler's
text with metaphors that are entirely his own (a carousel; an
omniscient/omnipotent narrator/MC, with Walbrook at times actually seen
splicing the celluloid stories together; and that perfect expression of the
Ophülsian circle, the waltz), Ophüls almost manages to make you forget that the
performances in the first half (Signoret, Reggiani, Simon, Gélin, Darrieux,
Gravey) are much better than those in the second. And there are more than
enough moments of cinematic magic to excuse the occasional longueurs of
talkiness.
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Even those unfamiliar with Ophuls' oeuvre know this much-imitated
film, adapted from another Schnitzler play and initially banned from the
La
Ronde (1950, France, Max Ophuls) Kevin Wilson from
Thirty Frames a Second
As alluded to in the previous piece, Ophuls' brief Hollywood career was completed after making 'Caught' and 'The Reckless Moment', but still at his creative peak, he resumed work in France, with 'La Ronde' being the first example of this. Based on 'Reigen', the play for Arthur Schnitzler which was banned for obscenity, a fate the film faced in certain countries, Ophuls weaves a mesmerising tale of a daisy chain of ten sexual partners (e.g. A sleeps with B, B sleeps with C, etc before returning back to A). Although Ophuls remains faithful to the original setting of the play, turn of the 20th century Vienna and scrutinises the sexual mores of society as well as its class differences, the crucial theme of the transmission of syphilis seems if not omitted, then underplayed, although this doesn't really undermine the satire too much.
One of Ophuls' masterstrokes is using the handsome and charismatic Anton Walbrook (most famous for 'The Red Shoes') as the film's narrator and master of ceremonies. An omnipotent presence over the events that unfolds, as well as influencing events to ensure the circle of lovers remains intact, he is the incarnation of our desire to know and dispenses romantic advice; "all are led the same merry dance, when love chooses its victims of chance". He initially sets up the whore with the soldier, then aids the pairing off of each subsequent set of lovers, all to keep the carousel going.
Ophuls shows how sexual impropriety crosses class boundaries; notice how the whore pairs off with both the soldier and the aristocrat, representing two arms of high society. The sole married couple both have affairs - as the husband says "marriage is a perplexing mystery" and perhaps the young gentleman who sleeps with his maid represents a sense of economic exploitation. Using typically elaborate camerawork, never more evident that the opening scene, unbroken for several minutes as it follows Walbrook's introduction and summation of the events at hand, Ophuls pans the camera in circular directions as if to denote the circular nature of the waltz of love. Good natured and whimsical, though no less specific in its observation of sexual attitudes of the time, 'La Ronde' is an enchanting cinematic experience by a film maker clearly on the crest of a wave.
Max Ophuls'
"La Ronde" - visual-memory.co.uk
Francis Wyndham from Sight and Sound, Spring 1982
Arthur Schnitzler's attitude to Reigen seems to have been
consistently deprecating. In 1900 he paid for two hundred copies to be
privately published and circulated among his acquaintances, describing it as 'a
series of scenes which are totally unprintable, of no great literary value, but
if disinterred after a couple of hundred years may illuminate aspects of our
culture in a unique way.' Twenty-one years later, when its production in
theatres at
It was made in
One thing is clear: if Schnitzler at his best was more bitter than sweet, with Ophuls it was the other way round. Schnitzler's original was unromantic, almost brutal in tone: a daisy chain of random couplings in which each sex exploits the other. The pattern of sentimental pretence and duplicity during courtship, followed by post-coital indifference, was repeated with only minor variations through contrasting social spheres, from low life via the opulent bourgeoisie to artistic bohemia. Ophuls' version, half a century later, softened this mischievously bleak study of prosaic promiscuity by approaching it through a haze of poetic nostalgia. His evocation of a never-never Vienna is blatantly stylised; the first shot is of a stage, with candles as footlights; the action remains contentedly studio-bound throughout and the sets have the gauzy, insubstantial look of theatrical backdrops or a once familiar landscape misremembered in a dream. By introducing a new character- the Master of Ceremonies, elegant in evening cloak and tilted opera hat, who sets the merry-go-round tunefully turning - he also introduced an element of determinist fatality not present in the play. The Master of Ceremonies is a figure from expressionist drama, a puppeteer ruthlessly manipulating his dummies while indulgently allowing them an illusion of free will. He is also, it must be admitted, a pretentious cliche- much more so than the broadly characterised 'universal types' of the central drama - and it took an actor with the finesse of Anton Walbrook to prevent him from seeming an irritating bore.
This device also enabled Ophuls to show us a little of what happens to the ten characters outside the two episodes to which each was strictly rationed by Schnitzler. In the process, the intrigue is prettified, becoming a circle of linked love stories rather than a catalogue of copulation or a relay race illustrating the spread of venereal disease. We learn that the soldier, after ditching the maid, falls in love with her too late; we see the husband sadly stood up by the grisette he had seduced with callous caution; and we understand that the grisette has lost her heart to the fickle poet.
Here, Ophuls flirts with sentimentality. Schnitzler's reductionist view of human behaviour, the follies and falsities it is driven to by the erotic itch, may have risked over-simplification and monotony but it was never glib. The notorious rows of dots he used to represent the act of love were tactful rather than arch. In stage productions today, the wretched actors are compelled by current convention to simulate the act, with effects both ludicrous and banal. Ophuls dealt with this problem by various exercises in winsome ingenuity - the most striking being an urbane intervention from the Master of Ceremonies with a reel of celluloid and a pair of censor's scissors. Did all this strike me as coy in 1950? I don't think so - but it does now. As so often in similar cases, one tends to the irrational belief that if anything has changed it is the work rather than oneself.
But such changes are of little importance: the work still dazzles. Ophuls' camera refuses to be restricted by the obvious limits on motion imposed by successive duologues in successive bed-rooms. It roams with the inquisitive abandon and sensuous grace of a cat set free from a basket round the upholstered restaurants, chambres privees, cafe concerts, garconnieres, theatre coulisses and misty riverside alleys which frame the action. The exquisite set and costume designs by George Annenkov do more than decorate: they interpret mood, hint at meaning, betray motive, enhance emotion. If it had no other distinction, the film would survive as an anthology of acting by some of the most brilliant stars of the pre-New Wave French cinema. Has any actress been more delectably sexy than Simone Simon as the maid who seduces (is seduced by?) the 'young master'? No one could equal the delicate glitter of Danielle Darrieux in her two bedroom scenes, with clumsy lover and sanctimonious husband. Given the almost impossible assignment of playing a glamorous ass, Gerard Philipe lives up to his legend. Serge Reggiani, Daniel Gelin, Fernand Gravey, Odette Joyeux... all are consummate. Only Jean-Louis Barrault as the poet embarrasses by caricaturing a philistine's notion of the artistic temperament, and Isa Miranda is not given time to develop her interestingly harsh characterisation of the actress.
Apparently one of their scenes together, in a country inn during a snow storm, was cut by Ophuls from the final print - and its absence, disturbing the crucial symmetry, does make itself felt. (It contains the line 'This is better than acting in stupid plays', which can set a live audience giggling.) It was the first scene he shot, and it was on location. From the rest of the movie, glorying in the artificiality of a studio setting, it must have stood out for Ophuls like a sore thumb, and he reckoned the cost of a little narrative confusion well worth paying for its excision.
La ronde: Vicious Circle Criterion essay by Terrence Rafferty
La ronde (1950) - The Criterion Collection
La Ronde - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Philip Kemp from Film Reference
Michael Wood
reviews Max Ophuls · LRB 9 October 2008
Michael Wood from The
Slant
Magazine review
Dan Callahan
La Ronde
- TCM.com Sean Axmaker
Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 917. La Ronde (1950, Max ... Kevin B. Lee
Prodigal Directors Come Home: Part 2 of 4: Movie info from ... David Parkinson from Film in Focus
The Grand Inquisitor [Robert Davison]
La Ronde (Max Opüls, 1950) Gonzolaz from Reading Cinema
La Ronde (1950) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
La ronde (Max Ophüls, 1950) « Simon's Film-Related Rants and Musings
La Ronde Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
LA RONDE (Max Ophüls, 1950) « Dennis Grunes
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd
review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion
Confessions
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3/5] Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd
review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection
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Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Laramie
Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
Paste
- DVD Review Andy Beta briefly
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TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
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LE PLAISIR
Le
Plaisir Dave Kehr from The Reader
Max Ophuls's 1951 anthology film (a popular form of the time that has sadly fallen into disuse) collects three short stories by Guy de Maupassant, each dealing with the ideal of “pleasure” in a different context: old age, sex, and sacrifice. On the whole, the film falls below the level of the work that surrounds it, La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de . . . , but it unmistakably belongs to Ophuls's postwar period, one of the most extraordinary creative peaks in film history. In French with subtitles. 98 min.
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
Featuring a dream cast--including Claude Dauphin, Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin, Pierre Brasseur, Simone Simon, Daniel Gélin, Jean Servais, Gaby Morland, Pierre Brasseur, Madeleine Renaud and Peter Ustinov--LE PLAISIR renders into exquisite Ophulsian cinema three stories by Guy de Maupassant. In the first, "Le Masque," an old man temporarily regains his youth by wearing a magic mask to a ball. In the second, "La Maison Telier," a group of prostitutes embark on an annual country holiday. In the last, a painter who makes his models his mistresses is forced to marry one (Simone Simon) after she cripples herself in a suicide attempt. Each tale is an exhilarating dance, alternating movement and stasis, light and shadow, pleasure and pain.
Ophüls' second French film following his return from the
Le Plaisir Fernando F. Croce from Slant magazine
As with Jean Renoir's "Everyone has their reasons," it's easy to misread Max Ophüls's famous maxim ("Life is movement") and reduce it to a comfy, affirmative aphorism. The Renoir quote is widely accepted as a warm shrug embracing all of humanity's foibles rather than an acknowledgement of the difficult interlocking and relativity of lives, just as Ophüls's statement can suggest the gracefulness of a universe in motion rather than the implacability of life's forward momentum and the transience of emotion. The beauty and Mozartian sense of visual musicality of his work enhance rather than detract from Ophüls's toughness, for, beneath the velvety suavity, the director's worldview could be as bleak, savage even, as those of fellow Teutonic masters Von Stroheim, Lang, Wilder, and Preminger.
Guy de Maupassant's sardonic pen would seem a perfect fit for the director, yet Le Plaisir, Ophüls's adaptation of three of the writer's short stories, both accommodates and questions de Maupassant's cynicism. Often palmed off as a minor work sandwiched between the clarity of theme of La Ronde (which critic Robin Wood correctly tagged a "thesis" work) and the fullness of expression of The Earrings of Madame de…, it's nothing short of brutal when it comes to depicting the human desperation of glittering surfaces. "I could be sitting next to you," the Maupassant-as-narrator (Jean Servais in the original French version, but Peter Ustinov in the English-dubbed version, sounding a lot like Pepe le Pew) announces at the start, yet the tone remains ruthlessly detached, the better to enjoy the human spectacles of vanity, regret, and elusive romance. Ophüls's justly celebrated mise-en-scène is at full throttle in the opening segment, Le Masque, with the camera picking up the swirling beat of a luxuriant 19th-century ball. Amid the festivities, a man decked in tuxedo, top hat, monocle, and mustache, virtually a parody of the dapper gentleman, rushes onto the dance floor to join the quadrille; in one of the most stunning of all tracking shots, Ophüls's camera follows his strenuous pirouettes until the mysterious figure collapses.
The camera movement ranks alongside Hitchcock's blurring of fantasy and reality in Vertigo and Antonioni's magisterial final zoom in The Passenger, though here Ophüls's spiraling track accentuates the character's loss of control, like a puppet getting tangled over his own strings. The fallen dancer is shown to be wearing a mask, and the scissoring of the plaster façade reveals a breathless old man (Jean Galland) trying to fool age and resurrect past glories. If life is movement, stasis is, logically, death, and, as the Doctor (Claude Dauphin) accompanies the old man back to his home, he realizes the price of fantasy etched in the weary face of Gaby Morlay, Galland's earthbound and long-suffering wife, who sees it as her duty to put up with her husband's egotistical flights of fancy. Surely Stanley Kubrick studied Le Plaisir because Le Masque appears to withering effect in Eyes Wide Shut, his own vision of marital discovery, yet Ophüls's touch is far more delicate than either Kubrick's or de Maupassant's, worldly without being jaundiced, and it is typical of his complexity that the adaptation remains faithful to the writer's words while at the same time indicting the male egos in search of pleasure at the cost of a woman's suffering.
Ophüls's sympathy for women corseted within patriarchal grids is
even more evident in the second episode, La Maison Tellier. The
virtuosic crane shot inspecting the outside of a Paris bordello, gliding from
window to window with the Madam (Madeleine Renaud), suggests the missing link
between similar maneuvers in Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise and
Argento's Tenebre,
though the movement has the subtly constricting effect of surveying a
dollhouse, with the women inside not only objects of pleasure for the male
customers, but also objects of contemplation for the audience. Ophüls slyly
hints that gender exploitation has become so ingrained into society that the
cathouse is essential to keeping stability; on the Saturday night that the
doors are closed, fights break out among men as the respectable pillars of society
line up by the shore to bitch and moan. It's the first Communion of Madam's
niece, so the jolly hookers take the day off to visit her family on the
countryside. The pastoral vistas away from the city make this the most
Renoirian of the episodes, a connection further clinched by the casting of Jean
Gabin as Renaud's earthy-peasant brother, whose daughter's church ceremony the
next day doesn't keep him from taking an interest on one of the girls, Danielle
Darrieux.
Again, Ophüls's own view differs from de Maupassant's, who went out of his way
to depict the women as coarsely and stupidly as he could, staging their
encounters with the rural community for derisive divisiveness. By contrast,
Ophüls visualizes their presence in church as a profound mingling of the sacred
and the profane, and his camera takes transcendental flight, literally.
Diagonal tilts follow the beams of light, lyricizing the physical distance
between religious statuary and human attendees, between spectacle and audience,
and, most importantly, between an image seen and an emotion felt. Contemplating
their own lost innocence, the women give in to the waves of feeling, spiritual
rupture is evoked via pure motion, and a sublime 360° pan brings it all
together into emotional community.
Back out in the fields, they savor one last meal before having to return to
town, until Gabin makes a wine-fueled pass at Darrieux and brings things to a
halt. Still, Gabin is the most sympathetic of the director's male characters,
his lechery an open and ultimately good-hearted impulse, free from the
hypocritical sheen of the city men who visit the Madam's gals while professing
moral superiority—indeed, one of the movie's most affecting shots follows
Gabin's lonely ride home after dropping the women at the train station. The
crane movement is reprised to close the segment, again inspecting the
bordello's windows, only this time the activities inside can only be seen
through semi-closed shutters, another view of whirling pleasure that, for all
the merriness, can only scream entrapment.
It is typical of the misunderstanding of the director's gaiety that this
episode was shuffled around to close the English-narrated version of the film,
the concluding twirl around the house sold as a happy ending. Ophüls's original
format, capped by the third segment, Le Modèle, is necessary for the
crystallization of the previous themes, and for the final dissection of the
nature of pleasure. The briefest of the episodes, it is also the most
lacerating. "Possession is always followed by the disgust of
familiarity"—it could be Peter Coyote talking in Polanski's Bitter Moon,
only it's Jean Servais, the narrator, finally given human shape as the jaded
friend of painter Daniel Gélin. The model of the title is Simone Simon, who
first meets and captivates Gélin in an art gallery, a site of frozen beauty.
"I adore your movements," he tells her, yet even in their first
moments together he is happiest when molding her into poses for his canvas,
immobilizing her into objects of visual plaisir. His colleague's dictum is
promptly honored, and Gélin soon grows bored and aloof with Simon—the early,
exhilarating lateral pan right in the night of the exposition is reversed,
harrowingly, to the left later on as the trajectory of a domestic row, capped
by the couple's shattering of their own reflections in a mirror.
Le Plaisir illustrates not merely Ophüls's unparalleled sense of flow
and texture, but also his proto-feminism. His later films often take a male
narrator, and, as noted Douglas Pye noted in a Senses of Cinema article,
the film spends considerable time, through visuals, contradicting the
all-controlling patriarchal voice. When Servais speaks of feminine
"directness of sentiment," he (and, therefore, de Maupassant) means
it condescendingly as inferior to male rationality, for women are meant to be
seen rather than heard, felt up rather than felt. That Simon refuses to be
discarded by her lover's wandering interest points to the film's structure of
awareness of and rebellion against the controlling gaze, the last progression
from the passivity of the wife in the first episode and the spiritual
epiphanies of the women-for-rental in the second episode. No longer kept in
rigid poses, the model is dumped unceremoniously by the artist—bursting into
Gélin's atelier, Simon is goaded into jumping out the window, and, for the only
time in the film, Ophüls's camera shifts into point-of-view for the swan dive.
Both legs broken, she forces Gélin into marriage, a grotesque victory that,
paradoxically, seals her freedom. In a society built on the oppression of a
gender, where pleasure is not only ephemeral but one-sided, Ophüls says, female
assertion can only erupt through such dreadful acts of revolt. "Life is
movement," but, as the narrator can only conclude, "Happiness is no
lark."
Le plaisir: Life Is Movement Criterion essay by Robin Wood
Le plaisir (1952) - The Criterion Collection
Criterion Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
Le plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952) Gonzolaz from Reading Cinema
Le Plaisir (1952) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
PopMatters (Marijeta Bozovic) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B+] also seen here: d+kaz . Plaiser, Le Review
VideoVista review Lucinda Ireson from Second Sight
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [3.5/5] Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (Jeffrey Kauffman) dvd review [5/5] Criterion Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection
Metroactive.com [Michael S. Gant] Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict (Daryl Loomis) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray] Criterion Collection
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FilmExposed dvd review Matt Kelly
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
Turner Classic Movies review Michael T. Toole on Peter Ustinov
Paste - DVD Review Andy Beta briefly reviewing 3 Ophüls films
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE…
aka: Madame De…
Madame
de... Dave Kehr
Certainly one of the crowning achievements in film. Max Ophüls's gliding camera follows Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica through a circle of flirtation, passion, and disappointment, a tour that embraces both sophisticated comedy and high tragedy. Ophüls's camera style is famous for its physicalization of time, in which every fleeting moment is recorded and made palpable by the ceaseless tracking shots, yet his delineation of space is also sublime and highly charged: no director has better understood the emotional territory that exists offscreen.
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
As the earrings of Madame de... take a treacherous route from one owner to the next, an entire world comes to life, the world of the French aristocracy during the Belle Èpoque, particularly the interior world shared by Madame de... (Danielle Darrieux), her rigid husband (Charles Boyer) and her soft, charming lover (Vittorio de Sica). Max Ophuls' masterpiece, easily one of the greatest films ever made, has all the trappings of romantic cinema, but its fluid camera takes us beyond the film's glittering surfaces ("only superficially superficial," as Boyer so aptly puts it) to the raw feelings surging beneath--and ultimately into the spiritually redemptive territory of grand passion. Darrieux, Boyer and de Sica did their greatest work in this towering film. "Perfection." -- Pauline Kael.
Ophüls' penultimate film, indulging a characteristically tender irony in its adaptation of Louise de Vilmorin's novel, is - even by his standards - exceptionally elegant in its rendering of its fin de siècle Paris milieu of ballrooms, the opera, and dashing young military officers paying their attentions to the unnamed heroine (Darrieux) of the title. The story concerns this beautiful woman's adulterous affair with an Italian diplomat (De Sica), with a pair of earrings playing an implausible and extraordinary role in their relationship. What is particularly brilliant about the film is the way Ophüls constantly draws attention to this improbable plot device, to allow a distanced and unmoralistic meditation on actions and their consequences. Also fine is the sumptuous decor, photographed in superb monochrome, and there is a particularly good performance from Boyer as the discreet 'wronged' husband.
All That Glitters Isn't Golden in Quintessential Ophuls
Max Ophuls (1902–57) is the auteurist's auteur. A director whose distinctive visual style and sustaining interests dominate movies he made in five countries and in as many languages, Ophuls epitomizes a particular worldview. Even as his long, intricately choreographed takes made the flow of time into something material, so his movies were often meditations on an irretrievable past.
The scion of a German-Jewish dry goods business, Ophuls (né Oppenheimer) defied his family to become first an actor and then a stage director in Vienna; although he began his movie career in Weimar, Germany and worked most prolifically in France and the U.S., Ophuls is the most Viennese of filmmakers. He taught the camera to waltz, often through a 19th-century city that, no matter its name, seems a glittering simulation of the Hapsburg capital.
The Earrings of Madame De . . . (1953), showing in a
sparkling new 35mm print for two weeks at Film Forum, is quintessential Ophuls.
Virtually every shot is a dolly and, although made in
Having overspent her allowance, the Comtesse Louise de . . .
(we're never given her family name) decides to sell the diamond earrings that
husband General Andre de . . . (Charles Boyer) gave her as a wedding
present—and thereby hangs the tale. Over the course of the movie, the jewels
pass back and forth between the characters, their value rising according to the
emotional meaning invested in them. Louise pretends to have lost them at the
opera; unbeknownst to her, the earrings find their way back to the general who
regifts them to his departing mistress who, losing at roulette, pawns them in
The circulation of these diamonds recalls La Ronde (1950), Ophuls's cause-célébre adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's play, in which a case of syphilis is passed from lover to lover. Simultaneously embodying precise social relations and priceless sentiment, the earrings equally suggest a Marxist riff on the nature of desire. (That the movie's English-language distributor added "earrings" to the movie's original title, Madame De . . . , has served to force such readings.) Last seen, however, the earrings have come to signify Louise herself.
Has there ever been so shallow a character whose fate is so tragic? Playing opposite two aging matinee idols, Darrieux is a natural coquette—not above strategic fainting spells—and undeniably lovely. With her upswept hair, bare shoulders, and impeccable posture, she blossoms from her gown like a single tulip in an Art Nouveau vase. Ophuls famously directed Darrieux to "incarnate a void," and one of the movie's great shots makes this literal (and also emphatic as, rather than moving his camera, Ophuls employs the motion of an object within the frame). As Louise goes on a trip, her train pulls out of the station, leaving the general, who has just seen her off, standing in a misty emptiness.
These characters have manners beyond mannerism. Almost every line has a double or even opposite meaning. When she's with the baron, Louise several times repeats, "I don't love you, I don't love you." But, as she actually does, he will cease to believe her. Vacuous as she is, Louise is always acting except when an unexpected surplus of emotion cues us that she isn't. Late in the day, the general tells her that he has always resented the role in which she cast him. Desperate to regain her love, he presents her once more with the earrings, only to discover that she has never loved him.
On one hand, Madame De . . . is all surface and style; on the other, it conveys real loss. The three principals ultimately drown in the giddy whirlpool of Ophuls's inexorable tracking shots. When the general tells Louise that their marriage is "only superficially superficial," he might be speaking about the movie and, indeed, Ophuls's entire oeuvre. Although the filmmaker is romantic enough to match cut from a flurry of torn love letters to the falling snow, the subtlety of other gestures seems more characteristic of Japanese than Western cinema. And the displacements are kabuki: Whether or not Louise and the baron ever consummate their love, their feelings are made amply (even shockingly) apparent at the two balls where they swoon in each other's arms as if they were the only people in the room.
Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris didn't agree on much but they did
find common ground when it came to The Earrings of Madame De . . . .
Writing in a small literary magazine in 1961, Kael used the word
"perfection" to characterize Ophuls's refined sensibility. And, some
15 years later, Sarris called Madame De . . . his candidate for
"the greatest film of all time." The greatness of Ophuls's official
masterpiece is that one can appreciate these sentiments even if one doesn't
necessarily share them. Much as I admire Madame De . . ., I prefer
Ophuls flawed: His mangled
The Earrings of Madame de . . . :The Cost of Living Criterion essay claiming greatest film of all time by Molly Haskell, wife of Andrew Sarris
The Greatest
Film of All Time: Ophüls’ Madame de … Is Coming Back to Town Andrew Sarris from The NY Observer,
Andrew Sarris & Lola Montès: A Brief History Film Forum, where Sarris also claims Lola Montès is the greatest film of all time (pdf)
The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953) - The Criterion Collection
Max Ophuls: A
New Art – But Who Notices? • Senses of Cinema Tad Gallagher, October 4, 2002
“… Only Superficially
Superficial”: The Tragedy of ... - Senses of Cinema Adrian Danks from Senses of Cinema, March 21, 2003
Derek
Malcolm's Century of Films Max Ophuls:
Madame De, by Derek Malcom from The
Guardian,
MDEarringsMmede Movie Diva
Heart-Shaped World:
“The Earrings of Madame de…” Sean
Axmaker from Parallax View,
House
Next Door [Steven Boone]
The New York Sun [Nicolas Rapold]
Madame de... (1953) James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
stylusmagazine.com review David Pratt-Robson
Madame de... (Max Ophüls, 1953) Gonzolaz from Reading Cinema
The Ophuls
Maneuver: The Earrings of Madame De... :: Stop Smiling ... James Hughes from Stop Smiling magazine,
Catching the Classics [Clayton L. White]
Film Notes -The Earrings of Madame De. . . Kevin Hagopian from the NY State Writer’s Institute
Madame de... Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
AvaxHome -> Max Ophuls - Madame de... (The Earrings of Madame de ...
VideoVista
review Lucinda
Ireson from Second Sight
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd
review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion
Confessions
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
The QNetwork
[James Kendrick] Criterion
Collection
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd
review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion
DVD
Verdict (Christopher Kulik) dvd
review [Criterion Collection]
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Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [4/4]
Film School Rejects (H. Stewart) dvd review [A-] also seen here: Cinepinion [Henry Stewart]
FilmExposed
dvd review Matt
Kelly
Eye for
Film (Nicola Osborne) review [3/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
The New Yorker [Anthony Lane] capsule review
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Paste
- DVD Review Andy Beta briefly
reviewing 3 Ophüls films
The Earrings of Madame de... Reviews Janus Films web page
Madame de... (Directors Suite) (1953) MichaelDVD
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [6/6]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times review A.W.
Max Ophüls, The
Earrings of Madame de... - Film - New York Times Dave Kehr from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
LOLA
MONTÈS
France
max ophuls Tracking
Eternity: Max Ophüls Moving Pictures,
from Walter Reade retrospective June 25 –
When this masterpiece opened, police had to be called to put down
riots, so confused and enraged were those who first watched it. In 1963, Andrew
Sarris dubbed LOLA the greatest film ever made--and it's surely an arguable
position! Ophuls' exhilaratingly composed screen--in color and
CinemaScope--magnifies the story of legendary courtesan Lola Montès (Martine
Carol). Long after her larger-than-life romances with aging King Ludwig (Anton
Walbrook), Liszt, and a handsome young student (Oskar Werner), Montès is
reduced to a circus display, with ringmaster Peter Ustinov acting as a director
who both exploits and adores his "muse.": The tabula rasa of
Martine's mannequin-like face and the turntable vignettes of her rich past are
the stuff from which movie magic is somehow unreeled. In the inexorable
circularity of Ophuls' mise-en-scène lies both the tragedy and transcendence of
human existence: he makes you believe that art and style make timebound
mortality matter. One of the great examples of the French cinema's provocative
bent for identifying Woman with Film.
Time Out Tony Rayns
A biography of the
celebrated 19th century adventuress, but not a biography in the conventional
sense: the lady's life is chronicled in a highly selective series of
flashbacks, framed by scenes in a New Orleans circus where she allows herself
to be put on show to a vulgar and impressionable public. The space between her
memories and her circus appearance is the distance between romantic dreams and
tawdry reality, or between love and the knowledge that love dies. Ophüls
conjures that space into life - indeed, makes it the very subject of his film -
by means of the most sumptuous stylistic effects imaginable: compositions
unmatched in their fluidity, moving-camerawork that blurs the line between
motion and emotion. If ever a director 'wrote' with his camera, it was Ophüls,
and this still looks like his most sublime work. [Note: Shot in three separate language
versions - French, German and English - this was premiered at around 140
minutes, but subsequently much recut. The English version - The Sins of Lola
Montes in the US, The Fall of Lola Montes in GB - ran 90 minutes,
but is seldom seen now. Prints of the French and German versions currently in
circulation are approximately 112 minutes. - Ed].
Agnes Poirier Lola Finally Gets Her Close-Up, from The Guardian,
Marcel Ophüls will always remember the afternoon of
Speaking before a screening at
The producers started re-editing the film behind Max's back. Soon, nothing remained of his complex narrative, or of the powerful soundtrack. Max Ophüls died a year later, and for generations Lola Montès has been known as the "doomed masterpiece".
Now, 53 years on, the film has been restored to its original
glory. At the
Elegantly rendered film of exceptional grace and beauty.
From a technical perspective this motion picture can be said to do no wrong.
It's one of the first great uses of widescreen and Technicolor. The continual
highly choreographed movements required very difficult camera movements - pans,
tracks, and tilts often in combination - but are all captured with such agility
they seem effortless. The sets are intricately weaved into these shots,
foreground and background details not only provide beauty but interact with the
characters/shots, regularly yielding new designs. Ophuls was one of the
greatest architects, but that strength also has downsides such as the
characters coming off as nothing more than puppets. That often plays into
Ophuls theme though, his films show external beauty but interior shallowness, a
world where no amount of opulence brings happiness. Lola (Martine Carol) is
sometimes very independent and outspoken, when she's free, but she's usually a
kept woman. We first see her in her lowest state in an exploitational circus
act that recounts her past scandals, and through a series of flashbacks we see
earlier incarnations where she belonged to men of great power and wealth, even
a king. The same ideas are often repeated, but shown from two different
perspectives; the circus representing the absurd and the flashbacks the more realistic.
Some have claimed there's great psychology here, but that the film is not as
captivating as it could have been because of a poor lead performance. To me
this is largely a stylistic exercise and Carol is no more or not less than
she's asked to be. The problem is the film is designed for her to be another
set piece rather than a three dimensional human being that's being explored.
Carol's name value was required to get investors to put up the then exorbitant
$1.5 million, so maybe if Ophuls had a different actress the film would have
been better. Certainly Joan Fontaine delivered a lot more in Letter from an
Unknown Woman, but Lola Montes would have had to be a quite different film, and
maybe then some of its visual energy and creativity would have been sacrificed.
Slant Magazine
[Fernando F. Croce]
Even before Andrew Sarris fanned the flames of auteur-theory wars
by proclaiming it to be the greatest film of all time, Lola Montes had
always been an object of controversy. Extravagantly over-budgeted, heavily
edited after hostile French screenings, and released in three different
languages, it was from the start designed as an all-or-nothing gamble, an
attempt to use its novelettish subject as a codex for everything its maker, Max
Ophüls, stood for. As such, the filmmaker's obsessive concerns with the passage
of time and female beauty (and its exploitation) take center stage—literally in
this case, as the story unfurls largely in the three-ring arena of a
19th-century circus. The main attraction at the center of the swarming trapeze
artists and costumed dwarves is the eponymous heroine (Martine Carol), an aging
courtesan whose sole claim of fame, a list of illustrious lovers during her
youthful romps throughout
As sawdust-and-tinsel reenactments of past scandals parade before her, Lola's
memories flood the screen. From her early days as an eager ingénue to her
flings with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg) and King Ludwig of Bavaria (Anton
Walbrook), her path is obscured by dreams and romantic impossibilities,
visualized by the breaking up of the widescreen with pillars, veils, color
filters, nets and frames within frames. It is this romantic drive, however,
that helps Lola through her life's many ascensions and declines: A royal
mistress turned sideshow freak, she is pelted with tawdry questions and sells
kisses for dollars yet regrets none of her decisions as a woman ensnared by the
trapdoors of love. "My life is whirling before me," she confides to
her assistant between circus acts, and Ophüls's overpowering camerawork,
forever tracking, circling and gliding, maps out an existence keyed to the
vertiginous highs and lows of emotional fantasies. Her ringmaster-husband
(Peter Ustinov) may crack the whip, but it's Lola, contemplating her life from
her platform, who, not unlike Simone Simon's spurned model at the end of Le Plaisir, defies objectification by
remaining true to her feelings even at the edge of the abyss.
A bodice-ripper invested with the profundity of a Stendhal novel, Lola
Montes is also, even more than La Ronde, Ophüls's definite commentary on
movie-watching. It's surely no accident that the circus arena, with its opulent
chandeliers, choreographed movement and behind-the-scenes clutter, is very
transparently a movie set, a self-reflexive contraption which, as Lola sits on
a revolving stage and is consumed by the eyes in the dark, seems to both exalt
and engulf the heroine. It's here that Martine Carol's lack of charisma in the
title role becomes an advantage: Many think she gives the film a hollow center,
but I believe her limitations are necessary for a part that crystallizes the
audience's own role in the cinematic process, that of projecting their own
desire onto celluloid surfaces. The Earrings of Madame de… is a smoother and
more precise valse romantique, but Lola Montes is Ophüls's boldest
vision of film as a medium that reveres beauty in order to both nurture and
mock dreams. After their own sobering affair with the film, viewers are left to
echo Liszt's compliment to Lola: "Thank you for the illusion."
Lola Montès - From the Current Andrew Sarris for Criterion
Ophüls
Proves Prophet With Prodigious <i>Lola Montès</i> | The New ... Andrew Sarris from The NY Observer,
The Greatest
Film of All Time: Ophüls’ Madame de … Is Coming Back to Town Andrew Sarris from The NY Observer,
Andrew Sarris & Lola Montès: A Brief History Film Forum, where Sarris also claims Lola Montès is the greatest film of all time (pdf)
“Greatest film
ever” or just eye candy? “Greatest film ever” or a cream cake? Andrew O’Hehir
from Salon,
Lola Montès • Senses of
Cinema Rodney Hill from Senses of Cinema, May 5, 2006
Lola Montes - Features
- Reverse Shot Chris
Wisniewski, December 21, 2011
DVD Times Gary Couzens
DVD Outsider L.K. Weston
Los Angeles
Film+TV - Lola Montes: Revered and Reviled, Max Ophuls ... J. Hoberman from LA Weekly,
Lola
Montès (1955) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
EyeForFilm.co.uk Nicola Osborne, also seen here from
Kinocite: Lola Montes
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson]
Lola
Montès Michael E. Grost from Classic
Film and Television
Construction
Zone Michael Turvey from Artforum magazine,
Max Ophüls' LOLA MONTÈS previously at Film Forum in New York City
Lola Montès 1955 filn notes (pdf format)
User
comments from imdb Author: FloatingOpera7 from
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• View topic - Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955) Criterion Forum
Sunday 18 Emmanuel Burdeau at Cannes from Cahiers du Cinéma
What Lola Wants : The New Yorker Richard Brody
projectfilmschool.org » 2008 » October
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
DVDBeaver Restored comparison [Gary Tooze]
Cinema is Dope » Movies: Lola Montes (1955) a few photos
LOLA MONTES / Max Ophuls (1955) - Peter Ustinov & Martine Carol ... more extraordinary photos
Excerpt from 1955 essay on Lola Montès François Truffaut essay from Film Forum (pdf format)
Truffaut’s homage to Ophüls and Lola in Shoot the Piano Player Film Forum on YouTube video
Andrew Sarris & Lola Montès: A Brief History Film Forum (pdf)
The Reel Thing XX: Program Abstracts brief restoration info
Article more restoration info
Lola Montez Wikipedia
The Real Lola Montez (pdf format)
Lola Montèz’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn
MONTPARNASSE 19
aka: Les amants de Montparnasse (Montparnasse 19)
The last year (1919-20) in the life of tubercular, alcoholic artist Amedeo Modigliani. Visually it's surprisingly bland - and what's the sense of making a film about a painter in b/w? - but Becker's humanism is unwavering, even when confronting such stereotypes as the rich American philistine or the uncomprehending working man. Creativity is viewed matter of factly, as an affair of sheer hard work. And while the scenes to do with Modigliani's string of selfless, supportive women tend to be repetitive and slightly irritating, they are redeemed by Lilli Palmer's performance as Manchester poet Beatrice Hastings and by the casting of the elegantly elongated Anouk Aimée, the perfect bride for a Modigliani. The project was initiated by Max Ophuls, then taken over by Becker when Ophuls died. The film was attacked by Ophuls' collaborator Henri Jeanson for its alterations to the original scenario, hence the absence of a writing credit.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
A transitional film
(1958, 108 min.) between the French “tradition of quality” and the New Wave,
this slick biopic about the last year or so in the life of the painter Amedeo
Modigliani (the title alludes to the bohemian quarter and the year, 1919) is a
highly personal effort by one of the idols of the New Wave generation, the
neglected Jacques Becker (Casque d'or, Le trou). At once clunky,
overproduced, and naive, it's also sincere and moving, in spite of its faults
as a statement about the gulf between serious artists and marketers. It's both
helped and hindered by its glamorous cast: Gerard Philipe, Anouk Aimee, and
Lilli Palmer. Jean-Luc Godard memorably defended this film when it came out by
writing, “Everything rings true in this totally false film. Everything is
illuminated in this obscure film. For he who leaps into the void owes no
explanations to those who watch.” In French with subtitles.
User comments from imdb Author: hasosch from
I am convinced that only those people can really appreciate this movie whose
title is either "Modigliani", "Les Amants De Montparnasse"
or "Montparnasse 19", who are aware that the last year of life of the
Italian-French painter Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) who died with 36 years,
was played by Gérard Philipe, who was lethally sick during the shooting of this
movie and died shortly after its release, 1959, with 36 years - on one of the
two diseases that Modigliano had himself and exactly in his age. Further, this
movie was directed by Jacques Becker - after the sudden death of Max Ophüls.
Becker, too, died only 2 years after this movie. Since it is clear that Philipe
knew that his days were counted and since one can assume that also Becker knew
about his own few remaining months, this movie, suddenly, does not look like
kitsch anymore. I just would like to mention that famous scene, where
"Modi" says: "Jeanne, on the other side, there will be eternal
joy, isn't that so, Jeanne?". Philipe's tears are probably real. In
another famous scene, where Modi is going to be humiliated by an American
billionaire, he quotes Van Gogh: "I have to drink a lot to get that
splendid yellow back that I found last summer". These words could be
Philipe's own words. Fassbinder who dedicated his movie "Despair"
amongst two others to Van Gogh called this phenomenon "A Trip Into The
Light".
It is a famous as well as sad fact that his contemporaries put as many
obstacles as they could in the way of Jacques Becker, so that he was able to
realize only a good dozen of movies. Today, half a century after Becker's
death, "Modigliani" is still not available. The only American VHS
edition is long out of print, and one pays horrendous prices for a copy. And
the worst: not even in
Montparnasse 19
(1958) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Cinematic biographies of famous artists are not a rare
phenomenon, but few such films manage to evoke the acute sense of despair and
injustice that
It is a deeply pessimistic but honest film. You can think of so many artists who have suffered a similar fate to Modigliani. His work was shunned and ridiculed during his lifetime, but within hours of his death, the art-dealers were out in force, crawling all over his works. The final scene of this film makes the point very effectively – it is a painfully tragic ending, and one which makes you feel both sad and angry.
The film itself had something of an eventful journey in production. It was originally to have been directed by the legendary director Max Ophüls, but he fell seriously ill and could not continue the project. He suggested that Jacques Becker, another great director, should direct the film in his place. Ophüls himself died just a few days before the film was released.
This is easily one of Becker’s better films. As in his
earlier film, Casque d’or , he manages to recreate the
And who better to play Modigliani than Gérard Philipe? An acting legend in his own lifetime, Philipe was the archetypal modern romantic hero – not the dashing, suave hero in the mould of Jean Marais, but a more human, slightly cynical kind of romantic hero. Watching his performance in this film you might think he was made for the role of Modigliani – it is certainly one of his best screen performances. Christian Matras’ masterful photography captures a real feeling of torment and despair in Philipe’s face – you can tell that the actor had a profound understanding of the artist’s psychology. But what makes his performance so memorable – and so moving – is the knowledge that Gérard Philipe himself died within just a few years of making this film – aged just 37 (in fact, the same age as Modigliani). This gives a disturbing tragic resonance to what is in any event a stirring film.
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Oplev,
Niels Arden
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON
TATTOO (Män som hatar kvinnor) B+ 91
Another impressive European film that is something of an audience favorite, perhaps this year’s TELL NO ONE (2006), a popular film that hung around all summer long, as both are intelligent, well-acted, and stylish thrillers distributed by Music Box Films that keep the audience on the edge of their seats. The title itself is terrible, and instead translates to MEN WHO HATE WOMEN, which is perhaps too bold, but is much more appropriate to this story, a decades long murder mystery filled with grisly murders balanced against an intriguing, off color love story. The film opens as a top notch journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is being sentenced to 6 months in prison for libel and is immediately whisked away from his family Christmas dinner to meet secretly with a millionaire business tycoon, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) in a remote island location where Vanger wants him to search for his missing for 40 years, presumably killed niece, but only after his libel case had been thoroughly investigated by a computer expert, a young punkish Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) who has found no evidence of any wrongdoing, but instead everything suggests a frame. Of interest, the niece always made him a birthday gift of crushed flowers, and those gifts have continued to be sent from various corners of the earth ever since she went missing. Vanger believes his is a hateful family, one of whom is likely the murderer with a sadistic interest in continuing the birthday reminders of her absence. With 6 months before his sentence begins, Blomkvist has nothing to lose and resigns from his magazine to begin his investigative work. Simultaneous to his mounting evidence, a parallel story reveals Lisbeth has hacked into his computer and is following his every lead, eventually sending him a significant missing clue, which, of course, he traces back to her. Her skills at uncovering secret evidence are unmatched, so he convinces her to join heads and the two stories merge as one.
With a kind of LAST TANGO IN
The dark and at times horrendous story is told with a brisk pace, advanced by clues, impeccable computer searches and interviews, but especially intriguing are negatives of old photographs which they blow up and scan, becoming a movie within the movie, where they uncover unsolved murders and follow the leads, leading them to various sexually gruesome murder sites across the country where something potentially connects to this case. As they get closer, the inner circle of the Vanger family become more and more suspicious and paranoid, as they all appear to have something to hide. The actual island estate is filled with architecturally stunning homes that are especially foreboding in the winter ice, with a few former Nazi’s living inside, men who have little respect for human life and will go to any extent to protect what they have. There’s plenty of suspense and psychological tension in this taut drama where a near secret sexual relationship coincides with a family’s near secret past. Something has to give, and when it does, it will carry the force of forty years of lies and cover ups, something dark, twisted, and repulsive, yet undetected throughout that entire period of time. Noomi Rapace, especially, is a real discovery, as her hostile yet vulnerable character is shrouded in secrets as well, but she’s actually looking for a way to believe in something better, yet all around her she is held back by deeply disturbed and detestable men who have turned her life into a living hell, isolated, alone, but an aggressive force, even as she sleeps with Blomkvist, a man who senses danger with every move, that only grows more acute as he draws closer. It’s one of these cool sophisticated crime fiction thrillers that’s gorgeous to look at, that relies on intelligence and a multitude of clues, where a heavy streak of brutal sadism lurks underneath the sexual intrigue between the major players. By the end, it may feel like something out of the Bourne conspiracy series, but this investigative team is smart, sexy, and unusual enough that they could return for an encore.
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [4/5]
Every so often, you get the gift of watching an under-the-radar actor bloom into a critical-mass phenomenon before your bloodshot eyes: Franka Potente in Run Lola Run, or Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. Add Noomi Rapace to the list; what she does with the title character of this Swedish thriller-cum-pop-lit-adaptation will spawn cults of swooning Rapacephiles stat. Of course, the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s Scandi-noir best-seller—the first volume of his megapopular “Millennium” trilogy—was hardwired for instant iconic status, but let’s not damn with faint praise. After watching this wispy young woman dig her talons into the goth-garbed, bisexual biker-chick hacker Lisbeth Salander, you’ll have witnessed a star being börn.
Lisbeth is just a piece of director Niels
Arden Oplev’s deep, degenerate puzzle, even if she eclipses everything
around her. A disgraced journalist (Nyqvist) is hired to investigate a
decades-old mystery; photographs contain clues, biblical passages are codes,
and the scribe and his pierced, pixie-ish sidekick race around trying to find
out whodunit. Oplev himself speeds through the story’s plot twists like he’s on
deadline, but importantly, the filmmaker nails the book’s indictment of the
sexual-predatory vibes seemingly embedded in
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review [3/5]
This is part of the mega-selling Millennium Trilogy of gruesome crime novels by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Originally (and pertinently) entitled Men Who Hate Women, this first story has now been adapted for the screen and finds its way to the UK having already become a European box office smash; the other two have also been filmed and their release here will presumably depend on how this is received. For what it's worth, I predict healthy returns. It is a forensic procedural with explicit violence, sex, sexual violence, violent sex and crime-scene photos of the sort that were once never shown, then just glimpsed and now blandly lingered over in every detail.
Michael Nyqvist plays Michael Blomkvist, a reporter facing an unjust prison sentence for criminal libel. Before his jail term starts, he is hired by a wealthy industrialist to solve the mystery of a niece who disappeared 40 years before, and who, poignantly, once babysat Blomkvist as a boy. He uncovers a string of hate crimes, and teams up with a super-sexy badass computer hacker with emotional issues called Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), the eponymous tattooed girl. This film is probably too long, and it's only after the first hour that the narrative engines are properly revved, but director Niels Arden Oplev really socks it over. A must for the existing fanbase: others might have preferred it in two or three TV episodes.
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (John Patterson) review also seen here: The Village Voice [John Patterson]
Essentially a locked-room mystery with lashings of gore and
sexual brutality, Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
disguised the simplicity of its narrative by embedding it within an almost Balzacian
depiction of Swedish society, warts and all (but mainly warts). Niels Arden
Oplev's adaptation relies more on the mystery, but has two complex, compelling
leads driving its story. Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist), a disgraced investigative
journalist, is asked by industrialist Henrik
Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the
disappearance of his niece from a family reunion 40 years ago. A finite number
of suspects emerge, mostly members of Vanger's hugely dysfunctional dynasty:
aged Swedish Nazis, venal old aunts, creepy brothers and cousins. Blomqvist
teams up with Lisbeth Salander, who is the true star of
Larsson's books, a state-raised, quasi-autistic computer hacker with a
horrifying past and an alarmingly black-and-white sense of morality. Played by
Noomi Rapace—the real discovery here—Salander is a walking time bomb of
injuries and resentments. Together they disinter the Vanger family's grotesque
secrets, while somebody—a still-active serial sex-murderer, perhaps?—uses
increasingly violent methods to try to stop them. An elegant contraction of the
novel, discarding Blomqvist's sexual bravado and thus saving Larsson from his
own worst tendencies, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo may be a
shallower experience than the book, but it has a headlong velocity all its own.
Catch it before the inevitable
The Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Sukhdev Sandhu
Oh
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, whose original and more potent title was Men Who Hate Women, begins with Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), an investigative journalist dedicated to exposing corporate crime, facing jail for libelling a wealthy tycoon. Unexpectedly, he gets a call from aristocratic industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) and is summoned to a palatial rural residence to be told about the murder of the old man’s niece Harriet (Ewa Froling) in the mid-1960s. Her body was never found and no one was ever prosecuted: can Blomkvist help?
Real help comes in the form of an androgynous, bisexual,
computer-hacking twenty-something called Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). She’s
a walking mystery; tense, tiny, apt to get into fights. She’s also, for reasons
that aren’t clear at first, financially reliant on a brute of a guardian.
Sharing a hatred for the old men whose ruthless, money-grabbing grip on power
gives the lie to the fiction of
Rapace is the real star of the film, carrying the action and compelling our attention much more than Nyqvist’s passive (literally so, as is shown in one head-scratchingly funny sex scene) and rather inhibited character. She’s never more dangerous than when she’s under attack, lashing out with a bottle at youths who attack her in a subway, exacting artful revenge against one of the bastards who exploits her. Something has happened to her – something that Larsson explains to readers in subsequent volumes of the “Millennium trilogy” – that makes it unclear whether or not she’s suffering from Aspergers syndrome. What’s going on in her head is the film’s real mystery.
Racism, patriarchal misogyny, globalization: director Niels Arden Opley gives all these hefty themes their due in this largely faithful adaptation that short-changes its source text only in the limited attention it pays to Blomkvist’s long-standing affair with a fellow journalist at his magazine. When it comes to pointing the finger of blame at modern-day Sweden, it turns out that the culprits are individuals as much as they are economic or political systems: the bad guys, unquantifiably more wicked than anyone could have imagined, represent a blue-blooded clan that, rather like the Winshaw family in Jonathan Coe’s novel What A Carve Up!, has been poisoning Swedish society for many decades.
If that makes this drama, scripted by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, feel a little synoptic, like the kind of twisty and rather twisted saga you might expect to see on television, that’s probably because it’s been constructed from material shot for two television movies. All of which means, in spite of its dark subject matter, it tweaks and extends the thriller genre to less startling or mysterious effect than another Swedish film, Let The Right One In, did to the vampire-genre flick.
Still, the wintry photography is consistently atmospheric, the sense of cultural scabs being picked at interesting, and Rapace’s performance altogether more thrilling than any that can be imagined from Kristen Stewart, Natalie Portman or any of the mooted co-leads in the promised Hollywood remake.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) Lisa Mullen, April 2010
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
theartsdesk.com [Graham Fuller]
PopMatters (Chris Barsanti) review
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
“The
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”: A bigger, darker Swedish ... - Salon Andrew O’Hehir
The Onion A.V. Club review [A-] Tasha Robinson
Eye for Film (Jennie Kermode) review [4.5/5]
Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez] a vote of dissension
The Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Eye for Film (Nick Da Costa) review [3.5/5]
Digital Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) review [B+] also seen here: Briandom [Brian Orndorf] and here: DVD Talk
RopeofSilicon (Brad Brevet) review [B-]
Screenjabber review Doug Cooper
Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
Film.com (Christine Champ) review [A-]
hoopla.nu review Stuart Wilson
Big Picture Big Sound (David Kempler) review [2.5/4]
Noomi Rapace interview: the world’s most seductive sleuth David Gritten interview with the star actress from The Daily Telegraph, February 18, 2010
Stieg
Larsson: author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Iain Hollingshead from from The Daily Telegraph,
Entertainment Weekly review [B] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The Hollywood Reporter review Sheri Linden
Variety (Boyd van Hoeij) review
Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [3/5]
The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo director lashes out at US remake Andrew Pulver from The Guardian,
Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo director attacks Hollywood remake Ben Child from The Guardian, November 9, 2010
The Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
The Boston Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
San Francisco Chronicle [Walter Addiego]
Los Angeles Times [Betsy Sharkey]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DEAD
MAN DOWN B- 80
Even
the most damaged heart can be mended. Even the most damaged heart. —Darcy (Dominic Cooper)
Though he built his career on made-for-TV movies in Denmark, director Niels Arden Oplev made an international splash with his highly inventive take on the opening chapter of Stieg Larsson’s The Millenniun Trilogy, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009), which also introduced a generally shattering performance by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, also seen in Beyond (Svinalängorna) (2010), where in both performances she plays a bitterly angry survivor of childhood trauma. In his first experience working in America with a budget that for this film alone may exceed all of his other films put together, featuring a terrific cast, the film is bound and determined to deliver the obligatory Hollywood explosive sequences, which have become so routine and standardized in American big budget entertainment that anything without it is likely called an indie film. Something out of the revenge genre, this action thriller focuses on two emotionally wounded characters who have each survived a horrible ordeal, yet both have eyes on obtaining revenge, becoming not only obsessive but maniacally driven to exact their own brand of justice. Colin Farrell, where you’d have to go back to IN BRUGES (2008) to find a performance this stylishly intense, plays Victor, a Hungarian immigrant looking to establish a new life in America, but his wife and daughter were killed under mysterious circumstances, becoming a low level gangster for the corrupt mobster Alphonse (Terrence Howard) who had his family killed, where he is believed dead as well, but changed his identity. Living on the same floor in the high rise building across the way is Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), where the two meet by strangely seeing one another from their respective buildings. Beatrice is disfigured, especially on one side of her face, from an auto accident caused by a drunken driver that she continues to rage against with open hostility, as he only served three months in jail. Living with Beatrice is her diminutive mother, Isabelle Huppert no less, speaking broken English and French, looking after her adored daughter by baking cookies, maintaining her good humor, and occasionally putting a smile on her daughter’s face. Both are the kind of women who simply take over your life with a zest for living most of us are incapable of experiencing, where Beatrice opens Victor’s eyes when he wasn’t even looking.
Using strange flashbacks that aren’t even initially
understood, Victor repeatedly stares at his computer screen watching home
videos of his wife and daughter, dead to the world in more ways than one as
he’s completely unresponsive to most people, so his best friend is fellow
gangster Darcy (Dominic Cooper), a nervous and fidgety guy who’s also a nonstop
blabbermouth given a second chance at life by his generously understanding wife
and newborn, suggesting “even the most damaged heart can be mended.” This understanding clicks in Victor’s brain,
as he’s obviously on a circuitous route to hell and damnation, where he has his
apartment set up as a surveillance lab, with tapped cellphones where he can
hear every conversation within Alphonse’s inner circle and a secret room hidden
behind the refrigerator that offers photos, memorabilia, and other clues about
each of the gangland players, like a commemorative memorial, even though they
are still alive. This is an indication
of Victor’s mindset, however, as in his head they are already dead. Initially we think he may be a cop
infiltrating this gang, watching every move they make, until eventually we
realize the convoluted path this picture is taking by making Colin Farrell a
one-man wrecking crew, a Rambo-like killing machine with designs on
revenge. When he finally meets Beatrice,
her burning need for revenge is not so hard for him to understand, though the
film reaches a hysterical level of anxiety when she blackmails him with
cellphone video footage of him killing a man in his apartment, vowing to turn
it over to the police unless he executes the driver who mangled her face. Once you understand Victor’s detached
emotional level is on par with Rambo, Sylvester Stallone as scorned
Written by J.H. Wyman, one of the feature writers of J.J. Abrams’ current sci-fi TV series Fringe (2008 to present), and shot by Paul Cameron, a co-cinematographer of Michael Mann’s COLLATERAL (2004), the film has a sophisticated, European arthouse look, with plenty of well composed shots from unusual angles, mixing dilapidated buildings, empty warehouses, and plenty of street action along with conflicting stories about gangland killings, mysterious letters with cryptic messages sent to Alphonse with only partially completed photos, where Alphonse initially targets who he thinks is behind it all, blowing away an entire detail of criminal drug operators in the process, which draws the ire of none other than mob boss Armand Assante, a legendary gangster figure and Emmy winner playing John Gotti, who has also been receiving the same letters, which couldn’t have been sent by anyone from his drug unit after they were already killed, sending him into a furious rage, where both men have to find a leak in their organization. In a sequence out of SAW (2004 and counting), Victor has a bound and blindfolded hostage that he’s keeping in an abandoned warehouse, one of the Albanian killers that actually murdered his wife and child. In fact, this guy has so many events going on at once, with his buddy Darcy continually blowing in his ear on his cellphone, filling him in on the latest developments, where most would be hard-pressed to keep track of them all, juggling a developing romance in between all his other gangster interests, all seemingly impossible, yet these various projects do amp up the intensity level, even if the viewer finds much of it preposterous. But this typifies what passes for Hollywood entertainment, where men have to rise to the level of superheroes, showing the capabilities of Rambo, where a huge part of the appeal are the special effects sequences blowing things up and high risk, showdown moments of blowing people away. With terrific acting performances on display throughout, including an interesting twist featuring the European talent of Rapace, Huppert, and Assante, not to mention a director that knows how to build suspense, the redemptive love interest of damaged souls may simply be too much, turning more existential, as there’s plenty more carnage yet to come. Despite the unpredictable twists and turns, there are too many holes and improbabilities, including scenes that make little sense, left dangling in midair as if something significant was edited or left out, yet overall, as an action and psychological thriller with a fixation on revenge, the well developed characters keep things interesting.
Dead Man Down | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Trevor Johnston
Finding a dead body in a freezer has crime boss Terrence Howard feeling even more uptight than usual. Somebody, somewhere, is stalking him, and loyal cohort Colin Farrell is among the team assigned to track down the miscreant. Farrell – he of the furrowed brow – has other issues to contend with, however, including troubled neighbour Noomi Rapace as a scarred beautician with her own vengeful agenda. So begins a way-too-leisurely thriller whose destination is fairly obvious from early on, but to which the talented cast apply themselves with effortful seriousness. We appreciate how they give the characters a semblance of dimensionality, yet the script is wilful to a fault, and Danish director Niels Arden Oplev (like Rapace, a veteran of the original ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’) overdoes the portentous suggestiveness while keeping us waiting for genuine excitement. Two hours of fractious, would-be arty idling is more than enough, so thank goodness for French actress Isabelle Huppert, delightfully dotty as Rapace’s cookie-baking maman. In all her long and distinguished career has she ever previously uttered the word ‘tupperware’?
Dead Man Down | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin
Dead Man Down, the grimy English-language directorial debut of Niels Arden Oplev, who helmed the Swedish adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is really two forgettable films, dimly battling for supremacy. The marginally more promising one is an action melodrama about Noomi Rapace (also from the original Dragon Tattoo), a troubled young woman who was physically and emotionally scarred in an accident, attempting to blackmail a low-level hoodlum (Colin Farrell) into murdering the callous judge who hit her with his car. The second, more muddled, less promising B-movie is an insanely involved quest for vengeance against an entire criminal outfit that’s only slightly less time-and-labor-intensive than the manhunt for Osama bin Laden documented in Zero Dark Thirty.
The always-dependable Colin Farrell stars as a steely-eyed gangland enforcer with a dark secret. His life changes when Rapace, the mysterious, scarred woman who lives across the street, reveals that she witnessed him committing a murder, and says she’ll turn him in unless she commits a murder on her behalf. Farrell is understandably reluctant, as he has shadowy, vengeance-minded business of his own to attend to, involving Machiavellian boss Terrence Howard.
Dead Man Down doesn’t tip its hand about its ultimate subject until late in the film. It takes forever to get going, unspooling its hopelessly convoluted, unwieldy plot for so long that it loses whatever marginal narrative momentum it possesses. The film shows a rare, illusory spark of life in a deceptively electric sequence where the full extent of Rapace’s soul-consuming hatred seeps out in an exhilarating burst. In this moment, and pretty much this moment alone, the film runs hot with emotion; otherwise, it’s clammy and oddly detached, in spite of the operatic themes at play. Dead Man Down exerts an unconscionable level of effort for minimal reward: It aspires to exquisite world-weariness, but just ends up feeling exhausted by its frenzied yet fruitless exertions.
Trashy action thrillers have long been a staple of the American moviegoing diet. The genre is dependably, unflinchingly derivative, its sole well worn, like that of an overworked shoe, holes and all. The action pic has been whittled down to a formula, easily replicated in labs by men in suits checking off boxes, recycling the same narratives, themes, and characters ad nauseam. And its audience is nearly as reliable. So, when something like “Dead Man Down” comes along, it deserves heaps of praise just for being so unique. Not all of it hits its mark, but when the picture starts to gain momentum at the hour mark, its distinctiveness sets in. And it’s almost startling.
“Dead Man Down” sees Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev (director of the original “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”) helming a script by J.H. Wyman (writer for TV’s “Fringe”). An uncharacteristically stoic Colin Farrell stars as Victor, a thug-for-hire working for a sleazy crime boss, Alphonse (Terrence Howard). Farrell broods in the background of the first few scenes, speaking only four words in the first fifteen minutes of the film. It’s a smart choice, allowing us to accept the character as a focused but broken man, always keeping an eye on his surroundings – quite a reach from Farrell’s chatty turns in fare like “Phone Booth” and “In Bruges.”
When Alphonse begins receiving threats via mail (think “The Riddler”) and one of his crew members is killed, he begins the hunt for his mysterious adversary. Dominic Cooper offers support as Darcy, a fast-talking friend and co-worker of Victor’s, while Noomi Rapace co-stars as Beatrice, a pretty but disfigured neighbor who often waves at Victor from her balcony.
Beatrice’s facial scars, the result of an accident with a drunk driver, have cost her her job and her well-being. When she accidentally witnesses Victor strangling a man in his apartment, she sees an opportunity for revenge. She decides to get to know her neighbor, ultimately producing a video of the aforementioned scuffle, using it to extort him. If Victor kills the drunk driver, she won’t go to the cops. As convoluted as this might sound, it’s only a jumping-off point for the rest of film. And while the director is guilty of dramatic whiplash early-on, revving up the action via loud music and quick cuts before slamming on the brakes, the best is saved for later.
The film is written and shot unlike most actioners, ripe with uncomfortable silences and thoughtful shot compositions. As the narrative’s twists and turns reveal themselves, the characters grow – particularly Victor and Beatrice – and what began as an exploitative relationship turns into something more. No, the screenplay doesn’t become overly saccharine, but the players’ motivations are entirely believable, even if their circumstances are not.
Some will criticize the story as a wholesale lift of “The Punisher,” minus the costume. And it is. I had no trouble imagining Tom Jane in one of the lead roles. But beyond some of the clichéd plot machinations, the picture never holds the viewer’s hand. It treats the audience like adults and allows the actors to play their roles multi-dimensionally – a rarity in this kind of picture. Portions of the film are downright elegant in their staging.
The shootouts are serviceable, but they don’t need to be any stronger when the character work is this strong. Some of the dialogue is less than ideal and some of the story beats don’t make a lick of sense, but as a whole, this is strong work by everyone involved. If you find yourself bored between the first and second acts, hang in there. The second half is far more illuminating, and the conclusions of the two main arcs are undeniably satisfying. And as much of a surprise as the film’s successes are, the involvement of WWE Films is even more enigmatic. It’s hard to say what their involvement was beyond producing the film, but it’s certainly the best project that they’ve had their name on to date. Not much of an accomplishment, I know. But “Dead Man Down” is very worthy of action fans who crave a bit more from the genre.
Review: 'Dead Man Down' Is A Surprisingly Satisfying ... - Indiewire Drew Taylor from The Playlist
Dead Man Down Jeff Nelson from DVD Talk
Dead Man Down (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Bleak Noir: 'Dead Man Down' | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Moviefreak.com [Sara Michelle Fetters]
Dead Man Down Review: Exactly What You Think It Is, and ... - Pajiba Amanda Mae Meyncke
Mark Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Movie Review - 'Dead Man Down' - A Gang-War Drama That's ... - NPR NPR Radio
DEAD MAN DOWN Review | Collider Matt Goldberg
Combustible Celluloid Review - Dead Man Down (2013), J.H. ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Dead Man Down | Review | Screen John Hazelton from Screendaily
FilmFracture [Anthony Taormina]
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
User reviews from imdb Author: carrotbun from United States
User reviews from imdb Author: GoneWithTheTwins from www.GoneWithTheTwins.com
User reviews from imdb Author: del91 from Penang, Malaysia / Chicago, USA
Dead Man Down: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
Movie review: 'Dead Man Down' - A&E - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Review: 'Dead Man Down' twists itself into knots - Los Angeles Times Betsy Sharkey
Dead Man Down - Movies - The New York Times Manohla Dargis, also seen here: 'Dead Man Down,' Starring Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace
SPEED
WALKING (Kapgang) B+ 90
Denmark (108 mi) 2014 Official
site
Director Niels Arden Oplev, whose made-for-TV version of the opening
chapter of Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium
Trilogy, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009), introduced the world to
Noomi Rapace while exceeding all expectations when it literally demanded an
international release, is back in Denmark after working in the United States
for several years on the less than inspiring Dead Man
Down (2013) with this uncharacteristically tender coming-of-age comedy
based upon Morten Kirkskov’s somewhat autobiographical debut novel Kapgang.
Reflective of a culture that prides itself on being the world’s
fairest and most sensible people (not withstanding Shakespeare’s dour portrait
of Hamlet, written by an Englishman,
or Lars von Trier, a narcissist and egomaniac who thrives on being the center
of the world’s attention), who are certainly not above going on raging drunken
benders, and can be coarse and vulgar and utterly
foolish at times as well, but by the next day things are back on an even
keel. According to Denmark
in the International Encyclopedia of Sexuality, Denmark became the very first country to legalize pornography
in 1969, where people have free access to porn, sold in most convenience stores
and movie rentals, where prostitution is not a criminal offense and is rare
among minors, and television channels initially broadcast hardcore pornography
free and uncoded at night. In the 1970’s
sex education in schools became mandatory while abortion was
legalized. In this era of sexual
liberalization, the story is set in the mid
1970’s in the small town of Sonder Helpful on
the Jutland
peninsula, where 14-year old Martin (Villads Bøye) is one of his school’s
better speed walkers, an Olympic event also known as racewalking,
where the toe of the hind foot must remain on the ground until the forward heel
lands out of the air. It’s an odd sport
with an ungainly body movement, where legs and arms are often seen moving in
different directions. Nonetheless, like
any sport, there are winners and losers, and according to his coach, Martin
shows promise of winning the upcoming regional race.
Martin is on the team with his best friend Kim, Frederik Winther
Rasmussen, where they’re at the age where boys play plenty of practical pranks
on one another in the locker room, like making outrageous sexual allegations,
teasing someone about having sex with an ugly girl, or snapping their towels at
defenseless naked bodies in the shower, often aiming for their private
parts. In this manner, undiscovered
words are often added to their vocabulary while also generating a healthy
interest in sex, which is pretty much all boys think about at that pubescent
age. The opening is mixed with tragedy
and absurd humor, as Martin notices the flags are being lowered to half-mast
without knowing who died. As usual,
Martin rides his bike home from school listening to the radio which is playing Nazareth’s soulful “Love Hurts” (1975) Nazareth - Love Hurts -
YouTube (3:36). On the street people
turn and stare in unison, which he attributes to his singing, while many are
also lowering their flags, but once home he’s told the sad truth about his
mother. While he thought she was sick
with the flu, it turns out she died from cancer. His father is completely distraught, hasn’t a
clue how to raise his own children, including meals, as that was the exclusive
domain of his wife, while older brother Jens (Jens Malthe Næsby) wears
sunglasses around the house to hide his continual tearful outbursts. For Martin, however, life goes on, where he
immediately seeks the comfort of a local blonde named Kristine (Kraka Donslund
Nielsen) to take his mind off his troubles, as both are in the same class about
to be confirmed in just two weeks. While
initially she agrees to a hug and kiss out of sympathy for his mother’s death,
she quickly realizes he’s got a crush on her and is interested in more, which
sparks her own desires, where she all but promises to sleep with him after her
confirmation when she’s considered an adult.
Meanwhile, Martin and Kim discover a pile of porn magazines and make do
with practice sessions, a literal rehearsal for the real thing, exactly the
kind of innocent boy on boy scene that would never be shown in American cinema,
as we remain too prudish in our sexual hang-ups.
At the funeral service, where Martin nearly jumps into the grave after
his mother, it’s only then that the realization that she’s actually gone kicks
in, as he’s been in denial, trying not to think about it, shifting his thoughts
to Kristine whenever he can. At the
community dinner afterwards where everyone has had plenty of stiff drinks, one
man, Rolf (Jakob Ulrich Lohmann), gets a bit too frisky with another man’s
wife, so Martin calls him on it, tells him he’s crossed the line of bad conduct
and asks him to leave. In stunned
silence, the adults are a bit embarrassed by their own collective apathy, but
Martin’s father, the kind of guy that stands up to no one, stands by his son
ordering the drunken man to leave. It’s
in Rolf’s rambling drunken remarks that rumors start to spread that Martin’s
father has already found another woman (the hairdresser) to take the place of
his wife, offensive remarks when repeated back to Martin, so he devises a plan
with Kim and Kristine to spy on his father, literally catching him in the act,
a rather hilarious moment of pathos, as he looks so pathetic. His soul-searching, confessional response to
his boys afterwards about how he promises to change his life for the better
couldn’t be more laughably surprising, as Oplev does an excellent job balancing
Danish humor with tragedy, as this is ultimately a serious tale of a young
boy’s grappling to find his way into an adult world, struggling through his
awkward love and fragile sexuality. Martin’s loss of his mother is seen as
something that he simply must overcome in a story filled with sadness, grief
and growing sexual awareness. While his
grandmother’s candid comments are overly bitter and hostile, and the boys trip
to a pitifully excluded town homosexual is hurtful and mean, everything in the
picture leads up to Martin’s sprawling confirmation party, the day he
supposedly becomes a man, plied with alcohol, the object of honorary speeches,
yet he remains as sexually confused as ever, where his world has simply been
turned upside down. He’s left in a
strange place between dark drama and disturbing comedy, where adolescence seen
in this light is uncensored, frank, and often devastating, where Martin’s own
coming-of-age reflects the world around him coming to terms with this newly
discovered sexual openness, where reality and fantasy have little in common
except the urge to experience both. Love
is not just a bottle of booze and a few porn magazines, where crudeness must
give way to a gentler approach, beautifully expressed when Kristine teaches
Martin how to kiss a girl properly, taking her feelings into
consideration. It’s a sweet initiation
helping him navigate his way through this Brave
New World.
Speed
Walking | Chicago Reader Ben Sachs
A small-town boy approaching his religious confirmation discovers
the weird, wild world of sex, experimenting with girls and boys, spying on his
widower father as the old man screws his hairdresser, and even paying a visit
to the local child molester. This icky comedy takes place in 1976, and director
Niels Arden Oplev (who did the Danish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) never
lets you forget it: the movie is so laden with period kitsch that it feels like
a spoof. (I was a little surprised that none of the characters owned a pet
rock.) As in Tattoo, the storytelling is almost slick and engaging
enough to distract from the rampant misanthropy. If you have any moral compunctions
about explicit sex scenes involving underage actors, stay far away. In Danish
with subtitles.
In a quirky, small town, situated in the outskirts of everything, 14-year-old Martin is getting ready for one of the most formal transitions from boy to man; the communion. It's 1976, music's in the air and hormones are blossoming. But in the midst of it all Martin's mother suddenly passes away and her tragic death trickers a series of events that not only changes Martin's life forever, but also affects everyone else in the local community. Overwhelmed with grief neither Martin's dad, nor his older brother, is capable to comfort Martin. He enters adulthood in a mixture of drunken happiness and immense sadness over the loss of his mother, and his relationship to both his friend Kim and girlfriend Kristine comes to its natural conclusion.
ciff-day-2-algren-and-red-army
- Sound On Sight Brian Welk
From The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden
Oplev is this ‘70s coming of age drama about Martin, a 14-year-old boy who has
unexpectedly lost his mother to cancer. Martin’s mother is widely loved in his
town, but Martin seems to be handling it better than his dad, who he suspects
is already seeing someone else, and his older brother, who clings to his
mother’s belongings. Her death looms large over other big moments in Martin’s
life, like training for a speed walking race and discovering his sexuality
along with a girl and friend. It’s a polished, surprisingly mature story, but
it raises some red flags that tow the line between teenage naiveté and
insensitivity. Speed Walking doesn’t fully grapple with Martin’s curious
sense of discovery and leaves some depth on the table. And speed walking in
high ‘70s jeans looks notoriously silly.
Film
Excess: Speed Walking/Kapgang (2014) - Funny and ...
Martin is soon getting his
confirmation (a Christian rite-of-passage for teenagers), but when he comes
home one day, he has lost his mother to cancer. In the time after this loss,
Martin is also very interested in a girl in the neighborhood. And a boy.
Set somewhere in the 1970's, Speed
Walking is a sweet, fun, unpretentious and charming coming-of-age dramedy.
- Surprisingly amusing and with very fine acting by debuting actor Villads
Bøye as the boy Martin and the two other kids, Kraka Donslund Nielsen
and Frederik Winther Rasmussen. Backing them up are some wonderful adult
Danish actors: Especially Sidse Babett Knudsen (Borgen (2010-13))
is a treat, and her delivery is flawless and particularly funny if you
understand Danish. Anders W. Berthelsen (Mifune/Mifunes Sidste
Sang (1999)) is great as the unprepared father, and Kristian Halken
(Dark Horse/Voksne Mennesker (2005)) makes a good, vague country
priest.
The film is very light, almost
unserious in its dealing with some real issues, - but only almost. It doesn't
carry any terribly heavy themes with it. - It's just a fine, very good time,
and that's welcomed.
It is directed by Niels Arden
Oplev, whose mega-hit The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Män Som
Hatar Kvinnor (2009) led him to make the American mega-flop Dead Man
Down (2013). He has announced an interesting-sounding mystery thriller as
his next feature with the title Deity.
CIFF
2014: Speed Walking | Cinema Scandinavia
Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
returns to
Over the course of a few, rough weeks, fourteen-year-old Martin (Villads Bøye) navigates a fluid, burgeoning sexuality, processes grief after the sudden death of his mother, and competes in a speed walking competition. The year is 1976 in this Jutland-set story of a boy adapting to his country’s rapid transition to a more liberal era.
Writers of coming-of-age films sometimes forget (or maybe choose to ignore) that growing up can be a pretty screwed-up experience. Sure, young hearts get broken over first loves all the time in the movies, but there’s a wild sort of destructiveness to childhood that’s not always captured on-screen. The ideals and pitfalls of the adult world are sometimes imposed on adolescents before they’re ready for it.
Oplev decided to adapt this story for the screen before
Lead actor Villads Bøye gives a bold, first-time performance as Martin and dares to hit every note Oplev asks of him. The process of grieving his mother’s death takes him through denial, anger, and hysterics, and each step rings true. Bøye is flanked by his older brother who struggles to move past the denial phase, and his father, who is at a total loss for how to raise a family on his own.
Oplev shot the film in eight and a half weeks on a four million dollar budget and clearly took great delight in designing a film that takes place in the 70’s. The American rock soundtrack includes hits like The Knack’s “My Sharona,” making this portrait of self-discovery during an imperfect childhood a perfect blend of “Dazed and Confused” and “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” The only lingering question is what the speed walking tie-in is all about, to which Oplev remarks, “It’s kind of a stupid sport…but it was popular at the time.” Speed Walking is a consistently hilarious, all-around worthwhile effort – a real highlight of Danish cinema in 2014.
Speed Walking -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oppenheimer,
Joshua and Christine Cynn and anonymous
THE
ACT OF KILLING B 89
Denmark Norway Great Britain
(116 mi) 2012 Director’s Cut (160 mi) Official
site
It is forbidden to kill.
Therefore, all murderers are punished,
unless they kill in large numbers,
and to the sound of trumpets.
—Voltaire
In
Southeast Asia, as in other places, dictators appoint rats and cockroaches as
their executors, and they live to tell their tales. This experimental documentary is a horror
show, a dagger, a guillotine, a confession box in an insane asylum. It’s also a very frightening lesson on history
and how we remember it.
— Kong Rithdee
The
essence of real state terror is when people don’t know they’re afraid anymore.
—Ariel Heryonto, Indonesian writer
First of all, let me say that I’m of the opinion that it was a mistake to make this film, as the director believes that telling the story of Indonesian Genocide from the point of view of the perpetrators was a sacrifice he had to make, as otherwise there would be no film. Had he attempted to tell the story from the point of view of the victims, the military would have forbidden any interviews from taking place, and would likely have confiscated any film. So perhaps a film is not the way to go in getting this information out to the world. After all, it wasn’t a film that exposed the tortures at Abu Ghraib or the flood of cover-up lies in Watergate, but solid newspaper reporting. This is actually a story where the director collaborates with the perpetrators and offers them a forum in allowing them to reenact their most heinous crimes, when they assassinated as many as two and a half million communists in 1965-66. Imagine making a post-war Nazi film where the filmmaker allows the Nazi’s to restage some of their most grisly atrocities in front of a camera, literally bragging about their actions, and even dragging in their wives and children and grandchildren to see how proud they are about what they’ve done. Reminiscent of the feeling one gets when watching Leni Riefenstahl’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (1935), something is morally deplorable about the idea of a film that would showcase brutal killers and then allow them to recreate in their own cinematic style how they visualize their role, seen jubilantly watching themselves onscreen afterwards where they continue to think of themselves as heroes in their nation’s history, yet they razed entire villages, raped and tortured, and committed government sanctioned ethnic cleansing, while no one has ever been charged with war crimes.
Oppenheimer was present at the screening, showing for the first time the
full-length, two hour and forty minutes Director’s Cut in Chicago (where the shorter, more compact version may
have a greater impact as it does feel more focused), and suggested
that at least in his mind, he made the film for the victims and their families,
and for human rights supporters, as only in this particularly twisted and
gruesome way would this chapter in Indonesian history ever be told. According to Oppenheimer, no one in Indonesia
had ever been told anything about what happened to all the missing persons in
1965, and as ironic as it may be, the murderers, in their zeal to proudly showcase
their anti-communist hatred, reveal exactly how they systematically murdered,
including thousands of beheadings, several million communists, union leaders,
ethnic Chinese, intellectuals, and social activists, becoming a
disturbing psychological portrait of killers who are motivated not by ideology,
but by wealth and stature. Perhaps even more
egregious is the
The American born director educated at Harvard has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims to explore the relationship between political violence and the public interest. Oppenheimer’s family is Jewish, many of whom perished in the Holocaust, where he has developed a highly unsual view of human forgiveness, including befriending one’s enemies, whether it be mass torturers or the Gestapo, recognizing that evil has always been part of the human condition and is something that needs to be confronted and reconciled. This film actually grew out of an earlier film, THE GLOBALISATION TAPES (2003), a documentary film about workers on an Indonesian Palm Oil plantation, many of whom have been stricken by horrible forms of cancer from working with such toxic chemicals and many also lost family members to the genocides. While they were never allowed to talk about 1965, it’s also notable that in this film, no one speaks for their lost voices either, as they continue to remain silenced. Again in a written article, their voices would be heard, largely incorporated into the fabric of the story and able to comment on this monstrosity that we witness in this film, which focuses solely on the killer’s point of view, allowing them to boast about their crimes, where these men are gangsters and former street thugs who escaped punishment and are now some of the richest and most feared men in a rampantly corrupt country still run by a military state. Of particular interest is the list of anonymous names in the final credits, as people are still afraid of repercussions, including one of the co-directors. When Oppenheimer initially began seeking out interviews with the killers, literally finding upwards to a hundred, within minutes they all began boasting about their accomplishments, which caught him completely by surprise, as usually one fears reprisals for admitted acts of murder, but these men continue to speak with impunity, and even appear on a nationwide talk show in a particularly grotesque segment. The film is a stark contrast to Rithy Panh’s autobiographical The Missing Picture (L'image manquante) (2013), where he recounts the Cambodian Genocide from the victim’s point of view, as he lost his entire family, and the film is a reverential tribute to the missing.
The suggestion, of course, is that this film gets at the heart of what’s so disturbing, perhaps even more than any regular documentary film, which this certainly isn’t, as it’s a deeply unsettling film that exposes the mass murders that took place in Indonesia in 1965, while allowing the murderers themselves free access to express how they did it, reopening deep wounds from the past, where perhaps the point is that it is necessary and worthwhile to unearth these atrocities. The men parade themselves in front of the camera with a kind of juvenile delight, which is a mix of the surreal, such as the dreamlike opening musical sequence that suggests all is right in the world, where colorfully clad dancing girls emerge from a giant fish, where offscreen a director’s voice shouts at them to keep smiling. This is the lead-in to what amounts to a welcoming into the delusional world of the killers themselves, seen openly riding through the streets like anointed war heroes, pointing out the buildings where people were tortured and murdered in mass numbers, actually bringing the cameras to the exact sites where the murders took place. The focus of the film is largely centered upon one character, Anwars Congo, now a family man and stately grandfather, seen early in the film dancing the cha-cha-cha, claiming he used to beat people to death but there was too much blood, so he refined the process, using a wire around their necks instead, something he learned from watching American gangster shows on television, showing the viewers how it’s done. While Anwar still has nightmares about what he did, haunted by the eyes of the dead that continue to seek him out at night, so he tries to forget by using alcohol, marijuana, or ecstasy, breaking out into song, where his friend responds “He’s a happy man.”
Anwar’s sidekick is Herman Koto, a larger-than-life figure whose chubby frame is often unadorned, a long-haired gangster feeling very comfortable in his skin, but also a goofball character who dresses in outlandish costumes in drag during the fantasy musical numbers, and never does he let this effect his overly macho masculinity. Herman was too young to participate in the murders, as he was only 10 at the time, but he emulates their status as the nation’s heroes and tries to be like them, bathing in the glory of their past successes. Added to this group is Adi Zulkadry, one of the gang of killers that belonged to a select team called the Frog Squad. While these three may be the main protagonists, others join in when Anwar and his friends are asked to dramatize their roles before the cameras and show just what happened. By turning the camera on the perpetrators themselves, the director then lets them tell their own story, which is far more effective than conducting interviews, as the dramatic impact couldn’t be more chillingly appalling. Perhaps the viewer keeps waiting for the standard documentary to take shape, but Oppenheimer instead takes us into the heart of darkness of these men’s Hellish imaginations, and then leaves us there, where each recreation of events becomes even more nightmarishly horrendous than the last. Adi is concerned that this movie will alter history and shift the blame onto them, changing the dynamic 180 degrees, as in the past they tried to pin the communists as the bad guys, where in real life they’re the wretchedly horrible creatures. But it’s this image of themselves that they boast about and pride themselves on, as people are right to fear them, which is how they stay in power, as they are remorseless and show no moral boundaries whatsoever. These are men capable of doing anything.
Anwar shows a fondness for John Wayne westerns, Elvis Presley musicals, and gangster thrillers, where the sheer flamboyance of their reconstructions reflects a fascination with the glitter period mixed with B-movie horror, where seeing Herman dressed in red glitter, belly exposed, wearing thick eyeliner and a giant headdress is sure to generate audience laughter, as these guys are so over-the-top, it goes far beyond absurd. It would be hard to imagine guys like Herman Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joseph Goebbels (or even lower level prison guards more reflective of these guy’s actual rank in the making of the genocide) conjuring up something this deplorably theatrical, taking this kind of unadulterated glee with themselves while doing it, where this obviously allows a certain catharsis to take place. What’s perhaps most intriguing is how these men have continually lied and deluded themselves (and their nation) for decades, shielding themselves with this fabricated vision of heroic truth so that they don’t have to face up to what they really are, cold blooded killers. While one grows almost sick of the unchecked egos on display, it’s also hard to look away, as where else can genocide be expressed in this manner? It feels mocking and highly exploitive, as if these guys are rubbing our noses in their immunity from prosecution, waving their own banner of freedom, but perhaps this indulgence goes too far, as it is certainly drawing the world’s attention. While there is no notion of redemption for Anwar and his cohorts, one is left with a sense that Anwar is somewhat revolted by what he sees reflected back onscreen, and has perhaps even renounced the violence of his past by the end of the film, a mysterious acknowledgement of wrongdoing that recalls the infamous ending of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE (1996), one of cinema’s most profound use of reenactment. Oppenheimer allowed his film to be streamed online for free in Indonesia, where on the first day there were more than 6500 viewers. The government’s secrets have inexplicably been revealed, where gangsters and thugs have been charading as freedom fighters, but are little more than murderers and assassins, where really the modus operandi in Indonesia is to rule by fear and intimidation, using the Pancasila Youth much like the Ton Ton Macoute in Haiti during the Papa Doc Duvalier era, where the government pulls out their heavily armed goon squad whenever they wish to suppress the opposition and strike fear into the hearts of all citizens, who continue to live under threat of arrest and persecution, while corruption rewarding the guilty parties remains rampant throughout every level of government.
According to Oppenheimer, “They’re desperately trying to run
away from the reality of what they’ve done.
You celebrate mass killing so you don’t have to look yourself in the
mirror in the morning and see a murderer.
You keep your victims oppressed so that they don’t challenge your
story. When you put the justification—the celebration—under a microscope, you don’t
necessarily see a lack of remorse, but you start to see an unravelling of the
killers’ conscience. So what appears to
be the symptom of a lack of remorse is in fact the opposite. It’s a sign of their humanity.”
Postscript:
While the film is bafflingly grotesque
and astonishingly gruesome, not to mention often ridiculous, it may lead to a
Nobel peace prize nomination for its director, which would be a first of its
kind, as it’s hard to find another film that’s had such an immediate effect on
a nation’s developing history. But the
hopefully profound effect of the film’s release in Indonesia has led to mixed
reviews, perhaps slower in coming than the West would like to believe, largely
because it implicates the people who continue to retain power, also the
politically connected paramilitary group, the Pancasila Youth. So the film can only be viewed secretly in
Indonesia, mostly in small gatherings, where no one wants their names to appear
on lists of people to be picked up by police for questioning. As a result, the producers have initially
been showing it through underground, invite-only screenings rather than submit
it to the national censorship board for approval, which will likely come after
the film’s theatrical run around the world is over. Despite the hopes that the nation would
undergo a massive social transformation in response to the film’s revelations,
in effect calling for throwing all the bastards out of office as they
participated in war crimes, this has simply not happened, but the next
scheduled Presidential elections, where a new President must be elected, are
coming up in July, 2014.
According to Dina Indrasafitri from The Jakarta Post, September 30, 2013, What
next after 'Act of Killing'? | The Jakarta Post:
Noted scholar Ariel Heryanto from the Australian National University said at the conference that before TAOK was released, he had anticipated controversy and even a possible change of mind-set among Indonesians regarding the violence.
This, however, did not happen. “The film
falls well short of generating the controversy in Indonesia that it deserves,
particularly when compared with the impact it had on its international
audience,” Ariel said.
According to Ariel, several planned private screenings in Indonesia had been
cancelled due to lack of interest. Some viewers even walked out of the film
before it ended, while others thought TAOK glorified its protagonists.
“If Indonesian viewers do not react to The
Act of Killing with the same emotions as their international counterparts,
the reason is not simply fear in expressing their voice,” Ariel said. “Rather,
it is because news about preman-ism [gangsterism], vigilante behavior and their
boasting impunity are all too common in everyday life.”
The lackluster response could also be attributed to changing times, according
to Ariel. “Indonesia has also had a new generation of young adults who were not
subjected to the vigorous anti-Communist witch hunt that ran during the height
of the New Order.”
An increasing number of young people had little or no knowledge about the 1965
massacre, Ariel said. “Worse still, to many of them its not immediately clear
why they should.”
According to Carolyn Cooper from Guernica magazine, June 13, 2013, Caroline
Cooper: The Act of Seeing The Act of Killing - Guernica / A ...:
Indonesian history books and government-backed narratives continue to explain the 1960’s purges in terms of defense and national sovereignty. Until Suharto’s 1998 fall, the state’s own bloody, slasher-style propaganda film, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, reinforced the idea that the nation was saved from communist terror. Indonesian schoolchildren under Suharto’s New Order regime were forced to see that film at least once per year.
“It is not particularly good or convincing acting,” recalled Indonesian journalist Dina Indrasafitri. “But imagine being seven years old seeing that movie. And seeing it every year afterward. That is a pretty early introduction to bloody scenes and propaganda.” […]
But Indonesia has been far slower to reckon with the earlier period of tremendous violence. “The reason for the inaction is that [current] President [Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s] father-in-law, Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, was responsible for initiating the killing,” Professor Adrian Vickers, a University of Sydney expert on modern Indonesian history, wrote in an email. “So he’s unlikely to do much.” […]
To date, the biggest number of simultaneous, private screenings in Indonesia occurred on December 10, 2012, International Human Rights Day, when an estimated fifty clandestine screenings in thirty cities took place. Oppenheimer estimates that, as of April, roughly three hundred covert screenings have happened in ninety-three Indonesian cities reaching up to fifteen thousand Indonesians.
“That’s not a huge number in a country like Indonesia,” he said. “But the film is like the kid in the emperor’s new clothes, pointing at the king and saying look, the king is naked. Everyone knew the king is naked but was too afraid to say so.”
Oppenheimer expects The Act of Killing will be banned by the country’s censorship board, to which he will have to submit the film to get it into Indonesian theaters. Although the country has fairly robust laws protecting freedom of print and online media, film censors continue to monitor what is shown in the theaters.
“If they ban the film, that will be a litmus test as to whether the government has any real commitment to ending impunity and to freedom of expression,” Oppenheimer said.
If the film is banned, Oppenheimer plans to upload it to the Internet so that it can be freely viewed. “We will encourage it being pirated,” he said. The film will be submitted to the censorship board following its global theatrical run.
According to Jean Duval from In
Defense of Marxism, July 19, 2013, Indonesia: Review
of “The Act of Killing” - In Defence of Marxism:
A special attention is given in the documentary to Pemuda Pancasila, a paramilitary youth movement and its relation to the state. Pemuda Pancasila (PP) is a million strong (3 to 5 million) militia composed of gangsters (‘preman’), petty criminals and youth of the informal sector and organised crime (extortion of Chinese traders). Pemuda was an attempt to create a mass organised base for reaction against the youth of the PKI, Pemuda Rakyat (People’s Youth) in the 1960’s. They were particularly active in North Sumatra (Medan and Aceh) in slaughtering communists. It is linked to the party of the dictatorship, Golkar. This movement still exists today as you will be able to see from the documentary. What is their role then today? Jusuf Kalla, the vice president of Indonesia, gives a straightforward answer in a speech shown in the documentary. In front of a meeting of cadres and political supporters of PP he explains:
“The spirit of Pancasila Youth, that some people accuse of being gangsters. Gangsters are people who work outside of the system, not for the government. The word gangster (‘preman’ in Bahasa Indonesia) comes from ‘free men’. This nation needs ‘free men’. If everyone worked for the government, we’d be a nation of bureaucrats. We’d get nothing done. We need gangsters to get things done. Free, private men, who get things done. We need gangsters, who are willing to take risks in business. Use your muscles! Muscles aren’t for beating up people. Although beating people up is sometimes needed. [laughter and applause in the hall].”
On another occasion, at a mass gathering of PP, the chairman of PP, Yapto Soerjosoemarno, delivered a speech in front of thousands of PP members and government officials, and once again highlighted the basis of the PP’s existence:
“All members of Pancasila Youth are heroes, from exterminating the communists, to fighting neo-communists and left-wing extremists, and those wishing to break apart the nation.”
It would be a mistake to think that PP is a militia made of lumpen elements from top to bottom. The leaders of PP are mostly highly educated people, with political and business ties. Yapto is a lawyer who finished his education in the Netherlands. He also owns a number of companies. His father, a retired Major General, is a member of the Javanese nobility. Here we see how gangsterism, militarism, capitalism, and feudalism in Indonesia form a complex interdependent network.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Christy Le
Master
Grotesque, absurd, and stunningly strange,
THE ACT OF KILLING is a full-bodied treatise on violence, as it's imagined,
organized, and performed. One of its directors, Joshua Oppenheimer, spent years
working with survivors of political violence in Indonesia and in the process
developed a robust frame on the region's terrifying history of paramilitary
control. The movie follows a few aging members of one of the country's death
squads, the Pancasila Youth—chiefly one man, Anwar Congo—as they live now,
enjoying the privilege afforded to victors. Adding a layer to the story, the
filmmakers collaborate with the killers to create filmed re-enactments of the
murders they committed. Oppenheimer, his collaborator Christine Cyn, along with
a rotating cast and crew of Indonesian people, participate in a bizarre creative
process. The work required simultaneously engages the history of the murders
and evokes rich portraits of the murderers themselves as they conceptualize and
perform their own artistic interpretations of their actions. THE ACT OF KILLING
is an elusive piece on non-fiction that slips in and out of several realms at
once: a conventional doc view of a country whose chaotic government openly
colludes with thugs, at times a darkly comic look at the close familial bond of
Anwar and his men, and finally a chilling look at how the brutal logic of
violence reverberates out into personal, national, and global consequences.
The Guardian [Catherine Shoard]
When Werner Herzog says a film is the most frightening and most surreal he's seen in at least a decade, you know need to steel yourself. He's right. Here's the best, and the most horrific, movie of this year's Toronto film festival.
It's a documentary about the Indonesian death squads of the mid-1960s who tortured and killed communists. But it's also a film within a film, as director Joshua Oppenheimer urges the ageing gangsters to recreate their acts on increasingly elaborate scale (prosthetics, props, drag outfits, soundtrack, location shooting). They grin and mug just as they also take it very, very seriously. A strangulation scene is interrupted by the call for evening prayers. But they return after their ablutions.
At first you suspect this will riff on familiar ground, with the main interviewees, former members of paramilitary organisation Pancasila Youth, explaining how they were inspired in both their look and sadism by the movies. The most charismatic of them, Anwar Congo, who has a radical hair dye job a third of the way through in reaction to the rushes, is slightly haunted by his acts, he admits, which he tries to forget with music and dancing. And booze. And marijuana. And ecstasy. Others are scornful of any regret: "You feel haunted because your mind is weak. It's just a nerve imbalance."
The frank corruption of politics, the glee of the media ("One wink and they were dead!" grins a local publisher), the killers' happy embrace by the government ("We need gangsters to get things done", says a senior minister) – this sheer giddy chutzpah has remarkable cumulative effect. We watch these gangsters (everyone emphasises their belief that the word stems from "free men") talking trash to female caddies on the golf course, waxing lyrical about the merits a life of "relax and Rolex".
Some have criticised Oppenheimer for not interviewing anyone who survived the ordeal. It doesn't matter. We know this was genocide. We know that they'd be likely to feel fairly aggrieved. These men hoist themselves and do more besides. The most extraordinary scene comes during one of the recreations. One of Anwar's neighbours, who is moonlighting as the victim, laughingly suggests they use in the film a story that he has. It's of a man – ok, it's his stepfather, he says – who was dragged from his bed at 3am by the death squad, to the sound of the screams of his wife and children (that's him, he laughs, that's me!). The next day they found his body beneath a barrel and then buried it by the side of the road, "like a goat", so frightened were they that they too would be taken. The percolation of reaction among the men listening is the most compelling thing you'll ever seen.
It's often said of documentaries that they deserve to have as wide an audience as possible. This doesn't deserve; it demands – not for what it says about present-day Indonesia or even about its former horrors. But because almost every frame is astonishing.
If the Nazis had remained in power, and the Holocaust been hushed up and excused, how might an SS officer feel in his autumn years about those slaughters in Belorussian clearings? What happens when the culture that demanded mass murder simply continues, and the murderers are treated as heroes, free to bask in their rewards for half a century?
Such questions arise as, having been arrested whenever he tried to interview victims of Indonesia’s Sixties anti-Communist Terror (in which up to 2.5 million were killed with Western complicity), director Joshua Oppenheimer instead asked some of the gangsters and paramilitaries responsible to talk, and restage their acts on film in any style they wished. One salutary lesson is that when propaganda is pervasive or convenient it works, and the people who commission and carry out slaughter often truly believe they’re right. So these sadistic old stagers are delighted to put the happiest, bloodiest days of their lives on-screen, fearful their part in history will be forgotten.
Oppenheimer spent almost eight years on The Act of Killing, and is viewed as friend and, through his camera, eventually confessor to his star, Anwar Congo. This dapper, likeable old man reimagines his crimes as gangster third-degree, World War Two interrogation, gory horror and a musical fantasia of forgiveness by his victims (pictured above and below). The scenes could be kitsch or comic; less so if you’ve seen Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cannes-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, based partly on the cheaply disturbing Thai ghost films - and anti-Communist massacres - of his childhood memory. And not at all for Anwar. Playing the part of one of the hundreds he tortured then throttled, sickening empathy dawns. Returning to the warehouse where he led this work, something deep inside him demands to be vomited.
It’s unsettling to watch a killer’s haunted discomfort as Oppenheimer lets his imagination loose. But this “journey” every hack TV doc has to take shouldn’t distract from the bigger Indonesian picture he paints. Here, an old newspaper publisher blithely discusses rounding up victims to be killed, and blackening their names in his paper as required. A paramilitary leader goes on his extortionate rounds, and chortles with his cronies about the good old days raping young teenage girls. “Gangsters”, everyone from TV presenters to the country’s vice-president keep telling the public, as if for the first time, means “free men”. Freedom requires these gangs of murderers.
A more sophisticated old friend of Anwar, Adi, isn’t haunted by, as Elvis Costello wrote of Margaret Thatcher, “every tiny detail”. The trick, he notes, “is to find a way not to feel guilty”. And he’s well-versed in the political relativity of evil, when not trudging gloomily round the mall behind his wife. “War crimes are defined by the winner,” he states, citing the American Indians and George Bush. “I’m the winner. So I can make my own definition.” With fear of Indonesian “Islamists” replacing Communists, these are still the people Britain wants in power. Our own reluctance to see and punish our national crimes, from Kenya to Iraq, can also be glimpsed in this film’s bizarrely revealing mirror.
Some tragedies are so horrific that it’s hard to reconcile one’s belief in the basic decency of human beings with the atrocities that some of them have perpetrated. Documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing focuses on one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, speaking to some members of the Indonesian death squads who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of their countrymen and women in 1965 and ’66. These people don’t live in the shadows, though: They’re treated like royalty in their native land, celebrated as heroes who helped “save” Indonesia from communism. The film is so shocking and depressing that its subjects’ utter disconnection from morality would almost be funny if it wasn’t so frightening.
Oppenheimer amplifies those conflicting reactions further by introducing a daring gambit. In the process of interviewing these butchers—who brag about raping and killing their victims (including the occasional beheading)—the director asked if they would be interested in re-creating their murders through fictionalized, filmed scenes. The men—most notably a gentleman named Anwar Congo, who was one of the death squad leaders—leapt at the chance, in part because they grew up on gangster films. (Before being recruited by the military, which had overthrown the country’s government, people like Congo worked as black-market movie theater ticket sellers.) And so Congo and his goons, now all rich and middle-aged, play dress-up for parts of The Act of Killing, casting themselves as heroes torturing their communist foes.
As an opening crawl indicates, Indonesia’s military labeled anyone who opposed its rule as communists as a way to tar its enemies and justify its genocidal plans. The Act of Killing illustrates that, more than 45 years later, the country is still far from acknowledging its previous barbarism: Local TV stations breathlessly interview Congo about his film project, the cheerful hostess reminding the at-home viewer that Indonesia is better off without those godless communists around. The extent of the intimidation is such that one of Oppenheimer’s two co-directors is billed simply as “Anonymous,” and indeed several of the crew members receive the same moniker out of fear for their lives.
The Act of Killing utilizes a deadpan style to illuminate the surrealism of its subject matter. Beloved in his homeland, Congo carries himself like a kindly grandfather, warmly telling stories about the people he murdered and the best ways to kill someone. (It involves a wire around the neck, which he’ll be happy to demonstrate for you.) He reunites with some of his old henchmen for this project, and the smiles, hugs and laughs prevalent among the gang would make you think it’s a festive occasion, not the meeting of callous, evil minds. Subtly, Oppenheimer puts The Act of Killing together like a nightmare twist on nostalgic documentaries like The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time in which a group of grizzled fogeys reminisce about the good old days. And why shouldn’t Congo and his cohorts feel positively sunny? As one of his associates explains, there’s no need to be afraid of human rights violations when “War crimes are defined by the winners.”
Oppenheimer’s film is all the more maddening because it coolly documents an environment in which these thugs’ attitude isn’t just tolerated but supported. Another of Congo’s men, Herman Koto, runs for public office because he knows if he wins, he can shake down locals for bribes. The ethnic Chinese (a minority group in Indonesia) have to pay stipends to paramilitary groups or risk having their shops attacked. As Oppenheimer and his co-directors follow Congo and others, you get an overwhelming sense that not only are these men undisturbed by their actions, they feel entitled to do what they do. As far as they’re concerned, participating in re-created scenes dramatizing their old murders is just another way of validating their own warped view of justice and valor. (Astoundingly, one of Congo’s henchmen tries to reassure an actor that he shouldn’t let the violence in a re-created scene bother him. After all, it’s just a movie—even though it’s based on an actual murder.)
By trying to refrain from editorializing, Oppenheimer wants his subjects’ blatant wickedness to indict itself, and it’s a smart move. Unfortunately, he can sometimes let the pokerfaced absurdity become repetitious, settling for a few too many still-life shots of his subjects doing seemingly “ordinary” things (like bowling) to underline how their mundane outer appearance is in such contrast to their wretched past acts. But those quibbles shouldn’t take away from the film’s distressingly grim impact. And it does nothing to temper an unexpected arc that occurs within Congo, which will perhaps help some viewers believe again in the basic decency of human beings. But it won’t wipe away the horror of what they’ve watched over the last two hours.
Interview: Joshua Oppenheimer - Film Comment Nicolas Rapold interview July 15, 2013
Since playing at Telluride and Toronto last fall, The Act of Killing has drawn admiration and shudders with its depiction of what Stuart Klawans calls “the genocidal imagination” in our July/August issue. Killers from the bloodiest days of Indonesia’s campaign of slaughter in the 1960s parade before us, thriving: chiefly, executioner Anwar Congo, portrayed as undergoing a stomach-churning recognition of his deeds, and two other perpetrators, buffoonish Herman Koto and cynically unrepentant Adi Zulkadry.
Born in Texas, raised in New Mexico and Washington, D.C., Joshua Oppenheimer came to Indonesia through The Globalisation Tapes (03, co-directed with Christine Cynn), a film about unionization efforts in Sumatra. His experimentation with filmmaking was present already in two works made during his years as a Harvard undergraduate: the hybrid all-American tabloid apocalypse The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (98) and These Places We've Learned to Call Home (96), for which Oppenheimer went undercover with American militia groups.
Based in Copenhagen and London, Oppenheimer is also artistic director of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster and has published extensively. He co-directed The Act of Killing over the course of nearly a decade with a Javanese collaborator who, like much of the film’s team, has chosen to remain anonymous. Last year at Toronto FILM COMMENT spoke at length with Oppenheimer, who was already talking about a contingency plan for distributing half a million DVDs of the film underground in Indonesia.
What are you hoping would happen if the film is shown in
Indonesia?
For international viewers, I think the film is primarily about today. It’s about a kind of impunity that spills over into celebration. And in the celebration of atrocity, we find a really troubling allegory for the jingoistic celebration of torture that has been predominant in the neoconservative right in the United States since the War on Terror began and continues today with the polarization of American politics. For Indonesians, it’s an exposé of the extraordinary impunity which is structuring all of Indonesian politics today—impunity so extreme that when Herman runs for office he’s able to talk about how he’s planning to do what he does extorting the Chinese [shopkeepers] but on a bigger scale. The impunity for human-rights abuses of course didn’t stop in 1965 but continued throughout the Suharto dictatorship. They estimate that a third of the population of East Timor was killed or died of hunger or things related to the Indonesian invasion which happened in the mid-Seventies, and the repression there continued until East Timor became independent. Aceh, in the northern tip of Sumatra, suffered terribly at the hands of the military dictatorship and afterwards, until the tsunami, when the situation was reappraised because all these NGOs flooded in to deal with the damage.
Anwar has called me rather nervously because journalists have started visiting him in the last few days asking about the film. In making the film his motive changes, and he starts showing me a kind of brokenness that he suffers from having killed so many people. So he knows that the film is not ultimately a glorification of killing, but I’ve had to reassure him that he faces no arrest, that Indonesia has a criminal code rigged so that human-rights abusers never get punished: after 18 years all criminal cases including mass murder expire in Indonesia. The national human-rights commission, which does exist to investigate crimes, is part of the government, but all they can do is research and make findings available for educational purposes. People in different parts of Indonesia know what happened in 1965, particularly in North Sumatra where the film was made because there the killers were recruited from the ranks of gangsters and they’ve been in charge ever since, and they boast about what they did. So it’s been part of the public discourse in North Sumatra ever since—which is why they can have that talk show about it. In other parts of Indonesia, the killers weren’t recruited from gangsters; they were student groups, religious groups, sometimes it was the army themselves. Those groups have no interest in boasting about what they did.
Some people have said, Josh, you interviewed all these army generals and CIA agents to make this film, why isn’t that in the film? And the reason is that the film would inevitably become a historical film about the mechanics of what happened, and this is primarily a film about the miscarriage of the collective imagination that underpins this condition of impunity and open celebration. And it’s about these very thorny issues: what does it mean to take joy in reenacting mass murder? At the Q&A, I told a story about the first killer I met. I was working with survivors, and they wanted to tell the story of what happened to them but they were too scared because the perpetrators were living all around them.
I remember.
And my neighbor turned out to be a person who’d killed a friend of mine. He tells the story of his grandchild much as Anwar invites his grandchild to watch the gangster scene at the end. The question was, what does he think I think when he tells me the story? What does he think his grandchildren think? What does he think his neighbors who are his victims think? What does he think the younger generations think? How does he see himself, is fundamentally the question, and how does he want to be seen? And those two issues are the issue of imagination. And this is primarily an intervention to open a space for a radical reimagining of the Indonesian present, and how the past is kept alive in the present in a very destructive and disturbing way.
The way you’re talking about imagination makes me wonder
whether you had in mind particular thinkers or theorists as you approached this
material.
No, I think that one of the important influences for me, and I definitely stand on his shoulders, is Jean Rouch, whose documentaries involved creating conditions for exploring their characters' imaginations. You mentioned The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase [before the interview], and I think in a very different way I was already interested in these questions then. In a way, documentary is a misnomer because in documentary we say that we’re documenting something, right? We have the idea that we’re documenting and the presumption is that there’s a reality that we then fill. But as many, many, many people have said, the moment you introduce a camera you change the reality. When you’re working closely with people, inevitably they start staging themselves. And they start staging themselves in ways that reveal how they imagine themselves.
What observational documentarians do—especially of the American direct cinema variety—is to set up conditions that are quite different. I deliberately don’t use the word cinéma vérité because cinéma vérité was a term coined around Jean Rouch’s work. In direct cinema—the Maysles Brothers, Wiseman—the premise is to create a reality with characters which simulates a preexisting reality. You create a reality that looks as if there’s no camera filming it. And that in fact is a very complicated thing to do—and it’s a rather arbitrary thing to do, and not necessarily the most insightful thing to do, although there are masterworks of direct cinema. But it is a charade. We’re actually creating the illusion of documenting a reality. So if it’s the case that, if I start filming you now, you’re going to start thinking “how do I look,” then filmmaking is a fantastic opportunity to explore the conditions of imagination that underpin our behavior.
And there’s no real theoretical basis to this—it may sound abstract, but it’s extremely simple. There’s this other side to it, which is how I came to this method with Anwar and his friends. They talk about walking out of the cinema, in the mood of every movie that they saw. It’s not in the film but there’s a line where he says, “I felt just like a gangster walking off the screen,” or the line that is in the film that if we walked out of an Elvis movie, we’d be in the mood of the film, which is something we’ve all experienced. Being heady after a movie, performing in the afterglow of a film—and walking across the street and killing in that mode. It’s a mode of performance, it’s a mode of acting, and it’s a very useful one because you’re not present when you’re acting in the same way.
So there again there was this convergence where the moment I’m filming Anwar he’s acting, and he was acting at the time of the killings. So suddenly the filming of Anwar, and the asking him to reenact what he did for me, brought back the mode of Anwar’s way of being at the time of the killing. It is not exactly the same. But the past literally comes into the present in an unexpected way, for the audience and for me—and for Anwar in a very, very disturbing way.
But one thing I still don’t quite understand is why the movie
limits its exploration of imagination to the imagination of the killers.
Wouldn’t the imagination of the victims give the film another dimension? I’m
not saying that just from an ethical standpoint.
No, I think it’s a really valid question. First I’ll just say I came to this movie from working with survivors, and I shot another movie which is a film focused on a family of survivors that I’ve been very close with since the beginning of this process. Their son was killed. And I was already close friends with them when I started filming close reenactments with perpetrators and found out that one man was telling me the story of how he killed my friend’s son. So I told them I filmed this, and they wanted to see it, and I said are you sure, and they said yes, they wanted to know what happened to their son. And it’s been seen in many other films, but there’s a terrible lack of closure when that happens. Then through the making of The Act of Killing they followed with great interest and followed closely, they became more and more upset at the conditions of impunity that the film was exposing.
The brother of the guy who was killed said, “You know, I’m trying to raise kids in this society, all around us live the people who did this, boasting to intimidate the rest of us. I want to meet them, and I want to ask them how they live with themselves knowing we’re all around them.” And then over the last year, over two shoots, he very bravely went with me to visit all the people involved with killing his brother. And that as you can see from The Act of Killing is a very, very brave thing to do, and he pulled it off with tremendous dignity and patience, and it’s beautiful. And it’s almost unprecedented outside the context of a truth and reconciliation commission. It’s very, very unusual for a victim to go meet the perpetrator in conditions where the perpetrators are still in power. It’s as if the Nazis had won and then someone visits the perpetrators—a Jew who is still living, in some condition of fear, or the family of someone who was killed. It’s a very, very fraught and dramatic and tough thing. And that’s the focus of a whole other movie.
I’d say a few things also about your question. To understand evil, to understand how human beings perpetrate evil, we have to actually look at the people who do evil. And that’s a big part of what The Act of Killing is about. And then to understand impunity we have to look at the way a regime of impunity is created. We thought a lot about bringing in some of the material that we had with survivors into this film. The problem is the moment you do that you set up this classic cinematic schism between the good and the bad, and Anwar and his friends immediately become bad against the victims with whom we immediately feel sympathy. And at that point our engagement with Anwar and the other perpetrators changes. We’re no longer walking this tightrope between repulsion and empathy. And in imagining how a human being does this, we are aligned psychically and emotionally with the victims, and we’re accusing. There are in fact victims in The Act of Killing, specifically there’s the neighbor who talks—
That scene is almost more difficult than any other, because
you feel the weight of the force that has kept him silent, and even as he’s
talking, the nervous laughter—I’ve never heard laughter that makes me feel
worse.
Yeah, it was, and when he tells the story at the beginning, he says, I want to tell you about a story I heard. And he doesn’t start by saying it’s his [own] stepfather. And he actually tells the story over 20 minutes talking about a story he heard, which is not the way it’s done in the film. By then I’d been filming in Indonesia for five years, I’d heard countless stories like this, and everybody was a little bit impatient with him to finish. We were in a big studio, we had a lot to film that day, why are we listening to a story about someone this guy has heard of? But there was this intensity to his laughter that kept us focused. Then, at the moment that both my Indonesian co-director and I were changing tapes in a camera, he admitted that this was his stepfather. And we actually missed that point while we were shooting.
Then the rest of the filming went on, they reenact with him as a victim, he cries. And we hadn’t used the shots of him crying, because we knew that, like Herman, he had been in a paramilitary-affiliated theater group. That’s also the back story for Herman being in women’s clothing: the group was like the globe theater in Elizabethan times, all the roles played by men, and Herman always played the women’s roles. But going back to this guy [who tells his story], I think he’s actually maybe not just the stepson of the guy who was killed. I actually have a feeling that maybe he was the son of the guy who was killed. He had diabetes and two years after filming he died.
So that reenactment scene in the studio was shot around ’09?
Yeah. And we had thought that was sort of melodramatic acting he’d picked up in this theater group. Then when we went back and really began editing and transcribed everything, we came across this confession that it was his stepfather, and that was very uncomfortable and very difficult. And we realized almost everything that happened afterwards: he plays the victim, he’s interrogated and tortured and breaks down there, then he’s in the massacre scene, he’s actually cheering along on the talk show. So it was a very uncomfortable realization, and if we’d heard that at the time, I would have absolutely taken him aside and said, you know, if this is your background maybe you don’t want to continue with this film.
But I felt that it was very, very important to assemble the film honestly and to show that he had in fact told them that he was the son of someone that was killed. He had told his story, and they’d rejected using his story, and instead put him in the position of playing the victim. And the first time I saw a rough cut of that I felt very, very exposed, because it’s not something that, had I understood the situation fully, I would have allowed to happen. But I also felt it was what happened, and it was really important to show honestly, as painful and almost embarrassing as it was for me.
It’s amazing how candid everyone is with you. How did you get
these people to this comfort level with you?
It was actually surprisingly easy…
You know the language, for one thing.
I know the language—I learned it working with survivors, actually, beforehand. And maybe I could have worked through a translator if I was a more conventional documentarian and I was going to work hard to get everyone used to me so they would simply forget me (or pretend to forget me), and I would stand back and observe. But the way I work with people to explore their moment of being filmed, which is the core of my filmmaking, I can’t work through translation.
But it was very easy to gain these men’s trust. The United States supported the genocide—they knew that, they were consulting with the American consulate in Medan during the killings, they knew that America supported the military regime that was in power ever since, and they knew that I was an American filmmaker, and they loved American movies. And anybody who had enough money to actually fly into Indonesia and leave Indonesia in North Sumatra, it was just assumed that I was on the side of the people who had enough money to come and go—who are the people with some power, and so therefore I was on their side.
All I had to do was behave as I’m behaving with you, which was to be nice, to be open, treat them like a human being. And they sense that. The impunity in North Sumatra is so hermetic, but also the power of the regime, the power of the men running North Sumatra, is contingent upon them boasting about what they did to remain feared. Because the basis of a gangster’s power is to be feared. All sorts of words that reek of genocide have acquired a heroic and glorious connotation. So the word “extermination,” which to us evokes the Holocaust, to them it's like, “Yes! I was involved in the extermination of the communists.” As if that’s something great. So I could be very, very honest. I could say, “Tell me about the extermination of the communists.” And so long as I would repress the emotions and the feelings that would come as they were telling me these stories, which was hard…
I would like to hear a bit about that, if you could. What’s it
like to be undercover, in a way, for so long? I mean, emotionally—you’re
describing a certain repression.
Well, first I take a little issue with the term “undercover,” because of course at the beginning…
I mean that more as a figure of speech.
No, but it’s an insightful one, it’s one worth exploring because at the beginning many of these men had different goals. The general goal at first was to glorify what they did. That could never have been my goal: to glorify mass murder. So in that sense I was undercover. But people’s goals changed. Adi comes into this film acting as though he wants to use it as a vehicle for reconciliation, and to say sorry to the victims. And I thought, Oh, wow, this is an opportunity to go in a very interesting new direction. And very quickly the shallowness of that position made itself clear, and the depths of his hypocrisy became clear. And by the end he realizes that this film’s going to make him look bad, and I could be openly confrontational with him, as I am in the car, when I talk about going to The Hague, and that it would be good for the victims' families for the truth to come out. So by the end there with him, I’m not undercover.
With Anwar, he starts with this motive, but somehow around his nightmares, a second and very unconscious but almost physical motive comes out: to get in touch with his brokenness, the part of him that died from killing people. And working with him on that and the whole second half of the film, I was also not really undercover anymore. When he’s choking on the roof, the dishonest thing to do would be to stop filming, or even to go put my arm around him and say it’s going to be okay. Because it’s not going to be okay. And I’ve told him what the film is now, and he’s said, Okay, if that’s what it is, I understand, I’m not angry, I want to see it. I’ve told him, I’ll send you a DVD when it’s safe to do so. I didn’t say, Do you want to see it? Because I didn’t feel he had to see the film.
In terms of the emotions, going back to your question about my feelings, yeah, it was really, really hard. And it was really hard for a long time. I felt all sorts of emotions that I simply couldn’t let myself go into while shooting, because I was working. It would be impossible to make this film if the human reactions, the emotions that were there, if I let them really fully come into my heart as I was filming. And that had a lot of consequences. One of the consequences was that it would be very difficult to go home at night. It was difficult to sleep. I’d have upsetting dreams. There was all of that. Also it meant that I felt somehow guilty and tainted as well. Because I was sort of detaching myself from the things I was filming just as Anwar had, and it was becoming more and more clear that that detachment was somehow part of the problem. And as I was realizing I’m detached and he’s detached, I felt implicated.
I think viewers of the film also have talked about this kind of shock turning into fascination turning into shock. I think it’s very painful because the viewer and I go through the same kind of emotional trajectory that somehow Anwar goes through and we therefore feel very implicated. We don’t necessarily go on that journey with Anwar the way we do in most films, which is out of empathy with the main character, but rather because a parallel process is happening in the viewer and me as a filmmaker. And that happened in Anwar.
I think something that might be different for audiences is
that the cultural reference points here are a bit different. Obviously the
“gangsters” are influenced by Hollywood films, but it seems they’re coming from
a different cultural diet so it looks even more garish in a way.
Yeah, that’s true. It is a film about a culture which, if you’re not Indonesian, is foreign. At the same time we took care to do two things: we took care to emphasize motifs that are in common, not just in the Hollywood films but in the Hollywood references. And it’s very important that during the massacre [that is re-created in the film], what it really feels like more than anything are Hollywood war movies. And the film deconstructs that when they call “Cut cut cut cut,” but at the same time the characters are upset and it’s really upsetting. When we were shooting that scene, we felt consciously, “Let’s create the iconic image for a genocide that hasn’t yet been made.” Knowing that there’s something perverse in a genocide having an iconic image. Hence its deconstruction. Hence the need to break it apart and show how it’s made.
But at the same time, there’s Adi drifting through a shopping mall that could be in White Plains; the empty bag shop at the end, where on the roof hundreds of people are killed, now they sell handbags; Adi’s references to the killing of Native Americans; Herman’s admiration for Obama. I think it felt very, very important to show that every culture, every human society whose normality is built atop terror and lies has a hollowness, a deathliness to it. By the end of the film Anwar is not just haunted, I think there’s something dead about him. And I think that your shirt, my shirt, is affordable, this recording device is affordable, because people are making [them] under conditions of fear and oppression that mean they can’t organize proper unions to fight for better conditions. And every place that these things are being made—be it in Indonesia, China—there’s men like Anwar and Herman who are actually enforcing those terrible conditions and who are intimidating people who are fighting for better conditions.
And we are implicated in that. I actually think we all know we are implicated in that. I think we know that we’re kind of guests at a cannibalistic feast. We’re not as close to the slaughter as men like Anwar and Herman, but we’re at the table, and I think we know it and we’re helpless to do anything about it most of the time. But it takes a toll on us too. I think there’s a sadness, a loneliness, a nervousness, a thirst for recognition, I’m not sure. But the emotional reactions that audiences are coming to me with, this experience of alienation, that’s very powerful.
Going back to the issue of the aesthetic being garish, one of the very important principles in the shooting and in the editing, and in the color correction and in the sound design, was to make it seductive whenever possible, although it’s tacky and garish. Whether it’s the fish or the waterfall at the end that looks like one of those things you see on a table at a tacky Chinese restaurant in the Midwest—if you could step inside that plastic universe, it ought to be beautiful. And Anwar’s chair when he gets up to go grab his grandchildren—this carved, painted, over-the-top gaudy chair with crystal in the background—that should be beautiful. It’s beautiful to them and maybe we find it’s tasteless, but here we are in this all glass condo [where the interview is taking place]—why is this more tasteful? So it was a very important principle: a way of translating, if you like, what’s culturally different into our world by trying to always make it seductive, and therefore implicate the viewer that way. To think, Oh it is beautiful, oh it is heart-stirring, even as it’s repulsive.
And by way of cultural context, you grew up in New Mexico and
D.C. How has that shaped your worldview?
Well, my family, especially my father and my step-father’s family, lost a lot of people in the Holocaust. And my mother’s family is Jewish, but they came before that. Both of my parents were political: my father was a political science professor, and my mother was a labor activist. The urgent political question growing up was, How do we prevent these things from ever happening again? And we say “never again” as a kind of mantra in the Jewish community, but far too often it’s never again for us, but actually it happens again and again elsewhere. And unless “never again” means never again for us humans, it’s happening again. And of course what’s happening in Palestine and the injustice in Palestine is an example of “never again” for us in its most tragic and hypocritical manifestation.
I think if you’re going to make a film about genocide, it had better be really disturbing, because what are you doing making a film about genocide if it’s not really disturbing? And two, if you’re going to make a film about genocide, if you’re going to try and understand genocide, you have to understand the people who commit genocide. You have to understand why people commit it, how they do it. And to quote Godard, forgetting an extermination is part of the extermination. After the Holocaust had been judged by history and by the world to be a crime against humanity, you could equally say that the persistent celebration of extermination is part of the extermination. And to expose that is to expose part of the mechanism, to expose the extermination.
In terms of getting into the mind-set of Anwar and the others,
I’m still trying to figure out what we do with that understanding then.
Not that I’m asking you to solve the world’s problems, or what’s the next step.
You know, I’m tempted to say that I’m not Mahatma Gandhi, that I leave it with the viewer. But I think that if we can understand the mind of the people who kill and the mind of the people who profit from killing, and the mind of the people who keep killing alive, and who continue to celebrate extermination, we can recognize it. We can see it when it comes to our own societies. We can argue vociferously against it. We can be more critical when Eric Holder says, to give you an example, that we’re not going to prosecute anybody who’s been involved with torture. We can think twice.
What I’ve tried to do in The Act of Killing is to expose the mind-set not just of killers but of a celebratory regime of impunity that’s so hermetic and so grotesque yet so human and so recognizably human that it becomes an allegory, it becomes a metaphor. It becomes an allegory for the impunity that exists across Indonesia where as I said it is not the case that everybody is as boastful as the killers in North Sumatra. But also the impunity that exists across the world, in Putin’s Russia, in China, in the UK, in the United States, and across the world—going back to what I said about the clothes, our normality, our everyday life, is built on things that make us queasy. And queasy is a good word because I think film makes us queasy. Things that make us queasy, yet things we also enjoy. And that enjoyment is tragic and it’s also for many viewers the dramatic motor in the film.
The reason I ask is because once we do get in their mind-set,
you find it’s more claustrophobic than anything else. Because it’s a small
mind, in a way. You get there, and what’s in there? First of all a lot of
vanity.
There was some little write-up about the film the other day: it’s all the seven deadly sins. There’s vanity, there’s pride, etc.; they’re all there for the taking. I mean, Rush Limbaugh’s mind is a small mind. And the mindset of the electorate for whom disappearing people is popular, is a small mind. And, as you know, my next film [The Look of Silence] is coming from the tradition of telling stories about victims in documentary. It’s very reassuring to see lots of films about victims. We feel, Oh, that’s where our sympathies lie. That may even be the effect of all these films about victims: it makes us feel like we’re in sympathy with victims. But actually we’re much, much closer to perpetrators than we care to admit.
I don’t think that these men have big hearts, you know. One of the things I felt—40 killers before I met Anwar and then all of Anwar’s friends—is that they all share a kind of exorbitant selfishness, vanity, and pride. But especially selfishness. To take a life is a very selfish act. And we can call that monstrous or psychopathic, but those are words we use to simply make ourselves feel like we’re not that.
But in fact we live in an economic system where selfishness is vaunted as the natural human virtue. That that’s what competition is about. So unless we also care to say that our whole economic system is monstrous and psychopathic, we can’t really say these men are monstrous and psychopathic because they’re selfish. I mean, I hope I’m not that selfish, I hope you’re not that selfish. But it’s human, it’s not monstrous. Hitler wasn’t a monster. We can call him names, but he was a person. And that’s the really scary thing.
Well, that seems a completely depressing and perfect note to
end on.
But the positive thing is, maybe if you can look at our selfishness, we can teach people to be less selfish. And I’ll say one last thing. There was this debate between Mark Danner and Peter Sellars in Telluride, and Mark was totally pessimistic and Peter was optimistic. And I said, to make this film you have to be both. You have to be pessimistic because the point of art, for me, isn’t to comfort people and to reassure them. Otherwise I’d take a walk! Go do something better than sitting in a cinema. Go talk to someone you love. The point of art is to unsettle people. And therefore there has to be pessimism or you’re not, for me, making art. But why do I make this? How could I do this for seven years? Because somehow some other part of me is optimistic. It’ll do something. It’ll touch people. And it’ll make real change in Indonesia, and it’s already starting to, and that double movement between optimism and pessimism is the only way.
The
Murders of Gonzago - Slate Errol
Morris from Slate, July 10, 2013, and, of course, the accompanying
Shakespearean notes by William Witherle Lawrence from Shakespeare Online: The
Significance of The Murder of Gonzago in Hamlet
The Act of Killing - Movie Review - 2013 - Documentaries - Ab Jennifer Merin from About.com, July 19, 2013
WE LOVE IMPUNITY: Nick Fraser on - Documentaries - Abou Jennifer Merin introduces a BBC Editor Nick Fraser essay, a preview of a longer piece from Film Quarterly, from About.com, January 12, 2014
The Story Behind 'The Act of Killing' : The New Yorker Jonah Weiner from The New Yorker, July 16, 2013
Anthony Lane: “Pacific Rim,” “Only God Forgives ... - The New Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
True surrealism: Walter Benjamin and The Act of Killing | BFI Carrie McAlinden from BFI Sight and Sound, December 3, 2013
The
Act of Killing review | Sight & Sound | BFI Tony Rayns, March 19, 2015
Caroline Cooper: The Act of Seeing The Act of Killing - Guernica / A ... Carolyn Cooper from Guernica magazine, June 13, 2013
The Act of Killing essay: How Indonesia's mass killings could have ... The Murders of Gonzago, by Errol Morris from Slate, July 10, 2013
Indonesia: Review of “The Act of Killing” - In Defence of Marxism Jean Duval from In Defense of Marxism, July 19, 2013
Revolution and counter-revolution in Indonesia (1965) Alan Woods from In Defense of Marxism, September 30, 1990
'Act of Killing': In small screenings, by word of mouth, Indonesians ... Sara Schonhardt from The Christian Science Monitor, December 13, 2012, also seen here: 'Act of Killing': In small screenings, by word of mouth, Indonesians ...
What
next after 'Act of Killing'? | The Jakarta Post Dina Indrasafitri from The Jakarta Post, September 30, 2013
The Act of Killing: A Formally Complex, Emotionally ... - Slate Dana Stevens
Berlin Review: Joshua Oppenheimer's 'The Act Of Killing' Is A . Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Movie Review: The Act of Killing -- Vulture David Edelstein
The Lumière Reader [Brannavan Gnanalingam]
Acting and Reenacting in 'The Act of Killing' | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
The Act Of Killing / The Dissolve Noel Murray, with an additional subsection here: “War crimes are defined by the winners”: Watch an ... - The Diss
notcoming.com | The Act of Killing - Not Coming to a Theater Victoria Large
The Act of Killing film review Nick Schager from The Village Voice
Slant Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
Review: The Act of Killing || ErikLundegaard.com
Ruthless Reviews [Matt Cale] (Potentially Offensive)
Klymkiw Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]
Electric Sheep Magazine [Mark Stafford]
Review: 'The Act of Killing' | Movie Mezzanine Dan Schindel
Film Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
In Review Online [Andrew Welch]
Stanley Kauffmann - The New Republic Stanley Kauffman’s final film review, November 8, 2013
The House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Little White Lies [David Jenkins]
Twitchfilm/Filmfest.ca [Jason Gorber]
JamesBowman.net | The Act of Killing
Screen Daily [Anthony Kaufman]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
MonstersandCritics [Ron Wilkinson]
Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]
Blu-rayDefinition.com - Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
DVD Verdict - Blu-ray [Tom Becker]
Movie Review - 'The Act of Killing' - In Indonesia, A Genocide Bob Mondello from NPR
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Merlin Harries]
The Act Of Killing · Movie Review · The A.V. Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
[SXSW Review] The Act of Killing - The Film Stage Bill Graham
Combustible Celluloid Review - The Act of Killing (2013), n/a Jeffrey M. Anderson
Out west, contemplating east: Telluride 2012 Joshua Jelly-Schapiro from BFI Sight and Sound, December 1, 2013
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Georgia Straight [Janet Smith]
The Act of Killing : The New Yorker Anthony Lane (capsule review)
Sight and Sound listed as #1 Best Films of the Year, January 10, 2014
Matt Zoller Seitz's Top 10 Films of 2013 | MZS | Roger Ebert listed as #1 Best Films of the Year, December 31, 2013
The best movies of 2013: Dana Stevens on a year of ... - Slate December 10, 2013
MUBI [Adrian Curry] movie posters
Build my gallows high: Joshua Oppenheimer on The Act of Killing Nick Bradshaw interview from BFI Sight and Sound, February 14, 2014
Act Of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer ... - The Dissolve Noel Murray interview, January 13, 2014
Joshua Oppenheimer on The Act of Killing - Page 1 ... - Villag Raillan Brooks interview from The Village Voice, July 17, 2013
An interview with The Act of Killing’s Joshua Oppenheimer Tim Wong from The Lumiere Reader, July 8, 2013
Filming the 'Killing' Fields: Joshua Oppenheimer on Making 'The Act of Killing' Sheerly Avni interview from The Jewish Daily Forward, January 4, 2013
The Act of Killing: Berlin Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Dalton
Joshua Oppenheimer: 'You celebrate mass killing so you don't have to look yourself in the mirror' Henry Barnes from The Guardian June 20, 2013
The
Act of Killing: don't give an Oscar to this snuff movie ... Nick
Fraser from The Guardian, February
22, 2014
The Act of Killing has helped Indonesia reassess its past ... Joshua Oppenheimer from the Guardian, February 25, 2014
The Act of Killing – review Petr Bradshaw from The Guardian
The
Act of Killing – review Mark
Kermode from The Observer
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [R.J. Justavick]
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Review:
'The Act of Killing' re-creates Indonesian slaughters - L Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
The Act of Killing Movie Review (2013) | Roger Ebert Steven Boone
Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Seongyong Cho] also seen here: Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
'The Act of Killing' and Indonesian Death Squads - NYTimes.co A.O. Scott
Joshua Oppenheimer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Indonesian killings of 1965–66 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Act of Killing film screening and EDGS Rajawali Distinguished ...
THE
LOOK OF SILENCE B+ 91
Denmark Indonesia Finland Norway UK Israel France US Germany Netherlands (103 mi) 2014 Official site
Art
doesn’t make a difference…until it does.
—Werner Herzog
You
ask much deeper questions than Joshua ever asked. I don’t like it.
—Inong Sungai Ular
Winner of a MacArthur Grant in 2015, Joshua Oppenheimer first visited Indonesia in 2001 to help workers from the palm oil plantations dying from a toxic chemical herbicide in their efforts to unionize, as the company hired members of the Pancasila Youth to harass and intimidate the workers, who immediately dropped their demands, becoming the subject of an earlier documentary film, THE GLOBALISATION TAPES (2003). In the process, however, the director learned many of these workers lost family members from a series of ghastly murders carried out by this same paramilitary group decades earlier, discovering what was killing the workers “was not just poison, but fear.” A surreal showcasing of the Indonesian Genocide of the mid 1960’s, as retold by aging members of the Pancasila Youth, led to The Act of Killing (2012). Oppenheimer obviously felt that film was incomplete, suggesting it only told part of the story, and while winning near universal acclaim from critics, some (including myself) were aghast that it was ever released, largely told from the point of view of the murderers themselves who proudly re-enacted their bloody deeds literally fifty years later in front of the camera thinking they were noble heroes, continually boasting of their heroism, with the camera enabling them to jubilantly express their delusions in front of their grandchildren. The moral question it raised was whether we’d ever accept a similar film from Nazi soldiers or concentration camp guards if they giddily reminded viewers of the efficiency of their killings, both carried out with a similar sadistic cruelty. According to a Cineaste magazine interview (and many others that followed), when Oppenheimer arrived in Indonesia in 2001, “I had the feeling that I’d wandered into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust only to find the Nazis still in power.” Imagine if the Nazi’s had won the war and a filmmaker allowed them to bathe in their glory, much as the director does with the mass murderers in his earlier film, where more than a half million communist or ethnic Chinese were murdered by shooting, strangulation, dismembering, and beheadings, with the corpses thrown into rivers in the span of about 6 months. While it is considered among the worst atrocities of the 20th century, with the American government at the time providing extensive lists of communist names to the Indonesian death squads, this idea that they should be congratulated for ridding the nation of communism remained thoroughly entrenched in the political state of mind for decades in Indonesia, leading to a controversial 31-year military rule dominated by President Suharto, as the same ruling party that inflicted the genocide continued to govern through intimidation and fear for the next half century. Not until the recent presidential elections of 2014 had there been a change in power from the corrupt and authoritarian rule of the New Order, as newly elected Joko Widodo, the first from a lower-class background, is also the first Indonesian president not from the military or political elite. To his credit, perhaps Oppenheimer’s film opened people’s eyes and contributed to a groundswell of opposition that helped bring about a new government. Not many documentary films have that degree of influence in changing the political and social dynamic around the world.
What’s immediately confusing when watching this film is the timeline with his earlier film The Act of Killing (2012), and while they are both connected, one following immediately after the other, it appears most all of the footage for this new film was shot sometime “prior to” the release of THE ACT OF KILLING. According to the director, he began conducting interviews in Indonesia as early as 2003 to 2005 prior to meeting Anwar Congo, the central character of The Act of Killing, which was then filmed from 2005 to 2010, editing it as he was shooting, literally a ten-year project, returning to Indonesia in 2012 prior to the film’s release to shoot a companion film, not knowing at the time that Adi Rukun would be his main character. While you can see Rukun studying old footage in THE LOOK OF SILENCE, this was material collected for his earlier film, shot before either film was released, during a time the director could still maintain his earlier contacts. This time the story is told from the point of view of the victims who are profoundly isolated, living under very humble conditions, who are eventually seen confronting the very people who murdered their families. It should be pointed out that due to the inherent dangers involved for Adi and his family, but also the filmmakers, they all had to remain on high alert, ready to flee at any moment, eventually moving Adi and his family to a different, more secure environment, as the perpetrators called in the police several times during the shoot, and much like the previous film, many in the credits are again listed as “Anonymous.” Both films form a collective memory play, where the victors are the ones allowed to mold and shape history in the manner of their own recollections, which are stunted by selective amnesia, as they remember what they want to remember and forget events too painful to recall. And while the first film engages in the hyperbole of anti-communist hysteria, allowing the explosive imagination of the vanquishing heroes to run wild with narcissistic self-deceptions, the second film is quieter and more intimate, living in the shadow of the first, reflecting the calm and contemplative demeanor of the featured subject, Adi Rukun (which is not his real name), and the results are even more devastating. Opening on a man wearing optician’s glasses, he stares straight at the camera, where what follows is a readjustment of our recollections of history as we painstakingly try, often through trial and error, to find the clearest focus of vision.
Adi is a 44-year old optometrist living with his elderly parents, both over 100 years old, his mother Rohani and father Rukun, in a small village in North Sumatra while wandering the countryside examining the eyes of his patients, a practice that allows him to enter their homes, often engaging in small talk as he changes the lenses in the glasses, where he inquires about their lives and listens to the stories they have to tell. In this manner, he speaks with former death squad members and commanders, including his own uncle, under the pretense of giving them an eye exam. The director returns to the 1965 purge of the communists, focusing his attention upon a massacre of 10,500 near the Snake River, opening with previously filmed footage of two former death squad members nonchalantly describing how they either beheaded or bled out prisoners before throwing them in the river, which is followed by footage inside a contemporary elementary school classroom where a teacher repeats that age-old rationalization for killing communists, characterizing them as godless villains intent on overthrowing the government, where many Indonesian civilians took part in the killings. What’s particularly surprising about this particular massacre is that the killings were all done hand-to-hand and face-to-face, leaving entire sections of villages empty afterwards, where the houses were looted and handed over to the military. Among the dead is Adi’s older brother Ramli Rukun, the village head of a farmer’s cooperative, perceived as an opponent of the new dictatorship, where he was arrested and stabbed repeatedly, but escaped back to his parent’s home, where two men, Amir Hasan, a former village schoolteacher and commander of a local paramilitary group along with his accomplice Inong Sungai Ular, recaptured him, telling his mother they would take him to a hospital in nearby Medan, but he was thrown in the back of a truck with other prisoners and dragged to the river, mutilated with machetes, cutting off his penis before being dumped in the river. Unlike the thousands of families who were never told what happened, his murder was one of the few that had witnesses, where among the surviving families, Ramli’s name has become synonymous with the killings, where his death literally haunts this picture, reflective of the scars left behind that still linger in the thoughts of the survivors who must continue coping with the pain, still living in the same village where a half century later the murderers of their son are treated as heroes, where Aki’s mother Rohani reminds us, “They destroyed so many people, but now they enjoy life.” Two years after his death Adi was born, where Rohani recalls, “I was going crazy after Ramli was murdered. And because I had Adi, I was able to somehow continue to live.” Adi grew up hearing stories of his brother’s murder, which continued to reverberate throughout his young life, first meeting Oppenheimer in 2003, where he latched onto the opportunity to confront his brother’s killers, fascinated with the director’s footage of Amir Hasan and Inong actually reenacting his brother’s killing before the cameras.
The first person Adi visits is Inong, an old man who has no inkling whatsoever that he murdered and mutilated with his own hands the brother of the man examining his eyes, instead he speaks freely about his crimes, describing how he once cut off the breast of a woman turned in by her own brother, recalling how the killers routinely drank the blood of their victims, supposedly to protect them from going mad amidst the relentless slaughter, describing the taste of blood as “both salty and sweet.” Probing ever deeper into the past, Adi couldn’t be more polite while expressing bluntly, “I don’t mean to offend you, but I think you’re trying to avoid moral responsibility.” Stunned, and a bit dumbfounded, all that Inong can muster is, “You ask much deeper questions than Joshua ever asked. I don’t like it,” as the information pipeline immediately shuts down and the men sit in a prolonged, awkwardly uncomfortable silence. Later he confronts his 82-year old uncle, living in a gigantic estate surrounded by lush trees, a man who has done well for himself and his family, who at the time was ordered to guard the prisoners, including Ramli, who bought into the government propaganda that these were bad people who “never prayed,” claiming he was only doing his job, becoming deeply offended by the line of questioning. When he meets Amir Hasan, the politeness of the exchange turns on a dime when he mentions the man killed his brother, that he was the commander who signed the death report. Immediately he is looked upon with suspicion, as if he were a “subversive.” Unfazed, Adi asks “If I came to you like this during the dictatorship, what would have happened?” He is told assuredly, “You can’t imagine what would have happened…so continue with this communist activity” Hasan died not long after being filmed, where Adi confronts his family, showing the reenactment of Ramli’s death, even a grotesque book of Hasan’s that lists the names of the dead alongside the date, time and location of each killing, which includes Ramli, but they only react with disgust and outrage, instantly calling the police. While these men rationalize and threaten, Adi is repeatedly told he is asking too many questions, reminded that “if you make an issue of the past, it will happen again.” While this may seem to some like ambush reporting, taking someone completely by surprise, but it’s important to note that members of the death squads were under the impression that the director was their ”friend,” as Oppenheimer freely encouraged them to describe their exploits in heroic terms (extending the rope only to hang them later), so early on a certain amount of trust was established where word got out among them as they all freely participated in recalling their experiences on camera. This, however, is turning the tables, like an FBI sting operation, where the desired intent is to get the stunned reaction on camera, as if this, somehow, stands for the truth. Despite the calm and resolute nature of Adi, who acts with unfathomable restraint, the moral center of the picture showing wisdom beyond his years, serving as his own truth and reconciliation committee all by himself, there is still something discomforting and altogether offputting about pulling the rug out from beneath these senile guys, who are hardly sympathetic figures, but it nonetheless feels tainted, like Michael Moore’s misguided ambush in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (2002) on gun ethics at the home of an aging Charlton Heston, five-term president of the National Rifle Association, after Heston was already suffering the effects of dementia from Alzheimer’s disease. Unlike the best documentaries that reserve judgment about the subject matter, this is a film designed to fit a premise that was already decided upon before shooting even began. While the results often feel revelatory, they’re not altogether surprising, as these aging men want the acclaim associated with their actions, but not the responsibility that comes with committing horrendous crimes.
TIFF 2014 | The Look of Silence (Joshua ... - Cinema Scope Celluloid Liberation Front
In Joshua Oppenheimer’s sequel to his Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing, the focus shifts from the colourful perpetrators of the crimes that the Indonesian junta committed in the mid-’60s so that Shell, BP, Goodyear and other companies could access the country’s natural resources to the killers’ victims. We follow an optometrist visiting his patients in the Indonesian countryside to measure their sight and provide them with a new pair of glasses, but what the intrepid optometrist really wants to face his patients with is their moral blindness towards the crimes they committed against some two million “communists,” amongst whom was his brother Ramli. As in his previous film the director has all the answers in front of his eyes, but keeps looking for remorse and moral repentance. At times his charitable quest is successful, at other times not so much. Good luck for your third installment in the Indonesian Genocide Trilogy, Mr. Oppenheimer! Maybe by the tenth installment the director will understand that evil is banal and any crime, however heinous, can be justified (it happens daily on every front page of our free press). What’s worse is that our outrage too can be easily manipulated, but the director seems fairly convinced that the world is really divided into baddies and goodies. Were the likes of Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi still alive (at least in our consciousness), The Look of Silence would be analyzed and judged for the piece of sensationalist voyeurism it actually is. But in this world thirsty for contradiction-free dichotomies, the film will probably be lauded like its equally facile predecessor. The naiveté and morbid emotionalism of the documentary is also peppered with moments of plain sadism (why would you show an old, sick man unable to walk while clearly in a confused state?). Yet the documentary’s most unforgivable shortcoming is its systematic refusal to investigate the very nature of its troubling subject matter: that is that there is no unspeakable crime people wouldn’t commit if given moral justification. To have the perpetrators regretting what they did without even questioning why they did it in the first place (not to absolve but to condemn them) is indeed a waste of time.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Alex Kopecky
The quiet, sobering hangover to the bender that was THE ACT OF KILLING, THE LOOK OF SILENCE is the equally essential flip-side to Joshua Oppenheimer's explication of Indonesia's mid-60's genocide of ostensible communists. In the previous film, Oppenheimer and co-director Christine Cynn followed the logic of their first collaboration, THE GLOBALISATION TAPES, and handed the means of aesthetic production to their subjects, in this case a group of unrepentant and publicly celebrated death squad leaders, to recreate their greatest hits of artisanal mass murder for the camera. This time around the protagonist is Adi, a village optometrist who calmly but insistently interrogates the men who murdered his brother five decades prior. It's a change of perspective that will appeal to THE ACT OF KILLING's detractors, who found the indulgence of the killers' flamboyant auto-hagiography with minimal pushback at the very least distasteful (a critical position that prevents some viewers from digesting the myriad grotesque pleasures of (ACT OF KILLING/LOOK OF SILENCE executive producer) Errol Morris's THE UNKNOWN KNOWN.) But just as significant are the distinct ways the films' subjects reflect the same underlying events. The gangsters in THE ACT OF KILLING are an inextricable part of Indonesia's written-by-the-winners society, contextualized in a fawning TV interview, a campaign for political office, and involvement with the powerful Pancasila Youth movement. Adi and his centenarian parents seem profoundly isolated, one family among hundreds of thousands living in silence with the absurd open secret of their loved one's murder by their neighbors. It's a fact that has never ceased to haunt them, as indelible to their lives as it was quotidian to the perpetrators. Through his work, and the connections Oppenheimer established over ten years exploring the mass murders, Adi is able to ask the killers and their families the most basic questions about their actions, meeting the repetitive demurrals, justifications, and threats used to eschew personal responsibility. The film's form echoes Adi's approach, with measured editing and careful compositions, its controlled outrage expressed as a precise, piercing look at impunity and hypocrisy. The recurrent static shots of Adi watching Oppenheimer's footage of death squad leaders reliving his brother's murder speak volumes to the way that images allow us to process history, whether in celebration or horror. As with the work of Claude Lanzmann and Rithy Panh, THE LOOK OF SILENCE is a moral inquiry that is concerned with the unique way that cinema enables victims, perpetrators, and viewers to reckon with the past. Whether considered along with its prequel or alone, this is a landmark in 21st century documentary filmmaking.
Little White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]
Joshua Oppenheimer's bloodcurdling and brilliant follow-up to his doc smash, The Act of Killing.
“I think you are avoiding moral responsibility,” says Adi to the man in charge of the death squad that tortured and murdered his brother, Ramli, during the 1965 Indonesian genocide. “You’re so sexy, I can’t stand it,” sings Adi’s father, a man so tiny and toothless he’s like a child, right down to the nappy he wears and the care he receives from his family.
Adi’s mother, Rohani, is a charmingly creased old woman. She passes the days chopping papayas or looking after her husband or sitting under a tree in the tropical heat. These tranquil scenes are at odds with the ragged state of her insides. She will never, not ever, move on from the memory of her oldest son, Ramli, appearing at the house, holding in his protruding guts, having briefly escaped from a death squad. They had tea before the gangsters came back to finish the job.
Rohani’s testimonies return like an automaton to this day, filling in details of an event that is vividly preserved and incomparably grotesque. She is a woman of few words and it takes the length of the film for the extent of her suffering to come out. When it does, the most staggering thing is how raw it all still is, 50 years on. At least, it is staggering to perceive on an emotional level. Intellectually it makes sense that, to quote another genocide survivor, “the wound is open” when those responsible still rule the country and flaunt their power every day.
The Look of Silence works as a standalone story of life in the heartland of grief, but is enhanced by having seen director Joshua Oppenheimer’s astonishing 2012 documentary, The Act of Killing. This film showed the psychological sommersaults that enable a human to kill another human. This time Oppenheimer – with Adi as his partner – has created a documentary that shows what it means to be a victim of a murderous and still dominant regime. He meticulously lays out the furniture of Indonesian past and present before zeroing in on intimate truths about the people who live there today.
While respecting the complexity of both standpoints, The Look of Silence is not an emotional democracy between killers and victims. It is an anguished tribute to those that suffer brutal injustice abstractly and in the particular devastating scheme of this film. The characters are a mother, a father, a dead son and a live son. Adi was born after his brother died and does not know how his family lived before a shroud of sorrow engulfed them. Having grown up among traumatised loved ones, his desire for justice is stronger than his fear of violence. The mood is hushed. The luxuriant land is captured in awe-inspiring framing as Adi, a door-to-door optometrist, goes about talking to members of the death squad or army. Some have boasted on film about the particulars of his brother’s torture. They are old but not decrepit and full of self-justifying logic.
Oppenheimer moves through the details of a sophisticated story with ambling poise, finding humour in the aching and graceful central family and their idiosyncrasies. Daddy is operating under the belief that he is a teenager. Mummy thinks he is “at least 140.” It’s like Oppenheimer is in love with his subjects and showing through cinematic storytelling how worthy of love they are. Adi’s desire for truth in the form of an admittance of guilt from perpetrators hangs in the air as a potential source of relief. So too does the idea of history repeating itself in the form of the violent silencing of his questioning voice. The spectre of further damage being visited upon this family that we have come to know is unbearable and palpably real. In the supposed ‘safe space’ of a filmed interview, evasion turns to menace. The footage suddenly attains the use of evidence in the case of a disappearance.
The next scene is of Rohani holding a tiny fluffy chick, cleaning out its cage. Her compassion seems like a brave little amulet against the machinery of state brutality. Oppenheimer locates tragedy as personal helplessness in the face of the unimagainable. This is the emotional core of a film whose layers go on and on, providing a challenging alternative to the Indonesian history we see being taught to children in a propaganda-driven classroom. Not only are the victims that Oppenheimer embeds with living with personal demons, they are also struggling to save their experiences from Big Brother-style vaporisation.
The Look of Silence is a hybrid of intellectual and emotional fearlessness that devastates as it educates and could only have been made by one man. Where journalistic immersion and philosophical brilliance meets humanism, there stands Joshua Oppenheimer with his camera.
Film
of the Week: The Look of Silence - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, July 24, 2015
The recent trial of 93-year-old former SS guard Oskar Gröning has reanimated long-running debates about justice, reconciliation, and the necessity or usefulness of prosecuting war criminals who have reached advanced old age. Much of the debate around Gröning’s trial has centered on the forgiveness publicly extended to him by Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, who received an embrace and a kiss on the cheek from the old man in court. It’s hard not to think of this while watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s new documentary The Look of Silence, a follow-up—and in some ways a contrasting companion piece—to his much-praised but highly controversial The Act of Killing (12).
In one sequence in The Look of Silence, a young Indonesian man, Adi, confronts an elderly former death squad member about his part in the country’s mass murders of the mid-Sixties. The old man’s daughter is present as her father boasts of his exploits, telling how he took a severed head into a shop to scare its Chinese owners and slit throats while catching the victims’ blood in glasses. The woman listens quietly, then asks Adi to forgive her father. Seemingly on the verge of tears—although Adi’s calm ability to contain his upset is an implicit motif throughout the film—Adi replies: “It’s not your fault that your father is a murderer.” He and the woman embrace, and she says: “Consider him your own father” (though seemingly well intended, you can hardly imagine a less inviting offer). The old man, meanwhile, seems miles away from all this: “It’s getting late,” he says, his apparent obliviousness effectively blocking out any consideration of repentance, and distancing him from the horrifying events he has only just been recounting.
For Adi, it is not forgiveness that is primarily at stake in his confrontations, but revelation. He is an optometrist by trade, and many of his meetings with former killers double as eye tests: one death-squad veteran, after railing at Adi’s pressing questions, asks him to make some reading glasses. The film’s repeated close-ups of eye-testing spectacles are a sustained metaphor for hard-won clarity of vision—enabling these old men to see the truth of their past, matching the clearness of the silent gaze with which Adi scrutinizes them.
The Act of Killing has been criticized as essentially a stunt documentary. It showed former death-squad members, many of them proudly characterizing themselves as gangsters, who took part in the mass murder of real or supposed Communists in Indonesia in 1965-66; over a million people were killed, and their murderers today not only flourish in freedom, but openly boast of their crimes. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer gave his subjects rope to hang themselves, encouraging them not only to narrate their actions, but to reenact them in fantasy mode as pastiche movie scenes all the more disturbing for their gruesomely kitsch nature. One argument against the film was that Oppenheimer was complicit with his subjects in allowing them to glorify themselves. But the film’s most extraordinary moment was a startling payoff. Having prided himself on his skill at garroting, one man starts helplessly dry-heaving—a classic example of the body speaking the inner disturbance that conscious words cannot.
Anyone who found The Act of Killing unpalatable because of its apparent complicity with its subjects will find The Look of Silence more acceptable—yet the film is hardly easy viewing. The directness and emotional rawness of its content make it in some ways more painful, not only because there is no longer the arguable relief of hellish farce, but also because of the surprising calm and visual beauty that Oppenheimer supplies as a foil to the extremity of the content.
Shot in Medan in North Sumatra, the film focuses on Adi’s family. His two parents are now extremely old: his very ill, skeletal father is apparently over 100, but believes that he is only 17. Adi was born in 1968; three years before, his brother Ramli was murdered by local death squads. In the film, Adi sets out to confront Ramli’s murderers—prominent members of the community who openly pride themselves on their involvement in the slaughter of the Sixties. Throughout, we see Adi calmly and silently watching footage of the killers that Oppenheimer filmed in 2004. Then, in a series of visits, he confronts them himself, getting them to open up—not to a stranger who could be seen as a detached journalistic documenter, but to someone whose entire life has been lived under the shadow of their crimes.
What is remarkable is how little the killers attempt to downplay their actions or deflect responsibility: there is no recourse to the classic “only following orders” defense (barring one remarkable instance, which we’ll come to), and no one claims merely to have been an onlooker. One man even produces an illustrated book recording his exploits, with sketches “to bring the story to life.” The nearest we get to anyone playing down personal responsibility is the argument that it was all just politics. One man claims that the killings of the mid-Sixties were “the spontaneous actions of the people.” But a million people were killed, Adi objects. “That’s politics,” his interlocutor counters.
In fact, the killers are more willing to talk than others. Adi’s mother, Rohani, says that she would rather he didn’t uncover these truths, nor seek punishment for the culprits, local notables that she crosses paths with every day: “In the afterlife the victims will take their revenge. There’s no point raising it now.” Later, the son of one of Ramli’s killers says to Adi: “Let’s forget the past and get along like the military dictatorship taught us” (this line is so sublimely quotable that you can’t help wondering whether some poetic license has been taken in the subtitling).
But most of all, people are willing to talk—and not just to talk, but to re-enact, to show Oppenheimer and later to tell Adi how and where their deeds were done. Two elderly men demonstrate exactly how Ramli’s penis was cut off, one of the pair obligingly bending over for the purpose. Given the enthusiastic reconstructions in The Act of Killing, you wonder whether there is something specific to Indonesian culture that makes people not want merely to confess, but to re-enact, dramatize. One of the most revealing moments in The Look of Silence is dramatic in a different sense, as a killer adopts the first person to convey his victim’s ordeal: “After my head’s hacked off, I’m kicked into the river.” It’s a form of identification that is as close as any of these criminals comes to actual empathy.
The confessions are horrific—not least because of the mixture of pride, calm, nostalgia, and a kind of disbelief (as if to say: can you believe the crazy things I did when I was young?) on the perpetrators’ part. One of the most shocking revelations comes when death-squad leader Inong Sungai Ular says that some people went crazy from killing too many victims, but that there was a way to avoid going crazy: drink your victims’ blood. We tend to reassure ourselves with the thought that murderers are likely to be driven mad by their crimes, to forever endure the torments of the damned. Oppenheimer’s films suggest this isn’t the case: the killers he depicts seem to live with their crimes only too cheerfully, and it’s a moot point whether guilt is truly involved. If anything, they have not subsided into madness, but assumed a socially approved eccentricity, living out exaggerated stone-killer personas even into their dotage. But just like the retching Anwar Congo in The Act of Killing, Inong loses his cool here. He complains that Adi’s questions are “too deep,” but undeterred, Adi accuses Inong of lies and propaganda; the old man can only respond by gasping silently, mouth moving helplessly like a fish’s maw, his bravado at last turned to abjection by the kind of accusation he’s clearly not used to.
Even these grim moments of truth are nothing compared to the sequence involving Adi’s 82-year-old uncle, Rohani’s brother. It emerges that the old man was ordered in 1965 to guard prisoners, Ramli among them. The classic excuses begin: “I was ordered to guard the prison, so I did.” In that case, he was part of the killing, Adi says. The old man replies: “I was ordered to defend the state, so I didn’t feel that way”—and besides, he had to save his own skin. Then he comments about the victims: “I was told they were bad people. What’s more, they never pray.” The scene ends with the old man uttering an ineffectual “How dare you,” followed by a weak smile, a sort of gurgle, and a pained look. But any satisfying catharsis we might derive from this scene is undercut when Adi takes the news home with him: he tells his mother about her brother’s guilt. She seems to greet the news with her characteristic composure, but you can’t help wondering about the ethics of the drive to revelation at all costs, when it involves telling the truth to an elderly woman whose life has already been destroyed by criminals.
In contrast to the sometimes lurid tenor of The Act of Killing, and despite the extremity of its own content, Oppenheimer’s follow-up has a calm, contemplative tone. The silence of the title is echoed by moments in which he cuts out natural ambient sound and replaces it with the insistent hum of crickets and other insect noise, as in the eerie night shots that bookend the film; these rhyme with close-up shots of jumping beans, the insects they contain struggling to emerge into daylight, just like the facts revealed in the interviews. Oppenheimer opts for visual composure and beauty that offset the horror and convey a sense of life’s tenaciously continuing in the face of grief: notably, shots of Rohani sitting among trees or inside against bright purple curtains. These contemplative moments, Oppenheimer has said, were modeled on Ozu and Bresson, but Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s rural scenes also come to mind.
Oppenheimer could be accused of aestheticizing content that, some might argue, deserves to be delivered in the most unvarnished way possible; yet the film’s formal elegance emphasizes Adi’s calm and his role as a seemingly impassive listener, his silence having something of the function of a psychoanalyst’s, establishing a space in which repressed truth can emerge freely. And the film’s seeming gentleness is offered as a striking counterpoint to the urgency of its content and its very concrete import for Adi, whose manifest bravery is quite awe-inspiring. More than once, his interviewees tell him that killings could start again at any time, if challengers of the status quo step out of line; Rohani fears that Adi could be poisoned by one of his subjects; his worried wife asks him about the consequences of what he’s doing. Indeed, after the filming, Adi and his family had to move to another part of the country, where human-rights campaigners could help ensure their safety. As a reminder of how risky this undertaking was, for its Indonesian participants most of all, it’s worth nothing that the film is in fact co-directed by Oppenheimer and “Anonymous”; the word “Anonymous” occurs more times that I could count in the end credits, just as it did in The Act of Killing.
Sight & Sound [Nick Pinkerton] June 12, 2015
The
Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer ... - Slate Dana Stevens
Suharto's Purge, Indonesia's Silence Suharto’s Purge, Indonesia’s Silence, by Joshua Oppenheimer, September 29, 2015
Kasia
Anderson: 'The Look of Silence': Showing ... - Truthdig Kasia Anderson from Truthdig, July 17, 2015
Joshua Oppenheimer's 'The Look of Silence' - The Atlantic Lenika Cruz
Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents [Seongyong Cho] also seen here: Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Small
Victories - The New Yorker Anthony
Lane
The
Profoundly Sad Look of Silence Is Necessary -- Vulture Bilge Ebri
Review:
The Look Of Silence is a worthy companion ... - HitFix Catherine Bray
Slant Magazine [James Lattimer]
The
Look of Silence :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Christine N. Ziemba
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'The Look of Silence' is Joshua Oppenheimer's First-Rate ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
The
Look Of Silence · Film Review The Look Of Silence is a powerful ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
The Film Stage [Tommaso Tocci]
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Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]
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Daily Verdict (Blu-ray) [Patrick Bromley]
Reel Insights [Hannah McHaffie] also seen here: Hannah McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie]
NYFF:
The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer's Follow ... Nick Schager from The Village Voice
The
Act of Forgiving: Joshua Oppenheimer's 'The Look of ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
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Look of Silence - Film School Rejects
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theartsdesk.com [Kieron Tyler]
The
House Next Door [Clayton Dillard]
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Film Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
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Daily
| Venice + Toronto 2014 | Joshua Oppenheimer's THE ... David Hudson from Fandor
The
Look of Silence gets Venice talking, but verdict from ... Xan Brooks interview from The Guardian, August 28, 2014
Joshua Oppenheimer: why I returned to Indonesia's killing ... Sean O’Hagan’s extensive piece interviews the director and lead actor from The Observer, June 7, 2015
Adi Rukun interview: The subject of a haunting new ... Karen Attwood interview with the lead actor from The Independent, June 13, 2015
Opening Indonesia's Eyes In 'The Look Of Silence ... - NPR Howie Movshovitz interviews the director and lead actor from NPR, July 12, 2015
Interview:
Joshua Oppenheimer | Feature | Slant Magazine Steve McFarlane interview from Slant magazine, July 17, 2015
It's
as Though I'm in Germany 40 Years After the ... - Slate Dana Stevens interview from Slate, July 17, 2015
Look
of Silence - Los Angeles Times Janet
Kinosian interview with the director, July 18, 2015
'The
Look of Silence': Venice Review - The Hollywood ... Deborah Young from The Hollywood Reporter
Film
Review: 'The Look of Silence' - Variety
Guy Lodge
The Look of Silence: Act of Killing director's second film is as ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
The
Look of Silence review – return to Indonesia's ... - The Guardian Mark Kermode from The Observer
South China Morning Post [Edmund Lee]
Toronto Film Scene [Sean Kelly]
Examiner.com [Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Austin Chronicle [William Goss]
Review:
'The Look of Silence,' - Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan, July 24, 2015, also seen here: PopMatters
[Kenneth Turan]
Indonesian
acts of killing - Los Angeles Times
Steven Zeitchik, October 2, 2014
'Act
of Killing's' Joshua Oppenheimer wins MacArthur ... 'Act of
Killing's' Joshua Oppenheimer wins MacArthur 'genius grant' by Steven
Zeitchik from The LA Times, September
17, 2014
The Look of
Silence Movie Review (2015) | Roger Ebert
Glenn Kenny
Review:
'The Look of Silence' - The New York Times
A.O. Scott
New
York Film Festival - ArtsBeat Blog - The New York Times
Indonesians Who Helped Make Documentaries Face ... Indonesians Who Helped Make Documentaries Face Uncertainty, by Cara Buckley from The New York Times, July 15, 2015
The Look of Silence -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Measuring Impact: The Importance of Evaluation for ... Measuring Impact: The Importance of Evaluation for Documentary Film Campaigns, by Beth Karlin and John Johnson from Journal of Media and Culture, December 2011
Oremland,
Paul
SURVEILLANCE D 55
Shot entirely on video, within 5 minutes you are already sick of the
flattened look of this small film which has more in common with television, as
it’s surely out of its league even in a mediocre film festival. Using the concept of telling a story largely
through fictitious surveillance video, supposedly a thriller, perhaps even a
gay thriller, what they left out is lousy gay thriller that so overstates its
case, following the journalistic ethos of what resembles The National Enquirer that what it takes seriously becomes
unintentionally comical, which simply subverts the director’s intentions to
create a taut, edgy thriller. The
director, who was present at the screening, indicated he was working on a
Princess Diana video, reviewing available surveillance tapes surrounding her
death when he got the idea for this film, expanding the scope of the tapes in
one’s imagination so that no one is ever out of surveillance range, providing
blanket coverage of all citizens, making it a reality that they can track down
anybody. At present, according to the
director, the average person in
Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline)
One of the first British films to get its initial release as
video-on-demand, this intriguing little thriller is amiable and involving,
avoiding
Adam (Harper) is a sporty teacher, happily going about his
active life. One evening in a gay nightclub, he picks up the intriguing Jake
(Brosnan), but the next day his life starts getting rather strange. Jake
disappears, while Adam is clearly being followed. And it soon becomes clear
that a tabloid hack (Steele), a powerful media baron (Jones) and a government
spy (Hollick) are all after something. Eventually, Adam meets "The
Saint" (Callow), a shadowy man who knows what's up, and why Adam may hold
the key to bringing down the British monarchy.
Despite the opening claim that this film is made up of
surveillance footage, it clearly isn't. But at least the filmmakers try to
achieve an inventive camera style, peering through gaps and around corners to
catch the action, and filling the plot with tracking devices, tiny spy-cams and
mobile phone trickery. Yes, it's extremely gimmicky, but it also makes a strong
point about privacy and security. Especially since the whole story is assembled
like a news channel's reportage.
Director Oremland (Like It Is) creates a moody tone
with sharply comical undertones. He also tries to be scary and tense, but never
quite gets there. On the other hand, the film is visually textured and cleverly
edited, with a fascinating mystery that keeps us hooked. At the centre, Harper
is very likeable as an innocent man caught up in some very nasty intrigue.
Brosnan is sexy and offbeat, and looks so much like his dad Pierce that it's
distracting, while Callow is having a ball chomping on all the scenery.
Since it's told more like an intimate drama than a
thunderous action movie, the story's quite engaging. The flashback structure
works nicely to let us get to know the characters before all of the plot twists
kick in. And when it all starts to come together, in a kind of gay twist on
Diana conspiracy theories, the film finally finds a gripping sense of pace.
Orlowski, Jeff
CHASING ICE B 87
Much of this plays out like a child’s curiosity about the planets, wanting to know more about this world around us, becoming more deeply involved in further scientific exploration until James Balog appears, one of the world renowned environmental photographers working for National Geographic. Initially he was fascinated how the ocean waves splashed along shoreline icebergs in Iceland that were only three or four feet high, or shooting ice under a night sky, enamored by the beauty of it all. But eventually this becomes a provocative counterpoint to those who still insist Global Warming is a myth. Balog targets glaciers around the world, using 36 time-lapse cameras shooting 16 different glaciers over the course of several years, shooting once every half-hour during daylight hours in remote locations of Alaska, Bolivia, Canada, France, Greenland, Iceland, Nepal, Switzerland, and the Rocky Mountains, producing nearly a million pictures over the course of three years, offering irrefutable evidence that melting glaciers around the world have retreated in the last 10 years distances that it took them 100 years prior to that, all attributed to the rapid rise of the planet’s temperature, which has been traced by scientists to the impact of humans releasing carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide emissions into the atmosphere. According to Balog, geological activity is usually measured in the hundreds of years, but in our lifetime we are currently living in a period of profoundly active geological change, as there has been such an explosion in the massive shifting of ice formations, literally elevating the sea level, where this is having an impact in oceanic weather patterns, causing greater natural weather disasters, as the water level is higher closer to the shorelines, creating more destructive flooding. The enormous release of Arctic water from the melting polar icecaps is documented by Balog and a small camera crew as they literally hike to the sources of greatest melting.
Balog initiated his Extreme Ice Survey project in March
2007, setting up cameras in some of the most difficult to reach places on the
planet, only to return 5 months later to discover uniform malfunctions in the
equipment, eventually changing to something less complex and more durable,
which has been working perfectly ever since.
While the individual photos showing before and after shots are impressive,
nothing shows the devastating magnitude of the change like videos that compress
years into seconds, showing mountains of ice disappearing before our eyes. But in order to get these shots, Balog and
his carefully chosen international team of younger field coordinators, Adam
Levinter and Svavar Jónatansson, had to travel by helicopter, canoe, and dog
sled across several continents, setting up tents and surviving the harshest
elements, before scaling the heights of mammoth icebergs, then traversing down
into the cracks where the water is furiously flowing, Chasing
Ice (2012) Clip - YouTube (1:43).
Ice in the
Despite his enduring intensity, the weakest part of the film
focuses on Balog himself, offering personal details the audience could do
without, as what’s most spectacular is the incredible imagery obtained from
this project. If traversing across the
barren polar icecaps was not daring enough, capturing some of the most
astonishing footage, where in 20 years one glacier shown shrunk in vertical
height by more than 1200 feet, or the size of the Empire State building. Balog truly outdid himself by sending his
team to camp out in front of a glacier for several weeks, where literally
nothing happened at all for the first few weeks, as these guys just stared into
the ice all day waiting for something to happen, culminating in the most
astounding footage of all when they capture 75 minutes of a spectacular glacial
collapse, actually captured on nine different cameras, where the ice literally
implodes upon itself in a domino effect, giant chunks toppling into the sea, a
unique experience never seen before where ice larger than the size of Manhattan
literally disappears before our eyes.
While this is visually breathtaking, the most extensive visual record of
glaciers ever recorded, there’s also an element of sadness and loss, as this
ice isn’t renewing itself, where once it’s gone it’s gone, a devastating loss
to the planet. In the future, the rising
sea levels can only lead to displaced millions living in settlements near the
ocean shorelines, and present levels of carbon dioxide are expected to double
within the next 50 years, raising the average global temperature by about 3
degrees. As some may argue there are
currently glaciers expanding, but scientists in the
Chasing Ice | Filmlinc.com | Film Society of Lincoln Center
In the spring of 2005, National Geographic photographer James
Balog headed to the
Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change
the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet.
Within months of that first trip to
As the debate polarizes
There's something formulaic about starting a
film by showing a slew of archival news clips showing various right-wing
pundits, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, claiming that science surrounding climate
change is preposterous and pure hokum. This sort of posturing inevitably leads
to an onslaught of expert testimony to prove the case, showing an abundance of
fancy diagrams and cool animations, blended with dialogue that will make the
naysayers sound like morons.
Jeff Orlowski's Chasing Ice differs from the status
quo of eco-documentary format by providing viewers with tangible visual
evidence that is impossible to refute logically. Structured around James Balog's
Extreme Ice Survey, a comprehensive multi-year photographic study of the
world's glaciers, Orlowski follows the team as they travel to
Obviously, the documentary is politically charged,
containing the usual suspect appearances of experts that provide additional
insight on a problem that has been reported countless times before. But what
sets this film apart is the breathtaking cinematography used to bring the point
close to home, revealing firsthand footage of glaciers breaking apart and
melting before your eyes. Hearing statistics and numbers is one thing but
witnessing definitive photographic evidence of receding glaciers is quite
another.
Orlowski's Chasing Ice is a powerful and
thought-provoking eco-doc that proves without a doubt the negative impact
humans have caused on the environment and begs us to take action without
heavy-handed tactics. As Balog stated in the film, "the story is in the
ice."
The Earth is dying. Not in a metaphorical way and not dying over a geologic timescale of billions of years. But dying in a very real and observable way. Chasing Ice from director Jeff Orlowski offers striking evidence of a dying Earth in footage of events that have rarely ever been seen, much less recorded. Orlowski’s documentary profiles famed environmental photographer James Balog who, together with a small and dedicated team, has sought to capture on film the retreat of Earth’s glaciers using an army of time-lapse cameras positioned across the globe—from Alaska and Glacier National Park in Montana to Iceland and Greenland.
Following Balog on his quest to document glacial retreat, Orlowski interviews several scientists who speak pressingly of the need for immediate policies addressing global warming. And the data that they’ve compiled—mirroring much of the evidence presented in An Inconvenient Truth (2006)—is startling. Data that points to the escalation of carbon dioxide in our air over the past 200 years, mapped out across animated graphics, is particularly lucid and fascinating. The scientists’ forecast of draughts, wildfires and floods occurring with increasing frequency and intensity is already being borne out for those paying attention.
Perhaps most eloquent of all—the most frightening and
heartbreaking proof that something is wrong—lies in the documentary’s incredible
imagery. As the climate warms, meltwater creates torrential channels beneath
the glaciers, causing them to decompose and retreat. Chasing Ice needs
to be seen on as large a screen as possible (IMAX if possible), if only to
allow viewers to witness the collapse of our environment in all its perverse
glory. By luck and pluck, Balog and his field coordinators, Adam Levinter and
Svavar Jónatansson, capture footage of titanic glaciers—varying from several
football fields in length to the size of
Balog comes through as a brilliant, fearless, compassionate environmental artist and activist. The results of his project are epic in scale and startlingly eloquent, complementing the overwhelming evidence from leading climate scientists of fast-rising greenhouse gas levels worldwide. Yet, as much as Chasing Ice wants to be the straw that breaks the deniers’ backs, the final exhibit in the science community’s urgent prosecution, the documentary won’t sway fence sitters or counter the noise of denial and skepticism perpetrated by right-wing media outlets determined to suppress the debate. Their presence is felt keenly in a couple of montage sequences featuring Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other climate change deniers. Overcoming this resistance is the real challenge, as Balog himself points out. We’ve got the policy and technology worked out. What remains is to win the hearts and minds of the unconverted.
Slant Magazine [Tomas Hachard]
Chasing Ice begins with footage of recent natural
disasters—floods, wildfires, tornadoes, and droughts—occurring all over the
world. A week after hurricane Sandy, though, many Americans will need little
reminder of the devastation that nature can cause, or of the growing number of
natural calamities that keep hitting cities and regions previously spared from
such events. "Anyone who says there is not a dramatic change in weather
patterns I think is denying reality," said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
a day after
In 2007, nature photographer James Balog and a team of engineers and scientists
began setting up cameras at glaciers in
Balog's photography
and director Jeff Orlowski's cinematography also capture the often ferocious
beauty of the arctic landscape. The documentary's most memorable moment comes
courtesy of two members of Balog's team who camped out for days waiting for a
glacier to calve (the term used for when a large chunk of ice breaks off a
glacier and falls into the sea). What we eventually witness is one of the
biggest calving events ever recorded. It's the equivalent, as the film
describes it, of watching lower
The film lags when it focuses on Balog, though the project leader certainly
comes off as a determined figure. Shortly after his fourth knee surgery, and
strictly against doctor's orders, he insists on hiking to one of the glaciers
on two crutches in order to check on camera footage. Balog clearly believes his
work can help raise awareness, but frustration also emerges when he observes
how, centuries after
That frustration hangs in the air throughout the film, especially because Orlowski bookends it with footage of adamant naysayers of climate change. Recent statements from Cuomo and Michael Bloomberg demanding immediate attention to the problem are great to hear, though it seems like only repeated disasters close to home will make climate change a real political issue. At one point, Balog, a former skeptic himself, says that "if I hadn't seen it in the pictures, I wouldn't believe it at all." For some people, you fear, no picture or video will ever be enough.
Film-Forward.com [Nora Lee Mandel]
Chasing
down the world's vanishing glaciers - CNN.com Tom Levitt,
Chasing Ice | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Alison Willmore
Movie Review - 'Chasing Ice' - Capturing Climate Change On ... - NPR Mark Jenkins
Sound On Sight Katie Wong
Combustible Celluloid Review - Chasing Ice (2012), Jeff Orlowski ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
IONCINEMA.com [Jordan M. Smith]
Cinemablographer [Patrick Mullen]
Chasing Ice (2012) Movie Review | Film School Rejects Daniel Walber
Chasing Ice (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Owen van Spall
Interview:
Jeff Orlowski and James Balog provide stunning proof of ... Danny Miller interview from The Hitlist,
Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]
Chasing Ice Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Trevor Johnston
Chasing Ice – review | Film | The Guardian Mike McCahill
Review: Chasing Ice - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Gerald Peary
Critic Review for Chasing Ice on washingtonpost.com Michael O’Sullivan
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
'Chasing Ice' review: Even disbelievers will get the ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Examiner.com [Jana J. Monji]
Chasing Ice - The New York Times
Osborne, Mark and John Stevenson
KUNG FU PANDA
Kung
Fu Panda Screendaily at
The world has already fallen in love with a grumpy green ogre (Shrek)
and a lugubrious mammoth (Ice Age) so it should have no trouble clasping
a podgy, self-deprecating panda to its collective bosom. Kung Fu Panda
ticks all the boxes for must-see family entertainment and the cute factor is
only enhanced by the vocal expertise of Jack Black and the fact that this
particular rotund panda has delusions of martial arts grandeur. The film's
status as the summer's animation front runner is only likely to be challenged
by W.A.L.L.-E but until then this is the kind of surefire
Dreamworks
have gone all Oriental for their latest animated venture, embracing every
imaginable cliché from dragons and firecrackers to peach tree blossom and
pagodas. Eve n the familiar Dreamworks logo has been given a makeover. The
storyline of finding the hero inside yourself is no less obvious but is given a
sprightly freshness by the breathless pace, attention to detail and sheer good
fun on offer. It might not be an instant classic but it is extremely
entertaining and a definite crowd-pleaser.
Jack Black
is perfectly cast as
Kung Fu
Panda moves at such a cracking pace, there is little
time to reflect on the failings of the story. Instead we are swept along by a
mixture of silly shtick, slapstick comedy, Crouching Tiger-style action
spectacle and Hans Zimmer's rip-roaring score. A number of the big name vocal
talents involved, especially Jackie Chan, are reduced to minor supporting
characters which may upset some fans but is unlikely to trouble the target
family audience. Little demands are placed upon Angelina Jolie as the proud
warrior Tigress but Jack Black is a blustering, frantic delight as Po and is
beautifully matched by Dustin Hoffman who brings a dry, deadpan comic timing to
the role of his longsuffering mentor. The heart of the film is built around the
relationship that develops between these two and the highlights include a Rocky-style
training session using food as a reward. Naturally,
The
animation does find time to balance the breakneck forward momentum of the
narrative with some beautiful scenes of misty mountains tops, trees with blood
red foliage and dark, shadowy moments in the fortress where Tai Lung has been
held. It is as if the spirit of recent Zhang Yimou spectaculars have informed
this warm and very likable
Oshii, Mamoru
GHOST IN THE SHELL
Japan
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Mamoru Oshi’s landmark Ghost in the Shell – which superbly melds two-dimensional artwork and computer graphics – has rightly been decried for helping usher in an age of convoluted, spectacle-driven science fiction. Simply blasting the film’s surface-over-substance storytelling, however, is to shortchange its intriguing (if frequently pretentious) investigation into the nature of reality. Major Kusanagi is a cyborg cop with a soul (the titular “ghost” in her buxom shell) who, along with her mechanically enhanced partner Bato, is hot on the trail of a hacker known as The Puppetmaster. Major is plagued by nagging doubts about her own “humanity,” unsure of whether she was ever a person or, on the other hand, just programmed to believe in her organic origins. Her hunt for The Puppetmaster thus becomes a quest for identity, and what she ultimately learns from the notorious hacker – and what the philosophical film attempts to posit – is that a sentient entity (human or synthetic) is defined by its capacity for memories, self-analysis, reproduction, and death. Such questions about the complex relationship between man and machine are juvenilely gussied up with Oshi’s voluptuous nude fembots, with Major regularly undressing before engaging in battle (such as during a thrilling, if brief, fight with a six-legged tank). But inflated boobies aside, the influential Ghost in the Shell – a film the Wachowskis repeatedly “borrowed from” for The Matrix – delivers a fairly entrancing vision of a human race overrun by evolving artificial intelligence.
Sci-Fi Weekly Tasha Robinson
If science can improve significantly on the basic design of the human body, is there any advantage in being human? Does a streamlined, superpowered cyborg have any use for something as invisible and intangible as a soul?
For Motoko Kusanagi, the grimly beautiful star of the animated Japanese mini-epic Ghost in the Shell, these aren't just abstract philosophical questions. As a mechanized, super-efficient government agent with only a fistful of brain cells remaining from her original body, she's brilliant, fast and deadly. But she's haunted by the dual question of whether she's still human and whether it really matters if she is.
Her insecurities solidify into concrete relevance as she and her strike team battle a plague of increasingly mysterious internal governmental problems. From the defection of a prominent computer programmer to the plotting of a mind-wiped terrorist, each new case is another piece in an emerging pattern. The missing link between all of Kusanagi's recent troubles appears to be the top-secret "Project 2501" -- a computerized super-spy dubbed the Puppetmaster.
When the Puppetmaster's machinations produce a wholly synthetic body that nonetheless claims to have a "ghost," or soul, Kusanagi's worldview is permanently shaken. If there really is an artificial soul locked in the Puppetmaster's cybernetic shell, it may hold all the answers to Kusanagi's questions about her true nature. On the other hand, it may be a trap designed specifically with her needs in mind.
Ghost's thoughtful, adult nature has generated unprecedented attention from the mainstream press, but overall, the stunning visuals are far more interesting than the plot details. Ghost follows in the footsteps of the all-time anime classic Akira with its towering, expansive urban landscapes, evocative soundtrack, fluid sense of motion and staccato pacing. The rich colors and amazing artistic detail are spectacular, and the entire movie begs for a large-screen viewing.
By contrast, the storyline is dry and slightly choppy. The direction is excellent, combining intense action and chase sequences with languid, wordless images of Kusanagi's synthetic "birth" and her subsequent attempts to return to the artificial "womb." But the actual plot is occasionally hard to follow, and sometimes hard to believe, as Kusanagi and company stagger through seemingly unconnected battles and rushed revelations.
The anime version of Ghost does prove much easier to follow than the original 400-page graphic novel by renowned manga artist Masamune Shirow (Appleseed, Dominion). Still, the highly-abridged 82-minute video adaptation leaves a few things to be desired. The new ending in particular is abrupt enough to give viewers whiplash.
Ghost in the Shell is a must-see for anime fans, but it's also unquestionably the product of intensely dedicated marketing that overshadows the film itself. As beautiful as Ghost is, audiences may be disappointed if they get caught up too thoroughly in the hype.
Visually very impressive, but it doesn't bear up under repeated viewing as much as I'd like. The graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics actually costs more than the dubbed video version, but there's about three times as much plot to work with.
Asian Cinema Drifter Tuna
With an attention grabbing
combination of beautiful animation, an original story and more breast-centered
shots than you can handle, Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell earned and seemingly
maintained its title as one of the best animes out there. Ever. So with these
weighty expectations when seeing this as far back as ‘98 or ‘99, which still
qualifies me
as a latecomer, it wouldn’t be entirely true to say the first feeling was
anything other than disappointment. The label of the start of the cyberpunk
sci-fi action wave is bound to create some excitement. And of course a badass
robot chick on the cover clutching a gun is self-explanatory. Nevertheless,
back then, the sporadic action wasn’t common enough and the substantial techno
babble that dominates the film seemed too self-indulgent to care about the
audience. It was cool, but not that cool. So that’s what I remember thinking
anyway.
In a future world full of technological advancements, robots and cybernetically
enhanced humans sits Section 9, a department consisting of these enhanced
humans, alerted about the reoccurring threat of a famous hacker known only as
the Puppetmaster. The self-doubting Major Kusanagi, a female cyborg cop and the
best Section 9 has to offer, is assigned to this mess of political
entanglements and techno-philosophy to put a stop to the Puppetmaster’s
terrorism and learn something of her identity as well.
With the release of Ghost in the Shell 2, came the necessity to refamiliarize
myself with the story and the characters. Instead, now with an open mind (but
still with the pain of the awkward English dubbing), came a deeper
understanding and appreciation that immediately changed whatever vague
recollections I previously had. First off, the animation quality. Taking recent
anime features into account, it’s remarkable how new this nine year old piece
of work felt venturing into cross-hand drawn/computer animation to blend
together a surreal look for the future. Not only for the story future, but the
future of animation work. It shows obvious influence for Metropolis, which
heavily improved on the style, among other works that just can’t all be named.
The company Production I.G. should be familiar to most, even to anime
newcomers, as here they’re known as the company that did the Kill Bill anime
segment (which funnily enough can’t compare to Ghost in the Shell’s.) Besides
the point, anything from the seamless character camouflage insertion to
detailed reflective looks at the city seems to point out that Ghost in the
Shell is more of a showcase for animation development, than the adaptation of
gripping story.
Still, even with an 80 minute running time, the film manages to cram in tons of
relatively new ideas (for 1995 mind you), elaborating on human nature,
artificial intelligence and basically containing many of those ideas explored
in sci-fi since The Matrix. Think the green numbers and jacking in look
familiar? Well they should. Not to say that this movie created every one of
these futuristic ideas or concepts or anything, but it does contain basic
sci-fi elements that due to its popularity, have been overused in tons of
movies that it’s influenced.
As far as the story goes, it seems rather short for the type of film it is.
More exploration and action is expected, as things seem to simply fall into
place for a smooth but short ride. It’s a bit like Akira in that respect, as it
feels like ideas from the manga never made it into the film, but it doesn’t get
to the point of utter confusion. Here, the plot can be followed, but depending
on the type of viewer, it’s possible to get hung up on plot holes and character
details. It’s hard to comment on, since the pacing still worked surprisingly
well, but the short running time is mainly noticeable when it comes to
characters’ humanity. The emotional value of the film is created exactly as
irregularly as the main characters, made up largely of cold mechanics with the
rare heart and sympathy. It detaches the viewer from the actual story and puts
the focus on the technological and existential concepts and dialogue.
It’s not necessary to worship every piece of philosophical dialogue to
appreciate the work here, but it is obviously intelligent dialogue, even if it
does come out a bit comically through the dubbing. It’s nice though for the
film to occasionally spout out thick dialogue that’s hard to follow because
it’s a movie that doesn’t cater to audience stupidity. It gives you enough
information and assumes you can think abstractly to get it. If you’re simply
the type that doesn’t callously disregard these ideas as pretentious loads of
crap, then it’s rather easy to find an appreciation for film in many places.
Regardless of the discussion the conceptual thinking can create, movies need a
compelling story. Even mindless action movies have you rooting for the hero
whereas here you’re forced to root for yourself, to be more drawn in by the
story. Ghost in the Shell is considered an anime classic. Plain and simple. I
can’t say I agree, but it did get better on the rewatch. Even if it lacks the
heart needed to make the movie a truly memorable experience, the other things
Ghost in the Shell does will stick with you, as long as it’s approached with an
open mind.
Monsters At Play J. Read
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film
Review Richard
Scheib
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday
Night Critic]
Senses of Cinema Jordan Wynnychuk
DVD Town (Yunda Eddie Feng & Olen Anderson)
DVD Verdict Joel Pearce
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
San Francisco Chronicle [Laura Evenson]
San Francisco Examiner [Barry Walters]
Austin Chronicle [Joey O'Bryan]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
DVDBeaver Gary W. Tooze
AVALON
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
By now, anyone who's
seen a movie by Japanese writer-director Mamoru Oshii (Ghost In The Shell,
The Red Spectacles, Talking Head) should be familiar with the
pattern: high-concept genre ideas, beautifully shot and composed images, pacing
somewhere between languid and draggy, lengthy meditative silent environmental
studies. Oshii's 2001 movie Avalon takes all of the above and blends it
with a William Gibson brand of cyberpunk and half a dozen visual and textual
concepts drawn directly from The Matrix. Shot in Poland, with a Polish
cast and a Polish-language script, Avalon takes place in a grungy future
in which the most popular entertainment is a virtual-reality military game
called Avalon. Most players team up in order to survive the game's dangerous
battles, but one woman (Malgorzata Foremniak), burned by a bad team breakup,
has achieved near-mythic status as a solo player. When former teammate Jerzy
Gudejko, also playing solo, winds up comatose—one of the many "unreturned"
who never log out of Avalon—Foremniak begins to follow up rumors of a game
level called "Special A," a challenge which has apparently destroyed
all previous players. The plot is formulaic, and much of the rest is familiar,
particularly the grubby, sunken-eyed, rag-bedecked people who lie in metal
recliners and plug themselves into a machine in order to retreat to a shinier
world where they can wear black leather and carry big guns. But while it wears
its influences unabashedly, Avalon also bears Oshii's unmistakable
stamp, his usual stately pacing, and the gorgeous music of frequent Oshii
collaborator Kenji Kawai. These elements combine to give Avalon the
weight of high religious ritual, and the visuals, mostly filmed in
high-contrast sepia tones, are often breathtaking. Oshii doesn't skimp on the
explosions or the CGI special effects (particularly the recurring images of
dead game-players dissolving in a spray of polygons), but his loveliest images
occur when Foremniak works quietly at her computer, bathed in harsh orange
light, or when she placidly makes an elaborate meal for her beloved dog. Like The
Matrix, Avalon eventually devolves into what-is-real?
philosophizing, though with a simpler bent and a punchy but inconclusive
ending. But unlike The Matrix, Avalon never seems to be in any
rush to get to that ending. As usual in his films, Oshii piles on the shiny
geek-bait, but reaches his greatest successes by hovering in ordinary moments,
just enjoying what he's created.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The unknown gem in the Walter Reade's ambitious sci-fi show,
Avalon is a "live-action" feature by anime maestro Mamoru
Oshii—acquired by Miramax at the 2001
Oshii's 1995 Ghost in the Shell—an anime elaborately set in a noirish total-computer world where cyborg agents interface online or download simulated memories into hapless humans—anticipated both The Matrix and eXistenZ; Avalon further elaborates on their computer game aesthetic. The protagonist, Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak), is a grave, elegant creature who plays the illegal game solo after the implosion of her old championship team—it fell apart after someone called for a "reset." She is, however, spooked when she discovers that an old teammate has gone "unreturned" from the game (and catatonic in a mental hospital) after chasing a mysterious phantom child who is the portal to Avalon's ultimate level, Special A.
Ash has almost no life outside Avalon. Nor, in a sense, does
Avalon. The game represents a yearning for some sort of redemption (as a choral
group sings, "Avalon, when will that day come?"). The movie offers
it—somewhere beyond anime. Oshii has admitted that using a Polish cast gave him
license to digitally manipulate their facial expressions in post-production.
Special A is supposed to be "realer than real," and in the movie's
final movement, Ash makes a breakthrough from her drab, near-monochrome
environment into a new world of color and advertising. Among other things,
Avalon may be the first movie that uses contemporary
Director Mamoru Oshii's live action/animation hybrid will be inaccessible to many, but it's a landmark of the genre. Or, if you're part of the "slow pace is murder" crowd, it's like Nyquil without the side effects.
Beyond its amazing visuals and memorable soundtrack, Avalon is almost impenetrable. There's little or no attempt to make you care for the characters or their personal develoment. The film puts you in a position very few films dare to by defying initial expectations. You're initially given some amazing action sequences and CGI, but the film quickly settles down and brings up metaphysical questions. It creates a world that's dark and pessimistic. It's more interested in giving you food for thought than shocking you with fantastic battles or special effects.
Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak) is one of the best, most respected players in an underground virtual reality game. She was part of the "invincible" group Wizard, which is now disbanded. There are rumors going around the community that she caused the break up, "resetting" the game for the first time among the members of the group. She's now going solo, and lives day-by-day with the profit she makes from the game. She hardly connects with anybody, and her only decent relationship is with her dog. It's a relationship with very little emotional demand, though. The dog doesn't complain, and just greets Ash and asks for food whenever she comes home.
Her first challenge in a long time comes when she sees a Bishop level player (players are ranked by levels, like any respectable RPG) perform better than her. She tries to find information about him, but it leads to nothing. It seems like he's operating from inside the game, and is searching for partners to venture into the ultimate level of the game, Class Special A. For the first time since the Wizard incident, Ash decides to work in a team. She wants to know about Class Special A, and what that will bode for her future. She also wants to find out about the truth behind the "unreturned" (players who accessed Class Special A but returned with nothing but a coma), as it will help her understand what happened to one of her friends.
Mamoru Oshii's decision to shoot the film in
Avalon is an incredibly demanding film, and most will give up after watching it two or three times. It's an intelligent piece of filmmaking, but it's up to you to answer the film's questions, to ask yourself what the end means, and to understand Oshii's messages behind the more inaccessible aspects of the film. The film works better if one isn't looking for something to top the first ten minutes, and watching it more than once certainly helps that. Oshii is more interested in creating a world that resembles an apocalyptic version of what we're experiencing today. He seems to give us a warning that's social (youth is clearly trying to escape a world that gives them no space to move), political/economical (there's no freedom even in Avalon, and only the best survive) and at the end even metaphysical (Oshii asks you what is reality after all).
It's probably too much to handle for just a film, but this is
nonetheless an amazing achievement by Mamoru Oshii. His work shouldn't be
overlooked just because the film is emotionally impenetrable and so difficult
to understand. Avalon is something that's hard to digest at first, but
it confirms Oshii as something more than just an Anime director. He clearly
wanted to separate himself from the belief that Anime is something for only
kids or fanatics. If Ghost In The Shell wasn't enough to make you
believe there can be Anime arthouse films, Avalon will certainly do the
job.
Midnight Eye review Jasper Sharp
DVD Times: Avalon Dave Foster
Film Freak Central Review [Travis Hoover]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
KFC Cinema Peter Zsurka
Foster on Film - Cyberpunk Matthew M. Foster
VideoVista Amy Harlib
BeyondHollywood.com Nix not impressed
Avalon Mark Schilling from The Japan Times
Ôshima, Nagisa
Nagisa
Oshima - Director - Films as Director:, Other Films:, Publications G. C. Macnab, updated
by Guo-Juin Hong from Film Reference
Nagisa Oshima, the
Godard of the East, spent much of the 1980s engaged in international
co-productions. He directed Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in 1983 for Jeremy
Thomas, who was later to produce The Last Emperor for Bertolucci, and he
combined with Luis Buñuel's old scriptwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, on Max,
Mon Amour —an Ionesco-like anatomy of bourgeois mores in which Charlotte
Rampling has an affair with an ape.
These European
excursions seem a world apart from the early work of the former student
activist and leader of the Japanese New Wave of the late 1950s. Back in those
days, Oshima was telling cruel stories of youth, using the ingredients of
American teenage exploitation movies, namely sex and violence, to make a
trenchant critique of postwar Japanese society. Railing against the U.S.-Japan
Security Pact, and despairing of the old left communists' ability to make a
meaningful intervention as the country experienced its "economic
miracle," Oshima mobilized delinquency and nihilism. Unlike the French nouvelle
vague , who tended merely to aestheticize the exploits of their young petty
criminals and misfits—the Antoine Doinels and Jean Paul Belmondos—and who took
until 1968 to become obstreperously political, Oshima was engaged from the
outset.
He learned his craft
as an assistant-director at the Shochiku Studios, where he directed his first
features. However, the controversy surrounding his fourth film, Night and
Fog in Japan (the title was deliberately designed to echo Resnais's
"gas chamber" documentary), pushed him toward working as an
independent. A despairing indictment of the disunity of the Japanese left—the
old left were felt to have betrayed the new— Night and Fog is as notable
for its formal characteristics as for its topical content. For a start, it
contains only 43 shots. (Compare this to his 1966 work, Violence at Noon ,
which is a masterpiece of frenetic cutting, boasting over 2,000 shots in its
90-odd minutes, and you realize that Oshima is a formalist jackdaw, ready to
experiment in whatever way he thinks fit.) And it was made in CinemaScope.
Oshima, like Godard in A bout de souffle , has a penchant for hand-held
camera shots. These, though, are rather more jarring when used in 70mm than in
16mm.
Cast out on his own
when Shochiku withdrew Night and Fog only three days after its release,
Oshima remained active in both film and television throughout the 1960s. His
first independent movie, The Catch , set the tone for much that was to
follow. It tells the story of a black American POW, held hostage by a small
village. While waiting for the military police to remove their
"catch," the villagers make the man a scapegoat for all their own problems,
eventually murdering him.
In its concern with
racism and brutality, whether institutional or practiced by private
individuals, The Catch anticipates Oshima's most famous film of the
1960s, and the one that finally brought his work to the attention of the West.
Shown out of competition at Cannes, Death by Hanging is as gruesome a
film about capital punishment as one could ever wish to see. Based, like many
of this director's works, on a "true story"—of a young Korean
sentenced to death for the brutal murder and rape of a Japanese high school
girl—the film operates on several levels, both formally and thematically.
Japanese racism toward Koreans—for so long the untouchables of Japanese
society—the mindless bureaucracy involved in state licensed murder, and good
old adolescent existential angst are amongst its narrative components. As Noel
Burch has observed, the film's style is constantly shifting: it starts as
drama-documentary, shot in sober black and white, but it later develops into a
self-reflexive avantgarde text in which the audience is addressed directly. It
uses theatrical masquerade, paying homage to the tradition of Japanese kabuki
theatre. Its early "classical realism" is utterly usurped. The Korean
fails to die when he is hanged. The officials—wardens, priests, police—must
recreate his crime for him because he has lost his memory. In their bid to
remind him of his guilt, they actually repeat his murder.
Jean Genet, the French
vagabond thief and writer, is Oshima's constant inspiration. With its emphasis
on crime, sexuality, and role playing, Death by Hanging is akin to
Genet's The Balcony. Oshima borrowed a Genet title for his Diary of a
Shinjuku Thief , and his rather more whimsical Three Resurrected
Drunkards , an exemplary modernist text that literally starts again halfway
through (at the 1983 Edinburgh Film Festival there was a minor riot from
patrons certain that the projectionist was accidentally replaying the opening
reel), looks at the question of Korean immigration in terms of costume and identity.
(Three Korean immigrants steal the clothes of three drunken Japanese youths.
The three Japanese, with nothing to wear and no money, become
"honorary" Koreans and are appropriately persecuted.)
It is perhaps
unfortunate that Oshima's best known film remains In the Realm of the Senses
, a work customarily shown in late-night double-bills with Last Tango in
Paris and, like the Brando vehicle, generally esteemed as the perfect
marriage between art and pornography. Another "true story," this time
of the notorious case of Abe Sada, who strangled and castrated her lover,
Kichizo, and was arrested with his genitals in her pocket, it marks Oshima's
most intimate meshing of the political with the sexual. Politics constitute the
film's structuring absence. It is 1936, the high point of Japanese militarism;
the two lovers' retreat into the realm of the senses must always be seen
against this historical backcloth. The links between political and sexual
repression are obvious, but it seems somewhat glib to view this innately tragic
story as being about a straightforward liberation of female sexuality, a sort
of "geisha's revenge." A familiar male response to the movie, as to
Bataille's novel The Story of Eye , is to welcome it as a scathing
critique of the male gaze: instead of being a film about a couple making love,
it is transmogrified, becoming a film about what it means to be a spectator of
a film about a couple making love. And, of course, it sells out every time it
shows.
Almost five years
after In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passions (1978)
came another international co-production, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence ,
in 1983. Pop icons David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto were cast in this film,
aptly helping produce what critic Janet Muslin called a "curiously
dislocated quality." This highly stylized picture is filled with erotic
tensions, though this time ones homoerotic and interracial in the era of war
and confrontation. Repressed sexual energy, in the form of the platonic kisses
Bowie (a POW) placed upon Sakamoto's (the commander of the camp) cheeks, was
released probably more in the viewer's displaced projection than in the
digests; Sakamoto's character was relieved of his command while Bowie was
brutally executed.
Max, Mon Amour (1986) proved to be ill-received—it took
three years for it to be released in Britain—and since then Oshima has been
working mainly for television as a talk show host. The once ardent advocate and
leader of the Japanese New Wave seems to occupy a different orbit that puzzles
his admirers and critics alike.
Film Comment Chuck Stephens from Film Comment, November 2000
ESSENTIAL OSHIMA
1. Cruel Story of Youth (1960)
An amped-up tear-down of the Fifties “economic miracle,” Oshima’s second
feature is as lurid and full-fistedly tabloid as anything by Sam Fuller. A
teenaged thug date-rapes his soon-to-be soulmate and soon the pair are running
a shakedown scam on horny salarymen. (Available on video from New Yorker.)
2. The Sun’s Burial
(1960)
A viper-like hooker entreats desperate slum dwellers to sell their blood to a
ramshackle clinic, then resells the blood to a cosmetics factory. A fresh-faced
boy is beaten with a bucket of innards. Rebel Without a Cause written as
a fireball of hopeless destruction. This is Oshima spitting on his national
banner and partying Roger Corman style. As critic Tadao Sato once wrote, the
film unfurls “like a scroll painting of Hell.” (Available on video from New
Yorker.)
3. Violence at
Also more toothsomely known as Floating Ghost in Broad Daylight, this
portrait of rape, re-rape, and the end of a socialist farming collective is as
jagged as a hacksaw. (Available on video from Kino.)
4. Death by Hanging (1968)
Based on the true story of a young Korean in
5. Boy
(1969)
A war veteran and his wife force their ten-year-old son to dash in front of
speeding cars, in order to collect insurance settlements. Another true story,
and oddly humanist in affect, for Oshima. The quintessence of the director’s
recurrent metaphor: postwar child (= modern
6. The Man Who Left His
Will on Film (1970)
Film editing as a revolutionary act. Students document the so-called War of
Tokyo (a series of street demonstrations marred by police over-reaction). One
of the filmmakers may or may not have died during the shoot, and the film found
in his camera consists of footage of placid street scenes. In cutting them
together, another student is driven to suicide. Uncompromising and
extraordinary, though tough going for the uninitiated, this is one of Oshima’s
signature accomplishments.
7. Night and Fog in
Two widescreen, candy-colored canvases, both staged as a succession of weddings
and funerals, both punctuated by shrieking and nihilistic rage. The first is a
Resnais-inflected palimpsest of three generations of college-campus radicals,
each haunted by the failures and betrayals of the others. The second dodges the
specifics of history, elliptically leapfrogging from one ceremony to the next
in the lives of a single family. As gorgeous as a Vincente Minnelli fantasia,
as demanding as a Robbe-Grillet rewrite of Beyond Good and Evil, the
film’s objective is the expansion of the average filmgoer’s political
consciousness. The result is the cracking of their skulls.
9. In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
By global consensus, a masterpiece, though some of us find this celebration of
a famous case of sexual devotion as death-driven transcendence mildly
interesting, but altogether inessential. The story of geisha Sada Abe and a
client whose passion is pornographic and fatal: the directorâs recurrent curiosity
about strangulation and castration reach a hardcore pitch in this
made-in-France and banned-in-Japan art-house snooze. (Available on video and
dvd from Fox Lorber.)
10. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1982)
David Bowie (in his worst performance) gives Ryuichi Sakamoto a kiss and
destroys the final vestiges of the samurai mind. Tom Conti is the titular
Lawrence, an English POW well-versed in most things Japanese, but it’s the
baby-faced Takeshi “Beat” Kitano who speaks the title line and steals the entire
show. Met with a degree of critical derision by many, the film has improved
with age and cries out for a properly letterboxed DVD edition.
All-Movie
Guide bio from Jonathan Crow
Hanami Web - Nagisa Oshima, Voice of Contemporary Japan biography
culturebase.net | The international artist database | Nagisa Oshima biography
Lenin Imports biography and introductory essay
Nagisa Oshima |
Japanese director | Britannica.com
brief bio
Filmbug Profile brief bio
Profile at Japan
Zone brief bio
Nagisa Oshima from Taboo - at Film.com biography
Nagisa
Oshima • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Nelson Kim from Senses of Cinema,
April 22, 2004
Strictly Film School Acquarello reviews A Town of Love and Hope,
The Sun's Burial and Violence at Noon
Notes on the Cinema Stylographer: Nagisa Oshima Archives Acquarello’s Strictly Film School reviews of Night and Fog, The Ceremony, and Boy
Strictly Film
School Acquarello’s reviews of
Oshima films
Nagisa Oshima Incomplete Overview of an Overlooked Japanese Master, Derek Smith from Cinematic Reflections (Undated reviews)
Nagisa Oshima and In the Realm of the Senses | Parallax View David Coursen from The Oregon Daily Emerald, updated from 1977 article on Parallax View, April 27, 2009
International
Harvest | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of Oshima's BFI documentary 100 Years of
Japanese Cinema, from The
Reader, November 21, 1996
Derek
Malcolm's Century of Films: Boy (Shonen)
Derek Malcolm’s #86 from his “100
Greatest Movies,” from The Guardian,
FILM;
A Master Returns to His Realm - The New York Times David Thomson from The New York Times, October 8, 2000
Contact Sports | Village Voice J. Hoberman on Gohatto, September 26, 2000
Deadly Youth | Nagisa Oshima Gohatto - Film Comment Chuck Stephens, November/December 2000
Feast
From the East [Oshima's GOHATTO] | Jonathan Rosenbaum January 10, 2001
The Unkindest Cut of All? Some Reflections on ... - Senses of Cinema Freda Freiberg from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2001
Gohatto, or, the End of Oshima Nagisa? - Bright Lights Film Journal Andrew Grossman from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001
The return of
Nagisa Oshima | Film | The Guardian Sex and
the Samurai, David Thomson from The
Guardian,
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Gohatto (1999) Philip
Strick in Sight and Sound, August
2001
• View
topic - Nagisa Oshima zedz reviews
posted on the Criterion Forum,
Naked Youth/Cruel Story
of Youth • Senses of Cinema Robert
Keser from Senses of Cinema, May 12,
2007
AvaxHome
-> Nagisa Oshima-Ai to kibo no machi ('Street of Love and ...
Cinema
Eye: Nagisa Oshima at the Cinematheque Ontario Gilbert Seah from Cinema Eye,
Why
you need to head down to BFI Southbank and catch movies from ... Trevor Johnston from Time Out New York,
Nagisa
Oshima - Film Comment A Samurai Among Farmers, Tony Rayns, September/October 2008
Dennis Lim Safeguarding a Japanese Master’s Place in Film, from The New York Times, September 25, 2008
Oshima
Nagisa: Politics is Pulp (Intro/The Catch/Boy) on Notebook ... David Phelps from Mubi,
The
Struggle to Believe by Chris Fujiwara - Moving Image Source September 26, 2008
In the Realm of Oshima Moving Image Source, September 27 – October 14, 2008
The Cruel Stories of Nagisa Oshima In the
Realm of Oshima BAMcinématek series,
September 27 –
Festivals:
New York 1976 - Film Comment
James McCourt, November/December 1976
Be My
Knife by Michael Atkinson - Moving Image Source September
29, 2008
Criminal
Minded by Joshua Land - Moving Image Source
September 30, 2008
Best
of the New York Film Fest's Nagisa Oshima Tribute Aaron Hillis from The Village Voice,
His
Will on Film Rob Nelson from Moving Image Source, October 1, 2008
The Sun Also
Sets [The Films of Nagisa Oshima] | Jonathan Rosenbaum Artforum magazine, October 2, 2008
girish: The Filmmaker Overview Essay October 6, 2008
Senses
collide Jason Anderson on the Cinematheque
In the realm
of Nagisa Oshima - thestar.com Cinematheque
NOW Magazine //
Daily // In The Realm of Oshima
Norman Wilner on the Cinematheque
In
The Realm of Oshima Cinematheque
Ontario restrospective, including a lengthy essay by James Quandt and brief
film reviews, October 31 – December 9, 2008
Nagisa Oshima — Taide & Design Magazine Cinematheque Ontario essay in full by James Quandt, October 2008
incredible Oshima piece for the Star Tribune ‘Senses’
and Sensation, by Katie Smith from The
Star Tribune,
In
the Realm of Oshima retrospective at
wrote for us here as well
40 years Ago Today: Oshima in ’68,
by Rob Nelson from
The Morning After Blog
In the Realm of Oshima @ The
Oshima
in New York: "Dear Summer Sister" on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman from Mubi,
Her post on her own struggle in choosing between Nagisa Oshima and Kevin Garnett KG vs. In the Realm of the Senses, by Katie Smith, November 23, 2008
Nagisa Oshima
and the Struggle for a Radical Cinema - Harvard Film ... Oshima retrospective from Harvard Film
Archive, December 7 – December 22, 2008
Oshima: Chasing
Shadows on Notebook | MUBI David
Phelps from Mubi,
Oshima:
Artists and Lovers, Take One (of Four) on Notebook | MUBI David Phelps from Mubi,
Oshima: Theater of the Revolution, Take Two (of Four) on ... - Mubi David Phelps from Mubi, December 16, 2008
Oshima: Perspective Matters, Take Three (of Four) on Notebook | MUBI David Phelps from Mubi, December 17, 2008
Oshima:
A World of Their Own (Chasing Shadows, Take Four of ... - Mubi David
Phelps from Mubi,
'In
the Realm of Oshima' at the National Gallery, the AFI Silver ... Philip Kennicott from The
Waggish: Nagisa Oshima and Other Japanese New Wave Films various film reviews, April 8, 2009
/ HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » IN THE REALM OF OSHIMA - Nagisa ... Nelson Kim, April 10, 2009
Nagisa Oshima at the American Cinematheque Andre Soares from Alternative Film Guide, April 16, 2009
Waggish: Nagisa Oshima: More Films brief film reviews, April 17, 2009
A Second Look: Nagisa Oshima's 'In the Realm of the Senses' Dennis Lim from The LA Times, April 26, 2009
Asia Pacific Arts: The Naming of Lions and Tigers: Nagisa Oshima ... Clifford Hilo reviews In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion, May 1, 2009
Los
Angeles Film+TV - Nagisa Oshima at LACMA: Radical Who Left His ... Aaron Hillis from LA Weekly,
In the Realm of
Oshima - BAM/PFA - Film Programs
Jason Sanders on Oshima restrospective, May 29 –
SBCC Film
Reviews » Blog Archive » In the Realm of the Senses ... Byron Potau,
Emilie
Bickerton on Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses ... Emilie Bickerton from The Guardian,
Film
Notes From the CMA Modern Japanese Cinema, by Dennis Toth,
Nagisa Oshima retrospective at Edinburgh Filmhouse - The Pensive ... The Pensive Provocateur, Tony McKibbon essay from The List, September 2, 2009
The Many Modernisms of Nagisa Oshima « the filmlinc blog Paul Brunick from Film Comment Blog, September 19, 2009
BFI | Sight &
Sound | In the realm of Oshima Alexander
Jacoby from Sight & Sound,
September 2009
A
Restless Rebel Trading in Sex and the Absurd Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May
14, 2010
'Oshima's Outlaw
Sixties,' Films by Nagisa Oshima - The New York ... A Second Look:
'Oshima's Outlaw Sixties' on DVD, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
Oshima
in the Sixties: Outlaw Cinema/Exploitation Cinema Sean Axmaker, May 16, 2010
DVDs. Oshima, "Walkabout," "Stagecoach," More on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, May 18, 2010
Nagisa
Oshima, Iconoclastic Filmmaker, Dies at 80 - The New York ... The
New York Times, January 15, 2013
Nagisa Oshima obituary | Global | The Guardian Ronald Bergen, January 15, 2013
Nagisa
Oshima - Telegraph Obituary, January
15, 2013
The Noteworthy: RIP Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013), The ... - Mubi January 16, 2013
Nagisa
Oshima dies at 80; iconoclastic Japanese filmmaker - latimes January 16, 2013
Japanese
film director Nagisa Oshima dies at 80 - Salon.com Mari Yamaguchi, January 16, 2013
Nagisa Oshima Film director best known for the controversial 'In the ... Marcus Williamson from The Independent, January 16, 2013
Nagisa
Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses: Sex, violence, and beauty. Dana Stevens from Slate, January 18, 2013
Nagisa Oshima 'In the Realm of
the Senses' Director Dies: 'Obscene Is ...
Andre Soares from Alt Film Guide, February 2013
Japanese
master Nagisa Oshima dies | BFI
Samuel Wigley, April 3, 2014
Nagisa
Oshima: 'You have to tell the truth about your country ... Roger Pulvers from The Japan Times, January 9, 2016
The
15 Best Films of Nagisa Oshima « Taste of Cinema - Movie ... Deepesh Thapa from Taste of Cinema, January 30, 2016
TSPDT - Nagisa Oshima They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Nagisa Oshima: The Man Who Left His Soul on Film | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum reviews Paul Joyce’s documentary film on Oshima
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Nagisa Oshima - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
STREET OF LOVE AND HOPE (Ai to kibo no
machi)
Japan (62 mi) 1959 ‘Scope
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Early Oshima is forever being compared with early Godard, but this debut feature (exactly contemporary with Breathless) shows that Oshima's political acumen was a great deal stronger than Godard's at this time. A schoolboy lives in a slum with his widowed mother and infant sister; his sole income derives from selling (and reselling) his sister's pigeons, which invariably escape from their buyers and fly home. This 'fraud' is eventually discovered, and the boy angrily accepts society's verdict that he is a 'criminal'. Oshima defines poverty in explicit terms of class oppression, and celebrates the boy's anger and pride. Along the way, he demolishes various liberal stances, and gives Japan's ruling class several short, sharp shocks. The film is rather schematic, not much flesh on its bones, but none the less powerful for that.
User comments from imdb Author: Meganeguard from
Oshima Nagisa best known in the west for either his erotic film _The Realm
of the Senses_ or the homosexual samurai drama _Gohatto_ began his career as a
director with this film that just clocks in over one hour. As with his films
_The Catch_ and _Death by Hanging_, _Street of Love and Hope_ concerns itself
with the lives of people at the margins of society. People put outside the
mainstream. In this film the viewer is introduced to the poor junior high
student Masao and the struggles he faces just to help his family survive.
Masao seems to have the entire world against him. His father is dead, his
mother is sick, and his little sister has a mental handicap and spends most of
her days playing or drawing pictures of dead animals. Masao is a bright boy,
but is torn between going to high school or getting a real job in order to
support his family. He wants to get a job, but his mother is determined that he
needs to go on to high school so that he can get a better job later on. Masao
does all that he can do to make a little money for his family, including
selling his younger sister's, Yasue's, pet pigeons. However, the selling of the
pigeons is a bit of a scam because they, if they can get away, return to
Masao's home. Therefore he can sell them over and over again. Masao is against
it, but his mother insists that they have to do it in order to survive.
Masao's life suddenly changes one day when a rich girl named Kyoko purchases
his pigeons for her younger brother. Kyoko seems to take a shine to the poor
boy and because of this Masao's teacher Akiyama-sensei asks the girl if she can
ask her father, who is the president of a company who makes electronics, if he
can give Masao a job.
Kyoko and Masao's relationship goes well at first as well as Akiyama-sensei's
relationship with Kyoko's older brother Yuji. However, always near the surface
is the fact that Masao is poor. After Yuji learns that Masao has sold the
pigeons several times, Kyoko and Masao's relationship is in danger.
Oshima's first film does a wonderful job portraying the lives of those left
behind when
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
A somber and unassuming adolescent named Masao (Hiroshi Fujikawa), still dressed in his school uniform, pensively sits on the sidewalk of a high-traffic metropolitan park watching over a ventilated wooden crate. An affable, wealthy young woman named Yoko Kuhara (Yuki Tominaga), the daughter of a company director at Koyo Electric, curiously peeks inside to discover the two pigeons that the boy has put up for sale. Touched by the reticent Masao's desperate circumstances that led him to sacrifice ownership of his pets, she offers to pay full price for the birds. Humbled by her generosity, but too proud to accept charity, he is adamant about returning her change by inserting the money inside the coop - an act of integrity that further captivates the well-intentioned Yoko. However, Masao's noble display of honesty proves to be tenuous when he explains to his younger sister, Yasue (Michio Ito) that the birds are away visiting their sick mother and will return home in a few days. A subsequent conversation with his ailing mother, Kuniko (Yûko Mochizuki), reveals his guilt at having to repeatedly sell the homing pigeons to make ends meet, knowing they will eventually return.
One day, Masao's teacher Miss Akiyama (Kakuko Chino) sets free a stray white pigeon that has wandered into the classroom, and tacitly explains to him that she is reluctant to have pets in the classroom because some of the children cannot afford them. Masao attempts to her alleviate her concerns over his family's financial straits by boasting that he also owns birds, a claim that he later reluctantly acknowledges is a fabrication when Yoko coincidentally encounters them on a street and inquires if a pigeon that had escaped from the Kuhara residence had returned to his home instead. The fateful meeting would prove to be a turning point in Masao's life, as Yoko and Miss Akiyama, equally concerned with the limited opportunities that are available to the diligent and responsible young man after graduation, attempt to secure an entry level position for him at Koyo Electric.
Nagisa Oshima presents a searing and provocative examination of the socially enabled, self-perpetuating interrelation between poverty and crime in A Town of Love and Hope. As a novice filmmaker, Oshima worked with members of the cast and crew of veteran director, Keisuke Kinoshita, whose 1950s sentimental "women's" pictures for Shochiku's Ofuna Studio embodied the Ofuna flavor, which Audie Bock describes as "subscribing to myths of human goodness, romantic love, and maternal righteousness" in Japanese Film Directors. However, Oshima would subvert the familiar elements of the Ofuna melodrama (ushering an artistic direction that encouraged non-traditonal creativity and experimentation that would define the Ofuna new wave) with dispassionate and muted expression (particularly evident in Masao and Yasuo's seeming emotional detachment) and character framing in predominantly medium and long shots that create a sense of distance and objectivity. It is interesting to note that Yasue's morbid obsession with dead animals (a childhood trauma similarly portrayed in Rene Clement's Forbidden Games) bears an imprint of what would become a recurring element in Oshima's films: a repressed, deeply rooted psychological aberration that manifests in incomprehensible, often destructive behavior (most notably in Violence at Noon, In the Realm of the Senses, and even in later films such as Gohatto). By paralleling the predictably repetitive, instinctual behavior of the homing pigeons with Masao's patternistic, morally reprehensible sale of the birds, the film serves as a harsh and unsentimental realist document on the disparity of social class and inescapability of poverty.
AvaxHome
-> Nagisa Oshima-Ai to kibo no machi ('Street of Love and ...
CRUEL STORY OF YOUTH (Seishun zankoku
monogatari) B+ 92
aka: Naked Youth
Japan (96 mi) 1960 ‘Scope
A sexual relationship with another brings about a connection with all humanity: by embracing one person, you are able to embrace all humanity.
—Nagisa Oshima
A
jarring, unsentimentalized story about the aimless indifference of the
rebellious next generation, where the lessons learned from the war, the
sacrifices and hard, self-imposed discipline in the reconstruction era of the
50’s are distant memories in the forming of a New Japan. This might be called the Japanese version of
REBEL WITHUT A CAUSE (1955), only one striking difference is the use of
unsympathetic lead characters. Miyuki
Kuwano is Mako, an attractive young teenage girl who carelessly hitches rides
with older men just for the provocative thrill of it. But when one middle-aged man sexually
assaults her on the street, she is rescued by another stranger, Kiyoshi (Yûsuke
Kawazu), who intervenes, though sadly, when they run off to an industrial
lumber yard the next day, he rapes her on a tied-together bundle of floating
logs after nearly drowning her to guarantee he got his way. After this mandhandling, she improbably falls
in love with the guy, who remains a brute, slapping her and throwing her
around, treating her like a slab of meat.
He’s a disillusioned student who dropped out once he realized social
change was not going to happen, so he defies student demonstrations as a waste
of time and is instead a small-time thug, creating a scam where Mako takes a
drive with a middle aged man while Kiyoshi follows on his motorbike, and when
the guy inevitably makes his move on Mako, he’ll be there to pound his face in
and steal his money. This works fine
until Mako gets sick and tired of being a bought and sold woman, where she’s
being dangled like a piece of merchandise.
The
family reaction is interesting, as the older sister can’t understand why her
own parents aren’t more demonstrative about Mako spending the night with a man,
or neglecting her studies at high school, something they made a point of doing
when she was growing up. The father, meanwhile,
accepts the fact that times have changed and you can’t simply put your foot
down and expect total compliance, as kids don’t listen anymore. When the older sister tries to intervene,
this only pushes Mako into Kiyoshi’s arms, as she moves in with him on the
spot. While there is instant passion
between the two, it’s directed inward so all they see is themselves, spending
their time living in a dive, drinking in sleazy bars, and getting into fights
with pimps who have their eye on the girl, seeing only dollar signs. Kiyoshi protects her, but rival gangsters
continue to lurk in the shadows, keeping their leering eye on the girl. Meanwhile, Kiyoshi continues to get secret
financial help from an older woman who gives him money for sexual favors—another
operator working behind the scenes.
The
film is at its lowest when she announces her pregnancy and all he can think
about is money for an abortion, failing to even consider the possibility of
having a future together. Mako may want
to love him, blind to all other possibilities, but it’s here she realizes his
vulgar limitations. In one of the
strangest scenes in the film emphasizing his crude ways, Oshima shows him
gulping down an entire apple in real time as he hovers over her still
anaesthetized body after the operation.
But these two have no future together, have no real connection to
anything at all. There’s a strange
detachment to these characters all along, yet we’re as intrigued by their
impulsive behavior as we are repulsed by their own crass indifference. The film pre-dates many of the much later
modern films of youth culture alienation, including nearly all of Hong Kong
director Wong Kar-wai’s films, which fill the screen with magnificent neon
colors and a pulsating sensuality. Here
the bright colors are garishly out of place, especially in the industrial
wasteland where they wander, using a hand-held camera style portraying a
heartless, disconnected world filled with a cold dissonance.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
This early, long-overlooked 1959 feature by Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) tells the story of a disillusioned university student who undertakes the sexual initiation of a flirtatious high school girl; eventually they go into business together, rolling the drunks that the girl picks up. The style is lurid and jagged, much like the contemporaneous American teenpics Oshima both draws on and criticizes. His first commercial success, it established him as the spokesman of a generation just entering the phase of postindustrial discontent. In Japanese with subtitles. 96 min.
Oshima's second feature offers a potent statement of moral and political disillusionment wrapped up within a familiar 'youth gone wild' shocker. Virtually ignoring the student protests over the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty, the teenage lives here revolve around the twin poles of sex and money, as a naive middle-class girl falls for a dubious boyfriend content to use her as bait in extorting cash from middle-aged lechers. The couple's youthful lack of scruples is set against the failure of their older siblings' generation to bring meaningful change to the defeated nation, with Oshima's decentred compositions and edgy location work underlining the sense of a society adrift. Unsympathetic characters render the central narrative somewhat academic, but this is still a significant moment in the take-up of European cinema's New Wave freedoms in Japan.
Electric Sheep Magazine Stephen Thomson
Hitching a lift from a random male, schoolgirl Makoto is molested. Student Kiyoshi turns up out of nowhere and saves her, extorting money from the sheepish gent in the process. The next day, our youthful pair meet up, are bored by a political demonstration, then turn up, inexplicably, in a speedboat in a desolate dockland of lashed-together log pontoons. When Makoto refuses Kiyoshi’s advances, he pushes her into the water and, despite the fact that she cannot swim, will not let her out again until she agrees to have sex with him. No good is going to come of this, is it? Inspired by the manner of their first meeting, they embark on a career of petty criminality, shaking down reliably predatory motorists. But, as periodic brushes with yakuza pimps hint, they are amateurs paddling in the shallows of a torrent that will carry them away.
As an essay in futility fuelled by amorphous desire and energy, Oshima’s ‘cruel story’ is up there with A bout de souffle (1960). This is how Naked Youth is usually read; as a contribution to the transnational sulk that envelops cinematic youth in the 1950s from The Wild One (1953) to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to, God help us, Beat Girl (1960). Closer to home, it has also been linked with the taiyozoku (tribe of the sun) genre, originating in a 1953 story by Shintaro Ishihara - now Tokyo’s colourful governor. Makoto and Kiyoshi certainly fit the bill insofar as they are young and rudderless, but they are equally, and unusually, incompetent at being glamorous. They have neither the pathos that makes James Dean a social worker’s wet dream, nor the cool insolence of Brando or Belmondo. Actually they are quite plain and frumpily clothed.
And are they even rebels, with or without a cause? Presumably
teen sex is, in itself, a rebellion. But the main criticism of parental
authority comes from Makoto’s older sister Yuki who wants to know why her
sibling is allowed to run wild. Indeed, the older generation are every bit as
clueless and compromised as the younger and, one way or another, fund their
misdemeanours. The endemic motor-rapists are easy pickings, and Kiyoshi’s older
mistress puts up the money for Makoto’s abortion, which is itself carried out
by Yuki’s disillusioned ex-idealist ex-lover. The supreme moment of bathos for
the whole idea of stylish revolt comes in a brilliant scene where our Primark
Bonnie and
The film is, however, interested in rebellion after a fashion. Dr
Akimoto and Yuki have some pained words about the loss of their political
ideals. Makoto and Kiyoshi’s romance itself starts from this point. Their first
date is preceded by newsreel footage of the Korean student revolution of
Naked Youth/Cruel Story
of Youth • Senses of Cinema Robert
Keser from Senses of Cinema, May 12,
2007
Japan
1960: <em>Cruel Story of Youth</em> Jim Reichert from
外人族: Review: Cruel
Story Of Youth (1960) Kuzu fromo
Gaijinzoku,
Cruel
Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima 1960) :: Japanese Movies at ... Sarudama,
Criminal
Minded by Joshua Land - Moving Image Source
September 30, 2008
Strictly Film School review Acquarella
Gotterdammerung
[Branislav L. Slantchev]
Cruel Story Of Youth Vadim Rizov from Movie Vault
News:
Nagia Oshima's 'Naked Youth' ('Cruel Story of Youth', 1960 ... Logboy from Twitch,
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Molodezhnaja
(German) movie photos
THE SUN’S BURIAL (Taiyo no hakaba)
Japan (87 mi) 1960 ‘Scope
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
An early feature
(1960) by Japan's great modernist, Nagisa Oshima. Set in a Tokyo slum (and
against a background of political protests against the freshly signed
Japan-U.S. security treaty), it's the story of a girl who supplements her
income as a prostitute by selling her blood on the black market. Meanwhile, her
father, a professional burglar, is planning a series of thefts that he hopes
will raise enough money to reopen the war effort. With Kayoko Honoo and Isao
Sasaki.
User comments from imdb Author: Sergiu Bursuc from
France
Haunting, melodic, melancholic, poetic... many more praising adjectives suit
this movie. It marks the birth of Japanese modern cinema. Oshima brilliantly
continues the masters Mizoguchi and Ozu, while at the same time marking a big
turn in style and themes.
The movie is modern in both: style and themes. I dare saying that this style
marked many great contemporary directors (as different as Tarantino, Jia
Zhang-KE or Michael Mann). It has, for instance, a questioning and a renewal of
the dramatic content that a scene can exhibit. Another novelty in Oshima's
style is the manner in which he treats social themes: a mixture of
documentary-style and fiction-style, greatly developed later by Jia Zhang Ke,
and having an affiliation with the French nouvelle vague (the time overlap is
no coincidence).
As for the themes: even if Mizoguchi was already interested in social problems
and their reflection upon the individual, he was never so pessimistic as
Oshima. Watch the movie and you'll see what I mean. But, in spite of a much
more cruel view upon society, Oshima has the same deep message as Mizoguchi:
the beauty. You can see it in every scene. Look carefully: there is much light
in this dark movie!
Nagisa
Oshima in New York: "The Sun's Burial" (1960) on ... - Mubi Daniel Kasman,
Nagisa Oshima had something in The Sun’s Burial (1960); it
wasn’t just one of the most throat-gripping titles in English, and it wasn’t
even the Shochiku-budget enabled, comic book energy zeitgeist of the so-called
Japanese New Wave of the time. It was Kayoko Honoo. Her dress may be all late
1950s floral prints and sashay, but her eye liner angles sharply upward and she
is the agitator and the aggressor, not the “son” of the title, the bums of
post-War
And cool they are. The Sun’s Burial is what all multiplex cinema should be like: ribald with sex and violence, brashly styled in the artificial colors of manga and neon (nearly half a decade before Jean-Luc Godard took up the look of advertisements and comic books) but shot in the real slums with nothing but the sticky faces of our jobless, our petty yakuza, our youngsters with nowhere else to go, our cagey women, all these pacing faces of grime and disquietude to keep the frame moving, the movie moving, the characters moving, the country moving—and politics churning in this pulp genre like mad. That’s why Honoo is spectacular, as an emblem and as an existence: the new, hard-edged attractiveness of a hip youth in harsh conjunction with a vivid political existence in life, where the actions one takes simply to live inherently become political statements, maybe even political activism. In a world where a girl must be sexy in the grime of the slums, where the sun is always scorching the ghetto with its most fierce, fiery orange, where a girl is wanted as much for her sexuality as for her criminal scheming, and where loving, living, and fighting are all directly political expressions, Kayoko Hanoo is hot in all senses of the word.
Electric
Sheep Magazine Sarah Cronin
Following the recent release of Naked
Youth, The Sun’s Burial is the second of five Nagisa Oshima
films to be released on DVD as part of Yume Pictures’ Oshima Collection. The
cult Japanese director earned his reputation making gritty, brutal films, and
while The Sun’s Burial, originally released in 1960, is uncompromisingly
bleak, it’s also a fantastically evocative snapshot of a post-war
In a sweltering
But the fast-paced and at times impossible-to-follow plot (the
film really demands a second viewing) often seems irrelevant; Oshima seems more
concerned with style and message than the actual narrative. While Naked
Youth is a film about teenage rebellion, here there is no authority for the
characters to rebel against. The Sun’s Burial, with its scenes of a
setting sun disappearing into the darkness of a ruined
Thankfully, the film’s non-stop misery is relieved by its fresh, almost playful soundtrack and riveting cinematography. The Spanish guitar often lends the film a spaghetti Western feel, with the rival gangs facing off against each other like urban cowboys. Much of the action takes place off-screen, the camera instead focusing on claustrophobic close-ups of tormented and tormenting faces, covered in a thin sheen of sweat as they stare each other down. The incongruous mix of lounge pop and violence, notably when Takeshi and Shin have their final, disastrous confrontation, adds to the film’s nouvelle vague appeal.
The Sun’s Burial is an exciting example of modern cinema
that also provides a documentary-like glimpse into a now forgotten past. Little
more than two decades later,
Midnight Eye review:
The Sun's Burial (Taiyo no Hakaba, 1960 ...
Kohei Usuda
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Gotterdammerung
[Branislav L. Slantchev]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
NIGHT AND FOG IN JAPAN
Japan (107 mi) 1960 ‘Scope
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Nagisa Oshima's
didactic 1960 film seems to anticipate the Maoist Godard: against a black
background, different symbolic characters step forward to offer an analysis of
the failure of Japan's traditional left and offer suggestions to the new wave
of student protesters. With Fumio Watanabe and Miyuki Kuwano. In Japanese with
subtitles. 107 min.
User comments from imdb Author: Meganeguard from Kansas
Those who are familiar with the literature of Murakami Haruki are sure to be
familiar with the Zenkyoto, Joint Struggle Councils, student movement that
spread throughout Japanese universities during the 1960s resulting in the
temporary halt of classes at a number of schools, including Waseda and
It is during this time that Oshima Nagisa's film _Night and Fog in Japan_ was
filmed, 1960. Soon after the failed attempt to halt the signing of the AMPO,
Japan-United States Security Treaty, a young protester named Reiko marries the
older journalist Nozawa. However, all is not revolution and roses because other
members of the group have beef not only with Nozawa, but with the group's
leader Nakayama and his wife Misako.
What follows is a series of flashbacks showing the days in which Ozawa,
Nakayama, Misako, and several others were leftist students. Marxist ideologies
are thick, but in fighting and lust are thicker, and the viewer witnesses
several cases of personal disputes and the vacuous preachings of Nakayama who
while talking about the equality of man seduces Misako away from Ozawa because
of his wealth.
This is an interesting movie, but it might be quite slow for some. Mainly the
film consists of arguments between the characters, but for those interested in
Japanese Leftist movements, this should prove quite entertaining.
Electric
Sheep Magazine Martin Cleary
Concerned with what will probably be a little known piece of
Japanese history to today’s viewer, Night and Fog in Japan is an
interesting fictional analysis of the actions of the left-wing Japanese student
protesters in response to the 1st AMPO treaty with the
Opening in 1960 at a wedding party, Night and Fog in Japan begins as a fairly standard, albeit stylised, dramatical piece. As the wedding speeches take place it becomes clear that all of the guests know each other from their past as politicised students. The narrative begins to assume a fragmented form as the guests’ reminiscences are played out as flashbacks. Slowly, Oshima outlines the group’s ideology in general terms, and as the different members of the wedding party put forward their points of view during what becomes an increasingly heated discussion, so the drama unwinds as a series of tensions within the group itself.
Night and Fog in Japan is an incredibly theatrical piece of work. Oshima is clearly not interested in creating an atmosphere of realism, and the technical attention to detail on-screen appears to be aimed solely at enlivening what is otherwise a very dry and ‘talky’ two hours. Although initially visually captivating (an early scene is one long ten-minute take; pauses in dialogue and movement allow for some interesting ’snapshot’ compositions), the theatricality soon threatens to undermine the dramatic impact and the cast too often seem to be concentrating on hitting their marks rather than delivering impassioned performances. The fluidity of some of the camera movement (occasionally let down by some shaky camera panning - it seems that the style may have been ahead of the techniques) fails to excite after a while and then only highlights the general sombreness of the proceedings.
For the first hour of its duration Night and Fog in Japan is a fascinating prospect. Even with its political allegiances totally at the fore - to the detriment of any real personal drama - the film offers a careful analysis of how political ideals affect a group by using flashbacks alongside the wedding party scenes. Sadly, the second hour of the film moves at such a slow pace - and with a cast of characters that are firstly so large in number and secondly so pessimistic in attitude - that it becomes no more than a backdrop for a lengthy lecture, denouncing in a rather simplistic manner the students’ ‘we’ve just let ourselves down’ attitude.
While it’s not an easy watch, Night and Fog in Japan is an interesting piece of work when viewed alongside other Oshima fare of the period such as The Sun’s Burial which, while still gloomy, manages to bury its political intentions deeper - and much more successfully - into the drama. Sure, part of the problem with Night and Fog in Japan is that it’s difficult to appreciate just how daring the film was on its original release (it was pulled by the studio after just three days in response to a political assassination) so viewed today the film is an intriguing - albeit limited - watch which sadly lacks the punch it had in its day.
Midnight
Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Tom Mes
Night and Fog in
Night and Fog in
The story concerns a gathering of former student activists, all previously involved in riots against the treaty, at the wedding of two of their fellow members. When the one missing member of the group, now a fugitive, unexpectedly arrives, the atmosphere turns bitter. The others don't want him there and prefer to let the past rest and go on celebrating the marriage. But even though the police are on his trail, the interloper has no intention of leaving quietly into the night again: he denounces the party as a charade and accuses those present of betrayal against the ideals of the group. Soon enough tempers flare and accusations start flying back and forth.
The overt political nature of Night and Fog in
This move is widely seen as the beginning of the Japanese New
Wave, a period of experimentation in form, structure and meaning of cinema,
inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague of Godard, Truffaut, et al (the title of
Night and Fog in Japan is a reference, or homage, to Alain Resnais' pivotal
documentary Night and Fog / Nuit et Brouillard, 1956). What's interesting in
this light is the intentional artificiality of Night and Fog in
This approach is initially fascinating, but dramatically it grows
stale over the course of its 107 minutes. This is further enhanced by the
repetitive story structure, which mainly consists of constantly alternating a
scene of bickering with a flashback, plus the often sloppy camerawork which can
never quite keep up with Oshima's careful planning. Viewed today, the film's
political and social relevance obviously diminished, these elements are sadly
too apparent to dismiss, making Night and Fog in
Nagisa
Oshima - Film Comment A Samurai Among Farmers, Tony Rayns, September/October 2008
Forty years ago Nagisa Oshima was one of the biggest names in world cinema, a brilliant modernist who made consistently electrifying films, each one radically different in form and style from the rest. If he’d been French, he’d be as well known as Godard—and probably more influential. Now, confined to his home in the suburbs of Tokyo by the stroke he suffered in 1996 (from which he willed himself into a sufficient recovery in 1999 to make his last film, Gohatto), he’s all but forgotten. One obvious reason is that so little of his work is available on subtitled DVDs, and so the touring retrospective put together by James Quandt at the Cinematheque Ontario is an essential reassertion of his talent and importance.
Since all too many Film Comment readers have never had access to Oshima’s best work, let’s start with an anecdote. In June 1984, Oshima was in Rome for a retrospective organized by the Marxist critic Lino Miccichè, who had characteristically chosen one of the more difficult films, Night and Fog in Japan (60), for the opening night. The cinema was packed. Gianni Amelio and Bernardo Bertolucci came onstage to welcome the Japanese guest and praise his work, and the screening began.
Few in the room had seen the film before. Set at a wedding party, it dramatizes the bitter conflicts between Japan’s “old” and “new” Left. The immediate issue is the fallout from violent demonstrations against the inevitable renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, but all kinds of Stalinist purges, factional schisms, betrayals, martyrdoms, and personal jealousies and resentments are given a good airing too. The film’s form is as challenging as its content: shot in color and ’scope and prone to whip-pans, it comprises 43 sequence shots, all of them (including a series of flashbacks) theatrically stylized in ways that Godard didn’t think of until he made Le Gai savoir years later. And the atmosphere is no less clogged and oppressive than the political wrangling: the film opens and closes in highly symbolic thick fog. It’s a tough watch.
Thirty-some minutes into the 107-minute film, there was a commotion in the cinema. Oshima himself was protesting that the reels were in the wrong order, that the projection had to be stopped. It emerged that the print had been “made up” on a giant spool and it would take hours to disassemble and reassemble it; there was no choice but to abandon the screening. And so the audience dispersed and the guests repaired to a nearby hostelry, where Oshima shed his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, drank plenty of wine, and was the life of the party. I have to admit that although the particular form of the film made it hard to be sure, I didn’t think the reels were in the wrong order at all. Donald Richie, also present, wasn’t convinced either. My impression was that Oshima had sensed that the audience was becoming restive and had perhaps unconsciously created an excuse for cutting the screening short.
Night and Fog in Japan had meant the world to Oshima in 1960. He made it against the advice of many of his friends and contemporaries at Shochiku’s Ofuna Studio, and walked out of his contract with Shochiku a few months after the company withdrew the film from its theaters only four days into release. (They said it was politically inflammatory; a socialist leader had just been murdered by a right-wing extremist.) And when he married the actress Akiko Koyama in 1961, he modeled his own wedding reception on the one in the film and used the groom’s speech to lambaste Shochiku executives. But 25 years later, with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in international distribution, the Left’s failures and hypocrisies in the Fifties must have seemed as remote to Oshima as they did to that audience in Rome. Whatever its political acumen, righteous fury, and aesthetic daring, the film is squarely addressed to the Japanese student-radical audience of 1960. Few in 1984 would have considered its debates relevant to their lives. Political historians aside, anyone who watches Night and Fog in Japan in 2008 does so simply because it’s an Oshima movie: because he’s a fascinating director, and because it’s interesting to see how he broke with the studio system that launched his career.
The episode in Rome illuminates two key aspects of the director, as a Japanese and as what Barack Obama is calling a “world citizen.” Let’s spell them out. Oshima was born (in 1932) into a family with samurai ancestry, and read law and political science at one of Japan’s most prestigious universities. The reality was much less “Ivy League” than it sounds. Oshima had a sickly, deprived childhood, lost his father at the age of six, and was raised by his impoverished mother in Kyoto, a city he grew to hate. (The father was a civil servant working on government fishery projects; he had a covert interest in socialist and communist thought.) He spent his time at Kyoto University not studying but immersed in student theater and political activism, where he suffered a series of tactical defeats. He then drifted into the film industry almost by accident, and earned the chance to direct features at Shochiku relatively quickly by directing an embarrassing promo short about the company’s latest boy and girl starlets.
BFI | Sight & Sound | In the realm of Oshima Alexander Jacoby from Sight & Sound, September 2009
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Cinematic Threads capsule review Matthew Lotti
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THE REVOLUTIONARY (Amakusa shiro tokisada)
Japan (100 mi) 1962 ‘Scope
Oshima: Perspective Matters, Take Three (of Four) on Notebook | MUBI David Phelps from Mubi, December 17, 2008
Theater of the Revolution again. Oshima’s Shiro of Amakusa
takes up the perspective of a blank stare—mostly minute-long takes, from
positions fixed as corpses, only for a quickly forgotten camera to reassert its
presence at dramatic moments, to track slowly in or out or around—transfixed on
revolution. The revolution is initiated, like most, by the squandered
proletariat and, like all of Oshima revolutions, doomed: not a revolution at
the end, but a revolt. Specifically, it’s the 17th century revolt of Shiro, the
Christian rebel who led bands of starving peasants to pointless martyrdom. Yet
for all of Shiro’s discussions of historical protocol, Oshima’s not
being specific at all (an identical story will be repeated in Oshima’s Band
of Ninja); Shiro is sheer, blatant allegory. “No tyranny or ideals!”
runs Christian mantra here—the meek shedding meekness to inherit the earth—as
does “I never thought of myself,” as if these Christians, bound together for
entirely secular purposes, were the communists out of Oshima’s The Man Who
Left His Will on Film, almost a decade later, or Wakamatsu’s United Red
Army, unsure just how to spend their days without any ideals beyond
societal and self-eradication to pursue. Yet as in Renoir’s La Marseillaise
and Jancso’s The Red and the White (as Renoir claimed he intended to do
in the former), Oshima, as if in commitment to the populist ideals of his
subjects, films from a distance so that the leaders and the peasants and the
heroes and the hanged all rule the frame equally, democratically. There are
tracking shots of spectators to emphasize each of them matters. This is a story
of the people.
Or: As in Renoir’s La Marseillaise and Jancso’s The Red and the White,
Oshima films in single takes armies milling by: he stages war’s fly by
slaughters as self-sustaining pomp, the usual inevitabilities over which nobody
has control, captured by a documentary camera left running and helpless to
interfere.
It’s two ways of looking at it.
Actually, Shiro is not about Shiro, but a peripheral
figure ignored by the anonymous masses. He’s an artist; like the filmmakers of The
Man Who Left His Will on Film, he means only to capture reality for what it
looks like and, like them, is suspected, his work embargoed, by the supposedly
free-thinking communists. (He rants, Lear-like). For the censors understand art
best: that viewers will always read meaning into it. That it’s commentary,
perhaps most incisive when it’s neutral. That—once again, Oshima’s favorite theme,
not only driving his works but frequently one of their subjects—that style, a
distillation and a limited viewpoint, can not be gotten rid of. Objectivity is
not ever a possibility, because there is always another perspective.
Four Oshima features pretend objectivity, each differently; three of them
concern artists to undermine it. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief is filmed in
shaky 16mm as handheld newsreel flipping events every ten or fifteen minutes,
but turns out to rhyme sequences in their ritualization: they’re all staged. The
Man Who Left His Will on Film, done mostly in smoother 16mm, hints at a
Borgesian labyrinth in which everyone is being filmed all throughout, the
subjects of a documentary we’re watching, but demonstrates the censoring
Christian’s worries more overtly, that people find personal resonance and
meaning wherever they look (as in Diary, if every shot is mediated by
some invisible presence, the shots not only seem more objective, severed as
they are from their subject, but seem more subjective, tied as they are to
someone’s vision). Dear Summer Sister, which doesn’t follow artists
beyond the usual Oshima folk singer or two, is breezy travelogue that
nevertheless ends up in brisk, Seurat-like abstractions, with a few plastic red
accoutrements of civilization (a couple chairs, a tent) planned neatly against
a beach as, appropriately and as usual, artificial civilities crumble. And Shiro
of Amakusa mounts its camera and militias, clogged in traffic of men, run
to battle in congested jog, as the frame slowly yields thousands of men to a
single one. Fires burn lands in far-distant backgrounds and tortures are
enacted to one side of the screen in the foreground, strategic discussions to
another, all anticipating Brakhage
on the Rubens adaptation he’d do for
Such practicalities deflate any visceral thrills of combat, of
course, but Oshima’s matter of facts vs. the usual romance of battles is only a
pose of objectivity—Steven Soderbergh, attempting Renoir or Oshima’s pretense
of artlessness actually achieves it in Che, with (a voice-over or two
aside) none of their interest in the mechanics of war or routine brutalities—as
the epic flame-lit spaces of every shot belie any notion of an impartial cameraman
or director. For each shot is perfectly composed in classic Renaissance
perspective: lines of men may criss-cross one way or another, or they may stand
still, but almost any Shiro-shot is neatly delineated, often against
solid black or white void skies, by columns of retreating soldiers retreating
toward a central vanishing point where a ruler might sit deep in background, or
an artist might mumble to unseen stars. Almost certainly, Shiro is
Oshima’s most awing work of artistry. The point isn’t just Oshima’s usual one,
that civilization establishes a sense of order (Oshima establishes it visually)
in a barren world where instinct tends toward chaos, nor just Oshima’s usual
one that communism is a sham when order calls for hierarchies (also established
visually, sympathetic tracking shots aside, and even if all men here are specks
equal before death), nor just Oshima’s usual one that objectivity is also a
sham when an artist, as he must, orders elements into a composition.
The point (another point) is also Oshima’s usual one, that any men of hopes or
delusions are artists: they rebel against an order only by advocating new
configurations, perversions of the old. Shiro’s artist isn’t Oshima’s
surrogate; Shiro is himself. Ostensibly, he’s the one who’s lined his men up
neatly to look worthy of a Rembrandt tableau.
SHIRO OF AMAKUSA, REBEL (Nagisa Oshima, 1962) | Dennis Grunes
YUNBOGI’S DIARY (Yunbogi no nikki)
Midnight
Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Tom Mes
Consisting of a series of diary entries narrated by a boy over
photographs made by Oshima himself during a 1964 trip to
With it, Oshima confronts his country with the mess it made
during the occupation, particularly the resulting chaos and poverty that would
continue beyond the Korean War. Throughout the film, he draws parallels with
the situation in
For much of the 60s, the director spotlighted the relationship
between
Perhaps given its openly critical attitude, the film was originally
meant as a personal project of Oshima's, who planned to show it to audiences
only when invited to do so. Things turned out differently and Yunbogi's Diary
was eventually quite widely screened, especially outside
The New York Times (Vincent Canby, Lawrence Van Gelder) review
THE PLEASURES OF THE FLESH (Etsuraku)
Japan (104 mi) 1965 ‘Scope
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Siegel
(michaelsiegel@yahoo.com)
The lead character, Wakizaka, a teacher, murders a man who has raped his
young female student, Shoko, at the request of her wealthy family. Wakizaka is
in love with and covets Shoko (as expressed early in the film by his highly
sexualized and possessive gaze over her) but cannot have her because of his
poor social and economic standing. A public official who has just embezzled 30
million yen witnesses this murder, and on knowing that he is on his way to
prison, makes a deal with Wakizaka that the latter will protect the money until
the public official's sentence is up or else be turned into the police for the
murder. Shoko having married someone else (the wedding is the opening scene of
the film), Wakizaka decides to experience "the pleasures of the
flesh" for one year: he will spend the entirety of the 30 million and then
take his own life before the embezzler is released. He spends the money mostly
on insufficient but living substitutes for his original love Shoko (long-term
prostitutes who look like her), as he slowly deteriorates further and further
into guilt and obsession. Because of the stern, bold-faced warning on this form
about spoilers, I won't say anymore about the plot.
A highly stylized, highly subjective film -- the narration never strays far
from the main character's point of view. Complex temporal and spatial
structure. Wonderful, intense, thrilling, apocalyptic and, as always with
Oshima, beautifully edited and shot.
Since it is a rare film and I had the chance to see it, I'd be happy to answer
any other questions via e-mail.
User comments from imdb Author: GrandeMarguerite from Lille, France
What looks first like a thriller (after the murder of a man who raped one of his students, a young teacher finds himself blackmailed into hiding a huge some of money) turns into an exploration of greed and sexual exploitation by one of the less politically correct Japanese directors, Nagisa Oshima, as the hero succumbs to his baser impulses and decides to spend the money on indulging his every (often sensual) impulse - planning to commit suicide when the cash runs out. "Pleasures of the Flesh" sees Oshima first embrace the themes of sexuality, sadism and obsession that characterize his later works. I see "Pleasures of the Flesh" as the turning point in Oshima's career, a cross between his early films, like "The Sun's Burial" or "A Cruel Story of Youth" with young criminals who exploit each other for money and enact transgressive fantasies, or "Night and Fog in Japan" with its political plot, and later films, like the famous "Realm of the Senses", and their sadomasochist tales of sex and death. Oshima is obviously already at work pushing the limits of what can be shown on screen and what can be said on the power of sex and money, on the perversion of love and capitalism. It is one of the most pessimistic works from the director. Everything is corrupt : the young girl the hero falls for (and kills for) proves to be not so innocent in the end, sex (which is a way to humiliate people), love (which only leads to frustration and guilt), money (a delusion), society (dominating and repressive). As "Pleasures of the Flesh" seems to embody most of Oshima's favorite themes, I would recommend it, but don't expect a "likeable" film with "likeable" characters. But after all, this is all too typical of Oshima's manner ! Has he ever filmed romantic stories and sweet people ?
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, May 20, 2010
Press Notes: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties May 28, 2010
On Oshima March 15, 2011
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion Collection
Oshima: Artists and Lovers, Take One (of Four) on Notebook | MUBI David Phelps from Mubi, December 15, 2008
A
Restless Rebel Trading in Sex and the Absurd Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May
14, 2010
'Oshima's Outlaw
Sixties,' Films by Nagisa Oshima - The New York ... A Second Look:
'Oshima's Outlaw Sixties' on DVD, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
Oshima
in the Sixties: Outlaw Cinema/Exploitation Cinema Sean Axmaker, May 16, 2010
DVDs. Oshima, "Walkabout," "Stagecoach," More on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, May 18, 2010
Molodezhnaja (German) movie photos
VIOLENCE AT NOON (Hakuchu no torima)
Japan (99 mi) 1966 ‘Scope
Time Out review Tony Rayns
As in several other films, Oshima takes the story of a real-life criminal (here, a rapist and murderer) and uses it as the key to a sweeping analysis of the ills of post-war Japanese society. Very little time is wasted on the nuts-and-bolts of the police manhunt; the focus is on two women who know the criminal, and - through them - on the history of the village in Shinshu where the wretched man was born and raised. Oshima reveals his real subject gradually, piecing it together like a mosaic. It is an account of the decay of post-war idealism, the collapse of brave ventures like a collectively run farm, the inexorable restoration of old inequalities and injustices. The visual approach, too, is like a mosaic: there are incessant changes of camera angle, as if to stress that no one point of view is 'true'.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Along with such celebrated peers as Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman
In The Dunes) and Shohei Imamura (The Pornographer, Vengeance Is
Mine), militant provocateur Nagisa Oshima was part of a Japanese post-war
movement that infused the country's austere cinematic tradition with
avant-garde experimentation and grim social commentary. Shot in harsh,
radically overexposed black-and-white, Oshima's punishing 1966 film Violence
At Noon plays like Rashomon viewed through the crooked lens of
Jean-Luc Godard, a prismatic take on rape and murder under the hot light of an
interrogation room. Based on the exploits of a real-life criminal, the film
concerns the peculiar bonds linking brutal sex murderer Kei Soto, his
protective schoolteacher wife (Akiko Koyama), and a rape victim (Saeda
Kawaguchi) who feels indebted to him for saving her from suicide. Oshima cuts
freely from the police investigation to scenes from Soto's troubled history in
a rural commune, where his twisted allegiances with the women first began to
form. Violence At Noon never presents Soto as anything less than a
monster, saving its real agenda for how modern society nurtures such deviancy
and allows it to thrive unabated. Once the focus shifts to the intimate bond
between Koyama and
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
A haggard, expressionless drifter named Eisuke (Kei Sato) encounters the object of his obsession working as a maid at a private residence. Her name is Shino (Saeda Kawaguchi), a former coworker from a failed collective farm in the province whose life he once saved. As Eisuke proceeds to terrorize Shino to the point of unconsciousness, he becomes aware of Mrs. Inagaki's (Ryoko Takahara) presence in the house, and violates and kills her, sparing Shino's life. Soon, Eisuke's criminal pattern of sexual assaults and murders emerges, as Shino becomes a reluctant witness and accomplice to Eisuke's increasing acts of violence. Shino appears to cooperate with the police on creating a composite description of the assailant, but secretly, withholds her crucial knowledge of his identity. Resigned to complicity for Eisuke's crimes by not revealing their mutual acquaintance, Shino, in turn, writes letters to Eisuke's trusting and dutiful wife, a schoolteacher named Jinbo (Narumi Kayashima), in order to expose his true nature, and induce her into turning Eisuke over to the police. Soon, the complex circumstances behind Eisuke's rescue of Shino at the collective farm is revisited, revealing the dichotomous, dual image of Eisuke as both criminal and savior in the eyes of Shino that forms an inextricable bond between victim and attacker. Shino insinuates herself into the investigative process by following Inspector Haraguchi (Fumio Watanabe) as he pursues clues and interviews victims, attempting to understand Eisuke's destructive impulses in the unspoken, self-reproaching belief that, as his first victim, she is the underlying cause for his violence.
Nagisa Oshima presents a taut, intelligent, and visually spellbinding portrait of repression, victimization, and guilt in Violence at Noon. Profoundly influenced by Alain Resnais' themes of altered time and haunted memory, Oshima creates a seamless visual transition of three disparate chronological events to reflect Jinbo's guilt-ridden conscience as she returns to the collective farm: a flashback sequence involving the community leaders connects to the present day with a dream sequence of Genji (Matsuhiro Toura) at a cemetery, and continues with a reluctant reunion with her fugitive husband.
Shot in high contrast and using frequent jump cuts (more than 2000, mostly stationary shots, according to Max Tessier's essay, Oshima Nagisa, or the Battered Energy of Desire in Reframing Japanese Cinema), isolated framing, changing character perspective, and elliptical narrative, Oshima reflects the mental polarity and deviant behavior of an amoral predator: the photographic police chronicle of the attack on Mrs. 'M'; the frenetic jump cuts during Shino's pursuit of Jinbo during a school field trip; the constant panning of the camera during Shino and Jinbo's final conversation on a train. Eisuke's entrance into the Inagaki home further alludes to his psychological fissure as he is presented in a series of fragmented and increasingly claustrophobic close-ups that culminates with a shot of his eye, then cuts to a montage of Shino's awkward (and decidedly unseductive) body as she washes the laundry, emphasizing the disconnection of Eisuke's body from his aberrant mind. Yet inevitably, despite Jinbo's continued devotion to her abusive husband and Shino's attempts to psychologically deconstruct the mind of her attacker, Eisuke's fatal compulsion remains senseless, irredeemable, self-destructive, and ultimately, tragic.
User comments from imdb Author: GrandeMarguerite from
First of all, let me correct a wrong statement which you can find in one of
the two other reviews on this film : no, Oshima never attended a film school in
No, as you may guess, this is not a "sit back and relax" film. To put
things in a nutshell, "Hakuchu no Torima" is the portrayal of a
violent rapist as seen through the recollections of his wife and one of his
victims. As the film starts, Eisuke (played by a great Kei Sato) encounters
Shino (Saeda Kawaguchi), who works as a maid in a house. She is a former
coworker from a failed collective farm, whose life he once saved -- only to rape
her. Soon, Eisuke's criminal pattern of rapes and murders emerges as he goes on
assaulting women (Shino being the witness of one of them, as Eisuke tries to
violate her employer). When cooperating with the police on making a description
of the rapist, Shino withholds her crucial knowledge of his identity. She
prefers writing letters to Eisuke's dutiful wife, Matsuko, a schoolteacher
(Akiko Koyama -- Mrs Oshima), in order to expose his true nature and perhaps
induce her into turning Eisuke over to the police. As the police investigation
develops, Shino insinuates herself into the investigative process by following
Inspector Haraguchi (Fumio Watanabe) as he pursues clues in an attempt to
understand Eisuke's destructive impulses. Haraguchi is led to believe that
Shino, as Eisuke's first victim, is the underlying cause for his violence.
Flashbacks tell us about the complex circumstances behind Eisuke's rescue of
Shino at the collective farm, revealing the dual image of Eisuke as both
criminal and savior in the eyes of Shino, and explaining the inextricable bond
between the criminal and his victim. Strangely enough, Shino and Matsuko will
unite their efforts to protect Eisuke from capture... or won't they ?
Throughout the whole film, Oshima is more preoccupied by the relationship
developing between Shino and Matsuko than by the rapist. The despair of both
women is linked to that of Eisuke himself and to the failure of the socialist
movement in postwar
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, May 20, 2010
Kei Sato 1928–2010 Criterion essay by Chuck Stephens, May 11, 2010
Press Notes: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties May 28, 2010
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion Collection
BFI | Sight & Sound | In the realm of Oshima Alexander Jacoby from Sight & Sound, September 2009
Kei Satô Passes Away At 81 « The Criterion Cast Ryan Gallagher, May 9, 2010
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Criminal
Minded by Joshua Land - Moving Image Source
September 30, 2008
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
A
Restless Rebel Trading in Sex and the Absurd Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May
14, 2010
'Oshima's Outlaw
Sixties,' Films by Nagisa Oshima - The New York ... A Second Look:
'Oshima's Outlaw Sixties' on DVD, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
Oshima
in the Sixties: Outlaw Cinema/Exploitation Cinema Sean Axmaker, May 16, 2010
DVDs. Oshima, "Walkabout," "Stagecoach," More on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, May 18, 2010
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Molodezhnaja
(German) movie photos
BAND OF NINJA (Ninja bugei-cho)
User comments from imdb Author: sleepsev
(bearania@yahoo.com) from
Ninja Bugei-cho is a very exciting film, and its excitement, for me, relies
solely on its powerful story. It is also a very strange film because it
consists of only still cartoon-drawings with voice-over and sound effects.
Seeing this film is somehow similar to reading a fascinating comic book or
storyboard. While the pictures on the screen are not moving, this film, similar
to any comic book, gives freedom to our imagination to move the pictures in our
mind.
I'm very impressed with its fast pace. The story is very dense. What is told in
its 131-minute length can be told easily in 30-hour-long tv series. Imagine all
the excitement in 30-hour-long tv series being compressed into 2-hour movie.
There are many climaxes, and I think even the story of each member of the Kage
family has the climax of its own.
But while the story is full of interesting characters, it lacks deep
characterizations. Most characters are as flat as its material, but I don't
think that is a flaw of this movie. It's just a style usually found in this type
of story. For a story like this, the movie must last much longer than 2 hours
so that each character can be given 'real flesh and blood' or 'real subtle
feelings and emotions'. I think its excitement much more than compensates for
its lack of 'real life'. What this movie really does best is giving each
character different fighting skill, and explaining how each of them acquires
that special skill. The story of each supporting character is so interesting
that each of them should be expanded into a 2-hour movie.
The two main female characters impress me a lot with their expertise in
fighting. I will never forget one fighting scene in this movie which involves
one pregnant character. Even a small character such as the lady bandit is very
fascinating. Oshima's female characters in this movie are as charming and
charismatic as in his other movies. Oshima's female characters are not the type
usually found in mainstream Japanese cinema. His female characters are as
physically strong, determined, bold, and fatally alluring as Paul Verhoeven's
female characters.
There's one scene in this film which is very scary. It's the scene of the
'running earth'. It frightens me so much and makes me feel as if I witnessed
the real event and was running away from 'them'. If this movie is a
live-action, this scene might cost a lot to make it look real. But this film
proves that in order to scare the audience effectively, money is not as
necessary as the audience's own imagination. There are also many brutal,
gruesome, and gory scenes in this movie, and they make me feel very grateful
that this movie is not a live-action. Sketches of blood are much more tolerable
than real-looking blood.
The ultimate pleasure and excitement I gain from watching this film are somehow
similar to the ones I get from watching 'X-Men' or 'Lord of the Rings'. Each of
them has a story full of cartoon-style fighting and many interesting supporting
characters. However, 'Ninja Bugei-cho' doesn't give you only excitement. It
also lets you exercise your imaginative power. This film is highly recommended
for those who don't care if there are 'moving pictures' on the screen as long
as they can create their own 'moving pictures' in their mental projections.
DOUBLE SUICIDE (Muri shinju: Nihon no natsu)
aka: Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
Japan (98 mi) 1967 ‘Scope
Kathie
Smith: Twin Cities Film Geek Galore
The elusive Japanese Summer: Double Suicide reveals itself.
Although many of Nagisa Oshima’s films are considered rare and unavailable,
this film was one of the most unavailable of the unavailable. Belied by vague
descriptions and nonexistent information, Japanese Summer ambiguity
intrigued me. Only now, can I fully appreciate that abstraction is inherent in
the film, making it just as hard to pin down thematically as it has been to pin
down physically. The narrative is completely cut lose and allowed to unfurl
into a free-form allegory.
The richness of Japanese Summer is in its characters, sketched into
ambiguous icons. These characters allow Oshima to explore a found reality that
is neither literal nor logical. Any attempt to offer a plot description will
quickly lead down a rabbit hole, and, with only one viewing under my belt, near
impossible. Japanese Summer is like a road movie without the road or the
car. Nejiko and Otoko are on a trek, nonetheless, that eventually leads them to
a secret hideout of anarchist thugs. Held prisoner, they find themselves locked
in a room of kindred outcast spirits. Over the coarse of the evening, they
learn of reports about a man randomly shooting people in
Despite what it sounds like, this is no action thriller. The grand finale may
be a shoot-out, but the film is much more akin to science fiction: set in a
nether world, caught between the past and the future. The apocalyptic settings
of empty freeways and abandon warehouses seem timeless. Without contextual
reference for the characters or the abstract scenes, Japanese Summer exists
outside of our cognizant time frame.
Nejiko is a devil-may-care young woman prone to whimsy despite circumstances.
We meet her as she is “celebrating” a breakup by tossing her undergarments over
the side of a bridge, if only to entice a group of swimming men below.
Audacious in style and sexuality, Nejiko wears her hair short on one side and
long on the other, with steaks of highlights. She lives a life of provocative
carpe diem, willing to give any man a chance. It is not love or sincerity she
looks for, but unambiguous physical pleasure. Although Oshima’s films are not
without dynamic female characters, Nejiko is unique. Her boldness defies the
stereotype of a Japanese woman, and goes against the grain of a typical Oshima
female character normally subjugated to object or victim. Nejiko is defiantly
neither.
Nejiko meets Otoko early in the film and puts him in her sights as her next
conquest. He offers a cerebral contrast to Nejiko without being her antithesis.
Otoko is unnaturally obsessed with dying, or, more accurately, obsessed with
being killed by another man. He imagines that moment before death as a pinnacle
moment when both killer and victim confront mortality together. He wanders with
the goal of surrounding himself with potential killers, with Nejiko in tow.
Although Nejiko and Otoko are the film’s two springboards, nearly a dozen
characters come and go, adding dynamism to the film. Foremost is a young man
who finds the hideout (literally coming in through a bathroom window) in search
of a weapon. His only desire is to kill. However, he hardly has the look of a
bloodthirsty killer in his cropped khakis, sweater vest and sweet young face.
Much like how Otoko and Nejiko initially fail to make an obvious connection,
this young killer is also not the one to fulfill Otoko’s death wish. Another
man that descends on the hideout is equal part yakuza and diplomat. His prize
possession is his television, which is carried by his loyal lackey. Also added
to the mix of characters is an elderly war veteran who is more than aware of
the reality of death and an American responsible for the shootings. Among them
all, Nejiko is the pulse of the film. I can’t help but think of the planetary
personification in Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies: in the case of Japanese
Summer: Double Suicide, they would all be sober and Nejiko would be the sun
with the men, and all their fatalism, spinning around her.
Near the end of the film, our outcast heroes find that they sympathize with the
American who seems to be randomly shooting people. They traipse off like happy
vagabonds ready to meet their destiny and join the American in fighting off the
police. It is a finale that works in glorious hyperbole as Nejiko and Otoko
finally have an epiphanic moment together.
Also known as Night of the Killer, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
is yet another Oshima film that seems like no other Oshima film. Working in an
anti-auteur style from film to film, Oshima was constantly reinventing himself.
He relished the fact that Mishima proclaimed he could not understand Japanese
Summer. And perhaps it is not to be fully understood, but simply
experienced. I’ve always thought that the greatest compliment a director can
give his audience is taking the risk to present a challenging work. Doing so in
this case seems to have sent this film down the road to obscurity. However,
seeing the Janus logo at the beginning of this new print makes me very hopeful that
I may be able to see this film again
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, May 20, 2010
Press Notes: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties May 28, 2010
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion Collection
A Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese Summer: Double Suicide David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast, August 9, 2010
Nihon Cine Art: To the friends and collaborators on "Japanese ... Miguel Patrício from Nihon Cine Art, February 26, 2009, also seen here: JS:DS
A
Restless Rebel Trading in Sex and the Absurd Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May
14, 2010
'Oshima's Outlaw
Sixties,' Films by Nagisa Oshima - The New York ... A Second Look:
'Oshima's Outlaw Sixties' on DVD, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
Oshima
in the Sixties: Outlaw Cinema/Exploitation Cinema Sean Axmaker, May 16, 2010
DVDs. Oshima, "Walkabout," "Stagecoach," More on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, May 18, 2010
A TREATISE ON JAPANESE BAWDY SONGS (Nihon
shunka-kô)
aka: Sing a Song of Sex
Japan (103 mi) 1967 ‘Scope
The
Auteurs Daniel Kasman,
The movies of Nagisa Oshima famously change shape—genre and style—from one to the next, but perhaps most surprising inside this accepted generalization is when they change inside themselves. Sing a Sing of Sex—the director's 1968 feature about a male quartet of recent high school graduates the afternoon after their university entrance exams—nearly jumps the shark half way through, but its first half is one of the most outrageous and inventive of the director’s many galling openings. It also seems one of the purest of existentialist movies, employing a narrative neither digressive nor wandering, yet somehow freeform, based on choices arbitrary, willful, and fantastic.
The boys focus initially more on sex than on their exams or their future, and especially on the identity of an unknown but beautiful female student spied during the tests. In lieu of being able to find out who she is, the students find some girls they do know—less cute but imminently easier to tease—and end up toasting their high school days goodbye with the girls and a beloved professor. In a similar kind of limbo-like funk of confused sexual desires and frustrated future as his young students, the professor drags the co-ed group to several increasingly more off-putting bars and lectures drunkenly on how ribald, sexually suggestive folk songs were authentic expressions of the lower classes. (Both Oshima and fellow Japanese New Wave director Shohei Imamura would definitely agree.) They party well beyond the last train—in a repeated gag, the drunken, frustrated night seems to loop, the group impossibly passing by the same place twice in the same shot, the first time instantly doubling back after they walk out of frame, the second time exiting frame left and entering frame right to repeat the scene!—so the group retires to an inn for a night of horny fidgeting. The boys make joking and pretty pathetic attempts to get into the girls' room down the hall, and the lead boy, checking his professor's room, finds the gas stove overturned and the professor sound asleep in the poisonous air. After another rendition of Sing a Song of Sex' anthem of masculine precaution before bedding various kinds of women ("if a girl is an only child, you must ask her parent's permission; if the girl is ugly, sleep with a rag over her head…" etc.) the boy simply walks away from the unconscious, dying man.
The incredible moral choice made by the student instead of being highlighted is carried along the film’s freeform, youthful movement. The next day, after a police investigation, the four boys tease the girls by saying they killed the professor, and the lead boy stoically turns over in his head his passive decision to let the man die. The climax of the film’s first half, and what undoubtedly prompted Jonathan Rosenbaum's flat-out untrue judgment of Sing a Song of Sex in the most recent issue of Cinema Scope as "rape-happy," is a tremendous sequence where the boys slowly walk down the underground hallways of a subway station and thoughtfully postulate various scenarios of raping the mysterious, beautiful girl they spied at the beginning of the film. These introspective thoughts are fascinatingly portrayed as a kind of collective fantasy: the boys taking turns variously raping the girl in front of a class full of test takers as the others look on, snickering. Oshima's characteristically post-synced soundtrack—like many of his other films eliminating nearly all ambient noise from his film and leaving just the lonely sounds of dubbed voices and scattered sound effects when necessary—has the boys' voices whispering overlapping comments, suggestions, and questions from outside of the fantasy, as if the scene is a visualization of their dialog as their walk through the subway, or theirs is an audio commentary on an interactive movie they are all watching together.
Afterward, the lead boy tries to confess his guilt and takes the film down an even stranger route of folk music and protest group parodies, as well as a late-act appearance of a common Oshima subject—the link between Korean and Japanese national identity. It all gets decidedly weirder—and as the title promises, the songs and the sex don't stop; there is at least one more implied rape (one far more disturbing than the already frighteningly constructed fantasy sequence) and an endless amount of American folk songs sung in Japanese-English. But Sing a Song of Sex never quite regains the fluid ease and freedom of its first half. The atmosphere was of a terrifying freedom of association and possibility, of boredom and culpability, of lust and the tangents of politics, ethics, and individuality it inspires. The surprise at this inspired storytelling was even greater after the film changed midway through for the worse and the weirder. In a narrative whose inspiration was in its unexpectedly free movements, Oshima, forever shape shifting as a filmmaker, reveals that he can even shape shift mid-film.
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, May 20, 2010
Kei Sato 1928–2010 Criterion essay by Chuck Stephens, May 11, 2010
Press Notes: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties May 28, 2010
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion Collection
Kei Satô Passes Away At 81 « The Criterion Cast Ryan Gallagher, May 9, 2010
A
Restless Rebel Trading in Sex and the Absurd Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May
14, 2010
'Oshima's Outlaw Sixties,'
Films by Nagisa Oshima - The New York ...
A Second Look: 'Oshima's Outlaw Sixties' on
DVD, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
Oshima
in the Sixties: Outlaw Cinema/Exploitation Cinema Sean Axmaker, May 16, 2010
DVDs. Oshima, "Walkabout," "Stagecoach," More on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, May 18, 2010
Molodezhnaja (German) movie photos
DIARY OF A SHINJUKU THIEF (Shinjuku dorobo
nikki)
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule
review
Nagisa Oshima, at his
most Godardian, directed this 1968 celebration of youth, sexuality, and
fantasy, employing Kabuki theater and petty crime. The film was dedicated to
Genet, which makes sense. In Japanese with subtitles. 94 min.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
One of Oshima's most
teasing and provocative collages, inspired by the student riots of '68 and
contemporary 'youth culture' generally. The main thread running through it is
the relationship between a passive and vaguely effeminate young man and an aggressive
and vaguely masculine young woman. They meet when he steals books and she poses
as a shop assistant who catches him in the act; they spend the rest of the
movie trying to reach satisfactory orgasms with each other. Their route takes
them through a dizzying mixture of fact and fiction, from an encounter with a
real-life sexologist to involvement in a 'fringe' performance of a
neo-primitive kabuki show. The logical connections are there, but they're
deliberately submerged in a welter of contrasting moods, styles and lines of
thought.
The
Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]
(excerpt)
Disaffected, effeminate young dropout Birdie Hilltop (renowned
graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo) shoplifts from a
Oshima: Theater of the Revolution, Take Two (of Four) on ... - Mubi David Phelps from Mubi, December 16, 2008
Restart. Capitalism, hard-wired for subjugations, turns relationships into staged exchanges. Everyone is under some sort of control and wants some more. Rebellion is transgression is sexual. Oshima rebels against definitive conceptions of realities (anyway built of lies, fantasies, and repressions) by conceiving alternate variations of stories and scenes. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief plays as his one’60s free-for-all collage: that anything-goes pastiche of skits and documentary footage and reenactments and stock footage (not all present here), loosely tied together by undeveloped themes of self-reflexive filmmaking and sexual rebellion paralleled by the filmmaker’s own flouting of order and structure, that wannabe anarchists like Robert Downey Sr., Brian DePalma, and Matsumoto Toshio were tossing off around the same time. More than any of Oshima’s others, it’s a film founded and unfounded, based and debased, on switches: not just the switch from segment to segment, narrative to documentary, but the switch from black-and-white to color (eye-popping scarlets, mostly). Oshima doesn’t just play some segments one way and some another, but suddenly, in the middle of the scene toggles a shot into color, and it’s as though the scene has changed altogether; the 16mm black-and-white taken, by convention, for on-screen reality is undermined entirely when the perspective changes to give a much more accurate view of the way the scene would actually look (colorful). As if there’s only one.
Again: one reason there’s no actual reality to grasp is because everything is staged. The story that Diary doesn’t really concern involves a boy who gets off (actually) stealing books—and getting caught by a cute employee who may just have taken the job to catch him. Such control games become a ritual, pointless but for its own sake; “Miss Suzuki, you don’t need to bring me every shoplifter you find,” the store’s boss says. “I’m quite busy.” Commentators have noted almost all of Diary films rituals of one sort or another (like so many Oshimas—another effect of the same scenes recapitulated in Hanging or Drunkards is to turn them into variations off a rite). The time, specified throughout to the hour, is 1968, which is why time is ousted in an opening montage of shattering clocks (freedom from daily regulations—the great regulator!), but the public demonstrations here are neither chaotic nor political. Men stand on their head in unison and a sort of noh play plays on and on and, as if by invocation, a mock-rape staged by lovers ends up enacted by a bunch of men who punch the boy and rape the girl on the street (more questions about why this performance is any more “real” than the boy’s). “I believe even sex with animals or incest would help,” states one interviewee, one of the drunken cast and crew of Hanging questioned in the “documentary” segments throughout, discussing freedom for the human race. As elsewhere in Oshima, the transgressions aren’t simply instinctual relief, but practical, predetermined solutions to play at some semblance of personal control (if not self-control) against overwhelming societal impotence and chaos under governments or revolutions. Rituals.
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, it’s called, like Yunbogi’s
Diary follows a story through still-photos: both playing at objectivity, in
Thief’s handheld 16mm, in Yunbogi’s found photos, when of course
there’s no such thing. Reality isn’t captured, but formed—and performed. To
somebody’s fantasy or another’s everyone else’s subjugated. Through them
characters find closed, closed-in environments to release their rage, sexually,
usually (In the Realm of the Senses is the prime case). In Oshima’s
1968, a boy doesn’t steal to promote communist freedom from private property,
but to cum; as in Pleasures of the Flesh, an order is needed to transgress
against. That Lubitsch told a similar story, of people who need the titillation
of burglary and charades and threats of exploitation and, in Trouble in
Paradise’s final scene, time-honored rituals to maintain a love affair;
that then, sublimely, Hitchcock told that one again, of people who sublimate
their sexual longings into metaphors of thievary ("Look John. Hold
them," Francie says looking down. "Diamonds.") and fireworks
("I have a feeling that tonight you're going to see one of the
Oshima: Perspective Matters, Take Three (of Four) on Notebook | MUBI David Phelps from Mubi, December 17, 2008
Oshima:
A World of Their Own (Chasing Shadows, Take Four of ... - Mubi David
Phelps from Mubi,
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review
DEATH BY HANGING
Time Out review Tony Rayns
All of Oshima's films deal in a challenging and committed way
with specifically Japanese questions and problems. Death by Hanging is an
'absurd' comedy about the situation of Korean immigrants in Japan, centering on
a state execution that goes wrong, mounted as a sort of witty Brechtian
argument.
The
Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]
(excerpt)
A staggering majority of the Japanese people opposed the
abolition of capital punishment, a statistic that Oshima clinically lectures on
while touring a death chamber, forcing us to watch the austere step-by-step
procedure of an execution. It plays like a sobering doc until the condemned
man—known only by the Kafka-friendly initial "R." (a reference to the
notorious case of Ri Chin'u, a Korean who murdered two Japanese girls in
1958)—survives the noose, then develops amnesia. Suddenly, the tone hops to
absurd theatrical comedy (the gallows humor in Dr. Strangelove's war
room now literal) as the guards begin dangerously re-enacting R.'s crimes to
jog his memory—after all, killing a man who feels no guilt would be murder!
Oshima is unsubtle in his critique of
User comments from imdb Author: Meganeguard from
In the year 1968 student movements throughout the world were trying to
change their respective societies. In
Death by Hanging opens with the Narrator, Oshima Nagisa, asking the audience if
they support the death penalty and he goes on to say that more than seventy
percent of the Japanese public supports the death penalty. However, he then
asks the audience if they have ever seen the inside of the death chamber
itself. We, the viewers, then receive a step by step introduction to the
environs of the death chamber and we are treated to the hanging of a condemned
Korean man who raped and killed two Japanese women. However, there is a problem
and that problem is that the body of the condemned man R refused to die.
Obviously being that someone who is hanged is supposed to die the prison
officials are not sure what to do. It is decided that they will hang him again
after he comes to, but after he does he has amnesia. Believing that it would be
wrong to hang a man without knowledge of his crime, the prison officials try to
recreate the rape and murder scenes for R so that his memory will be revived in
order for them to execute him once more. However, this task is not easy….
Filmed in 1968 only three years after Japan reopened relations with South Korea
and ten years after thousands of Koreans were repatriated to North Korea, Death
by Hanging details a number of the discriminations faced by Resident Koreans
during the 1960s: poverty, unemployment, poor educational opportunities, and a
general sense of disdain by the Japanese populace, although, of course, this
was not universal. Death by Hanging also attempts to show the political
ideologies of the Resident Koreans, mainly those affiliated with
Strictly Film School Acquarello
A clinically presented series of stark white, unembellished placards illustrates the sobering statistical data for the overwhelming public sentiment against the abolition of the death penalty as an off-screen narrator (Nagisa Oshima) provides a snide, but impassioned rebuttal to popular opinion by presenting a objective documentary of the austere and impersonal milieu associated with the methodical process of carrying out a state execution through the specific example of the appointed hanging of a convicted rapist and murderer known only as 'R' (Do-yun Yu): an empty, minimalist sitting room that provides an illusive, parting glimpse of a semblance of home for the condemned prisoner as he makes his way into the execution room, an assembly of unnamed official guests waiting in a segregated viewing room to witness the macabre ceremony, a procedural rehearsal of the chamber's fail-safe sequence as the prisoner is blindfold and fitted with a noose, the actuation of trap door, the median measured time of 18 minutes before the heart completely stops and a staff physician (Rokko Toura) is able to record the official time of death. However, the seemingly predictable execution script fails to correlate as expected, as the doctor continues to detect R's breathing for several minutes beyond the expected point of expiration. The unexpected development shifts the film's tone from observant polemic to wry, dark comedy as the guards - eager to disavow any culpability that may have led to the malfunction - are thrown into helpless confusion on how to proceed with the seemingly half-dead hanged man in order to complete their assigned task. Imploring the doctor to promptly resuscitate R as an ironic humane gesture so that he can regain consciousness before being put to death again (and therefore, have an awareness of his guilt), the guards soon realize that the trauma of the failed execution has resulted in the prisoner's amnesia. Acting on the advice of the education officer (Fumio Watanabe), the officials begin to re-enact episodes from the trial transcripts before an impassive and oblivious R in order to trigger his memory, revealing a more insidious and pervasive cultural malaise that cannot be set right by the empty gestures of inequitable justice.
Inspired by the notorious, real-life execution of a convicted murderer named Ri Chin'u who had killed two Japanese schoolgirls in 1958 (and subsequently courted publicity for his crimes through the newspapers and the police), Death by Hanging is an ingeniously conceived, subversive, provocative, and elegantly modulated tragicomedy on intolerance, assimilation, and capital punishment. Using recurring imagery of circles - in particular, the hangman's noose, the Japanese flag (a motif similarly used in Oshima's earlier film, The Sun's Burial), and the upended, spinning bicycle wheel - that is further reflected in the film's circular narrative structure, Nagisa Oshima illustrates the overarching public complicity that has perpetuated the cycle of dehumanization, racism, and violence and continues to provide the ideological bulwark for the nation's codified, postwar social policies that foster mono-ethnicity and conformity at the expense of inclusion and diversity. Through repeated episodes of role-playing and transference, Nagisa Oshima further creates an analogy for the collective subconscious that exposes the underlying hypocrisy of its entrenched (and obsolete) ideology: the physician's suppressed history of committed wartime atrocities (that broadly reflects the nation's prewar militarism, isolationism, and imperialism); the vulgar stereotypes of ethnic Koreans employed by the guards in an attempt to re-instill R's ethnic identity (note the use of a non-diegetic German language soundtrack as R is brought to the beach that further reinforces the historical legacy of racial intolerance); the awkward (and absurdly comical) re-enactments of the victims' abduction and violation that reveal the participants' own sexual neuroses and ambiguity over shifting traditional gender roles in modern society. In the end, the provocative and intrinsically incendiary issue of death penalty merely provides an integrally self-enclosed structural framework (and microcosm) for the film's more contemporarily relevant examination of marginalization, guilt, and social justice - a reluctant, but necessary expurgation rooted in the collective conscience of an unreconciled cultural identity.
BFI | Sight & Sound | In the realm of Oshima Alexander Jacoby from Sight & Sound, September 2009
User comments from imdb Author: Mar-Cinema
from
User comments from imdb Author: timmy_501 from United States
Criminal
Minded Joshua Land from Moving Image
Source, September 30, 2008
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Japan Society, New York - Death by Hanging
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THREE RESURRECTED DRUNKARDS (Kaette kita
yopparai)
Japan (80 mi) 1968 ‘Scope
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Oshima took to the spirit of '68 like a needle to a vein. This
riotous comedy (in colour and Scope) is a cocktail of dumb cops, desperate
Koreans, and Japanese students who don't know what's hit them. It starts with
the students taking a swim, and finding their clothes stolen from the beach;
the thieves are illegal immigrants from
The
Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]
(excerpt)
While hapless school buddies swim in the sea, a hand rises from the beach to replace their clothes with Korean military uniforms; whenever they manage to recover their duds, mysterious enemies force them back into the Korean garb, sometimes at gunpoint. For a blistering critique of Korea's role in Vietnam, this must-see Oshima rarity is zippy and zany in seemingly impossible ways: When the leads become convinced that they're Korean because someone told them so, it's easy to equate the gag to the old Bugs and Daffy "pronoun trouble" routine, but imagine the scandal in '68 when the boys took turns jokingly twisting up their faces to see who could best mimic the executed Viet Cong prisoner from Eddie Adams's famous photo, taken mere months before the film's release. Oshima has never used color more vibrantly, and I'll vouch that the new 'Scope print is an event all its own.
User comments from imdb Author: cllrdr-1
(cllrdr@ehrensteinland.com) from
First of all Godard doesn't have two d's in the middle.
Second of all Oshima never worked for him.
Most important of all this film stars the great Japanese pop group The Folk
Crusaders. Imagine The Beatles making an experimental film. It would look
something like this.
Oshima is concerned here, as he was in "Death By Hanging" made the
same year, with Japanese anti-Korean prejudice. Socio-political events too
complex and multi-faceted to discuss in a forum of this kind are the basis of
this film -- which end with the recreation of the most indelible image of the
Vietnam war.
The result is a baroque masterpiece that foreshadows Rivette's "Celine and
Julie Go Boating."
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion essay by Michael Koresky, May 20, 2010
Kei Sato 1928–2010 Criterion essay by Chuck Stephens, May 11, 2010
Press Notes: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties May 28, 2010
Eclipse Series 21: Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties Criterion Collection
A Journey Through the Eclipse Series: Nagisa Oshima’s Three Resurrected Drunkards David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast, January 3, 2011
Kei Satô Passes Away At 81 « The Criterion Cast Ryan Gallagher, May 9, 2010
Oshima in New York: video of the day Daniel Kasman from The Auteurs, October 27, 2008
A
Restless Rebel Trading in Sex and the Absurd Dave Kehr from The New York Times, May
14, 2010
'Oshima's Outlaw
Sixties,' Films by Nagisa Oshima - The New York ... A Second Look:
'Oshima's Outlaw Sixties' on DVD, by Dennis Lim from The New York Times,
Oshima
in the Sixties: Outlaw Cinema/Exploitation Cinema Sean Axmaker, May 16, 2010
DVDs. Oshima, "Walkabout," "Stagecoach," More on Notebook | MUBI David Hudson from Mubi, May 18, 2010
BOY (Shonen)
Time
Out review
Tony Rayns
It came from a
Japanese newspaper story: a down-and-out family were making their young son
fake road accidents in order to blackmail motorists for 'hospital fees'. Oshima
starts from character studies of the members of the family as outsiders in
Japanese society: the lazy, facilely embittered father, the tackily glamorous
mother longing for her stepson's love, the 10-year-old boy hopelessly confused
about his role as the family breadwinner. With characteristic tender roughness,
Oshima then develops this extraordinary story into an open-ended question about
the truth of appearances, centering on the boy's own fantasies about his sci-fi
hero. A key film in the struggle for a modern, political cinema.
Boy Film
Comment (capsule review)
“Fan’s of 2004’s home-alone drama Nobody Knows owe themselves a trip to Walter Reade to see this
equally heartbreaking study in premature adulthood, also drawn for the Japanese
headlines.” —Time Out
Based on a true story that captured newspaper headlines, Boy picks up on one of
Oshima’s favorite themes: the con game as a symbol for postwar Japanese
society. A couple trains their 10-year-old son to run in front of passing cars
and pretend to be injured. After an appropriately hysterical scene by his
parents, money is extorted from the terrified drivers in order to keep the
“accident” out of the hands of the authorities. The boy (an eerie performance
by Tetsuo Abe) becomes remarkably adept at his métier, even helping to select
marks as the family travels the length and breadth of
BOY (Nagisa Oshima, 1969) « Dennis Grunes
By the mid-1960s Japan
has miraculously recovered from the Second World War, defeat, military
occupation. Or had it? Writer-director Nagisa Oshima’s Shonen detects a
residue, a social warping, an appalling degeneration. His is a precise and
burrowing film.
The focus here is on a
criminal, renegade family. Father is a wound-riddled war veteran. Chillingly,
Mother is absent; we never learn her fate. But Stepmother is on hand: the Boy’s
Stepmother, that is, and the infant boy’s biological mother. Father has
impressed his family into a routine of grifting in order to earn a living.
Either Boy or Stepmother rushes into the course of a moving car, sustains a
hopefully limited injury, and Father on that basis extorts money from the
driver. But the authorities aren’t insensible, one of the patsies turns out to
be a savvy garage mechanic, and the family is on the run, northwards. The color
film passes into and out of black and white.
This film really
ripped at my heart. Boy: “I don’t think anything about anything”—and Boy’s
general demeanor suits the disposition of this remark. Father is a nasty,
raging bully, partly to rail against the loss of his traditional authority as a
consequence of the war; Stepmother, reflecting the same assault on the Japanese
family, believes that Boy is out to get her. She casually tosses away the one
thing that Boy holds onto as his own: his cap. Compare Oshima’s analytical
treatment of this cap and the sentimental treatment Peter Bogdanovich affords
another boy’s cap in The Last Picture Show (1971).
Is it possible Oshima
knows his Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930)? “Is this the end of
Japan?” Boy asks. He is referring, of course, to geography; but the line
reverberates beyond this ten-year-old’s intent.
A beautiful film.
User comments from imdb
Author: Meganeguard
from
From 1968 to 1971 Oshima Nagisa would direct five films that would not only
receive critical acclaim in his native
Like many of his films, Boy is grounded in fact. In the year 1966 a couple was
arrested for faking traffic accidents, they would pretend to be hit by cars
while "crossing" the street, and extorting money from the drivers.
However, what truly struck the Japanese populace as outrageous was that they
used their ten-year-old son as a tool in this scheme. Newspaper headlines read:
Accident-Faking Couple Uses Child," "The Criminal Journey of the
Demonic Accident-Faking Couple," and "Five Months of Strange Devotion
in the Parent-Child Accident-Faker Scheme." The story faded from the
headlines in a couple of weeks, but the story rooted itself in Oshima's brain
and he was determined to create a filmic version of the odd series of crimes
even going as far to scrounge orphanages to find the perfect "Boy" in
the figure of Abe Tetsuo.
Starring the always impressive Watanabe Fumio as the father and Oshima's wife
Koyama Akiko as the (step) mother, the story unfolds from the perspective of
the Boy as his family travels around
While seemingly not as artistic or complex as some of Oshima's other films, Boy
does examine such topics as the powers of imagination and guilt driven
obedience in good detail. Definitely a film not to be missed by fans of
Japanese New Wave Cinema.
Derek
Malcolm's Century of Films: Boy (Shonen)
Derek Malcolm’s #86 from his “100
Greatest Movies,” from The Guardian,
Nagisa Oshima is most
widely known in the west for In the Realm of the Senses, a story of sexual
obsession based on a true incident, which had censors everywhere reaching for
their scissors. The fact that the film was also a metaphor for the militarist
ills of Japan escaped them entirely. But Oshima shouldn't be judged solely on
the audacity and shock tactics of this admittedly astonishing film.
He was, in fact, only
one of three outstanding film-makers who reacted against the classical,
humanist cinema of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa and delved into the structures
of Japanese society as they were being broken down by the modern world. The
other two were Imamura and Shinoda who, like Oshima, were deeply affected by
the French new wave in their struggle against the studio system in Japan. It's
difficult to say who was the most successful, but each made unforgettable films
totally different to the great Japanese movies of the 50s.
Oshima's Death by
Hanging (1968), Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (1969) and The Ceremony (1971) showed
an even firmer grasp than In the Realm of the Senses of the way in which Japan
was changing and the profound effect of that change. My favourite of his films,
though, is Boy (1969), called Shonen in Japan.
Like Realm, its story
was taken directly from newspaper clippings, and the film illustrates perfectly
the view held by all three of these very different film-makers that the
underbelly of Japan was often worth studying more deeply than conventional
society, and that its denizens deserved as much understanding as anybody else.
The lovers in Realm were outsiders, and so is the down-and-out itinerant family
depicted in this far less notorious but equally impressive film.
The father is lazy and
embittered, the step-mother more presentable in a tarty sort of way - ever
hopeful that the father's 10-year-old son will regard her with affection. The
only way they can think of making a living is by using the boy as a
breadwinner. He has to fake being injured in road accidents in order to
blackmail "hospital money" out of drivers.
It's a strategy that
has some success until, perhaps inevitably, the boy is caught. But despite his
confusion and obvious unhappiness, he refuses to admit anything to the police.
His loyalty, even to this unsatisfactory family, is complete. To him, the world
outside is an even worse prospect.
Oshima tells this odd
tale, which could have sprung from Dickens, without sentimentality and secures
from the boy the kind of natural performance that makes us weep. He seems a
very normal child in abnormal circumstances, indulging in science-fiction
fantasies and longing for a hero to believe in.
The portrait of Japan
that Oshima paints is very different from the one westerners might expect. His
main thrust is that, in such a society, rushing towards the economic miracle
that was later to be so rudely interrupted, there are large numbers of people
who will always be left behind. In these circumstances, it is perhaps not
surprising that the family is unaware that they are doing wrong. They are just
trying to survive.
Some of Oshima's
films, which all come from the left, even if he began to hate the leaders of
the communist party he initially sympathised with, seem to be influenced by
either Godard or Bunuel, as well as by a deep suspicion of Japanese traditions.
But Boy, if it is to be compared with any European work, is more like a
Truffaut film. Its comparatively straightforward narrative is linked to a
warmth of expression that Oshima has seldom emulated since.
Oshima
Nagisa: Politics is Pulp (Intro/The Catch/Boy) on Notebook ... David Phelps from Mubi,
BFI | Sight &
Sound | In the realm of Oshima Alexander
Jacoby from Sight & Sound,
September 2009
Kathie
Smith: Nagisa Oshima's BOY
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
User
comments from imdb Author: Mar-Cinema from
User
comments from imdb Author: timmy_501 from
User
comments from imdb Author: Rob Williams from
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM (Tokyo
aka: He Died After the War
aka: A Secret Post-Tokyo War Story
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule
review
One of Nagisa Oshima's most perceptive and self-conscious films,
this 1970 study of the sensibility of youth tells of a student making a
film—which turns out to be his last will and testament when he kills himself at
the end of it. A brilliantly controlled work, Oshima's film is all the more
remarkable in that he used no professional actors. In Japanese with subtitles.
94 min.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
This is Oshima's post-1968 analysis of the failure and
disillusionment of the student Left, and it's among his most biting and
cautionary films. Like Death by Hanging and other movies, it starts with a
riddle (the real or imaginary disappearance of a student militant), and then
follows through all the implications with a remorseless logic. Another student
sets out to trace the missing boy, fearing that he committed suicide; his only
leads are conversations with the militant's estranged girlfriend and a roll of
film shot by the boy just before he vanished. But it's less a mystery thriller
than a series of provocative questions. What is militancy? Does 'struggle' mean
violence? Is it really possible for an individual to identify with the
interests of a group? And what part do sexual problems play in determining the
feelings and actions of young people?
The
Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]
(excerpt)
Anybody who still gives a damn about film criticism today needs to join Oshima's richly didactic call-to-arms laid out here. A member of a radical film collective chases an off-screen cameraman who then leaps from a building to his death, thus enacting the title. When the activist in pursuit loses the cameraman's Bolex to the cops, his concern isn't what they'll see on the film, but rather that they won't know how to use the camera properly. Wielding a filmmaker's tools like ideological weapons, Oshima challenges us to realize the possibilities of cinema's language—switching perspectives, altering realities, resurrecting on-screen ghosts, even evaluating himself (the left-wingers name-check the director). Satirizing the collective's all-talk inaction, Oshima charges that it's not enough to simply learn the medium; we must make waves to keep the culture alive. Grab a camera and rise up!
User comments from imdb Author: Mar-Cinema from United
States
The plot of the Man Who Left His Will on Film follows a young college student
who plummets off a rooftop to his death with only his camera and spare film in
hand. His friend in his film club recovers the film testament after the police
handle it. This young college student is inspired by the film and sets off with
the deceased's ex-girlfriend to locate and re-create the places where he shot.
The film has a Marxist agenda to it. All the members of the film club have
strong leftist leanings and even participate in many demonstrations throughout
The Man Who Left His Will on Film is definitely Oshima's most experimental film
so far, as many other critics and reviewers claim. Its like David Lynch and
Seijun Suzuki collaboration to produce a disjointed film on film narrative. I
love Nagisa Oshima just as much as any fan of Nuberu Bagu, but this film didn't
leave me with anything memorable. It may require some extensive knowledge about
Oshima:
A World of Their Own (Chasing Shadows, Take Four of ... - Mubi David
Phelps from Mubi,
Isn’t there a simpler way of saying all this? The Man Who Left His Will on Film, like so many Oshima movies, spins off in alternate directions from a central scene to pose, as if hypothetically, multiple interpretations; all are simple, and totally inadequate. This time, the central scene is an actual short film, depicting buildings, and the interpretations aren’t Oshima’s but those of his characters, wondering what it means. They are communists and the clip is that of a former member who filmed part of his own death but whose camera was also filmed being stolen by a new member who will be drawn back to that suicidal scene as he is, Vertigo-like, tempted to reenact it. These filmed scenes are integrated into the film proper, as part of them, even though the shaky camerawork evinces an amateur cameraman not behind the other images, and in fact evinces impossible filmmaking, as there is a soundtrack on the reel despite the fact it comes from a Bolex--which is silent. What looks like an attempt at diary neorealism may be a hallucination, and in fact, later on, a girl claims of the dead filmmaker (her ex), “I just made him up. He never really existed.” But then, he may be the ghost behind all the other images as well, for the central scene around which Will spins (the short) is filmed like the rest of the film: placid, non-stylized, black-and-white 16mm still takes. For the most part. As usual with Oshima, we’re meant to wonder (there is no satisfactory answer) just whose perspective is responsible for anything we’re watching. But this is also the question the characters are asking themselves about the film they’re watching. Hence the neutral filmmaking: Will proposes as anonymous a style as possible to propose there’s no such thing.
Because if there were such a thing as anonymous style, it would be true communist filmmaking, everyone’s image and nobody’s image. But even the communists here are auteurists, who in wondering why their dead filmmaker filmed shots of buildings as a last testament, recognize a single source of perception with private intent and private insights to reveal. Or not reveal (for nobody’s quite sure what the shots signify). In any case, they’re furious: “He had a sense of self that could relate to reality.” The communists, it’s immediately obvious, want neither a sense of self nor reality, but to lock themselves up in blank rooms and become anonymous ciphers. “You’ve still got the idea of personal property,” they proclaim, and, “ownership is a betrayal of the proletariat,” and protest the possibility of love (“my lover,” the girl says to the group’s condemnation, and as Oshima films attest, love is a form of possession, often economic). Any private sense of self is contraband. Yet immediately they betray their aims as the film clip becomes something of a Rorschach test: each has an entirely individual hypothesis what it might mean.
Diary of a Shinjuko Thief, which equates artists with thieves (each appropriators) tells us that filmmaking, in its ways, undermines a tyrannical order of reality: the filmmaker claims reality for himself, a private reconfiguration and perversion, distortion of it, and shows it from a single perspective as good as any other. But the fact that everyone has their own perceptions is why communism is impossible: people never can fully relate. Yet they try, as they always try in Oshima movies, by submitting to a mutual fantasy, mutual role-playing and enactments, because, as their discussion of the film proves, they have no concept of a mutual reality to submit to (each has his own interpretation). The hero of Will attempts to emulate the dead filmmaker, and even toys with the possibility of his own suicide, to become his adopted doppelganger and eradicate himself. The affair he has with the filmmaker’s ex is staged in front a blank screen on which they play the filmmaker’s enigmatic clip, which actually ends up playing (distortedly, of course) on their bodies; as she describes a scene, it is suddenly projected on-screen, as if she were summoning a fantasy realm for them to enter. In fact, they’re attempting to reappropriate the art into a personal context that has them in it and making love (as later she will restage the film with herself in the scenes), and they end up choking each other as they force each other submit to blatantly impossible fantasies: “The wind doesn’t blow, water doesn’t flow.” (Back to the lovers’ fabliaux.) Sex, meant as a merging of identities, is once again for Oshima only a means to assert oneself over another.
Or is it vice-versa? For the lovers become each other’s doppelgangers, both with equal grip over the other, both submitting to the same ridiculous fantasies, both attempting to kill each other—and the sense of each other in a real living world in which wind blows and water flows. And of course if you kill your doppelganger you kill yourself. The parallel—Will is a film built on parallels—is the filmmaker’s film. By claiming his film as a last testament, to take his place, he claims it as his own doppelganger, which would attest his identity. Except he’s missing from every shot, and the idea of his last testament is that he expresses his sense of self at the moment he destroys it, so he’s no longer left to give it meaning (could he?). “There is no such thing as landscape. All landscapes are the same. He’s in every landscape and he’s missing every landscape,” someone says with a zen-like sense of self-negation to match the film clip’s own sense of calm. As the lovers must kill themselves to really prove they exist (this is the gist of In the Realm as well), and as the filmmaker must kill himself to validate his last testament, as the film affirms his individual perspective by showing things everyone has seen and anyone could, as the communists attest their beliefs by losing them altogether, so death, here, is the only purchase on self-assertion and self-negation both. "The double," Freud writes in The Uncanny, "was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self... the meaning of the 'double' changes: having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death."
And: one can only prove one’s existence by recognizing a common reality with others; and yet that entailing recognition of a shared reality must deny an entirely private sense of self. We are, Will proposes like so many Oshima films, what we perceive. This, if anything, is the meaning of the filmmaker’s film.
We are what we perceive. But for the most part (if we are Oshima characters), we don’t have the same perception of reality as others. We probably don’t perceive reality. We perceive sadomasochistic fantasies of suicide and try to prove we exist by making someone else recognize them too. The girl in Will has to validate the images of the short film as having personal meaning—not the filmmaker’s, but her own—and so she recreates it with herself in every shot. Chris Fujiwara suggests her decision signifies her need to recognize a physical, bodily reality outside—as if reality, suddenly for Oshima, is real—but her recreation is just more doubling: in reappropriating the filmmaker’s images, she’s not asserting her presence in reality but her presence in a movie she’s seen, as if his film were a fantasy she can make her own. And Will, like almost all Oshima films, asserts that what we perceive, or even what we perceive we’ve perceived, may just be a fantasy or hallucination; the girl denies her ex-lover ever existed as characters in Night and Fog in Japan and The Catch and Death by Hanging repress, deliberately or not, memories of political traumas. Once again, only by dictating our ridiculous fantasies as plots to follow out can we be sure of the reality around us. And then, of course, they’re just fantasies.
People disappear and characters aren't sure they ever existed: Oshima's in Antonioni territory. The problem is how to affirm that the reality around you even exists.
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Nagisa
Oshima: The Man Who Left His Will on Film | Film Society of ...
Robert Koehler, January 16, 2013
User comments from imdb Author: harrizonn from
Channel
4 Film capsule review also seen here: Channel
4 Film capsule review and here:
Channel 4 Film capsule review
THE CEREMONY (Gishiki)
Japan (123 mi) 1971 ‘Scope
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
If you were bored by In the Realm of the Senses, this 1971 film by Nagisa Oshima offers much more convincing proof of his talent. A deadly parody of one of Japan's most beloved genres, the family saga, The Ceremony uses the story of the Sakurada clan as a mirror for the cultural decay of Japan in the wake of World War II. Influenced by Godard, Oshima employs a collapsing montage technique that transforms melodramatic cliche into metaphysical horror. In Japanese with subtitles. 122 min.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
A thinly disguised
commentary on Japan's post-war history, using ceremonial family gatherings
(mainly weddings and funerals) as a key to the changes in Japanese society:
individual characters represent specific political factions, just as events in
the narrative mirror the twists and turns in the country's domestic and foreign
policies. However dense the allegory, though, Oshima keeps it very accessible
to his audience by stressing individuals' feelings as much as ceremonies; their
dreams, aspirations, frustrations and agonies are all too familiar. A
significant political film for the time.
Program Overview Film Comment (capsule review)
Oshima’s brilliantly
constructed The Ceremony charts his
growing disillusion with the possibility of real change in
Film
Notes From the CMA Modern Japanese Cinema, by Dennis Toth,
As previously mentioned, Japanese culture was targeted for a
critical re-evaluation. The new filmmakers were acutely aware of the changes
that had taken place in modern
The
House Next Door: 921 (62). Gishiki / The Ceremony (1971 ... Kevin B. Lee,
Imagine a Japanese version of The Godfather where Michael,
Sonny and Don Corleone were all trying to sleep with Talia Shire’s Connie, and
you have an idea of how brilliantly perverse The Ceremony is. A radical
subversion of two stalwart genres, the family saga and the historical epic,
Nagisa Oshima’s critique of post-war Japan centers around Masuo (Kei Sato), a
Manchurian repatriate and sole remaining heir to the powerful Sakurada clan.
His coming of age under his domineering grandfather leads him to bear witness
to the family’s decades-long disintegration behind the most impeccable of
outward appearances. Masuo’s Oedipal longings for both a quasi-aunt and her
daughter are foiled by both his grandfather and cousin who molest the women
while Masuo looks the other way, becoming an example of Oshima’s contempt for
the individual’s subjugation to the will of authority.
Oshima uses a framing narrative to flash back to rituals and ceremonies
throughout the family’s history, all of which are presented as farcical
displays of hypocrisy and prejudice. The most unforgettable instance involves
Masuo’s wedding, in which the bride is nowhere to be found but the ceremony is
held anyway, with Masuo escorting his invisible bride in a haunting matrimonial
kabuki. Other rituals and activities such as funerals, nostalgic brooding, and
even baseball are lampooned as empty mechanical routines in which their
participants are excused from having to confront their present problems.
Blending both emotionally devastating melodrama with absurdist satire, The
Ceremony feels as refined and disquieting as the art camp of Douglas Sirk’s
Imitation of Life, sharing that film’s outsized ambition and intricate
self-awareness.
Rep Diary: The Ceremony - Film Comment Dan Sullivan, May 28, 2014
In the films of Nagisa Oshima, sexuality and mortality are always knotted up in a double-bind, and nowhere is this more apparent than in one of his most challenging works, The Ceremony. Oshima’s schizoid style precludes the film from engaging with his signature interests in the same manner as some of his better-known (but also radical) films such as Cruel Story of Youth (60) and In the Realm of the Senses (76), yet its strategies for staging oppressive and fascinating psychodrama are among the most effective in his oeuvre. This sordid, hypnotic death-trip is an incomparably entrancing slog, a workout that finds its punk auteur at his polemical and artistic best.
The Ceremony steadfastly recounts the saga of the Sakurada clan, a family whose decline plays out in stomach-churning fashion over the course of 25 years and multiple funerals and weddings. The bulk of the film is presented by way of protracted flashbacks to these mortifying get-togethers from the perspective of cousins Masuo (Kenzo Kawarasaki) and Ritsuko (Atsuko Kaku), as they journey to the island cabin of another cousin, Terumichi (Atsuo Nakamura), after receiving a telegram about his death. The basis for the tension and emotional baggage shared by Masuo and Ritsuko is slowly but surely revealed as Masuo relates a tragic narrative that Oshima seizes upon as an allegory for Japanese society. The plot jumps back and forth through time, but the sense of existential dread and impotence is constant.
For Oshima, it wasn’t enough to assert merely that the political is always personal: The Ceremony’s archly Freudian drama finds Eros and Thanatos dueling amid intergenerational struggle—a dominant theme across Oshima’s films, doubtlessly informed by the social tensions that led to the contemporaneous emergence of the Japanese radical left. (The Ceremony was released in Japan in May 1971; the following month, the remaining members of the Red Army Faction, led by Fusako Shigenobu, joined with Maoist militants to form the United Red Army and embarked on a year-long run of bloody internal purges, as depicted in Japanese New Wave peer Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army.) The perpetually anguished and humiliated ex-baseball star Masuo grapples with the patriarchal authority of his old-school grandfather, Kuzuomi (Oshima stalwart Kei Sato, at once terrifying and pathetic), the family’s master of ceremonies and sovereign lecher. A Sadean protagonist with a formidable fastball, Masuo finds himself surrounded by death, disappointment, and libidinal paralysis every step of the way as he strives futilely to establish a personal identity apart from his clan’s self-destructive complexes. His struggle dramatizes the plight of a generation trying to wake up from the nightmare of the previous generation.
But Oshima goes out of his way to complicate our perceptions of the film’s political agenda as well as our assumptions about his own politics through the figure of the fascistic cop Tadashi (Kiyoshi Tsuchiya). Tadashi’s attempt to crash one of the funerals in order to read a right-wing extremist tract (“Project for the Reconstruction of a New Japan,” which had been widely circulated during the 1930s) is portrayed as a commendable effort to disrupt the status quo. The film’s political position is otherwise more subtextual than one might expect, a far cry from the head-on confrontation with Japanese xenophobia in Death by Hanging (68) or much of anything in Oshima’s indignantly polemical oeuvre. But its adherence to and acknowledgement of contradiction comes off as surprisingly sensitive and nuanced in relation to the narrative’s smothering, unrelenting Sturm und Drang.
This omnipresent air of unease, of some horrible secret lurking in the shadows, is largely due to the limited yet potent arsenal of stylistic techniques Oshima deploys throughout. High-contrast lighting, deep-space blocking, widescreen compositions, and creeping tracking shots cohere to yield a concrete feeling of the struggle raging beneath the staid, self-denying surfaces of the depicted rituals—or as Leonard Cohen puts it, “a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.” Tôru Takemitsu’s quintessentially modernist score imbues the plot’s events with an indeterminacy that hints at terrible revelations still to come. The contents of Oshima’s narrative might be tonally gothic in and of themselves, but their mode of presentation ensures The Ceremony’s status as a bummer for the ages.
The two most memorable scenes are Masuo’s bride-less nuptials—surely one of the greatest and most mortifying wedding scenes in film history—and Masuo’s symbolically placing his ear to the ground to listen for his late brother (the circumstances of whose death remain in question throughout). In both of these instances, Oshima works overtime to evoke the existence of repressed memories that will return explosively sooner or later. What emerges is a disarmingly atmospheric portrait of a family’s collective psychopathology, thinly veiled by the ways in which they go through motions again and again, year after year.
Shooting Down Pictures » Blog Archive » 921(62). Gishiki / The ... Kevin B. Lee full version, August 16, 2008
You
Have to See… The Ceremony (dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1971) | 4:3 Jeremy Elphick from 4:3, November 20, 2014
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
User comments from imdb Author: sbrizzi from Los Angeles
DEAR SUMMER SISTER (Natsu no imoto)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
A film in which Oshima tackles Japan's 'Okinawa problem'. The Japanese today treat Okinawa as a holiday resort, and so this begins as a light, summery dream of sun, sand and teenage flirtation. But the underlying thread (a girl's search for her long-missing brother) conjures up darker spectres, and before long the entire idyll has been effectively undercut by guilt-ridden memories of the past - and especially the atrocities perpetrated on the island during the war.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Released in 1972, the year the
Oshima
in New York: "Dear Summer Sister" on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman from Mubi,
Case in point for the unreliability of what may come next from
this ever unpredictable director is another one of the Oshima retrospective’s
most startling finds, Dear Summer Sister. This film from 1972 strips the
director's duly noted and deservedly praised formal compositions resembling a
cross between Antonioni's architectonic modernism and a comic book's brash
stylization for—believe it or not—a typically early 70s, handheld, verité
layabout ease. And taking place mostly on the beachfront of
Think again—as always Oshima comes with the pointed end first.
This is the story of two pretty young Japanese women learning just how
incestuously tied to
Turns out the "realism" of the aesthetic is, first and foremost, to let all of sunny Okinawa shine through, tombs, bars, and brothels all ("the Okinawa girls are the best," praises the codger, "you just touch them and they are wet down to their knees"). Secondly, this style is used to encompass the wild array of acting styles Oshima employs to ratchet Dear Summer Sister up a notch of immoral lunacy on a scene by scene basis. Father Hosei Komatsu is a bulky lunk singing lustfully in the presence of his mistress, daughter, fiancé, and old rival, and presumably is the one who suggested a beachfront banquet of a dozen bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label to solve the group's problems. Wife-to-be and faux-incestuous lover, the fiancé is played by the freckled actress known as “Lily,” who bewitches in the Rivettian vein—an independently minded young woman unto herself, mysterious in motivation, wandering in behavior, but committed in aspect. And, if to only mention one more wonderful cast member, the young daughter played by Hiromi Kurita is fantastic in an erratically non-professional performance of mugging every line like the character is an actor in a play that's inside the movie ("This time I'm the lead," she squeals). Inventive and ribald in the most off-guard kind of way (versus Sing a Song of Sex' very deliberate and inevitable sexuality), Dear Summer Sister seems to be not finding itself as it goes along, but always tripping over itself only to think of something new—and then film it. It is fresh and fast and utterly hilarious—and, since it is Oshima, it is utterly, blindingly scathing.
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (Ai no corrida) A- 94
Japan
User
comments from imdb (Page 3) Author: Darragh O' Donoghue
(hitch1899_@hotmail.com) from
Supporters of this amazing picture err (understandably) in minimising its sexual aspects when praising its formal beauty, philosophical rigour, political anger and gender analysis. All of these things are here. Even before his final payoff, Oshima has revealed and depicted the timeless labyrinthine hell of repressive Japanese society. The lovers' realm is the rebellion to this, an exploration of truths and emotions severely denied in their culture, even if this is, eventually just as formal. The portrayal of sex is probably the most beautiful and honest in the history of cinema. Just as important is the treatment of voyeurism (like Foucault's panopticon, no-one is free from the controlling spying of others) and the privileged subjectivity of the female lead, which, consisting of dreams and imagination, is as powerful a weapon against tyranny as the sex.
In the
Realm of the Senses Peter
Bradshaw from The Guardian, August
28, 2009
Revived now as part of
an Ôshima season at BFI Southbank, this uncompromising film has not dated one
iota, perhaps because films that are really about sex are still such a rarity,
despite the supposed sexiness of everything that surrounds us. Eiko Matsuda
plays Sada, a serving girl who comes to work for an innkeeper, Kichi (Tatsuya
Fuji), and they begin an obsessive affair. Sada and Kichi have sex
compulsively, variously, all the time, and this is filmed by Ôshima with
untroubled candour. The couple never undergoes anything as banal as a
traditional storyline arc, and their love is never subject to any of the usual
retributive narrative corrections: Sada does not get pregnant or sick and they
never break up and make up. Most importantly, they are utterly incurious about
each other's background - it is part of their ecstatic indifference to anything
other than the present moment. The exception is one incredible scene in which,
having capriciously ordered Kichi to have sex with a 67-year-old geisha, Sada
and he have a brief conversation about their parents afterwards over this old
woman's body. Is she dead? Has she just fainted? Either way, it has to be one
of the most extraordinary moments in screen history. Oshima's film widens and
deepens the sensual realm.
Time Out London (Trevor Johnston) review [5/6]
The passage of time
may have lessened the shock value of its graphic sexuality, but for sheer –
pardon the expression – creative balls, this tale of 1930s amour fou remains
startling even now. Heralding an unmissable BFI retrospective for Nagisa
Oshima is an extended run for his no-holds-barred take on the notorious
true-life story of Abe Sada, a prostitute found wandering in Tokyo carrying her
innkeeper lover’s severed genitals. Oshima transforms the lurid details into a
concentrated chamber drama which shifts from heady exuberance to disturbing
death thrall, turning the porno come-hither of its shagged-senseless outline
into something that’s powerfully unsettling and culturally resonant.
Where Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ treated its hardcore elements as a
mischievous stunt, Oshima’s film understands that in order for us to
contemplate the meaning of this story – a ferocious counter-attack on Japanese
patriarchy, perhaps even the rapacious ethos of Japanese imperialism chillingly
refracted into the sexual sphere – we have to be inured to the bare flesh
first. Curiously, the film’s insistence on reminding us that unabashed
performers Eiko
Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji
have no use for body doubles somehow makes it less salacious. Since they’re
persuasive actors into the bargain, the film permits a voyeurism that’s also
emotive and thematic, taking the fierceness of longing to a horribly logical
conclusion, yet also playing out the ultimate class/gender transgression of
female chattel possessing male property owner. Unsanitised, worryingly
convincing in its sadomasochistic detail, this is seriously provocative cinema,
a telling reminder of what it really means to be dangerous.
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
A relentlessly explicit biopic of sorts in which
There are overriding signposts, obviously, including the invasion of the
private act into the eyes of the public, the rise of patriarchal militarism in
pre-WWII Japan, the tenuous sexual stamina of overgrown boys, the homicidal
nature of nurture, and humans' recalcitrant capacity to hone in on sources of
pleasure and fill each of their orifices with life's various nectars. And even
those among us who have never attempted to pass a soft-boiled egg through our
various equatorial lips would have to appreciate Oshima's attempt to feel out
the boundaries between the artistic and the pornographic representation of sex
on screen. It's not enough to rely on the litmus test of whether or not
Oshima's content is titillating, because lord knows that while I sat through
the film's 102 minutes without once shifting my instrument of attention,
someone out there likely blew their load two minutes in.
Even in the wake of Shortbus's auto-fellatio and musical
rimjobs, Senses still retains the capacity to reduce audiences into
paroxysms of humpy outrage. The film invites scorn not only because it depicts
almost every sex act you could ever want to imagine taking place—God help
us—between a man and a woman (right up to and including a woman inserting
pieces of mushroom into her vagina and letting them marinate in her lady juices
before serving them up to her man; because if he wants more, it must be
true love), but also because it dares to couch the entire
hedonistic-masochistic exercise as a cinematic cipher, an oozier version of
what, deep down, happens in every relationship. Or as the Landmark slogan goes,
the cunnilingus of this cinema is universal.
Midnight
Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Tom Mes
I hesitated for quite a while before deciding to include a review
of this film. Not for reasons of the film's content, but because of the volumes
that have already been written about it.
However, with the many times Ai No Koriida is mentioned in our other reviews it would be an oversight not to include it in this reviews section. Also, even though so much has been written about both the film's themes and its scandalous reputation, there is one question which cannot be argued about enough: is this film pornographic?
The story of Ai No Koriida is based on the true story of Sada Abe, a young chambermaid and former prostitute who falls deeply in love with her employer Kichi. Despite Kichi's marital status, the attraction is mutual and their adulterous affair soon evolves into one of unbridled and unbound passion.
Oshima focuses on the ever increasing passion that develops between the two lovers, reducing everything else to secondary status or less. This quite simply is a story about a love that knows no boundaries and grows all-consuming. It's a love that at first glance might seem more carnal than emotional, since the two spend nearly all their time together (amounting to months of almost non-stop lovemaking) in Kichi's bedroom, where all shame is left at the door.
As a result this film is explicit. There are close-ups of
genitals, fellatio, penetration, et al. By Japanese standards (or at least by
the Japanese ratings board's standards) this film goes very far indeed. Which
is why Oshima partnered with a foreign producer, to officially make his film a
French production. After the film was shot in the Daiei studios in
Ai No Koriida's explicitness is inherent to the story. Oshima
didn't go to
More likely it's a claim of hypocrisy. How can those chastising Oshima for making little more than arty porn live with the things that go on in their own bedrooms? Surely everyone who has ever known love can feel the emotional intensity in Oshima's film? Every act depicted in it springs forth from the characters and their motivations and as such is fully justified within the context of the story. Despite what the myriad of close-ups might suggest, this film is not about carnality. Oshima's approach was the right one, and the opposite choice - to not show - would have been far, far worse.
I think it was Edgar Allan Poe who said that only when an artist is truly honest can he create a masterpiece. Though I very much hesitate to call it a masterpiece, Ai No Koriida is certainly a work of honesty, and a valuable and emotionally rich piece of cinema.
Ai No Corrida - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Audie Bock from Film Reference
The first film to
break down the barriers between the commercial art film and hard-core
pornography, the all-explicit Ai no corrida was for Japanese director
Nagisa Oshima both a political and a psycho-cultural exploration. In keeping
with his consistent treatment of sensitive issues in the guise of dramatic
films, Oshima conceived this project at the suggestion of French producer Anatole
Dauman to do a hard-core film. Immediately subsequent to the abolition of
anti-obscenity laws in France, Corrida was the sensation of the 1976
Cannes International Film Festival, where an unprecedented thirteen screenings
were mounted to meet the demand. Shot entirely in Japan, where police
ordinarily seize in the developing laboratory films revealing so much as a
pubic hair, the exposed footage was sent to France for processing. When
re-imported to Japan as a French production, with every explicit scene air-brushed
into white haze by the censors, it was nevertheless hailed as the first porno
film for women. Oshima was therefore arrested and prosecuted for obscenity in
the screenplay, which had been published in book form in Japan. After four
years in court, he was found innocent by the supreme court, but he did not
succeed in overturning the legal concept of obscenity.
Like all of Oshima's
films, Corrida is based on a true story, the apprehension of Sada Abe,
who strangled her lover with his consent and then cut off his genitals in 1936,
months before Japan's full-scale aggression against China would open World War
II. The appearance of Japanese flags and marching soldiers elucidate a
background theme of sexuality as escape from political and social oppression,
one of Oshima's persistent concerns.
Corrida is an exploration of the limits of
sexuality. Sada (Eiko Matsuda) and Kichizo (Tatsuya Fuji) gradually reject the
outside world in order to pursue the ultimate in sexual pleasure. Couched in a
linear narrative with few but important stylistic deviations from a
conventional exposition, the sexual exploits quickly lose any prurient quality.
These lovers are too analytical; they comment too much; they allow and seek out
too much intrusion upon their acts. Finally, they develop too much need for
violence to stimulate themselves as over-indulgence dulls the pleasure. The
desire to possess another person ends in Kichizo's death.
The major reversal of
the conventions of the porno film lie in Kichizo's aim of giving pleasure to
Sada. She gradually changes from addressing him as "master" (of the
inn where she has worked as a maid) to adopting male speech and giving him
orders. Some psychiatrists have seen this as a calculated role reversal, in
which Kichizo takes on first a passive quality, then a maternal aspect for
Sada. Indeed Sada becomes the aggressor, initiator and possessor in every
sense. But Oshima characteristically ends the film without any comment but the
historical facts: Sada was arrested with Kichizo's genitalia on her person,
tried and jailed for murder. But she became celebrated as a folk heroine.
Aside from the
universal interest of the possession urge in sexuality, Oshima layers his film
with cultural references. He uses the formula of the Kabuki theater, the
lovers' journey (michiyuki, as they go to the inn that will be their refuge and
site of the murder) to presage a doomed alliance. He taps the rich pornographic
history of feudal Japan in the voyeurism, exploitation, and sado-masochistic
play of the geisha and maids at the inns, and he mocks the elaborate ritual of
the Japanese wedding ceremony. Use of traditional Japanese musical instruments
on the sound track, lush color photography even in the confinement of the small
inn room, and superb acting from non-stars and amateurs add to the disturbing
appeal of this psychological landmark of the cinema.
In the Realm of the Censors - Film Comment James Bouras, January/February 1977
Cancellation of the 14th New York Film Festival’s public showings of In the Realm of the Senses is another reminder of the Federal Government’s vast powers in the field of obscenity—powers easily overlooked in view of the general, though inaccurate, impression that the Supreme Court has returned control of pornography to the states.
The dispute surrounding In the Realm of the Senses involved a Federal law against the importation of obscene material. The Memphis, Tennessee, convictions of Harry Reems and others connected with Deep Throat involved a Federal law against the interstate transportation of obscene material. And the Wichita, Kansas, convictions of Screw’s co-founders involved a Federal law against the mailing of obscene material. (The convictions in the Screw case have since been vacated; it remains to be seen whether the case will be retried.) Still other Federal laws deal with such things as the broadcasting of “obscene, indecent, or profane language,” obscene interstate telephone calls, and the unsolicited mailing of non-obscene but “sexually oriented” material.
The current Federal law against the importation of obscene material— United States Code, Title 19, Section 1305(a)—has been on the books since 1930 (although its predecessors date back to 1842), has survived repeated attacks on its constitutionality (the Supreme Court, for example, upheld it in 1971 and again in 1973), and is still actively being enforced by U.S. Customs.
But what happened to In the Realm of the Senses was far from a typical Customs obscenity case. Indeed, it is the only case of its kind on the record. In the typical case, allegedly obscene material which arrives in the United States from abroad will be “seized” (i.e., detained) by Customs, and a Federal court will then determine whether the material is in fact pornographic. That’s what happened to James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Thirties (not obscene), I am Curious (Yellow) in the Sixties (not obscene), and a hard-core cartoon entitled Sinderella in the early Seventies (obscene). In a related case, Exhibition, one of the films shown in the 13th New York Film Festival (1975), was detained by Customs when it arrived in New York but was quickly released when the U.S. Attorney declined to bring suit to have it declared obscene.
The print of In the Realm of the Senses intended for showing in the 14th New York Film Festival arrived in Los Angeles on September 16, 1976, and was released by Customs and formally “entered” into the United States on September 21. As is frequently the case in Los Angeles, Customs officials did not screen the film before allowing its entry. The print was then sent to New York in time for its scheduled showings at the Film Festival: a press screening on Friday afternoon, October 1, and public showings on Saturday evening, October 2, and Monday evening, October 4.
Customs officials in New York, however, questioned the propriety of the film’s entry in Los Angeles and told the Film Society of Lincoln Center (which sponsors the New York Film Festival) that it could not proceed with the press screening unless Government representatives were in attendance. The audience for the press screening thus included three Treasury agents, a Customs attorney, and Eleanor M. Suske, Chief of Imports Compliance for the New York Customs area.
Following the press screening, Customs advised the Film Society and Anatole Dauman, producer of the film, that, had In the Realm of the Senses entered the United States via New York, Ms. Suske would have detained it and turned the matter over to the U.S. Attorney. Dauman and the Film Society were then told that Customs was exercising its right to recall the film under a Federal regulation which authorizes a “demand [for] the return” of entered merchandise which Customs later “finds … not entitled to admission into the commerce of the United States.” They were also told that the print would be seized if any attempt were made to show it, and it was ominously implied that other legal proceedings might ensue. The threat of seizure continued throughout the next few days and, as a result, the scheduled public showings of In the Realm of the Senses were both canceled. (Another Oshima film, The Ceremony, [71] was shown instead, and ticket-holders were promised free admission to a screening of the canceled film if and when it was freed.)
On November 1, Dauman, who had refused to surrender the print, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Fred R. Boyett, Commissioner of Customs for the New York area, Ms. Suske, and the United States.* The lawsuit, supported by various affidavits, contested the validity of Customs’ recall demand (formally called a “Notice of Redelivery”) and sought (a) injunctions preventing Customs and other Government officials “from interfering or threatening to interfere with the exhibition, possession, distribution or transportation of the film” and (b) a judicial declaration that In the Realm of the Senses is not obscene.
On November 8, the U.S. Attorney’s office filed an affidavit that announced, to everyone’s surprise, that “[a]ll prior [Customs] demands for surrender of the film have, in effect, been countemanded.” Specifically, the affidavit disclosed that the recall demand had been withdrawn with the concurrence of Customs officials in New York, Los Angeles and Washington and would not be reissued, and that Customs would not make any attempt to prevent the importation of additional prints of In the Realm of the Senses. Significantly, the affidavit also disclosed that the U.S. Attorney’s office, which had screened the film, “would decline any request [by Customs] for a forfeiture action” against it—a clear indication that an obscenity proceeding against In the Realm of the Senses would not succeed in court. The Government then moved to dismiss Dauman’s lawsuit as “moot” (i.e., academic).
At a hearing on November 9, Federal District Judge Marvin E. Frankel refused to dismiss Dauman’s case. Characterizing the Customs action against In the Realm of the Senses as “an outrage,” Judge Frankel announced from the bench that he would enjoin Customs from pursuing its recall demand “or from otherwise proceeding against the film in question or prints thereof” under the Federal law against the importation of obscene material. His ruling was, technically, a very narrow one: the procedure followed by Customs was invalid. Thus, he did not decide whether the film is obscene, and his injunction won’t prevent proceedings against it under other Federal obscenity laws (or state and local laws). Technicalities aside, however, Judge Frankel’s ruling is still of immense practical importance; the Customs statute is the only obscenity law which can used to prevent a film from showing anywhere in the United States—and now that won’t happen to In the Realm of the Senses.
NYFF Preview: In the Realm of the Senses - Film Comment Tony Rayns, September/October 1976
Like most of Nagisa Oshima’s movies, this is based on fact. In 1936 a young woman named Sada Abe was found wandering in the streets of Tokyo, apparently in a state of bliss, clutching a severed penis. It was discovered that her (married) lover Kichi had died in a sexual climax with her some days earlier, and that she had taken the genitals from his body as an assertion of their continuing passion for each other. As one of the first women in Japan to have her sexuality in any sense made public, Sada attracted considerable sympathy, and was finally sentenced to only six years’ imprisonment. According to Oshima, the mention of her name is still synonymous with the breaking of sexual taboos in Japan.
In the Realm of the Senses (Ai No Corrida, 76) reconstructs the relationship between Sada and Kichi, from its beginnings with Sada’s arrival as a new employee at Kichi’s inn, to its triumphant, convulsive end. Virtually all the film’s action takes place within a “closed” world of eroticism: every scene either depicts or relates directly to sexual love. The lovers deliberately isolate themselves from their society, drawing outsiders (geishas, inn-staff) into their sexual games only to increase their own pleasure. Their mutual ecstasies are predicated on a steady increase in erotic intensity: they experiment with voyeurism, copulation in sites where they risk being discovered, sex with elderly partners, and mild sado-masochism. Eventually, they recognize that death is not only the necessary climax to their pleasure, but also an integral part of it. In strictly Japanese terms, it’s surprising that Sada and Kichi did not opt for the traditional shinju or double-suicide; what makes Sada remarkable is that she felt secure enough in her “absolute” possession of her lover to be ready to go on living herself, and it was clearly this that drew Oshima to her story.
None of Oshima’s films looks or behaves much like any of the others, and In The Realm of the Senses establishes yet another new tonality in his work. The mise en scène appears utterly straightforward: nearly everything is filmed in long, static medium-shots (a strategy that tends to vouchsafe the “reality” of the physical action represented) that have neither the formalized organization of shots in The Ceremony (Gishiki, 71), nor the quasi-documentary naturalism of much of Boy (Shonen, 69), nor the self-questioning artifice of Death by Hanging (Koshikei, 68). At first, it is as if Oshima were endorsing his characters’ rhapsodic isolation by enshrining it in a form that permits no other frame of reference. A vein of fatalism in the plotting reinforces this impression, giving the film the air of a self-fulfilling prophecy: Kichi’s willing surrender to death is anticipated in two earlier couplings in which he thinks his partner has died, and several prominent appearances of knives and razors prefigure the climactic act of castration.
In fact, of course, Oshima challenges this complacency as surely as he challenged the supposed naturalism of Boy. The obvious authenticity of the lovemaking is offset by the unreality of Sada’s insatiable demands and Kichi’s hypervirility. Elements of expressionism (notably, the lighting of the interiors) complement the sense of hyperbole and help lead the film into a metaphorical register, in which an overt “fantasy” scene like Sada’s imagined murder of Kichi’s wife can stand on equal terms with the “realistic” scenes that it interrupts. Two other interpolated fantasies, both associated with Sada and both featuring young children, mark startling departures from the film’s dominant fictional world: one (placed during Sada’s first night apart from Kichi) shows Sada playing with a naked boy and girl, and the other (placed immediately after Kichi’s death) shows Sada, Kichi, and a little girl playing hide-and-seek in a huge, deserted stadium. Neither scene yields any straightforward psychological meaning, although both are rich in metaphorical suggestions; their main importance is evidently their status as interpolations, differentiated from the rest of the film by their limpid color, their sense of open space, and their emphasis on connotation over clear-cut denotation—all of which serve to generate tensions within the film.
But Oshima’s strongest challenge to any unilateral reading of the film comes in the closing moments, with the sudden appearance on the soundtrack of a narrator who describes Sada’s later arrest and locates the film’s action specifically in 1936. The mention of the date comes as a shock, not just because visual evidence alone could have placed the action in almost any year of the Meiji Restoration, but also because 1936 was a particularly significant year in Japan’s political history: the year that consolidated the growth of militarism, saw the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, and marked the country’s last serious attempt at a coup d’etat. Locating the action of In the Realm of the Senses in 1936 determines the meaning of a number of incidental details, from the fact that the children harassing a tramp in the opening scenes are clutching miniature national nags to the presence of a squad of armed troops who briefly block Kichi’s view as he waits for Sada; but it also makes the total absence of socio-political ideas from the film very striking. As Oshima has already demonstrated often (in the closing shot of Death by Hanging, for instance), absence can be as significant as presence.
However provocative such undercurrents may be—and it is clearly not accidental that Oshima should have made an ostensibly apolitical film at a time when Japanese political activists have lapsed into almost complete passivity—the film’s primary force remains its exceptionally bold analysis of the implications of true sexual passion. French critics have repeatedly invoked the current in anti-Catholic thought that runs from de Sade to Georges Bataille to “explain” the film’s psychosexual stance. Oshima, though, is interested in Sada and Kichi’s sexuality precisely because it reflects the mainstream of the Japanese erotic tradition (as a look at any of the 30-odd films by Koji Wakamatsu, who here worked as Oshima’s production manager, bears witness). Much in the film—from the use of traditional music throughout to Sada’s geisha trick of “laying” an egg from her vagina—evidences the acutely Japanese self-consciousness that makes Oshima’s earlier work so troubled, and troubling.
In the Realm of the Senses is not the first Japanese film to deal with Sada and Kichi—the magazine Kinema Jumpo cited Noburo Tanaka’s Jitsuroku Abe Sada (The True Story of Sada Abe) as one of the 10 best films of 1975—and it is not the first time that Oshima has foregrounded a sexual relationship in his work. On the other hand, it is the first film by a major Japanese director that could not be processed in Japanese laboratories, and cannot be exhibited in its own country without extensive cuts. Oshima says that he made the film because the offer of a Franco-Japanese co-production (with post-production facilities in France) allowed him to execute it with complete freedom; whatever else, the film is his polemical response to earlier battles with the Japanese censorship board. His audacity is fully matched by that of his excellent cast, especially the remarkable principals Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji.
Nagisa Oshima on In the Realm of the Senses Katsue Tomiyama interview of Oshima in April 1983 from Image Forum, reprinted for Criterion, April 30, 2009
In
the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography Criterion essay by Donald Richie,
PRESS
NOTES: THE NOTORIOUS OSHIMA REVISITED
IN
THE REALM OF JAMES QUANDT
On Oshima
In The Realm of the Senses Criterion Collection
Nagisa Oshima and In the Realm of the Senses | Parallax View David Coursen from The Oregon Daily Emerald, updated from 1977 article on Parallax View, April 27, 2009
The Unkindest Cut of All? Some Reflections on ... - Senses of Cinema Freda Freiberg from Senses of Cinema, February 13, 2001
Be My
Knife by Michael Atkinson - Moving Image Source September
29, 2008
incredible Oshima piece for the Star Tribune ‘Senses’
and Sensation, by Katie Smith from The
Star Tribune,
Her post on her own struggle in choosing between Nagisa Oshima and Kevin Garnett KG vs. In the Realm of the Senses, by Katie Smith, November 23, 2008
Asia Pacific Arts: The Naming of Lions and Tigers: Nagisa Oshima ... Clifford Hilo reviews In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion, May 1, 2009
SBCC Film
Reviews » Blog Archive » In the Realm of the Senses ... Byron Potau,
In the Realm of the Senses: A Masterful Fusion of Art and Pornography Dana Stevens from Slate, January 18, 2013
Life in
Film: Hito Steyerl | Frieze
April 1, 2008
Movie Reviews UK review [4/5] Damian Cannon
PopMatters (Michael Buening) review
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) review
[3.5/5]
Movieline Magazine dvd review Harvey R. Greenberg M.D.
David Dalgleish
retrospective [2/4]
DVD Net
(Shaun Bennett) dvd review [Region 4]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jesse Shanks) dvd review
DVD
Verdict (Mike Jackson) dvd review
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd
review [2/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion
Confessions
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[2/5] Criterion
Collection
DVD
Verdict (Clark Douglas) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
High Def Digest
(Blu-ray) [Tom Landy] Criterion
Collection
DVD Talk (Thomas Spurlin) dvd
review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version] [Criterion Collection]
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd
review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Verdict
(Blu-Ray) [Adam Arseneau]
VideoVista
review Gary
Couzens
Edinburgh
U Film Society (Keith H. Brown) review
Movie
Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review
[1/4]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
Critical
Montages: When Sex Is Not Subversive. . . .
November 24, 2007
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
User
comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: palpatine-1 from
User
comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: djexplorer from
BBC Films review Michael Thomson
Emilie
Bickerton on Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses | Film ... The Guardian, August 14, 2009
The Japan Times
[Mark Schilling]
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
The New York Times (Richard Eder) review
DVDBeaver dvd review [Blu-Ray Version] Gary W. Tooze
EMPIRE OF PASSION (Ai no borei)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
At once a companion
film to Ai no Corrida and a compulsive reaction against it: the dominant
themes here are guilt, repression and censorship. It's set in rural Japan,
around the turn of the century, and it centres on a crime passionel: the murder
of an elderly rickshaw-man by his wife and her lover, a soldier recently
discharged from the army. But the couple are literally haunted by their crime
(in the person of the old man's ghost), cannot separate themselves from their
own society, and finally pay for their crime at the hands of a grotesquely
cruel policeman. It now seems obvious that the film expressed Oshima's reaction
to the worldwide 'scandal' generated by Ai no Corrida, but it's worth
remembering that while he made it, Oshima was undergoing a prosecution in Japan
for publishing the script of his previous film. His hatred of the 'authority'
figure here reaches heights unseen since Death by Hanging.
Slant
Magazine review
Fernando F. Croce
Nagisa Oshima just can't win. After getting in trouble for being
too pornographic, he was chastised for not being pornographic enough. Following
the hardcore shagging that made his 1976 salvo In the Realm of the Senses an art-house
cause célèbre, the substantially less explicit sex scenes in his follow-up, Empire
of Passion, were reportedly enough of a disappointment to end the
director's contract with producer Anatole Dauman. If Empire is fated to
play diluted Manderlay to Senses's wicked Dogville when it comes to prurient outrage,
it remains a slashing provocation in its own right, and in some areas an even
more complex achievement. Set in a remote Japanese village in 1895 ("An
age of civilization and enlightenment"), the film chronicles the l'amour
fou affair between idle ex-soldier Toyoji (Tatsuya Fuji) and Seki (Kazuko
Yoshiyuki), the older wife of rickshaw driver Gisaburo (Takahiro Tamura).
Toyoji's jealousy drives them to kill the husband, but the pall of guilt and
persecution—enhanced by the appearance of Gisaburo's dejected, accusatorily
silent ghost—threatens to tear the couple apart rather than bring them
together.
While the lovers in the earlier film sought escape from the pressures of the
world by confining themselves to a small room, Toyoji and Seki can afford no
such escape. Instead, their spiritual and carnal unrest is forced out into the
open, placed against the changing seasons of nature, and ultimately castigated
by the increasingly militarized society around them. Oshima's take on the
Japanese tradition of kaidan (ghost story), Empire, with its
crawling-in-the-mud sexuality and eccentric peasants, is also something of a
stroll into fellow agitator Shohei Imamura's turf. Where Imamura warmly
embraces the impulses of his characters, however, the ruthlessly analytical
Oshima keeps his distance: The film's circular motif (rickshaw wheels, the
opening of the well into which the husband's body is dumped) suggests less the
continuous flow of life than a deterministic ring closing in on the main
characters as new local authorities investigate their crime. A sequence in
which the spectral Gisaburo drives Seki through a misty crossroads is a
toe-curler that out-spooks many of the J-horror chillers of the next decades,
yet, as Empire's finale powerfully illustrates, the suppression and
punishment of transgressive passion are to Oshima the real horror story.
filmcritic.com (Jason Morgan) review [2.5/5]
Love does funny things to men. Logic and reason go out the window
to satisfy an emotional craving -- up is down, together is apart, and death is
life. To quench Toyoji and Seki's lustful thirst in Empire of Passion,
it means killing Seki's alcoholic, rickshaw-pulling husband and then barely
seeing each other for three years. If that weren't bad enough, the locals are
starting to talk, and the ghost of Seki's husband begins showing up in dreams.
Set in a small Japanese village in the late 1800s, Empire of Passion's
bizarre passion is thinly veiled by its kaidan story. Western eyes would
likely equate the pale-faced, dark-hair apparition to the ghouls of popular
J-horror, but traditional kaidan play more on a character's writhing
guilt than on typical cinematic scares -- Seki's husband, Gisaburo, doesn't
crawl out of any TVs or screech like a cat (he does, however, escape the well
that Toyoji and Seki used to dispose of him). Before horror fans start lapping
at the freshly spilled blood, Empire of Passion's ghost story is a
diversion from Toyoji and Seki's shocking and, at times, brutal sexual
relationship.
Gisaburo was always in the way of Toyoji and Seki, but murder wasn't an option
until Toyoji decided to restrain Seki and shave her. Of course, Gisaburo would
eventually see Seki's smoothness and know that she's been with another man. And
that just won't do. The interesting thing isn't that the two commit the murder
together, but that Toyoji's single, selfish desire of the flesh motivates it.
When he's with Seki, he's only concerned with dominating her submissiveness.
His lustful passion blinds him to the consequences of his actions. And the
trouble for the two lovers, and the film alike, begins with Gisaburo's death.
While the ghost story plays out by the numbers -- the town's folk rumors grow,
the police get involved, and the undead Gisaburo appears until his secret is
revealed -- questions about Toyoji and Seki's relationship haunt us. Why is
Seki willing to die for a man who forces himself upon her? Does Toyoji feel any
guilt for Gisaburo's? What is the driving force behind Toyoji's need for
control? Empire of Passion gives us plenty of questions, but not enough
answers. After showing a passionate and violent exchange between Toyoji and
Seki, director Nagisa Oshima pushes the characters to the background in favor
of plot-driven mystery with the town's folk and police hot on the missing
Gisaburo case. That's not to say that the sexuality should hit as hard as
Oshima's acclaimed In
the Realm of the Senses (a film that features graphic sex and is still
censored in
With Oshima more interested in what's happening rather than why it's happening,
the predictable plot is lifeless. Luckily, the film's vibrant visuals pulsate
on screen, bringing the film some blood. As Empire of Passion moves
through the seasons, Oshima brings a new palette of colors to paint on the
screen. Spring rain saturates the mud browns, red and yellow fall leaves
glitter as they float down the well, and white blankets of winter cool and
isolate the two lovers. Oshima's rich blacks and foggy blues even send a chill
sprinting down the spine during scenes with Gisaburo's ghost. Though visuals
are an unsatisfying substitute for character, they are still effective,
especially in contrasting physical beauty with the emotional brutality of
Toyoji and Seki. Even if Empire of Passion's story is forgettable, you'd
be hard pressed to forget the stunning images of Oshima's brutal world.
The Criterion DVD includes an optional English dubbed soundtrack, archival
interviews with the cast, a 2003 interview with some minor members of the crew,
and a video essay about Oshima and his contemporaries.
Empire
of Passion (1978, Oshima) - Review Cahiers2Cinéma,
This was not a great Oshima film. It is a straightforward story
and only has brief moments that begin to approach “transcendent madness.” It is
not long enough or weird enough to invite deep thought about anything besides
the basic story, a disappointment in an art film. (Or I could consider it a
success if I was hanging on every subtle beat of the unfolding story and
performances, as with great novelistic films.) The movie seems to invite deeper
contemplation when Seki bites Toyoji's hand and things get slightly weird, but
it then seems to leave that aside and not explore pain/sex in the way Oshima
has before (in In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and a little bit in The
Pleasures of the Flesh (1965)). It then moves along to the conclusion in a
fully engaging way, but it doesn't have a big emotional or intellectual payoff.
It's a nicely done, slightly poetic end to the story.
Probably some digging into symbols, like Seki being blinded, may lead
somewhere, but I'm not sure. It crossed my mind that possibly the film is a
fantastical realization of what Oshima or the writer think is happening
psychologically when two lovers cuckold a woman's husband. But there are too
many stories where the lovers actually do kill the husband (and in real life)
for it to bear fruit as a cinematic realization of subconscious underpinnings.
If it was intended as a beautiful and extravagant fantasy of love, intense sexual
love, or doomed lovers, it's too restrained to flower into something truly
moving, and compared to In the Realm of the Senses, the intensity level
is low. Another metaphor that could bear investigation is the well, which I
also thought about as an external narrative depiction of internal
confrontations—as if when you cheat you toss the lover down the well and are
constantly trying to forget him, but then you have to keep tossing leaves down
there to cover him up, and find yourself periodically drawn back to the well.
Even as I say it, it sounds silly, so I'm skeptical that this was their
intention. (The film's basic scenario—and not anything in the filming
itself—has very similar elements to Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and
James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.)
I wish I had seen In the Realm of the Senses more recently, but my
memory is that it was a deeply engaging shock of a movie, where you were fully
enveloped in the mad, explorative passion of the two lovers, which culminates
in its disturbing climax. Even though my memory is vague, I think Empire of
Passion suffers in comparison, especially since it treads on some similar
subject matter—as if Oshima was in the
I find myself favoring early Oshima (first five or seven years perhaps), having
had a similar lukewarm response to Taboo (1999) when it came out. His
earlier films seem more radical in content and form. As horror or fantasy
featuring ghostly apparitions (at least of the Japanese variety), this film
does not bear up well in comparison to Kaidan (1964, Kobayashi), for
example.
Nagisa Oshima on In the Realm of the Senses Katsue Tomiyama interview of Oshima from Image Forum April 1983, reprinted for Criterion, April 30, 2009
Empire
of Passion: Interview with Nagisa Oshima
Michael Henry interview of Oshima from Positif, May 1978, reprinted by
Criterion
Empire
of Passion: Love’s Phantom Criterion
essay by Tony Rayns,
In
the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography Criterion essay by Donald Richie,
PRESS
NOTES: THE NOTORIOUS OSHIMA REVISITED
IN
THE REALM OF JAMES QUANDT
Empire of Passion Criterion Collection
Asia Pacific Arts: The Naming of Lions and Tigers: Nagisa Oshima ... Clifford Hilo reviews In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion, May 1, 2009
DVD Times Anthony Nield
PopMatters (Emma Simmonds) review
VideoVista
review John
Percival
DVD
Monsters and Critics [Andy McKeague]
DVD
Town (Christopher Long) dvd review
DVD
Talk (Thomas Spurlin) dvd review
[4/5] [Criterion Collection]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3.5/5]
Criterion Collection
DVD Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review
[3/5] [Criterion Collection] Jessica Baxter
User
comments from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
Infini-Tropolis rm237
SF,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review review [4/5] Richard Scheib
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Molodezhnaja (German) Movie photos
MERRY CHRISTMAS MISTER LAWRENCE (Senjô no
merî Kurisumasu)
Japan
The
Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]
(excerpt)
From Oshima's later career (after one stroke, he made 1999's Taboo;
after two strokes, it's unclear whether he'll direct again), most notable is
this bilingual, end-of-WWII tearjerker about forgiveness and understanding
between cultures, which could have been dubbed The Man Who Fell to Java.
A parachuting major with a secret (David Bowie) is captured and brought to a Japanese
prison camp run by a repressed gay captain (pop star Ryuichi Sakamoto,
who also composed the very-'80s synth score) and his crude underling (Takeshi
"Beat" Kitano), who first greets the new inmate upside-down.
"What a funny face. Beautiful eyes, though," deadpans a bemused
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
For all the praise heaped upon Oshima's admittedly ambitious film
about East-West relations in the microcosm of a Japanese PoW camp during World
War II, it's far less satisfactory than most of his earlier work. It may go
against Japanese taboos as it deals with commandant Sakamoto's obsessive love
for prisoner Bowie, it may be stylishly shot, it may seem uncompromising in its
depiction of the Japanese war ethic and the insistence on harakiri as a more
honourable reaction to defeat than submission to imprisonment. But the web of
relationships between English and Japanese is too schematic in its polarisation
of characters, Oshima's handling of the narrative is not so much elliptical as
awkward, and
Raging
Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review
[3.5/4]
Ambitious WWII prisoner of war film has Oshima, in his first
English language film, seemingly siding with the British captives rather than
his brutal countrymen. Oshima is one of the most enigmatic filmmakers, and
beyond an excellent portrayal of the cultural divide it's often hard to say
what he's trying to do here. Some of the material has little to do with
anything beyond being highly interesting and very offbeat, but with the
brilliant moving ending his critique on war becomes clear. The cast is all
male, and the film combines their nature to bond with their nature to believe
their side is correct. This mix of homoeroticism and sadism is what you might
expect from the taboo breaking director, though it's generally tame by his
standards, perhaps partly because he is also criticizing a mainstream genre.
It's all about power, so extending the control from physical to sexual may be
natural. Ryuchi Sakamoto contributes arguably his best score, greatly aiding
the lyricism, and is also effective as the brutal commandant. Takeshi Kitano
gives an early standout performance as the sadistic guard, a real eye opener to
the Japanese who were used to seeing him on TV as a comic performer. Tom Conti
is also excellent in a role that ties it all together; he's the translator and
the only one that has some understanding of each side. Some will criticism the
material for embracing suicidal fascism, but that's war, whether the sides know
it or not is another story.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Meganeguard from
As children we are imbued with imagery. From the color of fall leaves to the
faded color of your grandmother's favorite sweater, these images become
imprinted upon your brain. Living in a visual culture one cannot help that
television and movies leave lasting impressions. Back during the early 1980s, a
time in which I was enamored with Bugs Bunny, He-Man, Star Wars, and Indiana
Jones, I watched a number of films with my dad. I can still remember scenes
clearly from Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One and Stuart Rosenberg's Brubaker.
The scene in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence where David Bowie is buried up to
his chin in sand is one of those scenes that remained in my memory for some
twenty years before I learned its source.
Set in a Javanese prisoner of war camp, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence mainly
concerns man and his contact with the Other. However, who is actually
considered the Other in the film? Are the British, Danish, or
As a mediator between both sides,
Things in the camp truly change with the arrival of Maj. Jack Celliers, David
Bowie, who Yonoi took a bit of a shine to when the former was on trial. Hoping
Celliers can replace the hostile Hicksley, Yonoi looks carefully after the
man's welfare, but Celliers has other ideas.
Always one to rock the boat, Oshima's film was the first Japanese war film told
for the most part from the Westerner's point of view. Some of the best scenes
in the movie were between Lawrence and Hara. While enemies, both men have a
begrudging respect for each other. Hara considers
Beautifully scored by Sakamoto, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is a unique work
in the annals of Japanese film. Tackling such issues as the Other from both
sides, it leaves one wondering if harmony can truly be reached, but with its
depictions of friendships that develop out of violence and hate, the film shows
that these obstacles can be overcome even if the cost is high.
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum) review [3/5]
Not to be confused with "A Christmas Story", this film is a brutal look at the psychological power struggle between four men in a Japanese prison camp in Java during WWII.
Tom Conti is the title character
The four main players spend most of the film trying to vie for power, or so it
seems. The Japanese look down on the British prisoners, the British prisoners
look down on the Japanese. An early subplot involves the homosexual rape of a
Dutch prisoner by a Korean guard. The guard is slated for execution, and after
a false start, is killed. Celliers is found guilty of war crimes, and put in
front of a firing squad, who all fire blanks. This cycle of psychological
torture by making a man think he is going to die, then serving as a savior, is
repeated once more. Celliers and Lawrence are almost killed, but saved by Hara,
who fancies himself Father Christmas (it is around the holidays).
Yonoi calls Celliers a demon, and another guard tries to kill Celliers.
Celliers has a hold on Yonoi that goes beyond most captor/prisoner
relationships and borders on love. Celliers could be a demon, he could be
Christ, his identity is always being questioned. In one extended sequence, we
see Celliers before the war, when he betrayed his deformed younger brother and
has never forgiven himself for it. Perhaps the film deals with redemption,
whether it be at the hands of people we love, or people we come to think of as
enemies.
This was my main problem with the film. The film was so taken with the internal
conflicts of these four men, I wanted to understand it, not just observe it.
While you finish the film with more questions than answers, a few answers may
have helped.
There is a lack of closure, a lack of clarity, and in the end, a lack of
emotion as to how you feel about these enigmatic men. The war threw them into
each other's lives, but the viewer gets the idea they know each other better
than we know them. I felt like I was not in on a secret everyone else knew.
This is from the same director as "In the Realm of the Senses,"
another film that left me emotionally cold.
The four leads are outstanding, the music gorgeous, the direction good, but the characters were just as puzzling after the film as they were during the film.
Lawrence of Shinjuku: Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Criterion essay by Chuck Stephens, September 28, 2010
Big-Screen
Bowie Jessica Winter article “Cracked Actor,” from
Slate,
Press
Notes: Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
On Oshima
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Criterion Collection
DVD
Outsider Slarek
eFilmCritic.com (Jay Seaver) review
[4/5]
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: GrandeMarguerite from
User comments from imdb (Page 3) Author: holzfallen from
Pedro Sena
retrospective [4/5]
Dartmouth Film
Society retrospective
Urban
Cinefile (Australia) Amdrew L. Urban
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/5]
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Molodezhnaja
(German) movie photos
MAX MY LOVE (Max mon amour)
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Finding that his wife Margaret (Rampling) has been lying about her afternoon activities, Peter (Higgins) - a Brit diplomat in Paris - begins to suspect her of infidelity. But when he discovers that her lover is a chimpanzee, he is so taken aback that, instead of yielding to jealousy, he insists on Max moving into the plush apartment the couple share with their young son and a maid. As scripted by Buñuel's frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, Oshima's film bears more than a passing resemblance to the late master's sly, surreal satires on the charmless discretion of the bourgeoisie: eager to hide his shock and anger beneath a mantle of liberal sophistication, Peter merely engineers a situation of futile impasse, while Margaret's amour fou (or is it amour bête?) seems motivated less by passion than by a boredom born of indolence. That said, lumbered with stilted performances from Rampling and Higgins, clearly ill at ease with Anglo-French dialogue, Oshima never achieves Buñuel's cool but mordant tone: despite the potentially subversive material, the film frankly lacks bite. On one level, however, it succeeds: our sympathies rest throughout with Max who, despite his touchy irritability, deserves neither Peter's tolerant condescension nor - and this is perhaps more destructive - Margaret's love.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
With the possible
exception of Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses, Empire
of Passion, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) is the greatest living
Japanese filmmaker. Unfortunately, most Americans' knowledge of the modernist
Japanese cinema doesn't include Death by Hanging, Boy, The Man
Who Left His Will on Film, The Ceremony, and many other Oshima
masterworks. Max Mon Amour (1986) isn't as good as those movies, but
then what else is? This dry drawing-room comedy about an English diplomat's
wife (Charlotte Rampling) who has a “serious” affair with a chimpanzee was
produced by Serge Silberman, producer of Bunuel's last films, and written by
Bunuel's cowriter on the same films, Jean-Claude Carriere. Much of this film's
ongoing humor derives from the human couple's sense of decorum; in a game
effort to preserve his marriage, the diplomat (Anthony Higgins), who has a
mistress of his own, arranges to have the chimp moved into their flat. Even for
a filmmaker who essentially changes style with each picture—and has a
reputation as a taboo breaker—this is uncharacteristic: the poker-faced
surrealism of “civilized” people attempting to be mature about a woman's
passion for a chimp seems, not surprisingly, more like Bunuel than Oshima.
Slant
Magazine review
Fernando F. Croce
Peter (Anthony Higgins) and Margaret Jones (Charlotte Rampling)
are a veddy British couple living in Paris, he a bland diplomat and she his
pale, vacant wife. When he learns that Margaret has been holding furtive
afternoon meetings, Peter suspects infidelity and finds her with somebody else.
"Get up, please. Let's not make a big fuss about this," he politely
asks the figure hiding under the covers with his wife, and out jumps her lover:
Max, a scruffy, shrieking chimpanzee. The central joke of Oshima Nagisa's Max
Mon Amour is not so much that a bored woman would have an affair with a
chimp, but that, for the sake of the couple's stability, the jabbering monkey
is ludicrously integrated into the genteel family. Peter suggests that Margaret
bring her simian paramour home, where Max becomes the mangiest guest of the
bourgeoisie since Renoir's Boudu. Other than the sores proliferating over the
face of their working-class maid (Victoria Abril), the surfaces of the Jones
household remain wittily unperturbed by the hairy intruder, even during a
hilarious, candlelit dinner where the guests struggle to keep a refined front
as Max smooches and paws Margaret ("I take it it's a male," somebody
deadpans). Oshima co-wrote the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière, the droll
veteran of Buñuel's late works, and, indeed, Max Mon Amour's theme is
one that the great surrealist would have enjoyed—and pushed further. A wry mix
of King Kong and My Man Godfrey, it's a potent premise that
somehow never catches fire: Peter may at one point beat his chest and charge at
his secretary in mock-gorilla fashion, but the film is too satisfied with its
own notions to tap into the bestial impulses hidden under the sheen of class
civility. In fact, the opposite happens as Max gradually is made into little
more than a rambunctious pet, providing Oshima with his own unintended metaphor
of a wild subversive idea ultimately tamed and housebroken.
User
comments from imdb Author: Woodyanders
(Woodyanders@aol.com) from The Last
DVD
Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [2/5]
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Movie Reviews UK review [3/5] Damian Cannon
Austin Chronicle (Robert Faires) review [2/5]
100 YEARS OF JAPANESE CINEMA – Made for TV
International Harvest Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of Oshima's BFI documentary 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, from The Reader (1997) (excerpt)
Apart from Akira
Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima is plainly the greatest living Japanese filmmaker, but
given that he despises the work of virtually all other Japanese directors, he
seems quite unsuited to recount the history of his country's cinema. In 100
Years of Japanese Cinema he basically turns himself into an academician, and
not a very good one at that, giving us a pocket social history of 20th-century
Japan in relation to film, in which aesthetic issues play almost no role at
all. (At the end he speculates that over the next hundred years Japanese cinema
will cease to be Japanese and "will blossom as pure
cinema"--something he clearly would like to see happen.)
Kenji Mizoguchi,
Yasujiro Ozu, and Kurosawa are accorded only one clip apiece; even more
scandalous, Oshima accords himself no less than four clips (from Cruel Story of
Youth, The Ceremony, In the Realm of the Senses, and Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence) and manages to discuss or mention most of his other features as well.
He even foregrounds his self-interest by shifting from third person to first
person in his commentary on the 50s through the 80s--an honest approach, but
one that tends to play havoc with almost all the other filmmakers; and he's
scarcely convincing when he claims that his third-person commentary is
"objective." The real problem here is that the story of Japanese
cinema can hardly be recounted by a single voice, though apart from a quotation
or two that's all Oshima seems willing to offer; for all his intelligence, he
takes a backseat to even a drudge like Frears when it comes to conveying a
feeling for art.
It's possible that
Oshima's treatment of contemporary Japanese history is audacious and radical in
relation to Japanese norms (he's withering about state militarism and attentive
toward Korean residents in Japan), but how much does it say to the rest of us?
The stodgy sociopolitical slant and aesthetic indifference wind up crowding out
so much of value in Japanese movies--from Teinosuke Kinugasa's Page of Madness
(accorded only a brief still) to Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge (ignored) to
animation and documentaries (crammed into a few fleeting stills), all of which
Oshima seems as bored with as Frears is with English cinema--that what remains
is hardly sufficient to keep anyone interested.
User comments from imdb Author: JimmyCagney from
100 years of Japanese cinema ?...oh, this must be great! These were my first
thoughts when I found this 55 minute long documentary on the evolution of
Japanese film-making. Being quite fond of Japanese films for many years, I
believed this was a great chance to remember classic masterpieces of the past,
and most of all, learn about movies and directors I had never heard of. I was
VERY WRONG.. Nagisa Oshima had no intention of making a true and honest
documentary on the first 100 years of his country's cinema. All he was interested
in was a chance to glorify himself and his work, presenting himself as the man
who changed the whole system by breaking away from the major studios and
starting making break-through, independent films. Almost half of the narration
is in first person ("I thought this..I did that...") and equally long
is the time spent on his own films.
How about the other great Japanese directors? Let's see.. Akira Kurosawa: 2
references (half a minute on "No regrets for our youth" and 2 seconds
on "Rashomon"), Kenji Mizoguchi: 1 reference, 30 seconds, Yasujiro
Ozu: never existed (only a photo of his is shown!), Masaki Kobayashi: never
existed, Hiroshi Teshigahara: 1 reference, 4 seconds Not a single word is said
on films like Ran, Ikiru, Tokyo Story, Woman in the dunes, Ugetsu Monogatari,
Harakiri etc.. Mr.Osima probably believes that films of his own such as
"Gishiki" and "Koshikei" or "Merry Christmas
Mr.Lawrence" are worth to be mentioned extendedly in a documentary about
Japanese film-making.
I am glad I watched this already having an idea on Japanese cinema, so I won't
buy that crap. If this wasn't the case, I would be convinced that nothing
really good was ever produced in Japan in the 50's, since all the directors
were restrained by common themes and state limitations, a restraint which of
course has ended upon the arrival of the one and only..Nagisa Oshima.
Thankfully, this is not the case..
Mr. Oshima, if you think you are the greatest Japanese director..you are very
much mistaken. If you also believe that all "Rashomon" has achieved,
was to open Western audiences to Japanese films..let me tell you
something..even if Kurosawa had not made a single other film, he would still
the greatest of all. I wish you could have made a film like "Ugetsu
Monogatari" or "Chikamatsu Monogatari"..but you haven't. What
you are presenting here isn't a tribute to Japanese film history, it's just
your filmography in disguise.
p.s. One year later, in 1995, Martin Scorsese released "A Personal Journey
with M.S. Through American Movies". THIS IS WHAT A MOVIE HISTORY
DOCUMENTARY SHOULD BE LIKE..
GOHATTO
A 96
aka: TABOO
Japan France Great Britain
A ravishingly beautiful film, Takeshi Kitano is brilliant as a samurai warrior in a story not so much about homosexuality in the military as what homosexuality represents in the eyes of others, and how misconstrued actual events become in people's minds, or in the eyes of society such as the conformist-oriented Japanese, here rumors are imagined by others, re-created, changed, twisted, leading to one of the most astonishingly beautiful, hallucination-tinged endings.
I was stunned by the passivity of the effeminate samurai, and how, like the siren’s in “The Odyssey,” he lured them into his prey only to capture them, finding that single instant to catch them off-guard, and to use their mistaken feeling of strength and domination against these more dominant partners. This is his method, to manipulate and to kill all who get too close to him. His passivity is his disguise, his evil is disguised as beauty, and the subject of the taboo, the love of homosexual lovers, well love is love, no matter what color or shape. Here beauty is disguised as evil and threatening, and evil is disguised as beauty. I think the secret of the film is the written passages, particularly the chapter entitled “Rumors.” I don’t think the film is about homosexuality, it’s about what homosexuality represents in the minds of others, and how misconstrued actual events become in people’s minds, in the eyes of society, such as the conformist-oriented Japanese. There is only one actual sexual scene between the two male lovers, and this is seen by no one else. Everything else is imagined by others, re-created, changed, twisted, rumored, gossiped – that’s the beauty of Takeshi Kitano’s hallucinations – all without a single factual event that he knows about, yet a half dozen different scenarios are imagined so elegantly at the end by Kitano. And if one leader imagines several scenarios, multiply that by hundreds, thousands, millions of less intelligent, less-informed individuals.
That’s the evil of rumors, gossip, and the beauty of this ravishing film.
Time
Out review
Tony Rayns
Oshima's first feature
in 14 years (and the first since the 1995 stroke which left him part-paralysed)
adapts two short stories by Ryotaro Shiba about the Shinsen-gumi, a Shogunate
militia of the 1860s notorious for both ruthless violence and homosexuality.
Inducted into the force for his cool head and expert swordsmanship, the
exquisite teenager Kano (Matsuda, son of the late Yusaku Matsuda) sets many
hearts aflutter; the plot details the lust and sexual jealousies surrounding
him in the barracks and the callous machinations of his superiors (directors
Kitano and Sai) to put an end to the 'trouble'. Oshima conjures an odd mix of
realistic elements (the settings, the kendo practice) and stylisation (Emi
Wada's costumes, Sakamoto's excellent score) to produce one of his most bitter
accounts of passion and individuality snuffed out.
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)
review [4/5] also seen here: Movie Vault
[Goatdog]
Originally released in 1999 but just now showing up in US
theaters, Taboo (Japanese title Gohatto) is the best darned gay
samurai murder-mystery I have ever seen (actually, the only one...). It is not
only one of a kind, it is a great samurai movie and a great movie, period. It
takes place in the Shogun era of
The attractive Matsuda catches the eye of more than one of the other samurai. It is no surprise, since he is a very beautiful and feminine man, and the samurai don't see a lot of the opposite sex. One of my favorite things about the film is the fact that homosexuality, while not being openly accepted, was not really frowned upon by the masters of the dojo. I don't know how historically accurate it was, but their discussion of the sexual orientation of their students was limited to statements like "I didn't know he leaned that way." It was refreshing to see a movie where the fact that characters were homosexual wasn't a big deal.
Matsuda becomes the object of Asano's affection, despite his protestations. Several of the other samurai also woo him, including at least one high-ranking soldier. This leads to major problems when this officer is slain in the street by an unknown man. Witnesses report that the killer was wearing the insignia of Matsuda's dojo, so the investigation turns inward.
Meanwhile, the leader of the dojo, played by Japanese action star Takeshi Kitano (under his acting name "Beat" Takeshi), must deal with the murder as well as retribution on another dojo for insulting one of the high-ranking officers who happens to be a poor swordsman. To deal with the problem of Matsuda, he enlists another officer to convince the young man to go with him to a brothel; Matsuda misunderstands and thinks he is being courted.
The film has a wonderful ending that can be analyzed in two conflicting but equally valid ways. It is tied to a scene early in the film where an officer is going to be executed for borrowing money under the guise of borrowing it for the dojo (the samurai have a lot of interesting and ridiculous rules that the film presents as elaborate title cards throughout). I like that the ending is not so ambiguous that you have no idea what happened, but that you have two opposite choices, both of which make sense. Being too ambiguous is often a way in which the filmmakers refuse to make any decisions, but with this you can tell they knew what they were doing. This is Oshima's first film in eight years; he is the creator of the notorious 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses, which features explicit sex and a certain severed body part and was banned nearly worldwide upon release.
Midnight
Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Jasper Sharp
The old Japanese capital of
Director Nagisa Oshima's name should already be familiar to
anyone with more than a passing interest in Japanese cinema - in fact world
cinema in general - if only through his infamous In the Realm of the
Senses (Ai No Koriida, 1976), probably one of the best-known Japanese films
of the 70s despite (or more likely because of) its frankly pornographic
approach. In
After directing David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Furyo, 1983), Oshima decided to divorce himself from Japanese culture and went to France to direct Max, Mon Amour (1986), in which Charlotte Rampling falls in love with a large ape. Since this, aside from two documentaries for British television (Kyoto: My Mother's Place, 1991, and 100 Years of Japanese Cinema, 1995), Oshima has been struggling to get further projects off the ground. After a stroke in 1995 looked set to put an end to his directorial career, Gohatto represents the 68-year old director's return to the big screen after a 13-year absence.
As such, expectations were high. Directed in the Shochiku studios from a wheel chair, the credits for this film read like a who's who of the major players in Japanese cinema today. There's the box office lure of Takeshi Kitano in a major role, and Ryuichi Sakamoto (who played in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence alongside Kitano) provides the score. The lavish costumes were provided by Emi Wata, who has previously worked on Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991) and 8½ Women (1999), and with Akira Kurosawa on Ran (1985) and Dreams (Yume, 1990).
That said, the end result is perhaps a little laboured. Gohatto suffers mainly from its over-talkiness, especially when seen in the context of the new breed of visual stylists such as Takashi Miike, and the endless recourse to expository inter-titles seems rather retrogressive. Oshima's approach to the visuals is straightforward, subservient to the lavish sets in this studio-bound epic. Obviously naturalism is not the order of the day, with the climax played out against an obvious artificial set of bamboo fronds swirling with dry ice looking like something straight out of a 70s chanbara piece (sporadic flashes of violence result in geysers of blood in the Lone Wolf vein of verisimilitude). It looks good, it's true, but at times it all seems a little too much.
The role of the Shinsen-gumi at the end of the Tokugawa period
was also the subject of the 1964 film Cruel Story of the Shogunate's Downfall
(Bakumatsu Zankoku Monogatari, 1964 - directed by Tai Kato). Oshima's
revisionist approach to the material, adapted from Ryotaro Shiba's novel
Shinsengumi Keppuroku, of foregrounding the homosexuality inherent within the
period is novel and perhaps typical of a director who, throughout his work, has
always been interested in exploring social concerns within modern
Historical pictures from
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Gohatto (1999) Philip
Strick in Sight and Sound, August
2001
Nagisa Oshima's Gohatto tells of sex and swordsmanship among the
samurai. Philip Strick unveils its layers of meaning
With a shower of white cherry
blossom, director Nagisa Oshima ends Gohatto - much as, 10 years
ago, he framed his autobiographical documentary Kyoto, My Mother's Place.
There, in typically ambivalent symbolism, the cascading petals were shown to
prompt picnics and dancing among the citizens, a response scorned, Oshima
reported, by his strong-willed and independent widowed mother, who had no time
for such frivolity. Undecided as he wandered the decorated landscape whether to
cherish Kyoto's temporary beauty or to burn the place down, Oshima finally
admitted to defiance of maternal abstinence and proposed to get drunk. But the
tension between respect for the past and concern for the future while coping
with the fallible present is an established Oshima theme, and the emblematic
cherry sapling in Gohatto finds him once again irresolute.
Gohatto is set in 1860s Kyoto, among the elite
samurai Shinsen-gumi militia. At the simple story level, the 'death' of the
sapling - felled with a single sword-swipe by second-in-command Hijikata
('Beat' Takeshi) - appears to signal that the newly recruited samurai Kano
(Ryuhei Matsuda), a troublemaker too beautiful for anybody's good, has been
despatched. But the fallen blossoms, a lone blaze of purity on the drizzled
heathland, suggest much else, from the arguable innocence of Kano (he's accused
of murdering a fellow samurai, but his on-screen admission of guilt and execution
are denied us) to the chopping short of all future prospects for the military
tradition the Shinsen-gumi stands for.
Underlying the story of Kano is a
period of historical catharsis: 1865 was the year when western warships
anchored off Kyoto to enforce a treaty that would destroy the centuries-old
Shogunate system and transfer the newly empowered emperor from Kyoto to Edo
(renamed Tokyo). A postscript considered for Gohatto pointed out
that within two years of the Kano incident the samurai age was at an end, and
the Shinsen-gumi militia (including Hijikata, Okita, Kondo and Inoue, four of
its founders) were dead. Significantly, this perspective is omitted. As a
result, Hijikata and his tree more readily assume the stateless status of
previous Oshima protagonists, with implications outside any specific time and
place.
The film's final scenes, staged
in studio-bound disregard for authenticity, are a jumble of imagined and 'real'
encounters as Hijikata tries to work out the truth about Kano's admirers. Supposedly
in hiding in order to witness Kano's attack on his lover Tashiro, Hijikata and
his long-term colleague Okita stand openly nearby, surely in plain sight. The
effect is both to suggest the inevitability of legend and to make us consider
alternatives. The most striking of these would be that in felling the sapling
Hijikata has severed himself from his own inadmissible interest in the taboo of
Kano.
The wake-up call that sounds with
the arrival of Kano at the Shinsen-gumi headquarters - a microcosm of the
inflexibly feudal condition of Kyoto - is a familiar fanfare in Oshima's work.
His earliest films, which placed him in the 1960s at the forefront of an
acclaimed Japanese new wave, were replete with Godardian outsiders, among them
the US fighter pilot captured by villagers in the 1961 The Catch/Shiiku
and the amorphous Korean outcasts in the astonishingly surrealistic Three
Resurrected Drunkards/Kaette Kita Yopparai (1973). And with increasing
vehemence the primary challenge offered by Oshima's disruptive invaders was
sexual, though always with political reference, culminating in the starkly
confrontational Empire of the Senses/Ai No Corrida (1976), which
left little scope for further manoeuvre. Like addenda to a complete text, Merry
Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1982) and Max Mon Amour (1986)
offer variations on the same theme of sexual obsession, in which the
consequences of erotic rule-breaking are considered with mingled humour and
despair.
Unlike, however, the martyred
Major Celliers in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Kano brings no
apparent guilt or inhibition to his sudden absorption by a sealed community (in
which sense, perhaps, he is more like Max the innocent chimpanzee). "He
has something other than courage," comments Hijikata when Kano performs a
relatively neat beheading, but the nature of this hidden quality is never
entirely clear: Kano remains an enigma. Masked by flawlessly ambiguous features
(even a slash across the brow is briskly healed) and flowing hair which he
refuses to trim, he is unresponsive to the advances of fellow recruit Tashiro;
the only embrace to which he is seen to submit is that of the older samurai
Yuzawa, whose wild fumblings appear to evoke little more than boredom, except,
perhaps, when they approach strangulation.
As if a kind of plague-carrier,
himself uninfected, Kano might even be interpreted as being inspired only by
violence. ("I joined the militia," he says, "in order to have
the right to kill.") Properly respecting his elders - as illustrated when
he makes his own swordsmanship look bad when pitted against former leader Inoue
- he calmly attends to the duties assigned him. It's the rest of the
Shinsen-gumi troop who are in disarray, all motives and decrees open to
suspicion, all actions questioned for possible bias. Oshima makes light of most
of this, even resorting to interpolated titles that read like newspaper
headlines ("Rumor! Kano is still a virgin!") to update us on militia
speculation. There's considerable amused chatter about people who "have the
look of leaning that way", and much is made of the clownishly stolid
Yamazaki, the only person for whom Kano admits affection.
Not too seriously, perhaps, the
film gradually turns itself into a whodunit, only tentatively resolved by
Kano's final scuttle into obscurity. That Okita goes after him (we have to
assume this, as Okita doesn't admit to anything) offers a further solution,
uncomfortable to Hijikata, in which Okita has observed that the presence of
Kano has caused an as-yet unrecognised rift in the relationship between Kondo,
the troop's present leader, and Hijikata, his lieutenant. If they have begun to
compete for "ownership" of the youth, the unity of the Shinsen-gumi
organisation is in jeopardy, along with the entire Shogunate. Probably to alert
Hijikata to the risks, Okita tells him the celebrated story (Pledge of
the Chrysanthemum) of a pact between a scholar and a samurai which
results in an act of ultimate loyalty when the samurai, although dead, turns up
for a promised dinner party. Hijikata rather obtusely wonders if reading such
stuff might signify that Okita is of dubious persuasion, but Okita quickly puts
him straight: "I hate this kind of people - but I love beautiful
stories." The clear hint is that Okita, a champion of loyalty, has at the
very least been both an observer and a manipulator behind the Kano affair. We
might also note that Oshima, on the other hand, hates nobody and, wonderfully
served by cast and camera, loves the reticence of a story immaculately told.
Deadly Youth | Nagisa Oshima Gohatto - Film Comment Chuck Stephens, November/December 2000
Once upon a time, Nagisa
Oshima was a beautiful boy. Beautiful not in countenance, but in the ways he
tore Japan—and Japanese filmmaking—apart. In the Sixties and early Seventies,
Oshima was one of the most important names in world cinema. Today, he’s
remembered mainly as the guy who 25 years ago, made that arty porno film, In
the Realm of the something—you know, the one about the chick and the
severed dick. Somewhere in the middle, Oshima titled one of his movies as if he
were writing his own epitaph: The Man Who Left His Will on Film. But,
though long out of sight, Oshima’s no cherry blossom; he didn’t drop from the
branch in the blush of first becomings, nor is his a cruel story of youth. He
just doesn’t make many films these days, but when he does, they’re as fresh as
open wounds. Gohatto (Taboo)—a period film of rapacious beauty,
its meanings fleet as snakes—is Oshima’s first movie since 1986.
Built on a series of
interpretations within ruminations, all occasionally bundled together by a
narrator never seen, Gohatto‘s plot concerns an androgynous merchant’s
son named Sozaburo Kano, who joins the Shogun’s militia, in Kyoto, 1865. Lips
pinched tight, bangs like fangs, his body slight as a girl’s, Kano—played by
17-year-old newcomer Ryuhei Matsuda—is some sort of teenage daydream: a pale
and lethal alien from the glitter side of the moon.
When he’s admitted into
the militia, his fellow samurai woo him, only to discover that death trails in
his wake. Delicious in design, delirious with detail, Gohatto was
photographed in and around ancient temples in Kyoto. Its mysterious appeal is
poly-demographic: anime admirers, romance aficionados, fans of Mishima and Hana-bi,
young lovers on a date—this is the Oshima film for you.
Contrary to popular
opinion, though, Gohatto isn’t really about Kano, or forbidden and
perhaps fatal sexuality, or the passion of men for men. Gohatto—like Merry
Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (82)—is about the looks on Takeshi Kitano’s face.
“I’m a country farmer:
Nagisa Oshima is a samurai.”—Shohei
Imamura
The instigator of what
came to be called the Japanese New Wave, Nagisa Oshima was, and continues to
be, a polemicist, a provocateur, and— like Godard, a major influence—a film
critic in disguise.
A strenuous innovator,
Oshima makes films as filled with the hard left turns of radical politics as
they are, one from another, radically different in style. Night and Fog in
Japan (60) is, as J. Hoberman once observed, “a long-take tour de force
fashioned out of a mere 43 setups.” Violence at Noon (66) contains more
than 2,000 shots. In the shattered narrative of The Ceremony (71),
Oshima smacked the official versions of postwar Japanese history so hard across
the face, he has them seeing triple. Sexuality and sexual alienation are
forever co-joined in his films, and fornication is never less than a
revolutionary act. Yet, while some of his films border on the indecipherable,
many of them are quite funny, in an awful sort of way. Death by Hanging,
Three Resurrected Drunkards, and A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song
are bits of Brechtian slapstick about Japanese racial intolerance toward
Koreans—but, outside of the occasional graduate seminar, where could an
American under 35 ever have seen them play?
Oshima’s first film was
made for Shochiku studio’s Ofuna division in 1959. Melodrama was the Ofuna
house specialty, and it was there that Yasujiro Ozu made seven of his last ten
films. A bitter lament for the lost innocence of the teenaged, Oshima’s debut
was originally titled The Boy Who Sold His Pigeon; Shochiku insisted it
be released as A Town of Love and Hope. A year and a half later, the
director was already four films into his career: Cruel Story of Youth, The
Sun’s Burial, Night and Fog in Japan. Blood-sucking hookers, empires
of garbage, cha-cha rhythms, and nihilistic rage—those first films taste of
acid and pitch. When the last of them was pulled from theaters, in the wake of
a political assassination, just three days after it was released, Oshima quit
his job, got married, and used his wedding ceremony as a forum to denounce the
Shochiku brass. He founded Sozosha (“Creation”), his own company, in 1961, and The
Catch, his first independent production, was released the same year. Oshima
was 29; Takeshi Kitano had just turned 15.
Two years later, Ozu was
dead.
Ozu, so the legend goes,
always kept his camera close to the ground, at about the eyeline of a woman
seated on tatami. Oshima, so the legend goes, directed Gohatto entirely
from a chair. Ancestor worship? Not a chance. In 1996, Oshima suffered a
stroke; today, he walks with two canes. Samurai carry two blades, one short,
one long—a film, a career.
Gohatto, the director’s first film for Shochiku in
more than 30 years, is his 22nd feature. Only two of them are about samurai
codes of honor, and Kitano is the star of both.
“He’s grown uglier,
and it gives him more character.”—Oshima, on Takeshi Kitano’s face in Gohatto.
The first and last shots
of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (82) are close-ups on an actor then
credited only as “Takeshi.” Kitano was 35 at the time; pre-Sonatine,
pre-motorcycle wreck, his visage still bright and boyish, already a majore
Japanese television star. Based on a novel by Laurens van der Post, The
Sower and the Seed, and marketed on the stunt-casting of rock stars Ryuichi
Sakamoto and David Bowie, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was produced by
the Englishman Jeremy Thomas, shot largely in New Zealand, and released throughout
Europe (though not in Japan) under the title Furyo—“prisoner of war.”
But to which furyo does the title refer? Ostensibly to Major Jack
Celliers (Bowie), a (possibly) British officer held captive in a prison camp
run by Captain Yanoi (Sakamoto). A passion, obliquely rendered, develops
between the officers—just as it will in Gohatto, between samurai
recruits. But the association of these empurpled and ethereal rockers is but a
sidebar to the movie’s main concern: the cross-cultural understanding that
evolves between the eponymous Lawrence (Tom Conti) and the brutal Sgt. Hara
(Kitano).
Which prisoner of war?
How about Hara, who enters the film through a cell door, and exits it
incarcerated, unable to escape his impending execution? The Hara who actualizes
and utters the film’s English-language title: the Hara who faces death but
refuses fear. The final episode of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is
perhaps the most movingly melodramatic in all Oshima’s cinema, but it’s the
audience that does the crying. Unafraid of his own extinction, the brutal,
beautiful Hara is grinning, ear to ear.
“There is a beautiful
Japanese story about a woman’s love affair with her horse”—A zoologist in Max, Mon Amour
The last feature Oshima
made, 15 years ago, in France, was Max, Mon Amour, a project Luis Buñuel
didn’t live to complete; Serge Silberman produced it, and Raoul Coutard
(Godard’s longtime mainstay) lit it for the screen. The film seems to be all
about Charlotte Rampling’s love affair with a chimpanzee—a riff on Fay Wray and
King Kong, or a vulgar variation on Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape—except
that the mechanics of sexual congress between the couple is the one thing the
film refuses to reveal. Apart from its concern with radical intimacy, and a
casual mention of Japanese spaniels, Max, Mon Amour appeared, upon
release, to be an anomaly, a misfire, and many feared it might be Oshima’s
final whim. Wrong on all counts.
Funny and strange, Max,
Mon Amour is a film about a key and a keyhole, nature versus nurture, a woman,
her lover, and her child. Watch carefully the way Max, a former circus chimp,
mistreated by his trainers and estranged from other apes, doubles for, and at
times replaces, the incongruously blonde son of brunette Rampling and her
far-too-understanding husband.
Maybe Max, Mon Amour
is a rethink of Kon Ichikawa’s catalogue of claustrophobic perversions, Odd
Obsession (sometimes called The Key), or Louis Malle’s delicate
mom/boy romance, Murmurs of the Heart. More likely, though, it’s another
version of the film Oshima’s been making since the beginning, and all along the
way: a film like The Boy Who Sold His Pigeon or The Ceremony, Merry
Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, or the 1969 masterpiece simply titled Boy.
A film—like Gohatto—about a child deformed by men.
“Bishonen, homosexual or not, are treated
in a similar way to vampires and creatures from outer space. Outcasts all, they
are the pure, eternally young victims of adult corruption.”—Japanologist
Ian Buruma, on pop-culture imaginings of the cult of the beautiful, deadly boy.
As Gohatto opens,
Kano, the lethal man-child, is proving his worth to the senior officers of a
disciplined cadre of samurai warriors, the Shinsengumi. A particularly
dexterous swordsman, Kano will undoubtedly make a vicious samurai, but there’s
another, more implicit question at stake: will the Shinsengumi value the boy as
a warrior, or be ripped apart by the pleasures of the flesh his androgynous
features appear to portend?
“The writer Nosaka
Akiyuki,” notes Ian Buruma, in his essential culture study Behind the Mask,
“once said that a true bishonen [“beautiful boy”] has to have something
sinister about him. The vision of pure youth, because of its fragility perhaps,
reminds one of impermanence, thus of death. In fact, youth is beautiful precisely
because it is so short-lived. The cult of cherry blossoms, which only last
about a week in Japan, is the same as the worship of the bishonen, and
the two are often compared. Taken one small step further [the cult of the bishonen]
is the cult of death.”
Historically, the samurai
viewed homosexuality as the purest expression of manly love, but the arrival of
the bishonen Kano sows the seed of anxiety far more than the seed of
lust amongst the militia. Though many of the men scrutinize him—and Oshima photographs
most of them like stooges in a book of mug shots—no one pays Kano more
attention than Toshizo Hijikata, the Shinsengumi’s second-in-command. Reserved
and rather distant, Hijikata is unreadable, though his of every incident and
murmur in Gohatto will determine its character’s fates. He’s played by
the man who’s known, when he’s acting, as “Beat” Takeshi.
Familiar to every
Japanese schoolgirl and her grandfather, the ranks of the Shinsengumi belong to
historical fact. A fiercely nationalist legion headquartered in Kyoto, they
were charged with the protection of the Shogun, and were as opposed to the
Emperor’s restoration as they were to the increasing incursions of heavily
armed Western forces along the coast of Japan. Courageous and cunning, the Shinsengumi
demonstrated their power by suppressing anti-Shogunate rebel forces in the
battle of Ikedaya in 1864, yet scarcely three years later, the Meiji
Restoration succeeded, and the Shinsengumi were forever destroyed. Gohatto
is set in that interim, between victory and defeat. Hijikata, like most of the
characters in Gohatto—with the notable exceptions of Kano and Hyozo
Tashiro, another new recruit—was an actual samurai leader; feared for his
mercilessness, he was sometimes called “the demon of the Shinsengumi.” In
Oshima and Kitano’s incarnation, however, that demonology is elided;
introspective and bemused, the fictive Hijikata kills no one, and is never seen
in battle, though his skill with a saber—glimpsed once, in a training bout—is
ferocious and precise. A life¬long friend of Commander Isami Kondo (played, in Gohatto,
by another Japanese filmmaker, Yoichi Sai), the actual Hijikata was killed in
battle, in 1869; he was 35 years old. Kitano is currently 53; Oshima, 68.
Tales of the Shinsengumi
abound in Japanese literature and film; they’re the rough equivalent of stories
about the Alamo, or the legend of Wong Fei-hung, China’s most famous martial
hero. And while Gohatto, based on a pair of stories by the late novelist
and political commentator Ryotaro Shiba, is legible without it, this historical
background is essential to a fuller understanding of the film. Gohatto’s
characters and setting mav be cultural givens, but Oshima, though never mocking
his material, by no means plays it straight.
“My character has a
lot of monologues: he’s not so much the main character as the storyteller of
the film.”—Kitano, on the
role of Hijikata
What actually happens in Gohatto
remains, to the very end, as ambiguous as Kano himself, but this much we are
shown: Kano and Tashiro (played by heartthrob Tadanobu Asano, with the
whiskered insouciance of the young Toshiro Mifune) join the Shinsengumi on the
same day. Tashiro immediately begins hitting on Kano, who may be a virgin, and
has certainly never known a woman’s caress, but Kano rebuffs Tashiro’s
advances. Commander Kondo and Hijikata also take an interest in Kano, but the
nature of their interest is never precisely defined. Although Kano is a
superior swordsman to Tashiro, when Hijikata pits them against one another in a
training bout, Tashiro prevails. Hijikata interprets Kano’s defeat as evidence
that the two are, indeed, sexually entwined.
One militia officer,
played by Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s extremely funny/pathetic “Tomorrow”
Taguchi, does take sexual advantage of Kano, and dies soon thereafter. The
murder of another officer, perhaps suspected of being Kano’s lover, is
attempted, and while Kano is somehow implicated, the pair of executions that
bookend Gohatto are the only acts of bloodshed he is shown to commit.
(When asked why he joined the Shinsengumi, Kano— in translator Linda Hoagland’s
vastly superior subtitles, still extant on the Japanese DVD, though
flavorlessly rewritten for Gohatto’s international release—confesses:
“To have the right to kill.”) Few actions in the film—violent, sexual, or
otherwise—are presented in a particularly conclusive manner, and in fact, most
of Hijikata’s thoughts and conversations consist of wondering whether or not
various samurai are “so inclined.”
Analysis and
interpretations are the actual subjects of Gohatto, and, as if the
mystery of Kano and the lust-virus that infects the Shinsengumi weren’t enough,
Oshima introduces numerous digressions within the movie’s narrative flow. A
recollection of a prior outbreak of lustmord among the Shinsengumi; a
parable about preening raccoons, clever foxes, and river sprites; a story from Ugetsu,
about the ghosts of passionate men—each of these demand analysis, but only in
retrospect, or upon a second viewing, will their resonances align. Even the introspective
and self-assured Hijikata recognizes the value of close re-readings, as when,
in Gohatto’s exquisite final minutes, he imagines and reimagines the effects of
Kano’s attraction on, and for, the warriors. “He was too beautiful,” Hijikata
finally utters, voicing at last his interior suspicion that the boy was somehow
evil. Kano drove men to lust and madness, and when their passions turned to
demons, they stole the boy-man’s soul.
“Monster!” exclaims
Hijikata, spitting in the dirt, and the screams of offscreen dying for a moment
scent the air. Suddenly, there is violence, a single slash of sword, and the
bough of a blossoming cherry tree breaks and falls to earth. Kitano isn’t
smiling as Kyoto melts to black, for no grin can light the darkness of Hijikata’s
last assertion. Like the moth that lit on Bowie’s forehead, the fates of the
eternally youthful Kano, and the nearly extinct Shinsengumi, soundlessly flit
away.
Gohatto, or, the End of Oshima Nagisa? - Bright Lights Film Journal Andrew Grossman from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001
Feast From the East [Oshima's GOHATTO] | Jonathan Rosenbaum January 10, 2001
Taboo Gerald Peary
Contact Sports | Village Voice J. Hoberman, September 26, 2000
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
VideoVista review Richard Bowden
Film Monthly (Del Harvey) review also seen here: On The Box (Del Harvey) review
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
Beyond Hollywood review Andrew Mackenzie
TABOO (Nagisa Oshima, 1999) « Dennis Grunes
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: FilmFlaneur from London
Exclaim! review James Luscombe
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review
DVD Talk (John Wallis) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Town (Hock Guan Teh) dvd review
DVD Verdict (Michael Rankins) dvd review
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]
Eye for Film (Keith Hennessey Brown) review [2.5/5]
filmcritic.com (Jonathan Curiel) review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Brian McKay) review [3/5]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2/5]
Boxoffice Magazine review Chris Wiegand
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [1/5]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [2.5/5] Michael Dequina
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3/5] Rich Cline, also seen here: Shadows on the Wall by Rich Cline
Taboo New Yorker Film’s press packet (pdf)
Variety (Todd McCarthy) review
BBCi - Films Neil Smith
FILM; A Master Returns to His Realm - The New York Times David Thomson from The New York Times, October 8, 2000
The return of Nagisa Oshima | Film | The Guardian Sex and the Samurai, David Thomson from The Guardian, July 27, 2001
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Austin Chronicle (Marrit Ingman) review [3/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review William Arnold
San Francisco Chronicle (Wesley Morris) review
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
Óskarsdóttir,
Valdís
COUNTRY
WEDDING (Sveitabrúðkaup) B 87
The poster film for why you should
never have children, this is an Icelandic film that turns into a comically
absurd road picture set in the gorgeously picturesque Snaefellsnes
Peninsula located about an hour away from
Reykjavik, as rented buses carrying the bride and groom and their respective
families roam through the countryside on separate buses in a mostly futile
search for the country church, a white building with a red roof that was rented
for the occasion. Unfortunately, there
are literally dozens that fit that description out in the hinterlands. Slow in developing, featuring plenty of dizzying
hand held camera shots that feel amateurishly shot by various members of the
party, much of the film takes place inside these two giant tour buses as
conversations develop about just who some of these people are, as they may as
well be total strangers, as well as typical family gossip with interfering
parents who start the morning with a bit of drink just to calm the nerves who
by the late afternoon may as well be roaring drunk. When the guy who’s bringing the rings didn’t
even make it onto the bus, but who is missing in limbo somewhere, frazzled
nerves get aggravated and people start turning on one another. What begins as harmless bickering escalates
to an all out assault from various contingencies, as at occasional stops when
they think they’ve arrived, but soon discover they’re at the wrong locale,
fisticuffs break out between the bride’s brother and the groom, slighted by the
groom’s oversight of not even knowing where the church is located. The landscape shots beautifully shot in
‘Scope by Anthony Dodd Mantle reveal the timeless enormity of the world
surrounding them while their petty differences, in contrast, seem petty and
insignificant. As the characters become
more known to the audience, their alcohol-infused aggressive behavior
increases, until eventually, by the time they actually find the right church,
it feels more like an all out brawl is taking place. There’s an inventive peculiarity to this
whole event, as it feels like a wedding from Hell, but the locale is so
extraordinarily unwordly, like a land of the Gods, where one might immediately
feel like booking a tour to Iceland afterwards just to see this enchanted and
promised land for yourself.
eye WEEKLY capsule review [3/5] Damian Rogers
This slice-of-Icelandic-life trades in the age-old conceit that there are few things as reliable as a wedding to bring crazy to the surface. Ingibjorg and Bardi are on separate charted buses heading out to a remote — and difficult to locate — country chapel to get hitched in the company of a modest-sized collection of family, friends and total strangers. The film is wry and charming as the bride and groom's two family units quarrel, flirt and redistribute their alliances, but the situations' credibility decreases as the looniness increases. Still, this is a promising directorial debut from a skilled editor who has worked with hotshots like Terrence Malick, Lars van Trier, Harmony Korine, Gus Van Sant and Michel Gondry.
User comments from imdb Author: dumsumdumfai from Canada
7/10
This film is more about how the acting came together than the story. That is
from how I interpret what the director and cast explained during the post
TIFF08 Q&A. Provided you have never seen any Nordic/Scandanavian films
before this could be refreshing. But if you have seen others, it could still be
interesting but it's hard not to compare.
The story is basically a road movie cross a private cozy wedding day bonanza.
There are extreme close ups (chest and up) with hand held cameras, somewhat
grainy stock, so if you have an issue with that it could be a problem.
The dialogue ranges from casually realistic to dramatically revealing. The
story unfolds as the tension and that well foreshadowing the snow ball ending -
a bit more climatic for my taste but logical.
There are loads of characters and they contrast well with each other. And since
this is a comedy some characters are extended a bit more than normal. However,
well improvised (in certain respects) and well conceived considering shot in 7
days.
The Q&A indicated the cast rehearsed on the history of the characters, but
acted on the instance of each scene. Each had to make up an secret for the character
and have to decide whether to review the secret during the shoot. While this
kind of sounds intriguing it is nothing new and might be too much secret
culuminating for one film ? Then again we all have secrets don't we ?
They Shoot Actors, Don't They? Katarina
A directorial debut from the accomplished editor behind a slew of
Scandinavian films (most notably a bunch of Dogme stuff, including my personal
favourite: Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration),
Country Wedding is a light hearted comedy about a totally dysfunctional family
en route to a rustic, intimate wedding in the beautiful countryside of Iceland.
The small wedding party is traveling in enormous his & hers buses (a
booking mistake made by the unreliable best man, who is MIA with the rings at
the start of the film).
The bride's parents are divorced, mom's new boyfriend seems to be a shady
businessman (at best), and the maid of honour has brought a weird date and a
senile grandma without consulting the horrified bride. Throw in a long lost gay
uncle who's lived abroad for 25 years, a disgruntled sister, some drinking and
some fist fights, and you've got yourself a wedding:
To add to the miserable mix of incompatible personalities, no one in the motley
crew of celebrants knows where the church is, and country churches with red
roofs are apparently a dime a dozen on the icy island nation.
It's easy to see the Dogme influence on Valdís Óskarsdóttir's hand-held,
intimate shooting style and fast cuts. The tenuous peace between the young
lovers is barely maintained as the group gets more and more lost. Somewhere
between a charming cautionary tale and a clever satire of family relations and
the notion that love always has to be perfect, Country Wedding manages to
skillfully walk that fine, Scandinavian line between being hilarious and
totally depressing.
Osten,
Franz
PROPANCHA PASH (A Throw of
Dice) B- 81
Seen at an outdoor screening July 30, 2008 at the Pritzker Pavilion in Grant Park, Chicago, a U.S. premiere, complete with a live orchestra and voices accompanying the silent film that included the musical composer Nitin Sawhney at the piano for his updated score, and by all indications the place was packed to the rafters, where many sat out on the lawn in what is surely a unique event for most everyone who attended. The film was projected on a DVD, but it offered unusual delights, as there was a neverending processional of extravagant scenes, where according to IMDb Trivia, the film lists 10,000 extras, 1000 horses and 50 elephants. Featuring much more interesting filmmaking than the film itself, it opens in the jungle featuring tigers prowling, where the world is in complete harmony until it is disturbed by the presence of man who sends hunting parties into the jungle, causing all the animals to panic and flee, a metaphor for the story we are about to see. In an idyllic seclusion, a father raises his beautiful daughter, Seeta Devi as Sunita, who is immediately coveted by two brash young men who can’t help themselves from gambling, both rival kings, King Sohan (Himansu Rai) and the neighboring King Rajit (Charu Roy) who appear to be best friends, but Sohan is horribly evil and immediately plots to kill Rajit by having one of his men shoot an arrow into his back, claiming he was aiming at a tiger, hoping to obtain Rajit’s kingdom by nightfall. But Sunita’s father is a skilled healer who helps Rajit make a miraculous recovery, which ironically brings Sunita closer to him, so Sohan is left with a bitter taste in his mouth, which only makes him more heinous.
Shot in the mountain town of Ajmer, located in the scenic
northern state of Rajasthan, this film shows the splendor of India expressed
through pageantry and elaborate costumes, where kings travel riding in long
lines of elephants rumbling through the jungle or through neighboring villages,
all beautifully captured by cinematographer Emil Schünemann, where it was fun to see little baby elephants following
at the heels of these otherwise gargantuan creatures. The atmosphere of the film resembles Arabian Nights or Douglas Fairbanks in
THE THIEF OF
Seeta Devi is a beautiful heroine, well worth rescuing as heroines ultimately are, but her singlemost fascinating scene is a reflection of her own image in a handful of water, where she primps and preens and straightens her hair to please herself, a fascinating portrait of femininity in an otherwise all male stage. Sunita and Rajit are able to spend seven nights of bliss together, a somewhat modern touch complete with kisses, which felt unusual for the period, as they are basically living together out of wedlock. However, on the day of their planned wedding extravaganza, Sohan returns with his latest scheme to disrupt the proceedings, cleverly offering the groom a wager he can’t refuse, using loaded dice to guarantee he gets what he wants. It’s unlikely one would fall for this on their wedding day, or not be able to see through the obvious treachery, but Rajit is the honorable prince who is betrayed by a despicable man who eventually meets his own just end, but not before a child innocently performs a man’s job and an enraged kingdom takes back what was wrongfully stolen from them. There’s a Cecil B. DeMille extravagance to the set designs and the cast of thousands, but ultimately this is an intimate portrait of love overshadowed by the dark forces of lust and greed.
Dr. Richard E. Rodda from the Program Notes:
The Lumière Brothers – Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis
(1864-1948) – sons of a successful Parisian photographic materials
manufacturer, first displayed their revolutionary Cinématographe (from the
Greek, “movement” + “writing”) at the Société d’Encouragement de l’Industrie Nationale
on March 22, 1895 with a 46-second film of workers leaving the family’s
factory. After several other private demonstrations to academics and
photographic societies, the Lumières organized a paid public exhibition on
Among those enthralled with
Franz Osten, born Franz Ostermayr in
Rai was determined to make a film that defied the usual
Western snake-charmer-and-teeming-masses stereotypes of
In 1926, Osten went home to
In 2006, as part of the Mayor of London’s “India Now”
celebrations, the British Film Institute restored A Throw of Dice and commissioned for it a new orchestral score from
British-Indian composer, songwriter, flamenco guitarist, classical and jazz
pianist, DJ and producer Nitin Sawhney. Sawhney was born in 1956 and raised in
Here is a rare and fascinating gem: a lovingly restored version
of an Indian silent movie from 1929, in honour of the 60th anniversary
celebrations of Indian independence. It has a special free screening in
Electric Sheep Magazine Peter Momtchiloff
This silent romantic melodrama from 1929 is reissued by the BFI in a nice print, sharp but with considerable depth and subtlety of shade, including some pleasing murkiness. It is an extravagantly beautiful realisation of royal splendour in Rajasthan, inspired by the ancient Mahabharata but looking like what was then the fairly recent past. Anyone expecting an Indian Cecil B DeMille had better look elsewhere. The filmmakers (German director Franz Osten and Indian actor/producer Himansu Rai) deliver an elegant, pleasing, well-organised piece, admirably serious about its subjectmatter (love, desire, power, and especially gambling) but never pretentious or boring. Not a second is wasted nor a false note struck. Even the love scenes, even the children’s roles are acted with a restraint that one scarcely associates with cinematic epic.
I was rather dreading the new soundtrack by Nitin Sawhney, not being a fan, but I am pleased to report that it is mostly excellent. This is Sawhney in full orchestral mode: he proves to be a dab hand at sub-Rimsky orientalist doodling, very much the kind of thing that would have been popular at the time the film was made, and appropriately evocative of the never-neverish world in which the story is placed. The music is episodic but coherent, rich in melody and tone colour: it invigorates the action without ever going too far in dictating the mood - at least until the last fifteen minutes, when Sawhney gives in to the temptation to include some vocal numbers, which outstay their fit as action develops and mood changes.
BBCi - Films Stella Papamichael
Entrancing as it is exotic, silent classic A Throw Of Dice (1929) plays like a fairytale for adults. German director Franz Osten shot the film in Rajasthan, capturing dense jungle and sweeping mountain vistas to tell a timeless story based on the ancient Hindu legend 'Mahabharata'. It sees Himansu Rai and Charu Roy as two kings playing fast and loose for the affections of a beautiful hermit's daughter (Seeta Devi). But as in all great tragedy, the game is rigged.
All is quiet in the jungle until King Sohat (Rai) and the
neighbouring King Rajit (
It's a cautionary tale about greed, complacency and addiction, but unlike the Greek tradition, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The softly focused, flickering images and a brilliantly evocative new score by Nitin Sawhney heighten the sense of romance too, sparking nostalgia for a time and place beyond the reach of experience. But there's also a feeling of modernity about the way Osten cuts the action and peppers it with a few striking close-ups of bitter realisation. Tigers and elephants roam through, and thousands of extras create blockbuster scenes of public rebellion towards the end. It's a simple story, hardly a showcase for complex characterisation, but it's excitingly larger than life. The stakes couldn't be higher and a satisfying payoff is guaranteed.
User comments
from imdb Author: Igenlode Wordsmith from
I suspect the number of (living) people who have seen this Indian
silent picture may have gone up a hundred-fold in the course of the last few
hours: London's Trafalgar Square was packed to capacity with what we were told
was a 10,000-strong crowd, all present to see a free open-air screening
accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Nitin Sawhney's
new score for the film. The turn-out was nothing short of incredible for any
silent film, let alone for such an obscurity, and the event was clearly a wild
success.
As for the film itself, it's a highly-coloured epic based on a classic Indian
tale, and reminiscent of the works of the brothers Grimm or the stories of
Scherezade. There is trickery and romance, rival princes, a wise hermit, a
beautiful daughter unfamiliar with the outside world, palaces and jewels,
henchmen and loyal followers, kidnapping, disguises and an army on the march.
There is even the apocryphal cast of thousands -- with elephants! The new score
is well done, and is in a sufficiently 'Western' style to be accessible to a
European audience while containing an Indian flavour in the solo voices and
instruments: the LSO performance was admirable, and was in fact the best live
orchestral synchronisation I've yet heard. The actors are both good-looking
(where appropriate) and talented, and there is some impressive wildlife footage
at the beginning and sophisticated editing at the end.
What I didn't get, to be honest, was any sense of emotional depth: this is a
simplistic moral or fairy-tale style story with a great deal of plot and little
space for characterisation. It's all on the surface, and a very attractive
surface it is too; but that's all there is. The film is entertaining and
technically excellent, with lavish production values thrown into the bargain.
It never got me involved on any more intense level, though.
User comments
from imdb Author: bob the moo from
Kings Ranjit and Sohan may well be cousins who share a love of
gambling but, unbeknownst to Ranjit, Sohan plots to kill him and make his
kingdom his own. Sohan's plot fails though and Ranjit is only wounded during
his hunting "accident" and is saved by a local healer. While staying
in this village, Ranjit meets the beautiful Sunita and decides to make her his
wife. Her father refuses due to Ranjit's famed gambling habit but when Sohan
gets wind of the lovers' planned elopement, he comes up with another evil plot.
Unlike the consistently thorough IMDb reviewer "Igenlode Wordsmith",
I was not fortunate enough to see the BFI dust this film off in
Continuing the theme of scale, IMDb's trivia footnote tells me this film had
10,000 extras, 1000 horses and 50 elephants – I wouldn't have guessed those
figures but there is no doubt that the film is impressive in regards the scale
of the production. The sets and shots are impressive in their sheer size; this
is not a film shot on cheap sets but one that wears the majesty of its
characters in all the detail. Osten directs very well, managing these shots but
also bringing off intimate character moments as well as some technically clever
stuff as well (the reflection in the water shot was my favourite). He also
brings the best out of his cast – although again you need to appreciate that
this is a silent film and that the acting style demanded is different.
Finally, given that it is the reason for the recent showing, it would be
impolite not to mention Sawhney's score – indeed it would be foolish because it
is excellent. It manages to be modern and old fashioned at the same time but
most importantly, it perfectly matches the tone of the film as it plays. This
means that the drama is lifted, the humour is played out a little and the
involvement and attitude of the audience is guided by the music – and I cannot
think of what more I would want from a score. Will I be putting it on my pod
for casual listening? Well no, but within the film it is perfect and I am
jealous of the people who saw it with London Symphony Orchestra in the open
air.
Overall then a quite impressive silent film in terms of scale and delivery, the
addition of a great new score only serves to make it better.
Guardian/Observer
Time Out London (Wally Hammond)
Østergaard,
Anders
BURMA
In a repressive regime run by the military Generals, all citizens in Burma are guilty of crimes against the state simply by carrying cameras or videorecorders, which are the exclusive domain of the secret police, who incessantly film any demonstrations in order to identify dissidents and follow up with a flurry of arrests. With no foreign media allowed in the country and no privately owned media, freedom of expression simply does not exist, as journalists routinely regurgitate government propaganda. At the bottom of a list of countries along with North Korea and Eritrea, Burma is as completely closed off as a country can get to the outside world. Underground video journalists known as VJ’s secretly record street scenes, especially any sign of police skirmishes or demonstrators who are usually quickly arrested within minutes, and then smuggle the footage out of the country to safe Internet outlets in both Bangkok and Copenhagen, oftentimes seen later in BBC News broadcasts. Harassment, psychological pressure, intimidation and round-the-clock surveillance to ordinary citizens are routine, while any violators will be arrested, beaten, imprisoned, subject to torture, and potentially killed. The narration makes reference to Burmese student demonstrations in 1988, the year before the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, when the nation took to the streets to express their desire for democracy instead of a continuing police state, where there was a palpable feel that things would change for the better. But in one day the police shot 3000 protesters putting an end to that dream, literally firing straight into the crowds hitting anything in sight. That effectively ended any voice of dissent in Burma, where pro-democracy and subsequent Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has been living under house arrest for several decades.
This film largely consists of video footage shot on the streets along with a neverending chain of phone calls from various members of the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), an underground group of VJ’s who report activities to one another, share Internet feeds, and communicate where someone may need to be in order to capture some footage. These phone calls are the weak link in the film, as they are a constant voice throughout the film, right alongside the narrator known anonymously as Joshua, and their poor quality, with a mechanized sound to them, really cheapen the product. While some of these calls may have been helpful, they are overemphasized to the point where they become a distraction, even though they do string together a narrative thread, even posing journalistic questions about whether their work is actually accomplishing anything. The actual footage itself, the only evidence that any of this actually took place at all (as without it, the government would say it never happened), is not nearly as remarkable as exposing the conditions of what it’s like to live under such dire circumstances that make it a revolutionary act to secretly gather film evidence to be shared with the rest of the world. Much of this leads to a revival of the spirit of 1988, including street demonstrations, initially sparked by a huge spike in fuel prices in 2007 which led to street protests in Rangoon. And while there were a few unsuccessful protests that attempted to gain greater strength in numbers, they were quickly dispersed by the police.
It was only when the Buddhist monks, all clad in the exact same orange cloth, decided to demonstrate in support of the poor in a synchronized march all across the country, where thousands of marchers could be filmed, where bystanders on the street could join in, and this went on for several days. Initially the police underestimated the size of the marchers and the police units sent out were too small and ineffective to match the strength of the protesters, reaching over 100,000 strong, where the VJ journalists, initially suspected of being secret police because of their visible cameras, were eventually protected by the monks, pulling them inside their ranks. But like 1988, the police eventually turned on this group as well, using tear gas and the cover of smoke to cover up their actions so that they could not be photographed. But after shooting and killing a Japanese photo-journalist, they eventually turned on the monks, firing into the crowds and invading their monasteries, arresting some 200 to 500 monks, many of whom were beaten and tortured, some killed and left in the local rivers, and many never heard from again. The government’s response was to shut down all Internet access, leaving the country in a perpetual state of backward hibernation, where it remains to this day with over 2100 political prisoners languishing in jail for nonspecific crimes. While the footage itself is raw and sketchy at best, and unfortunately some of the film (without acknowledgment) has been re-enacted, especially the phone call sequences, nonetheless the film does an excellent job portraying the harrowing atmosphere of fear and dread of being forced to live underground, where many of the DVB contacts shown in the film were ultimately arrested or killed, and where any act of defiance in a police state leaves one subject to arrest, torture, and potential death. Burma remains near the bottom of the list of the Reporters Without Borders world Press Freedom Index.
Postscript
It’s significant that after nearly 21 years of house arrest, becoming one of the world’s most prominent political prisoners, Aung San Suu Kyi was finally released November 13, 2010. In April 2012, in part due to unprecedented reforms known as the Burmese Spring, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party swept nearly all the seats contested in a parliamentary election, while a large majority of seats in Burma’s lower house are controlled by the government party and the military. Despite a continuing poor human rights record, there have been some noteworthy actions by the government toward reform, releasing several hundred prisoners since 2011. While some laws have been amended, repressive laws remain. For the first time in over a decade, however, Burma has jumped favorably upwards on the Press Freedom Index 2013 - Reporters Without Borders, continuing an upward ascent begun last year. Previously, it had been in the bottom 15 every year since 2002, but now has reached its best-ever position.
The 8th Annual HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL Facets Multi Media
While 100,000 people, including thousands of Buddhist monks, took to the streets to protest the country's repressive regime that has held them hostage for over 40 years, foreign news crews were banned to enter and the Internet was shut down. The Democratic Voice of Burma, a collective of 30 anonymous and underground video journalists VJs recorded these historic and dramatic events on camcorderss and smuggled the footage out of the country, where it was broadcast worldwide via satellite. Risking torture and life imprisonment, the VJs vividly document the brutal clashes with the military and undercover police – even after they themselves become targets of the authorities.
Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
Since the 1962 military coup that overthrew the elected
government in
Shot
dead trying to show the real picture of Burma Images
suggest that Japanese video journalist was a victim of
Dodging the bloodstained sandals and the panic-stricken masses
who fled troops near Sule Pagoda in the centre of the Burmese capital
Then, in one dreadful moment, the Japanese video journalist took a bullet in the chest – almost certainly from the gun of a Burmese soldier.
We cannot be certain of the exact circumstances in which Mr Nagai died, but a series of pictures appears to suggest he was callously gunned down, a victim of the repressive junta who are almost as keen to quell the worldwide media coverage of the protests as they are to quell the protests themselves. Burmese state television has been running news bulletins accusing global broadcasters of pumping out a "Skyful of lies".
It fell to Mr Nagai's father to identify his son, who was working
for the Japanese news agency APF News, from photos and videos taken in the
street where he was killed.
Time Out London (Tom Huddleston) review [5/5]
Recent events on the streets of
This footage, captured on cheap digital cameras by operators fully aware that,
if caught, they would be imprisoned and tortured, and smuggled out of the
country to the DVB’s home bases in Bangkok and Copenhagen, is, by its very
nature, rough and unprofessional. But it’s also raw, immediate and, at times,
overwhelmingly powerful, capturing in remarkable, street-level detail the
joyous, optimistic first days of the protest and the vicious crackdown that
followed. The characters – including faceless editor-in-exile Joshua – are
ordinary people engaged in a desperate struggle, not just for their own
survival, but for the future of their country in the face of intolerance at
home and ignorance abroad. It’s a flawlessly constructed piece of work, as
relentlessly gripping as it is educational, a righteous and even uplifting
paean to the continued importance of collective protest, and a stirring
testament to individual bravery. For truthseekers everywhere, ‘Burma VJ’ is
simply unmissable.
Guardian UK
"Let us pray, to reduce the fear of death." This is the
heart-wrenching cry of one of the courageous demonstrators facing armed police
during
These were ordinary citizens who took it upon themselves, in the absence of anything resembling independent news media, to film as much as they could and tell the world what was happening by getting the footage out via internet or satellite telephone. They became the DVB, or Democratic Voice of Burma.
With visceral power, they show how the support of
The 2007 protest sank, but the footage lives on. John Pilger wrote in this paper that the culpable indifference and complacency of wealthy nations underpins an arrogant junta. The video testimony certainly makes that indifference more difficult.
Burmese army's violence against civilians The Guardian, March 11, 2010
• Since 1996, up to 1 million people have been displaced. Entire communities have been forced to relocate and their houses and food supplies burned to prevent their return. Those who refuse forced relocations and choose to hide risk military attack.
• More than 184,000 refugees in neigbouring countries originate from Burma. An estimated 2
million migrants are in
• The presence and conduct of the military are central to the plight of these civilians. Military operations have placed a particularly heavy burden on rural populations affecting their ability to sustain livelihoods.
• There have been numerous and frequent reports of civilians being forced to serve as porters and guides for the military, to build and maintain roads, to construct military camps, and to labour for infrastructure projects.
• Cases of rape and sexual violence committed by military personnel, many of them against young girls and adolescents, have been reported by human rights organisations.
• In Shan state the military has burned down over 500 houses and scores of granaries since July 2009, and forcibly relocated almost 40 villages, mostly in Laikha township. Reports say more than 100 villagers, both men and women, have been arrested and tortured. At least three villagers have been killed. This would be the largest forced relocation since 1996-1998, when more than 300,000 villagers in southern and central Shan State were displaced.@ Battles between government forces and ethnic groups in Shan State in August 2009 and along the Thai border region in June 2009 have raised serious concerns about security both inside Burma and its spillover effects in neighbouring countries.
• There is serious concern about the continuing armed conflict in Kayin
state, which severely affects the civilian population. It has been reported
that in Hsaw Law Kho village, three
villagers were killed and over a dozen more tortured by Infantry Battalion No
48 on
• The UN urges the government and all armed groups to ensure the protection of civilians, in particular children and women, during armed conflict. Recruitment of child soldiers, displacement of villagers, the use of anti-personnel landmines, and the forced labour of civilians should stop without any delay.
The Independent
The first film ever to be screened at
Its shaky, blurred, grainy images, shot with video cameras small enough to be quickly hidden at moments of danger, would not win an Oscar for Best Cinematography. And yet Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country, shown last Friday at an evening hosted by Sarah Brown, is as action-packed, thrilling and suspenseful as anything at the multiplex, and vastly more moving. In fact, it is as extraordinary a spectacle as you are likely to see all year.
This remarkable film was shot by a tiny cluster of fearless young "VJs", or video journalists, operating within one of the most oppressive and secretive countries in the world, a country with virtually unparalleled official censorship (Burma is ranked 170th out of 173 countries in Reporters Without Borders' 2008 world press freedom index).
During August and September 2007, a groundswell of protest
against the military junta, which has controlled
"I consider myself to be fairly well-informed, but I didn't
know a thing about
Ostergaard – whose previous work includes documentaries on the
Danish rock band Gasolin' and the creator of Tintin, Hergé – was in
For Ostergaard it was "the challenge of a lifetime" to piece together Burma VJ. He was, he recalls, confronted with a pile of "raw footage shot by at least ten different people, often with no label saying where or when it was taken or by whom. Sometimes we used satellite pictures of Rangoon from Google Earth to identify the actual street corners, so that we could establish how the demonstrations developed in time. We also called in eye witnesses." It was like trying to reassemble a broken vase from hundreds of fragments. "There was," the director concludes with a touch of dry understatement, "a little bit of detective work involved."
The fragments are glued together by two devices. Staged
reconstructions in the manner of Man On Wire – last year's hit documentary
about the tightrope walk between the
Joshua began his career aged 16 in government newspapers, but soon
became disillusioned and moved to Democratic Voice of Burma, the opposition
satellite television channel operating out of
Ostergaard met Joshua and a number of other VJs when he travelled
to
"But it is important not to be too in awe of them. They felt that this was what they had to do in order to feel alive. And I wanted to say that almost anybody could be motivated in a country like this to do subversive things. Because not to do something would be unbearable."
Slant Magazine review Joseph Von Lanthier
Hammer to Nail - Michael Tully
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The Burmese Spring - The New Yorker Evan Osnos from The New Yorker, August 6, 2012
A Burmese spring | The Economist Richard Cockett from The Economist, May 25, 2013
A Nutshell Review Stefan S.
SpoutBlog [Paul Moore] at indieWIRE
Village Voice (Ella Taylor) review
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [3.5/5]
theartsdesk.com [Sheila Johnston]
Daily Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
Movie Vortex [Michael Edwards]
Burma
VJ: Reporting from a closed country (directed by Anders Ostergard) Kimbo at Poppysmic! Movie Musings and
Reviews,
Eternal Sunshine Of The Logical Mind [Bob Turnbull]
Film Monthly (Del Harvey) review
Film-Forward.com Stephen Heyman
Little White Lies magazine Matt Bochenski
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Hollywood Reporter review Daniel Eagan
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review
Time Out New York (David Fear) review [4/5]
Time Out Chicago (Ben Kenigsberg) review [3/5]
The Globe and Mail (Michael Posner) review [3/4]
Burma
miners pay for fatal pleasures: Workers harvesting rubies, sapphires and jade
seek solace in heroin-shooting galleries, where the Aids virus is now rife,
writes Tim McGirk in Mandalay Tim
McGirk from The Independent,
Don't
forget Burma, a land of such beauty engulfed in a climate of fear Timothy Garton Ash from The Independent,
Tourists,
temples and torture Phil Reeves from
The Independent,
Burma repeats the revolt of '88 - the outcome is unlikely to be any happier Peter Popham from The Independent, September 28, 2007
Defiance, fear and brutality as the junta turns on the people Rosalind Russell from The Independent, September 28, 2007
Pascal Khoo-Thwe: The West must confront Burma's supporters Pascal Khoo-Thwe from The Independent, September 28, 2007
Junta
restricts internet access Alastair
Scrutton from The Independent,
Letters:
Burmese plight The Independent,
China
urges 'restraint' by both sides in Burma
Clifford Coonan and Andrew Buncombe from The Independent,
Worldwide
day of protest sends stern message to junta
Terri Judd from The Independent,
Opposition
rejects Burmese leader's negotiation offer
Andrew Buncombe from The Independent,
EU agrees extra Burma sanctions Constant Brand from The Independent, October 16, 2007
UN envoy criticises continued Burma crackdown The Independent, October 16, 2007
Husband of
Nobel heroine dies after 'no' to reunion
The Observer,
Suu Kyi's roadside protest ends as police raiders go in The Observer, September 3, 2000
Burma frees seven opposition MPs The Guardian, July 6, 2001
Burma refuses to set release date for Suu Kyi John Aglionby from The Guardian, June 16, 2003
World
concern over use of donated funds
Robert Booth from The Guardian,
Leader:
Keeping the foreigners out The Guardian,
'There's
at least 50,000 dead round here. But many of the bodies have disappeared' The
Guardian,
Nick Cohen: We must not shrink from our moral obligation to Burma Nick Cohen from The Observer, May 11, 2008
Cyclone
Nargis seen from above photo gallery
from The Guardian,
Burma refugees living in village school face eviction The Guardian, May 12, 2008
Constitution
ballot 'blatantly rigged' Ian
MacKinnon from The Guardian,
Letters:
Tragedy in Burma can be avoided The Guardian,
Relief
begins to trickle in, but Britain warns of 'unimaginable tragedy' in Burma if
junta fails to act Ian MacKinnon
from The Guardian,
First US aid
flight reaches Burma Ian MacKinnon
and Rachel Stevenson from The Guardian,
Eyewitness:
Aid worker's account of the situation in Burma following Cyclone Nargis Jonathan Pearce from The Guardian,
Simon Jenkins: As Burma dies, our macho invaders sit on their hands Simon Jenkins from The Guardian, May 14, 2008
UN calls for aid corridor to Burma Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, May 14, 2008
Leader:
No quick fixes for Burma's disaster relief
The Guardian,
New aid
setback as storm nears Burma Ian
MacKinnon from The Guardian,
UN to hold emergency summit on Burma aid, says Brown Ian MacKinnon and Rachel Stevenson from The Guardian, May 15, 2008
Naomi Klein: In the wake of catastrophe comes the whiff of unrest Naomi Klein from The Guardian, May 16, 2008
UN plans new plea to Burmese generals on aid Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, May 16, 2008
Brown hints at aid drops for Burma Jo Revill and Gaby Hinsliff from The Observer, May 18, 2008
Hope for Burma as UK signals breakthrough on aid Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, May 19, 2008
UN chief to meet Burma leader in effort to speed up delivery of aid Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, May 21, 2008
Simon Jenkins: The world and its media are playing the dictators' game Simon Jenkins from The Guardian, May 21, 2008
UN chief urges Burma to focus on saving lives Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, May 22, 2008
Burma agrees to let in foreign aid workers Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, May 24, 2008
Hope for release of Aung San Suu Kyi as Burma donors meet to pledge billions Tracy McVeigh from The Observer, May 25, 2008
Burma aid donors link cash to access to stricken delta Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, May 26, 2008
Fury as Burma shuts cyclone relief camps Aung Hla Tun from The Observer, June 1, 2008
Burma reopens schools hit by Cyclone Nargis Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, June 3, 2008
Not
such a hero after all, November 11 Can Aung San Suu Kyi lead while captive?
by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy from The
Guardian,
Mary's Meals in Burma photo gallery from The Guardian, August 29, 2008
Burma: Aung San Suu Kyi halts food rations boycott Ian MacKinnon from The Guardian, September 16, 2008
Response:
Remember, Aung San Suu Kyi's disengagement is not her choice Thaung Htun from The Guardian,
Anatomy
of an uprising Anders Østergaard
from The Guardian,
Outcry
over jailing of Aung San Suu Kyi
Chris McGreal from The Guardian,
Aung San Suu Kyi intruder is Mormon and Vietnam vet Maev Kennedy from The Guardian, May 14, 2009
Hope for Burma, even in disaster | Bo Hla Tint Bo Hia Tint from The Guardian, May 14, 2009
Simon Tisdall Suu Kyi's trial backfires on junta, by Simon Tisdall from The Guardian, May 20, 2009
Simon Tisdall on political prisoners in Burma and the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi Simon Tisdall from The Guardian, May 21, 2009
Burma junta bars media and diplomats from Aung San Suu Kyi trial again Matthew Weaver from The Guardian, May 21, 2009
Suu Kyi needs the UN to act, not talk | Meghan Clyne Meghan Clyne from The Guardian, May 22, 2009
Aung San Suu Kyi: Summary of decision and conclusion Siobhaion Butterworth from The Guardian, June 1, 2009
The
EU must start squeezing Burma | Simon Tisdall Simon Tisdall from The Guardian,
Burma plays long in trial of Aung San Suu Kyi Mark Canning from The Guardian, June 8, 2009
Aung San Suu Kyi trial delayed but there is no doubt about the outcome Mark Canning from The Guardian, June 15, 2009
Before
the storm: Aung San Suu Kyi photograph peels back the years The
Guardian,
Global
protests mark 64th birthday Mark
Canning from The Guardian,
Protests
mark Aung San Suu Kyi's 64th birthday
photo gallery from The Guardian,
UN's
Ban Ki-moon under fire for praising Burma leaders Julian Borger from The Guardian,
Asean's Burmese diplomacy has failed | Tom Fawthrop Tom Fawthrop from The Guardian, July 27, 2009
What can Jim
Webb achieve in Burma? Mark Tran
from The Guardian,
Burmese junta thrives on world division | Simon Tisdall Simon Tisdall from The Guardian, August 11, 2009
Suu Kyi sentenced to house arrest Justin McCurry from The Guardian, August 11, 2009
Aung San Suu Kyi's nightmare continues | Irene Khan Irene Khan from The Guardian, August 11, 2009
Concerns
for Aung San Suu Kyi intruder John Yettaw after Burma conviction Justin McCurry from The Guardian,
Burma:
Land of darkness The Guardian,
Senator Jim Webb's Burma visit raises speculation of new US policy Justin McCurry from The Guardian, August 14, 2009
US
senator meets Aung San Suu Kyi and says her visitor is to be released
Justin McCurry from The Guardian,
Burma releases US man who swam to Aung San Suu Kyi Paul Harris and Mark Townsend from The Guardian, August 15, 2009
Man
who crossed lake to Aung San Suu Kyi home leaves Burma Peter Walker from The Guardian,
US
signals major policy shift towards Burma
Ewen MacAskill from The Guardian,
Aung San Suu Kyi meets western diplomats James Sturcke from The Guardian, October 9, 2010
More
to Burma than Aung San Suu Kyi | Francis Wade Francis Wade from The Guardian,
Aung San Suu Kyi meets senior US diplomat in Burma Justion McCurry from The Guardian, November 4, 2009
Free
Aung San Suu Kyi, Obama tells Burma PM
Justin McCurry from The Guardian,
Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi loses appeal Haroon Siddique from The Guardian, February 26, 2010
Aung San Suu Kyi: a sham appeal | Andrew Heyn Andrew Heyn from The Guardian, March 2, 2010
Business
as usual in Burma | Simon Tisdall
Simon Tisdall from The Guardian,
UN calls for war crimes investigation in Burma Simon Tisdall from The Guardian, March 11, 2010
Burma's hip-hop resistance spreads message of freedom Jack Davies from The Guardian, April 22, 2010
Boston Globe review [3.5/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix (Lance Gould) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [3/4]
Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
The New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Ostermann,
Rick
WOLFSCHILDREN
(Wolfskinder) B 88
Germany (90 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Website
Unlike most war stories, this one actually takes place after the war is
over, in 1946-47 when orphaned German children separated from their families
attempted to make arduous journeys through Russian occupied territory across
Poland into Lithuania in hopes that distant relatives or friends might take
them in. Written by the director, the
story is inspired by true events occurring within his own family, where many
who successfully traveled to Lithuania were secretly forced to work for farmers
in exchange for food. While it’s
unfortunate the film comes on the heels of Cate Shortland’s Lore (2012),
an exquisite film that probes more deeply into the question of the heavily
stigmatized psychological shame of German defeat, it should also be pointed out
that some 12 to 14 million German people living in German occupied territories
during the war had to be transported back to Germany, becoming the largest
transfer of any population in modern European history. It was this group, mostly women and children,
which were the most severely mistreated before they were ultimately transported
back to Germany. Thousands died in
forced labor camps, millions died of hunger and deprivation, while as many as 2
million women and girls were raped by members of the Soviet Red Army, some as
many as 60 or 70 times. Ostermann’s
film, on the other hand, bears some similarity to Charles Laughton’s The
Night of the Hunter (1955), told almost exclusively through a a collective
children’s point of view, having to make their way through a military
occupation where they were continually forced to outrun and escape from
uniformed men with rifles and guns, while also lingering in those quiet moments
lying in the high grass, or next to a tranquil lake, where in contrast to terror
and fear, the pastoral beauty evokes a transcendent harmony or peace.
14-year old Hans (Levin Liam) and his 9-year old younger brother Fritz (Patrick Lorenczat) are forced to repeat their names in front of their mother moments before she dies of starvation, a reminder of who they are, insisting they don’t forget as she sends them on a harrowing journey to a Lithuanian farm where they once stayed. Also she makes Hans promise to take care of his younger brother to insure they don’t get separated, where at night he reads out of geography book an original description of what appears to be the initial discovery of the Galapagos Islands, describing how different species of turtles can be traced back to specific islands, where this peaceful narration of natural harmony is interspersed between signs of death and deprivation. Almost immediately, under attack from Red Army gunfire, the brothers get separated attempting to cross a river, where Hans ends up with a young girl his own age, the overly maternal Christel (Helena Phil), and two younger kids under her care. While they flee to safety, Hans is tormented by losing his brother, but in no time that guilt is replaced by hunger, thirst, and exhaustion, where they’re forced to travel off road as much as possible, which slows down their pace to a near crawl. When one of the younger kids gets bitten by a dog and needs medical care, they have no choice but to entrust him into the care of the local adults that do pass by on the road. He’s soon replaced by another kid Paul (Til-Niklas Theinert) wearing no shoes, with Hans carrying him on his back for most of the duration, looking after him much as he would his own brother. These small uprooted groups of wandering children were called wolf children.
There is no sense of time on this journey, as months and even years may
pass, but what’s eerie is how the accumulated numbers slowly diminish, where
kids like Fritz often disappear without a trace, getting killed, sick,
kidnapped by the army, or simply disappear mysteriously, where the group can’t
linger behind and figure it out, but must push ahead. One other observation is how kindly adults
help these kids out, though some may extract a form of payment in return, such
as taking a child’s doll away from them in exchange for food or safety. But the grim reality is a nightmarish odyssey
of brutality, starvation, and death, where these kids repeatedly witness traces
of the dead, the theft and slaughter of a farmer’s livestock, and the
brutalizing of women, where Christel’s maternal generosity soon becomes laced
with a paranoiac fear, where every man becomes a threat to her. Intermixed with the child horrors are
solitary moments of quiet and peace, where the cinematography by Leah Striker
reflects the kind of world Hans reads about in his book, where he curiously
observes frogs, lizards, and grasshoppers along the way, while moments later
he’s racing for safety. The continually
changing environment offers new challenges, where the kids are surprisingly
resilient and adaptive, and often choose to disappear with a helpful adult,
while the others stay together. In the
end, however, Hans ends up fending off dangers on his own, where he’s not the
same kid that set out on this journey, but he’s alive. Given the amount of time the kids wander
through dense woodland forest, there’s a mythical element of the inherent
danger of Hansel and Gretel,
especially every time they come upon a home where some new evil seems to await
them in this often beautiful but overly dour recollection of postwar
atrocities.
Wolf
Children | Reviews | Screen Lee
Marshall
An almost forgotten footnote in the immediate post-war history of German
is illuminated through a glass darkly in first-time feature director Rick
Ostermann’s tough, dour Wolf Children (Wolfskinder), which is inspired by
the true story of the packs of German orphans who roamed through
Soviet-occupied
Making demands on the audience right from the opening scenes, in which a slip of a lad steals a horse, shoots it and carves out a hunk of meat to eat, this is both a harsh survival story and a dark nature fable in which a group of hardened Hansels and Gretels attempted to outfox the witch of adult hostility and indifference. The cast of youngsters, most of them first-timers, deserve a medal for bravery, but there’s something in the performances that jars – at times it’s as if they’re in a kid-oriented adventure film, a kind of ‘Famous Five go Feral’, rather than in one of the darkest and bleakest times and places in modern European history.
This, and the fact that there’s little in the way of hope offered by a film where, much of the time, the kids are not alright, is likely to confine Wolf Children to festivals outside of Germany, plus perhaps the Baltic states and parts of Scandinavia. Another stumbling block to wider distribution will be the thematic overlap with the superior Lore – though Cate Shortland’s film dealt with the fleeing offspring of a Nazi officer, there must be a limit to the number of postwar feral German kids the arthouse market can absorb in a short space of time.
The horse-killer is resourceful urchin Fritzchen (Lorenczat), but it’s the point of view of his dreamier, far less together older brother Hans (Liam) that the film adopts. They live with their sick mother in an abandoned tower (one of many echoes of folk tale tropes and locations), and before long she’s departed for the next world, making them promise never to forget their names, and telling them to head for Lithuania, where a farming family will take them in.
This is the start of a journey that takes the brothers east, avoiding roads and grown-ups as far as possible, through a landscape of forests, meadows and marshes. Soon, attempting a river crossing under fire from Soviet troops, the two brothers are separated, and we stay with Hans as he hooks up with a raggedy bunch of other kids led by Christel, a girl of his age.
Ostermann and his cinematographer Striker deliberately remove all geographical markers from the journey to evoke these orphans’ own sense of disorientation as they are forced to harden up and feed themselves on berries, frogs and whatever else they can find. Nature is blank and ungiving at times, but also a refuge, and Hans (and the camera) is often distracted by the sudden beauty of clouds, reeds or a grasshopper perched on his hand (though we’re always half expecting him to eat these Malick-esque specimens). The few houses the band come across on the way are sources of danger or places of death, and even when some grudgingly sympathetic adults appear, their help is never given for free.
Gradually, Hans travels into a space that is part real and part dreamscape, culminating in a symbolism-laden encounter with a boatman. It’s a disappointment for the audience when he’s dragged back out of this cocoon, which would have provided the film with a convincing arc in which a boy who is forced to lose his childhood literally loses himself in nature. The anti-climactic ending – which sketches in the mixed Lithuanian reception of the ‘wolf children’ – is one of the stylistic wobbles in a film that never quite lives up to the glimmers of brilliance that shine through here and there.
Wolf
Children: Venice Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
Rick Ostermann's first feature is based on the flight of German
and Baltic children from Soviet-occupied
VENICE -- More captivating for its atmospheric visuals than its poorly contextualized plot, Rick Ostermann’s Wolf Children (Wolfskinder) follows a group of orphaned urchins in the wake of World War II as they flee what was then Soviet-occupied East Prussia to seek refuge in Lithuania. The film’s narrative similarities to Cate Shortland’s Lore from last year will likely work against it, as will its somewhat strained lyricism. But the grimly expressive faces of its young characters and the German writer-director’s skill at exploring the ways in which they adapt to nature help compensate for the wobbly storytelling.
The film’s chief distinction is the beauty of its settings. The dense woodlands and reedy swamps conjure evocative fairy-tale associations of children facing violence and peril, adding darkly enchanted dimensions to a drama of grim realism rooted in sobering 20th century history.
But Ostermann’s film plants the nagging sensation that the more compelling story is happening someplace else. After establishing an intriguing bond between siblings Hans (Levin Liam) and Fritz (Patrick Lorenczat) in which the traditional roles of older and younger brother are reversed, the director then sidelines the more interesting of the two kids for most of the movie.
While 12-year-old Hans hangs back in terror, 9-year-old Fritz fearlessly steals a soldier’s gun and horse, then leads the docile animal into an abandoned church and shoots it without blinking an eye. Hans looks on in stunned silence as his brother carves a slab of meat from the dead horse’s belly and then cooks it on the fire at the hideout where the boys’ mother (Jordis Triebel) lays dying. She instructs her sons to go to Lithuania and ask the couple on a farm where they once stayed to take them in.
It’s an arresting opening, and Fritz’s steely pragmatism, even in the face of losing a parent, makes him a promising protagonist. But as they scramble with a handful of other German and Baltic children in similar plights to cross a river while dodging Red Army gunfire, the brothers are separated.
The focus then shifts to the more emotional Hans, tormented over his failure to honor his mother’s wish that the boys should stick together at any cost. His anguish causes him to step back and allow a girl his age, Christel (Helena Phil), to serve as the group’s leader for a time, her maternal instincts providing comfort to the two younger kids traveling with them, Asta (Vivien Ciskowski) and Karl (Willow Voges-Fernandes). But as they encounter fresh dangers punctuated by moments of reprieve, Hans struggles with the choice between protecting the group and ensuring his own survival.
There’s undeniable dramatic traction in any story that places innocent children in life-or-death situations, weakened by fatigue, hunger, illness or injury and sometimes forced to commit acts of brutality. Ostermann’s observation of the ways in which their environment changes them, bringing out surprising resilience and compassion, is often quite touching.
But while Wolf Children is not without poignant moments, the director gets a little too bewitched by all the gorgeous images of nature. He seems more preoccupied with dreamy interludes and artsy flourishes than with bringing dramatic cohesiveness or tension to the kids’ odyssey. The developments of the closing scenes, while melancholy and unsettling, reinforce the feeling that we’ve been denied access to the real story here, which is that of resourceful Fritz.
Among the positives, however, cinematographer Leah Striker’s work shows an assured sense of composition, and the melancholy score is used with pleasing economy. The young cast all appear entirely unselfconscious in their roles; first-time actor Liam as Hans is especially convincing, conveying the haunted quality of a child forced to absorb horrors that no child should endure.
Rick
Ostermann to tell the story of the wolf children - Cineuropa Bénédicte Prot
'Wolfskinder'
Review: Rick Ostermann's Post-WWII Drama | Variety Alissa Simon
Östlund,
Ruben
INVOLUNTARY (De Ofrivilliga)
Involuntary
(De Ofrivilliga) Jonathan Romney at Cannes
Human folly in its rich variety gets a brisk, chilly airing in Involuntary,
an inventive ensemble piece from first-time Swedish director-writer Ruben
Östlund. Using a sprawling cast comprised largely of unknowns and
non-professionals - with one notable exception - Östlund paints a coolly
non-judgmental comic picture of the appalling things people do to each other,
and to themselves, when weak will, peer pressure and plain foolishness come
into play.
Involuntary's lack of a clear narrative line may make this
a hard sell, but brittle wit and an inventive shooting style should give this
film a boost with art-house buyers looking for fresh, non-conformist auteur
material.
Taking its time to gel
into an overall picture, Involuntary at first seems to be a series of
vignettes, set in
At a family gathering, an
elderly man has a mishap with a firework. At a school, a young teacher
demonstrates to her pupils the dangers of peer pressure, then has to make a
choice when she witnesses a colleague abusing a pupil. Two young girls get
progressively drunk, taking precociously sexual photos of themselves, before
pestering a shy man on the subway. When a group of men go on an outdoors
bonding weekend, alpha male Leffe (Johansson) teases a colleague with
homoerotic horseplay that crosses the line into sexual harassment.
The most entertaining
strand is an extended one, involving a coach journey on which the driver -
embittered by a recent divorce - stubbornly insists on remaining stationary
until one of his passengers confesses to committing a minor breakage. The
culprit is a well-known actress who keeps mum about her infraction; when
someone else finally pleads guilty, it's the film's most excruciating and
indeed pathos-laden moment.
Presented as a progression
of self-contained fragmentary vignettes, which seem to start and end
arbitrarily, the film rather resembles a droll equivalent of Michael Haneke's
similarly structured Code Unknown. The social comedy, however, is closer
to that of Neil Labute or Todd Solondz, depicting the enmities, aggressions and
imperfections that can make everyday life tip over into horror. Favouring a
softer approach than these satirists, however, Östlund tends to lead his
characters close to catastrophe, then pull mercifully back. Ostlund is out not
to punish his characters, but to have us share their embarrassment and identify
with their weaknesses.
The digitally-shot film is
framed with consistent inventiveness and rigour. He and DoP Marius Dybwad
Brandrud contrive to hide characters' faces, cutting them off at the neck (or
indeed, showing only their legs), obscuring them with windows and doorframes,
or shooting from behind. The large cast of players - faces visible or not -
give their all, running the gamut from self-effacement to outrageous
exhibitionism.
PLAY B+ 91
One of the more
divisive films of the year, a Swedish examination of race within the comforts
of the well-maintained Scandinavian middle class society, using a story pulled
straight from the headlines, which some may view as manipulative or
sensationalist, others as racist, while others find it deeply disturbing. Because these robbery incidents actually
happened, the question remains why they are significant, where the director
examines some of the underlying motives behind such a successful scam
operation, where between 2006 and 2008 there were about 40 reported similar
incidents in Gothenburg, Sweden where a small group of about five 12 – 14 year
old black kids would ask to see another young kid’s cell phone and then claim
it resembles the phone stolen by their brother a week ago, where they then go
through a charade of calling the brother and meeting him somewhere to sort it
all out. Using a psychologically complex
series of head games intended to intimidate the kids into following them, they
were actually successful in pulling off significant robberies without ever
using a weapon or resorting to violence.
Nonetheless it’s a frightening example of pack mentality, extremely
creepy, and amazing how easy it is for a small group to command this degree of
involuntary cooperation, where it’s a return to the Lord of the Flies mentality in terms of establishing who’s in control
of the situation, as the group with numbers tend to stand in the face of their
intended victims, cursing at them with rude profanity and making insulting
accusatory remarks, mocking them, calling them names, expressing out of control
rage which in the minds of the victims could easily lead to something
worse.
There’s no question
but that the blacks intentionally use to their advantage the white liberal
guilt trip, at times pleading repeatedly, literally begging them to cooperate,
while at other times they utilize the stereotypical views of blacks, that they
are prone to violence, as the perception is that black neighborhoods are
crime-infested, so the thinking is it’s to the advantage of the mostly white
victims, who are typically well dressed, well mannered and polite, carrying
cell phones, and usually showing signs of cash on them, to play along and
chances are they won’t get hurt. All of
these thoughts are tested throughout this film, almost all of them unpleasant,
where it’s extremely difficult to watch for a number of reasons, among which
include the racial angle, but also a defense mechanism not to be manipulated by
the director. What’s fascinating is how
easily the victims are manipulated, and when they’re targeted as a group,
perhaps a couple kids, if one tries to leave, the other victim turns on them
with a vengeance to stay behind, thinking it would only be worse for them if
their friend runs away. There are
opportunities to run away or to alert an adult, but these kids are literally
scared shitless to make a wrong move and are somewhat programmed by the rules
of their own more docile middle class society to obey. Like a cat toying with a mouse, these kids
enjoy the shifting of power and playing with their victims, extending the
experience to a lengthy afternoon, forcing them repeatedly into humiliating
behavior until they develop helplessly defeatist attitudes about doing anything
about it. Most likely these kids are too
ashamed of themselves to even mention it to adults, as evidenced by a subsequent
train ride home, and scared by the ease in which the larger group takes
complete control, where they futilely feel at their mercy. It’s not about the money, as they could
easily rob these kids at any time, where it’s easy to see that they enjoy watching
their victims squirm. By the end, as we
see the victors scarf down soft drinks and pizza, in accordance with the title,
it’s really all about enjoying themselves at someone else’s expense.
While this is a
fictionalized recreation of real events, initially set in a Stockholm shopping
mall, implementing a straightforward, documentary style, static camera of long
takes that simply observes human behavior mostly in real time without making
any suggestive commentary, it should be stated that the performances of the
black youths never appear staged and couldn’t be more naturalistic, constantly
moving in and out of the frame as if they’re intimately familiar with the
subject matter, offering sensational performances where it’s impossible to tell
this isn’t real. There are references to
Michael Haneke films, like the punishingly sadistic kidnapping scheme in FUNNY
GAMES (1997), only that film plays upon the audience’s expectations, where
there is a brief window where the audience perceives the victims can escape,
where because of their horridly brutal treatment the audience is actually
crying out for revenge, at which point the director pulls the plug and says not
so fast, literally playing with the audience through shocking treatment, which
is not the case here, as the camera is a quietly detached observer that simply
shows what happens and allows the audience to decide for themselves what it
means or if it’s at all relevant.
There’s also a similar agonizing subway scene in CODE UNKNOWN (2000)
where a passenger (Juliette Binoche) is tormented by an aggressive Arab youth
who grows angrier when she ignores him, eventually spitting on her. In that film, the director weaves together a
mosaic of seemingly disconnected incidents which are mere fragments of life
experiences, each expressing a stunning amount of authenticity, which seen as a
whole lends a commentary on the complex multiculturalism of the modern
age. Östlund’s ambitions with this film
might feel similar, but may be more personal, examining class perceptions
through racial imagery, where he’s actually holding the mirror into the
audience’s faces and asking if people recognize themselves. How much does racial stereotyping affect our
behavior as well as society at large, and to what ends will people bully others
to get what they want? Most will not
like what they see.
Details
- Center for creative arts
Play documents the true story of a game which took place in the
Swedish city of
The film begins with two
boys approaching two other boys and asking to use their cellphones. They then
accuse them of having stolen the phones from one of their brothers and coerce
them into making a long day's journey into nowhere, as the aggressors
lead their scared victims all around the city.
Languidly shot, Play
is a deeply thoughtful and occasionally harrowing film from director Ruben
Östlund, whose formalist approach to cinema resonates perfectly with the
psychological nature of the film's narrative and its urban locations.
Consulate
General of Sweden New York - Upcoming Events
Ruben Östlund's third
feature film Play relates a racial incident based on events that happened in
Illustrated in the film
Play is a deliberately provoked racial incident based on numerous similar
real-life transgressions. Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund has developed
visual strategies based on long takes and fixed camera positions to relate a
disturbing tale of how five African immigrant boys in Gothenburg take advantage
of the liberal guilt and placating temperament of three local kids to rob them
and take them for a ride to unknown destinations.
Social, racial and political credos are twisted and pulled inside out, which
might challenge the assumptions of many a viewer. Shot on the new Red 4K
camera, Play is a formalistic drama that poses more questions than answers.
What is lurking beneath the surface tranquility of Scandinavian life?
Ruben Östlund was born in Styrsö, a small island off the west coast of
Play TIFF
An insightful and
troubling film about race, mores and manipulation, and the social construct of
the Other, Ruben Östlund's Play is based on an actual incident in Gothenburg
where a group of black kids manipulated other teenagers, mostly from
"ethnic" backgrounds, into surrendering their valuables. Shot
entirely in long shot, Play is chilling in its ambiguity.
In Play, Yannick (Yannick
Diakité) and his friends target a trio of younger, presumably wealthier kids,
two of them from “traditional” Swedish backgrounds and one whose family
emigrated from
Filmed entirely in long shot, Play is chilling in its ambiguity. The distance
between the viewer and the action happening in the image invests the film with
an ominous impenetrability, exacerbated by inchoate assumptions and suspicions
about race. The atmosphere suggests violence (which does come eventually,
though not in the way you’d expect), but the kids’ behaviour, taken on its own,
does no such thing. In fact, there’s nothing to suggest that Yannick and his
pals mean the other kids any harm. Their ostensible victims have numerous
opportunities to run, but never take them. (Are they staying out of fear?
Boredom? The desire to hang out with older kids?) Moreover, there’s the
distinct possibility that Yannick and his friends have no intention of ripping
them off, but on some level are effectively goaded into it by the trio’s fear
and gullibility. The proceedings have the feel of a sociology experiment gone
horribly awry.
One of
Focus on Play Lux Prize
Play
is, among ten other european films, selected for the Official
Selection of the LUX Prize 2011. In central
This Swedish/Danich/French co-production has been one of
former general delegate Frédéric Boyer's European favourites in the 2011
selection of the 43rd Director's Fortnight at the Cannes International Film
Festival. Play, director Ruben Ostlund's third feature-length fiction
film, was in the Munich Film Festival.
Based on true events that took place in Gothenburg between 2006 and 2008, Play provides a detailed and carefully paced account of a protection racket between a group of young teenagers. The Gordian knot of the tale is that the five racketeers are black, one of their friends of Asian origin and their victims two Caucasians. The small, seemingly unified gang uses fraud, psychological intimidation (following victims in the tram and on the street, leading people to an isolated place where they finish the deal), leaders and followers, role playing (good cop-bad cop) and constant fun-and-games.
These acts obviously cause victims to panic, calling their parents for help but getting through to their answering machine; soliciting help from adults who don’t want to bother the police or prefer to turn a blind eye, they fight, they break up (the Asian is far from happy to be used as a negotiator). They victims are even are subjected to a morality lesson after get fined for fare dodging – how could they not seeing as how they were robbed of everything by the racketeers. Valuables and brand goods (iphones, MP3s, Diesel jeans) change hands by the end of a short game in which the victims are forced to hand over the items of their own “free will”. They fail to understand that the social rules they’ve learned don’t work at all with a "gang" who amuse themselves at their expense and shamelessly cheat.
Play Howard Schumann from Talking Pictures
Based on an actual racial incident in
One of the most promising young filmmakers, whose style is reminiscent of
Michael Haneke and Roy Andersson, Ostlund's camera is observational, simply
recording what is taking place without comment. The film opens inside a
shopping mall where we see a panoramic view that includes the shops, stairways,
and two levels, highlighting even the smallest detail. We hear the sound of
conversations but do not know where they are coming from. The camera then zooms
in on two small white middle-class children walking through the mall lobby.
They are approached from the left by five 12-14 year-old boys (all black and
immigrants) who ask them for the correct time.
The game is established early, though the main victims of the film are three
other children of well-to-do parents who appear later. Most likely repeated
many, many times during their two-year crime spree, the game is played like
this. One of the approaching black teens asks a younger child for the time.
When the white child pulls out his cell phone to check the time, he is accused
of stealing the phone that belongs to his alleged brother. He tells the boy
that the phone has the same exact scratch on it as the one that was stolen from
his brother, and asks to confirm it by showing it to his brother.
When the child refuses, a "good cop/bad cop" routine is played out in
which one of the five pretends to be a friend of the harassed boy. The child
inevitably denies that he stole the phone giving the "good cop" the
job of reassuring him, saying, "Okay, I believe you, but we have to solve
this, right?" He tells the boy not to worry, that his friends are not
trying to rob or hurt them. At the same time, the "bad cops" are
making aggressive demands in an intimidating manner. Ostlund keeps the
characters at a distance with mostly long static shots, yet we feel that we are
there with the victims, acutely feeling their tension, frustration, and growing
fear.
The scenario is then repeated, this time with three other children, two white
(Sebastian and Alex and John who is of Asian origin). Compelled by fear and
insecurity, the boys allow the bullies to control the game and only rarely ask
for support from adults. When they do come in contact with them, the adults are
reluctant to become involved, or, as shown later in the film, become involved
inappropriately. The white boys are forced to follow their black tormentors
around the city, on trams, and buses, then finally out into a remote, wooded
area of Gothenburg where the game is played until its ultimate end point.
Though the victims have several opportunities to escape, they do not take them,
perhaps because the fear of black violence has been so firmly instilled in them
that they feel that they have to be "nice" in order to save
themselves.
Play has a light touch as well. In one scene, a group of feather-clad Indians
do a war chant for donations in the middle of a busy street. In another amusing
sequence, a cradle is placed between the second and third compartments on a
moving train and remains there despite the urgent pleas of the conductor to
move it for safety reasons. When he gets no response in Swedish, he repeats the
warning in English. One of the key moments of the film is a sudden attack by older
gang members against the young perpetrators in the back of a bus. Later, when
one of the gang of thieves wants out, he is kicked and beaten inside the bus by
the other four. Also, in a reversal of roles, the bullies blame the bullied.
One says, "Anyone dumb enough to show his cell phone to five black guys
deserves whatever he gets." Finally, an end game is set up by the
perpetrators. A contest takes place in which both sides choose their fastest
runners and whoever wins the race gets to take everyone's valuables. Of course,
the winner is pre-determined and the white children lose all of their personal
belongings, including their cell phones, a jacket, and an expensive clarinet
belonging to John. A follow-up to Ostlund's highly praised 2008 film, Involuntary,
Play is a complex and multi-layered film that has a surprise twist near the
end. Filled with sharp insights into human behavior, Ostlund challenges us to
shine a mirror on our own behavior and see whether or not we employ the same
kind of psychological tricks ourselves to get what we want. Despite a few
shocking moments that do not add much to the film, Play is a brilliant work of
art that deserves to be seen.
Cannes 2011 Review – “Play” > Shadow and Act | Cinema of the ... Ms. Woo from indieWIRE
Cannes 2011. Rushes: "Play" on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman from Mubi
Play Mark Adams at Cannes from Screendaily
NYFF Spotlight: Ruben Östlund's Controversial “Play” Fabian Baez
Nisimazine | Interview-Portrait: Ruben Östlund Maximilien Van Aertryck interviews the director
Play:
Cannes Review Todd McCarthy at
Variety Reviews - Play - Film Reviews - Cannes - Review by Leslie ... Lesie Felperin
Cannes
'11 Day 5: Knock-offs - Movie Nation - Boston.com Wesley Morris at
FORCE
MAJEURE (Turist) B 89
Sweden (120 mi) 2014
‘Scope
Following in the footsteps of his earlier film Play (2011),
an extremely provocative award-winning film on racial intimidation, where a
handful of young 12-14 year old black kids in Gothenburg, Sweden used highly
sophisticated, psychological head games to steal cell phones and other
expensive items from young white kids without ever resorting to weapons or
violence (where the director used some of the actual real-life perpetrators in
the cast to add authenticity to the experience), Östlund seems to specialize in
theater of discomfort, placing people in uncomfortable situations where there
is seemingly no way out. Winner at
Cannes of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize (2nd
Place), here he has conjured up another psychological nightmare taking
place in, of all places, a spectacularly upscale ski resort in the French
Alps. One of Östlund’s strengths is his
power to observe in near documentary fashion, where some may feel he is overly
calculating due to the power of his precision, where like Stanley Kubrick or
David Fincher, he takes some 30 to 50 shots per sequence, possessing superior
control of his framing, tone, and pacing, but he is continually commenting on
the human condition, often finding dark humor in our most uncomfortable
moments. While the film takes a page
from Julia Loktev’s The
Loneliest Planet (2011), where a man’s masculinity is challenged in the
mountainous wild, this shifts the focus to a wealthy Swedish businessman Tomas
(Johannes Bah Kuhnke) on a 5-day ski holiday with his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven
Kongsli) and two children Harry and Vera, real life brother and sister Vincent
and Clara Wettergren. It’s interesting
to see them being photographed at the outset against the snowy backdrop of a
majestic mountain range, smiling and happy, looking forward to getting out on
the slopes where they are a family that loves skiing together. While they happen to be economically wealthy,
they share common family experiences where the kids get grumpy and run out of
gas long before the day’s activities are complete, where they have to be
dragged back to the room, but the next day, they’re ready to do it all over
again.
Stylistically austere, showing a precise eye for detail, the snow is beautifully captured by cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel, including the lifts, the mist machines, and all the machinery of the night clearing a smooth path for the skiers, accompanied by the sharp punctuation of Vivaldi’s “Summer” (ironically - - not “Winter”) Antonio Vivaldi - "Summer" from four seasons - YouTube (soloist: Mari Silje Samuelsen, 10:51), where the resort is tucked into a flat space surrounded by enormous mountains. While having lunch the next day at the foot of a spectacular peak, guests are busy snapping pictures while dining, as it’s a truly rare experience, but this family gets more than they bargained for when it appears an avalanche is heading for the hotel. While Tomas assures them it’s all carefully controlled, Ebba is not so sure when it tumbles too close for comfort in the money shot of the film, as the guests all leap to their feet in a panic to get away while the kids are screaming, and bodies go flying in all directions, including Tomas who grabs his iPhone and makes a hasty exit, leaving Ebba to grab both kids herself and duck under a table for protection, where they are all engulfed in white. While the sounds of pandemonium can be heard, the screen stays white until there is complete silence, until finally a few shadows move and the snow cloud dissipates. The shot is reminiscent of the Lumière brothers Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (The Lumière ... - YouTube (50 seconds), one of the first films ever made in 1896, where initial audiences fearfully jumped out of the way to avoid being run over by the oncoming train. As it turns out, the snow was controlled and actually stopped well before it reached the hotel, but a cloud of powder blinded the tourists and covered the outdoor deck. Of interest, the real avalanche was shot in British Columbia, where they built a restaurant in a studio and transposed the shot with actors against a big green screen, where no CGI effects were used. According to the director, the goal was to make the most spectacular avalanche scene in film history, coming in just the first ten minutes of the film. The music of Vivaldi beautifully reflects the intensity of the moment, especially the escalating emotions of panic, which rise to a rapid crescendo before a longer period of quiet prevails.
While the film documents each day of the trip, it’s as if an infection
kicks in that slowly attaches itself to the family, where the effects are slow
in developing, but once they do, they have a debilitating force. While Tomas is in denial about what happened,
Ebba can’t get it out of her head, especially that her husband would save his
phone, but leave the kids to fend for themselves, where they’re obviously too
young to do that. This eats away at her
until it spills out in unexpected places, angrily talking to another woman
about her liberating lifestyle choice, or having guests over for dinner, where
she simply can’t control what comes out of her mouth, as this feeling has a
life of its own, as she feels compelled to berate and humiliate her husband
publicly, where she doesn’t accept his silence or his excuses. Initially Tomas thinks he can either lie or
manipulate his way out of it, never expecting people would doubt his version of
the story, but Ebba speaks with such conviction, where her shocking revelations
are among the most dramatic moments of the film, and she refuses to let her
husband weasel out of it, even when he attempts to produce fake tears or
regret. What’s perhaps most appealing is
how the director always finds humor even in the worst and most pathetic
situations, where the urge to protect oneself is a primeval instinct going back
to the caveman and animal groups, where the male is supposedly the provider of
the collective, so this mythical image is ingrained into our collective
consciousness. Not everyone is a hero
under fire on the battlefield, where wounds of conscience haunt and traumatize
some survivors, especially knowing what they did to survive, while others lost
their lives. It’s interesting how
marriages are often saved by overt manipulation, sheer theatricality, where
relationships are a fragile thing, and partners often have to heal a wounded
ego in mysterious ways. While the film
exposes masculinity in crisis after being challenged by mortifying danger,
Östlund creates an icy psychological thriller with a creeping sense of dread
and foreboding, suggesting a labyrinth of dead ends and wrong turns lies ahead
when framing this issue as a masculine or feminine option, as survival is
really part of the human condition.
Which
movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival Ben Sachs from The Reader
Force Majeure If Michael Haneke were recruited to direct an American sitcom pilot, the results might look something like this Swedish feature, about an upper-middle-class family vacationing unhappily in the French Alps. Like Haneke, writer-director Ruben Östlund (Play) employs eerily controlled long takes to conjure an air of doom around his characters, yet beneath the commanding surfaces lie some rather basic observations about marriage, parenting, and social conformism. For a comedy about emotional pain, this is neither discomforting nor terribly funny, and the satire of bourgeois complacency doesn't cut very deep. A few sequences, though, are potent enough to hint at the squirm-inducing provocation this might have been, namely an awkward double date between the spouses and another vacationing couple that mutates into a long, passive-aggressive debate. In English and subtitled Swedish.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago
Michael Glover Smith
While holidaying in the French Alps and facing an impending natural disaster, Tobias (Johannes Kuhnke), a yuppie family-man from Sweden, behaves in a cowardly fashion in front of his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and their two young children. The marital discord that results spreads like a virus to another vacationing couple, Tobias's friend Kristofer (Kristofer Hivju) and his much younger girlfriend Fanny (Fanni Metelius). This masterful drama piles complex emotions--shame, fear, embarrassment, anguish--on top of one another and then, amazingly, finds a way to somehow mine the most emotionally excruciating moments for a vein of rich, black comedy. Writer/director Ruben Ostlund's meticulous attention to sound and image, and his love of formal symmetry, make FORCE MAJEURE a more apt point of comparison with the films of Stanley Kubrick than anything Jonathan Glazer has ever done. The only thing preventing me from calling this a full-fledged masterwork is the inclusion of a couple of unnecessary scenes at the very end: Ostlund's illustration of how both male protagonists are desperate to redeem themselves in the eyes of the women who love them through dramatic external action is redundant; he has already conveyed this notion with more subtlety and power in the preceding hour and 45 minutes.
In
Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]
Force Majeure details a similar impending marital breakdown—this one, however, taking place in a French ski resort rather than of the Turkish countryside. Instead of tapping into Tarkovsky, though, Ruben Östlund’s film, at least structurally and thematically, reminds one more of Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet (2011). As was the case with Nica and Alex in Loktev'’s film, the threatened fissure between Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) hinges on an impulsive decision made by the latter at a particularly fraught moment—in this case, an avalanche that momentarily endangers the safety of the family—that calls into question Tomas's masculinity.
Östlund, though, carves out his own aesthetic space with a visually playful style and a penchant from finding humor in unexpected places. Montages of everyday goings on at the ski resort are scored to electronic renditions of Vivaldi; a craggy-faced custodian observes some of the characters’ more outwardly outrageous actions from his broom-holding perch; Tomas’s best friend (Kristofer Hivju) gets so intensely roped into Tomas and Ebba’s marital troubles that he begins to question his own girlfriend's loyalty. None of these amusing bits are made at the expense of Östlund’s chief concerns: Ebba’s loss of respect for Tomas; Tomas’s own acknowledgment of his momentary failure as a patriarch; and, on a broader level, the emptiness of traditional societal gender roles. A tantalizingly open-ended conclusion involving an incompetent bus driver going down a mountain hill ends Force Majeure on a note that suggests a final, ambiguous leveling of the playing field.
Force Majeure (2014);
written and directed by Ruben Östlund
Sheila O’Malley
Force Majeure premiered at
A Swedish family (dad Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), mom Ebba (Lisa Loven
Kongsli), and two kids, Harry and Vera, played by Vincent Wettergren and Clara
Wettergren) go on holiday in the
During lunch on a rooftop cafeteria overlooking the slopes, the family and the other guests eating watch as a spectacular controlled avalanche barrels down towards them. It’s moving fast. People feel safe, they “ooh” and “ahh” and take out their phones to capture the magnificence. But very quickly everyone realizes that the avalanche appears to be coming right towards them. And although they are several stories in the air, the wall of snow coming at them is taller. Panic erupts. The screen goes to white.
And then stays white. We hear the screams, the running feet. We see nothing.
As the event dissipates, as the white disappears, melting into nothingness, providing us with sight again, it becomes apparent that Tomas made a choice, when that avalanche was about to hit. He made a choice that is the impetus for all that follows. It is a choice he denies, vehemently, throughout. Ebba, though, knows what she saw. Her marriage is called into question. Her life choices. And for Tomas, it is an assault on his identity and self-perception that leads him into treacherous psychological waters, an abyss of nothingness, a total obliteration of Self. The two young children are helpless bystanders as they watch their freaked-out parents become aware of the sheer amount of wreckage left in the avalanche’s wake.
Filmed in a formal and omniscient way, with repetitive stunning shots of the slopes, the ski-lifts barreling over the blinding white, the resort seen as a vulnerable block of concrete surrounded by an austere landscape, Force Majeure ends up being a brutal look at concepts of masculinity, heroism, courage, and what all that might mean in a modern world. It also contains the suggestion that modernity could be swept away in a second by a natural disaster, a “force majeure.” Are we ready for it? Tomas works in an office. He is a family man. He is domesticated. That is not necessarily a negative thing. But when a moment occurs where he needs to rise in a more traditional role, he fails. Horribly. The expectations not just from Ebba, but from his fellow male counterparts, stare at him in the face. Leer at him, jeering and mocking.
Ebba can’t “let it go.” Much of Force Majeure (which was also written by Östlund) is made up of long conversational scenes, between Tomas and Ebba and various friends. A couple joins them on vacation. Immediately, Ebba and Tomas tell the story of the avalanche, each one sharing their different versions. They want outside approval for their point of view of what happened. And yet they can’t agree on what happened. These scenes are long, complex, with shots that repeat, metronome-like, so that you realize you are going into a Hall of Mirrors. What is perception? What is identity? Does it exist all on its own, or must it be reflected back to you? What happens when the reflection does not match the desire? The couples who are forced to listen to these varying interpretations, start to weigh in with their own opinions. Tomas and Ebba’s anxiety and trauma start to wear off on others. The fallout is not isolated to one family. It makes the other characters wonder: “Who am I, when push comes to shove? Would I do what Tomas did? Can I even explain Tomas’ actions, or excuse them? How will I be in a moment when heroism is required? Will I fail?” The dialogue is intricate, fascinating. The acting is deep and extremely strange. These are people facing the abysses within. These are people who have never been tested, who have never been forced to look at, really look at, who they are in the world.
The avalanche we see in Force Majeure is a controlled one. Throughout the film, there are constant blasts from speakers placed out on the slopes, to shift the snow so that the skiers will be safe. At first, the characters in Force Majeure are not aware of how bad the psychological damage has been. They think they, too, may be able to control the avalanche. In scene after scene, relentless, sometimes extremely hilarious (believe it or not), Tomas and Ebba realize that the event that has befallen them cannot be controlled. They try. They talk. They plead their case to their friends. They listen to the responses. They go skiing again. They try.
But what was seen cannot be unseen. Their marriage is hurtling at breakneck speed towards a bottomless pit. And, even more frightening, Tomas’ entire sense of self begins to shatter. At first slowly, because he resists. And finally, devastatingly, he can no longer control any of it.
Östlund films this uncontrollable landscape of trauma and fear in an extremely controlled way. Shots repeat. We see things from far off: the resort, the mountains, the horizon. Even the interior of the resort, strangely repetitive, stacked balconies around an open space, is filmed in a way that destabilizes our understanding of what we are seeing. It’s eerie. The effect makes one extremely uneasy. Nobody is a villain. Human beings do not always do their best when push comes to shove. Everyone hopes that in a crisis situation they will be the resourceful one, the one who holds a group together, who has ideas about what to do. Even if we are not conscious of that hope, it’s there. Östlund films some of it as though it is a play: long shots, with people talking. I didn’t have a stopwatch on the length of these shots, but he basically lets these devastating conversations play out, without pushing in close, or editing the heck out of the footage telling us where to look. And so these scenes, with everyone sitting around trying do damage-control from that initial event, start to feel even more frightening than the avalanche we saw. Östlund, and his camera, doesn’t blink.
The physical disaster of the avalanche happens in the first 10 minutes of the film. The emotional disaster that follows, however, is the thing that really spreads, obliterating all in its path.
Force Majeure is one of my favorite films of the year thus far.
See This Brilliant and Pitiless Critique
of Marriage With Someone You Love
Dana Stevens from Slate
The
Lumière Reader [Brannavan Gnanalingam]
Force
Majeure (2014) Film Review - Film School Rejects Kate Erbland
Review:
Swedish film Force Majeure asks hard ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
[TIFF
Review] Force Majeure - The Film Stage
Ethan Vestby
Fantastic
Fest Review: FORCE MAJEURE Snows On ...
Andrew Todd from Badass Digest
The
House Next Door [Tomas Hachard]
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
The House Next Door [James Lattimer]
'Force
Majeure' ('Turist'): Cannes Review - The Hollywood ... Boyd van Hoeij from The Hollywood Reporter
Cannes
Film Review: 'Force majeure' - Variety
Peter Debruge
Ôtomo,
Katsuhiro
AKIRA
Lessons of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyber-punk anime classic Akira may be as muddled and ridiculous as it is exhilarating, but there’s no denying its still-astounding animation. Otomo, adapting his own 2,000+page manga, packs his convoluted film with too many extraneous side-stories involving anti-government protestors (angry about tax reform?), an army coup, and a romance between a rampaging superboy and a dainty waif. But as a purely visual experience, this science-fiction epic is a furious spectacle of lush colors and dynamic movement that deftly combines elements of Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. In post-WWIII neo-Tokyo, the military-industrial complex maintains tenuous control over rebuilt Japanese society, biker gangs rule the streets, and one kid – Tetsuo, a picked-on member of popular Kaneda’s moto-delinquents – becomes an out-of-control semi-diety when he crashes into a psychic child. Mid-way through, Akira’s story – which, like so much anime, is concerned with man’s relationship with machines – unravels into incomprehensibility, though it’s clear the film functions as both a parable about technological (specifically, atomic) progress, and a coming-of-age story about one maligned kid’s angry retribution against authority figures. Yet to really enjoy Otomo’s masterpiece, it’s best to just turn one’s mind off and enjoy the incredible imagery.
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha Robinson]
In spite of its increasingly daring and experimental visual stylings, the Japanese animation industry has yet to produce a film that truly rivals Katsuhiro Otomo's much-heralded animated film adaptation of his 2,000-page comic book Akira. The 1988 cyberpunk extravaganza—in which a weak, put-upon biker punk named Tetsuo is suddenly endowed with phenomenal psychic powers, and uses them to exact violent retribution on any and all perceived authority figures—certainly has its problems. Its script is crowded, rushed, and occasionally opaque; screenwriters Otomo and Izo Hashimoto tried to cram a sampling of the political and social complexities of the manga series into the film, with uneven results. While the central tragic conceits of Japan's familiar man-vs.-machine conflict are lucid enough, as is the more universal coming-of-age story, the motivations behind many of the bit players are far from clear. But the imagery remains incomparable among animated films. Post-apocalyptic Tokyo comes alive in Otomo's hands, both on the micro level, as bike gangs engage in an adrenaline-fueled duel in the film's opening segments, and on the macro level, as a massive urban area is laid waste in the finale. Otomo's masterful and creepy use of sound, music, and silence creates a variety of powerful moods without forcing them. And, in this latest version of the movie, both image and sound have been refurbished as part of a million-dollar restoration project. Pioneer Entertainment (which picked up the Akira release rights after the film's previous owner went out of business) digitally restored, remastered, and retranslated the film, with impressive results. The vivid colors sometimes seem likely to burn their way off the screen, while the new English soundtrack finally features normal speaking tones instead of shrill squawking. The special-edition DVD is only necessary for the true collector, as the extras mostly consist of dry 1998 making-of documentaries, a 1993 talking-head Otomo interview, a random collection of production art and storyboards, and brief, choppy video clips about the restoration projects. But the film itself is a landmark production that can be watched with equal satisfaction as a metaphorical psychodrama or as a sheer visual spectacular.
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
Katsuhiro Otomoto's "Akira" is the most expensive animated feature
ever made in
"Akira" is set in Neo-Tokyo in 2019, 31 years after World War III. The rebuilt city, looking like an animated "Blade Runner" prototype, is under military rule, though barely: Packs of motorcycle-riding cyberpunks race through the streets engaging in deadly jousts. One pack, led by Kaneda, has a run in with a physically withered but telekinetically charged child named Takashi. As a result, one of Kaneda's pals, the emotionally scarred Tetsuo, is captured by the mysterious military-scientific coalition that rules Neo-Tokyo. Soon, Tetsuo's powers grow out of control and he becomes the focus of a battle between oppressive authorities, an underground resistance group, Kaneda's gang and a trio of fellow psychics terrified that he will unleash "Akira" and once more destroy the world. All of this unfolds at a fast-forward pace.
What makes it work is the astounding animation, 160,000 cells worth. The detail is exceptionally realistic, fluid and multidimensional, suggesting both a futuristic world and ancient quests. Otomoto's neon-lit Neo-Tokyo is a marvel of post-apocalyptic tension and desires. "Akira" is equally astounding for its color design, whether in the brightness of Neo-Tokyo, the damp darkness of its underground or the steely edge of its scientific outposts and military hardware. It's a complete world sprung from Otomoto's pen and imagination, and realized in 327 colors.
A warning to parents of young children: "Akira" is not rated, but it does contain quite a bit of graphic violence, and not of the "Roadrunner" variety. When bullets fly, punches land and folks die, blood flows, copiously. There are several "Scanners"-style showdowns, "Altered States"-like hallucinations and none of the comic release usually found in cartoons. This is probably not a good film for anyone under 12.
Of course, "Akira" is not a long cartoon, but an ambitious animated feature that can be seen as a parable of scientific responsibility and cosmic rebirth, or just an action-packed serial. Or it can be seen as a visceral example of the future of animation.
DVD Verdict: Special Edition Mike Pinsky
DVD Times Mark Davis
Anime Jump! Mike Toole
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Dan Lopez)
DVD Journal DSH
Furie's Review Ryan Donovan
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Movie Vault [Vadim Rizov] not sold on this film
Anime News Network Bamboo Dong
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
Ouédraogo,
Idrissa
Idrissa Ouedraogo - Films as director: Ellie Higgins from Film Reference
Idrissa Ouedraogo is
one of Africa's most prolific filmmakers. His early films are remakable in
their ability to communicate through imagery. Poko , Les Ecuelles (The Wooden Bowls), Les Funerailles
du Larle Naba (The Funeral of Larle Narba), Ouagadougou, Ouga
deux roues (Ouagadougou, Ouga Two Wheels), and Issa le tisserand (
Issa the Weaver ) appeal to a multi-lingual audience without using
dialogue or voice-over narration. Although his subsequent films incorporate
dialogue, Ouedraogo's talent for creating meaning with images remains a
hallmark of his work.
Ouedraogo's first
commercial success, Yaaba ( Grandmother ), narrates the story of
two young children who befriend an old woman wrongly accused of malevolent
sorcery. This film exemplifies Ouedraogo's interest in the multiple
ramifications of individual choices. It also demonstrates Ouedraogo's skill at
adapting the poetics of African oral tales to contemporary cinema. Nwachukwu
Frank Ukadike notes that Ouedraogo "fuses the neorealist penchant for
eliciting polished performance from nonprofessionals with the African narrative
tradition of the griot . . . as in the oral tradition, a story's interest and
attraction for an audience depend upon how creatively a storyteller embellishes
what he has heard or taken from his own experience." Ouedraogo's humor,
wit, and keen sense of drama in Yaaba earned him international acclaim
as an exceptional storyteller and filmmaker.
Ouedraogo's second big
success was Tilai ( The Law ). At the film's beginning, the
protagonist, Saga, leaves his village. His life away from home is left out of
the narrative, which speaks to Ouedraogo's commitment to rural life. Saga
returns to find that his father has married the woman he loves, Nogma. Nogma and
Saga decide to disobey the law and escape to another village. Saga's brother,
Kougri, also refuses to follow his father's order to punish Saga with death.
Ouedraogo sympathizes with young villagers' desires for change, but treats his
elder characters with sensitivity. The film depicts the injustices of certain
traditional laws in addition to the difficulties involved in defying them. At
the same time, Ouedraogo deeply respects his country's cultures, and sides with
their battles for self-preservation.
Although Ouedraogo
often critiques strict traditional laws, his love for his African heritage is
clear in his films. His appreciation for African traditional life is expressed
poignantly in Un cri du coeur ( A Cry from the Heart ). Here, a
young boy named Moctar moves from his village in order to live with his
middle-class parents, who have immigrated to France. Pained by his nostalgia
for his village, and especially for his grandfather, Moctar has difficulty
adjusting. When he has visions of a hyena on the streets, he alarms his
parents, who hoped that France would provide Moctar with better opportunities. Un
cri du coeur , like numerous African literary works, examines the affection
shared between the older African generation and their grandchildren. When Moctar's
hyena, a strong figure in African folklore, appears for the last time, it takes
the form of his dear grandfather.
In the context of
African cinema, Ouedraogo's films have been especially successful. He is
committed to filming the specific realities of his home country, yet his themes
of fidelity, resistance, transformation, and the recovery of traditions have
touched diverse, world-wide audiences.
Idrissa
Ouedraogo • Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema Martin
Stollery from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004
A Collective Film Project - Idrissa Ouédraogo Filmography and awards
African Cinema - Kinema : : A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media Rod Stoneman from Kinema, 1992
The
Mirror of Memory: African Film and the ... - Senses of Cinema Niels Buch-Jepsen from Senses of Cinema, April 22, 2004
Strictly Film School
Acquarello
Kini
and Adams Michael Dembrow from the
Nonth Cascade festival of African Films
YAABA (Grandmother)
Nitrate
Online (Eddie Cockrell) capsule
review
New Yorker Films is to be commended for making director Idrissa
Oudraogo’s landmark 1989 film available to the public. In the language of
Moorea “Yaaba” means grandmother, and this elegant, beautiful film explores the
growing friendship between Bila, a young village boy, and Sana, an elder who
has been banished under suspicion of being a witch. Based in part on the
director’s memories of his own childhood, Yaaba has an epic sweep that is
nicely balanced with the universal quirks of rural life and the details of
Bila’s life. The film won the Gold Award at the 1989
In the Mooré language
of Burkina Faso, 'yaaba' means grandmother, in the sense of respect towards an
elder touched with wisdom and grace. And 'yaaba' is the name given by a young
village boy to an old woman ostracised by the community and forced to live
alone outside their walls. Ouedraogo's beautifully controlled film gently
illustrates how the villagers' prejudice towards the old woman reveals to the
boy an adult world of folly and generosity that he's about to join himself.
Amid the palpable heat and dust, characters are confidently drawnin the great
cinema tradition of the rural poor, wit more than an occasional nod to Satyajit
Ray's Pather Panchali. Oudraogo's direction of actors is superb, and as
in Cissé's Yeelen, an input of European money and talent gives the film
a polished surface. Unlike Yeelen, though, this seeks not to create a
magical universe, but to tell a direct, affecting story of superstition and
love that marks Ouedraogo as a talent to watch.
User comments from imdb Author: etoukesteph
(etoukesteph@yahoo.fr) from
The very touching story of Yaaba examines a major aspect of African and
societies; the complicity between the young and the old. Through his contact
with Yaaba, the young man discovers his ability to comfort her. As he chooses
to ignore the distance set by the rest of the village he undoubtedly becomes a
man.
Director Ouedraogo visits a theme he knows, as he grew up in a rural setting.
The emotions aroused as he pictures the
A proof that where such inspiration and ability to convey emotions exists,
appropriate means can contribute to making better movies. Idrissa Ouedraogo's
script could have been better exploited by a more experienced crew. The
inadequacy between the emotions expressed and the music is unfortunate, though
the script makes this a good movie.
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
In a small African village, a boy (Noufou Ouedraogo) is drawn to an old woman (Fatimata Sanga), despite her ostracism by the village as a witch. Defying his strict father, he makes friends with her, calling her "Yaaba" (grandmother).
The film is from
The director was fortunate in his choice of the boy who plays Bila, the main character. The young man is a most engaging performer - charming and mischievous. (I don't know if he is Ouedraogo's son or relation - the last name seems to be common there.) There are relaxed, humorous scenes between him and his girl cousin, who is always vowing never to speak to him again.
The picture is beautifully shot, edited and performed, with production values as high as any film made in the West. It's a story about Africans, for Africans, in the sense that it doesn't aspire to any overt political statements, yet the tale and its import are accessible to anyone. Ouedraogo's message is sweet and simple. Not only is it good for the health of our culture to value the elders and the traditions they represent, it is actually necessary for our survival. The child has not been hardened enough to judge by appearances - he senses the goodness of the old woman even though she is an outcast, and he is able to reach beyond the prejudices of his environment, helping his village in the process. Simple, perhaps even a bit simplistic, but in the end as satisfying as only the deepest truths can be.
Randy Parker
retrospective [3/4]
User comments from imdb Author: Lalit Rao
(cpowerccc@yahoo.com) from
African Cinema - Kinema : : A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media Rod Stoneman from Kinema, 1992
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[4/5]
Washington Post (Hal Hinson) review
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
TILAI (The Law)
Saga (Rasmane Ouedraogo), the wayfarer returned, learns that in his absence his beloved Nogma (Cissé), the girl he has waited so long to marry, has been taken to wife by his father. When a rendezvous is arranged between Saga and Nogma, they realise at once that their destinies are sealed. Committing incest, they know that according to traditional law ('tilaï') Saga's life will be called for. Explosive problems are unleashed. Who will be asked to kill Saga? Will he and Nogma be able to flee and avoid tragedy? Emphatically African, despite Ouedraogo's clear intention to universalise his themes, the story is mythic and simple. What is the role of law in society? To what does one owe one's greatest loyalty? If there are rules in social and moral conduct, are they fixed? The film is shot - with an emphasis on landscape - with a rare beauty, using a spare, ritualised style, aided by a bare and expressive score by Abdullah Ibrahim. Unflinching, almost to the degree of cynicism, Ouedraogo presents a fascinating, brave look at the contradictions at work in his impoverished homeland.
Edinburgh U Film
Society (Spiros Gangas) review
Following his own Yaaba, and in parallel course with
As Saga (Rasmane Ouedraogo) returns to his village after a long absence he is confronted with the bitter fact of his beloved girl Nogma (ma Cisse) having married his father. Ostracizing himself in an act of despair and anger, Saga leaves the village only to settle in a nearby hut. However he gets frequent visits from Nogma - who confesses that she still loves him which eventually lead to incest. Unluckily, they are seen by a villager. "Tilai", the law of the community, prescribes death as a punishment. This makes things more complex as nobody is willing to carry out such a task.
Ouedraogo conducts with remarkable acuteness a story which at first glance looks rather simple, perhaps due the modest nature of his cinematography, but which ultimately raises all sorts of questions as to the absolute or relative validity of social mores, the loyalty which members of a community give to them, and the extent to which the individual freedom and action is thwarted by them. The actors express a peculiar sadness, capturing splendidly the emotional atmosphere which the incident has spread to the village. Tilai might not stay in your memory for years but it will certainly provide, with almost uncomfortable honesty, a stark and idiosyncratic perspective of the society's most firm invention: law.
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Tilaï opens to a long sequence, off-axis shot of a lone traveler moving away from view as he slowly traverses the arid, featureless plain on a lumbering, overburdened mule and disappears into the desolate horizon. It is an appropriately distanced and alienated introduction for the weary, but sanguine Saga (Rasmane Ouedraogo) who, after an extended journey away from his native village, has returned to the foreboding sight of anxious villagers assembled at a clearing near the entrance of the intimate community. Greeted by his brother Kougri (Assane Ouedraogo) who heads off Saga at the footpath to the village on behalf of the family, Kougri informs him of an unforeseen (and reprehensible) development during his absence: the marriage of his beloved Nogma (Ina Cissé) to their father Nomenaba (Seydou Ouedraogo), having changed his mind and taken the reluctant young woman - once promised to Saga by the old man himself - as his second wife. Unwilling to accept Nomenaba's feckless and inconsiderate act, Saga defies his father's demands to return home and instead, decides to build a hut away from the village on a self-imposed exile from the inconsiderate elder. Deliberately insulated from the tribal repercussions of Saga's disobedience over the complicated affair, Nogma's curious and well-intentioned younger sister Kuilga (Roukietou Barry) stumbles upon Saga's new habitation and subsequently brings the unhappily married Nogma to the location, unwittingly sowing the seeds of temptation for the unrequited couple.
Idrissa Ouedraogo creates a distilled, lucid, and incisive cautionary tale of obdurate pride, self-righteous rationalization, and archaic traditions in Tilaï. By setting the film in pre-colonial Africa, Ouedraogo eschews the implication of external, social and ethno-political factors in order to present a culturally indigenous, yet universal examination of the bifurcation of tribal law (or more broadly, social custom) and moral judgment in the governance of everyday life (note a similar atemporality in the depiction of coercively imposed, ancient customs in Keisuke Kinoshita's Narayama Bushiko and Shohei Imamura's subsequent re-adaptation, The Ballad of Narayama). Ouedraogo's economic, but exquisitely realized compositions capture the pervasive austerity of landscape through predominantly medium and long shots that illustrate a paradoxical coexistence between an openness of environment and an intrusiveness of social setting inherent in village life: low property walls that preserve (if not foster) communality; expansive and desolate topography that aggregates population into localized, autonomous tribes for mutual cooperation; scarcity of population that engenders dubious (if not self-serving) laws by tribal elders to ensure survival and continuity of the community (and implicitly, their own ancestral lineage). In the end, it is this corruptive and implicitly incestuous relationship between entrusted authority and personal vanity that is reflected in Saga and Nogma's seemingly star-crossed destiny: the breakdown of humanity in the absence of humility, compromise, forgiveness, and acceptance of human frailty.
The New York Times (Caryn James) review
SAMBA TRAORÉ
Samba Traore Tony Rayns from Time Out London
On the face of it,
Samba is a village boy who struck it rich in the city. He comes home, marries
the single mother Saratou and opens a bar with his friend Salif. But then
awkward questions start to arise about the source of his wealth. The hint of
ethnography which hovered just off screen in Ouedraogo's Yaaba and Tilai
is missing here. This tale of a criminal trying to go straight is almost
generic, and could be set almost anywhere. Maybe this points the way out of
African cinema's impasse? As usual the director picks a fine cast and directs
them with great empathy.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Iain Lang]
Samba grew up in a village, but left to find work in the big city. When he returns wealthy and marries the most beautiful girl in the village, everyone is very happy for him. But how did he make all his money? Nobody cares at first, and he isn't telling; he builds a lovely new house, sets himself up in business, and his wife becomes pregnant - everything is going well for him. The audience knows where he got the money from, however, and know also that the police are after him. The curiousity which has been aroused behind his back breaks out into the open when he refuses to accompany his wife into the city when she has labour complications; instead he runs off into the countryside.
This film has been critically compared to Hitchcock, though its African setting makes it quite different in that respect at least. There is a great feeling of life within this movie, coming both from the naturalistic performances (many of the actors are non-professionals), and from the setting, with the action taking place almost totally outdoors. Alongside the film's moral dilemma, it is humorous and fun.
Films from
Strictly Film School Acquarello
On an uneventful evening at a gas station in
Samba Traoré is a serene and thoughtful exposition on guilt, human imperfection, and the inescapability of personal conscience. Idrissa Ouedraogo eschews regionalism and cultural specificity in order to create a universal parable on transgression and atonement: archetypal characters, gentle humor, and distilled mise-en-scène that illustrate the mundane (and egalitarian) human rituals of everyday life. From the opening sequence of the night-time armed robbery at the Burkino Faso gas station, Ouedraogo juxtaposes daytime sequences of the open plains and vibrant, borderless village with the concealed, darker elements of Samba's character: Samba's diversionary flute-playing for his parents at a campfire, his evasive behavior (and thwarted confession) towards Salif during an all-night drinking binge, his recurring nightmares that betray his fear of discovery. It is this subconscious acknowledgment of guilt that inevitably underlies Samba's long and difficult journey home: not the triumphant return of a native son, but a humble, irrepressible quest for a return to innocence in search of an elusive - and uncommodifiable - inner peace.
LE CRI DU COEUR
aka: The Cry of the Heart
aka: Hyena
Writer/director
Ouedraogo, maker of the acclaimed Yaaba, travelled to Paris from his
native Burkina Faso to shoot this intriguing tale of an African boy adjusting
to life in France, where he's troubled by memories and visions of his homeland.
Although the overall feel isn't as idiomatic as the film-maker's previous work,
Bohringer is on mercurial form as the former truckdriver who befriends the
child, and the blend of the experiences of two worlds and cultures is
arresting, if not fully achieved.
Variety (Deborah Young) review
Leading Burkina Faso
director Idrissa Ouedraogo transplants an African family to Paris in "The
Heart's Cry," a well-made, dignified, French-funded production. Presence
of Gallic star Richard Bohringer in a supporting role should boost local
interest, though pic's main audience will be viewers interested in African
cinema, plus some younger auds. A good fest run is assured.
Moctar (Said Diarra),
an 11-year-old boy living in Mali, leaves his village and sick grandfather to
go to Paris with his mother Saffi (Felicite Wouassi) to join his father,
Ibrahim Sow (Alex Descas). After years of hard work as an emigrant laborer,
Ibrahim now owns his own garage. He has prepared a nice home for his family,
and aspires for his son to become a doctor.
Moctar seems to be
adapting well to his new environment, until one day he begins seeing (or
hallucinating?) a scary hyena trotting down the street. His schoolmates laugh
at him and the school psychiatrist alarms his parents about the boy's mental
health. Everybody tries to persuade him he's imagining things. Only Paulo (Bohringer),
an outsider who befriends him, is willing to take him seriously and help him
overcome his fears.
Film's interest lies
in the way Ouedraogo (director of the prize-winning
"Yaaba,""Tilai" and "Samba Traore") sidesteps the
usual African-immigrant plot issues of racism and marginalization to
concentrate on the psychological adjustment problems of a child.
As Moctar, newcomer
Diarra is a serious, plucky hero who courageously engages the hyena in a fiery
showdown in pic's climactic scene.
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
LUMIÈRE
AND COMPANY
A Lumière centenary production (cf Les
Enfants de Lumière). Forty film-makers were invited, or challenged, to make
a Lumière movie: one shot, 52 seconds long, no direct sound, using an original
1895 camera. The result is a series of tableaux - elaborate, banal, enigmatic -
in which the favourite gambit has been to include the past and the present in
the same shot (Boorman, Yimou, Merchant Ivory). Several look like fragments
that have shaken loose from one of their director's features (Wenders,
Rivette), while the most distinctive (Greenaway, Lynch) blithely ignore the
ground rules. Even 40 of these film-lets don't add up to a feature, so each
director is quizzed on such topics as 'Is cinema mortal?' and even 'Pourquoi
filmez-vous?' And yes, in principle there's a 1995 'train arriving at La
Ciotat station' - that's Leconte, opening the proceedings. Except the train
doesn't stop there now.
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips, Jr.]
This was a really interesting idea. Gather 40 of the world's best directors, hand them the original equipment that the Lumiere Brothers used in 1896 to make the first moving picture, and give them 52 seconds worth of film. Add some ground rules, like you only get four takes to get it right.
What you end up with is an incredibly diverse
group of films, from Wim Wenders'
contemplative look over the shoulders of two men overlooking a washed-out city,
to David Lynch's
attempt to pack one of his full-length movies into 52 seconds. I mention these
two because the former was my favorite, and the latter was an example of what
not to do. The project was an attempt to push directors to look at film in a
different way, but Lynch didn't depart from his style a bit. Not that Lynch's
piece is bad. I was just hoping that he would do something completely against
type, to see what the limitations given him would do to his creativity.
Interspersed between the films are clips of the directors answering (or refusing to answer) questions about their art, like "Why do you film?" and "Is film immortal?" These are almost a distraction from the true reason for the documentary.
As a postscript, it is really interesting that it was only the American directors who attempted to tell stories with their films. The European, African, and Asian directors were content to use the films to create moods or atmospheres. What does that say about Americans?
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Lights Out Films [Alex Mestas]
Mixed Reviews [Martin Scribbs]
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe)
All Movie Guide [Dan Friedman]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
KINI AND ADAMS
Time
Out review
Geoff Andrew
User comments from imdb Author: Alejandro Gaspar from
Spain
"Kini and Adams" is a very human movie from African director Idrissa Ouedraogo. It tells the story of the two friends of the title and their dream of leave their small town and start a new life in the city with a old car they are repairing. It's a sad comedy, very funny at moments. The acting is wonderful and the beautiful African landscape is very well filmed, with a lot of color. The movie deals with the subject of how the poverty can affect the personal relationships, and the way the director handles it remind me the Charlie Chaplin movies, whose themes are similar in a certain way. It has been a surprise for me, the African cinema is absolutely unknown in occident, and movies like this prove that it deserves more attention.
Chicago Reader (Ronnie Scheib) capsule review
At the geographic and
moral center of Idrissa Ouedraogo's earlier films (Yaaba, Tilai)
there was always the village. Here there's no village, only a road. On the side
of the road is a broken-down jalopy that the title characters dream of fixing
up and driving to the city. The dream is an old one—it has defined their
relationship for years. It's not a particularly rational or well-thought-out
dream, which becomes increasingly evident as it begins to come true. When a
local quarry reopens, their lives become a paradox: they get well-paid jobs to
make money to fix the car to go to the city so they can get well-paid jobs. As
reality sets in and choices have to be made, their friendship begins to
unravel, their integrity to falter. Kini and Adams (1997), a Burkina
Faso-French-Zimbabwean-English production, made in English with South African
actors to reach a larger audience, consciously strives for universality. And
there's absolutely nothing simplistic in this powerfully told tale. The cast is
magnificent, and it's amazing what beauty can be found in a flat, dusty
landscape or in the gray and white stones of a quarry. Yet one misses the
unique contours of Ouedraogo's village and the specificity that rooted it so
deeply in time and space.
Variety (Deborah Young) review longer review
It's clear from the
start that this is a pipe dream, for Kini is married to the stern Aida (Nthati
Moshesh) and has a little girl to take care of. But the men's lives change when
a nearby stone quarry is reopened, bringing them jobs and regular salaries. It
allows them to get the jalopy moving but splits apart the buddies when Kini is
promoted to a position of responsibility while Adams remains a simple worker.
Working with a top
South African cast, Ouedraogo strives to bring out the elemental human themes
of male bonding, love between men and women, and conflicting loyalties. As the
story builds, jealousy and passion explode into classic tragedy that is too
predictable to have the impact intended.
One cares about the
characters, particularly Kini and Adams, and the perfs are excellent. But
scripters Ouedraogo, Olivier Lorelle and Santiago Amigorena have provided
overly simplistic motivations, and the terrible end of the duo's friendship in
the pic's contrived climax seems less like the hand of fate than the heavy
hands of the writers.
Plot gambits including
a set of stolen keys are telegraphed so far in advance it's a relief when they
finally arrive. A little more imagination would have gone a long way. Also
distracting is the uncomfortably blocky editing, which has a hard time keeping scenes
flowing into one another.
Kunene and Mohloki
deliver warm, full-bodied perfs, and it is a tribute to them that Kini (the
smart one) and Adams (the emoter) emerge as 3-D characters. As Kini's
no-nonsense wife, the frail-looking Moshesh is a rock of solidity who holds the
family together. John Kani is multifaceted as the ambiguous quarry foreman, who
dignifies Kini with status while he subtly undermines his moral fiber.
Shooting in impressive
widescreen, cinematographer Jean-Paul Meurisse creates a world of immense
natural spaces, verdant rolling hills interrupted by isolated shanties and a
powdery white quarry dotted with colorful workers. His work allows Ouedraogo's
strong feeling for visuals to shine through in every scene. Wally Badarou's
fine music score has the kind of breadth the film keeps reaching for.
Film
Scouts (David Sterritt) capsule
review
Variety (Deborah Young) review brief comments at Cannes
LA COLÈRE DES DIEUX
Burkina Faso France (95 mi)
2003
Films for Africa - ANGER OF THE GODS/ La Colère des dieux
This epic tale about royal bloodlines in
Overbay,
Joshua
AS IT IS IN HEAVEN C 72
USA (87 mi)
2013 ‘Scope official
site
Shot for a mere $40,000, this small apocalyptic film was
interestingly shot in ‘Scope by Isaac Pletcher, examining the cloistered lives of a
small religious cult in rural Kentucky where they all live in an isolated old
farmhouse on the edge of the woods, where it’s just a short walk to a nearby
stream where their members are baptized.
At the film’s opening, the dozen or so members are all dressed in white
robes as newcomer David (Chris Nelson) is baptized into their holy order, an
event that is met with smiles and hugs and a joyous affirmation. Shown with a minimal of dialogue, and no
backstory, we have no idea who these people are or what led them to this
isolated place, but all that are here are devout believers led by their elderly
paternalistic preacher Edward (John Lina), suggesting soon they will have the
chance to meet their maker, where the group needs to be prepared, driving them
into a frenzy promising the end is near, leading them to chant “We are the
chosen people!” No one seems surprised
or reluctant, as without any hesitation everyone in this tiny community is on
board with the promise of a better day to come.
Jumping ahead a year, their preacher unfortunately falls ill and refuses
medical treatment, asking only for prayers, but dies, naming David as his
chosen successor, which irks his own son Eamon (Luke Beavers), who believed he
was the natural heir apparent. The
funeral service takes place without David who is off in the woods praying for
strength, as he has doubts about his own abilities. It’s a fragile moment, where more than ever
they are viewed as lost sheep without guidance, but David steps up and
announces he’s received a sign from God that he must lead this group to the
promised land.
While Eamon has his doubts and suspicions about David, wondering if
perhaps his father was delirious and in a weakened state when he made the
choice, as so little is known about this newcomer, where there’s no lack of
faith in God, but David may not be the one to lead them, thoughts that he
expresses to his mother Azra (Carola Lina), but she assures him they all need
to stand behind David, as he is the chosen one.
Again, without any hint of outside information, they welcome a new
member (
Written by the director’s wife,
New York : As It Is in Heaven - Village Voice Michael Atkinson
An indie-film challenge: Try to make an earnest movie about a
doomsday cult in which the characters are not all bat-shit nuts. First-timer
Joshua Overbay's palm-sized hyperventilator plops down in the center of a tiny
millenarian church stationed in a sprawling Kentucky farmhouse, led by an aging
messiah (John Lina), and recently joined by a wide-eyed, doubt-free apostle
(Chris Nelson). There are no outside points of reference, just white shirts,
hymn humming, and Bibles raised to the ceiling. The doctrinal details of the
faith and its Rapture mythology are never mentioned -- just universalized
beseechments to the Lord and, when the patriarch falls ill, a power struggle
dominated by the newbie's questionable visions and his tragic insistence on a
fast leading up to Judgment.
Overbay's palette is carefully lyrical, at a benumbed Martha Marcy May
Marlene pitch, he pays attention to the verdant landscape and keeps his
cast at a pensive and watchful low boil. The upshot, though, becomes a
Rorschach test -- there is little overt suggestion that these content Americans
are deluded, however much the sweaty tension of the leads and owlish passivity
of everyone else (Overbay cast the film with faces that evoke flight-or-fight
response in the secular viewer) smacks of group dementia. If you're a
millenarian, you could read the film as a drama of the devout -- at least,
until the ending, when the clock runs out.
Facets : Cinematheque Schedule: As It Is In Heaven
Devoted to a simple life of faith in unforgiving Kentucky backcountry, a small religious sect seeks spiritual awakening as their Prophet (John Lina) is near the end of his life as his son, Eamon (Luke Beavers), prepares to step forward as the heir apparent. But, in his last moments, the Prophet instead names newcomer David (Chris Nelson) as his spiritual successor and tension mounts when he makes a prophecy about the end of the world in 30 days.
Fighting doubt every step of the way, David becomes convinced that the Almighty has picked him to lead the "chosen people" while feeling the weight of responsibility as their lives hang in the balance. But, when the prophecy does not come to pass, David struggles to cling to his faith while keeping his community together while Eamon expresses skepticism about David as the anointed of God, so everyone feels pressured to take one side or the other. Tragic events along their journey raise questions about whether the new leader is acting from the Lord's wishes or his own.
As It Is In Heaven deftly leads audiences down a twisting path of passion and devotion, envy and manipulation in this sympathetic portrayal of a modern-day cult leader and his spiritual convictions.
“As
it is in Heaven” heads to theaters ‹ The Asbury Collegia Alex Heath from The Asbury Collegian
A lively crowed filled the screening room in Asbury’s Miller Center for Communication Arts last weekend to watch a special screening of “As It Is in Heaven,” a film directed by professor Joshua Overbay.
The film was shot last summer and its crew consisted mostly of current and graduated Asbury students.
Centered around a small cult in rural Kentucky, the film is meant to explore the “dangers of an unquestioned faith,” according to Overbay. After the cult’s leader dies, a new prophet is chosen to prepare the group for the second coming of Jesus Christ.
After the screening, Overbay and some cast members answered questions from the audience. He described how he drew from his own southern Pentecostal roots and a fascination with cult leaders.
The film has been well received at multiple film festivals around the country, including Cinequest in California and the prestigious Nashville Film Festival. It recently won the best picture award from the Indie Grits Festival in South Carolina.
After having success in festivals, “As It Is in Heaven” will open in select theaters in the coming months. It will play at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington for a week at the end of July and in select New York City and Seattle theaters this summer.
Overbay is also planning on making the film available on-demand and digitally through services like Netflix.
Cult leader's will be done in 'As It Is In Heaven ' - The Seattle ... Moira Macdonald from The Seattle Times
A film whose very quietness seems to speak volumes, Joshua Overbay’s coolly mesmerizing “As It Is In Heaven” immerses us in the life of a religious cult whose members believe that the end of days is imminent. We don’t know how this group of a dozen or so came to live together in a big, painfully tidy old house far from a main road somewhere in the American South; here and there, a framed photograph or a stray gaze hints at a previous, different life.
With beatific smiles, the group does chores, baptizes new members in the river (all clad in white robes), prays together in the living room. “We are the chosen people!” says their leader, the Prophet (John Lina), beaming with charismatic joy as he moves among his followers, touching each, and you can see how a lost soul would be drawn to such assurance. But, early in the film, the Prophet dies, and the group’s new leader, a pale young man named David (Chris Nelson), announces that their days on Earth are numbered — that they will soon know heaven.
Written with less-is-more simplicity by Ginny Lee Overbay, “As It Is In Heaven” grows ever more devastating as the final days draw near, and as David’s pronouncements create both deprivation and division in the group. A clean white sheet becomes a shroud; a member’s motivations are questioned; a baby cries; a curtain billows softly, like angel wings, in the quiet wind. Little is said, and little needs to be said; this is a tale of desperate waiting and longing, told mostly through lingering close-ups on faces. “It’s not worth it,” a member tells another at one point. She looks back at him, an untold story of another life in her eyes. “It is,” she says. “It has to be.”
Film Review: Absolutism's Destructive Power in 'As It Is in ... Evans Donnell from Arts Nash
The Focus Pull Film Journal [Josef Rodriguez]
AS IT IS IN HEAVEN | Popcorn and Vodka
Murfreesboro Pulse [Justin Stokes]
As It Is in Heaven | Chicago Ben Sachs
Joshua Overbay - Popcorn and Vodka interview with the director January 30, 2014
Hollywood Reporter [Frank Scheck]
Chicago Sun Times [Bill Stamets]
New York Times [Jeannette Catsoulis]
Oxenberg,
Jan
THANK YOU AND GOOD NIGHT
Jan Oxenberg's "Thank You and Goodnight!" is a remarkable, moving document, not least of all because it may well be the most hilarious personal chronicle of death ever made.
The subject matter -- the decline and eventual death of the filmmaker's beloved Grandma Mae -- couldn't be more serious, but, though the picture has its wrenching moments, Oxenberg never allows the film to spin its wheels in easy pathos. Irreverence -- in this case, the gumption to laugh in the face of that which is profoundly unfunny -- is her saving grace; that, and the funky home-movie quality of the film. Scads of films masquerade as personal quests, as attempts to work through some private trauma, but this one has a genuine, if puckish, sense of psychic exploration.
The film is a homage to Oxenberg's grandmother, presented as a record of current events, as the cancer-ravaged old woman struggles through her last days, and as the memories of the director as a young girl (represented by paper cutouts) recalling the vital woman she knew as a child. Not many of us have the opportunity to know someone as indomitable and spirited as Oxenberg's grandmother, but the director gives us such an uncensored, yet affectionate view of her subject that we feel as if we've come to know her. And what a happy meeting it is. Even while being taped into place for radiation therapy, she's a trouper. When her granddaughter suggests that she's a ham, she responds, as always, with a ready quip. "Yes, that we know. But a kosher ham."
She takes to the camera without the slightest trace of self-consciousness or vanity. At times she comes across like a Catskill comic, and, as a filmmaker, Oxenberg has inherited her bone-dry sense of humor. We also get to know the filmmaker, to learn about the importance of her relationship with her grandma, their trips to the movies, their afternoons watching TV. "I did everything for you but give birth to you," Grandma says. "If your mother hears this she'll shoot me."
Oxenberg asks profound philosophical questions about life and death as if she had jotted them down in crayon; there's still something of the precocious schoolgirl about her. The issue of death is dealt with in much the same manner as Woody Allen dealt with it when asked if he believed in an afterlife: "No," he said, "but I'm taking a change of underwear just in case." With her cardboard double lying in an open grave, Oxenberg asks, Are we the same person after we die? Do we wear the same clothes? She asks other essential questions, such as "Was her life really rotten or did she make herself miserable?" And "Why didn't she teach my mother how to cook?"
Other family members chime in with their observations too, including her brother Ricky, about whom Grandma says, "Why doesn't he comb his hair and dress like a normal person?" Ricky, whose room looks as if there might be 10-year-old sandwiches lying about, is the family philosopher, and his rambling dissertations bubble out like uncorked verbal champagne of dubious vintage. The director doesn't bother to tidy up family messes either, particularly the tension between her mother, Helen, and her grandma. "I don't know what she has against me," Grandma Mae says. Nor, when the end comes, does the director flinch from the horror of her grandmother's deterioration, even when she is nearly incoherent and crying out for her mama.
The free-associative structure of the film allows Oxenberg to wander easily though her memories and casually shift emotional gears, from the seriousness of Mae's passing -- when Oxenberg goes to the hospital and, sitting in the nurses' office, takes the same Polaroid of a paper bag containing her Grandma's possessions 71 times -- to the trivial debates over who gets the TV set and the impressive collection of tchotchkes. With this wide-open technique she covers a tremendous amount of territory, including interviews with her grandma's friends, who are brought in to give often contradictory but always charming opinions.
Oxenberg gives us the full dimension of these people, their relationships and their view of the world. And yet, Oxenberg always presents her project as a playful enterprise. Though Oxenberg's sunny, self-mocking disposition may be a pose, a cover for the guilt and the loss and the million ways in which family members betray and disappoint one another, it's also a blessing and, in the best possible sense, a display of aesthetic taste.
Films
of Jan Oxenberg Michelle Citron
from Jump Cut, March 1981
Özge,
Asli
LIFELONG
(Hayatboyu) B- 80
Turkey Germany Netherlands
(102 mi) 2013 ‘Scope Website
Continuing in the Turkish tradition of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who receives a
debt of thanks in the end credits, this is a stylistically modern film,
beautifully shot by Emre Erkmen, where the centerpiece of the film is not the
characters themselves, but the home they inhabit. The Architectural
Digest style home was built by Turkish architect Hayriye Ozel, which
features a multi-story glass home with a winding staircase down the middle,
producing a Vertigo
(1958) effect. The home is situated in
Nisantasi, the upscale neighborhood of Istanbul, where its stark appearance may
as well be the leading character in the film, as it’s cool and sleek, stocked
with all the latest gadgetry, where it continuously looks so impressively clean
and sterile, and is such an impressive museum piece that it’s a shame people
actually have to live there. Can (Hakan
Çimenser) is the 50-year old successful architect who supposedly designed his
own home, while his wife Ela (Defne Halman) has an art studio on the first
floor. The only way up is via the
staircase, where feet produce a clanging sound of metal that resounds
throughout the house. Early on, Ela has
the home phone bugged, as she suspects her husband is cheating on her. The film is largely an exposé on the
deteriorating state of their marriage, owing a great debt to early 60’s
Antonioni films like RED DESERT (1964), which similarly uses modern
architecture juxtaposed against spectacularly hand-colored industrial
landscapes to express the neurosis and psychological alienation of the lead
character. But while Antonioni had one
of the great modern actresses in Monica Vitti, Özge’s disengaged and overly
detached characters are largely inert, expressing boredom and ennui throughout,
where luxury and wealth apparently have taken the starch out of their humanity.
Ela is a peculiar one, as her secret ways and pained facial expressions,
often showing no expression at all, are reminiscent of Ulrich Mühe as a 1980’s
East German Stasi agent in THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), where it could be the
face of a secret agent or spy, as she can listen in on phone conversations and
not be detected, or it could be the result of harsh treatment, including
behind-the-scenes police torture. It
comes as something of a surprise that the cause of such personal anguish is
simply marriage, especially when both are successful enough, career-wise, to
work on artistic projects of their own choosing, which allows for a great deal
of self expression. Can, however, is an
opinionated and overbearing husband with a self-righteous streak that can get
on anybody’s nerves, as he has to have things exactly his way or everyone else
is wrong. It should not be surprising
that neither one of these lead characters evoke much sympathy, and therein lies
the heart of the problem. With no
emotional or dramatic connection to anyone in the film, it’s largely a
stylistic exhibition. They have an
idealistic college age daughter (Gizem Akman) that Ela favors, often bringing a
smile to her face, but she’s equally spoiled and pampered, used to having the
best of everything given to her by her parents.
These fractured lives express an inexplicable emptiness, as wealth does
not necessitate happiness, where instead they largely avoid one another and
never have long conversations about anything, even art, or speak of anything of
significance, as they’ve become strangers where they’re simply too impatient to
even try, leaving long periods with no dialogue, where the film offers next to
no explanation for the root of their problems, allowing the audience to come to
their own conclusions.
Written, directed and edited by Özge, who was born in Istanbul but lived
in Berlin for more than ten years, the film does offer a portrait of a
successful woman in the middle-age period of her life, where the male
dominated, patriarchal effects of an Islamic society are largely unseen, but
perhaps felt in Ela’s constant doubts about herself. Even after a successful art exhibition, an
interpersonal light show where the audience follows Can as he immerses himself
in the ghostly color effect on bodies walking about, turned into mere shadows,
as if in a cloud, where her husband is impressed with her work, she remains
plagued by the negative comments received from her own daughter at the
breakfast table the next morning, asking why doesn’t she design things people
would want to hang on their walls? This
has to infuriorate her, as she’s most likely used to hearing that kind of
comment from shallow art connoisseurs, but from her favorite child, the one
offered the best education money can buy?
This has to hurt. While there are
abrupt moments when Ela insists she’s looking for her own apartment, supposedly
leaving her husband, the next thing we see is her husband by her side claiming
they are searching for an art studio.
Who knows what they’re really up to?
The issue is never really resolved, as they continue to avoid one
another by each claiming their own separate floor to inhabit in their home-made
castle, making it easy to avoid one another, though an apartment is chosen, an
act that amusingly bears a resemblance to Antoine Doinel in Antoine
and Colette (1962). This is a couple
that makes up their mind by never making up their minds, as the movie plods
along at a glacier pace showing precious little interaction, where little to
nothing happens, but the look of the film is impressive. The austere tone and artistic set design are
so spectacular that even with a subtext of dull and insufferably boring lives,
the film deserves merit.
Lifelong
(Hayatboyu) - Cineuropa
Nisantasi is a classy
BFI
Sight&Sound [Geoff Andrew]
February 11, 2013
Asli Özge’s
Lifelong, meanwhile, focuses on the mid-life crisis of an
Istanbul
Film Festival Lesley Chow from
Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2013
Far more accomplished but still predictable, Asli Özge's Lifelong
was the quintessential classy festival film; premiering in
Özge is one of a long line of directors who equate cutting-edge
architecture with barren inner lives. In La Notte (1961) and L'Eclisse
(1962), Antonioni made the combination work because his compositions
were always startling as well as harmonious; they never let our eyes rest. But
as the camera in Lifelong glides over the house's interiors,
it overemphasizes the link between spartan design and a sterile relationship.
Luckily, Özge is a skilful filmmaker, and the film withholds just enough
information to keep us watching. But its most memorable aspect is the way its
fifty-year-old actress holds the camera. As the wife, Defne Helman has a long
wan face — like an emaciated Modigliani — and a strangely beautiful body. She
gives a technically excellent performance, but her haggard beauty is the main
draw.
An artist and her architect husband in
Lifelong (Hayatboyu), a dark reminder of the ups and downs of life spent together, is a variant on the stolid deliberate dark-palette storytelling of Nuri Bilge Ceylan (who is thanked in the end credits). The drama should have a long ride on the festival circuit, where Turkish films draw audiences globally. Art houses releases should be strong in Germany (a source of part of the budget) and in France, but elsewhere this film about a souring bond will struggle.
Gaunt bird-like Ela and bearded Can are fiftyish, respected in their fields, and secular (there’s no mention of Islam in the film.) When Can leaves the house late in evenings, Ela suspects him of having an affair and starts tracking his phone calls. As the days plod along, both husband and wife feel the weight of their stress on their health. Love isn’t ripening.
Realism is Ozge’s style, in low gear, with the camera watching patiently for signs of adultery in the apartment and the car, and signs of emotion anywhere. Ozge is also taking cues from muffled French sex dramas where the coup de foudre is replaced by glacial distancing of one spouse from another.
As Ela, Defne Halman acts on her suspicions with stoic reserve, and a bit of telephone surveillance. Shots of the successful artist viewing her aging near-nude self in the mirror – the most fearsome picture frame - are a dreaded reality check that many in the fifty-ish audience have felt. As Can, a greying balding presence who’s still attractive to waitresses, Hakan Cimenser plays a man whose own worries prevent him from feeling his wife’s pain.
The couple’s home, designed by Can (a real house by the Turkish architect Hayriye Ozel), is a multi-level stage, horizontally transparent and vertically opaque. The location plays into the tension of a couple with secrets, as sonorous footsteps on the metal stairs issue gentle sounds of alarm. Thanks to cinematographer Emre Erkmen’s inventive design imagination, middle-aged disintegration has rarely looked so well-composed. A shot of the spiral stairwell, seen from top to bottom, looks like an unblinking omnipresent metal eye that witnesses everything.
As the story unfolds, Erkman’s camera turns to long close-ups of the couple, illustrious professionals in a comfortable class, whose faces can’t conceal their anxieties. There are a few false notes but Lifelong holds its emotional tautness despite a slow pace with painfully long camera stops on its weary characters.
FIPRESCI
- Festival Reports - Istanbul 2013 - Mental State of Istanbul John Asp from FIPRESCI, June 2013
CIFF 2013: Lifelong (Hayatboyu,
2013) Marilyn Ferdinand from Ferdy
on Films
Asli Özge -
Festival Scope: Festivals on Demand for Film ... Director biography
Hollywood
Reporter [Jordan Mintzer]
Ozon,
François
Ozon is one of the more inventive of all the French filmmakers working
today, and even the films that go wrong have gads more originality than what
passes for filmmaking today. I haven't seen his early shorts, which are
available on DVD, but I think I've seen all his main features since Criminal Lovers (1999). One
of the things he does better than anyone else working today is integrate
fantasy sequences which are indistinguishable from his reality, which leave the
viewer guessing what really happened. At this, he is brilliant, and
it's featured in nearly all of his films, but since it's so open to
interpretation, many don't recognize this at all, but are simply confused at
the narrative. He blends it so seamlessly that the viewer is still
impressed by the quality of filmmaking, even if they're not sure what
happened. Ozon also features exquisite performances from all, his
leads and secondary cast, so he's an actor's friend behind the camera. He
usually writes his own scripts, each is intelligent, crisp, concise, never
overlong, and his style of filmmaking is most appealing, where unlike
most filmmakers, he's not afraid to shoot in the daylight sun, where bright
colors in the open air are also regular features in his films. Early
in his career he used Hitchcockian twists, or bizarre relationships, never
afraid of twisted mentalities, but lately he's become much more literary, adapting
his most recent film Ricky from
a short story, his first film since Water
Drops written by someone else, where nearly the entire film can be seen as
a fantasy sequence projected from one of the characters. The film didn't
work for me, but that narrative aspect couldn't be more intriguing. While
the film before that, Angel, features
the most garrish, operatic, overtly melodramatic performance in his entire
career, a film I loved from start to finish as I found it hilariously
overwrought. The exaggerations were simply high comedy.
There's very little drop off between his best films, which are likely
his early 2003 – 5 films, each of which couldn't be more exquisitely made and
truly show him at the top of his game. As a gay filmmaker, he is
unabashedly gay, yet this doesn't in any way whatsoever alter the vision of any
of his films, which feature gays alongside heteros, all relationships to
be explored, where nudity can be pretty commonplace. Time to
Leave may be his most seriously overtly gay film, but it's hard to deny the
camp love affair he has with Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 8 Women,
and Angel, which are like gay burlesque romps.
Criminal Lovers is his most twisted, Under the Sand his
most Hitchcockian, Water Drops on Burning Rocks is his Fassbinder romp,
written by Fassbinder at age 19, terrific fun, 5 X 2 and Time to
Leave may be his most tender, Angel his most emotionally delirious, 8
Women his most hilarious, Swimming Pool his sexiest, and Ricky
one of his weirdest.
The only slight against him is that perhaps he's intellectually slight,
not into heavy Slavic drama, or even a sense of emotional urgency. Always
detached and minimalist, what he does do well is make short story films as
opposed to novelesque, where his attention to detail is excellent, his
performances superb, his poetic taste is always well chosen, and he's an
extremely concise filmmaker.
In my view, his best films are:
Water Drops on Burning Rocks (1999)
8 Women (2001)
Swimming Pool (2003)
5 X 2 (2004)
Time to Leave (2005)
Angel (2007)
In the House (2013)
Next tier:
Criminal Lovers (1999)
Under the Sand (2000)
Ricky (2009)
Le Refuge (2009)
Potiche (2011)
Young & Beautiful (2013)
Zeitgeist Films | François Ozon biography
François Ozon was born in 1967 in
According to critic Claire Vassé, Francois Ozon is “inspired by a high and
demanding idea of film. He is distinguished above all by his predilection for
portrayals of transgression and sexuality that lead the viewer into shadowy
zones he would never have thought to visit.”
François
Ozon > Overview - AllMovie
Rebecca
One of the most provocative and vibrant filmmakers to emerge during the 1990s, French director François Ozon has distinguished himself with dark, mordantly psychological films that draw their impact from Ozon's frank and often disturbing explorations of transgression and sexuality. Combining wry humor, sensitivity, and subversive insight with a talent for manipulation, Ozon has earned comparisons to Hitchcock and Chabrol, directors whose works have provided ample inspiration for the young director as he has staked out his own, impressive territory in the cinema.
Born in
Ozon followed See the Sea with Sitcom, his first feature-length film, in 1998. The film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is a black comedy about a seemingly perfect middle-class family that brims with sexual and psychological perversity. A number of critics pointed out that while it was entertaining, Sitcom also betrayed Ozon's roots as a director of shorts and, as such, ran out of steam midway through. More successful was Les Amants Criminels, which followed a year later. Another exercise in sexual brutality and psychological dysfunction, it centers on the experiences of two young murderers (Natacha Régnier and Jeremie Renier) who are imprisoned by a nefarious, carnally minded woodsman; Les Amants was described by one critic as "[an] extremely soft-core, gay, S&M fantas[y] based upon Hansel and Gretel." Earning comparisons to everything from Natural Born Killers to Bonnie and Clyde, the film strengthened Ozon's status as the enfant terrible of contemporary French cinema, although it also led some critics to note that this status didn't guarantee solid work.
The director next adapted an early, unproduced play by a
then-19-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder for his next
project, Water Drops on Burning Rocks. A
portrait of the dysfunctional relationship between the young, naive Franz (Malik Zidi),
his older, tyrannical lover Leopold (Bernard Girardeau), and their respective
fiancée and ex-girlfriend, Water
was a complex, claustrophobic, resolutely unsentimental love story that ended
in tragedy. It enjoyed great popularity, earning a Teddy Award for Best Gay
& Lesbian Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, and was
enthusiastically embraced by a number of European critics. This enthusiasm was
not shared by many American critics, who found the adaptation of Fassbinder's work less than satisfying;
however, critics were almost unanimous in the opinion that despite the film's
flaws, Ozon continued to reign as one of the most promising of
For his next feature the director known for his somewhat outrageous and sexually charged films cemented that status with a remarkably somber drama addressing the subjects of death, grieving and the ability to move on with one's life after losing a dear loved one. Starring Charlotte Rampling as a mournful widow whose husband simply disappears one day while the couple is on holiday, Under the Sand proved a haunting and affecting drama that indicated Ozon's versitility may stretch much further than some critics may have given him credit for. Nominated for Best Actress, Best Director and Best Film at the 2002 Cesar Awards, Under the Sand marked a newfound maturity that signaled great things to come from the director. Of course predictibility is a concept that seemingly doesn't exist in Ozon's celluliod universe, and for his next feature the director performed a cinematic about face with a campy musical mystery involving murder and an isolated house overflowing with suspect characters. Overflowing with an unprecedented cast of French film legends including Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart, Danielle Darrieux, Cathering Denuve, ISabelle Huppert, Virgine Ledoyen, Firmine Richard and Ludivine Sagnier, 8 Women proved an enjoyable take on the overexagerrated Hollywood musicals of yesteryear.
If stateside audiences had yet to discover Ozon, all of that would change with the release of Swimming Pool in 2003. Reuniting Ozon with Under the Sand star Rampling, the mysterious tale of a repressed older woman confronted by the carefree abandon of youth in a remote sitting may have indeed evoked memories of See the Sea, though Swimming Pool would opt to take the horrors of Ozon's earlier work in an entirely new and unexpected direction. While Swimming Pool may not have displayed the rich decadence of Criminal Lovers or the deeply moving drama of Under the Sand, the film ultimately treaded a comfortable middle ground between the two and offered a noteworthy introduction to his his work for the uninitiated.
François Ozon's Official Website
François Ozon biography and filmography from his website
François Ozon •
Great Director profile • Senses of Cinema
Thibaut Schilt from Senses
of Cinema, April 22, 2004
François Ozon - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia biography
François Ozon - Director, Screenwriter, Adaptation/Dialogue Writer ... UniFrance bio
François Ozon NNDB bio page
François Ozon Summary Bookrags bio
François Ozon Trailers and film ratings from Listal
François Ozon - French Film Director - IFC.com The 5 French film directors you should know
Enfant Terrible François Ozon Follows up with Slate of New Films Anthony Kaufamn from indieWIRE, June 16, 1999
FRANÇOIS AND HIS FRIENDS Peter Bowen from Filmmaker magazine, Summer 2000
Out of the Cave Charles Mudede from The Stranger, August 24 – 30, 2000
The Nightmare in the Fairy Tale: Francois Ozon's Criminal Lovers ... Susan Knecht from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1, 2000
Bright
Lights Film Journal | Ozon, Fassbinder: Water Drops on ... Gary
Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal,
October 1, 2000
BFI | Sight & Sound | Under the Sand (2000) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, April 2001
Buried
Alive: François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000) - Bright Lights ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001
La
Vie en Rage: Rampaging Women in Five French-Language Films: Les Voleurs; Regarde la Mer; Dreamlife of
Angels; Rosetta; Baise-moi Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 2001
BFI | Sight & Sound
| 8 Women (2001) Ginette Vincendeau, December 2002
15 February 2003: Love in a time of intolerance [the films of Douglas Sirk] Tim Robey and David Gritten from The Telegraph, February 15, 2003
Secrets of Swimming Pool Future Movies, July 4, 2003
Identity and Love Adam Bingham from Kinoeye, November 10, 2003
Francois Ozon: Monsieur extreme | The Independent Jonathan Romney, March 12, 2005
Short films by Francois Ozon Teazed, January 16, 2007
AvaxHome -> Francois Ozon - Six Short movie Collection (1988 - 1998) November 8, 2009
Ozon, François They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
François
Ozon Keeps His Distance | Village Voice
François Ozon Keeps His
Distance, interview by Dennis Lim from The
Village Voice, July 11, 2000
INTERVIEW: Francois Ozon’s Cinema of Perversity Anthony Kaufman interview from indieWIRE, July 19, 2000
A Conversation with François Ozon Interview by Terrance the Paris Expatriate, October 2, 2001
Dangerous Dames Jeremiah Kipp interview from Filmmaker magazine, September 26, 2002
Francois Ozon Fade to Black francois ozon 8 Women fade to black Fade to Black, Darroch Greer interview from Digital Content Producer, December 1, 2002
Gerald Peary Interview The Boston Phoenix, July 1, 2003
Francois
Ozon on 'Swimming Pool': Fantasy, Reality, Creation ... Erica Abeel interview from indieWIRE,
BBC - Films - interview - François Ozon Jamie Russell interview from BBC News, July 25, 2003
François
Ozon: Vampire of the senses | Film | The Observer Vampire
of the Senses, Liz Hoggard feature and interview from The Observer,
Film-makers
on film: François Ozon - Telegraph
Marc Lee discusses Douglas Sirk with Ozon, from The Telegraph,
Francois Ozon Interview by Moving Image Source, June 5,
2005, Read
Transcript (HTML), or Download
Transcript (PDF), or listen (18:12)
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Time to Leave (2005) Ryan
Gilbey from Sight and Sound, May 2006
kamera.co.uk - feature article - Interview - François Ozon: by ... Interview by Antonio Pasolini, May 12, 2006
V MAGAZINE | FILM | DEATH AND FASHION V Magazine interview (2006), also seen here: FILM
He's in the realm of the senses | The Japan Times Online Kaori Shoji interview from The Japan Times, December 7, 2007
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
François Ozon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Les Puceaux” by François Ozon | Short Films of the World see the entire film from Short Films of the World (3:34)
PHOTO DE FAMILLE
User comments from imdb Author: lippertokes from
I have often wondered what the early super 8 shorts of successful directors are like, and with this film I think I got a fairly good idea of what Ozon's early films are about. It is set in his families house, using his family as actors. It tells a black comic story about a boy who kills his family because they didn't like his movie they he showed them. The film is ultimately a home movie, shot by someone who is still trying to learn the basics of the medium. However, the story is told clearly and is never confusing as far as images are concerned. I suppose it can be summed up as an interesting little oddity by a director who has become quite famous.
"Photo
de famille" Jim’s Reviews
In this early short film, shot without sound, Ozon convinced his real-life mother, father, sister and brother to enact an unnervingly comic family snuff film. Although the filmmaking is rudimentary – Ozon wrote, directed, photographed and edited this 7-minute exercise by himself in his parents' house – he is already tackling the combination of horror and social satire which come to fruition ten years later in Sitcom. In fact, virtually all of Ozon's films twist the suspense genre in various ways; at their best – See The Sea and Under The Sand – the results are strikingly original. We can already see the beginnings of his experimentation with the thriller here in "Photo de famile." Although the crude visuals – eerily imitating a real home movie – are likely the best he could then afford, they actually make the son's nonchalance, as he offs his entire family one by one, even more disturbing than a slick style (even in 1988 most thrillers were shot like music videos). What's most unsettling is the genuine calm and happiness with which the boy positions himself among his nuclear family for the climactic snapshot. His boyish grin lets us know that at last he has his family exactly where he's always wanted them to be. If we didn't know that Ozon would develop into such a lucid filmmaker, we might be very worried about the kid photographing this family – both in fiction and real life. Clearly not for all tastes, "Photo de famille" is included complete on the Sitcom DVD.
DEUX PLUS UN
User comments from imdb Author: (ctimberl@hotmail.com)
from
A great contemporary French director creates a delightful short film. A young gay couple is vacationing at a seaside resort. The younger man has a sexual encounter with a woman 10 years older at the beach. What effect does this have on the gay couple's relationship? But that would be telling. Sex and nudity are handled tastefully by Ozon and are visually rewarding, especially for gay men and straight women.
LE TROU MADAME
User comments from imdb Author: Rogue-32 from L A.
This is one of the titles from the Collected Shorts of Francois Ozon. Le Trou Madame (The Hole Madame) is definitely from the mind of a Scorpio, a truly demented little piece that has to be seen to be believed. Not for the squeamish.
ACTION VÉRITÉ
User comments from imdb Author: Afracious from
This very short film shows us four teenagers, two boys and two girls, who sit down and play a game of truth or dare? It seems at first like harmless trivial fun, with the four youngsters teasing each other; then the final dare leaves them all speechless.
User comments from imdb Author: raymond-15 from
Francois Ozon has accumulated quite a number of short films over the years as we have watched him grow into an important film-maker. One of the great features of his work is the originality of his themes. This very short film is a mere incident in the lives of four teenagers daring to be different as they approach the boundaries of their sexual explorations. I liked the choice of characters - fresh-faced youth with a suggestion of cheekiness and naughtiness in their dancing eyes. There is a temptation to outdo each other in their game of "dares". Each "dare" probes deeper and becomes increasingly embarrassing to the participants until the result of the final "dare". Their laughter turns to shocked silence. I felt quite sick...but then Francois Ozon sets out to shock and in this respect it must be said he is once again successful.
The Films of François Ozon Mondo Digital
User comments from imdb Author: gradyharp from
DVD Outsider: François Ozon: Regardez la Mer and Other Short Films ...
LA PETITE MORT
User comments from imdb Author: jihel-ge from
The story is at the same time hard and touching, a deep diving in the
intricacies of family relationships. Very far from the kitsch-touch of some
subsequent movies of Ozon. Under the provocative varnish, a drama upsetting on
the relation father-son, the melancholy which presses the heart, on
homosexuality and the difficulty in liking and being liked in return.This film
is far from the voyeurism which one could fear with the reading of the script.
The play of François Delaive is definitively like a razor. People that like
this short-movie must absolutely see "Abattoir"
("Slaughter-house"), a movie from Didier Blasco (the co-scenarist of
"Petite Mort") with the same François Delaive.
User comments from imdb Author: raymond-15 from
Paul a young gay photographer is tormented by a photograph of himself as a baby. He believes he is incredibly ugly and rejected by his father. When his father is dying, he photographs him lying naked in his hospital bed. This is a form of revenge. After his father's death a box of family photographs is presented to Paul and he discovers the startling truth. The film depicts how tension and misunderstanding can arise within a family. Paul seeks solace in his relationship with his lover Martial who assists in his photographic activities. In his portrait gallery he has a series of photos of contorted faces of men at moment of orgasm. The title of this French film "La Petite Mort" translates as "Orgasm". The acting is good throughout, but for me the most moving scene follows the telephone call informing Paul of his father's death.
The Films of François Ozon Mondo Digital
User comments from imdb Author: gradyharp from
User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York
DVD Outsider: François Ozon: Regardez la Mer and Other Short Films ...
UNE ROBE D’ÉTÉ ( A Summer Dress)
User comments from imdb Author: raymond-15 from
There's not a dull moment in Francois Ozon's "Robe d'Ete". It's surprising how much is packed into this short film. While reclining on a deserted beach after a nude swim, a young gay is approached by a girl seeking a light for her cigarette. She invites him to make love in a wooded area near the beach. On returning to the beach. they find that all his clothes have been stolen. She lends him a summer dress to cover his nakedness and requests he return it next day. He rides his bike back to the holiday cabin dressed as a girl. His gay companion is sexually excited. Early next morning the young man returns to the sea and bids farewell to the girl whose holiday has ended. She suggests he keep the dress as a memento of their summer romance. It's a light-hearted film that captures the spirit of summer holidays by the sea, but perhaps not for those who are embarrassed by nudity or homosexual themes.
DVD Times - Francois Ozon: Regarde la mer and other short films Anthony Nield (excerpts)
The arguable highpoint, however, is Une Robe d’été.
As the title suggests it’s something of a summer movie and, indeed, Ozon would
appear to be on holiday – and enjoying himself immensely. Beautiful people,
drama of no consequences (ie, no darkness), smiles all round and a sing-a-long
to camera, it’s a pure delight. You could accuse it of being slight, but then
it’s also unabashedly fun. Indeed, paranoia would appear to stalk the rest of
the disc.
But don’t let this be off-putting. For our director always
comes to these films with tremendous intimacy. This mirrors what’s happening
on-screen – the characters being myriad friends, family, lovers and one night
stands – and Ozon always empathises, whether with teenage misfits, an eyeless
whore or a photographer who’s relationship with his father has gone well beyond
breaking point. Furthermore, he wishes for us to share in that intimacy.
A Summer Dress | CINEMOI | French Movie Channel
Following a fight with
his lover Sébastien, Luc goes to the beach to cool off. There he meets a
charming, young Spanish woman, Lucia, who seduces him and they make love in the
dunes. For Luc this is his first time with a woman. When they return his
clothes are stolen and he is forced to borrow a dress from Lucia on his ride
home, much to the surprise of his boyfriend.
This early short from
the catalogue of François Ozon is one of his most entertaining works and it
duly picked up the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival. On a shoestring
budget, Ozon brings together an engaging script, three enthusiastic
performances and some lush summer photography to culminate in an intriguing and
accomplished work, which goes beyond its deceptively simple appearance.
Few directors tackle
the subjects of sex and relationships with the frankness and vigour of Ozon and
in these fifteen minutes he proves how effective his approach is. A wonderful
play on gender roles and sexuality, Ozon’s film is bustling with energy and
quality, signaling the director’s imminent foray into feature filmmaking and
eventual position as one of the most prolific and internationally acclaimed
filmmakers working in France today.
"A
Summer Dress" Jim’s reviews
Ozon's acclaimed short comic film, "A Summer Dress" (1996), is often presented – as on the DVD – with See The Sea (reviewed above), to make a full, and eclectically satisfying, program. "A Summer Dress," one of the last of three dozen shorts which the director made between 1986 and 1997, is a buoyant work of imagination and genuine charm. Among other awards, it won Best Short Film at the L.A. Outfest.
"A Summer Dress" begins with handsome, low-key 19-year-old Luc (Frédéric Mangenot) relaxing with his boyfriend Sébastien (Sébastien Charles) on their summer holiday. When Sébastien insists on lip-synching, and swiveling his hips, to the singer Sheila's French version of Sonny Bono's (!) song "Bang! Bang!," Luc makes a beeline for the beach. There he is approached by Lucia (Lucia Sanchez), a young woman eager to make his acquaintance. As the plot unfolds, we learn much more about Luc's memorable day, and discover the playfully ironic meaning of the title.
Pairing this short with See The Sea works on several levels. Both of these well-crafted, and inspired, films take place near the beach, revel in the sensual pleasures of summer, feature trysting in the nearby woods and, centrally, show protagonists exploring their sexuality. Luc does so overtly and with delight, while Sasha in See The Sea approaches it more subtly and with tension.
All of the actors in "A Summer Dress" are natural and convincing. Frédéric Mangenot is especially adept at conveying, subtly but clearly, the wide range of feelings which Luc experiences.
The writing and direction (both by Ozon), design, cinematography, use of sound and music (even "Bang! Bang!" has its place) are all excellent.
This film succeeds beautifully in capturing not only the unique delights of a summer holiday, but a young man's continuing sexual awakening.
Ozon's accomplishment shown in this short reveals how supremely ready he was to create his first feature, See The Sea.
A
New Week exploring queer cinema (UNE ROBE D’ETE) A Downtown Boy’s Thoughts, December 5, 2008
AvaxHome
-> Francois Ozon - Six Short movie Collection (1988 - 1998)
DVD Outsider: François Ozon: Regardez la Mer and Other Short Films ...
A
Mother, Her Baby And a Disarming Guest
Janet Maslin from The New York
Times,
SEE THE SEA (Regarde la Mer)
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Confirms everything you knew about how freaky and messed-up French people are. Story: Island-dwelling woman with little baby welcomes a drifter into her home while her husband is away. Drifter turns out to be psycho, as does mom. Despite a 52 minute running time, an awful lot of freakiness is traded back and forth before the ultimate, tragic ending. Very, very twisted.
On the surface the story seems slight. Set on Ile d'Yeu, one of the French Atlantic islands, it concerns Sasha (Hails), a lonely English housewife - abandoned for the week by her businessman husband - and their screaming baby. Happy to have the company, she allows a French backpacker to pitch her tent in the yard. Tatiana (de Van) is sulky and taciturn, but is she also dangerous? Ozon builds an overwhelming sense of nightmarish unease from seemingly banal detail; every composition, every cut signals a startling, disquieting talent. The scene in which Tatiana 'borrows' Sasha's toothbrush is worthy of Repulsion.
DVD Times - Francois Ozon: Regarde la mer and other short films Anthony Nield (excerpt)
Regarde la mer is clearly the centrepiece. The film to
herald Ozon as a major French filmmaking talent (though previous shorts had
made him something of a mainstay on the festival circuit), it’s a
Polanski-esque scare piece. Bookended by the cries of a young child, it plays
some clever tricks with psychodrama clichés and proves far more satisfying than
the standard
Regarde la mer
(1997) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Regarde la mer is one of those rare films which provides a
genuinely unsettling viewing experience and will have you wondering why for
hours afterwards. Its impact lies not in its subject, but in the subtle
way in which it plays with and skilfully undercuts our expectations, threading
some very nasty undercurrents into a situation which, on the surface at least,
seems so quaintly banal. It is an exploration of the human psyche which
is both darkly sinister and chillingly accurate, all the more effective by
virtue of its understated, rigorously naturalistic approach.
Remarkably, this is not the work of an established world-renowned cineaste but
a thirty-year-old novice filmmaker who had a mere dozen or so short films under
his directorial belt. With its sombre, introspective tone and dark
subject matter, the film presages many of Ozon’s subsequent full-length films –
notably Les Amants criminels (1999) and Sous le sable (2000). Ozon’s
well-known fascination for psychological derangement, murderous intrigue and
sexual perversion is readily apparent in Regarde la mer, which is an
ingenious re-interpretation of the great Ingmar Bergman film Persona (1966).
As in Persona, Regarde la mer is about the relationship between
two women who are polar opposites in character, and how they experience a
gradual personality-swap as they get to know one another. Sasha and
Tatiana each recognise in the other an aspect of femininity which is missing in
herself and which each is desperate to attain. For the child-burdened
housewife Sasha, Tatiana represents absolute freedom, the freedom to go
anywhere, the freedom to satisfy wild sensual desires and live like a wild
creature. Tatiana sees in Sasha the loving mother she has secretly
yearned to be, fulfilled through the maternal bond with the child born of her
own flesh. At a darker, more metaphysical level, Sasha’s lives but
craves death, whilst Tatiana is a dead soul who yearns for life.
The women’s chance meeting allows both of them the opportunity to realise what
they most desire – but with terrible consequences. A fascinating but very
disturbing film.
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
“Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.” In the mouth of a character in Mel Brooks' Spaceballs, it's a laugh line. But how should we react when a filmmaker presents that proposition as true, as a profound discovery rather than a cynical canard? We might laud him for making us face up to unpleasant realities, celebrate his daring iconoclasm and disregard for convention. Or, taking a step back, we might realize that the art of shoving ugliness in people's faces is a relatively unchallenging one, and it takes a great deal more integrity and moral intelligence to examine why it is that ordinary people fall prey to disreputable characters.
Sasha (Sasha Hails), the heroine of François Ozon's See the
Sea (Regarde La Mer), is almost impossibly naïve, a slender, fair-haired
Parisienne who finds her vacation home invaded by the sullen, dangerous-looking
Tatiana (Marina de Van). A backpacker who wanders into the well-kept yard of
Sasha's vacation house (filmed on the pristinely beautiful Ile d'Yeu),
Tatiana—clad in torn jeans and jacket even under the summer sun—sets off audience
alarm bells from the moment she chain-smokes her way onto the screen, but Sasha
hesitates only a moment before allowing this mysterious stranger to camp in her
backyard. Given the presence of Sasha's 10-month-old child and the absence of
her husband (held up in
Sasha's arbitrary credulity wouldn't be worth dwelling on if it weren't central to the film's plot, and if it weren't a piece of what makes See the Sea both promising and unfulfilling. Like Under The Skin's Carine Adler, another director who recently made the leap from shorts to features, Ozon has an exquisite sense of composition and visual texture. Captured by Yorik le Saux's camera, the beach where Sasha and her daughter (and later Tatiana) sun themselves is immaculately threatening, the sky and sea a vivid, almost electric blue. The doors of Sasha's cottage are the same blue, giving way to a dark interior split by vertical slashes of light.
But Ozon's visual skill isn't matched by a similar talent for character. Ozon has to make Sasha's world immaculate, unsullied, because only a woman who lives in such a world could be as foolhardy as Sasha. See the Sea seems to start with the tacit assumption that to be good-hearted and trusting is to be fundamentally out of touch with the way the world works. That menacing sky hearkens back to Paul Bowles novel The Sheltering Sky, where a pair of arrogant Americans face death and madness in the African desert; behind the sky's shelter is a vast, annihilating blackness. There's no racial component to the story in See the Sea, but the basic idea seems to be the same; there's a real world out there, and Sasha needs to have her nose rubbed in it.
What's disturbing about this is not Ozon's cynicism, or his (understandable) contempt for bourgeois values, but the surgical precision with which he draws lines between Sasha and Tatiana. He seems intent on polarization: Sasha stands for refinement and bourgeois values, Tatiana for feral self-interest. Sasha brags about undergoing natural childbirth; Tatiana quizzes her—in graphic detail—about the extent of her vaginal tearing. (Tatiana's preoccupation with Sasha's maternity is reflected in the film's original title; the French word for "sea" is a homonym for the word for "mother".) It's not that Ozon has anything against Sasha, or that he seems to take any particular delight in Tatiana's assault—first covert, then finally explicit—on Sasha's home. In fact, he doesn't much seem to care about one or the other. The plot proceeds inexorably but leisurely towards its unpleasant conclusion; Ozon's interest seems mainly to be in keeping us waiting for what we already know is coming.
Keeping at a distance and withholding information may be useful tools for building suspense—at which Ozon excels, in a mechanical way—but they're not great tools for characterization. If he backed Sasha's overfriendliness with more credible psychological detail—being lonely because her husband's detained isn't enough—if her actions were motivated by more than symbolism, See the Sea might have begun to break real ground. The movie skips over the most interesting question: why would a respectable, middle-class woman with a 10-month-old baby invite a seedy-looking backpacker into her house? (That's the question the newspapers ask the next day.) See the Sea hints at erotic and psychological answers—more by way of reference to Persona than anything else—but ultimately Ozon's naturalistic, long-take style, so intoxicating in small doses, proves insufficient to probe the situation's complexities.
See the Sea, which runs just under an hour, is preceded by Ozon's 15-minute A Summer Dress, a more lighthearted look at perversity by the seaside in which a woman's dress proves the necessary ingredient to rekindle the relationship between two gay men.
Jim's Reviews - See The Sea & "A Summer Dress"
La
Vie en Rage: Rampaging Women in Five French-Language Films: Les Voleurs; Regarde la Mer; Dreamlife of
Angels; Rosetta; Baise-moi Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 2001
Goatdog's
Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review
[4/5]
June miscellany Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
David N.
Butterworth review [3/4]
DVD Talk (Ian Jane) dvd review [3/5]
DVD Outsider: François Ozon: Regardez la Mer and Other Short Films ...
AvaxHome
-> Francois Ozon - Six Short movie Collection (1988 - 1998)
Video
Business capsule dvd review Mayna Bergmann
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment Weekly review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
A
Mother, Her Baby And a Disarming Guest
Janet Maslin from The New York
Times,
SITCOM
After a series of acclaimed shorts, Ozon goes for the big one - and misses. A vaguely Buñuelian exercise in taking a swing at the bourgeoisie, the film traces the implosion of an apparently typical family under the baleful influence of a predatory pet rat. The story is essentially Boudu Saved from Drowning with a rodent in the Michel Simon role. It is sharpest etching minor social infractions, like the father's complacency, but lacks the restraint which lent Ozon's short films such a powerful, sinister undercurrent. Instead, we get bizarre fantasy, arch black comedy and a charmless camp sensibility.
Sitcom Jim’s reviews
When an unsuspecting businessman brings home a pet white mouse – which had been used for "lab experiments" – every member of his family, and visitor, who's bitten by the rodent begins acting out their most taboo fantasies. Very strange, very funny, and gorgeously designed and shot; if 'lemon chiffon' is your favorite color, this just might become your favorite film (although the subject matter could prove a stumbling block). Although not nearly as rich as the two best 'mysterious stranger brings liberating anarchy to a repressed middle class family' pictures I know – Renoir's fabulous Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) and Pasolini's seductively unnerving Teorema (1968) – I think this is an interesting addition to Ozon's often impressive filmography. Besides, how can a little white mouse hope to compare to those other enigmatic liberators, Jean Gabin or Terence Stamp?
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
A farcical send-up of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema, Sitcom
may be the worst film François Ozon has ever made, but not unlike Pedro
Almodóvar's Kika, it's queering of genre conventions is still
refreshing. To the utter revulsion of his wife, a bourgeois dad brings home a
pet rat the day after the family hires Maria (Lucia Sanchez) to do their
housework. Here, the white rat is a symbol of sorts for displaced desire, and
the rodent's fur affects all who touch it: Nicolas (Adrien de Van) becomes a
raging queen; Sophie (
Sitcom
(1998) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Having made a dozen or so controversial and often hugely imaginative short and medium-length films, François Ozon achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his first full-length film, Sitcom in 1998. Since, the young director (barely into his thirties) has quickly acquired a reputation as one of the most radical but exciting new talents in French cinema, winning critical acclaim for his film eye-opening 2000 film Sous la sable.
Sitcom is certainly less polished and satisfying than some of Ozon’s subsequent films, and most spectators will find the jet black comedy (involving almost every permutation of sexual perversion, including bestiality) to be in extreme bad taste. In spite of this, it is an extremely entertaining film in places, with some moments of unbridled and genuine hilarity, yet at the same time it has an intellectual appeal which other intentionally "sick" comedies lack. Ozon has clearly been greatly influenced by the work of Luis Buñuel, the Spanish master of film surrealism, since he freely adopts some of Buñuel’s techniques (such as the merging of reality and dreams), often to great effect.
The film is as much a satire on the trite formula of television sitcoms, with their predictable characters and nauseatingly cosy atmosphere, as on French bourgeois life. Comedy at the expense of the middle classes is hardly a recent feature of French cinema - examples of the genre can be traced back to the origins of cinema itself, and some of the world’s greatest directors (Buñuel most obviously) have made a career knocking wind out of the sails of the Bourgeoisie. What is new, and more exciting, is that Ozon adopts the sitcom format for his film and then breaks all of the rules (plus a few others), the result being the total opposite of a cosy family teatime comedy.
The main reason why Sitcom works as well as it does is because of its unpredictability and its novelty value. For this reason, it has to be a one-off, and even by the end of this film Ozon is having to resort to more and more extreme (and increasingly surreal) plot developments to prevent the film from sagging.
Ozon should be commended on the originality of his script and, more crucially, on his ability to make the best out of his limited resources. Sitcom is a very low budget film by today’s standards, but that is scarcely noticeable, or important; indeed it is only really apparent at the end of the film, when’s Ozon’s ambitions for an explosive finale overtake his directoral judgement.
Sitcom may not be a faultless piece of cinema, but it is relentlessly funny, daringly original, shockingly stylish and terrifyingly unpredictable.
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [2.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]
User
comments from imdb Author: The_Void from
User
comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Graham Greene from
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: dbdumonteil
User
comments from imdb (Page 3) Author: Chris Knipp from
Film Journal International (David Noh) review
Harvey's
Movie Review (Harvey O'Brien) review
Qwipster's Movie
Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3/5]
DVD Verdict
(Rob Lineberger) dvd review
Fulvue
Drive-in dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
A New
Week exploring queer cinema (SITCOM)
A Downtown Boy’s Thoughts, April 28, 2008
Mike D'Angelo review
DVD Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd
review [1/5]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review
[3/5] Ilana
Lindsey
iofilm review Rebort
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Sitcom (1998) – François Ozon PRE Share Anything, September 29, 2009
Cinema
of the World: François Ozon - Sitcom (1998)
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
San Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
FILM
FESTIVAL REVIEW; Until the Erotic Encounter With the Rat, It Was Cool Janet Maslin from The New York Times, April
9, 1999
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
SCÈNES DE LIT
Scènes de lit Time Out London
Seven vignettes with different couples on the point of soiling the sheets, as it were. In one tale, we learn the secret of a whore's speciality (giving head while singing 'La Marseillaise'), in another, a woman balks when her partner refuses to leave the light on ('Do you mind if I masturbate?' he asks politely). Sharp, funny stuff; Ozon respects no sexual boundaries, but unlike the disappointing Sitcom these provocations aren't scoring points at the expense of bourgeois stereotypes; any transgressions are ultimately liberating.
User comments from imdb Author: petershelleyau from
This collection of 7 shorts by Francois Ozon shows the talent that he would later display in longer form - humor, sensuality, erotica, empathetic treatment of homosexuality, and unsettling behavior. All of the shorts involve 2 people in a bed, and the camera-work is mostly single medium-shot setups. This means that he relies upon performance and inventiveness of narrative to make his point. Also Ozon adds an Ingmar Bergman bell ring after each short. The Black Hole, about a prostitute and her client, features Francois Delaivre who was in Ozon's earlier Le Petite Morte, with a fanciful horror-style conclusion. Mr Clean is solely reliant upon performance to create an unsettling character in opposition of the title, whereby there is no other evidence to support what he claims. The Lady is the weakest of the group, presenting a somewhat aimless tale of the coupling an older woman and a young boy. Presenting a woman as 52 and still attractive and sexually active, suggests a theme that Ozon will later present with Under the Sand and 8 Women. Heads and Tails is a gimmicky piece with a funny conclusion. The Ideal Man uses humor to undercut the tension of both a woman in love in pain, and lesbianism. Again Ozon has an older woman pursuing a younger person, though what could be interpreted as predatory behavior is diluted by the context of patience and empathy. Love in the Dark is the most successful of the shorts in terms of sustained tone. It shows a woman's sexual frustration over men's predilections, and gets laughs from a reversal of the social expectation that a women prefers to make love in the dark. What elevates the situation is how innocent and dumb and of course gorgeous the man still is. Ozon also can't help being a little heterophobic here. The Virgins covers the same male bisexual territory as his short Summer Dress, for which he was criticized for seeming homophobia, or at least an argument that a gay man cannot be exclusively gay when there is a woman available. However by adding a gay man's curiosity about women to counterbalance a straight man's curiosity about another man, this time is seems less problematic. Here also Ozon shows two beautiful men in erotic and amenable behavior.
The Films of François Ozon Mondo Digital
User comments from imdb Author: gradyharp from
DVD Outsider: François Ozon: Regardez la Mer and Other Short Films ...
X2000
User comments from imdb Author: jotix100 from New York
Francois Ozon is one of the best new directors that have appeared on the French
cinema's scene in the last two decades. "X200" is a collection of
short films Mr. Ozon created, perhaps for his own amusement, since the format
doesn't allow for commercial distribution. For a little more than one hour the
director tries to give us an insight of how his mind works. It shows a playful
and relaxed Francois Ozon.
The best tale of the ones presented is without a doubt, "La Petite
Morte", in which a young gay photographer comes to terms with his dying
father, a hated figure who he blames for everything that is wrong in his life.
His sister, who has come to take him for a visit at the hospital, is shocked to
find him taking pictures of the sick man, who appears to be a terminal cancer
patient. The irony of the film comes at the end as the sister gives this young
man some family pictures that show how his hatred for the old man was wrong.
"Scenes De Lit" also illustrate how the director deals with sex. In
"Truth or Dare", four teens are playing the game with a sexual twist.
"X2000" shows us a young man who is hungover and discovers ants in
the kitchen, in one of the most enjoyable short in the picture. The funniest
being, the one about the prostitute whose specialty is singing "La
Marselleise" while performing on a customer, who must pay extra for the
privilege! All in all, we are left wishing for more, but we are thankful for
watching this collection, as it's clear Francois Ozon was in a playful mood
when he decided to put all these short takes together.
User comments from imdb Author: Graham Greene from
There seems to be two very distinct arcs to the career of Francois Ozon. On
the one hand, we have a cinema of reference, with films like Sitcom (1998),
Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) and 8 Women (2002) taking influence from
the disparate likes of Buñuel, Fassbinder, Sirk and Minnelli. On the other hand
we have a cinema of examination, with projects like Under the Sand (2000),
Swimming Pool (2003) and 5x2 (2004) looking at characters trapped-insect like
beneath a distancing sheet of glass and dealing exclusively with
heavily-wrought personal issues devoid of the more obvious fun and frivolity. X
2000 (1998), an eight minute project about time, perspective and pre-millennium
tensions, would seem to be closer in tone to the latter approach; with the
sense of wit and humour of some of the director's more colourful works being
replaced by an almost Haneke-like feeling of cold, clinical abstraction.
At the minimal eight minutes in length this is obviously something that will be
seen, quite rightly, as a vague sketch of a work; one that feels unfinished and
unfocused or indeed, as an early experiment into the same thematic territory of
Swimming Pool and 5x2. The plot, as discussed by other reviewers, is slight to
the point of seeming nonexistence; a vague accumulation of scenes intended to
create a greater whole, as opposed to a sense of cohesion. It does tell a
story, though one that remains indistinct and enigmatic; entirely undone by the
subtly of Ozon's direction and the broad opportunities of interpretation
offered by the particular use of iconography. In my mind, it is a film about
looking and seeing. Or not seeing? Regardless, there is an interesting germ of
an idea presented in this short film wherein the central character looks
without necessarily intending to look, and discovers things. In the first
instance, there's the sight of a women bathing from his apartment window. In
the second, he discovered a colony of ants in his kitchen.
Alongside these images there are allusions to the constant sex and death motif,
with naked forms in a still and silent embrace, and further ideas of cleansing,
confusion, freedom and alienation. These issues are conflicting and
contradictory, thrown together in a jumble but clearly leading to something
with meaning. Perhaps all of this is pointing towards the kind of revelations
eventually discovered in a film like Swimming Pool, with its notions of sight
and perception, seeing without looking, looking without finding, etc. Again, at
eight minutes, X 2000 is far too slight to really dig any deeper or find the
answers that we're looking for, but regardless, there's something undeniable
fascinating about the film and about the way in which Ozone has carefully put
it together.
The Films of François Ozon Mondo Digital
User comments from imdb Author: gradyharp from
DVD Outsider: François Ozon: Regardez la Mer and Other Short Films ...
CRIMINAL LOVERS (Les Amants Criminels) C+ 77
Alice (Régnier, from Dream Life of Angels) is a provocative bitch, toying with the vulnerable affections of Luc (Rénier), who loves her, he thinks, even if he can't get it up. After she manipulates the murder of another boy, they go on the run in the woods, and the movie turns into a macabre gay fairytale, with nods to everthing from the Brothers Grimm through Night of the Hunter to Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The flashback structure maintains the intrigue, but the movie never rouses much sympathy for its protagonists, and you sense that on some sick level Ozon finds it funny. Accomplished it may be, but it's just too knowing to be truly involving.
Criminal Lovers Jim’s Reviews
"Hansel and Gretel" meets Natural Born Killers, by way of The Night of the Hunter and the poetry of that teenage genius of angst, Arthur Rimbaud. A seductive, emotionally deranged teenage girl convinces her confused boyfriend to help her kill the class stud. Then things become really unusual as the two, fleeing from the crime, get lost in a forest and are held captive by, yes, an ogre. If you thought Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) was as far as a Freudian revision of a fairy tale could go, wait till you see what Ozon does.
Although I found the film rather uneven, to say that it consistently held my attention is an understatement. It's also one of Ozon's most visually rich pictures, capturing both the creepy neatness of the middle-class world and the alluring chaos of the forest scenes. The boy's homoerotic relationship with the ogre, who keeps him on a leash, is not easily forgotten.
Les Amants
criminels (1999) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
In many ways, Les Amants criminels is an impressive film, belonging to a new breed of French film noir. The creepy combination of fairy tale, gory crime and sado-masochistic eroticism makes a surprisingly compelling, albeit utterly disturbing, combination. After a confused and messy start, the film soon has little difficulty holding the viewer’s attention, although this arises largely out of a morbid fascination over what is about to happen next.
The film is however badly let down by its director’s excesses. There is an over abundance of male nudity, and the sex scenes are gratuitous and often demeaning to the film. The biggest fault is probably that Ozon fails to make his lead characters sympathetic – Natacha Régnier comes across as just a mixed up evil bitch, constantly snapping at her supposed lover, whilst Jérémie Rénier appears incapable of standing up to anyone, passively succumbing to his sexual predators’ every whim. Too strong and canny to be innocent victims and too shallow and nasty to be heroes, both characters just fail to arouse our sympathy, and in a perverse way we enjoy what they get.
The film’s dramatic ending could have saved the film, but Ozon’s all-too-obvious attempt to fashion a moral conclusion just fails to convince and it is too visibly a crude attempt at audience exploitation. Forget the subtle Bressonesque redemption idea. What matters is showing how nasty the French police are. Surprise, surprise.
Many will like the film for its dark thriller content and erotic titillation. The acting is by and large quite good, in spite of the flawed characterisation, with both Natacha Régnier and Jérémie Rénier showing great promise. Overall, though, this is not a great film. Its director’s motives are far too apparent and some of his attempts at cleverness look faintly absurd. If you don’t look too deeply and are not put off by the gratuitous doggy-collar sex and violence, you may find the film enjoyable, in a morbid film noir kind of way.
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Sean Axmaker
Imagine Hansel and Gretel by way of "Natural Born Killers," with the dark, sexually charged undercurrent of a gothic horror movie.
Natacha Regnier, so fragile in "The Dream Life of
Angels," is the intense teenage temptress
The film opens on the murder, Luc attacking with the righteous fury of a man wronged and Alice standing by, fascinated and even a little thrilled at her power.
Hiding the body in the trunk of a car, they hit the road like an
adolescent Bonnie and
Part psychodrama and part perverse love story, "Criminal
Lovers" is the latest from Francois Ozon, the bad boy of French cinema,
his most beautiful film to date, shot in rich, deep colors and dripping with
atmosphere, but his least satisfying. Ozon's script refuses to define his
characters by family or social situation. We get barely a glimpse of
That works fine for Luc, a veritable innocent manipulated by a
femme fatale in training,
But it leaves
A completely unforeseen third act twists into territory at once tender, troubling and thoroughly unsettling, more fascinating than compelling. Ozon has crafted a film beautiful and mysterious and emotionally dense, but it's unaffecting and static. It's a passionate vision thick with eroticism, but the musky atmosphere gets a little thick and murky.
The
Nightmare in the Fairy Tale: Francois Ozon's Criminal Lovers ... Susan Knecht from Bright Lights Film Journal, October 1, 2000
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
SF, Horror
and Fantasy Film Review review [3.5/5] Richard Scheib
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [1/5]
New York Observer
(Andrew Sarris) review
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [4/5]
PopMatters Josh Jones
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review
CinemaSense.Com:
Movie Reviews of the Heart review [2.5/4] Craig Sones Cornell and Anna-Maria Petricelli
Eye for
Film (Nicholas Dawson) review [4.5/5]
The Films of François Ozon Mondo Digital
Shadows on the Wall [Rich Cline]
Eye for
Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review
[3/5]
A
New Week exploring queer cinema (LES AMANTS CRIMINELS) A Downtown Boy’s
Thoughts, April 25, 2008
Criminal Lovers (1999, François Ozon) « Diary of a Mad Movie Fanatic
Entertainment
Weekly review [C-] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
BBC Films review Neil Smith
Philadelphia
City Paper (Sam Adams) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Bob Graham) review
FILM
REVIEW; Wise Up, Bonnie and Clyde: You're No Babes in the Woods Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times, July 21, 2000
WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS (Gouttes d’eau sur pierres
Water
Drops on Burning Rocks Tony Rayns
from Time Out
Cynics would argue
that this is so much more achieved than Ozon's first two features because there
was a real script: it's based on an early, unproduced play by Fassbinder. The
plot is quintessential Fassbinder: middle-aged businessman picks up a young
straight, seduces him, installs him as his lover/housekeeper and begins to tire
of him. Then the boy's jilted fiancée shows up, soon followed by the
transsexual who sacrificed everything for love of the businessman. Emotional
recriminations ensue. With French actors playing German characters, quoting
Rilke in German and, in one show-stopping scene, grooving to German pop of the
'70s, it manages to be 90 per cent pure Fassbinder and 90 per cent pure
Ozon. A perfect co-feature for Chinese Roulette.
BBCi
- Films Michael Thomson
To a young film enthusiast growing up in the late 1960s and early 70s - still young enough to be hugely impressed by the shock of the new but too young to have devoured the French New Wave - the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (and certain of his German New Wave cohorts) revealed that cinema could be bent and twisted into all manner of interesting shapes. A tyrannical drug addict who died of an overdose at 36, Fassbinder was also one of the most creative forces in post-war European cinema and regularly transfixed audiences with films which honed in on the bleakness and the sourness of the human condition. These were often films which were static, hanging for their impact on ambiguous characters and rich dialogue.
"Water Drops On Burning Rocks" was a play written, but never performed or filmed, by the 19-year-old Fassbinder, and his lifelong creative absorption in mind-games, manipulation and the cynicism of relationships is already abundantly clear. A gawky young man is picked up by a middle-aged homosexual, they move in together, and their relationship first teeters, then becomes more complex when the two men's girlfriends come to visit. The ebb and flow of this knot of relationships is this very theatrical film's central focus, and French director François Ozon never tries to hide the staginess (or the sex).
Extraordinary though it is that the teenage German talent already had such a twisted view of relationships, it is easy to see why he left this play on the shelf. Despite some mesmerising acting (particularly from Bernard Giraudeau as the cold, hostile egotist), both characters and situation are little more than routine; mind you, at least the director stuck to the unflashy theatricality of Fassbinder, instead of buzzing around the set with a camera in order to cover the cracks.
Gouttes
d’eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000)
James Travers from FilmsdeFrance
Freely adapted from an obscure play by the famed German director
R.W. Fassbinder (written when he was just 19), Gouttes d’eau sur
In some ways, Gouttes d’eau sur
Gouttes d’eau sur
As has become an Ozon trademark, Gouttes d’eau sur
Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes has allowed François Ozon to develop and refine his approach to film making, to the point that he must now surely be considered one of France’s most intelligent, imaginative and technically competent film directors. An auteur in the truest sense of the word, Ozon has conceived a new, exciting and totally unpredictable style of cinema which – judging by the success of some of his subsequent films (notably 8 femmes) – is proving to have a greater impact and far wider appeal than one might have expected.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Water Drops On Burning Rocks (1999) Richard
Falcon from Sight and Sound, November
2000
The
Six months later. Franz is now living with Léopold as his chattel. The lovers row about domestic details, but the sex keeps them together. During one of Léopold's business trips, Anna arrives and finds Franz depressed. She has had an offer of marriage but still loves Franz and is determined to win him back. They sleep together. Anna is enthused by Franz's new-found sexual confidence; Franz, though, is reluctant to leave. Léopold arrives and shows a sexual interest in Anna. Léopold's ex-lover Véra, who visited while he was away, then turns up. Léopold, Anna and Véra have sex; sidelined by Léopold and Anna, Véra joins Franz in the living room where she tells him she had a sex change to maintain Léopold's interest. Franz swallows poison and phones his mother. When Léopold and Anna discover his body, Léopold takes control. Leaving Franz's corpse in the living room, he continues having sex with Véra and Anna.
Review
François Ozon's third feature is a treat for devotees of European film culture. In adapting for the cinema a play written in the mid 60s (but never staged) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon conjures a complex film experience out of what would have been relatively thin - if typically provocative - theatrical material. The reasons why Fassbinder never directed the play are a matter of speculation; perhaps he considered this first work an apprentice exercise - the claustrophobically perverse sexual-power dynamic between young student Franz and older sophisticate Léopold finds echoes in the relationship between the two gay protagonists of Fox and his Friends (1975) and the lesbian couple in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972).
Having already established his credentials as a pasticheur in Sitcom (1998), Ozon here adopts some of the most obvious stylistic traits of mid-period Fassbinder. There is the claustrophobic single-interior location (Léopold's flat) and the use of overt theatricality for specifically cinematic aims (Ozon even employs captions to introduce each act). The one exterior shot, repeated throughout the movie, isolates the characters - first Franz and Léopold, then Franz and his girlfriend Anna, then Franz and Léopold's ex-lover Véra - from each other within the apartment's window frames; and when the prowling camera rests, it entraps the characters within a constricting mise en scène similar to that in Fassbinder's Douglas Sirk-inspired melodramas. The result is quite an achievement, a startling homage that reflects Ozon's preoccupation with the black humour of potentially menacing power games, visible in his chilling 1997 film Regarde la mer, as it does Fassbinder's conviction that, in the words of one of his film's titles, love is colder than death.
The play, whose first three acts Ozon is remarkably faithful to, turns on a series of reversals. The unhappy Franz - subtly and confidently played by Malik Zidi - is first seduced by the charming Léopold (the older man even takes time to wash the drinks glasses before taking Franz to bed). By the end of the second act, it is Franz who is cleaning the glasses, looking after the flat as Léopold's live-in lover. A recurring Fassbinder pattern, in which a passive victim internalises his oppression and in turn oppresses others, looks set to establish itself when Anna arrives, wanting to rescue Franz. By the third act, though, Franz is still the victim; as Anna reciprocates the sexual interest Léopold takes in her, Franz's meagre raison d'être is the domestic tasks he performs for Léopold. Unlike Franz Biberkopf, the hero of Fox, this Franz isn't a working-class rent boy used by a middle-class gay sophisticate, but a student, while Léopold is an insurance salesman, driven by the need to earn a living. The power relations between them are initially ambiguous - Franz, for instance, chooses to succumb to Léopold in the first act. But by the end, in the land of blind desire, Léopold is king and Franz as doomed as Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis.
But Franz is not the only victim: Véra, who appears, like Marlene in Petra
von Kant, in Fassbinder's original as a wholly subjugated and thinly
sketched character, is here given a tragic backstory, taken by Ozon from
Fassbinder's In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) - she underwent a sex
change, Véra tells Franz, to maintain the fickle Léopold's interest. As Véra moves
into focus in the final act, so too does the difference between Ozon and
Fassbinder. In performance terms, Ozon's film is polished, where Fassbinder's
would have been rawer, reflecting perhaps the borderline sado-masochistic
relationship between the director and his cast. Here Ozon's close-ups allow us
to enjoy the subtleties of Bernard Giraudeau's performance as Léopold, in some
senses an embodiment of the archetypal old French roué (the character in the
play is 35, not 50). Ozon uses popular music, not to illustrate bathetically
the longings of the characters as Fassbinder might have, but to manipulate
audience mood - there is a sudden joyous outburst as the characters start
boogying to 70s Euro pop song 'Tanze Samba mit mir' by Tony Holiday before, in
a moment of pure farce, Léopold claps his hands and ushers Anna and Véra into
the bedroom for sex. If Ozon is necessarily self-conscious in his
cross-cultural foray - ending the film with the title track 'Traüme' from
Françoise Hardy's only German-language album, having Franz quote a Heine poem
in German, and starting the film with a series of retro postcards of Germany -
he at least proves he is far more than a tourist in Fassbinder's peculiar, and
fast receding, 70s Federal Republic.
Soundtrack:
"Träume" - Françoise Hardy; "Symphonie No.4 en sol majeur" - l'Orchestre Philharmonique Tcheque; "Zadok the priest" - Choeur et Orchestre Bach de Munich; "Requiem - Dies Irae"; "Tanze Samba mit mir" - Tony Holiday; "Vor der Tür wird nicht geküsst" - Susi Dorée; "Wohlauf noch Getrunken & Miniature : Auf d'r schwäbsche Eisebahne" - Thomas Kern-Niklaus
Water Drops On Burning Rocks Jim’s reviews
Bright
Lights Film Journal | Ozon, Fassbinder: Water Drops on ... Gary
Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal,
October 1, 2000
Kiss Me Deadly |
Village Voice J. Hoberman, July
11, 2000
filmcritic.com
Drops on Burning Rocks Jeremiah Kipp
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from
The Films of François Ozon Mondo Digital
eFilmCritic Reviews iF Magazine
Full
Story Bob Thompson from JAM!
Movies
EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown
The Reel Life Review [Paul Benmussa]
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
San Francisco Chronicle [Bob Graham]
FILM
REVIEW; Leopold & Franz & Anna & Vera in Berlin A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
FILM;
One Enfant Terrible Translates Another
Leslie Camhi from The New York
Times,
UNDER THE SAND (Sous le sable) B 85
France Japan
The subject matter of
prolific young French auteur François
Ozon's fourth feature - a happily married, childless woman's traumatised
denial of her husband's sudden death by drowning - may, superficially, suggest
a move on the director's part to calmer, more classical, waters after the sly,
shocking tactics of his more transgressive early melodramas. Indeed, in
focusing so sharply on Charlotte
Rampling's tautly controlled, subtly nuanced performance as the elegant,
Paris-based university lecturer who painstakingly, if psychotically, maintains
a pretence of continuity, Ozon's film can be appreciated as a quality star
vehicle, and as a tribute to the graceful mystique, sexual potency and
fractured sensibility that the now 56-year-old actress brings to the screen.
The movie's emphasis, however, gradually becomes more philosophical, abstract
and quietly macabre. Hence a persuasive, intimate study of grief is transformed
into a more general critique of romantic self-delusion in conventional
marriage, made all the more unsettling by Rampling's film persona which,
ultimately, remains impenetrable.
Under the Sand Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Charlotte Rampling, familiar to
American audiences as the woman who helped Woody Allen rape Fellini in Stardust
Memories, has done more to fetishize death than any other actress
imaginable (see Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter). In François Ozon's
brilliant Under the Sand, a college professor (Rampling) reinvents
erotic desire in the aftermath of her husband's death. Jean (Bruno Cremer)
mysteriously disappears during a trip to the beach and is presumed to have
drowned. Plagued with grief, Marie is haunted by the overwhelming lack of
closure. She convinces herself that Jean is still alive and carries on
conversations with him as if he were in the room. Marie returns to the city and
to her job as a professor. While teaching a class on Virginia Woolf's The
Waves, Marie discovers that one of her students was one of the men that
tried to find her husband's corpse. Under the Sand is more staid than
Ozon's twisted Criminal Lovers though both films are fraught with all
sorts of erotic displacements and rituals of denial. Marie isn't so much crazy
as she is desperately holding on to the idea that her marriage was perfect;
though she welcomes the advances of a new man (Jacques Nolot), she can't
separate herself from the memory of her husband. During sex, Marie bursts out
in laughter, amused by the fact that she has never had a man so light lying on
top of her. This humorous moment is also overwhelmingly sad and evokes her
pained desire to reinvent sexual pleasure in wake of her husband's physical
bsence. Although her "imaginary Jean" is accepting of her new
relationship, Marie is nonetheless guilt-ridden. In her attempts to absolve
herself of this guilt, she involves Jean in her fantasies. Ozon evokes the
duality of life and death when Marie masturbates and imagines both Vincent and
Jean's hands all over her body. This is the most remarkable scene of the year.
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak, short review
Less is deliciously, mysteriously more in Francois Ozon's mesmerizing story of a midlife crisis that slyly finds resolution by not resolving itself.
This beguiling film, which was part of the Seattle International Film Festival lineup, is blessed with a wonderfully complex performance by Charlotte Rampling.
Rampling plays Marie Drillon, a 50-something college professor relishing the upcoming summer holiday that she and her slothlike, hulking husband, Jean (Bruno Cremer), have planned. When the film opens they're on their way to the beach, happily discussing their itinerary for the first day of vacation.
Next morning they're gazing into the brilliant glare of the sea. Jean says he's going for a swim and ambles to the water. Marie fades into a deep, sun-stoked sleep. When she awakes, Jean is gone. Marie runs up and down the beach, asking a youthful couple if they've seen her husband. But no one has noticed.
So has he drowned -- or has he left her?
When the film returns to
Ozon, who is only in his early 30s, has shown a flair for mining the supernatural from the ordinary in films such as "Water Drops on Burning Rocks" and "See the Sea" and this time he turns a lean story line into a haunting template for midlife crisis.
This is a ghost story that is unique because its ghosts lie within the living. Ozon paints a fascinating, elusive portrait of a middle-aged woman torn between her fondness for the familiar -- the easier memory of a missing husband -- and the future, which ostensibly represents a different, perhaps difficult, unknown.
There are no gratuitous answers in this fascinating, visually gorgeous cinematic study that will frustrate some viewers by its ambiguity. But for those who have the patience, there's a profound and transcendent understanding of the great weight and weariness in the space between the routine of a safe marriage and the frightening blank void that forces Marie to look at herself once the security of her other half has disappeared.
Sous
le sable (2000) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
With his first three full-length films (Sitcom, Les
Amants criminels and Gouttes d’eau sur
Compared with Ozon’s previous films, the subject of Sous le sable is both simple and realistic, and therein lies its seductive charm and devastating power. The film is about a middle-aged woman, Marie, who is unable to accept the loss of her husband and who resolutely holds onto the belief that he is still with her. Occasionally, reality breaks through her spell of denial and self-delusion, like a ray of sunlight breaching the gap between a pair of drawn curtains. But so strong his her love for her husband and so reluctant is she to let go that her desire to keep him in the present tense soon reasserts itself. The film’s effect stems entirely from the way it allows us to see and experience the world from Marie’s perspective. Seen from a distance, the character would appear sad, mad or pathetic. The genius of this film is that it lets us enter into her world, lets us experience her inner disintegration as she struggles to reconcile her irrational hopes with an inescapable reality.
With a self-discipline hitherto unseen in his work, the talented Mr Ozon shows us the minimum, just enough to allow his audience to latch onto the mood of his characters and accompany them on their faltering journey towards oblivion or enlightenement. Watching the film is an absorbing yet totally unsettling experience. What we are witnessing, from a privileged position, is the torment of a human spirit collapsing under the effort of trying to superimpose her flawed mental picture of the world on a reality that she cannot bear to see. In virtually every respect, Sous le sable is François Ozon’s darkest, most haunting, most accomplished work to date.
Ozon has stated that the idea for the film came from an unhappy childhood recollection. Whilst on holiday with his family, he would often see an elderly Dutch couple on the beach. One day, the Dutch husband disappeared, apparently having drowned, and the disarray of his wife left an impression on the young François Ozon. When he came to make the film, over 20 years later, Ozon had difficulty financing it. Having shot the first part of the film (leading up to the disappearance of Jean), the rest of the filming had to be put back six months until the director had acquired the funds to finish his film. When filming was resumed, it was undertaken relatively speedily with Super 16, in contrast to the 35mm film which was used for the first part of the film. This gives the film a striking point of discontinuity which reinforces the impression that, after Jean’s disappearance, we are in an altogether different world, that seen by Marie in her state of abject denial.
However accomplished Ozon is in his art, it is unlikely that Sous le sable would have succeeded without a strong, hugely talented lead actress. The director and his film are blessed by a mature English beauty, Charlotte Rampling, who gives the performance of her career in a role that appears to have been carved out for her and for her alone. From the first scene to the last, Rampling’s presence dominates the film – the camera capturing both her external beauty and her internal conflict in equal measure. With courage and skill which are rarely seen in cinema, the actress takes her character to the limits of human experience and what we see is a tortured victim who might easily be any one of us. Cinema is rarely this explicit or effective in depicting an intense psychological trauma, and for the audience participating in this adventure is both an illuminating and harrowing experience.
Although Charlotte Rampling is the film’s focus, the supporting
actors are well chosen and each contributes magnificently to the film’s
impact. Rampling’s husband in the film, Jean, is played by the bear-like
Bruno Cremer, an actor who is now best known in
Credit should also go to Jacques Nolot for an equally convincing performance as Marie’s new lover, Vincent – a character who is, for Marie, no more than a corporeal stand-in for her physically absent husband. Indeed, Marie’s strained relationships with all of the characters in the film (after her husband’s disappearance) emphasise repeatedly the impression of a woman who is trying to live simultaneously in two worlds. One of the film’s dramatic highpoints is the vicious confrontation between Marie and Jean’s mother (movingly portrayed by Andrée Tainsy). The tension in this relatively simple scene is almost unbearable and provides a convincing trigger which enables Marie to finally look reality in the face and emerge from her period of denial.
The final segment of the film is daring in its simplicity but it is hugely effective, with Marie finally having the courage to confront her grief and begin a new life without her husband. Ozon then comes dangerously close to blowing it all by tacking on a needlessly surreal ambiguous ending. Fortunately, Rampling’s performance is so strong at this point that this indulgence is easily forgiven. In a curious sense, the film’s ending works quite well, closing the mystery of Marie’s ordeal with an enigmatic question mark about her future life – a life which, of course, we can only guess at. Who knows what else may lie there, hidden, under the sand...?
BFI | Sight & Sound | Under the Sand (2000) Ginette Vincendeau from Sight and Sound, April 2001
Review
Like the beauty of its star Charlotte Rampling, Under the Sand is stylish
and slightly haunted. Its director François Ozon suffuses the everyday life of
the Parisian middle classes (those classic clothes, those elegant apartments)
with a sense of dread. The film opens in a manner reminiscent of George
Sluizer's The Vanishing and Dominik Moll's recent Harry, He's Here to
Help, with an 'ordinary' couple driving to their holidays and stopping at a
motorway café. But, as in these two films, we know immediately that something
is wrong: Jean yawns all the time and refuses his wife Marie's discreet
advances to make love; their country house is too neat, the beach too empty.
Back in
Although there is an element of mystery (Is Jean actually dead? Did he
commit suicide or did he drown accidentally?), Under the Sand is not a
thriller. Instead the film unfolds as the drama of a woman's grief, an
apparently normal woman who goes to work and to the gym, who meets her best
friend for lunch, takes the Metro and shops. Ozon's minimalist mise en scène of
the quotidian - a departure from his farcical fantasy Sitcom - places him in
the classic tradition of Claude Sautet or Bertrand Tavernier. Charlotte
Rampling's intense but understated performance makes Marie utterly credible in
her grief, even, initially at least, when she is denying that her husband is
dead. Rampling's magnetic looks grace the film in a series of still
compositions, both in the luminous scenes at the seaside and the darker ones in
Marie increasingly appears like the beach in the film: beautiful but vacant. In contrast to the plumper but happier Amanda, who's a great cook, Marie must have, as Vincent says, "other talents". But what are they? We soon find out they have little to do with her work, as her lecturing consists of reading bits from a book (one wishes it were that easy). Revealingly she tells Vincent that she has long abandoned plans to write. The film also makes two pointed references to her childlessness. Marie's life is thus presented as devoid of creation: her agency, such as it is, is her fidelity to a (literally and metaphorically) ghostly husband, about whom she knows so little that she failed to notice his clinical depression when he was alive; and her talents are erotic, as spectators might have inferred from Rampling's star persona. But Marie's eroticism is no joyful sensuality. She works hard at maintaining her beauty (the insistence on the gym begins to make sense), and her eroticism is repeatedly frustrated by her husband, whether alive or dead: she interrupts love making with Vincent with an odd laugh at the thought of Jean's body.
Concurrently, Marie is emphatically linked with death, through her association with water, the medium of her husband's disappearance: she teaches Virginia Woolf's The Waves and is seen through an aquarium at a Chinese restaurant. Marie's association with eroticism and death is also strongly based on Rampling's 'perverse' star image, derived from such films as The Night Porter (Nazi erotic games) and Max mon amour (love with a chimpanzee). Here, Marie/Rampling is the attractive but ultimately deadly femme fatale. In a brilliantly vicious sketch of the in-law from hell, Jean's mother tells Marie, who "could not even create a family", that Jean was suffering from depression because she bored him. Death by boredom, then - a new twist on the femme fatale's destructive ways. This may stretch the spectator's credibility - Bruno Cremer's Jean, even alive, is a heavy, silent presence against Marie's brightness and beauty, and you can't help thinking he may be the "boring" one. But we will never know, as Jean's life is otherwise off screen. Apart from playing out the cliché of wife and mother fighting for 'their' man, the point of the mother-in-law scene is to drive home further Marie's deadliness; it's when the mother suggests Jean has escaped to get away from her that she finally decides to see his body: for her, therefore, he is better dead than free.
Under the Sand is ostensibly the portrait of a woman who fantasises about her dead husband, but it actually presents us with a male fantasy of a morbid and unhinged femininity. As Violette Nozière and Betty Blue show, French cinema loves beautiful, tragic women who go crazy. That these women are portrayed by such expert directors as Claude Chabrol, Jean-Jacques Beineix and Ozon, and that they are embodied by such talented actresses as Isabelle Huppert, Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Rampling, makes the fantasy more attractive, but also more bitter.
Under The Sand Jim’s reviews
Buried Alive: François Ozon's Under the Sand (2000) - Bright Lights ... Gary Morris from Bright Lights Film Journal, July 1, 2001
Women
of Substance | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, August 9, 2001
UNDER THE SAND Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Nitrate Online (Paula Nechak) review long review
The Village Voice: Melissa Anderson Charlotte’s
Web: Luxuriate in a Half-Century of Rampling at the IFC Center, January 05,
2016
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [4/5]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
kamera.co.uk - film review - Under the Sand directed by François ... Jim McCann
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [4/5]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer) dvd review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
CineScene.com (Mark Netter) review
Talking Pictures (UK) review Jaap Mees
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [3.5/5] Rachel Deahl
Film Journal International (David Noh) review
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Under The Sand Vadim Rizov from Movie Vault
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]
Xiibaro Productions (David Perry) review [3.5/4]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]
hybridmagazine.com review Sandhya Shardanand
DVD Talk (Jason Bovberg) dvd review [4/5]
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
David N. Butterworth review also seen here: Offoffoff.com, a guide to alternative New York
The Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
Francois
Ozon + Charlotte Rampling + Marc Jacobs
El Bosquejo,
Inexplicable
sex scenes - Steady Diet of Film
Jam! Movies review Liz Braun
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
BBC Films (Jason Korsner) review
Philadelphia City Paper (Sam Adams) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Under The Sand
Movie Review & Film Summary (2001) | Roger Ebert
FILM
REVIEW; The Intoxicating Embrace of Grief Holds Both Pleasure and Distress A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
FILM;
The Joy of a Comeback That Leaves the Past Behind Alan Riding interviews Charlotte Rampling
from The New York Times, April 29, 2001
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
8 WOMEN B+ 90
Time
Out review
Tony Rayns
Ozon couldn't get the rights to remake Cukor's The Women, and so he fell upon a forgotten boulevard-theatre mystery by one Robert Thomas as a vehicle for divas of all ages. The play is an Agatha Christie knock-off set in the 1950s: all eight women stuck in a snowbound country house had motives for killing the patriarch Marcel, whose corpse lies upstairs. Ozon re-runs all his strategies from Water Drops on Burning Rocks: he wallows in homages to Hollywood melodramas, plays up the theatricality of all, and gives each diva one vintage French pop song to perform, to express her character's inner feelings. It's never boring, and sometimes quite bracing: the moment when Deneuve hits Darrieux over the head with a bottle lingers in the memory. But the material is hopelessly thin and the package is too obviously calculated to hit box-office gold. And this is a style of camp so broad that even the most bovine straight can get it.
8 Women Jim’s reviews
In an isolated mansion, with the phone lines cut and car sabotaged, eight women are snowbound with the corpse of a man which every one of them had a motive for killing. Ozon whips together suspense and musical comedy in a film boasting a stellar (almost) all-woman cast: Catherine Deneuve (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Belle de jour), Danielle Darrieux (La Ronde, The Earrings of Madame de...), Isabelle Huppert (Violette Nozière, Sauve qui peut (la vie)), Emmanuelle Béart (Manon of the Spring, La Belle noiseuse), Fanny Ardant (The Woman Next Door, Confidentally Yours), Virginie Ledoyen (Chabrol's La Cérémonie, Danny Boyle's The Beach), Ludivine Sagnier (Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Swimming Pool), and Firmine Richard. (The sole representative of his sex, Dominique Lamure plays the man with the knife stuck in his back.)
To quote (young) Stephen Sondheim's lyric from Gypsy (stage 1959 / film 1962), "You gotta get a gimmick, if you want to get ahead." True enough, whether politics, business or show biz. But unfortunately the "gimmicks" in 8 Women wear thin pretty quickly. Ozon, who adapted a stage play by author Robert Thomas for his script, uses a melodramatic murder mystery, set at the height of 1950s female fashions, and then periodically inserts "one-note" musical numbers every ten minutes. The songs are tuneful, and they give each talented cast member a turn at struttin' her stuff in a solo (there is only one ensemble number), but the numbers grind the story to a halt. Like good journalism, each song clearly states its topic in the "lead sentence," then simply spins out several more examples until it ends.
On another level, Ozon is clearly taking several cues from his aesthetic mentor, filmmaker extraordinaire Rainer Werner Fassbinder; in fact Ozon's film of teenage Fassbinder's unproduced play, Water Drops on Burning Rocks, is a fascinating amalgam of these two openly-gay writer/directors' interests and techniques. But in 8 Women, the Fassbinder card is not the ace it can sometimes be. Ozon here plays up the '50s melodrama/Douglas Sirk (All That Heaven Allows) angle, as does Fassbinder in many of his best films (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Lola); but for Ozon it's annoying and not, as in Fassbinder, an imaginative way of dissecting such deep social problems as sexism, racism and homophobia. Perhaps even worse, the would-be spoofy gimmickry just isn't that much fun in 8 Women; there's a clunky, mechanical feel to how it's employed. Artifice can be a wonderfully effective element, whether in an unselfconscious way, like Singin' in the Rain, or at its most cerebral/political, like Godard's Week End; but here there's really nothing humanly involving behind the campy, cliched surface.
Those conceptual problems weigh down even this exceptional cast, which spans over a half century of French cinema, from Max Ophül's star Danielle Darieux to some extremely gifted young actresses. Despite all of the "shocking" revelations, nothing they do can bring these paper-thin characters to life. Yes, I realize that Ozon is trying to "distance" us from the plot – an ostensible reason for the candy-colored production design and all of those songs – so that we can "contemplate" the critical social message but, for me, it never gelled. However, the last half of the movie was more involving than the squirm-inducing first half. But since the multiple plot revelations are similar to those in most conventional mysteries – and the culprit is always the person you least suspect – it felt hollow at the end. If you're looking for an "upstairs/downstairs" period murder mystery, with an incisive political conscience (and a touch of homoeroticism), don't miss Gosford Park, Robert Altman's best film in years.
8
femmes (2002) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
With this outrageous mélange of murder mystery à la Agatha
Christie and camp pastiche of 1950s
Having seen George Cukor’s 1939 legendary MGM comedy, The Women, François Ozon was keen to make a film with an all-female cast. When a re-make of Cukor’s film proved to be out of the question (the rights having been sold to someone else), Ozon opted instead to make a liberal adaptation of a 1960s stage play written by Robert Thomas.
8 femmes makes a striking – indeed jarring – contrast with
Ozon’s previous high-quality dramatic works, Gouttes d’eau sur
In a sense 8 femmes is the ultimate parody of the kind of films the French directors of the New Wave rebelled against – films which were merely vehicles for popular film stars, almost totally bereft of any intellectual or artistic content. The irony is that not only is 8 femmes a plausible imitation of such films – it is also the absolute antithesis. With its pretty but flimsy sets and burlesque comic routines, the film conveys a superficial sense of superficiality. Listen to the dialogue more carefully, watch the actresses more closely, and something much more laudable becomes apparent. Far from yielding to the yoke of conformity, the hand of the auteur is very much in view.
The film’s apparent raison-d’être – a trite murder mystery – is actually its least important element (which is just as well, given its singularly unimpressive resolution). What the film is really about is the eight women of its title – eight very different individuals whose own personal tragedies are exposed through the stimulus of a murder. Of course, the film’s preoccupation with parody and overly-abundant set of principal characters prevents it from being a serious character study, but the fact that it gets at least half-way there, and still be such an enormously effective comic send-up, is no mean feat. The real pleasure in the film lies in watching the way the eight disperate women interact with one another. Therein lies the comedy – and the tragedy also.
The appeal of 8 femmes is that it is the opposite of what it appears to be (namely, a straightforward spoof). Rather, it is a more profound and complex work, which leads us, the audience, to question our approach to cinema. What is the role of cinema - François Ozon appears to be asking – is it to inform, stimulate or entertain? 8 femmes does all three, but in an ingenious and somewhat sophisticated way. This is a film which is cleverly calculated to appeal to quite different strata of cinemagoers, at very different levels. Monsieur Ozon appears to have found the filmmaker’s holy grail, the coveted recipe of making an intelligent and reactionary film which can appeal to the masses and earn him commercial success, without sacrificing his hard-earned reputation as a serious avant-garde director.
Without a shadow of doubt, most of the success and impact of 8 femmes derives from its impressive cast list. Take away three or four of its lead actresses, and the film would very probably have failed spectacularly. Ozon’s masterstroke was in realising from the outset that such a film could only have worked with such a strong cast – and he is entirely vindicated in his choice of cast. And what a cast. Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, Virginie Ledoyen... It reads like a Who’s Who of French cinema, with the leading actresses from each generation represented. With such a bouquet of beauty, talent and intelligence at his disposal, Ozon would have been criminally irresponsible if he had failed to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Needless to say, the gamble paid off magnificently, and not one of Ozon’s eight glittering angels fails to shine in the role into which she has been skilfully shoehorned.
Fanny Ardant is stunning (and worryingly convincing) in her role of a totally liberated lesbian prostitute – relishing her stereotypical rendition of the French pute whilst subtly exposing a tragic vulnerability. She is only narrowly eclipsed by Catherine Deneuve, whose portrayal of the self-centred bourgeois husband-cheater is the perfect caricature of the kind of roles which have earned Deneuve her name. Her over-the-top reactions to such revelations as her daughter’s pregnancy and her negro maid’s lesbianism - totally appropriate for the era in which the film is set – are the stuff of classic vaudeville.
Doyenne of French cinema, Danielle Darrieux is perfectly cast as the seemingly respectable grandmother who has more than a few skeletons in her cupboard – proving that she can still hold the limelight, even on the same set as such modern icons as Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert. Crossing a generation or two, Emmanuelle Béart regails us with a superlative – brilliantly post-modern – parody of the French housemaid – whose duties clearly include far more than polishing the family silver. The comparative newcomers – but clearly major stars of tomorrow – Virginie Ledoyen and Ludivine Sagnier also have the opportunity to shine in this star-studded "girls’ only" extravaganza, as does the delightfully eccentric Firmine Richard.
If there is one member of this dream ensemble who deserves special mention that has to be Isabelle Huppert. Although she has played a wide range of parts, in many diverse films, Huppert has a reputation for playing austere, emotionally crippled and vulnerable women. The words "comic farce" and "Isabelle Huppert" are not usually to be found in the same sentence. Ozon’s decision to cast her in 8 femmes in the film’s most over-the-top character was a calculated risk – he envisaged Huppert as a playing a female equivalent of Louis de Funès – but the gamble paid off. As the hypochondriac temperamental middle-aged spinster Augustine, Huppert reveals an astonishing aptitude for comedy which will doubtless broaden her repertoire and public appeal. Ozon’s personal preference for Huppert is reflected in the script, which sees the actress having by far the best lines, which she belts out with almost inhuman speed and venom. No character that Isabelle Huppert plays could ever be a simple caricature – and her role in 8 femmes is as complex and tragically flawed as any other on her impressive CV. Having driven her audience to the limits of hysteria with her comic outbursts, she moves them to tears with her soul-aching rendition of the song "Message personnel" , one of the film’s highlights.
Isabelle Huppert is not the only cast member to have an impromptu musical number. Each of the 8 leading women gets her chance to sing her own personal drama – with varying degrees of success. After Huppert, the only other musical diversions which appear justified are the songs from Fanny Ardant (seduction personified) and Catherine Deneuve (the guilt-stricken husband-cheater). Fortunately each of the eight songs fits the period of the film and works with the grain of its feigned veneer of sugar-sweet superficiality. If there is one area where the film is totally faultless, is in its design. The musical interludes are a natural part of the film’s design and work, along with the gaudy sets and chic period costumes, to create a real sense of phoney luxury and slightly sick-making shallowness.
Whilst it could legitimately be classed as a masterwork of post-modern reductionism, it is clear that 8 femmes is primarily intended to entertain – something it manages to do magnificently. One of the most uplifting films to emerge from French cinema in recent years, it evokes the hypnotic escapism of the classical American musical whilst tickling our ribs with some sublime comedy. Not all spectators will appreciate the plethora of cinematic references (yes, the woman in the photograph is Romy Schneider), but few – if any – will fail to be entertained by this magnificently tongue-in-cheek comic romp, which is probably destined to become a classic. For the eternally surprising François Ozon, this will be one Hell of an act to follow.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| 8 Women (2001) Ginette Vincendeau, December 2002
France, the 1950s. Young Suzon
(Virginie Ledoyen) returns to her home - an isolated country house - for
Christmas. She is welcomed by her wheelchair-user grandmother Mamy (Danielle
Darrieux), her glamorous mother Gaby (Catherine Deneuve) and sickly maiden aunt
Augustine (Isabelle Huppert), her younger sister Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier),
who is a fan of detective stories, the nanny Chanel (Firmine Richard) and the
new maid Louise (Emmanuelle Béart). Her father Marcel (Dominique Lamure) is
found dead, but they are unable to phone the police as the telephone wire has
been cut. Mamy springs from her wheelchair, revealing she can walk.
Realising the killer must be in
the house, the women begin discussing each other's movements. Truths and
counter-truths, suspicions and rivalries begin to unfold in speech, song and
dance. The broken-down car and heavy snowfall mean escape is impossible.
Pierrette, Marcel's estranged sister, arrives after an anonymous telephone call
tells her he is dead. His bedroom door now will not open. Many secrets come to
light: that Louise slept with Marcel, that Chanel loves Pierrette, that Suzon
is pregnant (and was at home the night before), that Suzon is not Marcel's
daughter (which is just as well since she is pregnant with his child), that
Gaby was about to leave with Marcel's business associate (who was also
Pierrette's lover) and that Mamy had poisoned her husband a long time ago.
Chanel is shot and, though not killed, is rendered speechless. Frumpy Augustine
appears transformed in a glamorous dress. Gaby and Pierrette fight but end up
kissing. Catherine reveals that Marcel is not dead and that she had plotted
everything in order to show her father the truth about "his women".
As she opens the door to his bedroom, he shoots himself in the head.
Review
François Ozon's 8 Women
is a bubble of pastiche cinema (and theatre) with a dream cast of glamorous
French stars - Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny
Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen and the veteran Danielle Darrieux (a prodigy of the
1930s and the star of some of Max Ophuls' films from the 1950s). Colours,
costumes and song-and-dance numbers are pure kitsch and the whodunit plot
deliberately improbable: eight women are trapped in a country mansion after a
man (Marcel) has been murdered. Marcel's mother-in-law Mamy (Darrieux), his
glamorous wife Gaby (Deneuve) and daughters Suzon (Ledoyen) and Catherine
(Ludivine Sagnier), his sister-in-law, the old maid Augustine (Huppert), his
'scandalous' sister Pierrette (Ardant), the nanny Chanel (Firmine Richard) and
the maid Louise (Béart) all could have killed him for love or money. For the
duration of the film the eight women - isolated by snow and cut-off telephone
wires - bitch at each other, only stopping now and then to burst into song.
Deliberate artifice rules, as do
cinematic references, right from the opening credits which unfold in pink
letters over crystal baubles, like the shower of diamonds in Douglas Sirk's
Imitation of Life (1959). The film continues as a game of references beyond
Sirk: to Vincente Minnelli's musicals, Gilda (1946), Jacques Demy, boulevard
theatre, Hitchcock, and Ozon's first feature Sitcom (1997), as well as to the
actresses' own careers (Darrieux and Deneuve, for instance, have played mother
and daughter in three films before 8 Women).
With its multi-layered
revelations, 8 Women plays like speeded-up soap opera: plot turns
that hinge on sibling rivalry, incest, pregnancy, murder, adultery and a kinky
maid sleeping with her master but in love with her mistress pile up so fast we
soon stop caring. The lovingly crafted colour, lighting and costumes evoke
films that were already 'artificial', but there is a difference here. The mise
en scène of, say, Imitation of Life was also a critique of that artificial
world, a glossy and hollow counterpoint to deep emotions. In 8 Women
the plot is so contrived that laughter is the only possible reaction and the
strategy of visual pastiche is pure self-reference.
A closer precedent for 8
Women is George Cukor's 1939 adaptation of Clare Boothe's play The Women
(which Ozon wanted to remake, but in the absence of the rights, currently in
the possession of Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan, he turned to a forgotten 1960s
French play by Robert Thomas). As in Cukor's film, the characters here are all
women - we never see Marcel though he is much discussed throughout. And as with
Cukor's film, discussion of 8 Women revolves around whether it's a
glorious celebration of womanhood or devastating misogyny. Ozon has been keen
to distance himself from The Women in exactly these terms: "Cukor regards
his women as monsters. We don't like any of them. In 8 Women, even
if [the female characters] occasionally fight like fishwives, I wanted them to
be moving, I wanted people to feel close to them." I'm not sure he
succeeds. It's true that men in 8 Women are redundant rather than
the ultimate goal of the female characters, as they are in the more
conservative The Women. It's true also that Ozon has added 'modern' details
such as Mamy's revelation of the boredom of her married life. Yet 8 Women,
like The Women, presents women endlessly fighting in a hot-house of overblown
femininity, each of them introduced as a "carnivorous" flower. Barely
hidden under the humour is a fantasy of beautiful but 'tragic' and faintly
pathetic older women, not so far from Charlotte Rampling's glacial English
lecturer in Ozon's earlier Sous le sable. I would agree with Deneuve, who said
to Libération: "I am not sure Ozon likes women, but he likes
actresses."s
In this respect, 8 Women
is a feast. Each performance is beautifully controlled, notably Huppert's
devastating comic turn as Augustine, and integrated into a seamless ensemble.
For actresses used to brutally realistic contemporary auteur cinema, to be
flattered by lighting and gorgeous costumes (Dior's New Look filtered by
Hollywood) must have been an enjoyable change. The costume designer's admission
that "It was the intention that the costumes be perceived as weapons in
the women's competitiveness" unwittingly hints at the film's underlying
misogyny, but the deep colours and sumptuous fabrics are still a joy. Deneuve's
green velvet dress and panther-collared coat and Ardant's deep red and black
outfit are particularly delicious. Each actress has her scene and her song,
starting with the youngest and ending with Danielle Darrieux's moving rendering
of 'Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux' (the most famous and best song in the film, a
poem by Louis Aragon set to music by Georges Brassens). Like the rest of the
film, the numbers play on the contrast between high artificiality and authentic
feeling: can sentimental popular tunes hold profound emotional truth?
Ozon's reference point may be
1950s Hollywood, but the considerable success of his film in France rests as
much on his nostalgic homage to French popular music and French actresses as on
the marketing coup represented by his multi-star cast. Yes, there is a whiff of
vacuity and misogyny about 8 Women, but as in the other
deliberately 'artificial' French film of 2001, Amélie, the euphoria of the
spectacle is sufficient to keep these objections in the background.
The Onion A.V.
Club [Scott Tobias]
Kamera.co.uk
review Bob
Carroll
Movie-Vault.com
(Avril Carruthers) review [9/10]
Jigsaw
Lounge (Neil Young) review [7/10]
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B+]
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
“8 Women” - Salon.com
Stephanie Zachaek, September 25, 2002
VideoVista
review Paul
Broome
AboutFilm.com
(Carlo Cavagna) review [C-]
AfterEllen.com
- Lesbian and Bi Women in Entertainment review Sarah Warn
The New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
PopMatters
(Elbert Ventura) review
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[3/4]
Nick's Flick
Picks (Nick Davis) review [C+]
Vulture: Bilge Ebiri listed at #49 of 50 greatest musicals, October
28, 2015
Jon Popick
review also
seen here: Planet Sick-Boy
Eye for
Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]
Mark Reviews Movies (Mark Dujsik) review [2.5/4]
Movie Martyr
(Jeremy Heilman) review [3.5/4]
SPLICEDwire
(Rob Blackwelder) review [3.5/4]
Qwipster's Movie
Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Films of François Ozon Mondo Digital
hybridmagazine.com
review Roxanne
Bogucka
DVDTimes review Noel Megahey
Film
for the Soul: The Year 2002: 8 Women (Francois Ozon)
Reverse
Shot review
Jeff Reichert places the film among the worst of the year
The
Popkorn Junkie review [4/4] Mike
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5] Thom
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally) review
filmcritic.com (Rachel Gordon) review [2/5]
Eye for Film
(Jennie Kermode) review [4/5]
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe Murray) review [2.5/5]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B+]
Christian Science Monitor (David Sterritt) review [4/4]
Film Freak
Central capsule [Bill Chambers]
Brilliant Observations on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
BBC Films review Laura Bushell
8
March 2002: French lessons with Madame Frosty [interview with Isabelle Huppert] Philip Delves Broughton interview from The Telegraph, March 8, 2002
14 August 2002: Alone with Truffaut's dark lady [interview with Fanny Ardant] Harry de Quetteville interview from The Telegraph, August 14, 2002
5
November 2002: Clinches and catfights [Ozon's 8 Women] Clinches
and Catfights, Sheila Johnston from The
Telegraph,
The Boston Phoenix review Jeffrey Gantz
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review
City
Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Terri Sutton) review
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak, also seen here: Nitrate
Online (Paula Nechak) review
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle (Jonathan Curiel) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
FILM
REVIEW; A Stellar Gathering of Femmes Proves a Bit Fatale A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
STYLE;
French Twist S.S Fair and Blair
Sabol from
The New York Times,
FILM;
Corralling Eight Egos By Letting Them Run
Kristin Hohenadel from The New
York Times,
FILM;
A 'Let's Try This' Approach to Musicals
Stephen Holden from The New York
Times,
Los Angeles Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
SWIMMING POOL B+ 91
The Boston Phoenix review Chris Fujiwara
This elegant suspense piece from François Ozon (Sous le
sable/Under the Sand; 8 femmes/8 Women) stars Charlotte Rampling as
a successful, ill-tempered British mystery novelist whose publisher lends her
his house in
Ozon is, as always, a remote, mechanical director with a dry and cold style, a neat stack of chips on each shoulder, and every intention of keeping several sinuous steps ahead of his characters and his audience. Here, his chilliness is perfectly suited to the ambiguous relationship between the two main characters. The flat, airy, sinister quality he generates (as in Sous le sable, which is probably still his best film to date) remains interesting and pleasurable, if not deeply compelling. Rampling’s performance gets better as her character loosens up, and the plot reversals in the last section will fuel many a post-film conversation. In English and French with English subtitles. (102 minutes)
Swimming Pool Jim’s reviews
More a work of psychological suspense than an actual thriller (which the trailer leads you to expect), this picture features another superbly nuanced performance by Charlottle Rampling (Under The Sand) and showcases the dramatic range of Ludivine Sagnier (Water Drops on Burning Rocks). Hoping to jumpstart her next book, a bestselling mystery author (Rampling) goes for some peace and quiet in the French countryside at her publisher's vacation house. Everything goes swimmingly until the unexpected arrival of the publisher's voluptuous and hedonistic teenage daughter (Sagnier). The two women clash, until an unexpected event compels them to join forces.
Ozon again finds ways to create cool, alluring surfaces even as he suggests the violence below. Although Rampling, and Sagnier, give spellbinding performances, I wish that Ozon had showed us more of how their relationship unfolded. In his best enigmatic suspense films, like See The Sea and Under The Sand, Ozon is a master at suggesting (shall we say) abysses of psychological subtext; what's unsaid and never shown are utterly compelling. But in those films, what we see onscreen of the characters he has written is more developed, and hence more involving. In other words, he grounds his rich ambiguity in psychological insight. In this film, Rampling's character – although Rampling the actress is superb – feels underdeveloped as written. And when, near the end, we get to the not-so-shocking big revelation, the character, and indeed the entire film, holds itself up for accusations of mere gimmickry. Rampling is at her best, but unfortunately Ozon – who has elsewhere proven himself a fascinating contemporary filmmaker – is not. Still, the film offers considerable pleasure as a work of design, cinematography and performance; and despite my reservations, it's worth seeing.
Swimming
Pool (2003) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
After the overly stylised romp that was 8 femmes, director François Ozon returns to more familiar territory, that of the psychological thriller, with Swimming Pool, his first English language production. There are striking similarities with Ozon’s earlier film, Sous le sable: both are dark, compelling dramas with a small cast and minimalist style, both involve the subtle interaction of reality and imagination, and both see the magnificent Charlotte Rampling in the lead role. Despite the stark difference in the visual style we see in Ozon’s films, there is a strange sense of continuity and a gradual progression towards a darker, more introspective style of cinema, a trend which Swimming Pool continues.
Ozon’s near-faultless filmmaking technique makes this a seductive, evocative work, curiously reminiscent of the style of those masters of the psychological thriller genre, Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol. The cinematography is so beautiful that the spectator’s gaze is constantly drawn to the screen, whether the camera is locked onto a gently lapping swimming pool or is lustfully panning along the outstretched naked form of one of the film’s two leading ladies. Yet in addition to this sensual thrill there is something else, something which engages the intellect and holds our fascination. As in all of Ozon’s work, there is a mystery at the heart of this film, and one that is - frustratingly for the spectator – rather abstract and not even partly explained. The most ambiguous and baffling of the director’s films to date, Swimming Pool shows us many visual clues and leaves it to us, the voyeurist intruder, to assemble them into a coherent whole. Those who rise to this challenge will doubtless enjoy the film; those who can’t be asked will – justifiably – feel they’ve been had.
A strong cast is another of Ozon’s hallmarks and in this department Swimming Pool certainly does not disappoint. Charlotte Rampling, who gave such a memorable performance in Sous le sable, is perfect for the part of the archetypal English crime writer - a cool, staid exterior barely containing a torrent of pent-up emotions and wild sexual impulses. She is perfectly complemented by Ludivine Sagnier, a talented young actress who has starred in two of Ozon’s previous films. Totally transformed into a Bardot-esque object of desire, Sagnier shows herself to be a mature and capable actress who is clearly destined for a hugely successful international film career.
The film has been criticised for its abstract nature, reliance on stock clichés and predictable ending. It is certainly true that Swimming Pool is not François Ozon’s best work to date – it lacks the cool Germanic style of Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes, the vulgar originality of 8 femmes and the aching, introspective depth of Sous le sable. Yet it is a mesmerising, haunting work – an exploration of the creative process and a carefully observed portrayal of how one human being can be affected by interactions with other human beings. And, for the less intellectually endowed, there are plenty of erotic shots of Ludivine Sagnier to drool over and savour (in a purely artistic sense, you understand). All in all, an intriguing and skilfully crafted piece of cinema.
The Boston Phoenix review Gerald Peary
In the off-year 2003 at the Cannes Film Festival, François Ozon’s frothy but entertaining Swimming Pool was one of the few movies in Competition to escape the wrath of the international film-critic corps. Nobody considered it worthy of a Palme d’Or, but many in the press thought that Charlotte Rampling, playing brittle, nervous British crime novelist Sarah Morton, should have won for Best Actress (it went to Marie-Josée Croze in Denys Arcand’s Les invasions barbares). Or perhaps shared the prize with her lively French co-star. Ludivine Sagnier portrays Eurotrash twentysomething Julie, whose crude television watching, topless swimming, and public fornication threatens to ruin Ms. Morton’s sedate sojourn on the Provencal country estate where she’s struggling to write a new murder novel.
"I read Agatha Christie when a child, yes, I do like her
novels," Ozon said at
In interviews, Ozon has explained how he studied the pathologies of British women crime writers and noted how "a number of them drink too much, have repressed lesbian tendencies, and are fascinated by perversions." That’s how he built the character of Sarah Morton in the screenplay: underneath the rigid, puritanical veneer, there’s a voyeuristic interest in the naked female body, and in murder.
"I looked at pictures of Rendell and Highsmith," said
Rampling, who accompanied Ozon to
How did Ozon choose Rampling for Sarah Morton?
"I was looking for a woman who was 50 years old and who was beautiful, who was not ‘overhauled,’ and who was willing to wear a swimsuit." And yet who is protective of her dignity. "The very first time I saw Charlotte Rampling, I said, ‘I would like to film you using a vacuum cleaner.’ She was very British and answered, ‘I think not.’ "
But Rampling went on to star in Ozon’s 2000 film Sous le
sable/Under the Sand. And he insisted she play the lead in Swimming Pool
before he’d written a word of the script. "I asked
"We filmed in chronological order," Rampling said.
"We started with Sarah coming from
Ozon added, "The idea was to shoot something different from 8 Women, which was a very heavy production. I felt a need for something more intimate, almost a holiday. I decided to work with only two women, and with whom I get along very well. Who are my friends. I’m always more interested in women characters than male. They are more complex, and I get along better with actresses than actors. Maybe that explains my films: I have to feel desire for the actors, not necessarily to sleep with them."
On one point the
Swimming Pool - Reverse Shot Nick Pinkerton, July 2, 2003
Dive, She Said |
Village Voice Dennis Lim, July 1,
2003
stylusmagazine.com (Dan Emerson) review
Swimming
Pool: gobs of nudity, no point. - Slate Magazine David
Edelstein, July 8, 2003
DVD Times review [Michael Mackenzie]
d+kaz.
Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C]
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
AboutFilm.com
(Carlo Cavagna) review [A-]
The Onion
A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
New York Observer
(Andrew Sarris) review
World
Socialist Web Site review Emanuele Saccarelli
PopMatters
(Cynthia Fuchs) review
Salon (Stephanie Zacharek) review
Swimming Pool Kevin O’Reilly from DVD Times
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
culturevulture.net, Choices
for the Cognoscenti review
Arthur Lazere
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) review [3/5]
Swimming
Pool Michael den Boer from 10k bullets
Film
Freak Central Review [Travis Hoover] and Bill Chambers
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis) review [B-]
eFilmCritic.com (Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
Film Monthly (Hank Yuloff) review
Plume Noire review
Sandrine Marques
Ruthless Reviews review
Matt Cale
Nitrate Online (Nicholas Schager) review
SPLICEDwire (Rob Blackwelder) review [3/4]
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp) review [2.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com review [4/5]
Thom
Cinema Crazed (Felix Vasquez Jr.) review
Film Journal International (Erica Abeel) review
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress) review [2/5]
The Popkorn Junkie review [3.5/4]
Mike
NYC Film Critic (Ethan Alter) review [4/5]
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) review [4/10]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince Leo) review [3.5/5]
hybridmagazine.com review
Corey Herrick
Movie Gazette (Anton Bitel) review [8/10]
Movie
House Commentary Johnny Web
Premiere.com review
Glenn Kenny
One Guy's Opinion (Frank Swietek) review [B]
Moda Magazine (Brian Orndorf) review [7/10]
Jam! Movies review
Jane Stevenson
Charlotte Rampling in Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool: The Writer's ... Alan Dale from Blog Critics
Film for
the Soul: The Year 2003: Swimming Pool (Francois Ozon)
Offoffoff.com review David N. Butterworth, also seen here: David N. Butterworth review [2/4]
Exclaim! review Erin Oke
The
shallow end: Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool has style and great ... Rebello from The Free Library,
A time for happiness
Suzie MacKenzie interviews Charlotte Rampling from The Guardian, August 16, 2003, also seen here: A time for
happiness (The Guardian, 2003)
16 August 2003: Charlotte's web [interview with Charlotte Rampling about Swimming Pool] John Hiscock from The Telegraph, August 16, 2003
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4]
Entertainment Weekly review [B+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
BBC Films review
Neil Smith
Swimming Pool | Reviews | guardian.co.uk Film
- The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
22
August 2003: Stuck in the shallow end [review of Swimming Pool] Sukhdev Sandhu from The Telegraph, August 22, 2003
Boston Globe review [3/4] Wesley Morris
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [3.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer review Paula Nechak
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
The Oregon Herald (Mark Sells) review [4/5]
San Francisco Chronicle (Carla Meyer) review
Movie
review: 'Swimming Pool' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
FILM
REVIEW; Repression Thaws Under the Mediterranean Sun A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
A
NIGHT OUT WITH: Ludivine Sagnier; City of Light's Bright Star Marshall Heyman from The New York Times,
AT THE
MOVIES Dave Kehr from The
THE
WAY WE LIVE NOW: 7-13-03: PAGE TURNER
A.O. Scott from The New York
Times,
More
Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Than Ever
Ginia Bellafante from The
New York Times,
NEW DVD'S; Poolside in Southern France, Looking for a New Mystery Peter M. Nichols from The New York Times, January 13, 2004
DVDBeaver dvd review Eric Cotenas
Swimming pool - François Ozon, Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine ... movie photos from Cinematic Intelligence Agency
5 X 2 B+ 92
Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi is a familiar sight in French films, but I believe she was never better, as Ozon is a terrific director of actors, and here he stretches her range by writing an unusually honest and unsparing story in reverse that includes five scenes in a marriage of a couple that begins with their divorce and ends with their blossoming love. Opening with the meticulously clinical language of the court, the couple, including the husband Stéphane Freiss, retreats to a hotel room for one last fling that borders on rape, where by the end, nothing but hatred and bitterness remains. These two have nothing more to say to one another. An Italian pop song plays in transition as we interweave to an earlier dinner scene with the husband’s gay brother and his attractive young lover who offers an interesting exposé on the need for maintaining infidelity in a relationship, which produces amorous moods as well as an exploration on what the couple considers the limits of love, including unusually provocative marital truths, an interesting dance sequence, and plenty of affection. Following the same musical pattern we move backwards to the young couple’s first baby, where we see a generational pattern of men afraid to commit, who simply cannot be where they are needed, offering feeble excuses that from birth actually amount to a lifetime of lies, to their hilarious wedding night, extremely well conceived, as it so perfectly connects to the husband’s stand on marital commitment from the previous scene, and finally to their chance meeting at a seaside resort, where he is saddled with his embittered partner, the enormously uncomfortable Géraldine Pallhas. Is there any wonder he chose the wonderfully inviting and optimistically charming allure of Bruni-Tedeschi, as his otherwise grim relationship was based on making inconsiderate, back-stabbing quips and comments that would probably follow him for the rest of his life, even on her sunny side of the street. Ozon was quoted as saying, “A couple’s bliss doesn’t really inspire me.” I found this deliciously enjoyable.
Time
Out London review Dave Calhoun
In ‘5x2’ François
Ozon, the hard-working boy wonder of new French cinema, leads us backwards
through the failed marriage of a young couple, from the cold details of their
divorce to the first pangs of lust on the shores of a Sardinian beach resort.
Composed of five chapters of roughly equal length, the film takes us back over
about five years, going from misery to bliss – an irony that Ozon compounds by
liberally decorating his soundtrack with corny Italian love songs. (Corny
maybe, but very catchy; the deep strains of Paolo Conte’s ‘Sparring Partner’
are still ringing round my head…)
So we begin with the
end: the marriage of Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane
Freiss) is over. Their lawyer clinically reads out the terms of their
separation. The newly divorceds then retire to a hotel where they indulge in
loveless sex (which becomes rape when Marion changes her mind). Perversely, Stéphane
suggests that they try to work things out; Marion sensibly disagrees, leaves
the room and walks into the hotel lift. It’s the last moment of Ozon’s story –
and we’re only 20 minutes in.
Ozon’s narrative
Tardis then transports us through four well-framed scenarios in the history of
the couple’s relationship: a dinner party with Gille’s gay brother and partner
while their son sleeps; the birth of their child; their wedding; and the
beginning of their affair in Italy, where Gilles is on holiday with his
previous girlfriend. It’s an interesting exercise in signposting. Too often, we
watch movies and groan at the obvious twists and turns towards a predictable
end. But there’s something Brechtian about Ozon’s approach here. The end is
clear; the question is how we got there, what we can deduce from the little
behaviour we witness. The experience is something like a criminal
investigation, a search for clues to Gilles and Marion’s impending break-up. It
makes for engaging viewing – but still leaves you with a feeling that all love
is doomed. Stimulating, but hardly comforting.
5x2
(2004) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Having given us some breathtakingly stylish and original pieces
of cinema in recent years, François Ozon has taken most people by surprise with
this latest offering: a seemingly anodyne portrayal of a couple falling in and
out of love, told in reverse. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage , the film relates
five key events in the turbulent relationship of an obviously ill-matched
couple, offering a deeply cynical view of romantic love which is
characteristically Ozon-esque.
Once again, the director can hardly be faulted on his technique – the film is
beautifully composed, using close-ups to devastating effect to drive home the
full psychological impact of a disintegrating love affair. Ozon’s
lead actors, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Stéphane Freiss, convey real emotion in
their finely tuned performances which elevate a pretty mediocre script to the
level, almost, of a classic piece of drama.
However, the film is not without its faults. Its reversed five-part
composition emphasises weaknesses both in the characterisation and the
structure of the film. Near the end of the film, it is hard to imagine
how Gilles and Marion could ever have got it together, and so their meeting has
a more than a touch of implausibility. However, the rot sets in way
before then. After a promising first couple of segments, the film throws
up a number of unresolved questions about the nature of the relationship.
Why is Gilles so reluctant to attend the birth of his child? Why does
Whilst it may not be Ozon’s best work to date, there are some things which do
mark 5x2 out as significant. A fair criticism of Ozon’s cinema is
that there tends to be plenty of style but a lack of genuine human
emotion. For all its faults, 5x2 does convey a deeper sense of
compassion, humanity and emotional torment than most, if not all, of
Ozon’s earlier films. In that sense, it is a more mature and thoughtful
work than what has gone before, and gives a good indication that François
Ozon’s greatest films are yet to come.
5x2 (Cinq fois deux) Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Mom . . .Dad . . . I'm heterotextual. Ozon is a strange
case for auteurists, and despite its relatively placid surface, 5x2
just keeps the mystery going, but not necessarily in a positive way. It isn't
hard to detect certain thematic continuities across Ozon's films, but
stylistically he's all over the place, producing serious-minded, adult drama
with hints of Antonioni (Under the Sand), candy-colored Sirkian comedy
(8 Women), Fassbinderian examinations of sexual sadism (Water
Drops on Burning Rocks, actually adapted from an early Fassbinder play),
or superficially chilly bourgeois thrillers a la Chabrol (Swimming
Pool). Even though he began his career with Gallic versions of John Waters
shockfests like Sitcom and Criminal Lovers, and now he's
moved his focus from incestuous unions to the middle-aged married couple, Ozon
doesn't make it easy to identify an evolution in his style. Like Patrice
Leconte or Michael Winterbottom, Ozon adopts a new directorial mask at nearly
every turn, and lately I suppose his work represents a new
"maturity." But what is it? A maddening remoteness, mostly, an
ability to ape the surfaces of the classic European art cinema while leaving
his audience in a state of puzzlement. It's not just that watching 5x2
will prompt Ozonites to spend half the running time trying to pinpoint just
which auteur is being appropriated this time. (Woody Allen? Bergman? Chabrol
again?) It's that even though Ozon's mastery of the medium is evident
throughout, I'll be damned if anything ever really appears to be at stake. It's
gamesmanship standing in for insight. 5x2 deconstructs a failed
marriage, offering five reverse-order segments in the manner of Pinter's Betrayal.
While the title seems to promise an x-ray of a couple distinguished by their
typicality, Gilles and Marion (Stéphane Freiss and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) are
anything but. As this love affair rewinds, we soon realize that this isn't a
relationship that any non-sociopathic viewer could be expected to identify
with.
The Independent review [3/5] Anthony Quinn
Without our really
noticing, an unlikely genre has come into being: the movie that goes backwards.
It made its debut with Betrayal, the 1983 film of Harold Pinter's play in which an adulterous affair is
traced from its bitter fag-end right back to the spark that lit the whole
shooting-match. In 1986, Jane Campion's TV film Two Friends told the
story of a friendship in reverse.
Without our really
noticing, an unlikely genre has come into being: the movie
that goes backwards.
It made its debut with Betrayal, the 1983 film of Harold Pinter's play
in which an adulterous affair is traced from its bitter fag-end right back to
the spark that lit the whole shooting-match. In 1986, Jane Campion's TV film Two
Friends told the story of a friendship in reverse.
But it wasn't until Christopher Nolan's murder mystery Memento (2000), and
Gaspar Noé's violent Irréversible (2002) that the backwards structure
really attracted attention; switching the timeframe back to front wasn't just a
gimmick, it was a means of exploring memory, varying the tone and, let's be
honest, messing with your head.
The young French film-maker François Ozon has adapted the technique in his latest
offering, 5x2, a movie that invites us to perform a kind of spiritual
autopsy on a recently dead marriage. The evidence we are sifting comprises five
key moments in the couple's life, starting in an office where they are
finalising their divorce. Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane
Freiss) sit next to one another as a lawyer reads out the terms of their
sundering; both of them have the distracted air of people lost in a dream and
wishing they could wake up.
From the lawyer's they
go, by some strange prearrangement, to a hotel room, strip off and climb into
bed. "It doesn't make sense," he says to her, though whether he's
referring to this horizontal adieu or the dawning realisation of their break-up
is uncertain. Afternoon sex in a hotel room is a thing adulterous couples do -
but newly divorced ones?
Ozon enjoys
tantalising his audience, and especially so where the mysteries of coupledom
are concerned. His early features, Sitcom and Gouttes d'eau sur
pierres brûlantes (Water Drops on Burning Rocks), were bracingly nasty
squibs on sexual deviance, and seemed to announce him as an heir to Buñuel. But
then, almost out of the blue, came Sous le sable (Under the Sand), an
exquisitely controlled drama about a woman so deeply in denial that she won't
acknowledge the fact of her husband's death. It's a remarkable film, not just
for Charlotte Rampling's eerie composure as the widow, but for the way that its
opening 20 minutes, the portrait of an apparently stable marriage, demanded
reconsideration in the light of the husband's disappearance. Was there
something we'd missed in the easy familiarity between them? Were there fault
lines that we should have spotted?
5x2 poses the same questions, and by throwing
its narrative into reverse, allows us the luxury of foresight. We are on the
alert for clues as to why this marriage will fail, though recognition of them
as clues isn't immediate. There is nothing strikingly objectionable
about Marion or Gilles: she's tender-hearted, self-contained, shy, oddly beautiful;
he's prone to boredom, lazily tolerant, and unsure of himself. The first time
we register a significant tremor on the marital seismograph is during a cosy
dinner when Gilles tells the story of a party he and Marion attended which, at
some point in the evening, became an orgy. He joined in, he recalls. She
didn't.
As he recounts this to
his guests, he doesn't notice the tears in Marion's eyes, and nor does anyone
else. His unthinking candour has exposed a somewhat aggressive sexuality,
though it's also hard to ignore his snippiness as they're clearing up at the
end of the evening - "Rinse the plates before you put them in the
washer," he tells her. Did she remember that tone when they were breaking
up?
The film disconcerts
partly on account of its impersonal, matter-of-fact style. Ozon allows things
to happen so casually that they're gone before we've had a chance to take them
in. A pair of secrets, one his, one hers, are stowed away like time bombs. When
Marion is rushed to hospital to give birth, Gilles ignores the phone calls
importuning his presence; later, quizzed as to his whereabouts, he lies about
being stuck in traffic. This seemed far more plausible as a guilty secret than
Marion's wedding-night infidelity; having left Gilles drunkenly asleep in their
hotel bedroom, she goes for a solitary midnight wander through the gardens and
meets - no kidding - a tall, dark stranger who takes her in his manly embrace
and... well, two words came to mind at this point: "Mills" and
"Boon". Perhaps Ozon or his co-writer Emmanuèle Bernheim had heard of
just such a betrayal and wanted to work it into their script, but dramatising
it requires a greater degree of stealth than they can manage.
Where the film truly
gets under your skin is in the final section, which recounts how Marion and
Gilles became a couple. With its sunny meditative tone and blithe coincidences,
this inescapably recalls Eric Rohmer's tales of youthful romance, and sharpens
the paradoxical nature of the enterprise: the ending of the film echoes the
ending of the marriage, and yet the last image is a long-held shot of the
couple, newly in love, striking out to sea beneath a glistening postcard
sunset. How could such optimism founder?
Ozon said that the
film was driven by his realising how few people he knew whose relationships had
lasted more than five years. Yet, from the fleeting and impermanent, he has
fashioned a substantial and haunting film, beautifully acted by Bruni-Tedeschi
and Freiss. One could see it as a corrective to last week's 9 Songs. Both films describe the arc of a relationship,
both are experimentally structured, both are the work of young directors. But
only one of them makes you feel you've been on a journey - even if it is going backwards.
Francois Ozon: Monsieur extreme | The Independent Jonathan Romney, March 12, 2005
Everything Old Is New Again: François Ozon's “5 x 2” | IndieWire Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot with responses by Nicolas Rapold and Michael Koresky, from indieWIRE, June 7, 2005
Reversal
of Fortunes: Ozon's Marriage Drama, Back ... - Village Voice Dennis Lim, May 31, 2005
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
The Onion A.V.
Club review
Scott Tobias
Slant
Magazine review
Eric Henderson
filmcritic.com
(Nicholas Schager) review [3.5/5]
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
The New York Sun
(Melissa Anderson) review
sneersnipe
(David Perilli) review
The
Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review
[B]
Film Monthly (Matthew Vasiliauskas) review
www.european-films.net
(Boyd van Hoeij) review
CompuServe (Harvey S. Karten) review
Movie
Gazette (Anton Bitel) review [6/10]
ReelViews (James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
DVD Times Noel Magahey
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Chuck Aliaga) dvd review
DVD Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [3/5]
DVD
Verdict (Joe Armenio) dvd review
A Guide
to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle) dvd
review
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd
review [4/5] [Canadian Release]
Film
- Bright Lights Film Journal O Bruder, Where Art Thou? The 8th European
Union Film Festival (Chicago), by Robert Keser, April 30, 2005
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Film Journal International (David Noh) review
Georgia
Straight (Mark Harris) review
SPLICEDwire
(Rob Blackwelder) review [2.5/4]
Exclaim! review James Luscombe
Exclaim! dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice dvd review
[4/5] Rory L.
Aronsky
Film Freak Central Review [Bill
Chambers]
Culture Wars [Philip Cunliffe]
FilmJerk.com
(Neylan Bagcioglu) review [B] also seen
here: FilmJerk.com [Neylan Bagcioglu]
One Guy's
Opinion (Frank Swietek) review
[C]
Tiscali UK review Paul Hurley
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment
Weekly review [B-] Owen Gleiberman
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review
[3/4]
Variety (Lisa Nesselson) review
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
Boston Globe review [2.5/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough (capsule)
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post (Michael O'Sullivan) review
Washington Post (Stephen Hunter) review
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [2.5/5]
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean
Axmaker]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick
LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
Movie
review: '5X2' Michael Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
FILM REVIEW; An
Unhappy Marriage, From Divorce to Wedding
A.O. Scott from The New York
Times,
TIME TO LEAVE (LE TEMPS QUI RESTE) B+ 91
Supposedly the second part of a trilogy on death, following his 2000 film UNDER THE SAND, this is an exquisitely tender portrait of a moody, detached, and mostly unlikable guy, Romain (Melvil Poupard), a young gay fashion photographer whose career is just taking off, who hears early in the film that he has metastasized cancer on several organs, too late to operate, but they can offer chemo therapy, an option he’s not the least bit interested in. Given 3 months to a year, he decides not to tell anyone, internalizing the entire experience. Initially he has issues with anger, directed mostly at his own sister Sophie (Louise-Anne Hippeau), with whom he was very close growing up, but now that she has kids he’s decided he hates kids, and despite their family’s request, he refuses to photograph them. Romain decides to break up with his boyfriend, which is followed by an extremely eerie scene in a gay bar, utilizing a long tracking shot that gets even more strange as the shot evolves as we hear voices of sacred music, it’s an amazing mix of near porn voyeurism with a sense of sublime elegance.
Romain’s natural self-centeredness is aptly reflected as he’s in every shot in the film, which initially is of little interest until he visits his grandmother in the country, Jeanne Moreau, who is clearly elderly, but wonderfully alert, the only person he decides to tell, explaining “You’re as close to death as I am.” This visit changes the entire complexion of the film, which becomes suddenly tender, as Romain revisits childhood memories with a walk in the nearby woods, filmed as an out of body experience where he sees himself as a child as he stands aside and watches, while extremely elegant music from Arvo Pärt plays, both the soft piano of Für Alina that Gus van Sant utilized so well in GERRY (2002), and also the quiet orchestration of his 3rd Symphony. From this point on, the film becomes a lyrical, transcendent journey, filled with memories and spacious, poetic imagery, not the least of which are Ozon’s fascination with the sea.
But before he gets there, he maintains his self-absorbed nature, not living life to the fullest, as we might expect, but retreating into still further detachment, expressed in a chance meeting with a café waitress, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, which leads to the kind of scene that only Ozon would compose, as well as an equally odd scene with his sister, which exhibits an almost surreal, ghost-like quality. There’s an extremely humorous moment in the church which is preceded by overtly serious ritual and prayer. Becoming tired and gaunt, his physical appearance all but confirming his state of mind, Ozon ends his film with a wordless elegance, with a beautiful, quiet intensity, where there’s a wonderful use of the setting sun, at one point raised to just above his lips, as if this was his last breath, a poignant metaphysical shot that probes our curiosity until the credits roll at the end, where the sound of the waves continues.
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review
The latest from François
Ozon is a typically lean and poised study of impending, untimely death that
is as ghostly and unpredictably sketched as the coming of the Grim Reaper
himself. Romain (Melvil Poupard) is a 31-year-old gay fashion photographer and
not the most likeable man in all Paris; he snaps at his assistants, mistreats
his family, snorts copious amounts of coke and is generally quite far up
himself. Too bad, then, the more cold-hearted viewer might snort, when he
collapses at a fashion shoot and is diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer
that’s barely worth treating and given just a few months to live…
How to deal with this news? How (indeed if) to tell family and friends? How to
consider one’s suddenly shortened life? Such questions are at the heart of
Ozon’s film, but his treatment of them is elliptical, essential and defiantly
in the first-person rather than fully realist or weepingly theatrical in the
way that a less contemplative, more tear-jerking effort might attempt. Sure,
Romain’s attitude to his family softens (there’s a quite special interlude when
he spends a night with his grandmother, tenderly played by Jeanne
Moreau and the only relation who knows of his illness), but our perspective
of Romain’s death, like his life, remains resolutely selfish. There are some
awkward notes. It’s difficult to swallow Romain’s late act of charity and
sexual exploration: he agrees to impregnate a complete stranger (Valeria Bruni
Tedeschi). And nostalgic visions of Romain as a child only just teeter on the
right side of cloying. But Ozon succeeds best in presenting death’s approach as
a sort of half-removed, ghostly existence – a point most movingly made by a
beautifully conceived and choreographed final scene.
Le Temps
qui reste (2005) James Travers from
FilmsdeFrance
Death is a subject that is seldom treated with the reverence and
seriousness that it deserves in cinema. In this thoughtful meditation on
mortality, director François Ozon skilfully avoids clichés and trite
sentimentality and gives us a film, which, despite being rigorously understated
and straightforward, is profoundly moving. The tone and composition of
the film show a far more sophisticated and mature director than the enfant
terrible who brought us the raunchy black comedy Sitcom
a decade before.
Significantly, Le Temps qui reste is Ozon’s first film in Cinemascope (a
choice which, the director claims, was determined by the proportions of a man
lying stretched out on a beach, one of the key images of the film). It’s
an unusual choice given the intimate nature of the subject and perhaps some
sequences do not work as well as they might. However, the widescreen
format does allow the film to include some breathtaking panoramic shots, most
notably the achingly beautiful beach sequence at the end of the film.
One area where François Ozon cannot be faulted is his choice of cast. In
arguably his best, most intense performance to date, Melvil Poupaud brings an
unnerving sense of realism and humanity to his portrayal of Romain – a very
complex character who, whilst not particularly likeable at first, ultimately
arouses our compassion. (Interestingly, Poupaud had previously turned
down a part in Ozon’s earlier film, Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes,
1999). Jeanne Moreau, an icon of French cinema, is also noteworthy
as Romain’s dying grandmother, her scenes with Poupaud being particularly raw
in their poignancy. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, the star of Ozon’s
previous film 5x2, makes a small but pleasing
contribution, and Daniel Duval is surprisingly engaging as Romain’s father.
What sets Le Temps qui reste apart from the numerous other films about
terminal illness is its self-restraint and lack of surface emotion. It
would have been easy for Ozon to have made this a real tear-jerker. He
could have framed the central character a sympathetic hero with a loving
entourage who would shed buckets in learning of his condition. But this
has been done before – ad nauseum – and Ozon sensibly chooses a
different path. The film focuses exclusively on the character who is
dying and merely shows us how he comes to accept his mortality.
Consequently, it’s a far more intimate, poignant and adult film than it
otherwise might have been. It probably won’t make you cry, but you will
be touched by what you see.
Time to Leave - Film Society of Lincoln Center Paul Fileri from Film Comment, July/August 2006
Nearly a decade after his rise to prominence began, François Ozon
might seem to be the last filmmaker one could see drafting the outline of a
trilogy, as the trajectory of his career resembles nothing so much as a
ricocheting pinball, bounding and rebounding from genre to genre at an even
clip of one film per year. Certainly there's a difference between being
versatile and being fickle, and such a path doesn't mark one for disgrace. But
Ozon, no longer shrink-wrapped as
And yet Ozon has now declared a trilogy, and since its premiere
at
Time to Leave keys itself from beginning to end on Melvil Poupaud-an impressive actor, most memorably seen as the boy who composes a sea shanty in Rohmer's A Summer's Tale, and also a Raúl Ruiz veteran since childhood. Here he plays the role of Romain, an arrogant and brusque fashion photographer, and within the first reel, Ozon's first gay male protagonist has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and renounced treatment. The film's remaining time is structured around a succession of self-contained encounters: dinner with his parents, a country visit to his grandmother (the only person to whom he reveals his condition), played by Jeanne Moreau, reconciliation with his sister, break-up sex with his boyfriend, and a threesome with a couple who asks him to father their child.
Unlike Patrice Chéreau's Son frère, few emotional or corporeal particularities are permitted to sink in, as Ozon designs these last days more around a skeletal arrangement of theses-ideas (memory, photography, reproduction) to be simply transposed into his mise en scène. Shooting in cinemascope for the first time, Ozon tends to frame his compositions broadly around a single set of contrasting focal points-e.g., Romain-the-observer snapping photos of Life (a healthy baby cradled in a mother's arms or scampering kids at play on a sunny day in the park). Time to Leave strikes a certain register of restrained placidity, yet in the end, succumbs to more and more frequent idealizing interludes of Romain dumbstruck before his dewy-eyed childhood self, memorializing Life and Memory before fully embracing Death. The conclusion aims at a poised moment of release, the screen fading on a seaside sunset as Ozon decorously summons a secondhand Death in Venice. In short, all the machinery, duly oiled, has been set in motion with the paltry virtues of assured competence and control, and the mechanism can now be prepped for volume three.
Procreative
Imperatives - Gay City News Steve
Erickson
Nine films into his career, it’s still a little hard to figure out French director François Ozon’s personality. Much of his work riffs on his favorite directors—his last film, “5x 2,” was a takeoff on Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” told in backwards order. Although he’s credited melodramatist Douglas Sirk with the inspiration for “Time to Leave,” it doesn’t recall any individual film so much as a whole sub-genre about beautiful young people with terminal illnesses. In cinema, cancer is usually a sure cure for being a selfish jerk, a cliché “The Onion” once parodied with a story headlined “Loved Ones Recall Local Man’s Cowardly Battle with Cancer.” At times, Ozon has dabbled in the role of provocateur, but he plays “Time to Leave” disappointingly straight.
Photographer Romain (Melvil Poupaud) lives with his boyfriend Sasha
(Christian Sengewald) in
“Time to Leave” is the second part of an Ozon trilogy about mortality. The series began with his 2001 masterpiece, “Under the Sand,” and will conclude with a film about a child’s death. Ozon has frequently returned to the ocean—after all, his 1997 breakthough was called “See the Sea.” However, he’s usually used beach imagery with some irony. The protagonist of “See the Sea” endures her vacation, rather than enjoying it, and her loneliness leads to a vulnerability that proves lethal. In “Under the Sand,” the beach is the sight of a disappearance—and probable death—that makes a woman delusional. If the sea is associated with death in the final scenes of “Time to Leave,” it’s a far more peaceful sort than Ozon presented in “Under the Sand” and “See the Sea.”
“5x2” questioned whether the vow of monogamy implicit in most heterosexual marriages is workable. The subtext of “Time to Leave” is far more troubling. Like many troubled movie characters, Romain is repulsed by children but comes around to embrace them. As death creeps closer, he sees visions of a young doppelganger. Making the concept of an inner child literal is typical of this film’s missteps. While he initially rejects Jany’s offer, he eventually changes his mind, leading to a hot three-way between him, her and her husband. Even for gay men, “Time to Leave” suggests that procreation is a must, imagining no other way to leave a lasting legacy or continue the cycle of life. Romain’s fashion photography is not art with real value, just a sign of the shallow trendiness that cancer will allow him to transcend.
Melodrama has attracted gay directors as different as Ozon, Todd Haynes, and Stanley Kwan. Ozon is too knowing not to be aware of its pitfalls—or the pointlessness of camping it up or parodying it—but he still falls prey to it. Poupaud looks like a fashion model throughout—one can only conclude that he passed up chemotherapy because it would ruin his looks. As critic Jim Ridley wrote, “‘Time to Leave’ remains the kind of movie that evokes imminent death by having the hero wear shades and not shave.” When he gets sicker, he shaves his head, but his vanity remains. Ozon’s only real twist on melodrama is making its lead character gay. Compared to the imaginative vision of “Under the Sand” or Portugese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ delirious “Two Drifters,” “Time to Leave” may as well be a remake of “Love Story.”
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Time to Leave (2005) Ryan
Gilbey from Sight and Sound, May 2006
Paris, the present.
Romain, a successful 31-year-old photographer, is diagnosed with terminal
cancer. He declines chemotherapy and is told that he has a less than five per
cent chance of survival. At dinner with his family he insults his sister
Sophie, reducing her to tears. That night he breaks up with his boyfriend Sasha
and visits a club to watch strangers having sex. He goes to stay with his
grandmother, who becomes the only family member to learn of his illness.
Driving home, he meets a
waitress, Jany, who had served him the previous day. She asks if he will
impregnate her, with the consent of her husband, who is infertile. Romain
refuses. He makes a conciliatory phone call to Sophie after receiving a letter
from her. He asks Sasha to have sex with him one last time but is rebuffed. He
finds Jany and agrees to sleep with her in a threesome with her husband. Later,
Jany and her husband act as witnesses as Romain makes a will that leaves
everything to the unborn child. He lies on the beach and remains there as the
sun sets.
Review
When terminal disease is
soft-pedalled in movies, as it routinely is, the audience is spared, but
something is lost also. Our full anguish is foreshortened by seeing Julia
Roberts in Steel Magnolias or Barbara Hershey in Beaches embodying
suffering by removing every last speck of foundation and donning a homely
headscarf. And there is never any genuine engagement with what death entails.
In Time to Leave
mortality catches up with Romain, a 31-year-old cancer victim, before illness
gets a chance to erode his looks; the notion that the audience will shed fewer
tears over the suffering of someone ugly or plain stretches back to Garbo in Camille.
Romain does lose his hair, though it's by choice, not chemotherapy. And perhaps
no film that thanks Agnès B, Paul Smith and Prada in the end credits can be
entirely tough-minded. But by the time Romain stretches out on a beach in the
final shot, a symbolic gesture that may not sound like much of an improvement
on Anthony Hopkins crossing a bridge to oblivion in Meet Joe Black,
the film has nimbly sidestepped enough brushes with the clichés of the form to
have earned its euphemistic ending.
French cinema has a recent
tradition of films that confront terminal disease robustly, or appear to, as in
Savage Nights and Don't Forget You're Going to Die,
both about HIV-positive men. Time to Leave sits somewhere between
these and Hollywood productions in the vein of Steel Magnolias. At
least François Ozon has tweaked the form to fit his own needs, rather than vice
versa. It seems typical of this director's barbed humour, for instance, that
when Romain arrives home following his grim diagnosis, an argument with his
sister, a visit to his dealer and an emotional embrace with his father, his
boyfriend should be playing a shoot-'em-up computer game featuring exploding
heads and other comforting images of death.
Ozon's compulsion - it's one of
his defining characteristics, in fact - to root out sensual properties in
unlikely places is more than usually evident in Time to Leave.
When Romain sits astride a chair and begins shaving his locks the camera fixes
on his gleaming white underpants, where shorn curls fall like black ash on
snow. In an earlier scene Romain asks to join his grandmother in bed. "You
know I sleep naked?" comes the reply, which might be more startling if she
weren't played by Jeanne Moreau, still sunny at nearly 80 years old. She's the
latest beneficiary, after Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand
(2000) and half the cast in 8 Women (2001), of Ozon's
equal-opportunities approach to sex appeal.
Drawing from the more formulaic
end of the genre, Ozon's script gives Romain the chance of some last-minute
reconciliation (with his sister) and tenderness (with his ex-boyfriend), as
well as offers of a more transgressive nature: should he have sex with a
stranger in an S&M club, or a waitress whose husband is infertile, or
consent to his grandmother's suggestion that they commit suicide together? What's
interesting is that all but one of these opportunities is thwarted or rejected.
Romain does have a final conversation with each of his loved ones, just as he
would have done if Hollywood had got hold of this material. But those loved
ones, with the exception of his grandmother, don't realise that they will never
see him again, that au revoir in fact means goodbye. The effect is to leave one
side of each of these standard farewell scenes as if suspended in mid-air,
discrediting the idea that life ends with a tidy full stop rather than a
nagging ellipsis.
Cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie
has shot three previous films for Ozon, including Under the Sand,
which the director now says was the first part in a trilogy about death that
continues with the new picture. In Time to Leave, Lapoirie's
clean, glossy images of Romain's privileged life are disrupted repeatedly by
Monica Coleman's brisk editing, which prevents us from relaxing into the movie.
Anyone anticipating lots of trashy, Eyes of Laura Mars Mars-style photo-shoots
as Romain goes about his business as a snapper for Vogue will have
to make do with just one (in sight of the Eiffel Tower, of course) before he
receives his unhappy tidings only four minutes into the movie.
Ozon's work has always been lean;
he still seeks counsel from Truffaut's innovative editor Claudine Bouché on all
his films. And his unwillingness to linger too long on a shot, unless
soliciting our unease, rescues scenes that could have tipped over into
mawkishness. On paper it sounds disastrous that Romain glimpses repeatedly a
younger incarnation of himself, beginning with the moment when he sees his own
reflection morph into the face of him as a ten-year-old self. But the gimmick
is used so judiciously, mostly in flashbacks that unfold within the present
tense à la Annie Hall, that it assaults the hairs on the back of your neck
rather than your tear ducts.
The two Romains eventually
interact in the final sequence on the beach, when the older version returns the
boy's inflatable ball to him. A studio executive might approve of the
suggestion of closure in that exchange, but for followers of Ozon's work it's
just more proof that strange things happen at the seaside: a wife can lose her
husband (Under the Sand), a gay teenager can be seduced by a woman
(A summer Dress, 1996), a mother can be terrorised by a backpacker
(See the Sea, 1997). Ozon even creates a continuity between the
beach scenes in his films. Time to Leave begins with a shot of the
younger Romain sitting on the sand with his back to the camera and then running
towards the ocean. That shot picks up from Ozon's last film 5x2
(2004), which ended with the doomed lovers bounding into the water. In stopping
abruptly before the boy reaches the ocean, it also harks back to the cruel
cut-to-black that curtailed the widow's final visit to the sea in Under
the Sand.
Despite these layers of
self-reflexiveness, the most complex moments in Time to Leave are
nothing more than brief reaction shots that depend for their impact on the
actors' barely perceptible facial expressions. When Melvil Poupaud's Romain is
summoned to his doctor's office with the warning that it will be bad news, his
first question is: "Do I have Aids?" Receiving the answer he desires,
there is a glow of smugness and infallibility, which is extinguished abruptly
by the mention of a tumour. Having been excused Aids, Romain assumes wrongly
that his death will be a timely one.
Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi, who plays
the waitress impregnated by Romain, pulls off a similar effect. After witnessing
Romain making his will, there is a question she wants to ask, one she should
perhaps have raised before falling pregnant by him: is his disease hereditary?
When Romain says it isn't, that it's cancer, the actress must signal profound
relief that her child will not be unduly disadvantaged before disguising this
with a twinge of sympathy for Romain. The entire film is a balancing trick,
with scenes of potential banality redeemed at the last by a subtle twist or
subversion. In their conflicted expressions, the performers prove themselves
experts at their own high-wire acts.
Look
at Me: Francois Ozon's Time to Leave | IndieWire Kristi Mitsuda from indieWIRE with
responses from Michael Koresky and Chris Wisniewsky from Reverse Shot,
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd review [2/5]
Slant
Magazine review
Ed Gonzalez
The Dying Gaul |
Village Voice Dennis Lim, July 4, 2006
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir, July 13, 2006
stylusmagazine.com (Sandro Matosevic) review
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
DVD Outsider Slarek
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) review
Eye for
Film ("Chris") review
[3/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Le Temps
Qui Reste | Review | Screen Dan
Fainaru in
www.european-films.net
(Boyd van Hoeij) review
Film Journal International (Jon Frosch) review
Plume Noire review Fred Thom
The Nation (Stuart Klawans) review (Page 3)
AvaxHome -> Francois OZON (Drame) Le temps qui reste [DVDrip] 2005 ...
Exclaim! dvd review Travis Mackenzie Hoover
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Entertainment
Weekly review [B-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
BBCi - Films Tom Dawson
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The Observer (Philip French) review
Boston Globe review [2/4] Ty Burr
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [2/5]
The Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San Francisco Chronicle [G. Allen
Johnson]
Los Angeles Times [Gene Seymour]
Breakthrough
Performances: Five to Look Out For; Melvil Poupaud K.D. from The
New York Times,
FILM REVIEW;
Loneliness, Generosity and Selfishness at the End of Life A.O. Scott from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Movie Photos: François Ozon, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Melvil ... movie photos from All Movie Photo
CURTAIN RAISER (Un Lever de Rideau)
User comments from imdb Author: boblipton
from
Promptitude, so goes the saying, is the politeness of kings and
this short film by Ozon covers that subject, a comedy of manners.
As a New Yorker, I am often told by people from outside the City, that New
Yorkers have no manners. This, of course is a falsehood. In
This short subject shows this is an attitude not unique to the
Ozon has shot this simply but classically: long takes with fluid camera
movement to maintain composition. thanks to dp Yorick Le Saux, with the length
of each shot gradually decreasing in each section to heighten tension. The
compositions are simple but elegant and this is fairly typical of Ozon's
leisurely pace of storytelling at longer lengths. Color choices are also muted,
another hallmark of Ozon's style. In fact, this is a fairly good introduction
to Ozon's work. If you're thinking of investigating this director, you could do
far worse than try this 30-minute film before essaying works of greater length.
User comments from imdb Author: TimeNTide
from
I've watched this twice on the Sundance Channel in the
Very intelligent and thoughtful, often philosophical, sometimes poetic and
reflective, and rather verbose exploration of love, selfishness, respect,
self-respect, pride, punctuality, relationship power, ideals, determination,
willpower and especially about the choice between sticking to your ideals
versus sacrificing them for love.
Bruno is a fussy young man who wants to hang onto his self-respect by living up
to his ideals, even if it means losing the girl he really loves. Rosette is
flighty young woman who lives for the moment, unfettered by any time
restraints, and who is simply clueless about Bruno's inner struggle with their
situation. Bruno's best friend Pierre is the only one of the three who can see
both sides of the coin, and he strives to bridge the gap between the two.
A gorgeous film to look at, even though it consists entirely of three people in
an apartment. The leads are stunningly attractive, the short is beautifully
shot, and although it's mostly dialogue, there's some lovely and very effective
piano music to bridge the gaps between the discussions. It's also well acted
and directed.
I'm sure many in the non-thinking crowd would consider this short film boring,
talky pretentious French crap, but we probably don't have to worry about that
since most of those people will turn it off as soon as they realize that have
to read subtitles with big words.
Excellent short film.
`Curtain
Raiser': Short but Long-Lasting Lee
Hyo-won from The Korean Times,
The maker of creative films such as ``8 Women'' (8 Femmes, 2002) and ``The
Swimming Pool'' (2003), Ozon once again captures the human condition with
poignant realism and a streak of theatricality.
Bruno (Louis Garrel) has been waiting for his girlfriend (Vahina Giocante) at
his apartment for half an hour. He vows to break up with her once and for all
if she is more than 45 minutes late. They have been dating for eight months
now, but not once has she been on time for their rendezvous. Despite Bruno's
almost obsessive regard for order and punctuality, Rosette managed to win him
over with her sweetness and ridiculous excuses. But he's had enough, he says.
Meanwhile, his friend Pierre (Mathieu Amalric) tries to dissuade him, saying
love is meant to be ``a confinement.'' A true romantic (and thus embodying
stereotyped fantasies of French beaus), he tells Bruno that he should enjoy the
wait for a beautiful woman. As the 45-minute mark draws near, Bruno becomes
increasingly resolute with his break-up plans but also more and more nervous
about losing his beloved girlfriend. How will this sentimental tug of war end?
Developed in
And given its ``stage'' roots, ``Curtain'' is very theatrical. The conversation
among the three characters is more like a monologue from each one of them,
defining themselves through their verbalized philosophies on love.
It's also very, very French. What may seem like incessant rambling about love
is actually intelligible, thought provoking and above all, thoroughly amusing.
Alas, much is lost in translation ― but the fine actors pay keen
attention to their speech and demeanor, and their personas translate across
language barriers.
``Curtain'' is brilliant: Ozon proves once again his genius for depicting
subtle sentiments. Showing the triumph of quality over quantity, it offers
everything you could hope for in a short film. It's like a French cafe ―
short and sweet, with a bitter aftertaste.
In French with Korean subtitles. Opens March 13 at Gwanghwamun Spongehouse
(near exit 6 of Gwanghwamun station on subway line 5). Tickets cost 4,000 won.
A 50 percent discount is available upon presenting a ticket for ``Angel,'' also
directed by Ozon and currently playing at the same venue. Keep your ticket for
the discounted viewing of Yoo Ji-tae's short film ``Out of My Intention,''
coming to screens March 20.
DVD Outsider: François Ozon: Regardez la Mer and Other Short Films ...
ANGEL B+ 92
aka: The Real Life of Angel Deverell
I
am Angel Deverell! —Angel
Deverell (Romola Garai), spoken as she rises from her bed before collapsing to
her death
Set at the turn of 20th century England, François Ozon pulls out all the stops in this hilariously comic, over-the-top
take on the melodramatic Douglas Sirk movies using sumptuously Technicolored
Vincent Minnelli style lavishly detailed production values as he follows the
life and career of a delusional, supremely confident, yet arrogantly
self-centered romance novelist Angel Deverell (Romola Garai) who thinks
she’s writing War and Peace and that
the world should bow down at her feet.
Utterly audacious in its projection of blissful, eternal love as it’s
portrayed in the happily-ever-after dime store novels, this was a delight from
start to finish, as the satiric tone gushes with garish verve and
imagination. Never has a film made
better use of such lame dialogue, projected onscreen as if we were watching the
behind the scene story of Scarlett O’Hara, the early years, when she aspired to
be a writer. An interesting mix of
trashy soap and hyper-exaggerated sets, intelligently directed by such a
stylishly gifted director, this is overacting like you’ve never seen before, as
it’s comical in the overarching melodrama, yet also pointedly on the money when
used to reveal the hearts and souls of its characters. While the original
Amazingly, a
London publisher (Sam Neill) takes an interest in her work and encourages her
to write more, which she does effortlessly, even at the tender age of 15,
though from the acrid comments of his old-world, intellectually refined wife
(Charlotte Rampling) it’s obvious she has no conception of the real world. But it hardly matters, as she’s instantly
jettisoned into the world of fame and fortune, where she’s finally treated like
the royalty she’s always imagined, finally able to live in a castle called
Paradise surrounded by obedient servants along with dogs and cats that bound up
off their feet when she arrives, a place where she can remain totally oblivious
to the world around her. Her servants
are forbidden from giving her bad news.
The state of denial has never been portrayed with greater melodrama,
where the servants can’t even tell her when one of her pets has died, but
instead immediately replace it with a similar looking one hoping she can’t tell
the difference. She wears full make up,
elaborate costumes and full-plumed hats for every occasion, even around the
house, and through fictitious embellishments continually reinvents herself with
her public, where each incident in her life reads like another chapter of a
neverending soap opera where she is of course idealized and revered, seen at a
theater performing one of her plays where the patrons rise at once to offer her
a standing ovation. The delineation
between fantasy and reality is stretched so thin that they become inseparable,
at least in Angel’s mind. She chooses
her own husband (Michael Fassbender), a moody, disagreeable painter who has the
audacity to poke fun at her own idyllic yet tasteless societal values where
she’s always the belle of the ball, yet his vanity falls victim to her
incessant adoration, supposedly of his all but ignored work, but more likely
it’s for how she perceives the Greek god sculptured look of his perfectly
chiseled face. The honeymoon sequence is
hands down one of the most outrageously hilarious sequences seen in years, a
delicious satire on those picture perfect post cards sent from places around
the world, like one of the eight wonders of the world. Amusingly, her husband’s sensitive sister
Nora (Lucy Russell), is a plane Jane, deeply repressed secret admirer of the
romance writer who so idealizes her own love for her that she would do anything
just to be near her, so becomes her long-suffering attendant in Fassbinder’s
Irm Hermann mold from THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972). Interestingly, Nora is the closest thing to
the truth in this film, as she’s always humiliated, taken for granted, treated
horribly, yet she always comes back with total adoration. Even when everyone else’s interests turn
elsewhere, like taking notice of a World War, Nora’s devotion to Angel never
wavers.
Romola Garai’s performance is so into the vamp category that its sheer oddness deserves attention, much like Summer Phoenix in Desplechin’s earlier work ESTHER KAHN (2000), another turn of the century period film that attempts to get inside the world of an artist who is forced to reject family, friends, and the world as she knows it to discover the life of theater. Esther awkwardly and artificially immerses herself into a different echelon of society, yet the director painfully takes the time in near documentary fashion to realistically etch into the viewer’s imagination the conditions of family poverty in her early childhood. Similarly, Angel’s abysmal childhood is featured prominently in the film yet is all but reinvented, even in what little we see in the classroom settings where Angel is accused of borrowing liberally from the lengthy descriptions by Dickens, as what we see in the world around her is never mentioned and what we actually hear from her is completely made up and never happened. While much of this resembles the silent film era style of Norma Desmond exaggerations, where in each shot Angel is begging the world to see her in close up, but like SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), her world inside and out begins to decay, as elements of unhappiness find their way creeping into the perfection of her marriage, much like James Mason as Norman Maine in George Cukor’s version of A STAR IS BORN (1954), where Judy Garland’s rise to stardom takes a free fall collapse as a result of his disturbingly cynical influence. But mostly this film is immersed in the flamboyant color schemes of Douglas Sirk who attempted to express the inexpressible in films through overblown melodrama, where he used artificial means to get at the truth which was hidden underneath the repressed surface of human love and anguish. Angel in this film couldn’t be more isolated and alone, yet she pretends to be loved and adored and surrounds herself with servants and pets of all kinds to reinforce those needs, but in the end was loved by few who could even remember her, as the obscure paintings of her husband actually outlive her own fame which burned out in an instant and was quickly forgotten.
Film
Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
François Ozon is what David Bordwell might call a "polystylist" in the Fassbinder vein, though his eclecticism has mostly yielded diminishing returns. His latest finds him suiting up for yet another genre, and although it could be considered something of a throwback to his early features Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women (if by virtue of its roots in someone else's material), he's too tony now for the vaguely subversive pastiches with which he made his mark. Based on a book--unread by yours truly--by the other Elizabeth Taylor, Angel on the one hand arguably corresponds to the historical biopic (or sprawling period pieces in general) the way the upcoming Walk Hard does to Walk the Line or Ray, with the contempt seemingly manifested in Romola Garai's silent-movie gesticulations and a globetrotting sequence that has less aesthetic credibility than Conan O'Brien's wild desk rides betraying the film as a turn-of-the-century Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. And yet, there's a kind of lazy veneration for stalwart tropes like the shell-shocked veteran, the tragic miscarriage, the mistress in the city, and, my personal favourite, the death-by-heartbreak--all of which serves to undercut the singularity of Angel's protagonist, a woman who writes her way to wealth and privilege in Edwardian society. (Perhaps Ozon's playing it safe because this is his first film entirely in English.) While Garai is very good in the title role, ingratiating even at the character's brattiest, only Sam Neill, as the henpecked publisher of Angel's potboilers, transcends the movie's cumulatively-disengaging tonal fluctuations.
If you think they ‘don’t make movies like that any more’, François Ozon is here to prove you wrong. In an energetic homage to MGM of old and its stable of beloved directors (Douglas Sirk springs to most minds), Angel is melodrama writ large. Based on Elizabeth Taylor’s scorching satire, it arrives preloaded with the staples of its genre: a feisty young female, a handsome drunk, a tragic love, an inconvenient war, sumptuous sets, acres of velvet and some of the most obvious rear-projection seen in decades.
It is 1905 and Angel (Garai) is the precocious daughter of a grocer. But she sees herself as a celebrated romantic novelist and before you can say fiddle-dee-dee, she’s caught the attention of a publisher (Neil). Fame and fortune quickly follow, as does eternal love in the handsome shape of philandering Esmé (Fassbender). His sister, Angel’s doting assistant, holds the estate together as events traverse the entirety of human experience.
What prevents Angel from degenerating into pointless parody is Ozon’s acute understanding of the purpose of melodrama. He plays the story for rightful amusement as Angel disappears into her own imagination, then plunges deep to matters more urgent, creating an altogether more interesting commentary on denial and revisionism than mere tribute could afford.
And all this
under the saturated tone of an art-department drunk on colour. As with 8 Femmes, camp is only half of it, but
what a half! While Garai’s fashionably ripe performance nails every scene, the
film recalls Gone With the Wind, Brideshead Revisited and perhaps Absolutely Fabulous before rounding
off with one of the best death-bed scenes in years. Ozon’s devotees might take
pause at the idea of an English-language bodice-ripper, yet they miss the point.
Angel is an audacious work, an
extraordinary film and a remarkable achievement from one of
Last
Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
François
Ozon's first English-language feature was the closing film at the Berlin
Film Festival, which perhaps explains why certain presumably exhausted critics
failed to understand the romantic saga's tone and the filmmaker's intentions
(according to Variety's Derek
Elley, "arthouse aficionados of Ozon's earlier pics won't be
amused"). Angel is
a movie you either get or you don't - this response more or less
dictates whether sitting through the film's 134 minutes is a wicked delight or
a dreadful bore...
Adapted from Elizabeth Taylor's 1957 novel, Angel is set in
As in Swimming Pool, it's hard to pinpoint the precise moment when
reality is replaced by the narrative of the woman's imagination... (some in the
audience won't even make the leap). Ozon delivers the rest of the story with a
straight face, but the seasoned viewer knows better: Angel has become the
fictitious heroin of her own romance novel.
What follows are the epic and romantic adventures of a successful young
novelist's meteoric rise to fame, starting with an encouraging letter from an
enthusiastic publisher (Sam Neill). Everything happens just as it should, her
pulp romance novels are runaway best-sellers, she meets and marries Mr Right
(Michael Fassbender) and buys the mansion of her dreams (aptly named Paradise
House).
We are well and truly within the realm of artifice and heightened reality.
Angel's universe is pure Douglas Sirk and vintage
Paying a cheeky tribute to old
Faced with the poor comprehension of adult themes such as war, manipulation and
infidelity, Angel's revisionist narrative rewrites her experiences to fit her
dreams. Ozon establishes a brilliant parallel between our capacity to suspend
disbelief and Angel's own ability to believe her own lies. The result is not
only a witty exposé of the manipulative nature of storytelling but an
intelligent comment on our capacity for denial in the face of sour reality.
Independent.co.uk [Anthony Quinn]
The French director François Ozon
has taken Elizabeth Taylor's beadily satiric novel and transformed it into a
droll and somewhat disturbing fantasia on the creative temperament.
"She had never much cared
for books, because they did not seem to be about her, and she thought that she
would rather write a book herself, to a pattern of her own choosing." Thus
Angelica Deverell, an extraordinarily conceited and headstrong young miss of
the Edwardian era, writes a story as florid and sumptuous as her own origins
are humble and workaday. Angel (Romola Garai) lives above her mother's grocery
shop in Norley, a drab brewery town which she longs to escape.
With a blithe self-confidence
belying her 15 years, Deverell offers the manuscript of her novel, The Lady
Irania, to London publisher Théo Gilbright (Sam Neill) who, half-appalled,
half-fascinated, decides it might be a success, despite its author's own
indifference to reading and literature.
"I quite like
Shakespeare," she admits, "except when he tries to be funny."
Gilbright's faith is repaid, the book becomes a best-seller, and Angel embraces
a world of public acclaim and spectacular opulence she has long thought her
due.
Ozon has previously investigated
the fertile territory of a novelist and her imagination in his 2003 film
Swimming Pool, wherein a British crime writer (Charlotte Rampling) tries to
work through a creative block while sojourning at her publisher's holiday
chateau.
This time, however, the
distortions of reality are even more ambiguous, and, for a while, we feel
unsure as to whether we are being shown a portrait of ecstatic self-delusion or
merely a sly glimpse into a grotesque mismatch between talent and success. How
can a writer who spangles her prose with words like "coruscating" and
"iridescent" command such a huge readership? What's beyond doubt is
just how wittily it plays, at least for the first three quarters of an hour.
Garai has exactly the right spoilt set to her mouth for this precocious
fantasist, and her large eyes widen with humourless affront at anyone who dares
question Angel's imaginative despotism.
Her first meeting with Neill's
gently coaxing publisher is superb: when he suggests a few changes to her
manuscript – a bottle of champagne, he points out, would not require a
corkscrew – she fiercely rejects any kind of intervention. Later, her conduct
at dinner with Neill and his wife (Charlotte Rampling, again) is so obnoxious
and self-regarding you begin to think she really must be a writer.
The film's look also bamboozles
us with its seamless switching between reality and artifice. Crude
back-projections of London landmarks announce Angel's arrival in town, and the
extravagant country mansion, Paradise House, she buys for herself is upholstered
in the vivid, heated colours of a stage set, a cross between a Douglas Sirk
melodrama and an MGM musical. One begins to wonder if this glamorous social
whirl is simply happening inside Angel's head. Yet the attachments she forms
with Nora (Lucy Russell – brilliant), an adoring fan-turned-secretary, and
Nora's brother, a saturnine-looking artist named Esmé (Michael Fassbender),
keep tugging the film back towards realism. Esmé's bleak, dark-hued paintings
of cemeteries and tenements are the opposite of her own wildly romantic
fiction, while the man himself proves a scoundrel and a waster. But Angel falls
for him all the same.
So how vexing that the film's
sprightly satire comes to so little, and that the truth of Angel's life is left
so elusive. Ozon poses the question beautifully, yet his refusal to offer an
answer seems not so much a mystery as a cop-out. If there is a pathological
strain in Angel's longing for the picture-perfect in everything, then the film
ought to show the mask slipping. If, on the other hand, her life unfolds in
just the way it has been presented, then – so what? The sight of the older
Angel, chalky of face and wild of hair, is perhaps intended to be tragic, yet
all you're left to wonder is why she looks like one of the Addams family. It's
a great disappointment, though it's fun for a while.
Telegraph.co.uk [Mike McCahill]
If there was one Elizabeth Taylor
whose work you imagine being devoured by François Ozon, it'd surely be the
Hollywood icon, not the underrated novelist. Ozon's latest, Angel (15),
provides the latest twist in this film-maker's uneven but always surprising
career: an English-language adaptation of Taylor's tremendously sly 1957 novel
concerning a writer of terrible romantic fiction.
Angel Deverell (Romola Garai) is
a gauche provincial girl who achieves staggering popular success through sheer,
demonic force of will; you might call it 'Barbara Cartland: The Early Years'.
Dismissive of others ('I quite like Shakespeare, except when he's trying to be
funny'), she triumphs with such titles as 'On Violet Banks' - purple prose,
presumably - before falling for painter-philanderer Esmé Howe-Nevinson (Michael
Fassbender), an individual singularly unable to provide the happy ending she's
written for herself.
Ozon has admitted 'my main
challenge was to make Angel likeable'. I'll say. On the page, she reads like
the female equivalent of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood: unrepentant,
monstrous indeed. Casting Garai, a performer whose meekness has previously
looked a liability, at first seems counterintuitive. Here, though, she's a
knockout, recognising there might yet be something sympathetic, as well as
pathological, about someone who so persistently turns their back on the real
world to inhabit one of their own creation. Her Angel still insists the band
strike up the national anthem whenever she enters a ballroom, but Garai lets us
catch the insecurities - about looks, talent, upbringing - lurking beneath the
head-girl hauteur.
If the film is practically
constructed as a coming-out ball for her, equally enjoyable contributions can
be found on the sidelines. A wry Sam Neill, as ever-patient publisher Theo
Gilbright, brings with him the same class James Mason used to lend to those old
Gainsborough melodramas; Charlotte Rampling, as Neill's wife, has one priceless
line about canaries; and Lucy Russell sensitively draws out the novel's Sapphic
subtext as Nora, Angel's long-suffering attendant.
Around them, Ozon seizes upon the
distance between humdrum reality and the wilder flourishes of Angel's
imagination - a distance further redoubled by Philippe Rombi's extravagant
score, the patently fake back projection, the creative energy expended on ensuring
the heroine's furnishings are just tasteless enough. Ozon can sometimes seem
coldly ironic, but this time we're in on the joke: it's the wittiest costume
drama for some while, not least because its costumes are often uproariously
tacky.
The melancholy of Taylor's novel
- the understanding that death alone has the final word - is present, but in a
less potent form, and there's some directorial tidying up towards the end that
leaves the film a taster of the book's greatness rather than a full translation.
Still, it's a playful and piquant taste: coupled with Catherine Breillat's
bruising The Last Mistress, it suggests the French are finding more to pull out
of the costume genre than the starched collars and stiff upper lips beloved of
certain British directors.
Clearly this is no week for
reticent composers or self-effacing cinema-tographers. The Turkish drama Times
and Winds (15) comes complete with a score (by Arvo Pärt) so emphatic
and imagery so lush it's no surprise it has enraptured multitudes on the
festival circuit. Writer-director Reha Erdem's first film to reach Britain
deserves consideration for entry into the pantheon of great films about rural
communities: more picturesque than The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), less
romantic than Days of Heaven (1978).
Essentially, it's a coming-of-age
tale, set in a coastal village. While the adults toil in the mosques, fields
and schoolrooms, trying to prevent any erosion of land or authority, their
offspring lark about on the surrounding mountains, sneaking cigarettes and
evading the local gamekeeper. More restless still, teenage Ömer (Özkan Özen) is
plotting to kill his own father, an imam with a clear favourite in Ömer's
know-it-all younger brother.
If you've seen a Turkish film
recently, chances are it's been the work of director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Uzak,
Climates). Erdem's style is altogether more fluid, contrasting ideas of natural
and man-made order with broad good humour. One charming sequence simply
observes the differing reactions of giggly boys and quizzical girls to the
sight of two asses mating. A cut from a line of schoolchildren reciting the
Turkish oath of allegiance to goats proceeding haphazardly up a hillside makes
its own sardonic point.
Erdem doesn't shy away from the
harshness of this world - black eyes and bruises speak eloquently if
distressingly of parental abuse - but he counters them with stunning landscapes
that underline how the protagonists are at one with the rocks, leaves and roots
about them.
You might, on reflection, want a
little more narrative oomph, but collectively these images propose Erdem as a
big-canvas film-maker more than adept at engaging the senses. Perfectly timed
to arrive as yet another British summer washes itself away, his film is
leisurely, sun-kissed and deeply invigorating: it feels less like two hours in
the cinema, in fact, than a couple of weeks off in the countryside.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s Sweater
Angel Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Future Movies (Coco Forsythe) review [8/10]
Screen
International [Jonathan Romney] in
A Nutshell Review Stefan S
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Susanna Krawczyk]
Screenjabber review Michael Edwards
Shadows on the Wall (Rich Cline) review
ViewLondon (Matthew Turner) review [3/5]
Reeling Reviews (Robin and Laura Clifford) review [B-]
Black Sheep Reviews by Joseph Belanger
The Age review Jake Wilson
Jam! Movies review Liz Braun
Why
Francois Ozon's Angel makes me nervous | Film | guardian.co.uk Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
Interview
with Romola Garai John Preston
interviews lead actress Romola Garai from The
Telegraph,
The New Zealand Herald review Francesca Rudkin
Boston Globe review [3/4] Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix (Gerald Peary) review
RICKY C 75
A bizarre little film that never really gets going, feeling more like a
sketch or a sequence than an entire film.
Although IMDb currently lists Ozon as the sole and exclusive
screenwriter, the end credits suggest otherwise, as the movie was adapted from
“Moth,” a British short story by Rose Tremain.
Just like any film with Udo Kier in it (see Von Trier’s 1994 TV
mini-series THE KINGDOM), one always has raised eyebrows with the casting of
Sergi López, who can come pretty close to consummate evil. Perhaps this entire film is a reaction to
what he represents as opposed to who he really is. In Ozon films, sometimes it’s hard to tell
the difference. The kicker in this film
is the little opening segment that is fraught with anguish and a single mother
who is desperate to give up rights to her newborn baby. The film then flashes back several months,
never making it clear when or if a timeline changes, even as events unfold, all
of which places everything that happens into question. Perhaps it’s easy to overlook this little
detail, as there are many perfectly rational potential explanations, but none
are offered by the film itself. So just
for openers, this remains something of a nagging mystery.
Alexandra Lamy plays Katie, a single mom with an extremely close
relationsip with her 7-year old daughter Lisa (Mélusine Mayance). Katie works at a chemical factory where she
meets Paco (Sergi López) who wastes no time moving into the family. All goes well until Katie conceives their
mutual child, Ricky, an excessive crier who shows peculiar signs of bruising on
his back which incredulously transform into feathered wings. In a bit of a twist, Ricky’s wings begin
fluttering and he soon begins to fly, preferring to perch on the top of
cabinets high up near the ceiling.
Without calling a doctor or asking for any assistance, Katie raises this
child alone with Lisa, a second mother, as the disinterested Paco has been long
gone since before Ricky even grew wings.
But when Ricky gets loose in a grocery store fluttering near the ceiling
lights like a moth to a flame, some of which was captured on cell phone
cameras, he becomes an instant TV sensation, as the paparazzi now follow them
everywhere. While the prevailing medical
view is to keep Ricky safe and under observation, Paco returns and believes
otherwise, making a decision that turns disastrous.
Yes, of course all this sounds contrived, too contrived and unengaging
for my tastes, especially the lackluster attention paid to him by his mother,
but again, it’s Sergi López we’re dealing with as the father, sometimes thought
of as the devil incarnate. Paco never
stood behind Ricky from the beginning, while Katie on the other hand, sees
things more from a Biblical perspective, as if Ricky’s existence is a
miracle. Lisa is caught in between,
wanting to love her little brother, but hating all the attention he gets,
stealing her time with her mother.
Lisa’s thoughts may actually determine the eventual outcome. Always with a slight undertone of menace in
the air, what actually happens is anybody’s guess, as all the characters have a
different perspective on Ricky, but one thing is clear, no animals or winged
babies were harmed in the making of this film.
Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall
Francois Ozon, director of such realistic dramas as Swimming Pool (2003) and Under the Sand (2000), ventures into fantasy with this French feature, which might be read as a parable about coping with "special needs" infants. A single mother (Alexandra Demy), living in a council flat with her seven-year-old daughter, throws herself into an intense affair with a new coworker (Sergi Lopez); after she gives birth to a son, the baby strains the domestic fabric with his incessant crying, provoked not by teething but by the wings sprouting from his back. This is among Ozon's most lyrical and daring films. The daughter (Melusine Mayance), forced to grow up too soon, is both frightening and sympathetic, simmering with jealousy as she makes room for the new men in her home.
TimeOut Chicago Keith Uhlich
François Ozon’s intriguing modern-day parable could be glibly synopsized as the “French flying baby movie,” though that is as much of a feint as the film’s opening shot, which elegantly misdirects our attentions. A visibly shaken woman, Katie (the extraordinary Lamy), sits isolated in the frame, talking to an offscreen social worker. Background details slowly emerge—her husband has left her; she’s thinking of giving her baby son up for adoption—that help to define her emotionally fraught, working-class existence. Then Ozon, playing on our expectations, cuts to a “several months earlier” flashback that suggests he’ll work his way back to this heartrending opening salvo.
Yet he never does. This turns out to be the first of several beautifully employed ellipses that signal a subtle shift in the film’s tone. For a while, it seems we’re in for a mostly grounded blue-collar love story between Katie and her coworker, Paco (López). Then after an almost-invisible nine-month jump, Katie gives birth to a child, Ricky (Peyret), who pushes the tale toward the blatantly spiritual when he sprouts a pair of wings. It would be risible if Ozon’s hand didn’t remain so steady and confident throughout, all the way up to a complicatedly upbeat conclusion that recreates the Christian Annunciation with the straightest of faces.
Time
Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]
The best thing about Ricky is no
doubt its titular baby character (Arthur Peyret), who’s so breathtakingly
adorable that it will turn your heart into a lump of butter. Inspired by
novelist Rose Tremain’s short story, this latest from the French enfant
terrible (8 femmes, 5x2) begins with Ricky’s extraordinary birth – when
working-class single mom Katie (Alexandra Lamy) and her Spanish immigrant
co-worker Paco (Sergi López) fall in love at first sight, and then possibly
conceive Ricky in a factory washroom right away. Tension in the family quickly
mounts as Paco moves in with Katie and her seven-year-old daughter, Lisa
(Mélusine Mayance), but it all changes when Ricky starts to… grow wings.
Engaging for the most part, this
urban fairytale is unfortunately almost as clueless as the flying baby’s
parents, resulting in a casual mishmash of social realism, cutesy baby humour,
marriage drama, media circus, and even shades of psychological horror. The last
bit is especially puzzling, considering the film’s central focus on the
heart-warming nature of family love. While its sporadic use of unsettling music
distantly echoes Polanski’s devilish Rosemary’s Baby, Ricky is laden with
enough details to suggest that it’s all part of little Lisa’s imagination.
Improbable as it sounds, this minor Ozon is a bit like Under The Sand, or
Swimming Pool – but with kids.
The
Hollywood Reporter [Neil Young]
The latest adventurous effort from tireless French writer-director Francois
Ozon ("Swimming Pool," 2007's "Angel") is a particularly
tricky sell as the less audiences know about it beforehand the better. But the
picture is sufficiently unusual and its big midpoint twist sufficiently bizarre
that there's an outside chance of reasonable art house success among indulgent
patrons seeking something out of the ordinary.
Ozon and co-scriptwriter Emmanuelle Bernheim have taken a brisk, fable-like
story by Brit author Rose Tremain (itself half-inspired by a cult novel from
seminal fantasy scribe Mervyn Peake) and, as well as transplanting the action
from a U.S. trailer-park to a northern French housing-project, freely adapted,
expanded and (inevitably) literalized it. "Ricky" is thus perhaps a
not-so-distant Gallic cousin of "Benjamin Button."
Early stretches are soberly realistic, presenting the daily life of a
working-class mother and daughter: Katie (Alexandra Lamy) works long shifts at
a chemical factory, while 7-year-old moppet Lisa (rock solid newcomer Melusine
Mayance) is precociously self-sufficient and solemn. Lisa's dad having long
since disappeared, mom and kid have grown into a close-knit "team,"
but when Katie falls for rough-hewn charmer Paco (Sergi Lopez), the pair's
domestic setup is irrevocably altered. Lisa's sense of exclusion doubles when
the cherubic Ricky (Arthur Peyret) appears -- and deepens yet further when it
becomes apparent what a "special" baby this is.
Despite the title, "Ricky" best makes sense if interpreted mainly
from Lisa's POV -- like many children, she must quickly adapt to no longer
being the sole center of attention and affection. Here, however, sibling
rivalry takes on a whole new dimension. Whereas the first half has a Dardennes
brothers vibe, what follows owes rather more to Messrs Cronenberg, Lynch,
Burton and Gilliam, with a dash of Preston Sturges added for crucial
satirical/comic measure.
It sounds like a rather messy recipe, and what a pity Ozon can't quite manage
to sustain the necessary focus -- particularly in the last reel, when events
become more a realization of Katie's maternal worries than of Lisa's juvenile
insecurities. The plot's discombobulating gear-changes are marked more smoothly
by Philippe Rombi's score, which coyly hints at "Rosemary's Baby"
horrors early on before transitioning to Hitchcockian suspense-themes, then
pastiching Spielberg-style uplift during the soaring, effects-heavy final act.
Eye for Film
(Adam Micklethwaite) review [3/5]
Based on a short story by Rose Tremain, this magical-realist
fable is an intriguing and charming, if at times somewhat paradoxical, effort
from experienced French director Francois Ozon. Ricky is a tale of striking
contradictions, beginning as a kitchen-sink drama, which centres on the love
affair between two ordinary people, before transforming into an altogether
different animal, shifting focus towards the extraordinary child resulting from
their union.
With a storyline which wouldn’t be out of place in a Sixties
Disney film, this is certainly an unusual choice for French auteur François
Ozon, but unsurprisingly his interest is not so much in the ‘extraordinary’ for
its own sake, but rather for the way in which the extraordinary interacts with
and impacts upon the ordinary and everyday.
The first half of the film plays like a kitchen sink drama, as
Ozon’s trademark naturalism tracks the blossoming of a relationship between
Paco (Sergi Lopez) and Katie (Alexandra Lamy), two workers at a cosmetics
factory in the industrial heart of northern
Then, one day, something truly extraordinary begins to happen
to Ricky, and the family’s world is irrevocably changed. Ricky’s transformation
leads to a rift between Paco and Katie before attracting the interest of the
outside world in a scene which is blatant critique of the media circus and its
impact upon the lives of ordinary people. Ozon uses the juxtaposition of the
ordinary and the extraordinary to create a weird mix of the comedic and the
unsettling. Many of the incidents involving Ricky are touching and funny, but
at the same time it is no coincidence that sections of the score have echoes of
Rosemary’s Baby.
Ozon seeks to maintain the mystery and suspense of the twist
even once it has been revealed, leaving the audience with a vague sensation of
impending crisis, even when there is apparently nothing to fear. The crisis,
when it does arrive, is typically understated and unexpected, as the director
sensibly avoids the temptation towards melodrama, which could have ruined the
film. Likewise the ending is handled adeptly, being at once suitably ambiguous
and suitably gratifying as to remain open-ended but also offer a sense of
closure to this urban fable.
Although Ozon never quite makes his mind up about the tone of
the piece, the weird juxtaposition of the normal and abnormal is mostly
effective, backed up by some heart-warming comedy and fine performances from
the leads. The film’s greatest weakness, however, is its somewhat cumbersome
and lengthy first half which precedes the introduction of the child and makes
it difficult to escape the impression that Ozon is no more at ease with baby
Ricky than the doctors who unsucessfully try to examine him.
REVIEW
| Flight of Fancy: François Ozon's “Ricky” | IndieWire Michael
Koresky
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Slant Magazine review [2.5/4] Bill Weber
PopMatters (Cynthia Fuchs) review
The Onion A.V. Club review [B-] Sam Adams
Urban Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
Screen International review Lee Marshall
Village Voice (Melissa Anderson) review
NewCity Chicago Ray Pride
RICKY Facets Multi Media
User reviews from imdb Author: maxklaxon from Amsterdam, Netherlands
User reviews from imdb Author: unfairVoter (mellowelbow@gmail.com) from Democratic People's Republic of Korea
Variety (Boyd van Hoeij) review
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The New York Times (Stephen Holden) review
HIDEAWAY (Le Refuge) B 85
A modest and slight film that has the feel of an improvised
workshop that was quickly pulled together surrounding the very real pregnancy
of actress Isabelle Carré, not
to mention the singing talents of pop singer Louis-Ronan Choisy, both of whom
were integrated into this story about pregnancy and a gay friendship. The first film in Ozon’s career to be shot in
HD video, yet one must say the look is stunning, in particular the opening
night shot which shows the glistening lights of
Ozon tends to frame his subjects in idyllic settings, rarely showing anyone actually working for a living, yet they are captured in exotic locales that most viewers would consider dream worthy. With little to no explanation as to how she is managing, Mousse is soon spending the summer alone in a fabulous chateau owned by a mysterious unseen childhood acquaintance overlooking a horizon of undisturbed farmland and the nearby Atlantic ocean, apparently in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, not far from the Spanish border, as she’s soon met by one of Louis’s brothers, Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), who is bumming his way into Spain. Despite coming from a wealthy family, Paul prefers a lifestyle of cheap travel, the highlight being the occasional pick up of stray guys, where languishing his afternoons on the beach becomes a daily routine. Mousse is initially irritable and hard to get along with, refusing to open up, but Paul is patient and pursues other interests, which only makes her grow more curious, as along with the unborn child that she chose to keep in defiance of Louis’s family, both Paul and the unborn are a connection to her dead boyfriend. When he plays piano and sings a song the brothers liked as children, she very nearly gushes with appreciation. While she remains unglamorized, completely unsentimental and always something of a free spirit, where people seem to channel their uncomfortable feelings about pregnant women directly through her, the film is not complicated and moves at its own slow pace, becoming one of the more predictably conventional films over the course of Ozon’s career.
The original music written by Louis-Ronan Choisy actually becomes hummable, identifiable theme music, something not seen in any other Ozon film, where the tone is more typically austere and starkly naturalistic. There’s some interesting observations about continued methodone use during the pregnancy and the ease of French prescription refills, which differs in a major way from the highly regimented American delivery system, including the care of the baby itself, which would be born addicted to methodone and most likely have a myriad of other health risks, subject to the care and constant oversight from a team of medical and social service personnel, not to mention the police, to guarantee the mother’s irresponsible behavior doesn’t harm this child. In Ozon’s film this is entirely non-existent, continuing the idyllic portrayal of a perfect childbirth. While one easily sympathizes with Ozon’s broader themes, such as the impact gays have on the healthy development of a pregnant mother and her baby, like so many of his other films, he sun drenches his subject matter in a dreamlike artificiality, turning a pregnancy fable into a leisurely, bucolic drama set in the French countryside.
2009 TIFF Update #8 - Reviews by David Nusair
A typically slow-paced drama from François Ozon, Le Refuge follows an ill-tempered Mousse (Isabelle Carré) as she learns that she's pregnant and subsequently heads to an old friend's beachfront home to kick her addiction - with her solitude interrupted by the arrival of her dead boyfriend's homosexual brother (Louis-Ronan Choisy's Paul). There's little doubt that Le Refuge improves marginally as it progresses, with the far-from-likeable nature of the central character initially preventing the viewer from wholeheartedly connecting with the material. Though Carré offers up a stirring performance, Mousse remains entirely unsympathetic for much of the film's opening hour - which isn't terribly surprising, admittedly, given her prickly demeanor and penchant for saying the absolute wrong thing at any given time. And although there inevitably does reach a point at which Mousse becomes a relatively compelling figure, the relentlessly uneventful nature of Ozon and Mathieu Hippeau's screenplay - coupled with the movie's slow-moving sensibilities - ensures that Le Refuge, even when it does improve, never becomes anything more than a mildly watchable drama (with Carré's affecting work ultimately setting the movie apart from its similarly-themed brethren).
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Rob Christopher
In an interview with the British magazine electric sheep,
Ozon explains, "I'm interested in identities that are not defined yet,
that are gestating. That's what I want to do in films, I want to show things
that are not finished, that are being constructed, and to participate in, or
rather follow, the construction of that identity." HIDEAWAY explores this
theme both literally (a woman discovers that she's pregnant with her dead
lover's child) and metaphorically (the dead man's brother finds himself growing
close to her, despite the fact that he's gay). Ozon has never been championed
as a Gay-with-a-capital-G filmmaker like Greg Araki or even Gus Van Sant for a
very simple reason. Throughout his films, Ozon explores the notion that one's
sexuality might be fluid; in fact, he insists that it is. And in HIDEAWAY he's
willing to feature a main character who's gay, yet has no qualms (or regrets
after the fact) about sleeping with a woman. That's clearly a threat to gay
orthodoxy, which cannot allow for such complexity. That narrow-mindedness is a
shame, because HIDEAWAY showcases Ozon's unique ability to create a mood of
delicate ambiguity--one that is startlingly resolved in the film's final scene,
a moment that manages to be both quietly optimistic and unabashedly political.
(2009, 90 min, 35mm widescreen)
The
Village Voice [Ernest Hardy]
There are actually two hideaways in François Ozon's meditative Hideaway—the gorgeous, sparsely furnished apartment used as a drug den by wealthy young couple Mousse (Isabelle Carre) and Louis (Melvil Poupaud, star of Ozon's Time to Leave), and the isolated beach house to which the pregnant Mousse retreats after Louis dies of an overdose. An exploration of familiar Ozon themes (complex femininity, emotional isolation, nuanced sexuality), Hideaway slowly layers psychological detail as the writer-director funnels his staple obsessions into a measured character study of family (chosen and otherwise) and maternal instincts (or lack thereof). Though Mousse mourns Louis, the film centers on her evolving relationship with his melancholy gay younger brother, Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), who unexpectedly joins her at the beach house. Prickly and manipulative, Mousse (whose reasons for keeping the baby—defiance of Louis's aloof mother, longing for Louis, indifference—are rooted in anything but maternal longing) nonetheless slowly connects with Paul, whose outsider status in his own family has left its wounds. Ozon wields his HD camera subtly but potently, using facial close-ups and a slow scan of Paul's dripping wet body to effectively convey everything from grief to erotic longing. Though the psychological layering and thematic ambition of the screenplay do not quite result in the depth intended, Hideaway's unsentimental performances will hook you.
Le Refuge Nick Hammond
Only 42 years old, François Ozon is a film director with quite a reputation. Respected by the academic world, he has churned out a dizzying array of very different films, from the surreal Sitcom to Sous le Sable (in which Charlotte Rampling fails to convince as a university professor); from the derivative but enjoyable 8 Femmes, where the characters break into song at various junctures, to the (in my view) vastly overrated Swimming Pool (also with Rampling); and from the touching 5 x 2, which charts the disintegration of a romance in reverse, to Le Temps qui Reste, about a gay man who discovers he is soon to die. Ozon’s new movie, Le Refuge, starring Isabelle Carré and first-time movie actor Louis-Ronan Choisy, a singer who also composed the music for the film, represents another departure for Ozon, even though familiar themes such as loss, birth and sexuality play an important part.
Le Refuge starts with a grimly realistic depiction of a young couple, Mousse (Carré) and Louis (Melvil Poupaud), shooting up heroin together in a plush Parisian apartment. Louis dies from an overdose, but Mousse survives and discovers she is pregnant at the same time she learns of her lover’s death. The remainder of the film functions on a different plane from that of the gritty opening, as Mousse, having decided to continue with the pregnancy (against the advice of Louis’s coldly bourgeois mother), moves to a house on the Basque coast. Although we see Mousse drinking methadone during the course of the movie, the transition from being an addict desperately trying to find a viable vein to living an idyllic seaside existence seems less than credible. The appearance of Louis’s younger gay brother Paul (Choisy), however, gives the movie a refreshing and believable angle, as both characters get to know each other while they come to terms with the loss of Louis and the impending arrival of Mousse’s baby.
Pregnancy dominates the movie and is perhaps its strongest and weakest point. On the positive side, never has a woman’s pregnancy been filmed with such candor. The camera lingers over the body of Isabelle Carré, who herself was pregnant during the filming, and the state of impending motherhood becomes something very real on the big screen, unlike the prosthetic bumps that so many actresses usually wear. The less positive feature comes from what seems to be a very French attitude to pregnant or overweight women. Although Ozon seems to be exploring in the movie the attitudes of others toward a pregnant woman on her own, the only characters who show real enthusiasm for her pregnant state are a woman on a beach, who starts off by complimenting her for having the courage to show herself in a swimsuit but who subsequently turns out to be insane, and a man who buys her a drink and then admits to being a fetishist who is only turned on by pregnant women. Mousse even apologizes at one point for being overweight. It reminds me of a female friend living in Paris who, while expecting a baby, was given a 50-page official booklet for mothers-to-be that contained only one paragraph directed toward fathers, in which they were told that it was natural to feel disgust for their bloated partners but that they should still tell their partners how much they loved them!
Le Refuge is a convincingly acted and thoughtfully produced movie. Ozon might lack the charm, panache, humor or distinctiveness to be called the French Almodóvar, but he is still one of the most interesting French directors around.
Digital Fix Noel Megahey
Slant Magazine (Bill Weber) review
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Film-Forward.com
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
François Ozon: Le refuge (2009)--R-V Chris Knipp
Eye for Film (Amber Wilkinson) review [4/5]
The New Yorker (David Denby) review
The Onion A.V. Club review [C+] Scott Tobias
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Phil on Film (Philip Concannon) review
Sound On Sight Laura Holdebrinck
Black Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Time Out Hong Kong [Edmund Lee]
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/5]
Film review: Le Refuge | Film | The Guardian Cath Clarke
Independent.co.uk
[Geoffrey Macnab]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los Angeles Times review Kevin Thomas
Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Saint-Jean-de-Luz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Images for Saint-Jean-de-Luz photos
Saint_jean_de_luz_-_église.JPG Church of
POTICHE B 87
Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu first worked together in Truffaut’s THE LAST METRO (1980), where Deneuve kept the theater going in Paris, hiding her Jewish play-writing husband deep in the bowels of the underground of the theater during the Nazi occupation, with Depardieu playing a French resistance fighter who also joined her onstage as her leading man, working together 5 times in the 1980’s, again in André Téchiné’s CHANGING TIMES (2004), making this their 7th film together. They work together like long lost friends, and their stature only adds respectability and pleasure to this candy colored, picture post card recollection of life in the late 1970’s, which plays very much like a TV sitcom. With the frequent use of split screens and over the top piped in strings, Ozon floods the screen with saturated color and light, also stereotypical characters, at least seen by today’s world. Adapting a successful play written by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, the film version is a farce, like joyously watching a train wreck as it happens, where Deneuve’s sheltered and seemingly harmonious world as the trophy wife of a ruthless factory owner (Fabrice Luchini) in a small provincial town covers up his egregious acts as an arrogant, philandering crook who thinks only of his self-interest, and to hell with everyone else, cooking the books, having a continuous affair with his secretary (Karin Viard) while also regularly seeking women’s company in high end night clubs at the company’s expense. When a work stoppage at the umbrella factory he runs that she inherited from her father causes him to come to blows with striking workers, he is placed under immediate medical care, causing her to step in and run the factory during his absence.
While most think of this temporary fix as something of a
joke, Deneuve enlists the help of the Mayor (Depardieu), a local Communist
whose activist tendencies are the opposite of what her husband stands for, so
they make an engaging pair, especially when they take a little walk down memory
lane, using younger actors to play their shared rosy memory of much younger
times, an amusingly sunny recollection where they each looked picture
perfect. Deneuve, once deemed the most
beautiful woman in the world during the 1960’s, is now 67, and Depardieu,
horribly overweight but as natural as ever, is 62. Both apparently wear wigs. The mayor agrees to get the ball rolling in
establishing negotiations with the union, where Deneuve wears pearls for the
occasion, claiming they paid for them, so the workers may as well share in
their enjoyment. Knowing many of the
workers by name, including the family they came from, as many worked for her
father, Deneuve immediately develops a hands on style that gets the factory
back on its feet and running smoother then ever, involving the help and
participation of their two otherwise floundering children, Judith Godreche
and Jéremie Réniér, both amusingly cast with an ultra right and ultra left
viewpoint, where the dizzying naiveté of each child leaves one wondering if
this really resembles the era of the American 50’s as portrayed on TV, yet the
color scheme is definitely the 70’s.
When her husband returns to his rightful position, he’s surprised to
learn that the rug has been pulled out from underneath him, where he’s
literally been stripped of his power and his position, relegated to an out of
the way TV room where he can be the dutiful trophy husband.
Of course, there are more twists and turns, where the comedic battle of
the sexes, and the social classes, only develop more forks in the road, each
turning the tables on the other, all shot with a sunny disposition and a delightful
sense of humor. While there are dark
moments, they are brief and touchingly eloquent, usually followed by out and
out laughs. There’s a wonderful cameo
from Sergi López, the sadistic Fascist army officer in PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006),
also the wayward father in Ozon’s surreal RICKY (2009), playing a truck driver
who offers more than a helping hand. The
children’s development into something more substantial is clever, as is the
eye-opening awareness of the secretary, as all figure prominently in the outcome. There are some particularly observant
variations on a theme, as there’s a musical chairs of the children’s love
interests, each humorously cast in a different sexual angle. Everyone grows out of their stereotypical
depiction except the husband, a guy who simply refuses to change with the
times, remaining despicable until the end, even as it gets him nowhere. But this is the Deneuve and Depardieu show,
where they have a seriously dated dance sequence in a nightclub that is
adorable, where the Bee Gees can distinctly be heard in the background, shot
with all the kitsch and tongue-in-cheek that Ozon can muster. By the finale Deneuve actually breaks
out into song, a deliriously campy number that couldn’t be more poignantly life
affirming, singing about how beautiful life is, bringing the curtain down in an
exquisitely “French” moment that encapsulates a kind of harmonious unity where
all is right in the world, like the memorable final chorus of Mozart’s Marriage
of Figaro which the audience is happily humming in unison as they leave the
theater.
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
at
More like Pastiche. Back in kitschy-feminist 8 Women mode, François Ozon channels Jacques Demy (pink umbrellas and all) for this plush hymn to the fabulosity of all things Catherine Deneuve. The campy tone is set in the opening sequence, as French cinema's knowing empress is introduced in a jogging tracksuit and tasteful curlers, cooing at fawns and winking at squirrels. It's 1977 and she plays the docile wife of a right-wing, openly unfaithful industrialist (Fabrice Luchini). When her husband is hospitalized after a clash with striking workers, she dons her best pearls and furs and heads out to run the factory with her adult children, reactionary Papa's girl Judith Godreche and queer-eyed artist Jeremy Renier. Though larded with lines like "Paternalism is dead" and "The personal is political," Ozon's romp is less interested in charting a bourgeois wife's private revolution than in doting on feathery coifs, split-screens, and geometric wallpaper. Deneuve does plenty of elegantly funny swanning, and works up iconic poignancy with Gerard Depardieu (as her unionist-turned-mayor ex-lover). It feels churlish to carp when a star is having so much fun, though I wish the material didn't play like a Gallic remake of Mamma Mia!
The Village Voice [Karina Longworth]
The opening title card of François Ozon’s 1977-set Potiche seems to take design inspiration from the exploitation films of that period—a sneaky-smart way of nodding to one of this pastel-colored political farce’s key topics, if not its stylistic mode. As Suzanne, Catherine Deneuve plays the title role, which translates as “trophy wife”; she is married to the smarmy, unfaithful Robert (Fabrice Luchini), whose primary attraction to Suzanne appears to have been motivated by the umbrella factory she inherited from her father, which Robert now controls with cold capitalist efficiency. Still lovely at sixtysomething, Suzanne is cheerfully resigned to serving her husband and living passively in his shadow (“Your job is to share my opinion,” he condescends). When Robert has a heart attack precipitated by a workers’ strike, he presumes his wife will be a better-coifed mouthpiece for his own managerial ideology and allows her to take over the factory while he convalesces. Seeking counsel from Babin (Gérard Depardieu), a local lefty pol and her long-ago lover, Suzanne puts her womanly wiles to work, making broad improvements to the business, while gradually, casually revealing that she never really let her marriage hold her back at all. Like its heroine, Potiche is deceptively lightweight, its camp screwball fizziness giving way to a surprisingly cogent feminist parable, in which the personal proves again and again to be the most volatile variable in the political.
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich]
She’s a prize, that’s for sure. We meet 1970s French homemaker Suzanne Pujol (Deneuve)—the potiche, or “trophy wife,” of the title—during her morning jog through a misty forest. Her tracksuit is a blazing shade of Technicolor red, and everything she does is just so darn cute. After spotting a pair of humping animals, she raises hand to mouth in the most endearing expression of mon Dieu! affrontery you’re ever likely to see. Of course, there’s more to the character than sight-gag facial expressions: She’s also a devoted spouse to a cheating husband (Luchini) who owns a local factory that’s on the verge of a strike. When the situation turns volatile, she steps in to run things and quickly comes to like her newfound sense of freedom.
Writer-director François Ozon, adapting a popular comic play by
Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, creates an archly stylized world through
the use of split screens, saturated colors and in-on-the-joke performances and
situations. The allusions pile up fast and furious (the factory Suzanne takes
over specializes in umbrellas—though not of
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
François Ozon made his reputation in the late ’90s and early ’00s as one of the most gifted, eclectic, prolific stylists of his French filmmaking generation, but over the past few years, he’s seemed more interested in the “prolific” part of his rep. Potiche (loosely translated as “trophy”) returns Ozon to the colorful, energetic retro-homage of his musical 8 Women, and it’s his most purely enjoyable movie in nearly a decade. Set in 1977—which gives Ozon license to evoke the era through music, fashion, decor, and a kind of sitcom breeziness—Potiche stars Catherine Deneuve as the upbeat wife of uptight factory owner Fabrice Luchini. When Luchini has a heart attack during a labor dispute, Deneuve takes over and improves the workers’ lot and sales of the company’s umbrellas, all while renewing an acquaintance with an old lover, the town’s leftist deputy mayor, Gérard Depardieu.
Funny, twisty, and sometimes bittersweet, Potiche is a fluffy good time, but not entirely insubstantial. Ozon (along with Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, who wrote the play Ozon adapted) has a lot of fun with the dubious paternity of various characters in the movie, in part because Potiche is essentially French farce, and in part because the movie is trying to say that people of different classes and backgrounds should be nicer to each other, because we’re all brothers—literally, in some cases. And though the “sisters are doing it for themselves” theme is hardly novel, the period setting gives it a raison d’être, as does the presence of former Umbrellas Of Cherbourg ingénue Deneuve, playing a woman who knows a little about what makes a good parapluie.
If nothing else, it’s a treat to see French cinema legends Deneuve and Depardieu in a movie that uses their iconic status so slyly, making reference to their characters’ wilder pasts, and showing they still have some juice left. More than that, though, it’s a treat to see Ozon so on-point. Potiche has a spark that’s been missing from even some of Ozon’s more florid recent films. It isn’t a comeback per se, but a case of a director in full command of his craft, turning out a more attractive product than he has been of late.
The House Next Door [Nick Schager]
So arch you can practically hear its back breaking, Potiche finds François Ozon following up the psychologically incisive Hideaway by reverting to his campy 8 Women ways. Ozon immediately establishes his mood of lighthearted frivolity via an opening credit sequence in which the screen breaks into round-edged fragments, all of them encapsulating sights of Suzanne (Catherine Deneuve) jogging through a softly lit forest while wearing a candy-red track suit, stopping along her route to watch rabbits screw and write poetry about passing squirrels. That self-satisfied tongue-in-cheek mood doesn't dissipate once Suzanne returns home, where her adulterous, umbrella factory-running husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), treats his wife like an empty-headed "trophy housewife" (the film's title refers to a decorative vase that sits on a mantle), scoffing at her advice while explaining that her role is to be merely his most prized piece of domestic ornamentation.
Suzanne suffers her husband's domination with good cheer until he falls so ill fuming over a worker's strike that she must take over the company. As befitting a women's-lib fantasy about looking good while kicking chauvinists' asses, she carries out this task to great acclaim, a triumph that, as when she champions abortion rights, directly pays tribute to, while reducing to a cheeky one-note joke, Deneuve's own feminist politics and status as an icon of female sexuality and power.
Ozon's story also involves the plights of Suzanne's Farrah Fawcett-coiffed conservative daughter, Joëlle (Judith Godrèche), her ascot-wearing liberal son, Laurent (Jérémie Rénier), and Robert's secretary, Nadège (Karin Viard), whose affair with her boss becomes complicated by her admiration for Suzanne's you-go-girl progressiveness. Furthermore, there's the issue of Suzanne's past fling with her husband's union-labor nemesis, Maurice (Gerard Depardieu), which affords farcical paternity-related complications as well as opportunities to further the material's shallow class and gender warfare-related concerns.
Potiche, however, is only interested in those issues insofar as they allow for dreary sitcom-style hijinks and opportunities to lavish adoration on Deneuve. Ozon treats his leading lady as a regal beauty who, despite her character's initial subjugated status, remains one step ahead of her male counterparts not only in affairs of business (where her honesty and fairness are presented as the keys to true success), but also of the heart (far from a cheated-on fool, she's eventually revealed to be an expert in clandestine indiscretions). Ozon's cozy Lite-Brite period aesthetics are part and parcel of the material's aggressive lightheartedness. Yet with his tale never rising above tepid cutesiness, the tone struck is less amusingly frothy than irritatingly precious, a situation not redeemed even by a typically charming Deneuve performance of imposing stateliness and playful, sexy insolence.
Potiche review :: Movies :: Reviews - Paste Magazine Jonathan Hickman
Reluctant Habits [Edward Champion]
Screencrave [Tom von Logue Newth]
Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Jennie Kermode]
The Film Pilgrim [Natalie Gallacher]
Potiche
- Reelviews Movie Reviews James
Berardinelli
Monsters and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Christian Science Monitor [Andy Klein]
Living in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Cinema Viewfinder: Movie Review: Potiche (2010) Tony Dayoub
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Desert Entertainer [Norman Mark]
ArtsBeat
Blog: A Talk With Catherine Deneuve Mekado Murphy from The New York Times,
Entertainment Weekly [Lisa Schwarzbaum]
The Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]
'Potiche' review: French comedy has a delightfully retro feel | NJ.com Stephen Whitty from The Star-Ledger
The Miami Herald [Rene Rodriguez]
San Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
'Potiche': Movie review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Potiche :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Catherine Deneuve The most beautiful woman in - The whole world ... The Gorgeous Hussy, also more seen here: #catherine deneuve
IN THE HOUSE (Dans La Maison) B+ 92
While more lighthearted than the usual fare, Ozon has
nonetheless crafted a smart and cleverly insightful comedy about the boredom
and ennui of the middle class, a film that beautifully unravels though serial
installments of an apparent neverending high school class writing
assignment. Germain
(Fabrice Luchini) is the overly cynical and largely bored and disinterested
literature teacher continually under the spell of Flaubert who has grown to
hate the illiteracy of his students, coming to work with a giant chip on his
shoulder, a pretentious know-it-all that continually degrades his students,
where coming to work has become an exercise in futility. As he’s reading some of his student’s papers
to his wife, the engrossed listener is the perfectly respectable but utterly
bourgeois Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who runs an art gallery owned by a
pair of twins that have no interest in art and continually threaten to shut the
place down. The impression given is that
this is a cultivated and sophisticated household, childless, no doubt, so that
they could pursue their professional careers, where by now they have become
accustomed to the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie,
to coin a Buñuelian
phrase. As he reads examples of
atrocious writing, one paper stands out and holds his wife (and the audience)
in rapt attention, where a student describes his meticulously detailed plan to
get inside the house of another fellow student, Rapha (Bastien Ughetto),
offering to help with his math homework while he secretly inspects the
premises. We surmise the writer lives in
a tiny claustrophobic dwelling in a congested, overpopulated part of town,
while this house, viewable from a park right across the street, represents the
dream home in the eyes of the writer, with two loving parents who proudly show
affection, even in front of adolescent kids, something rarely seen these days. What gives this paper a kick is not only that
it’s an engrossing story filled with shrewdly discerning observations, but that it concludes “to be continued.”
Germain immediately pulls this kid
aside, Claude (Ernst Umhauer, somewhat in the manner of Michael Cera), and
inquires about his motives, as he rather subtly is painting a sarcastic
character portrait that gets disturbingly deep into the
personal affairs of a fellow student, which could have negative repercussions
if asked to read aloud in class. Claude
was only following the class assignment, so he claims, before nonchalantly
dropping off the next installment.
Germain waits until he gets home where he and his wife literally devour
the story for details and personal insight, becoming a prominent part of their
lives, like a movie-of-the-week, discussed right alongside the various pitfalls
of their careers. To be blunt, the story
is much more intriguing than anything either one of them has going for themselves,
and they eagerly look forward to the next episode. Germain works with the kid
after class, critiquing his writing, his motivation, while offering various
books to read from his own collection.
In his eyes, at least one student shows promise, and the least he can do
as a teacher is encourage him to develop his craft, though we all know the real
motive is to read the next continuing chapter, as the kid churns them out like
daily editorials, something one can count on and look forward to on a regular
basis, becoming the one constant in their lives, even as everything else is
falling apart. Ozon places the audience
in the same position as this couple, where we’re deliciously eavesdropping into
the intimate affairs of another household.
Germain continually suggests that he use his imagination and take his
narrative elsewhere, but Claude insists the only place he’s inspired is inside
that house, where his writing style amusingly starts to resemble the teacher’s
recommendations, where his original comic satire evolves into personal obsession,
perhaps more reflective of the teacher’s state of mind, but it only gets Claude
deeper in trouble as he spies on Rapha’s parents having sex, among other
things, developing a deep infatuation for the mother, Esther (Emmanuelle
Seigner), always seen flipping through various house remodeling magazines,
someone he calls “the most bored housewife in the world.”
While Rapha and his Dad (also named
Rapha) express themselves only through the limited vocabulary of sports
analogies, showing no imagination whatsoever outside of that boy world, Esther
is often left out, where Claude sees himself swooping in and rescuing her from
the emptiness surrounding her. As the
story evolves, which is little more than a writer’s exercise, Germain stresses
fiction while Claude insists upon realism, as only real life provides such
vivid details and clarity, where each of the characters is appropriately
affected by the changing events as Ozon seamlessly weaves in and out of fiction
and reality until eventually one can’t tell the difference. All of this is really just teasing one’s
imagination, where the storyline balances comic absurdity with ever evolving
character development, but the longer Claude ventures inside the house,
voraciously accumulating pertinent details, the closer he comes to crossing the
line into morally objectionable territory, as he’s continually prying
into dark corners. Germain is so reliant upon the next
installment, as if his life is utterly dependent upon it, that he also ventures
into questionable human behavior in his attempts to do anything to keep the
stories coming. Of course, this is all
something of a chamber farce, like being stuck inside your head—Buñuel’s THE
EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) anyone?—where Claude simply can’t leave
their house, or who knows what disaster might strike? The original source
material is Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga’s 2006 contemporary play, El Chico de la Última Fila (The Boy in the Last Row), which the
director adapts for the screen. All of the characters are interesting and well-developed, where
Emmanuelle Seigner recalls Margaux Hemingway, where there’s an underlying
sensuousness, but it’s much more suggested (in our heads!) than real, as she is
little more than a bored housewife. The
emptiness of the middle class is constantly made fun of, not only in some of
the tasteless art exhibits where Jeanne attempts to drum up interest, but
especially in the vacuous world of the adults which offers little of value to
the next generation, instead condescendingly cramming culture down their
throats like some kind of force-fed regimen, failing to inspire or generate any
hint of enthusiasm for the subject matter, where a random school paper incites
much more interest than anything happening in their own dreary lives. More fun than profound, nevertheless this is
something of a charming delight, beautifully scored by Philippe Rombi, which
has that pulsating underlying energy of Philip Glass.
Ever the genre provocateur, François Ozon's
latest self-conscious work of comic academia tackles the nature of authorship
as a form of manipulation or, as the title implies, a way into someone's house.
He does this by examining the relationship between the reader and author while
himself altering tone and style to reflect both the learning curves and
misguided deviations of mysterious teenage protagonist writer Claude (Ernst
Umhauer).
A high school student of limited financial means, Claude
blends into the herd with the newly appointed uniform code, popping up
unexpectedly as a satirical voice amidst a sea of lackadaisical tedium in the
classroom of weathered and cynical French teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini)
Seeing promise in a boy that took the humdrum assignment
of "what did you do this weekend?" and made it into a dissection of
middle-class values and ideals, in describing a visit to his more affluent
friend's home, he tutors him and offers suggestions on improvement.
Claude's story about a present, encouraging father, Rapha
(Denis Ménochet), and bored housewife mother, Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner),
gradually changes from broad satire to realist deconstruction to twee melodrama
as Germain offers new suggestions and tactics to his student about how to
write.
But while this is happening, Germain's story with art
curator wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) makes similar tonal jumps, going
from caricature, with an art gallery filled with penis swastikas and nude
Hitler blow-up dolls, to sombre and introspective, with impressionist art
displays.
Ozon constantly reminds us that the author is manipulating
us just as Claude is manipulating Germain. The tone and style may change, but
the template of winning over and taking over the life and/or will of the reader
remains consistent, even when the narrative experiments with the nature of
self-indulgent writing.
While this structure wears out its welcome somewhat by the
third act, this self-aware, smartly rendered and ultimately voyeuristic look at
writing as a tool for validation in relation to reading as perverse peephole
titillation leaves a lot to think about.
What's more is that it's genuinely funny and entertaining
while offering up its message, which is something more auteurs should work on.
Slant Magazine [Nick McCarthy]
In The White Album, Joan Didion wrote that we "tell ourselves stories in order to live," and, with the cheeky dark comedy In the House, bad-boy French auteur François Ozon flips that idea and sets out to confront characters whose lives, and the lives of those they spin yarns around, are twisted by the truth-seeking and illusion-creating narratives they obsess over. Ozon is known as a prolific pop filmmaker who's guilty of his own grandiose flights of fancy (Ricky) and unreliable narrators (Swimming Pool), and surveying his camp-and-melodrama-filled oeuvre, it's only natural that he would attempt to depict voyeurism and literature as a form of both life force and desperation. Despite the film's murky and turbulent underbelly, Ozon is more interested in creating a puzzle rather than solving one, and he maintains a bright and stylish veneer throughout his own tales of blurred fiction and reality.
Having spent the summer reading Schopenhauer, pompous high school literature and composition teacher Germaine (Fabrice Luchini) greets the new school year with a pessimistic attitude concerning the state of education. Growing further disillusioned by yet another class of underachieving adolescents incapable of writing a cohesive essay about their summer, Germaine marks up every paper with red ink and sarcastic remarks—except one. Written by a shy, blond boy who always sits in the back of the class, Claude (Ernst Umhauer), the prose strikes Germaine due to its fluidity, confidence, and curiously pointed observation gleaned from a visit to a classmate's home. "What's a perfect family's house like?" Claude writes, surveying the smells and society-proscribed roles of an archetypal French middle-class family.
Although hypocritically troubled by the condescending tone of the essay, Germaine believes Claude has talent, and soon the man is lending the boy classic novels and privately providing editorial feedback, as Claude turns in each new assignment as a serial installment of his narrative—which mostly includes a sardonic view of pizza, basketball, and a bored housewife. Claude's drafts, which are visualized for the audience as Germaine rapidly reads each new episode, grow more intrusive and subversive—yet Germaine still possesses a curious hunger to hear more of the Claude's stories. But is the boy actually pursuing the provocative actions toward the family he describes, or is it all storytelling folly? Germaine's wife, Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), a curator at a contemporary art gallery, is fascinated and consequently troubled by her husband's interest in Claude's prose. They were once an erudite couple who traded barbs during a flippant discussion of whether art and literature actually teaches us about life, but now Jeanne is feeling distance: "All you care about is that family."
If Claude impishly takes aim at the functional banality of a middle-class family, Ozon snidely targets the bourgeois institutions—literature, contemporary art—we let define our lives and the way we see the world. And, like Claude, Ozon wants you to have fun as he toys with your mind, layering on an unyielding amount of suspicious occurrences and meta-textual developments that lead to an entropic denouement. Ozon champions the construction of his script over the plausibility of his characters, making In the House more of a successful experiment than a scintillating portrait; the cast does their best at humanizing their roles, but with all its winks and nudges (once Germaine explains that Claude must add conflict to his story, tensions occur), it remains a unique view of the writing process yet takes the sting out of the potentially devastating statement regarding humanity's gullible reliance on stories. It's buoyant and titillates, striking that distinctly Ozonian balance between the beautiful and the sinister, but it doesn't resonate. Despite its cerebral subtext, In the House is more head-spinning than heady.
François
Ozon's In the House Leo Robson from The Guardian, March 22, 2013
François Ozon's new film In the House marks the completion of a decade-long enterprise – a study, drawn from three angles at five-year intervals, of that cold-blooded parasite, the novelist. The approach is a broad one, psychoanalytic, anthropological, even literary-critical, with emphasis on where the creative urge comes from – being an only child helps – and how it is indulged, the wellsprings of creativity and its workings, too. When it comes to describing the relationship between life and art, Ozon isn't above drawing parallels and even arrows, though most of the time he aligns himself with a more antic French tradition – previous representatives include Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette – in which the two are intertwined to the point of blurring.
Swimming Pool (2002), the first of these films, is at times reminiscent of Resnais's Providence (an English novelist pictures his family members as ghouls in a psychological melodrama) at others of Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating (a pair of girls get lost in a "house of fiction"). The script – written, like all of Ozon's films, by the director – concerns a Ruth Rendell-ish ice queen, Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), who hopes to dissolve writer's block by taking a holiday. By cutting from, for example, Sarah dancing with a hunky Frenchman to a shot of her tapping away on a laptop, Ozon risks appearing overliteral – all you have to do is write it down! – when in fact he does away with literalism altogether. It turns out – spoilers coming – that most of what we have seen is a kind of daydream or reverie, to be treated symbolically. Sarah ends up with a new novel, entitled Swimming Pool, whose contents we cannot possibly guess at but whose creation we have, in some muddy sense, witnessed.
Ozon plays things a little more straight, and fair, in Angel (2007), an adaptation of Elizabeth Taylor's novel. In this film it is the heroine (Romola Garai), an Edwardian superstar with shades of Daisy Ashford and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, rather than the vulnerable viewer, who lacks a firm sense of where reality begins and ends. When Angel falls in love with a dashing, unscrupulous painter (Michael Fassbender), the backdrops to their whirlwind romance – the Houses of Parliament, for example – are presented as back-projection, implying that, even when living out her dreams, she is in some sense still dreaming.
Angel's aunt worries over her indifference to "the facts of life", and her publisher (Sam Neill) gently advises her to correct the facts in her fiction – for example, he explains, you don't open champagne bottles with a corkscrew. But apart from the connections drawn between Angel's naivety and the otherworldliness of her novels, the drabness of her upbringing and the wildness of her imagination, the film displays little interest in tracing the route by which first-hand experience is transmuted into words on a page.
In the House, the most light-footed and literary of these films, is also the most ambitious, combining black comedy, family drama, cautionary tale and psychological thriller; as a study of genre, it variously pays tribute to, and short-changes, its subject matter. The central scenario, borrowed from Juan Mayorga's play The Boy in the Back Row and relocated to northern France, has been rigged with care to produce a series of sharp and often dizzying reflections on the meaning of realism and the moral duty of the writer. Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), a 16-year-old student at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert, uses homework assignments to write an account of his developing friendship with a more affluent classmate, Rapha Artole Jr (Bastien Ughetto), complete with awestruck descriptions of the boy's family home and voluptuous mother (Emmanuelle Seigner), who trails "the singular scent of a middle-class woman". Claude's serial project – every instalment ends "To be continued" – wakes his teacher, M Germain (Fabrice Luchini), out of a slump that is career-long if it isn't life-long, and the two become embroiled in a relationship that contains elements of editor/writer and father/son – with all the warmth and affection, bitterness and one-upmanship, that that implies.
Germain's English wife, Jeanne, though no less addicted, nevertheless makes disapproving noises about Claude's disingenuous behaviour and her husband's enthusiasm ("a B+ for making fun?"). Jeanne is a splendidly brittle and shifting creation, played, as all bored wives should be, by Kristin Scott Thomas, but her main role in the film is to embody cultural attitudes against which her husband can rail – much as the work of Angel's painter husband, with his "restricted palette" of "brown and grey", constitutes a powerful alternative to her candy-coloured romanticism. When Jeanne says that "art in general teaches us nothing", he replies that it awakens your senses to beauty. Looking at a gallery exhibition that Jeanne has curated on "the dictatorship of sex", featuring, among other highlights, a canvas of penises in the shape of a swastika, Germain says he needs "faces, people".
Particular kinds of faces and people. To Germain, realism is not an impulse common to all art but the descriptive term for a body of work, characterised by its even-handed approach to ordinary subject matter (broadly, the "moeurs" of the "moyen"). With the exception of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony", all of the reading matter he passes on to Claude comes from the 19th-century social tradition (Dickens, Victor Hugo) with Flaubert being singled out as the model. In their private tutorials, during which Germain dispenses advice altogether more technical and specific than his classroom mantra "Read books, be curious", Germain warns Claude against such pollutants as caricature, gossip, art-catalogue soft-focus, farce, and "Barbara Cartland". The aim, he explains, is to present things as they really are, avoiding exaggeration and withholding judgment. But these prescriptions lead Claude into paradoxical waters. Germain places a higher value on the plausible than on the factual, with the effect that in rewriting a chapter Claude has to make things up in the name of realism. He quickly gets a taste for fabrication.
In the House is troubled, but mostly tickled, by a number of paradoxes about realist art which came of age in the 1830s, when Daguerre was developing one form of bourgeois portraiture, Balzac another. During the film's most theory-fed scene, Claude asks Germain what he means by "realism", and he uses the image of a hidden camera. Claude's interpretation of what it is to be a camera, far from following Christopher Isherwood's "quite passive, recording, not thinking", proves a liberal one, which retains the idea of his presence at the scene but places no importance on the veracity of what he writes about. Claude never abandons the first person, so that his writing moves from diary to metafiction, and Ozon never abandons the habit, formed in the more trustworthy early scenes, of providing audiovisual renderings of Claude's stories; the stenographic and the hand-crafted exist on the same flat plane. As in his more overtly theatrical work (8 Women, Water Drops on Burning Rocks), Ozon appears keen to remind the viewer that photography isn't a truth-teller, just a really convincing liar, the best friend an illusionist ever had. What better front for acts of sleight-of-hand than the medium that Marcel L'Herbier defined as "l'art du réel"?
The apparent contrast between truth and lies isn't the only one that Ozon is interested in – there's also what Baudelaire was invoking when he wrote that Balzac, who had been retrospectively classified as a realist, wasn't an "observer" but a "visionary". It's only necessary to defend someone against the charge of being a mere observer if you have a narrow conception of realism, and observation. At one point, Claude defends himself against Germain's criticisms by saying "I write what I see", but in time he realises that seeing is just a starting-point – a spur to imagination. The only child looks around; his beady eye logs impressions, finding ordinary things strange; eventually, he starts to extrapolate and speculate. In this beguiling film, the most autobiographical he has yet made, Ozon uses all of his powers, his wit, his wily intelligence, to show that, just as cinema lies as often as it tells the truth (24 times a second), so looking at is a kind of seeing through.
Review: In the House - Film Comment Jared Eisenstat from Film Comment, April 17, 2013
French writer-director François Ozon invades the sanctity of the home with frisky, acerbic stories that lay bare the fragile nature of domestic tranquility. His early narrative film See the Sea (97) sets a sociopathic backpacker loose in the house of a young mother. Under the Sand (00) offers a glimpse of a woman unable to cope with loss, her life stalled by a ghost that haunts her mind, and her apartment. In Swimming Pool (03), the sedate charm of a vacation cottage is rocked by the arrival of a nubile blond oozing vivacious promiscuity. With his latest film, In the House, adapted from the play The Boy in the Last Row by Juan Mayorga, Ozon identifies the intruders as outsiders, artists even: Claude (Ernst Umhauer), a malcontented teen with literary ambition to burn, and his mentor, Germain (Fabrice Luchini), a sardonic middle-aged high school lit teacher.
It’s the dawn of a new school term, but the cynical, snooty Germain cannot muster the slightest enthusiasm for the year ahead, despairing over the inane, barely literate writing of his students to his cultured wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas). But when Germain reads a provocative essay brimming with originality, his posture of contempt cracks. Written by Claude, it details how the quiet teen finagled his way into the home of his dopey classmate Rapha Artole (Bastien Ughetto). The essay then takes aim at this normal family, dismissing Rapha Artole Senior (Denis Ménochet) as a vulgar galoot, and objectifying Rapha’s comely yet passive mother Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), who exudes “the singular scent of a middle-class woman.” The childless Germain decides to train Claude in the art of writing, and the eager pupil’s imagination blooms as he insinuates himself deeper into the simple yet loving Artole family. Inspired after all these years, Germain eagerly anticipates each new installment of his young protégé’s story, which the film presents in flashback form with a wistful, crisp voiceover by Umhauer. As the stakes of the game escalate, teacher and student remain blind to the growing risks.
Ozon films are often pushed ahead by their dialogue, and with In the House he offers up some of his sharpest tête-à-têtes. Jeanne and Germain’s casual banter recalls the brainy urbanity of Annie Hall—one of many nods to Woody Allen—and conveys all we need know about their relationship: “Worst class I’ve had in my life,” Germain grumbles while looking over student papers. “You say that every year,” Jeanne responds without a trace of sympathy. Despite the couple's air of intellectual superiority, both are tainted by hypocrisy: Jeanne is proud to exhibit deviant art (naked life-size dolls with female anatomy and the heads of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, paired with a swastika of kinked phalluses, in a show on “the dictatorship of sex”), but objects to Claude’s aesthetic explorations along the boundaries of social propriety; Germain, meanwhile, scorns the people around him while he insists that Claude respect the characters in his stories.
As 16-year-old Claude, Umhauer incarnates a boy of cool reserve, fiery resolve, and a dash of menace. Miserable, he wants to infiltrate the Artole home and enter its warm embrace, but once there, his urge is to destroy the family and escape with its treasure. With a boyish grin that curls easily into a smirk, Umhauer gives off the vibe that wily plots are brewing within. At other times, he’s just a gangly teenager, as when he awkwardly kisses a romantic interest.
François Ozon is a reliably mischievous director, and he’s up to many of his old tricks in his latest feature. But he also puts a new spin on things, allowing the nuclear family to emerge intact and mostly unscathed while turning the knives on those, like himself, who deal in imagination and the dangers of storytelling. In the House satirizes the process of aesthetic creation and the damage it can inflict on the artist and those around him. Still, Ozon’s sympathy remains with these outcasts, as he affirms the mystique that fiction imparts on the quotidian. He may feign sympathy for the middle-class family, but one senses that underneath it all, like Claude and Germain, Ozon still struggles to transcend his contempt for normality.
Anthony Lane: “Oblivion” and “In the House ... - The New Yorker Anthony Lane
François Ozon Does His Best Post-modern Hitchcock ... - Village Voice Zachary Wigon
Can Hollywood Understand François Ozon? -- Vulture Carl Swanson from New York magazine, April 19, 2013
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Seongyong's Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
169 Movies that make you think [Jugu Abraham]
[Review] In the House - The Film Stage Jared Mobarak
In The House (2012) Movie Review from Eye for Film Ann-Katrin Titze
Tiny Mix Tapes [Matt Biancardi]
Movie Review - 'In The House' - When One Person's Telling ... - NPR Ella Taylor
In The House | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Noel Murray
Film-Forward.com [Zachary Jones]
Smells Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Blu-rayDefinition.com - UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
theartsdesk.com [Emma Simmonds]
Sound On Sight Laura Holtebrinck
7he Movie Waffler [Eric Hillis]
In the House: Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
In the House | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Trevor Johnston
In the House – review | Film | The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
In the House – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French
The Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
'In the House' review: French melodrama is well ... - Pioneer Press Chris Hewitt
Austin Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Movie review: 'In the House' observes and reports with flair - Los ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
In the House Movie Review & Film Summary (2012) | Roger Ebert Jim Emerson
'In the House,' Starring Fabrice Luchini - Movies - The New York Times A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
The Boy in the Last Row, by Juan Mayorga | Book Around The Corner
YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL (Jeune & Jolie) B- 82
France (95 mi) 2013 Official site [France]
The French have always been fascinated with prostitution in
films, so the subject should come as no surprise. Godard’s VIVRE SA VIE (1962) is still one of
his best efforts, which almost clinically explores the day-to-day life of a
woman’s downward descent into prostitution.
Buñuel’s
Ozon, who is outwardly gay, has always written strong women’s parts, especially UNDER THE SAND (2000), SWIMMING POOL (2003), 5 X 2 (2004), and ANGEL (2007), which feature not only extraordinary performances, but showcase characteristics of women’s inner strength that match their outer beauty, often at odds in the same film between different characters, where he’s expressed amazing insight into the female psyche. While this may have been his goal here as well, the naïveté and tender age of the lead actress creates unintended obstacles, where the way she breezes through a life of prostitution, seemingly unaffected and without a care in the world suggests a certain separation with reality. It’s unclear if this fantasized sexual ease is the view of the director or the young character herself, but either way, it’s a bit offputting, evoking a less than sympathetic identification with the character, as she’s simply oblivious to the negative ramifications. Perhaps this is due to the ease of her bourgeois, upper class lifestyle, where at the outset on holiday in the south of France, we see Isabelle sunbathing topless at an idyllic secluded beach that she apparently has all to herself. This recurrent beach setting exists throughout Ozon’s works, and may be his identification with queer culture which is otherwise absent in many of his films. Spied on by her younger brother Victor (Fantin Ravat), who also sees her masturbating in her room, she is already something of an exhibitionist, catching the eye of a German vacationer Felix (Laurent Belbecque) who takes her virginity on the beach one night, and while seen as an out of body experience, as if she’s a separate entity able to escape her body and watch herself, the event seems to have little effect upon her. Jumping ahead, Isabelle, aka Lea, is already in the habit of meeting older men in upscale hotel rooms, where we see her with Georges (Johan Leysen), who could easily be her grandfather. This establishes a stream of similar visits in hotel rooms, offering the appearance of luxury and hedonism, where her naïveté becomes more obviously uncomfortable with crudeness and more demanding customers who are used to getting exactly what they ask for.
Understated and apathetic, it’s never apparent whether Isabelle receives any sexual gratification at all, as she rarely changes facial expressions, or why she chooses prostitution, never even spending the money, simply stashing the money away in a cash purse in her closet afterwards, but what is clear is that she begins to associate sex with power. Often at odds with her mother, Géraldine Pailhas, who worked with Ozon in 5 X 2 (2004), Isabelle sees this as a way of exerting her own sense of rebellious independence, which parallels her mother’s own behavior, caught by Isabelle flirting openly with another man. Perhaps only because it’s easier, she begins seeing Georges more often, where all she really has to do to please him is look young and beautiful, resembling Kiarostami’s latest Like Someone in Love (2012), though not nearly as involved, where the viewer here is more attuned to the vacuous repetition of hotel sex, where there’s little interaction or personal satisfaction. Isabelle’s life undergoes an upheaval when one of her customers is found dead in a hotel room, where security cameras trace her to the room, with the police exposing her secret to the family, who simply can’t come to terms with their somewhat aloof little girl who has lacked nothing during her lifetime turning to a life of prostitution, almost as if it was a lifestyle choice. Instead of hanging out with students her age, she was receiving compliments from older men by making a career out of granting sexual favors, basically becoming her own Make a Wish foundation. At seventeen, this is all a bit much, but Isabelle is unscathed by the revelations, showing little if any concern, where her world starts coming apart only afterwards when she no longer has the same control over her life, having to answer once again to her parents, feeling more like a kid—exactly what she was trying to get away from. Her only recourse is to withhold information and to rebel against their better instincts. The problem with this film is beauty is only skin deep, and Ozon never penetrates this young girl’s psyche like he has with older women in previous films. In something of an ode to those glory years, Charlotte Rampling, who is associated with Ozon’s best films, makes an appearance near the end that feels somewhat surreal, but even she can’t provide the depth or emotional heft that’s missing from this film. The film resembles the sexual objectification of Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011) (hint: remove the wall to wall nudity from these films and what have you got?), where the subject is oversexualized young women, both mystifyingly strange by their emotional passivity, and both incapable of any real connection in the world, where the unique formalism of the film couldn’t express more human detachment, as the stark nudity on display is stylishly empty.
Time Out New York [Keith Uhlich] also seen here: Heli, Young & Beautiful, The Bling Ring
The teenage heroine of François Ozon’s seasonal French melodrama Young
& Beautiful is also interested in pushing limits. When we first
meet Isabelle (sublime newcomer Marine Vacth), she’s being spied on while
sunning naked on a beach in summertime. Her pubescent younger brother later
kids Isabelle about her harlot’s makeup job as she prepares to meet the German
boy who will take her virginity and, wouldn’t you know, inadvertently set her
on a path of prostitution. Summer segues into autumn, and our not-even-legal
heroine is hiring herself out to older men, ostensibly to pay for school—though
she's really testing the classist and social boundaries set by herself and her
family circle.
As with many films by the prolific Ozon, there’s an ephemeral quality to Young
& Beautiful that makes it seem as if it’s evaporating as you watch it.
Many scenes play out with little resonance, fully formed on the surface—the
“Summer” section has the lazy-days glow and melancholy of Eric Rohmer’s great Pauline
at the Beach (1983)—but half-baked in toto. (The overall theme can be
too-easily boiled down to ’tis pity she’s a whore.) Fortunately, a few
striking sequences break up the yeoman tedium, such as a strobe-lit party that
Isabelle struts around with better-than-all-of-you brashness, as well as a
terrific climax in which Ozon regular Charlotte Rampling pops up to lend the
proceedings some wisdom-of-the-ages regality.
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
A typically slow-moving drama from François Ozon, Young & Beautiful follows rebellious teenager Isabelle (Marine Vacth) as she loses her virginity one summer and, a few months later, begins working as a call girl in Paris. It's an unabashedly salacious premise that's employed to consistently subdued effect by Ozon, with the movie's deliberately-paced opening half hour, which is devoted primarily to Isabelle's leisurely summertime exploits, demanding a fair amount of patience from the viewer. The surprisingly engaging atmosphere, then, is due mostly to Ozon's strong direction and a seriously impressive central performance from Vacth; there is, however, little doubt that Young & Beautiful improves considerably once the action shifts to Paris, as the viewer is, to an increasingly prominent degree, drawn into Isabelle's fascinating (yet almost inexplicable) double life. (Ozon doesn't, interestingly enough, reveal the character's reasons for prostituting herself until well past the halfway mark.) It's not until the narrative takes a dramatic turn at around the one-hour point that Young & Beautiful begins to slowly-but-surely wear out its welcome, as the decidedly meandering nature of the movie's final stretch ensures that the viewer has checked out long before the end credits roll - with the only real respite arriving in the form of Charlotte Rampling's late-in-the-game appearance as the wife of one of Isabelle's former clients (ie the actress provides the film with a jolt of much-needed electricity). The end result is a watchable yet uneven effort from Ozon, with the movie ultimately fitting right into the filmmaker's almost uniformly passable yet underwhelming body of work.
PlumeNoire.com [Moland Fengkov]
Young and pretty, she certainly is; newcomer Marine Vacth has the looks and talent to give life to her role, infusing her performance with fragility, absence and rebellion. French director François Ozon (Swimming Pool) certainly knows how to choose his muses. This promising actress is radiant throughout the film, carrying it on her frail shoulders. She assumes her nakedness, offered to rich men and to us spectators, to deliver an uncompromising portrait of adolescence.
Young and pretty is the story of Isabelle, a young girl who embraces quietly, secretly prostitution until the truth comes out following some dramatic events. With this film, Ozon clearly focuses on our society’s sickness, with pornography, Internet access and dating sites opening the door to teenagers to explore their sexuality without boundaries; and to his credit, Ozon tackles this tricky subject with surprising subtlety. Avoiding vulgarity and the exploitation of an erotic sensuality, the filmmaker keeps his heroine’s motivation secret: She comes from a wealthy family, has good relations with her brother (her confident), her young mother and her stepfather … so why is she selling her body? The answer will remain a mystery and this actually doesn’t really matter as the real theme here is teenage prostitution and post-adolescence melancholy.
In the sequence where Isabelle loses her virginity, her character splits into two doubles, one of them watching the scene, like a witness. This duality is omnipresent throughout the film and even if it might be some showy trick, the actress’ performance makes you forget this superficial aspect of the movie.
Young and pretty isn’t far from being flawless though, the film suffering from being clearly underwritten. Ozon accentuates the character’s traits and succumbs to the temptation to take the spectators’ hand to lead them through his story. He uses several obvious devices to provide us with information about his character; for example, a birthday cake lets us know about Isabelle’s age; in another scene we hear a Françoise Hardy songs featuring explicit lyrics while books from Rimbaud and Choderlos de Laclos (Dangerous Liaisons ) are part of Isabelle’s life. There are also quite a few clichés, whether it’s in the depiction of her clients – from dirty old men to friendly regulars – or a subplot involving a boyfriend and showing them kissing on the Pont des Arts (the Parisian bridge where lovers come to kiss). All those scenes might be successful, mostly thanks to solid supporting performances from the likes of Charlotte Rampling (great as Françoise Hardy), Géraldine Pailhas, Frédéric Pierrot and Fantin Ravat (the young brother) but this isn’t enough to save Young and pretty from its cliché-ridden storyline; once you leave the theater, Marine Vacth’s presence is probably the only thing that will remain from that movie.
Slant Magazine [David Lee Dallas]
François Ozon could never be called a cold or somber filmmaker, but his notoriety as a ringleader of camp flamboyance has always been misleading. The mainstream success of the gaudy musical 8 Women and satirical pulp exercise Swimming Pool thrust him into an international spotlight as a sort of Gallic Almodóvar—an auteur of irresistible style even when the substance of his films was questionable. But contrary to his reputation, Ozon has proven himself to be a master of restraint as well as excess. The devastating Under the Sand, his finest work, is a ghost story predicated on fetish and fantasy, but its narrative ostentations are grounded by minimal dialogue and an austere mise-en-scène; the result is a hypnotic viewing experience in which delusion and delirium reverberate with truth. And like Under the Sand, Young and Beautiful sees Ozon less as a prankster of excess than as a humanist Haneke, articulating the outrageous lurking beneath the ordinary—and vice versa. Though the filmmaker's flair for the bombastic and macabre remains, with Young and Beautiful he channels that energy into a quiet, earthbound story that grows stranger and sneakier as it progresses.
The film opens with a shot of Isabelle (Marine Vacth), the striking teenager to whom the title clearly refers, glimpsed from above in a cheeky binocular shot; the theme of voyeurism, on part of both the character and camera, is so blatant that it almost reads as a joke. It's a quintessentially Ozonian beginning, considering his films' main through line is their (and their characters') undying obsession with the act of looking; the image of Isabelle's outstretched figure even functions as a self-referential nod to Swimming Pool. Isabelle's observer is her prepubescent brother, Victor (Fantin Ravat), whose interest in her body soon reveals itself to be less sexual or even objectifying than it is a manifestation of his own self-fixation. Later in the scene, he regales her with questions about the boy she's seeing, making her promise to tell him of whatever sexual exploits she gets up to: In Isabelle, Victor seems to see a more developed variation of himself, through whom he can vicariously experience her newfound sexual agency, but only insofar as she allows him.
Isabelle is thus identified early on as a figure of power and authority, and her male counterpart literally infantile by comparison. This dynamic typifies Isabelle's entire sexual coming of age, which begins with a passionless summer fling and evolves into a series of prostitution stints upon her family's return to their Parisian home; significantly, all developments are instigated by Isabelle, not the more experienced partner(s). Despite the swoony pop soundtrack and vibrant cinematography, Young and Beautiful's increasingly unnerving story mostly unfolds with minimal flair, intensely focused as it is on its steely and enigmatic protagonist. What makes Ozon's film remarkable is its deference to Isabelle, who acts as the singular agent not only of her own sexuality, but of the narrative itself. She dominates every man she encounters and every woman who tries to place judgment on her, effectively reversing the traditional power dynamic of the voyeuristic gaze. When her actions eventually lead to dangerous consequences, they're nothing like the consequences that normally befall young prostitutes on screen, and despite repeated plot developments that threaten to compromise the story's boldness and irreverence, Ozon, by way of Isabelle, continually steers away from self-righteous or moralistic terrain up to the film's very end. Young & Beautiful's final scene is in fact an unexpectedly graceful one, announcing the completion of Isabelle's journey of self-discovery without ceding her any of her power or authority.
Jeune Et Jolie (Young & Beautiful) Opens At Cannes With Model ... Richard Porton from The Daily Beast, also seen here: Richard Porton
Kevin Jagernauth at Cannes from The Playlist
Review: Jeune & Jolie proclaims once a whore ... - HitFix Gregory Ellwood from Hit Fix
Young & Beautiful / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
Cannes 2013: Young And
Beautiful – Review David Jenkins at
Jeune et Jolie | Cannes Review - U.S. Indie News ... - Ioncinem Blake Williams from Ioncinema
Young & Beautiful (2013 Cannes review) - Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
Surrender to the Void [Steven Flores]
Next Projection Parker Mott
Independent Ethos [Hans Morgenstern]
Mary Corliss for Time magazine
Young
& Beautiful Allan Hunter at
SBS Movies [Rochelle Siemienowicz]
Blu-ray.com [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
FilmSchoolRejects [Daniel Walber]
Young & Beautiful Explores the World of a Young French ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Cannes
2013, Day One: Sofia Coppola offers the first misfire of the festival Mike D’Angelo at
Filmmaking Review [Jordan Baker]
[Cannes Review] Young & Beautiful - The Film Stage Shanshan Chen
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Richard Mowe]
Phil on Film [Philip Concannon]
Daily |
Cannes 2013 | François Ozon’s YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL David Hudson from Fandor,
Marine
Vacth: 'Nudity is a costume too' | Film | The Observer Jonathan Romney interviews actress Marine
Vacth from The Observer,
Domenico La Porta at Cannes from Cineuropa, which also includes a
Owen Gleiberman at
Young
& Beautiful: Cannes Review David
Rooney at
Leslie Felperin at
Elsa Keslassy
profiles actress Marine Vacth from Variety
Young & Beautiful | review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes, movie ... Dave Calhoun from Time Out London, also seen here: Dave Calhoun
Jeune Et Jolie | Film | The Guardian Mark Kermode
Cannes
2013: Jeune et Jolie – review Peter
Bradshaw at
Robbie Collin at
The Oregonian [Jamie S. Rich] (2nd)
'Young & Beautiful' yet lacking in grace - Los Angeles Times Gary Goldstein
Young & Beautiful Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Sheila O’Malley
Marine Vacth in 'Young & Beautiful,' - The New York Times A.O. Scott
THE NEW GIRLFRIEND (Une
nouvelle amie) B 84
France (108 mi) 2014 Official site [Japan]
Continuing in the same vein as Young & Beautiful (Jeune & Jolie) (2013), Ozon reiterates his views that the conventional middle class lifestyle is empty and meaningless, flooding the screen with a well-edited opening montage that tells the story of two best friend girlfriends, Isild Le Besco as blonde-haired Laura and Anaïs Demoustier as freckle-faced Claire, who follow the traditional path to happiness and success through marital bliss, but something is decidedly missing from their lives. In typical Ozon fashion, he provides a subversive alternative, opening with a clever scene where a women is being groomed for her wedding to the sounds of wedding music, only to see how he’s switched the mood and she’s really being dressed for her funeral, where the lid of the coffin closes to seal her fate as the film title appears, obviously showing the fate of the old girlfriend, clearing the way for what follows. While this film is wildly uneven, the Ozon of today seems much more interested in maintaining his enfant terrible status by being an agent provocateur, never afraid of tackling taboo subjects and broadsiding the public, provoking the masses with satiric stabs at whatever is PC (politically correct) for the moment instead of just making a great film. In one sense, the gay experience is “the new girlfriend,” as it has suddenly blossomed onto the American (and French) landscape by making same sex marriages legal, overcoming all legal challenges, where it is finally the law of the land, though Hollywood and television have been promoting gay characters for decades. Ozon is the new mainstream, suddenly elevated to a new respectability as a longstanding gay filmmaker who has been unashamedly bold in challenging stereotypical views on gay and straight relationships, offering subversive alternatives for decades. As the writer of most of his own films, he’s displayed an inventive playfulness often expressed in overly bright daytime colors, where exaggeration and misdirection are often presented as high comedy. Despite the nature of the subject, where the surviving husband resorts to wearing make up and wigs while dressing up in his deceased wife’s clothes to minimize and maternalize the baby’s fears and anxiety from missing her mother, becoming an increasingly prominent focus of his new life, for the most part this is played straight, with the idea that trying something totally different often produces unexpected results. While this in no way matches the depth and dramatic power of Xavier Dolan’s ode to the transsexual experience in 2013 Top Ten List #2 Laurence Anyways, this is a more casual presentation, spoofing the outlandish nature of a surviving husband literally transforming himself after the death of his wife into “the new girlfriend.”
While some have gone feverish with delight
over the film’s bizarre central premise, it’s a fairly restrained approach to a
difficult subject, and one can’t say Romain Duris is entirely successful in the
role, as his slightly embarrassed, overly pronounced smile while dressed in a
blonde wig is difficult to gauge, while he couldn’t be more believable as Jacques
Audiard’s piano playing hit man in The
Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arête) (2005). Instead, like many Ozon films, the film is presented
almost as wish-fulfillment fantasy, making effective use of Claire’s dream
sequences, where for a good part of the film the audience can’t tell the
difference between what’s real and what’s being imagined, which is the most
intriguing quality in nearly all Ozon films.
Adapted from a 15-page short
story by Ruth Rendell where the outcome is decidedly different, as instead of
becoming the best friend, he/she is murdered instead at the first declaration
of love. Ozon read the story nearly
twenty years ago, writing an adaptation for a short film, but never obtained
the financing. Unlike other
crossdressing classics where musicians disguise themselves as women to avoid
detection while on the run from the mob in SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), or an
unemployed actor becomes an actress to find a job in TOOTSIE (1982) and again
in VICTOR/VICTORIA (1982), in Ozon’s story, the husband has a preexisting
desire to crossdress even while married, so it is more of an outgrowth of his
own distinct personality. After the
death of her best friend, having vowed to look after her surviving husband and
daughter, Claire decides to pay a visit to David (Romain Duris), walking in
unexpectedly after no one answered the door, only to find David dressed as a
women as he cares for his infant daughter, running back out the door in a state
of confused anger. Rather than be honest
about it, she lies to her own husband Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz), pretending
she was with a girlfriend named Virginia, which is the excuse she uses each time
she revisits David, becoming more supportive of the idea as she can feel the
sense of gratification David gets by transforming himself into Virginia,
eventually helping him find the right clothes and make-up, going out on
shopping sprees together, having lunch, and doing the things girlfriends do
together. Easily the centerpiece of the
film is an excruciatingly intimate glimpse of gay acceptance in a drag
nightclub act performing an ultra-dramatic, anthem-like song about “becoming” a
woman, Nicole Croisille’s “Une Femme avec Toi,”Une nouvelle amie - Une femme
avec toi (hymne LGBT ... YouTube (4:01), which extends into the evening
cocktail hour where they end up on the dance floor at an “anything goes”
discotheque.
All seems right wth the world as Dennis is
realizing his dream as Virginia. The
confusion comes when he tries to take it to the next step by proclaiming his
love for Claire, unleashing dormant, pent-up emotions, which is a rush of exhilaration
for Virginia, while something of a curiosity for Claire, which leads to a
moment of truth when a panicked Claire rejects Dennis, claiming “You’re a man!”
once again rushing out the door in a state of confusion. This could go any number of directions, where
the best film to ever delve into the dire consequences is Fassbinder’s In
a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden) (1978), arguably his most personal film, where just
such a rejection leads a man to undergo a sex change operation for love, only
to be rejected and laughed at, later beaten and humiliated by men on the street. Ozon doesn’t explore the depths, but instead
creates an inversion of the original story, where the woman is so repulsed at
discovering a man’s body that she murders him.
Instead, this rejection opens a path for Claire, who suddenly discovers
her own femininity, wearing make-up and more colorful dresses, where she’s more
in touch with her own sense of beauty.
In clear Sirkian mode, the film is not so much about the life of a
transvestite, but explores the prejudices and preconceived notions associated
with different forms of sexual expression, especially as seen in such a
Catholic society as France, where middle class views express open tolerance so
long as anything considered objectionable is hidden from view. It’s here that Ozon mixes dream fantasies
with reality, where the Buñuelian merging of the surreal becomes associated
with accepting the peculiarities of others.
In this sense, as a kind of idealized dream, the film is a journey of
expression, begun at the outset in an extreme close-up with the application of
lipstick and make-up, as both best friends eventually discover the woman inside
of Claire and Virginia that was lost in the beginning when her real best friend
Laura died. The biggest problem with the
film is just how exasperatingly boring all the middle class characters actually
are, regardless of their sexual expression, straightjacketed by their economic
conformity that defines them in so many other ways. Work, or any concept of work is completely
absent in their lives, where they are completely free to redefine themselves
any way they choose. This is simply not
the standard for most people’s lives, who are more centrally connected to their
economic circumstances. Nonetheless,
this is another fever dream from François Ozon, a variation on a famous quote
from Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming
A Woman: Simone de Beauvoir on Female ..., where “One is not born, but
rather becomes, a woman.”
Short
Takes: The New Girlfriend - Film Comment
Graham Fuller, September/October 2015
Based on a Ruth Rendell story, François Ozon’s delightful, intermittently morbid drama-lite offers his most textured meditation on gender identity since Water Drops on Burning Rocks (00) while also recalling his playful short A Summer Dress (96).
The story traces the growing desire of Claire for David, the husband of her friend Laura, after discovering him dressed in Laura’s clothes. Death and regeneration respectively bookend the film, a ruffler of suburban complacency in the mold of Chabrol and Buñuel. At the start, Laura (Isild Le Besco) is shown apparently being outfitted for a wedding, but the occasion turns out to be her funeral, and the dresser her widower, David (Romain Duris). At the climax, Claire (Anaïs Demoustier, as freckled and expressive as twentysomething Huppert) dresses David as his alter-ego, “Virginia,” to awaken him/her from a coma.
David’s apotheosis as a straight transvestite is uncomplicatedly joyous (and Duris’s smolder ravishing). Instead, Ozon derives tension from the ambiguous source of Claire’s liberating excitation. She doesn’t know whether she desires Virginia or harbors a necrophiliac yearning for Laura.
Claire’s openness to polymorphous possibility is heroic compared with the mystification Virginia provokes in her macho husband and Laura’s stupid parents, or the homophobia of a smirking waiter. Ozon’s film thus scolds those too obtuse to comprehend that others’ gender images do not fit into conventionally prescribed molds.
Ozon's
'The New Girlfriend' Is Almost Marvelous - Village ... Serena Donadoni from The Village Voice
Love and tragedy are inexorably linked in François Ozon's The New Girlfriend, adapted from Ruth Rendell's Edgar-winning short story. It's in the speech Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) delivers at the funeral of Laura (Isild Le Besco), pledging to care for her best friend's husband and infant daughter and declaring her undying love with a raw intensity that's embarrassingly intimate. As Claire's relationship with Laura's husband, David (Romain Duris), develops into something she never expected, that feeling of devotion and dread deepens.
Claire is shocked to discover David dressed in his late wife's clothes, but intrigued enough to offer encouragement. She names this new female presence Virginia, and treats her as a stand-in for the lost Laura.
French writer-director Ozon (In the House) excels at re-contextualizing outré behavior, and his melodrama illustrates the benefits of gender fluidity. Mousy Claire becomes the dominant partner while embracing the feminine accoutrements she'd ignored while living in her ethereal friend's shadow. An emboldened Virginia expresses the vivacity that David kept under wraps, and a marvelous Duris makes them distinct individuals, demonstrating a palpable disappointment when her exuberance is sacrificed to his reserve.
Ozon falters by sticking primarily to Claire's perspective. She vacillates between joy and fear as playful secret outings with Virginia trigger unnerving sexual fantasies. Her husband, Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz), plays the hapless straight man while David craves Claire's acceptance. Her change of heart is more important than Virginia's emergence, and Ozon sacrifices his sharp portrayal of grief and rebirth to clumsy convention.
François Ozon is a clever filmmaker, and even when he’s just doing setup, he’s up to something. In the opening credits of his new film Une nouvelle amie (or, as it’s being called here, The New Girlfriend), we see what first seems to be the dressing of a bride, only to eventually reveal itself as a corpse being dressed in wedding apparel. It is the body of Laura (Isild Le Besco), a very young woman who has left behind a husband, David (Romain Duris), a baby daughter, and a grief-stricken best friend, Claire (Anaïs Demoustier), who speaks at the funeral of how they met when “we were only seven, but we knew we’d be together forever,” prompting a virtuoso montage that summarizes their entire friendship in a swift, efficient series of images. Among these images are the most familiar, even clichéd, of young female BFF-dom: blood in the palms, brushing each other’s hair, etc. The filmmaker isn’t just establishing the length of Claire and Laura’s bond; he’s acknowledging the familiar way we visualize female friendship, a perception the ensuing film will turn on its head.
Claire has made a pledge to look after David and the baby, but she finds it difficult, in light of her own grief and depression. But one day she drops in on David unexpectedly, and discovers him caring for the little girl — while wearing Laura’s clothes. He confesses that he occasionally wore women’s clothing before he met her (“For fun,” he admits, “for pleasure”), to which Claire does not respond well (“You’re a pervert,” she snaps). But as he walks her through the thinking that brought him to this point, Claire realizes he was creating the feminine presence needed by not only the baby, but himself. “It was like she was there, talking to me,” he says. “She was in me.”
What’s fascinating about The New Girlfriend is how Ozon, perhaps not entirely purposely, addresses the very timely issue of trans and non-binary gender identity, yet he does it within the framework of his usual style and preoccupations — and shortchanges neither. The filmmaker lets so much of what’s fascinating about this story breathe, in the looks and pauses and subtext. It’s a story about acceptance, the (thankful) baseline these days in cinematic trans stories, but as with so much of his work, The New Girlfriend is about identity and desire. The complexities of the identity, in this case, inform the specifics of the desire, but never in a manner that feels exploitative or sensationalistic — he’s merely exploring this dynamic, from all possible angles.
To explain the sudden presence of this new friend to her husband Giles (Raphaël Personnaz), Claire dubs David “Virginia,” and that friendship becomes, in a way, a thrill for her — a turn-on as much as a secret, as she finds herself attracted to Virginia’s masculinity and femininity. Reverberating throughout their outings and intimacies are complicated questions: of David/Virginia’s sexuality, of Claire’s own unresolved (and perhaps sexual) feelings for Laura, and of the triangle created by Giles and the possibilities that opens up.
Ozon has a tendency here to load the plate up a bit, and some of the turns (particularly in the third act) embrace melodrama in a manner more gleeful than any filmmaker this side of Almodóvar. The movie frankly gets a little too messy, feeling as though external forces have been brought into play because the script ultimately comes up against a wall in the Claire/Virginia dynamic. But by that point, such a dead-end doesn’t do much real harm; The New Girlfriend is both an intelligent movie and a kind one, funny and sweet and, when it matters, plenty hot as well.
In the English-speaking world, Ruth Rendell hasn’t exactly made her mark on the big screen. In the Francophone world, however, the late mystery and thriller author’s effect continues to be felt. At fewer than 15 pages, Rendell’s Edgar Award–winning short story “The New Girlfriend” seems an odd choice for a feature film. But director François Ozon has fleshed out this spare selection, adding tons of characterization and plot (indeed, the film is really only loosely inspired by the source material) but always preserving the underlying dark tone.
The film opens with the funeral of Laura (Isild Le Besco), who’s passed away after a long illness. Best friend Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) speaks about her relationship with Laura, interspersed with flashbacks of the two transforming from schoolmates into young women. Laura leaves behind a husband, David (Romain Duris), and an infant daughter, Lucie, and Claire vows that she’ll uphold the promise she made to her dying best friend: to watch over David and Lucie for the rest of her life.
Soon after, Claire falls into a depression, but when her husband, Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz), urges her to visit David and Lucie, matters take an abrupt turn for the strange. Cue the record needle scratch sound effect as Claire walks into the living room to see Lucie in the arms of a woman: David in drag. David explains that cross-dressing has always brought him pleasure and it’s something that his late wife knew about and accepted. When Laura was alive, however, her femininity was enough; with the loss, David feels the need arise within him again. He also tells Claire that he thinks that Lucie needs both a mother and a father.
While Claire is initially repulsed, she becomes intrigued, and an unlikely friendship springs up as she begins to help David explore his female persona, whom they dub Virginia, while keeping this aspect of her life a secret from her husband. Ozon plays with gender and sexuality quite effectively—there’s a quietly witty moment in which Gilles, a man’s man who questions David’s virility, dons Claire’s scarf because he’s cold. However, in today’s climate, the shock value of a gender-bending performance wears off quickly: we’ve come a long way from The Crying Game. But there’s plenty to unpack and explore even after viewers learn David’s secret.
The film subtly but powerfully establishes a dark, often unsettling mood; there are even a couple of scenes that evoke The Black Swan. Plot wise, it’s a fairly sedate work, without a ton of twists and turns: consider this the anti–Gone Girl in that regard (though the ending certainly takes what can only be called a very French twist). What dominates here are the troubled thoughts and emotions of Claire. The innovative and inspired Ozon takes full advantage of the medium. His visual storytelling employs images to establish plot and characters, rather than using clumsy expository dialogue, and often plays with viewers’ expectations. (The scenes that roll over the opening credits are a particularly inspired addition.)
It’s Ozon’s visual choices that make the film’s points, such as drawing parallels between Laura and Virginia. In flashbacks, Claire looks tomboyish compared with the graceful and ethereal Laura. Similarly, in the present day, Claire wears button downs and trousers that Annie Hall would envy, while Virginia revels in her newfound femininity, sporting light and airy frocks and va-va-voom figure-hugging dresses.
Viewers may remember Duris as the endearingly boyish Xavier from L’Auberge Espagnole. Here, he spends more time playing Virginia than David, but he pulls off the dual role, of sorts, impressively, with a sultry and often realistically faltering performance. He channels a young woman grappling uncertainly but eagerly with her budding sexuality. Demoustier, on the other hand, is understated, though it’s always clear that there’s something brooding below the surface, and Ozon will have audiences rapt as they try to figure out just what is going through her mind.
As with the best of Rendell’s novels and stories, the film is the thinking man’s (or woman’s) thriller: intelligent, thought-provoking, disturbing, and utterly engrossing. To this winning combination, Ozon adds a dose of sensuality (let’s not forget that this is a French adaptation). Rendell would be pleased.
François
Ozon's Cross-Dressing Melodrama, 'The New ... Rex Reed from The New York Observer
TIFF
Review: François Ozon's 'The New Girlfriend' - Indiewire Christopher Schobert from The Playlist
Little
White Lies [Craig Williams]
Spectrum
Culture [Seth Katz]
theartsdesk.com
[Nick Hasted]
The
New Girlfriend · Film Review · The A.V. Club Mike D’Angelo
The
Film Stage [Sky Hirschkron]
French
Film Festival 2015: THE NEW GIRLFRIEND ... - Twitch Kwenton Bellette
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Magazine [Amy Wong]
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[Amber Wilkinson]
FilmFracture
[James Jay Edwards]
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Review: The
New Girlfriend | Newcity Film Ray
Pride
Interview
with François Ozon Ozon website
'The
New Girlfriend' ('Une Nouvelle amie'): Toronto Review ... David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter
The
New Girlfriend review - The Guardian
Steve Rose
The
New Girlfriend review – witty French psychosexual ... Mark Kermode from The Observer
An
intriguingly fluid friendship in 'The New Girlfriend' - LA ... Gary Goldstein From The LA Times
Francois
Ozon's 'New Girlfriend' evolves as a story of changes Susan King from The LA Times
The New
Girlfriend Movie Review (2015) | Roger Ebert Peter Sobczynski
Review:
In 'The New Girlfriend,' a Widower's Secret Life Is ... Stephen Holden from The New York Times
The New
Girlfriend (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FRANTZ A- 94
France Germany (113 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official site [UK]
The long sobs
of autumn's
violins
wound my heart
with a monotonous
languor.
Suffocating
and pallid, when
the clock strikes,
I remember
the days long past
and I weep.
And I set off
in the rough wind
that carries me
hither and thither
like a dead
leaf.
Autumn Song, by Paul-Marie Verlaine from Poèmes
Saturniens, 1866, Paul
Verlaine, Song of Autumn
Viewers are usually
in for an unexpected treat with Ozon films, as he’s a mischievous, openly gay
filmmaker known for his eclectic styles, with a flair for misdirection and
exaggerated melodramas, playful sexual comedies, identity issues, and an
outright contempt for bourgeois families, which is why it comes as a
complete surprise to find a film uniquely different from anything seen by Ozon
before, where the opening half is utterly brilliant, perhaps the best of
anything seen throughout this director’s career, showing a decisively more disciplined cinematic technique that couldn’t
be more eloquently restrained and understated, completely measured and precise,
like a companion piece to Michael Haneke’s richly austere THE WHITE RIBBON
(2009), as both are historical films revealing buried secrets that are shot in
black and white. Having never shot a
film before in black and white, having more in common with the garish colors of
Douglas Sirk, the film is actually Ozon’s own adaptation written in
collaboration with Philippe Piazzo of an earlier French play by Maurice Rostand, gay son of Edmund Rostand,
the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, whose 1920’s play was used in an
earlier Ernst Lubitsch film BROKEN LULLABY (1932), one of his lesser known
efforts, told from the point of view of a French soldier visiting Germany
shortly after the war, where there is an element of suspense, as no one knows
why this man is in Germany. Ozon begins
his film the same way, but adds a unique twist to the second half. Set in the small town of Quedlinburg,
Germany in 1919, not long after the end of the First World War, the film opens
on narrow cobblestone streets leading to a cemetery, where a young woman, Anna (Paula Beer), tends to a grave, but
is startled to discover someone else has already laid fresh flowers. Thus begins a mystery about why a young
French man (who is fluent in German), Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney), is
visiting Germany so soon after the war, where his presence in town is
immediately detected, arousing hostile emotions, becoming a subject of derision
and contempt by an angered nation still smarting from defeat, where anti-French
sentiment is commonplace, though most of the snickering comments are made
behind his back, yet it’s hard not to notice a swell of nationalist fervor in
this film, mirroring the posture of an anti-immigrant, post-Brexit and
post-Trump world.
Anna visits the grave every day, the burial site of her fiancée Frantz who died on the battlefield, still living in the home of his parents, as if she were their daughter, where Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner), a stern, white-bearded doctor, lives with his wife, Magda (Marie Gruber), both still mourning the loss of their son. When Adrien initially visits the home to pay his respects, the doctor rudely sends him away, refusing to even speak to a French soldier, calling them all murderers of his son. But Anna meets Adrien at the cemetery, offering him an invitation, intrigued that he knew Frantz, urging him to share what he knows with his parents. This time, the doctor agrees to hear him out, somewhat skeptical at first, but the visitor seems genuinely affected by Frantz’s death, just as they are, becoming more curious about how they came to know one another, as he is the only living connection to their son. Acknowledging they met at university in Paris before the war, they both shared common interests, including an appreciation for poetry and music, especially the violin, with Adrien giving Frantz lessons, as he is a professional violinist in a Parisian orchestra, but both also enjoyed visiting the Louvre, expressing a similar passion for French paintings, including a shared love for one painting in particular by Édouard Manet. Frantz’s favorite poet was Verlaine, while French was the secret language used in an exchange of romantic letters with Anna. By discussing art and shared cultural interests, both parents grow more accepting of this young gentleman, identifying with the personalized detail, recognizing in him their own son, finding mirror images of one another, literally transforming tormented memories of grief into happier remembrances, curiously astounded that a French soldier, a complete stranger, could offer such healing properties to the profound tragedy of losing their only child. Eventually they look forward to every visit, inviting him to play Frantz’s violin, which may as well be offering their son’s heart, with Adrien playing a gorgeously sublime piece, an elegiac tribute that recalls the haunting beauty of Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida. Having this man around, their tears turn to utter joy, sharing with him their son’s most prized possessions, where perhaps the biggest surprise is the degree of artistic restraint shown by Ozon, where one wonders if this muted expression is a newly discovered maturity, with the film unfolding through the refined eyes of Anna, viewed almost entirely as a modern woman, whose inner turmoil is at the heart of the picture, increasingly strong and magnetic, with Beer carrying the entire film on her shoulders, reminiscent of Alida Valli in Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (1949), another film about secrets and lies in a toxic atmosphere of war.
One cannot minimize the brilliance of Ozon’s superb direction, as it is an insightful meditation on the grief and loss of what Europe was experiencing at the time, beautifully rendered by the stunning look of the film, given painterly detail by cinematographer Pascal Marti, a superb musical score composed by Philippe Rombi, with subtle, achingly reserved performances that couldn’t be more sophisticated and dramatically compelling, where the chilling dramatic realism feels spawned by personal experiences, as if guided by the Strindberg school of acting, where the understated manner is exquisite, showing taste and refined manner, where the accumulation of emotion builds effortlessly, establishing credibility and grace. Viewers will all be questioning Adrien’s motives, as his recollections of Frantz have a distinct homoerotic quality to them, where there’s more electrically charged chemistry with Frantz than there ever is with Anna, resembling the close friendship of Oskar Werner and Henri Serre in Truffaut’s JULES AND JIM (1962), as it appears to resemble the heartbreaking final sequence of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), returning to the family of a deceased lover, where we all expect a revelatory gay moment, which would fit right into Ozon’s wheelhouse, but it doesn’t go that way, choosing misdirection of a most pleasant variety, using a series of flashback sequences where the two relive recalled memories, where the past suddenly transforms into color, though dulled and washed out, like photographic images of antiquity, showing a surprising degree of restraint and good taste, where the film is a symphonic expression of whirling emotions. The tenderly affectionate Magda claims Adrien reminds her of Frantz, “shy, but stormy,” while the introverted Anna heads straight into the eye of the storm, accompanying him on piano when he plays the violin (a successful merging of the two nations), quite taken by Adrien’s charms and good looks, along with his melancholy nature, agreeing to accompany him to a local ball, where despite an underlying tone of resentment for a Frenchman in their midst, there is plenty of music and dancing, and overflowing mugs of beer, creating a dizzying celebratory spectacle. Again, mirroring this image, Frantz’s stone-faced father defines the lingering postwar tensions between France and Germany, initially dubious of Rivoire, and of the French in general, yet he clears the deck of longstanding resentments, rejoining his social position by meeting his peers in a Gasthaus, where he’s not exactly welcomed with open arms, befriending a Frenchman, yet he embraces a worldview not yet accepted by his drinking comrades, insisting they are ultimately responsible, as it was the fathers of both the French and German nations that sent their sons off to war, supplying the guns and ammunition to do the job, ultimately leading them to their slaughter. For this to be followed shortly afterwards by the singing of Die Wacht am Rhein, a specifically anti-French patriotic anthem, suggests the message has fallen on deaf ears. The tragedy of this realization matches the equally inconsolable remorse expressed by Adrien, who carries with him an unspeakable pain that he reveals only to Anna before returning back to France. The silence that accompanies these revelatory moments is deafening.
While the first half
takes place in Germany, with Ozon extremely successful in evoking both period
ambience and German flavor, Ozon adds a final segment with Anna (who is fluent
in French) searching for Adrien in Paris after letters are returned
undeliverable, where upon her arrival, just as Adrien received in Germany, she
receives a heavy dose of French nationalism, none expressed any better than an
impromptu singing of “La Marseillaise,” where underneath the surface patriotism
are cruel suggestions of violence, a tribute to Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972),
where perhaps the most chilling moment is the singing of Tomorrow belongs to me -
Cabaret - YouTube (3:06). Unable to
find any traces of him, the film turns into a detective story with a
tragic-romantic twist, where she’s forced to search through all available
clues, discovering Adrien lived in a dingy Parisian neighborhood filled with
brothels, while also making depressing visits to army hospitals and cemeteries,
finding herself face-to-face with insurmountable pain and anguish, searching
through the listings of the dead, ultimately becoming wiser, but more world
weary, having to distinguish whether Adrien is just a substitute for the
ghostly memory of her dead fiancée or a genuine start of something new, where
she can only hope her trip is not in vain.
During a visit to the Louvre she is shocked to discover that the Manet
painting, the source of a joyous cultural exchange between friends, is actually
entitled Le Suicidé (The Suicide)
(http://a-lixref.tumblr.com/post/152478963833/nataliakoptseva-tumblr-com,
then click on image), a darkly dramatic and somber picture that starkly
contrasts with the rest of his work, nearly undiscovered and barely mentioned
within Manet’s oeuvre, as art historians have difficulty finding where it fits
within the development of Manet’s art.
This distressing clue is reminiscent of the museum scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958), where a portrait of the dead continues to haunt the living, as a work
of art, one’s imagination, and real life strangely intersect, actually
connecting death to desire, where in this film Anna miraculously encounters a
family relative. What she discovers when we meet the Rivoire family feels dumbfounding, as
the previous subtlety and lyrical grace established in the German scenes go
right out the window, as if the director’s reestablished footing back on French
soil has rebooted his default tendencies, where an exaggerated melodrama
kicks into overdrive with mixed results, especially the stunning effects of
unforeseen circumstances, the immensity of the French manor, the aristocratic
heritage, revealing an overcontrolling mother (Cyrielle Clair) who has a
tendency to nose into everyone’s business (perhaps resembling Ozon’s own
mother), thinking she still pulls the strings and imperiously knows all, but
hasn’t a clue, as the aristocracy she’s accustomed to is coming to an end. Offering a portrait of a matriarchal head of
a scandalously emptyheaded bourgeois French family that hasn’t an ounce of
understanding about their future or about their son’s true feelings, as Adrien
is genuinely tortured by Frantz’s death, blaming himself, still traumatized by
the war and its senseless deaths, becoming an ardent pacifist, yet the
aristocracy thinks only of itself in its shortsighted views, exactly the
opposite of what Anna and Adrien are striving to become, eying the future,
literally having to transform their lives, trying to process the true meaning
of love and loss, where both remain scarred by unimaginable grief and
despair. Despite the tonal missteps near
the end that temporarily veer out of balance from what is otherwise such a
poetic and tastefully subdued film, with near perfect production design by
Michel Barthélémy and art
direction by Susanne Abel, this remains one of the director’s most quietly
moving and impassioned efforts.
CINE-FILE Chicago - Cine-File.info Ben Sachs
Like Steven Soderbergh, François Ozon is a cinematic chameleon, exploring multiple styles and genres over the course of his career. Unlike Soderbergh, Ozon has a consistent theme that unites his disparate work: he’s fascinated by the human impulse for perversion, the curious instinct that leads people to explore taboos. The taboos that Ozon’s characters confront (and often break) tend to be sexual in nature, and when they aren’t, you can easily detect a sexual subtext in the films. In FRANTZ, Ozon’s sublime reworking of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 melodrama BROKEN LULLABY (aka THE MAN I KILLED), that subtext is further beneath the surface than usual; the passion it addresses is essentially metaphysical. The film concerns a young German woman’s friendship with—and growing desire for—the mysterious Frenchman who murdered her fiancé on the battlefield during World War I. Their relationship may be chaste, but that doesn’t keep Ozon from emphasizing its perversity. Before Adrien, the Frenchman, reveals that he is Anna’s fiancé’s killer, he pretends to be a long-lost friend whom the fiancé, Frantz, met while studying in Paris. He introduces himself to Anna and to Frantz’s parents under this ruse, and they respond by incorporating him into their lives as though he were the reincarnation of their dead loved one. That the principal characters are acting out of grief doesn’t make their arrangement any less strange, and, as in Ozon’s previous feature, THE NEW GIRLFRIEND, the way the characters normalize their desires comes to seem no less perverse than the desires themselves. Yet the writer-director never condescends to these people; rather, the film is gentle and delicate, shot mainly in gossamer black-and-white widescreen and in compositions that grant a certain spatial integrity to each character. Ozon respects the emotional sincerity of classic Hollywood melodrama without slavishly imitating it. (To return to the Soderbergh comparison, this is not Ozon’s THE GOOD GERMAN.) The acting styles feel contemporary even when the mores depicted onscreen do not. Further, the brief flashes of color that occur whenever Frantz is evoked in others’ hearts may feel sometimes like a gimmick, but at least it isn’t an ironic, postmodern one. Ozon wants to understand these characters and their period on their own terms, despite using entirely personal means to arrive at that understanding.
Frantz
(François Ozon, France/Germany) — Special Presentations ... Tommaso Tocci from Cinema Scope, Fall 2016
Almost a decade after the disappointing Angel, François Ozon is again stepping out of France to direct a film abroad in a different language. Fortunately, he fares much better this time around with Frantz, a post-WWI black-and-white melodrama dealing with duality, deceit, and distance as fuel for the obfuscating power of the mind.
No doubt among the most distinct entries in a filmography as diverse as it is uneven, Ozon’s latest is elegantly economical in drawing a portrait of a small German town deeply traumatized by the Great War. Like most residents, Anna always wears black and is often seen walking to and from the cemetery to visit her once betrothed Frantz, who never returned from the front. Living in the house of Frantz’s parents, she’s effectively trying to read her own story on a blank page, as she will find herself doing with a crucial letter later in the film. The arrival of Adrien, a young man who knew Frantz back in Paris, soothes the soul of the whole family with memories of joy, music and dancing that he shared with their lost son. In Ozon’s most unnecessarily literal touch, these flashbacks light up with colour, if only for a few promising seconds. But can you accept the gift of chromatic richness when it’s offered by a French hand?
Anchored by a vividly restrained performance from young German actress Paula Beer, whose wall of grief Pierre Niney is left to climb with his disarmingly expressive eyes, Frantz originates from a play, later reworked by Lubitsch into his Broken Lullaby (1932), which focused on the French visitor rather than the grieving Germans. More significantly, the original ultimately went for a synthesis of these two conflicting worlds, while Ozon doesn’t shy away from the brutal historical undercurrent of the material. In fact, Frantz deftly escapes the traps of its own limited premise by creating a mirror version of itself, like many of its own characters do. Twin sections in Germany and France provide a satisfying symmetry to the film’s structure, and elaborate on the notion that the lies and gaps in a lover’s discourse are where things really get interesting.
Ozon
Elevates Gay Sensibility | Out Magazine
Armond White
“My only wound is Frantz,” says French Army veteran Adrian (Pierre Niney) about the German soldier who was killed in combat during World War I. Because this declaration appears in gay director Francois Ozon’s new film Frantz, it sounds like an intimate sexual revelation. But Ozon, typically, is not so obvious.
Frantz seems more solemn than other Ozon caprices (The New Girlfriend, Young & Beautiful, In the House, Ricky) but this film also plays with your expectations. Adrian does more than pay respect to a fallen soldier; when he travels to Frantz’s gravesite in Germany, and visits the grieving family, Frantz’s fiancée Anna (Paula Beer) falls in love with him. Ozon goes from elegiac melodrama to heterosexual romance.
But don’t think Ozon has lost confidence as a gay filmmaker and sold-out. Because he’s an artist, Ozon uses gay sensibility to transform a not-so-traditional period love story (based on Ernest Lubitsch’s 1933 Broken Lullaby) into an ever- deepening meditation on the meaning of love.
Frantz flips that old Hollywood irony of gay filmmakers disguising their inclinations behind the emotional and stylistic flourishes of heterosexual stories (women’s pictures). Ozon’s elegant, period atmosphere is sexually discreet but not restrained—in fact, during flashbacks of Adrian and Frantz dancing with women in a ballroom (bachelor hijinks that recall the close friendship of Oskar Werner and Henri Serre in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim), they yet keep intense eye-contact with each other. Homosocial customs of a century ago are depicted modestly—not as a political statement but with a frankness and sensitivity that makes recent all-out gay films such as Akron, Those People and Moonlight appear timid, closeted and weak.
In Frantz, Ozon dispenses with the storytelling and political conventions of most gay films—in fact, he teases them in profound ways. During a battle scene, Adrien and Frantz are coupled in a trench and after an explosion, Adrian brushes dirt and blood from Frantz’s face with a lover’s tenderness.
Like the great World War I scenes in Terence Davies’ Sunset Song, Frantz feels ceremonial, a lament that honors the dead while also burying gay-film clichés. Ozon connects gay sensibility to the long-honored expressiveness of movies that celebrate romantic grace and agape, big-L love.
That’s the significance of the wound Adrian confesses. He and Frantz shared brotherly traits (“a demeanor that is shy and stormy”) that usually signify gay behavior. Frantz’s father presents Adrian, a violinist in civilian life, with Frantz’s own violin in a case like a coffin. The gift combines gratitude and bereavement. Frantz’s black-and-white photography (by Pascal Marti), resembles a polished black and silver casket, but occasionally shifts into faintly colored flashbacks that suggest still-sensitive memories.
Through the story of Adrian and Anna’s grief and shared passion, Ozon discovers means to greater, more universal, gay empathy. Adrian and Anna visit The Louvre to contemplate Frantz’s favorite art work—Manet’s painting of “a young man with his head thrown back”—Le Suicide. This somber art work complements the influence of the Lubitsch film. Both references to torment reveal what makes Frantz so surprising and so mysteriously profound. It is Ozon’s late expression of AIDS mourning and the love (“The need to live for others,” Anna says) that survives.
Review:
Frantz | François Ozon - Film Comment
Nick Davis, March/April 2017
Frantz begins in 1919, as a German war widow decides to buy some flowers—not to host a party but to honor a fallen soldier. In fact, Anna is not quite a widow, because Frantz Hoffmeister, the man she mourns, was still her fiancé when he died on a French battlefield. His grave is also not quite a grave, because Frantz’s body was never recovered for proper burial. For the lover and parents he left behind, the cemetery plot is a palliative half-truth. Even this solace gets threatened, however, when Anna discovers a mysterious Frenchman named Adrien (Pierre Niney), unknown and unwanted in this German hamlet of scarred veterans and grieving families, leaving his own bouquet at Frantz’s headstone, for reasons nobody can guess.
From this premise, François Ozon and his cowriters unspool a melodrama full of volatile events, yet cool in image and tone. They have adapted their scenario from a Lubitsch drama called Broken Lullaby (1932), but exhaust that template within the first hour, after which they embellish this tale about embellishment with new twists and revelations.
If, for all its soapy intricacies, Frantz remains a muted and disappointing experience, the blame lies with Ozon’s miscalculated direction. He hangs much of the film on the performance of Paula Beer, a young, proficient actress who does not yet transfix the camera in ways that fully exploit Frantz’s emotional or psychological potential, especially as Anna’s choices and motives grow ever more complex. Beer looks a bit like Renée Zellweger in some shots, and more like Bérénice Bejo or Ludivine Sagnier in others. These are not faces you’d expect to confuse, but the camera never gets a clear hold on Beer, who feels more like a vague presence than a prismatic shapeshifter.
The film as a whole has a similar problem, feeling uncertain at the script level about which characters to emphasize or discard, what genre or tone to pursue, and how much flashback or fantasy to incorporate. Unfortunately, Ozon is no more sure-footed as a stylist than he is as a dramatist. His framing often seems listless, missing opportunities to sharpen the story or intensify characterization. Even the best images get scuppered by awkward ones, as when Ozon follows a dark, misty tracking shot of Anna and Adrien returning home from a late-night dance with some boilerplate medium close-ups that dissipate dramatic tension and muffle expressive detail. The silvery monochrome photography itself feels like an arbitrary choice, handsome in hue but not especially evocative of the period, and exacerbating the under-composed aspect of the shots.
Eventually, Frantz risks some surprise transitions into color—a ruddy palette in soft-edged light that looks almost hand-tinted, and thus feels more antique, oddly, than the black and white. These sporadic interludes risk further affectation in a film that already feels like an exercise. However, as the logic motivating these shifts becomes clear, Frantz starts adding up in more interesting ways. Appearing at first to distinguish past from present, the color sequences gradually reveal themselves as indicators of narrative misdirection, as various characters seek to fool or soothe the bereft, to ignite romance, to assuage themselves, or all of these.
No sooner does this pattern emerge than we find ourselves asking in turn whether the characters’ or the film’s deviations from truth are necessarily limited to the scenes in color. Even the dubious texture of the black-and-white images, which seem digitally achieved rather than authentically monochrome, feels newly salient to Frantz’s story, so riddled with lies that hide in plain view. If all this imposture has been strategized to suit the script’s themes, Ozon may have crafted a cleverer, more coherent piece than it initially appears to be.
Even if the director has his reasons, though, it’s dispiriting that Ozon gets so excited about fancy tricks, a recurrent bent that doomed the buoyant pastiche of 8 Women (2002) and the plot convolutions of Swimming Pool (2003) and In the House (2012) to quickly diminishing returns. For my money, Ozon has never made another feature half as bracing as Under the Sand (2000), which shares with Frantz an idea of how dire misfortune becomes an alibi for zealous self-deception. Granting the obvious advantage of having Charlotte Rampling as its centerpiece, Under the Sand articulates itself in the simplest, most character-attentive terms. By contrast, for all that the new film showcases Ozon’s versatility and sneaky ambition, it demonstrates too how visual and narrative fussiness often undermine his efforts. Frantz improves as it goes, or at least opens up more pathways of interpretation, signaling more method to its addledness—but it’s still not an experience that lingers much in the head, or tugs much at the heart.
Mode mineur - Café des Images Jean-Sébastien Massart
Frantz :: Movies :: Reviews :: frantz :: Paste Kenji Fujishima
Review:
François Ozon's FRANTZ, Sumptuous, Subversive, Touching ... Dustin Chang from Screen Anarchy
A Unlikely Romance Blossoms, Rooted In A Secret: 'Frantz' : NPR Mark Jenkins
'Frantz'
Review: François Ozon Remakes Ernst Lubitsch's Film ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Antti
Alanen: Film Diary: Frantz
François
Ozon's 'Frantz' Is A Beautifully Shot Melodrama [Review] Kimber Myers from The Playlist
TrustMovies: François Ozon's FRANTZ: an elegant, sad period piece ... James van Maanen from Trust Movies
Frantz – first
look review - Little White Lies
Katherine McLaughlin
[Venice Review]
Frantz - The Film Stage Zhuo-Ning
Su
Frantz
film review: François Ozon directs - The Skinny James Dunn
Scott
Reviews François Ozon's Frantz [Sundance 2017] Scott Nye from Criterion Cast
Frantz - Francois
Ozon - 2016 - film review - Films de France
James Travers
Frantz
· Film Review They should have taken the You've Got Mail route ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
'Frantz' review by Michael
Sicinski • Letterboxd
'Frantz':
Venice Review | Reviews | Screen
Jonathan Romney from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen
International [Jonathan Romney]
“Frantz”: Ozon's post World
War I mystery – Bill's Media Commentary
J.B. Spins: Ozon's Frantz Joe Bendel
Review: Frantz
(2016) – CineQuaNews Marina González
FRANTZ directed by Francois Ozon - New York in French Aimee Morris
MOVIEMOVESME
- Ulkar Alakbarova
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Anne-Katrin Titze]
Frantz: Ozon's
New Feature | Emanuel Levy Jeff Farr
Cineuropa.org
[Fabien Lemercier]
“Personal Shopper” and “Frantz” Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
Ozon's
"Frantz" Treats Raw Grief With Polite Restraint | Village Voice Melissa Anderson
ShockYa
[Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi]
Sneak
Preview: Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2017 Dustin Chang from Floating World
TIFF:
François Ozon's Elegant "Frantz" - Blog - The Film Experience Nathaniel R
Battleship
Pretension [David Bax]
Daily
| Venice, Telluride + Toronto 2016 | François Ozon's FRANTZ ... David Hudson from Fandor
François Ozon
Discusses His Twisty, Anti-Nationalist, Post-WWI ... Moze Halperin interview from Flavorwire,
March 15, 2017
Figure from the Past: Francois Ozon's 'Frantz' plumbs a World War I ... David Noh interview from The Film Journal, March 14, 2017
François
Ozon Talks FRANTZ: Secrets and Lies and the Rise of Nationalism Dustin Chang interview from Screen Anarchy,
March 13, 2017
Francois
Ozon's 'Frantz': Venice Review | Hollywood Reporter Boyd van Hoeij
Venice
Film Review: 'Frantz' by François Ozon | Variety Jay Weissberg
Frantz, directed by François
Ozon | Film review - Time Out Dave
Calhoun
Frantz review: François Ozon surprises again with sumptuous period ... Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian
Huffington Post [Brandon Judell]
Frantz - By
sherilyn-connelly - SF Weekly
Frantz Movie Review &
Film Summary (2017) | Roger Ebert
Peter Sobczynski
Review: 'Frantz,' a Mysterious Frenchman and the Wounds of War ... The New York Times
Broken
Lullaby at the Just Me... Just Sayin' site
review of the original Lubitsch film
Ozu, Yasujirō
DVDBeaver Director’s Chair: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/direct-chair/ozu.htm
Yasujiro Ozu is often labeled by film scholars as the greatest
filmmaker of all time. His films dealt primarily with the dynamics of
middle-class Japanese family life and the subtle conflict between generations.
Universal themes examining parent/child communication were prevalent in many of
his gentle social dramas. Ozu, ironically, had no direct personal exposure to
this familial lifestyle remaining a lifelong bachelor. He is most recognized
for his meticulous static-camera style which centered almost entirely on
detailed composition. He minimized all camera movement giving his characters an
unencumbered field of expression which allowed more intimate viewer bonding
through his often simple narratives. With occasional shots of trains, clocks
and elevated hydro-electric lines, Ozu subtly broached the conflict of an
encroaching modern displacement upon the established traditional lifestyle.
Defining the intricacies of Japanese culture Ozu's cinema is credited for
capturing the essence of "mono no aware" - that we experience the
wholeness of life by encountering things (mono) and being sensitive to them (no
aware).
All-Movie Guide Jonathan Crow
Yasujiro Ozu has been widely touted as the most Japanese of Japanese film directors. In fact, Japanese distributors initially refused to release Ozu's work abroad, fearing that the West wouldn't appreciate its subtle beauty at a time when films of Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi were winning award after award at international film festivals. Fortunately, such fears proved to be unfounded and Ozu is now recognized as one of cinema's truly great filmmakers.
Yasujiro Ozu was born in the old Fukagawa
district of Tokyo, to a fertilizer merchant, in 1903. He proved to be an
indifferent student in middle and high school, frequently choosing to watch
movies rather than tend to his studies. Later in life, he proudly recalled how
he watched Rex Ingram's Prisoner of Zenda when he should have been
taking the entrance examination for the
Early in his career, Ozu began to experiment with an
idiosyncratic film style that ran contrary to the conventions of Japanese or
Ozu directed his first film in 1927, an otherwise unremarkable period film called The Sword of Penitence. In 1932, he began to hit his creative stride with the touching comedy I Was Born, But..., which was his first commercial success and is considered to be one of his finest pre-World War II movies. It was also at this time that Ozu began to develop his signature film style. During World War II, he made few films and those that he did, such as There Was a Father, all but ignored the conflict. After the war, Ozu reached his creative peak and made some of his finest films, including Late Spring, Early Summer, Floating Weeds, An Autumn Afternoon, and his masterpiece Tokyo Story, which is generally considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Far from the muscular narratives of Kurosawa samurai epics, the films of Ozu are
simple, contemplative, and edged with nostalgia and sadness. Through the course
of his long career, from 1927 to 1962, Ozu refined and narrowed the scope of
his films to the bare essentials. His oeuvre, which is almost completely
confined to that of domestic dramas or shomen-geki, is thematically quite
coherent from one film to the next. Though the particulars of the characters
might differ, they are all snugly enmeshed in the same quiet world. There are
no heroes or villains, no wild successes or great failures. his characters are
ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Conflict arises from natural changes in
the relationship between parent and child, be it a daughter who is reluctant to
marry and abandon her widowed father in Late Spring
or a pair of young sons who realize the modest social position of their father
in I Was Born, But.... Ozu's remarkable
sensitivity to the human condition and his nuanced understanding of the
patterns of everyday life give these seemingly mundane conflicts a tremendous
emotional power rarely found in conventional
Late in his career, Ozu became the target of criticism by the iconoclastic directors of the Japanese New Wave. Many decried his film style as rigid, while others criticized his refusal to address social issues. His quiet, transcendent vision of humanity, however, has stood the test of time and has been an influence on such diverse Western directors as Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Martin Scorsese. Ozu died of cancer in 1962.
24fps | Yasujiro Ozu: The Opacity of Life and Art Zach Campbell from 24 fps (2003)
Our
brains have something like a hundred billion neurons, each of which has fifty
or a hundred different kinds of connections with other neurons. That's what
experience is. All those billions upon billions of different chemical baths
overlapping and interacting. And that's what a great work of art stimulates. …
We may remember plot or psychology or symbols, but it's those millions of
electro-chemical flickers that we are experiencing, and that criticism must
find a way of describing. We may understand backward, but we live forward, and
we must find a way of making criticism responsive to our living, not just our understanding.
—Ray Carney
Various cities throughout the world are this year celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Yasujiro Ozu’s birth by holding retrospectives of his work. What follows are some of my ideas on how Ozu’s cinema operates and the principles on which viewers can approach them.
TO BE TAKEN OUT OF ONE MOMENT AND RELEASED INTO
ANOTHER
Yasujiro Ozu is a supremely opaque filmmaker. Thousands of brilliant words could be (and have been) written on him, and in the end we return to our starting point. It’s not that Ozu possesses some mystical inscrutability—it’s that his films are such that critical scrutiny becomes a termitish (pace Manny Farber) process, leaving behind only “signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” We end up where we begin, justified only by the richness of the journey.
When watching Ozu, I feel not that I’m seeing representations of situations and reproductions of emotional states: what Ozu does (what most of my favorite artists do) is challenge the viewer with an experience one cannot step inside and “figure out,” but rather an experience one must live beside (for a few minutes or hours), and study as they would a person or animal or object (which is to say that the films are not forbidding to the viewer). We negotiate the rhythmic storytelling, so that the Ozu’s famous transition shots and unorthodox shooting techniques (he breaks the 180-degree rule!) acquire their own sense and form. Ozu’s films are not “difficult”—how disappointing it has to be for someone to come to Ozu and realize he’s not the challenging Zen sage that many critics (particularly mainstream ones) insist that he is.
THEY PLAY THEIR PARTS AS BEST THEY CAN
A few comments about Ozu and acting: for one thing, we should not forget that Ozu was a commercial filmmaker working with professional actors. Since Paul Schrader’s book, film enthusiasts have often likened the acting in an Ozu film to that of Bresson’s models. This is simply not a constructive comparison, however. It is true that both directors fostered acting styles that appear ‘minimalist’ next to Western-Hollywood performances in commercial film and theater. And both Ozu and Bresson would often force actors to rehearse extensively and to reshoot scenes to the point of exhaustion. But based on the disparate results of their work, I could only say that their motivations for extreme repetition were different. It seems Ozu was rehearsing for perfection, and Bresson was trying to physically wear down his models.
It has been noted that Ozu’s films do not allow for psychological readings, but this is clearly not true and the evidence is on the screen. Ozu’s psychology is different from conventional formations of character psychology, but it is very much existent. And it exists largely because the professional actors in Ozu’s casts are performing impeccably. Setsuko Hara’s laughing responses to questions of marriage early on in Late Spring represent a defense mechanism of hers that glosses over her character’s profound misgivings about leaving her father for a husband. Shin Saburi’s resoluteness in Equinox Flower betrays a host of insecurities, regrets, and resignation about the balances in the ledgers of life. Tatsuo Saito rubs the back of his neck and smiles when he’s obsequious, and darts frightened glances at his wife when he is trying to assert his own authority to his rebellious children in I Was Born, But… .
ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART
Ozu’s films often document and culminate in supreme acts of love. Frequently this involves the stereotypical Ozu plot of the father giving away the daughter in marriage. The best example for this may be Late Spring, in which Chishu Ryu’s professor (and widower) Shukichi overcomes his fondness for life with his only daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) and nudges her into an arranged marriage. Noriko, however, does not wish to marry, and would like to continue living life with her father.
Late Spring is a tragic film in that it forces the two protagonists to go against their will, using only the social institution of marriage as a makeshift comfort blanket. The father accepts the custom first, and has a heartbreaking conversation with her about “making happiness.” Noriko eventually accepts her father’s advice and enters, bravely, into the marriage and into a life without her father. Ozu’s film is distinctly not about the marriage as a natural part of time’s progression—it is about social pressures and their effects in the intellectual-emotional states of his characters. Even while Late Spring takes us into territory that lets us feel out the painful and restrictive mechanisms of forced monogamy and family life, I believe it is vital that we nonetheless read Shukichi’s appeals to Noriko as acts of genuine familial love. Shukichi is unable to transcend his social position, pressured as he is to “give up” his daughter for her own good. Enough of his person becomes convinced that he is being selfish, which in turn prompts him to believe that the unhappiness of parting with his daughter is a sacrifice to pay for her later (socially-constructed by no less real) happiness as a wife and mother. Therefore initially hurting his daughter and himself, believing that she will be happier in the long run (as she well might, because society will confer upon her acceptance in her womanly role). Shukichi’s autumnal years, however, will be marked drastically by the loss of his daughter.
This is not to say that Late Spring is solely or primarily about Shukichi. As Robin Wood has pointed out, the final shot of the film is of waves, an ambiguous but probable reminder of Noriko’s earlier happiness, at her seaside bicycle ride with her father’s engaged assitant Hattori. Prior to this shot is the famous apple-peeling scene, but before Shukichi enters his home to sit down and peel the apple, Ozu shows him walking on the dirt road and into his front door, a shot earlier reserved a few times in the film for Noriko. Her absence from his life, and her removal from her original sphere of contentment, is inscribed on the viewer’s mind in this final scene. Even the hopeful future, even social happiness, is borne of sadness and transcience.
Does she accept it? Is she conditioned to accept it though her prior experience has prompted her to initially oppose it? Does her father accept the natural status of marriage, or is he pushed into it? In Ozu’s work, as in much art, language proves inadequate. Art expresses what language cannot. And Ozu’s cinema of multiple contemplative energies produces films that are irreducible, but instead revel in the innermost recesses of what we’re tempted to call the soul.
The
Poetics of Resistance - Film Comment
Richard
Combs from Film Comment, September/October
2003
Is Yasujiro Ozu unique among major filmmakers in that his name conjures up such a definable and clear-cut image of his work, while his filmic personality and stylistic history, through a 35-year career and some 53 films, slides away somewhere behind it? To spare the effort of looking for a comparable case, we can construct one: imagine that John Ford’s films from The Informer through Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and My Darling Clementine, had largely dropped from the historical memory, had somehow been rendered redundant by his development from, say, The Searchers through The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Donovan’s Reef to 7 Women.
Late Ozu is “our” Ozu (possibly infringed upon only by the 1932 comedy I Was Born, But . . .), the succession of family dramas with seasonal titles, from Late Spring in 1949 to An Autumn Afternoon in 1962, films in which plotlines are diffused through quotidian detail and the dramatic highlights are either elided or undramatically tidied away. These are films in which “nothing happens” but where matters of life and death, the weight of the past and the terror of the future, are dealt with, and anger, disappointment, despair, and resignation are also accommodated.
Not that earlier Ozu has exactly been consigned to oblivion. Commentators as diverse as Donald Richie and David Bordwell have kept the entire oeuvre in view (Bordwell’s 1988 Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema is dauntingly comprehensive), and Noel Burch (in To the Distant Observer) provides a theoretical account that claims the late silent and early sound period as Ozu’s most experimental and throws out “our” Ozu as a steady calcification. The remarkable imposition of the Ozu “image” beginning in 1949 depends on a narrow range of subject and theme, worked through a comparably narrow range of stylistic choices-choices made from the common pool of classical or mainstream movie techniques.
The image imposes itself so forcefully mainly because it doesn’t seem to manifest any idiosyncratic “authorial” authority. Its means are selected from the prescribed methodologies, but it is then rendered unique by the unnaturally high degree of selectivity and the idiosyncratic combinations into which the choices fall. It’s as if the narrowing process leads inevitably to some vanishing point of the individual artwork and cinema’s industrial norms. In such vanishing is the perfection and preservation of this Ozu image.
To be sure, our Ozu will be put in perspective by the 34 films to be shown in the retrospective at this year’s New York Film Festival, and in other programs set for this centennial year. But context apart, are there other ways of picturing Ozu that might in a sense break up the image, by revealing new lines of force, bringing a different dynamic into play?
One starting point might be a potent line of dialogue in Tokyo Story (53), toward the end of the Hirayamas’ visit to their grown children in Tokyo. The problems of accommodating the elderly couple have finally led to their being split up, and while father Shukishi (Chishu Ryu) is out drinking with old buddies, mother Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama) is put up in the small apartment of her widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko (Setsuko Hara). The latter’s husband, the Hirayamas’ eldest son, Shoji, is missing, presumably killed in the war. His photograph is still prominently displayed, and as she is settling down for the night, Tomi sighs, “How nice to lie in my dead son’s bed.”
This could be taken as one of a number of premonitions that have begun to build up around Tomi, to be expressed by her (watching her grandson play earlier, she muses, “By the time you’re a doctor, I wonder where I’ll be?”), about the unsuspected illness that will put her in a terminal coma soon after she returns home. Or it could be that families will always keep their dead and missing close. “I’m forgetful, yet I remember things about Shoji,” says Chieko Higashiyama, the same actress but as a different mother in a different film, Early Summer (51), talking about a different Shoji, also missing in the war. Father believes he must be dead, but mother continues to hope and listens to a radio program called “The Missing Persons Hour,” a kind of doubling of his ghostliness.
And if Tomi in Tokyo Story can slip into her son’s place, father Shukishi already stands more ambivalently, troublingly, behind it. “Did Shoji drink?”, Tomi asks her daughter-in-law at one point during their reminiscences, and when told that he did, she sympathizes, “So you had the sort of trouble I did.” Shukishi admits to his old friends, “I’ve always disgraced myself by drinking,” before going out on a bender that will lead to the film’s most comic scene. In the dead of night, Shukishi and a similarly incapacitated friend will be delivered by the police to the premises-home and hairdressing salon combined-of his discomfited daughter Shige (Haruko Sugimura), who has been most irritated throughout by the old folks’ visit, and dropped into her hairdressing chairs to sleep it off.
The like-father-like-son comments might be an aside, if they didn’t shade what is ostensibly the main concern of the film: the drifting apart of the generations, the disappointment of the parents both in what the children have achieved for themselves and what they’re prepared to extend to their parents, the changes that time and modern life bring. What is suggested instead is that the drifting apart is illusory, that alongside ties of guilt and responsibility there will always be a slip-sliding between characters, a substituting and making up, in whole or part, because loss, incompleteness, and insubstantiality are also part of the passage of time. In the bar scene where Shukishi gets drunk with his two friends, it’s an almost de rigueur Ozu moment that one of the men will declare, as the evening goes on, that the bar girl more and more resembles his departed wife. It’s an effect that also overtakes the mild but quite steady drinker Shuhei Hirayama (Ryu) when he’s introduced to Tory’s bar in An Autumn Afternoon. He even takes his elder son, Koichi, along to confirm the resemblance, but the latter can’t see it. This might explain the remarkable predominance of widowers in Ozu’s later films, which doesn’t have to do with the life expectancies of men and women in Japan but with the need to set these men adrift to find substitutes (or imagined substitutes) for their missing loved ones-though it’s a ribald joke in An Autumn Afternoon that one of the three friends simply finds it in a younger wife.
But the fulcrum of this in Tokyo Story is not any of the blood relatives of the Hirayama family-with their ambivalent, guilty, recriminatory ties that bind-but the partial outsider Noriko. She is identified with Shoji but is now necessarily adrift from him (“Often I don’t think of him for days”); she is more considerate and obliging toward her in-laws than their own children are, but can confess, “I’m quite a selfish person, actually.” Their pleas that she should remarry seem to fall on deaf ears: “My heart seems to be waiting. . . . Sometimes I feel I can’t go on like this forever.” Which picks up on the dark hint she leaves when Tomi warns her that she’ll feel lonely as she grows older: “I’ll never be that old, don’t worry.”
In Early Summer, Setsuko Hara’s Noriko again has a pulling-away quality, whether because she’s a new woman (“It’s not that I can’t-I won’t,” she says in response to family pressures to marry) or just contrary. The man she finally elects to marry-against her family’s angry protestations-is a widower with a child, a doctor colleague of her brother’s about to be posted away from Tokyo. “That’s what made me decide,” she says, although she also worries that in the process she is breaking up the family. There’s even her boss’s remark, when a friend comments that Noriko used to collect photographs of Katharine Hepburn: “A woman? Is she that way?” (It’s hard to recall the question of sexual compatibility, let alone preference, being raised in all the discussions around Ozu marriages.) And for all her kindness and consideration, Noriko (here and in Tokyo Story) has a habit of being late.
Her persona in the Japanese cinema earned Setsuko Hara the sobriquet of the “perennial virgin,” which is not exactly the kind of “holding out” she displays in Tokyo Story and Early Summer. Though perhaps, for all its connotations of Doris Day-ness, the tag hints at the secretiveness along with the sweetness, the wryness, and the apologetic perversity (which seems to come from not quite knowing herself) of her Norikos. Chishu Ryu, with roles through nearly all of Ozu’s output, may be the holding center of his cinema, his alter ego on film, Ryu’s sorrowful detachment at the close of Tokyo Story allowing it to support interpretations of Buddhist serenity and transcendence. But the performances of Setsuko Hara may be closer to whatever is secretive, wry, and resistant in Ozu himself. There’s a film with Hara that Ozu didn’t make-although in some way he may have-called I Married, But . . .
He certainly found the “I ·, but . . .” construction (evidently a popular catchphrase of the time) appealing enough to use it three times: I Graduated, But . . . (29), I Flunked, But . . . (30), and I Was Born, But . . . It’s interesting to speculate about what he was resisting, or what appealed about this equivocation, this going-back-on-itself self-assertion, since in terms of his working life he was so famously and unusually well adjusted. Partly this explains that narrowing to a vanishing point of late Ozu, because he was a happy house director working with the stylistic rigor of Carl Dreyer. His first film, Sword of Penitence (27), was made for Shochiku Studio, as was his last, An Autumn Afternoon. The few exceptions in between-for example, Floating Weeds (59) at Daiei; The End of Summer (61) at Toho-were not signs of periodic estrangement or rebellion, just that he had fulfilled his Shochiku contract in those years.
But if not rebellion, there was a persistent pulling back, a turning aside from certain options, or a tendency to approach matters of both dramatic craft and technological innovation in a roundabout way, so that the teasing delay, the development left in suspension, becomes part of the texture of his films. Most striking of Ozu’s delays was the fact that he took until 1936 to make his first full sound film, The Only Son. But Donald Richie has traced Ozu’s refusals back even to his reluctance to accept promotion from assistant director: “Early, Ozu became known around the studio as the man who says no. He said no to becoming full director. Later he said no to a number of scripts. Now he was saying no to his actors, making them work harder than they had ever had before. Later, he would refuse to make talkies-for a time. He would eventually refuse to make more than one film a year. Still later, he would refuse color, to succumb eventually. He never did accept widescreen.”
And eventual acceptance might then entail a retrospective rejection. When he did move into color, with Equinox Flower (58), Ozu thereafter nailed down the camera, which is so conspicuously in motion throughout his Thirties films. According to David Bordwell, “the emblem of all Ozu’s refusals” was the restricted camera height that he began to adopt consistently from the early Thirties, that position about three feet above floor level that again creates an aesthetic and graphic pattern out of conscious elimination. For a while, it also became the emblem of a critical argument that Ozu could be understood only through his sheer Japanese-ness, and that everything in his films was seen from the point of view of someone sitting on a tatami mat.
From these technical and titular strategies, it’s a short step to far-reaching formal ones, where suspensions, suppressions, and forestallings create playful gaps in the Ozu image. Consider the opening of Tokyo Story, when Shukishi and Tomi Hirayama are packing for their visit to their two married children in Tokyo, with a stop first to see their younger son, Keizo, in Osaka. The arrangements for meeting Keizo are spelled out, and the film then cuts to some transition shots-a row of tall industrial smokestacks, a railway station-that should be Osaka but are not. That visit, as we learn from a later conversation, has taken place but been elided by the film, and we are already in Tokyo.
Then there is the early conversation in An Autumn Afternoon in which Shuhei Hirayama discusses meeting two friends for an after-work drink. One of them demurs, saying he wants to go to a baseball game. There is a transitional flurry of shots of a baseball stadium lighting up at night, then the film cuts to a bar where the three friends are drinking. The baseball fan, it transpires, passed up the game. So the transition, retrospectively, becomes a bridge to nowhere; it is a tease, a joke, a “what if,” and, of course, an elaboration of narrative space in its own right. When we come to the narratives, and the character dramas, this playfulness-the suspensions, the equivocations-continues to operate, most strikingly in the maneuvers to marry off a daughter in Late SpringEarly Summer, and An Autumn Afternoon, which eventually produce likely prospects whom we are never allowed to see.
This leads to one of the major divides in Ozu criticism, between Donald Richie’s view that the revelation of character is paramount, which is why plot is so unimportant to Ozu, and David Bordwell’s emphasis on the works’ formal processes: “Both the films’ overarching structural rigor and their overtly playful narration work to minimize character psychology.” It’s possible, though, that they’re both right and both wrong, that the processes of ellipsis and suppression wouldn’t have worked as they did if there hadn’t been an answering conception of character, one of doubting and disappearance, of substitution and duplication. The “I ·, but . . .” formula is a principle not just of doing but of being.
The film doesn’t use formal strategies to minimize her psychology, but one of the most significant examples of character suppression in Ozu is Noriko in Tokyo Story, suspended between the image of a dead husband she cherishes for his parents’ sake and a future she finds untenable (“I don’t know what I will do if I carry on as I am”). Her personality is another bridge to nowhere. This is a dramatic conception of character, but the formulation of emptiness-one of Ozu’s figures of style in his transitional, intermediary, still-life shots-also has an absurdist quality, pushing toward the comic. Is Noriko cousin to those sweet young things of indeterminate function who pop into Hirayama’s office at the beginning of An Autumn Afternoon, their main function being to be quizzed by him about their age and marital prospects, since they exist only as simulacra of his daughter?
Or they may have distantly sprung from the comic. The feckless students who inhabit Ozu’s campus comedies are necessarily simple figures, but they are called on to fulfill cycles of disappointment and failure that only in later films will have to be figured as spiritual loss. I Graduated, But . . . and I Flunked, But . . . are a matching set of mirrored comedies: in the first, the newly graduated hero finds that his diploma is not a passport to a job; in the second, the flunking hero sees his successful fellows go straight into unemployment, so happily re-consigns himself to student life-cheerleading, that is, not studying.
The student friends of Days of Youth (29), Watanabe and Yamamoto, are rivals for the same girl, Chieko. When they both lose her on the ski slopes to another student, they wind up back in their student rooms, with Watanabe optimistically sketching out in mime the “better one” he will find for Yamamoto. Made under the sign of Harold Lloyd-literally, with posters of the latter providing apt student decor-Ozu’s silent comedies are physical comedies of mime, acting out, imposture (the roommates of I Flunked, But . . . use an elaborate silhouette play to order the food they want from a nearby bakery).
Another kind of mime used by Ozu, as described by Bordwell, was sojikei, or “similar figure” compositions, in which two actors would be arranged “so that in posture, placement, or orientation they became compositionally analogous.” This could be extended into a kind of choreography-Ozu’s students are much given to doing odd little synchronized jigs-which possibly helps to subordinate “the individual to the frame’s overall spatial or temporal rhythm.” It possibly also becomes another kind of character comedy-a comedy of character manquŽ, or its surrender to such routines. Something about it brings to mind that favorite Ozu scene-setting or “intermediary” shot: clothes stretched out on a washing line in mocking imitation of their absent wearers. Father stands among them doing exercises with a chest expander in I Was Born, But . . . ; the last shot of Good Morning (59) honors the drying shorts of the boy who can’t join in his friends’ farting games without losing control of his bowels.
In between the student comedies of bodies in antic motion and the late films of spiritual irresolution, some fascinating Thirties melodramas bring things very much to the point. That Night’s Wife (30) is a thriller in which a penniless commercial artist steals some money to buy medicine for his desperately ill child, then spends the night holed up in his apartment with the detective who has pursued him (the latter for most of the time held at gunpoint by the artist’s wife). Gradually, around such Ozu domestic still-lifes as a teakettle steaming on the hob, an exchange of sympathies takes place between thief and detective, a Conradian secret sharing, no less, in what must be Ozu’s most Western film (the use of identifying motifs such as the detective’s gloves, and Ozu’s initial idea of confining all the action within the flat, even suggest something Hitchcockian). Eventually, the artist decides to pay for his crime, and he and the detective go off into the dawn, almost arm in arm.
An Inn in Tokyo (35) was one of Ozu’s series of four films featuring the drifter Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), usually wandering through a desolate landscape in search of work and sustenance for himself and his son (or here, two sons). In An Inn, he meets a woman as adrift as himself, and another ailing child prompts another hero to theft. Character correspondences are brought out in some “ghostly” substitutions and dialogue echoes: “You’ve got the wrong person,” says a prostitute when Kihachi tries to give her a necklace he has bought for the woman he believes has now abandoned him. “You’re asking the wrong person,” says the landlady of the inn when Kihachi goes to her for money. It’s an effect Ozu would carry over to Tokyo Story: “Being in Tokyo is like a dream,” says the mother on her arrival. “It’s just like a dream,” says her bewildered daughter Shige after her mother’s sudden collapse and death.
The theme is picked up in Good Morning by the elderly Tomizawa (Eijir™ Tono), retired and almost perpetually drunk, who declares, “Life is an empty dream.” This may be the sentiment, unspoken, behind Shige’s declaration, and perhaps it circulates through all the interchanges and transactions, particularly the arranged marriages, in Ozu’s films. In which case, Good Morning is its most thoroughgoing correction. This may not displace Tokyo Story as Ozu’s generally acknowledged masterpiece, but it is one of his most extraordinary films, a pellucid examination of the ties that bind in a suburban community, a strangely yet charmingly defined artificial world over which the comic spirit of not Harold Lloyd but Jacques Tati seems to hover.
Good Morning is usually classified as a remake of I Was Born, But . . . , though it is in fact more of a satellite, taking off in a different direction from the conceit of children going on strike against the perceived injustice and inanity of the adult world. Here the two sons of Keitaro Hayashi (Ryu), told off for making too much noise over the television they want, declare that grown-ups make too much unnecessary noise with their good-mornings and how-are-yous, and go on a silence strike.
This sparks a chain reaction of neighborhood paranoia, until communication is restored (“Those unnecessary words are the lubricating oil in our society,” the lesson is spelled out), along with some plain transactions and not-so-secret sharing (Tomizawa becomes a salesman and Keitaro buys a television from him for his boys). The boys’ aunt (Yoshiko Kuga) meanwhile carries on a kind of romance-no arranged marriages here-with their unemployed English teacher (she brings him translation work, naturally enough). But they find that “important things” are hard to say, and carry on their relationship by discussing that most necessary of unnecessary Ozu topics, the weather.
Ozu-san.com : A website dedicated to Ozu Yasujiro
ozuyasujiro.com Masters of Cinema, also here: Yasujiro Ozu at Masters of Cinema fansite
ozuyasujiro.com - life biography by Nick Wrigley
TCMDB biography
Film Reference profile essay by David Bordwell
Yasujiro Ozu • Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Nick
Wrigley from Senses of Cinema, March 22,
2003
Yasujiro Ozu - The Legendary Film Maker, Biography, Filmography ... Sensasian biography
Yasujiro Ozu The Auteurs profile
Yasujiro Ozu home Kurt Easterwood tribute website
Yasujiro Ozu: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article bio from Absolute Astronomy
Yasujiro Ozu Film Japanese Isbn Tokyo Late Ozu's Director bio from Economic Expert
BBC - BBC Four Cinema - Yasujiro Ozu: Profile Chris Wiegand
Yasujiro Ozu - Filmbug brief bio
Yasujiro Ozu@Everything2.com brief bio and filmography
Yasujiro Ozu Novel Guide Helper
Yasujiro Ozu Listal
Ozu - 90th Anniversary book - part one of two Reprinted summaries of the first 18 of 34 films from the 90th anniversary Ozu retrospective (apparently Part Two is no longer available)
The Films of Yasujiro Ozu - by Michael Grost Classic Film and Television
Strictly Film School Acquarello reviews 26
Ozu films
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews
Film Diary Kevin Lee comments on over 30 Ozu films from Also Like Life
Yasujiro Ozu: Old School Reviews
Yasujiro Ozu - Director by Film Rank
The Criterion Collection also seen here: Criterion Collection's Yasujiro Ozu
Dept. {15+ films on DVD}
Yasujiro Ozu [1903-63] Page at Magic Lantern Video & Book Store
Digital Ozu a series of photos and essays from the Tokyo
University Digital Museum (English and Japanese)
Censorship
of Japanese Films During the U.S. Occupation of Japan: The Cases of Yasujiro
Ozu and Akira Kurosawa Lars-Martin
Sorenson book (338 pages)
October
5, 2004 (IX:6) Excerpts from David
Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema,
1988,
Ozu
and the Poetics of Cinema 2004
online book edition by David Bordwell (401 pages), also with an introduction
here: Ozu
and the Poetics of Cinema
OZU & HOU comparative film essay from Cinemaspace (undated)
Cinespot : A Great Auteur - Yasujiro Ozu Kantorates at Cinespot (undated)
Cinema:
Painful Accuracy - TIME Jay Cocks
from Time magazine,
Ozu's
Reactionary Cinema suggestions about the socio-economic
determination of signifying practices, by
Marc Holthof from Jump Cut, August
1978
FILM:
YASUJIRO OZU, AS DIRECTOR AND SUBJECT
Vincent Canby from The New York
Times,
Underrated:
Art from the rising sun: The case for Yasujiro Ozu ... Kevin Jackson from The Independent,
FILM
VIEW; How American Intellectuals Learned to Love Ozu Mindy Aloff from The New York Times,
Is Ozu Slow? •
Senses of Cinema Jonathan
Rosenbaum from Senses of Cinema, Marh
5, 2000
From Behind the Camera Ken Sakamura on a Yasujiro Ozu exhibition in Tokyo, The University Museum, The University of Tokyo, 1999
Harvard Film Archive September/October 1999
Boston
Phoenix Article (1999) The Composer’s Eye, by Chris Fujuwara
from The Boston Phoenix, September 30
–
Kitano's Hana-bi
and the Spatial Traditions of Yasujiro Ozu • Senses of ... Mark Freeman from Senses of Cinema, June 7, 2000
Banshun (Late
Spring) - Yasujiro Ozu Film Movie Review
Vanes Naldi from Metal Asylum,
Equinox Flower • Senses of
Cinema Michael
Koller from Senses of Cinema,
November 20, 2001
International
Federation of Film Critics Article Ozu at
Auteur House Presents: Yasujiro Ozu | Nexus Dr. Richard Swainson from Nexus (2003)
'Home-drama' in
your own home | The Japan Times Online
Donald Richie from The Japan
Times,
100-year
Centennial Exhibition at the Kamakura Museum of Literature Kurt Easterwood site, April 25 –
Jonathon
Delacour: A double Ozu retrospective
Ozu's
Angry Women Shigehiko Hasumi from Rouge, October 2003
The films of Yasujiro Ozu: true to form ArtForum essay, October 2003, also seen (all on one page) here: The films of Yasujiro Ozu: true to form. - Free Online Library
Yasujiro Ozu | The Jim Jarmusch Resource Page Two or Three Things About Yasujiro Ozu, by Jim Jarmusch from ArtForum, October 2003
CRITIC'S
NOTEBOOK; A Director's Calm as a Relentless Force Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times,
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Midnight Eye
feature: The World of Yasujiro Ozu
by Michael Arnold, Jasper Sharp, and Tom Mes from Midnight Eye,
Taipei Times - archives Revisiting Ozu’s Masterpieces, by Yu Sen-lun, December 9, 2003
Quandt on Ozu Doug Cummings from Film Journey,
Errata:
Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story Robert
Davis from Errata,
Movies
| Complete and incomplete Yasujiro Ozu at the Harvard Film Archive, Chris
Fujiwara from The Boston Phoenix,
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro) • Senses of Cinema Michael Kerpan from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004
The Only Son (Hitori Musuko) • Senses of Cinema James Leahy from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004
Brothers and Sisters of
the Toda Family • Senses of Cinema Adam
Binham from Senses of Cinema, July
26, 2004
Record of a Tenement Gentleman • Senses of Cinema Michael Price from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004
Time and Tide: Yasujiro
Ozu's Late Autumn • Senses of Cinema
Adrian Danks from Senses of
Cinema, July 26, 2004
Dragnet Girl (Hijosen
no onna) • Senses of Cinema Freda
Freiberg from Senses of Cinema,
September 2004
• View
topic - Yasujiro Ozu Criterion
discussion forum,
The spaces in-between: the Cinema of Yasujiro Ozu - page 5 ... Adam Bingham from ArtForum, Winter 2004
Yasujiro Ozu Retrospective at the Northwest Film Forum [2005] in Seattle, WA N.P. Thompson from Movies Into Film, January 2005
motion
picture, it's called: The other man in Ozu's world: Shin ... The other man in Ozu's world: Shin Saburi
(Thursday Great Actor Blogging), by Alex,
blog post Kurt Easterwood on a visit to the Seishunkan in Matsusaka, a museum dedicated to Ozu’s youth, January 2, 2006
The
Criterion Collection Database: Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu ... Dan Callahan,
hackwriters.com - Yasujiro Ozu's 'Floating Weeds' - Review by Dan ... STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS & FLOATING WEEDS, by Dan Schneider from hackwriters, March 2007
Umbrella: Issue 2, Spring 2007 - Dan Schneider on Yasujiro Ozu's ... Dan Schneider on LATE SPRING from Umbrella Journal, Spring 2007
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Cinema
and Movies.: Ozu,The greatest master of cinema in Japan Allal from Cinema and Movies,
BrokenProjector.com
» Blog Archive » An Autumn Afternoon by ...
Guatam Valluri on AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON, from Broken Projector,
Habits of
Waste - Yasujiro Ozu: a First Impression
Jeff Purdue 5 page essay, Yasujiro Ozu:
a First Impression , Parents and
children, The world's
indifference, Ozu's camera,
and Films
about cinema from Habits of Waste, November 2007
various artists - yasujiro ozu: hitokomakura Yasujiro Ozu – Hitokomakura, Musical CD created in the pillow shot style of Ozu (2007), also seen here: Various Artists: Yasujiro Ozu - Hitokomakura: Squidco
history
of japanese cinema to 1960 - japanese cinema's MySpace ... Gregg Rickman from My Space Cinema of
Colin
Marshall: Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
Colin
Marshall: Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)
Hou
Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière :: An Homage to Yasujiro Ozu ... Sly from The
Open End,
Doc
Films capsule reviews and essay, Yasujiro Ozu, the Pre-War Masterpieces, January 2009
Doc Films capsule reviews and essay, Yasujiro Ozu, the Post-War Years, Spring 2009
Film
Reviews | Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu | No Ripcord ... Dan Schneider from No Ripcord,
The
Listening Ear: Late, Strange, Ozu
WeepingSam from The Listening Ear,
The Wonder of
John Hughes and Yasujiro Ozu « The Enterprise Blog Michael Auslin,
Food, Trains and the Lived-In Cinema of Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao ... Mark Asch from The L magazine, September 17, 2009
Japanese
Film Greats – Director Yasujiro Ozu: Late Spring and ... Jeanne Lombardo from
Yasujiro Ozu: an artist of the unhurried world Ian Buruma from The Guardian, January 10, 2010
DVD Times - Tokyo-Ga Noel Megahey reviews Wim Wenders documentary journey to Japan seeking out Ozu film sites and people who worked with him
Ozu Yasujirô: the master of time | Sight & Sound | BFI Thom Andersen, May 7, 2015
5
Essential Films By Yasujirō Ozu | IndieWire Oliver Lyttelton, March 7, 2016
Ozu, Yasujiro They
Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Kinema Junpo - 1995's Top 100 Japanese Films of the 20th Century ...
Seen from "Kinema Junpo's Top 100 Japanese Films of All Time (1999)"
»
Best Japanese Films Since 1927! Wildgrounds
Chris Fujiwara's Top 10 Directors
Derek Malcolm's 5 Best Directors
David Robinson's 5 Best Directors
David Sterritt's Top 10 Directors
Survey of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
501 Movie Directors: A
Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
Yasujirō Ozu Find a Grave
Directions for
finding Yasujiro Ozu's grave at Engaku-ji
Yasujiro Ozu's
gravesite in Kita-Kamakura: How to get there (Part Two).
Yasujirō Ozu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Image results for Yasujiro Ozu photo
Hanami Web - Kinuyo Tanaka bio and filmography of frequent Ozu actress
THE
SWORD OF PENITENCE (Zenge no yaiba)
Thoughts from Ozu:
To be honest, I wasn't in a hurry to become a director. As an assistant
director, I could take it easy; once I became a director, I wouldn't be able to
get any sleep, what with all the continuity to plan and develop. But everyone
around me urged me to at least have a go at making one. Originally, I decided
to direct a film using a script I wrote:
DREAMS
OF YOUTH (Wakōdo no yume)
Thoughts from Ozu:
After Sword of Penitence, I turned down
WIFE
LOST (Nyōbo funshitsu)
Thoughts from Ozu:
The film was developed from a script which won an award in some magazine. The
story wasn't particularly interesting. As a matter of fact, I have forgotten
most of the plot. I made it under company orders.
PUMPKIN (Kabocha)
Thoughts from Ozu:
This film was way too short. I started to get the hang of how to do continuity
from this time onwards.
A
COUPLE ON THE MOVE (Hikkoshi fūfu)
Thoughts from Ozu:
The company handed me the script. Though the company was calling the shots, as
long as I thought I could handle it, I would accept the assignment dutifully. I
made a conscious effort to try out a few things here. I thought I managed to
offer something new and interesting but regrettably, the finished product was
far from what I envisaged. Almost half the original was edited out.
BODY
BEAUTIFUL (Nikutaibi)
Thoughts from Ozu:
With this film, I had finally evolved my own style. It was also the first
work to gain the company's recognition. I still remember Uchida Kisaburo's
critical review in Kinema Junpo. I had by that point figured out what
filmmaking was about. Nowadays, rookie directors could make features that ran
seven or eight reels, but in my time, newcomers were only assigned
three-reelers. In other words, it was much harder for young directors then to
find out their strengths and weaknesses. They had to take much longer to
understand themselves.
Thoughts from Ozu:
My memory of this film was that it was churned out in a hurry. Working day
and night, I didn't sleep for five consecutive days. In spite of that, we
didn't feel too tired. We even played baseball on the morning of the sixth day.
I could still visualize that ball now. We were young after all. I wouldn't be
able to sustain that later in life. It would take me much longer time to
recuperate.
DAYS OF YOUTH (Gakusei
romance: Wakaki hi)
Yasujiro Ozu • Great
Director profile • Senses of Cinema Nick
Wrigley from Senses of Cinema, March 22,
2003 (excerpt)
Days Of Youth (Wakaki Hi, 1929) is Ozu's earliest extant picture, though not especially typical (and preceded by seven others, now lost) as it is set on ski slopes. A variant on the then popular comedies depicting students at work and play, in this film two students endeavour to pass their exams and impress the girl to whom they have both taken a fancy. Stylistically it is rife with close-ups, fade-outs and tracking shots, all of which Ozu was later to leave behind.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Ozu’s earliest extant film reveals the director as a master of
Hollywood-style filmmaking. (Donald Richie and David Bordwell have both pointed
out that Days of Youth is indebted to the films of Harold Lloyd and Ernst
Lubitsch.) Two friends at
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Ozu's earliest surviving film is a hilarious, Hollywood-style student comedy, replete with homages to Frank Borzage and Ozu's beloved Lubitsch. Gleefully ignoring their studies, happy-go-lucky Watanabe (Ichiro Yuki) and his geeky friend Yamamoto (a very Harold Lloyd-like Tatsuo Saito) try to outdo one another in winning the affections of a young girl. When the action moves to the ski slopes, Ozu pulls out all the stops for a series of great physical gags, including the neat, vertiginous POV shot of a neophyte skier. Keep an eye out for the sign of a barbershop: it was common practice for Shochiku and rival studio Nikkatsu to sneak in names of each other's screenwriters as an in-joke, and whose appears here other than that of the great Kenji Mizoguchi?
Film Diary Kevin Lee from Also Like Life
This breezy student comedy about the misadventures of two slacker collegians (Ichiro Yuki and Tatsuo Saito, who does a great riff on Harold Lloyd) is Ozu's earliest existing film. The narrative is as incidental as ever but eventually locks into an extended sequence capturing the foibles of a romantic triangle that develops during an extended skiing sequence -- which in itself is a wonder as it's probably the longest exterior sequence Ozu ever filmed. Ozu's filmmaking is more "mainstream" than what he's known for, utilizing dissolves, handheld camerawork and clever point of view shots to capture the thrills and spills of the ski slopes. Ozu's characteristically lovely moments of human intimacy are in evidence, but they have yet to be as sharply composed, pared down to the graphic simplicity that is his hallmark. It seems evident that a younger, more carefree Ozu directed this -- it's relatively slight but extremely affable depiction of youth -- one wonders what wonders Ozu would have done with AMERICAN PIE.
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
As the film opens, a gregarious loafer named Watanabe (Ichiro Yuki) turns away a young man who has inquired about a sign on the window for a room for rent, explaining that he had just rented the room earlier that day. Moments later, an attractive young woman inquires about the same room and, attempting to get into her good graces, Watanabe remarks that he is in the process of vacating and that the room is available. With nowhere to go, he moves into the apartment of his meek, bookish friend Yamamoto (Tatsuo Saito) who, unbeknownst to him, is enamored with the same young woman. After completing their final examinations, the two friends decide to bide time waiting for their final grades by competing for the affection of the young woman at a ski resort, resulting in a series of misadventures for the novice skier Yamamoto. The earliest extant film by Ozu, Days of Youth is a whimsical, amusing, and entertaining fusion of physical and situational comedy. Most noteworthy in the film is the absence of Ozu's familiar 'pillow' shots that are functionally replaced by the use a bookend, long panning panorama shots of the city to convey placement and scenario.
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]
Though the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu made seven film
before it, Days of Youth (Gakusei romansu - waka ki hi, or
"Student Romance - Days of Youth," 1929) is the earliest of his films
to survive the war, neglect, and nitrate deterioration. Many of Ozu's earliest
films were comedies, often about student life, and this falls neatly into this
category as its title makes explicit. The picture is quite enjoyable, easy to
follow and influenced by
The story is simple: two university students vie for the same virginal sweetheart, Chieko (Junko Matsui, whose dimpled smile suggests Ame agaru's Yoshiko Miyazaki). Watanabe (Ichiro Yuki) is a lazy rogue, irresponsible and crafty. As the film opens he advertises that his room is for rent, but keeps lying to interested parties that the place is already rented; he's holding out for a beautiful girl to flirt with. He eventually rents the room to Chieko, and decides the best way to win her heart is to stalk and annoy her until she falls in love with him.
Meanwhile, Watanabe's long-suffering friend, shy and bookish Yamamoto (Ozu regular Tatsuo Saito, later familiar for his work in Hollywood productions filmed in Japan, 1962's My Geisha for example) has fallen for Chieko as well, he with his round glasses very much in the Harold Lloyd mold of youthful enthusiasm and crippling shyness.
The three eventually meet up on a ski trip after Watanabe and Yamamoto take their exams, and like the Lloyd comedies the bulk of the film has gentle Yamamoto trying to romance Chieko, only to be thwarted at every turn by Watanabe, whose actions only cause him one embarrassment after another. Quite unlike Lloyd's persona, however, Yamamoto is a man of undying, Herculean patience; Japanese culture is rooted in a social structure where one is expected to put up with the selfishness of their friends and neighbors, even one as scurrilous as Watanabe. Lloyd would certainly have mustered the courage to throttle the jerk in the final reel.
Days of Youth has many moments that would not be out of place in an American silent comedy. One early scene has Watanabe leaning against a lamppost with dripping wet black paint. This leads to some very funny stuff where, on a kind of date with Chieko, he tries to hide his blackened palm which gets paint everywhere.
The film is a fascinating document of its period, when men wore western-style hats with their kimono, and before Japanese militarism put a halt to American imports. (In Yamamoto's room, adorned with pennants from American universities, he and Watanabe eat "Libby's [canned] California Asparagus.")
Overlooked Silent Films – Days of Youth (1929) and Matinee Idol (1928) Helen Geib from Commentary Track
FIGHTING FRIENDS – JAPANESE STYLE (Wasei kenka tomodachi)
Thoughts from Ozu:
Noda thought up this story, about two men who fall in love with the same woman.
It was such old hat we had to package it by adding "Japanese Style"
to the title.
User comments from imdb Author: GrandeMarguerite
from Lille, France
This early short (and silent) film by Japanese master Ozu seems
to be the perfect illustration for XVIIth century French poet Jean de La
Fontaine's fable "The Two Cocks" : "Two cocks in peace were
living, when / A war was kindled by a hen." It is the simple story of two
friends who live together in a poor tenement and who share about everything in
life (food, hopes, work...). Everything goes well until they gallantly rescue a
young (and pretty) woman injured in a road accident. Since the lady has nowhere
to go, the two good-hearted friends invite her to their home. She soon becomes
their housemaid and they soon begin to seek her favors. Alas, she falls for a
young student she has met in the neighborhood, much to the two friends' dismay.
Set in the austerity of depression-era
I GRADUATED BUT… (Daigaku
wa Deta Keredo…)
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Recent college graduate Tetsuo (Minoru Takada) has to swallow his pride when, after several rejections, he's still unable to find a job, and can no longer hide his status of unemployment from his mother and fiancée. In a country where over 300,000 were unemployed, Ozu's timely drama resonated with the populace, and became part of the zeitgeist when its title caught on as a popular catchphrase. The great Kinuyo Tanaka, who would go on to star in a number of masterpieces by Ozu, Naruse, and Mizoguchi as well as embark on her own directorial career, makes her Ozu debut with a delicate performance as the young fiancée Michiko.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
In this short reconstruction of an otherwise lost film, Ozu
focuses on the unemployment that was rampant among college graduates in
late-1920s
User comments from imdb Author: Czaro Woj (czarowoj@gmail.com)
An early Ozu short about a young graduate who can't bring himself
to accept a low-on-the-food-chain position at an office because he feels he's
overqualified; and the consequences of that decision.
Very bittersweet stuff, with a great ending that's happy, but not unabashedly
happy. Like a lot of later Ozu works, 'I Graduated, But...' is a humble,
down-to-earth story about ordinary people and its joy comes from their minor
(meaningless in the great scheme) triumphs.
Especially noteworthy are a couple of shots of the main character at the bar,
filmed from table height and incredibly striking, a Harold Lloyd poster that
shows up in the background several times, and the conflict between tradition
and modernity illustrated by the film's second-to-last shot of a moving train.
'I Graduated, But...' is recommended to Ozu fans and to fans of silent cinema
in general.
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Michael Arnold
from
Tetsuo Nomoto (Takada) is a recent college graduate who, like many educated young men at the time, is having a hard time finding work. He attends a job interview and is offered a position as office receptionist, but turns it down in a fit of diploma-inspired pride. When his mother (Suzuki) and fiancée Machiko (a youthfully charming Tanaka) unexpectedly move in, Tetsuo has to pretend that he is employed, so he spends his mornings and afternoons out of the house, playing ball with the boys at a nearby park. Soon mom moves out, and Tetsuo admits to his new bride that his "job" was only an attempt to keep his mother from worrying. The two quarrel, and that night Tetsuo visits a café with a friend only to discover that Machiko has been working there as a waitress without his knowledge. The trauma of finding his wife employed as a café waitress strengthens Tetsuo's resolve to find a job, and he returns to the previous company to beg for whatever work is available. Satisfied with Tetsuo's newfound humility, the gentlemen offer him a position as a full company employee.
I Graduated But is a pleasant drama with the sprinklings of (post-) college humor that are common to Ozu's earlier work. But with only a fraction of the film's footage in existence today it's difficult to judge the overall quality of the film and "Ozu-ness" of the technique. Luckily the surviving fragment has been released on video in Japan, and at least one version features the familiar and enlightening voice of Shinsui Matsuda, whose benshi narration sutures the film's narrative handicap into a 15-minute whole. Ozu's colleague and an excellent director in his own right, Hiroshi Shimizu, who was originally planned as the director for this film as well, wrote the original story.
Critical Culture [Pacze Moj] also seen here: FilmJerk.com (Pacze Moj) review [B-]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
THE
LIFE OF AN OFFICE WORKER (Kaishain seikatsu)
Thoughts from Ozu:
A forerunner of the salaryman genre, I deliberately wove scenes with a more
realistic touch into comedy. I also made the exception of using overlapping
shots, using a dissolve to conjure up the atmosphere of dawn in one scene. I
only ever did it once, I didn't think much of it. I don't deny that some people
use the dissolve to brilliant effect, but most of the time it only serves as a
gimmick. I have a distaste for those kinds of overlapping shots.
User comments from imdb Author: jmillard2 from
While in college at The University Of Illinois I was fortunate enough to view several Ozu films, this being one of them. I took one film class and this director struck me as having a sensibility about life and the simple aspects of it that are often unnoticed by other directors. I loved the pace (patient but not overly slow) of this film and the attention to detail. Where as Kurosawa's better known films seem to deal with larger themes, war, societal strife, etc, Ozu seems to be more concerned with the family unit and the sensitive interpersonal relationships that we all go through. His astute focus on emotion both from his actors and as seen through his use of the camera is a joy to watch and I only hope that more of his films become available on DVD.
A STRAIGHTFORWARD BOY (Tokkan Kozo)
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Long thought lost, this delightful little film was written
quickly over beers in a
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Taking its inspiration from O. Henry's "Ransom of Red Chief," this charming short follows two hapless kidnappers who find more than they bargained for when their abductee, a mischievous brat with a seemingly endless supply of energy, pesters them incessantly for toys and candy. Shot in just three days, A STRAIGHTFORWARD BOY was a vehicle for Ozu's favorite child star, Tomio Aoki, who, as a result of the film's popularity, adopted his character's name (literally, "a boy who charges into you.") Aptly characterized by film scholar David Bordwell as "diabolical," the irrepressible Tokkan Kozo would further display his Dennis the Menace-like antics as the younger brother in I WAS BORN, BUT·, and as another mean kid with a sweet-tooth in the great Kihachi film, PASSING FANCY. (Fans of Howard Hawks may note that he also adapted the same O. Henry story, even if Ozu's is arguably the finer film.)
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
"Tokkan kozo" (a charging-ahead boy) is the earliest Ozu I've seen yet. Only one older film directed by him still exists. This one was believed lost until 1990 or so, when the first and last reels of this 4-reel "nonsense comedy" were re-discovered. This is an adaptation of O. Henry's "Ransom of Red Chief". It stars a diminutive bespectacled Tomio Aoki (the little brother from "I Was Born But" -- a couple of years later) as the unmanageable and ultimately unwanted kidnap victim and Tatsuo Saito (the father from IWBB) and Takeshi Sakamoto (Aoki's father in "Passing Fancy" and "Tokyo Inn", also from the 30s) as the hapless kidnappers. One assumes that this film was inspired by the "Little Rascals" films -- and (except for the clothing -- and the comparatively sophisticated direction and cinematography) looks like the American exemplars -- especially the end which features a batch of our young hero's friends. Nothing profound here, but good fun -- despite the missing middle (wherein our kidnappers try unsuccessfully to return their "visitor").
Critical Culture [Pacze Moj] also seen here: FilmJerk.com [Pacze Moj]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
THAT NIGHT’S WIFE (Sono Yo no Tsuma)
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
This uncharacteristic
Sternbergian crime thriller by Yasujiro Ozu, one of his more interesting silent
pictures (1930), is set almost entirely inside a single cluttered flat, where a
policeman, hoping to arrest a commercial artist who's robbed an office, is held
at bay by his gun-wielding wife. The results are tense, claustrophobic, and
visually striking throughout. In Japanese with subtitles. 65 min.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Ozu makes the best of what appears to be an uncharacteristic potboiler assignment involving a man (Tokihiko Okada) driven to crime to help his wife and ailing daughter, chased down by a cop (Fuyuki Yamamoto who looks like a Japanese Charles Bronson) who suddenly faces a moral dilemma. The characters are clearly played for genre type, but great performances make it special -- especially by Emiko Yagumo as the fiercely protective wife -- and Ozu achieves a feeling of moral resolve and atonement through personal sacrifice similar to what he did in WALK CHEERFULLY.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
The title suggests a sex comedy, but That Night’s Wife is
a tense suspense thriller based on a popular Japanese short story of the time
called “From Nine to Nine.” A penniless commercial artist robs an office to pay
for medicine for his critically ill daughter. A police detective pursues him to
his home and is held captive by the artist’s gun-wielding wife, who spends the
night watching over her husband and child. The dark, tense atmosphere has been
compared to early Lang and von Sternberg, while Ozu’s use of the couple’s
claustrophobic flat as a single set evokes the stylistic bravura of early
Dreyer films. But That Night’s Wife remains an Ozu film, with the melodrama
firmly rooted in social and domestic malaise.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
After he robs a bank to pay for his feverish daughter Michiko's medical treatment, impoverished artist Shuji (Tokihiko Okada) finds himself trapped in his apartment, where his loving wife and a determined cop wait out a suspenseful evening until Michiko recovers. With this unusual hybrid of crime thriller and domestic drama, the young Ozu set himself a daunting technical challenge that he surmounted with a typically resourceful command of film language: save for the opening reel-a visual tour-de-force depicting the bank heist in a tense eight-minute sequence without resort to a single intertitle-the whole of THAT NIGHT'S WIFE takes place on a single set. Ozu's fluid and endlessly inventive coverage obviates any sense of visual claustrophobia, while the many surprise twists and reversals in his and screenwriter Kogo Noda's scenario keep viewers in an agreeable state of suspense.
One of seven films Ozu made in 1930, this seems at first to be a prime example of his 'atypical' early silent period, when he experimented with numerous Hollywood-influenced genres and techniques before gradually refining the minimalist style and thematic focus of his mature career. The film opens as an effective heist drama pastiche, with Okada trussing up bank clerks and dodging the long shadows of a police dragnet, fox-like; we follow him home to his wife and their critically ill baby daughter, as does a wily police chief. As captor and prey sit out the night, waiting for the child's recovery, the scene is set for a claustrophobic battle of nerves. But see how Ozu - and his characters - constantly forgo the opportunities for conventional melodramatic conflict. The antagonists accepting with remarkable equanimity both their roles and their fate on opposing sides of the law. Seeds of Ozu's conservatism are well in evidence, then, but so too is his sedate pace and his even-handed sympathy and contemplativeness.
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
That Night's Wife The Auteurs
WALK CHEERFULLY (Hogaraka ni Ayume)
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
A silent picture by Yasujiro Ozu (1930) about a petty thief who dreams of becoming a boxer and decides to go straight; he's helped by the love of a woman and ultimately a job as a window washer. Like all Ozu silents, this is much brisker than his subsequent sound work, and the compositions are an eyeful. 96 min.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
A genuine rarity, an Ozu gangster movie, in which a conman falls for one of his targets, achieving redemption through love in a way that is highly reminiscent of Frank Borzage's tales of romantic salvation. Ozu achieves a variety of moods, from the playful hand signals and spontaneous dance routines that gangsters use to greet each other, to the passion of not only romantic love but fraternal devotion between the conman and his best buddy, resulting in one of his most macho movies as well as one of his most tender. Incidentally, Ozu gives a lot of visual time in this film to close-up shots of people's feet, a motif I don't quite understand in its relation to the movie but is certainly striking.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Opening with a bravura tracking shot that only hints at the
virtuoso filmmaking to follow, Ozu's highly entertaining gangster pastiche
revels in
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Audacious and packed with action, Walk Cheerfully is the
story of a new kind of hoodlum who began to appear in westernized
Walk Cheerfully (1930) is the concluding film in the
Silent Film Theater’s mini-festival of Yasujiro Ozu’s silent comedies. Walk
Cheerfully isn’t actually a comedy, although it has comedic elements,
despite what the title would suggest (I strongly suspect difficulties in
translation). It is a redemption melodrama in the mold of Hollywood films of
the ‘twenties. The visual style is similarly indebted to the Hollywood cinema,
particularly in the editing rhythms and camera set-ups, with a fillip of the
German cinema in some striking, mobile camerawork.
Walk Cheerfully is the story of a small time criminal who
goes straight for the love of a good woman. Characterization and milieu owe
nothing to the yakuza and everything to the urban toughs and seedy urban
locales of the American cinema. While decidedly a melodrama, it is a light
melodrama with many welcome comic moments and a finely balanced emotional
register. The plot is restrained and credible, and the film is all the more
engaging for it.
The heroine is played
by Hiroko Kawasaki, who essayed a very similar character in The Lady and the
Beard the following year. Her character in each film is an attractive blend
of the traditional and the modern, and is distinguished by intelligence, grace,
and strength of character. The part in Walk Cheerfully is the more fully
developed of the two, and Kawasaki’s lovely performance is one of the
highlights of the film. The standout character in the supporting cast is the
hero’s best friend, who emulates him in everything including going straight.
The role is overall that of a comic sidekick and supplies many of the film’s
laughs, but there is also an appealing sweetness in the mutual trust and consideration
that characterizes the friendship.
Both the filmmaking
style and subject matter of Walk Cheerfully are atypical for an Ozu
film. The visual and narrative hallmarks of Ozu’s sound films are already
clearly established in Days of Youth and I Was Born, But…, with The
Lady and the Beard falling somewhere in between. All four are enjoyable,
well made films. The variety marks out Ozu’s silent period as one of
experimentation; taken together, the films give the sense he was trying on
different hats to see what fit best. Walk Cheerfully is a very
entertaining movie and one made with evident skill and care. Its real artistic
merit is convincing evidence that Ozu could successfully have pursued a more
conventional filmmaking path, and that the distinctive style of the mature work
was a deliberate development of interest and affinity.
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
AN
INTRODUCTION TO MARRIAGE (Kekkongaku nyūmon)
Thoughts from Ozu:
There was a work of mine called The Strength to Live (Ikiru chikara)
which was supposed to precede An Introduction to Marriage, but the former was
shelved before the script was finished. As the latter was a festive film, it
was scheduled for release at New Year, though it was actually a 1929
production. Since this was a New Year film, it was in general quite
conservative and unexciting. This was the first time I cast Kurishima Sumiko.
I FLUNKED BUT… (Rakudai wa shita Keredo...)
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Ozu was given a week to make this diverting "exam hell"
vignette about a student who fails his graduation test when the shirt on which
he wrote his crib notes gets taken away by the laundry lady. The film's gags
are pulled off with characteristic aplomb, and Ozu cranks up the irony by
letting the failed student enjoy his indefinitely prolonged school life while
the graduates go on to suffer job search humiliations. An amusing obverse of I GRADUATED, BUT· that provides a
comic perspective on unemployment.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Ozu's follow-up to I GRADUATED, BUT... actually plays somewhat like a prequel: a student fails when the shirt on which he wrote his exam cheat sheet gets mistakenly sent to the laundry. The student contemplates his outcast fate as his graduating dorm-mates all face the working world. The film is loaded with clever shifts in perspective (such as when a boy, misunderstanding the meaning of 'flunk' declares that he wants to flunk just like his big brother), and the film becomes a hilarious and touching reflection on college life and what it means to leave it.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Ozu was particularly fond of this college comedy because it was
the first of his films to give Chishu Ryu, his favorite actor, a major role.
(The great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, largely known for her roles in Mizoguchi’s
films, also appears.) A student facing “exam hell” decides to cheat by writing
crib notes on his shirt. The plan goes awry when an overly solicitous landlady
sends the shirt to the laundry, thereby guaranteeing that the miscreant will
fail. Ozu’s delectable irony lies in the “but ...” after flunking—the student’s
failure turns out far sweeter than the success of his companions.
I Graduated, But . . . AND I Flunked, But . . . Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
Japanese director
Yasujiro Ozu shot these silent films with complementary titles in 1929 and 1930
respectively. I Graduated, But . . . appears to be a drama; only an
11-minute fragment survives, but it manages to synopsize the entire story, in
which a college graduate refuses to accept a job as receptionist and then hides
his unemployment from his visiting family. I Flunked, But . . . (64
min.), a pre-Animal House romp about college goof-offs who cheat on
their exams, is so light it threatens to evaporate. But Ozu gets some weird
formal effects by periodically synchronizing the movement of the students as
they walk or do little dance turns, and the film includes the first screen
appearance of Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. The great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, known
for her work with Kenji Mizoguchi as well as Ozu, appears in both films.
User comments from imdb Author: artist_signal
"I Flunked, But..." (Rakudai wa shita keredo) is an Ozu
piece made in the 1930's, and a great example of what a Silent Film can
achieve. A college satire set in
It concerns the humorous attempts made by Takahashi and his gang of friends in
trying to pass the rigourous "Exam Hell" mandated by the
The film's ironic punchline comes in the harsh truth that during tough times,
there are rarely any jobs, so the student who flunks is actually better off
than the student who graduates. All of Takahashi's dorm-mates receive one
job-rejection after the next, and reminisce of the "good college
days" - one of the most memorable lines is when one of the characters say:
"I want to go back to college - we graduated too hastily". The film
may be a hard find, being that its silent and B&W, (and it was made in
1930!) but if you can catch it, it's definitely worth it. Definitely a small
fraction of the overall aesthetic greatness of Ozu as a director, auetuer and
an artist.
User comments from imdb Author: thsieh_83
from California
"I Flunked, But..." (Rakudai wa shita keredo) is an Ozu
piece made in the 1930's, and a great example of what a Silent Film can do. A
college satire set in
It concerns the humorous attempts made by Takahashi and his gang in trying to
pass the rigourous "Exam Hell" mandated by the
The film's ironic punchline comes in the harsh truth that during tough times,
there are rarely any jobs, so the student who flunks is actually better off
than the student who graduates. All of Takahashi's dorm-mates get rejected one
job after the other and reminisce of the "good college days" - one of
the most memorable lines is when one of the characters say: "I want to go
back to college - we graduated too hastily". The film may be a hard find,
being that its silent and B&W, (and it was made in 1930!) but if you can
catch it, it's definitely worth it. I was able to watch it at
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
THE VENGEFUL SPIRIT OF EROS (Erogami no onryō)
Thoughts
from Ozu:
Kido Shiro asked me to get a good rest at a hot spring, yet
at the same time he asked me to come back with a film ready. Presented with
those conditions for my holiday, my retort "how can I relax if I have to
make a film?" was to no avail. So I made The Vengeful Sprit of Eros there.
It was a seasonal film scheduled for release during the summer o-bon festival.
I have forgotten the plot.
LOST
LUCK (Ashi ni sawatta kōun)
Thoughts from
Ozu:
What exactly was this film about? I couldn't remember a thing.
YOUNG MISS (Ojōsan)
Thoughts from Ozu:
The company wanted to use this film as a star vehicle for a couple of popular
comedy actors. It boasted one of the strongest stellar cast of the time. From
my personal vantage point, I had put a lot of effort into it. Perhaps I need to
clarify the identity of "James Maki", who was put down as gagman on
the credit list. Some thought it was my pseudonym. Actually, it was a fictional
name thought up by Fushimi Akira, Ikeda Tadao, Kitamura Komatsu and me.
However, after the pen name was invented, none of them wanted to use it so I
became its sole owner.
THE LADY AND THE BEARD (Shukujo to Hige)
The
Lady and the Beard Jonathan
Rosenbaum from The Reader
Many of Yasujiro Ozu's films have topical interest, but few are as novel as this 1931 silent comedy about the westernization of a conservative young hero. Played by Tokihiko Okada, a big star at the time, he indulges in kendo sword fighting and sports a traditional beard until he's persuaded to lose it in order to land a job at a travel agency. Some of his classmates ridicule him, but he's also lusted after by one of the ladies, which gives this sexy, offbeat comedy of manners part of its punch. 72 min.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
The Lady and the Beard begins as a knockabout, vulgar
comedy but shades into melancholy and pathos. The “beard” of the title belongs
to Okajima, a kendo sword fencer and collegian who cannot find a job in
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
This eccentric comedy of manners follows a love quadrangle
centered on a kendo master (Tokihiko Okada), whose chauvinistic upholding of
Japanese culture screeches to a halt when he falls for a progressive (but not
too progressive) office worker. He shaves his beard (after protesting memorably
that "all great men have beards!" including Lincoln, Darwin and
Marx), puts on a suit and learns the Western ways of wooing a woman, attracting
a haughty aristocrat and a gangster floozy in the process. The three very
different women seem to be presented as three feminine responses to the Western
modernization of
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Kendo champ Okajima (Tokihiko Okada) is conservative in more ways than one: he sports an unfashionable beard, refuses to wear Western clothes, and clings to old-fashioned conventions when dealing with women. When the love of a demure, kimono-clad office girl prompts him to shave his beard and modernize his ways, he finds himself suddenly attracting the affections of a chic, haughty aristocrat and a tough, brazenly westernized swindler. Ozu shot this comic parable of the conflict between tradition and modernity in a mere eight days, and designed it as a showcase for matinee idol Okada, with whom he had already made THAT NIGHT'S WIFE and YOUNG MISS. Ozu would go on to observe again with irony the obstinacy of those who hold onto past traditions in the face of changing values, but the anarchic humor of THE LADY AND THE BEARD may be unrepeatable - a priceless gag (which narrowly escaped the attention of government censors) manages, mischievously, to conflate Abe Lincoln with the equally hirsute Karl Marx. The punchline: "All great men have beards!"
Overlooked
Silent Films – The Lady and the Beard (1931) Helen Geib from Commentary Track
The Lady and the
Beard, directed by
Yasujiro Ozu and starring Tokihiko Okada, is a charming light comedy about a
young man who graduates from college, falls in love, shaves his beard at his
lady’s suggestion, and finds a job. It’s very charming, and very light. Even my
brief summary suggests more plot than actually exists. The film is largely a
series of comic vignettes about a vibrant young man and three young women of
differing temperaments who take an interest in him.
Beard is less true to life than Days of
Youth, made not long before and the last Ozu film I wrote about, though the
difference is one of degree rather than kind. Days lacked even a hint of
contrivance, whereas the scriptwriter’s hand is evident in Beard in the
hero’s small adventure with a small gang of petty criminals (especially their
pretty woman leader). Nevertheless, the predominant tone in Beard is an
engaging and unforced naturalism. Ozu’s early comedies are sometimes compared
to Harold Lloyd’s ‘twenties features, and though the comparison can very easily
be stretched too far, there is a resemblance to Lloyd’s boy next door persona
and his films’ lighthearted comic misadventures arising out of quotidian urban
living.
The film benefits
tremendously from Okada’s wonderful comic performance. Okada has a natural
charisma, expressive face and gestures, and fine comic timing. This is the kind
of performance that makes you wish you could see every movie the actor made.
Films like Beard
offer another source of interest to contemporary audiences, one entirely
incidental to the story and unintended by the filmmakers. Filmed on city
streets, using ordinary furnishings for the sets and everyday clothing for the
costumes, the movie makes for a fascinating documentary record of everyday life
in Tokyo between the wars. Though a necessarily limited window on the past,
it’s nonetheless fascinating and evokes the period in a way that written
history cannot.
We are introduced to
the hero at a kendo (traditional Japanese fencing) match and next see him
striding down the street dressed in a kimono and geta (robes and wooden
sandals; as pictured in the still). It’s meant to be funny that such a young
man should present himself in such an old-fashioned way, and his traditionalism
makes him distinctly unwelcome when he arrives at the birthday party of his
friend’s sister. The family is wealthy and has adopted many foreign fashions:
western furnishings; western cakes for refreshments; western music and ballroom
dancing for entertainment. But the western elements coexist easily with the
Japanese: the son of the house wears suits; his sister wears kimonos; some of
her guests wear kimonos and some dresses. The hero’s modest room is furnished
in traditional Japanese fashion, as is to be expected from his penchant for
traditional clothing, but even he has a poster of a Hollywood movie on the wall,
and he easily doffs his preferred Japanese garb and dons a suit to go job
hunting. The heroine wears kimonos and lives in a traditionally furnished
apartment with her mother, but works in a modern office. In a deliberately
comical presentation, the woman criminal and her two confederates affect the
dress and manners of one of the seedier quarters of bohemian Paris.
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
THE BEAUTY AND THE SORROW (Bijin aishū)
aka: Beauty’s Sorrows
Thoughts from Ozu:
I wanted a change of scene from the "nonsense" comedy and create a
vignette that fuses some realism with delightful candy-floss elements. However,
the finished product was long and tedious. Much as I labored to make this film
work, it was a failure. Despite the supreme effort put into Young Miss,
it was no match for The Lady and the Beard which was so simple and
effortless to do. This meticulously produced worked turned out to be an even
bigger flop. It's hard to tell what makes it tick in this filmmaking business.
I always thought it's not good to be stuck in this scene for too long.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
An office worker is dismissed from his position in an insurance
company when he stands up for a colleague in a minor dispute. Facing the
financial demands of his family, he walks the street looking for work until he
meets an old high school teacher now managing a restaurant. As is often the
case with Ozu’s films of this period,
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Kendo champ Okajima (Tokihiko Okada) is conservative in more ways than one: he sports an unfashionable beard, refuses to wear Western clothes, and clings to old-fashioned conventions when dealing with women. When the love of a demure, kimono-clad office girl prompts him to shave his beard and modernize his ways, he finds himself suddenly attracting the affections of a chic, haughty aristocrat and a tough, brazenly westernized swindler. Ozu shot this comic parable of the conflict between tradition and modernity in a mere eight days, and designed it as a showcase for matinee idol Okada, with whom he had already made THAT NIGHT'S WIFE and YOUNG MISS. Ozu would go on to observe again with irony the obstinacy of those who hold onto past traditions in the face of changing values, but the anarchic humor of THE LADY AND THE BEARD may be unrepeatable - a priceless gag (which narrowly escaped the attention of government censors) manages, mischievously, to conflate Abe Lincoln with the equally hirsute Karl Marx. The punchline: "All great men have beards!"
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
A well-to-do employee of an insurance firm gets a handsome bonus only to get fired for standing up for a laid-off co-worker; his stay-at-home wife, son and daughter (a very young but no less adorable Hideko Takamine) all must contend with the effects of his unemployment. This could very well be re-titled I WORKED, BUT... as it has the same eclectic mix of tones found in that "trilogy", this time ranging from the wistfully ruminative to the starkly violent to the hilariously scatalogical. The film also continues the major theme that preoccupied Ozu at this time, employment as a determinant of social status and self-esteem, while also pointing to the dichotomy of home life vs. office life and how children view their parents which would be explored further in I WAS BORN BUT... It is wonderful to witness the sheer range of devices Ozu employs, from tracking shots to keyhole iris shots, generous helpings of physical slapstick and odd assorted throwaway moments that reveal characters in quirky, intimate ways. With its freewheeling technique examining the foibles and fissures of Japanese society from all angles, this is a major example of the young, robust Ozu at his best.
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Michael Arnold
from
Handsome cinema star Okada plays Shinji Okajima, a young parent
and slightly stubborn employee at a
One of the highest peaks of Ozu's prewar work, Tokyo Chorus won the number three position on the Kinema Junpo Best Ten list of 1933. This one too mixes Ozu's usual humor, drama and tragedy, but somehow the overall effect leaves something to be desired. (A benshi, perhaps?) It does, however, exhibit a wonderful playful spirit in the photography, with shapes and compositions that draw the viewer into some very enjoyable visual "jokes". One particular highlight is the payday sequence at the office early in the film.
Tokyo
no Korasu (1931) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker, also reviewing I WAS BORN BUT…, and PASSING FANCY
If all you know of Yasujiro Ozu, Japan's national treasure of a
film director, is the quiet restraint and rigorous simplicity of his sound
films, then you only have half of the story of the director's remarkable
career. The artist called the most "Japanese" of Japanese directors
was a voracious film buff more interested in
Perhaps his most beloved films of the silent era, and certainly his most
enduring, are his lively family comedies. Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies,
a collection released by Criterion's no-frills Eclipse label, features some of
the director's richest and most delightful productions from the period.
Directing from a screenplay by Kogo Noda, who went on to write many of Ozu's
greatest films (including Tokyo Story, 1953, and Floating Weeds,
1959), Ozu fills the film with deft sight gags, many thanks to the antics of
the son, yet there's undercurrent of desperation to the comedy. As father
struggles to find work to support his wife and children, and is forced to sell
his wife's kimonos to pay the doctor when their young daughter falls ill (the
sick child is a classic dramatic crisis in Ozu's silent films, invariably
illustrated with the image of a bag of ice water suspended on the child's
forehead with a string). And when the wife sees Shinji marching the streets
with an advertising banner, reduced to the lowest form of day labor, she's
first humiliated by his spectacle and then shamed by her attitude to his
sacrifice for them. For all the comedy, the film is filled with tender and
delicate moments in such seemingly simple scenes as a round-robin of patty-cake
with the kids or sing-song at the teacher's banquet. It's still very
traditional filmmaking compared to his later style, more Lubitsch than late
Ozu, but you can see the director mastering his tools and finding his voice. In
the words of Japanese film historian Donald Ritchie, "With this film, what
Ozu called his "darker side" and what we would call his mature style
began to emerge."
Young father Shinji begins the film as something of a clown but matures along
the way, learning to subsume the emotions and his impulses of his youth and
join the adult world of duty and deference. There is no greater contrast to
this sensibility than the children of Ozu's films. They are forces of pure id:
impulsive, obstinate, willful, at times downright rude to parents and often
destructive when they don't get their way, as when the young son throws a
tantrum when he doesn't get the bike he wanted. He makes a show of his
indignation by poking holes through the paper walls and methodically eating the
scraps.
Silent
Ozu: Three Family Comedies — Cineaste Magazine Catherine Russell from Cineaste, Fall 2008
The release of three of Ozu’s silent films on English subtitled discs is a landmark moment in film history, even if it means that most of his thirty-four silents, along with those of most of his Japanese colleagues, remain unavailable. These three films offer a glimpse of Ozu’s early career, and they also offer remarkable insight into the social milieu, the anxieties, and the challenges facing working- and middle-class families during a period of rapid modernization. All three titles in the Criterion Eclipse set placed highly in the annual Kinema Jumpo top-ten polls, indicating that they were very likely popular as well as critical successes in Japanese theaters. Tokyo Chorus placed third in 1931, while both I Was Born But... (1932) and Passing Fancy (1933) took top prizes in their production years, and were followed by another first prize in 1934 for A Story of Floating Weeds, which Criterion released on DVD a few years ago packaged together with Ozu’s 1959 remake Floating Weeds.
Ozu continued to work in the silent medium well after the introduction of talkies in Japan in 1931, making him one of the last global silent directors. Inspired by American comic directors such as Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, his cutting style in this period is generally far more continuous and “invisible” than in the postwar films for which he tends to be better known. These films make it plain that he learned and mastered the “rules” of narrative cinema, even while he demonstrates a perpetual playfulness with all the conventions of space, time, framing, and montage. The fluidity of the silent films is quite unlike the pictorial rigour of the late films, and yet many keys to his auteurist signature are already readily apparent: the low camera angles, the inserts of objects and locations, the “piecemeal” style of constructing conversations, and the playful undermining of spatial expectations.
David Bordwell has of course meticulously detailed the formal and technical traits of these films.[1] He especially underlines the clever ways in which Ozu’s silent films are frequently organized around gag structures that are developed into larger narrative patterns. Often these turn on repeated gestures, but they also turn on certain spaces and objects that gain layers of significance through repetition and return. Recurring thematic patterns also run through these films, which are organized around the family, the workplace and the suburban locations around Shochiku’s Kamata studios where the films were shot. Behind the auteurist idiosyncrasies, these films were produced within a studio system that was consolidated precisely during the early 1930s.
In fact Ozu’s silent film style was very central to the establishment of the genre system that underscored the Japanese industry through to the 1960s. It was at Kamata studio, under the supervision of producer Kido Shiro, that the basic contours of the shoshimin-eiga (a.k.a. shomin-geki) were laid out. Films about “ordinary people” or the emergent middle class were very central to the project of the construction of Japanese modernity. As this was also the target audience of the film industry, the success of the genre involved the translation of everyday life into the new “modern” medium of cinema, enabling Japanese audiences to visualize themselves as part of global modernity. In her new book on this period, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano shows how Ozu and his colleagues in the industry during these crucial years developed a visual language for the representation of a new modern Japanese culture. Kamata studios became “the center of modern film production and the cultural hub of Japanese modernity itself.”[2]
The three films in this collection are especially interesting for their depiction of fatherhood and the challenges faced by working men attempting to support their families in a depressed economy. The depression hit Japan along with competing discourses of nationalism and modernization, leaving a new class of white-collar workers somewhat stranded in their newly established nuclear families, quite removed from traditional familial support structures. These three films feature three very different male protagonists who are caught up within a vast network of social hierarchies and pecking-orders, economic crises, and family responsibilities. And yet, all three films could also be described as satirical comedies, as Ozu gently mocks the institutions in which his characters are so caught up.
In Tokyo Chorus, Shinji (Tokihiko Okada) is a father of three, working for an insurance company. On the day he and his wife expect a big bonus, he gets fired instead for trying to defend an elderly colleague who has been unjustly fired himself. Shinji’s confrontation of the boss as a hilarious Chaplinesque scene and quite an unusual challenge of authority. The slapstick display of pushing and shoving is indicative of just how outrageous such insubordination would be in the Japanese workplace. Despite his college education, Shinji cannot find another job until he runs into his former teacher Omura (Tatsuo Saito) distributing flyers on the street. The teacher runs a small restaurant and convinces Shinji to swallow his pride and work with him promoting the restaurant with flyers and banners (like a “sandwichman” in Depression-era America). Shinji’s wife, Sugako, is also persuaded to accept their new situation, and she helps to ladle out chicken curry. The plot resolves with a school reunion of Shinji’s classmates all toasting their former teacher, and during the meal Omura receives a letter announcing a new job he has found for Shinji teaching English in Toshigi prefecture. Paternal authority is restored, as has the class status of the protagonist.
In I Was Born But... the father, Yoshi (Tatsuo Saito), far from confronting his boss, obsequiously sucks up to him. This is probably the most well known of Ozu’s silents, and it is in many ways the most stylistically and thematically tight of the three in this set. Yoshi’s two boys, new to the neighbourhood, play out their own scenarios of power and social maneuvering, but while they manage to supplant the local bully, they are ashamed at their father’s subordination. The film’s climactic scene, when the boys and the adults all watch home movies at the boss’s house, is a fascinating moment of reflexive filmmaking, with its multiple levels of spectatorship and cinematic representation. I Was Born But... is a remarkable portrait of a salaryman who is made to feel inadequate by his own family. Order is restored in the end, as the boys come to understand the inevitability of social convention and they give their father “permission” to light the boss’s cigarette. They retain their power over the boss’s young son, however, with their fairy-tale rituals of “ninja” authority—signalling him to play dead on cue.
Passing Fancy features a single father played by Takeshi Sakamoto, who is not a salaried worker but a laborer in a brewery. Sakamoto’s character Kihachi actually became a recurring figure in Ozu’s cinema of the 1930s and is the prototype of Tora-san, Kiyoshi Atsumi’s character in the long-running Tora-san film series that sustained Shochiku studio from 1969 to 1995. Takeshi’s Kihachi, a widower with a young son, is a much more full-fledged comic character than the fathers in the other two films discussed here, although the narrative of Passing Fancy is less satirical. The film concerns the arrival of a homeless young woman into Kihachi’s neighbourhood. He finds the woman, Harue, a home in a café run by his lady friend Otome (Choko Iida) and a kind of love triangle develops between Kihachi, Harue, and Kihachi’s buddy Jiro—a younger man who also lives off Otome’s cooking. Eventually, after a series of melodramatic misunderstandings, Harue and Jiro get together.
Passing Fancy is brought to life by the antics of Kihachi’s son Tomio, played by Tomio Aoki, who also plays the younger son inI Was Born But... In the 1932 film, the two boys perform routines of doubleness and automatism, invoking the codes of the machine age into their very performance styles. In Passing Fancy, Tomio displays a similar repertoire of stylized poses and gestures, even while his character is one of studious responsibility. The child in this film also comes to realize that his father is not a great man, and accuses him of being an illiterate drunk. Father and son forgive each other, but the boy gorges himself on candy, almost dies, leaving his father with an impossible doctor’s bill. His friends pitch in, and even forgive the debt; but Kihachi insists on travelling to Hokkaido to pay it off. The film ends with him spontaneously jumping ship to return to his son in Tokyo.
Tokyo Chorus features a similar incident of a child getting sick from sweets, followed by a huge bill for her father to pay. In that film, Shinji sells his wife’s kimonos (without telling her), which are basically the signature of a class inheritance. The way that these films repeat such motifs is indicative of the way the generic formula of storytelling was implanted in the detail of everyday life. The so-called “middle class” was carved from a plethora of new and old social rituals. Children in these films are constantly coveting toys, and of course their parents can never provide enough and thus commodity capitalism is depicted as a kind eternally unfulfilled desire. Moreover, when Ozu enters the homes of the wealthy, decorated with Western furniture, his low-angle camera renders the furniture strangely monstrous. The overindulgence in sweets is symptomatic of the excesses of modern culture that are unevenly and unequally distributed; meanwhile the requisite hospital scenes underscore the science of modern medicine.
Ozu’s silent films are versions of the Japanese home drama, although his female characters tend to be far less developed than the men. In both Tokyo Chorus andI Was Born But... the wives are passive, inexpressive women. Only Choko Iida’s Otome, the café-owner in Passing Fancy, is a strong female character, and Iida continued to play supporting and lead roles in Ozu’s films into the 1940s. The recurrence of actors in these films and through the entire Japanese industry links them into a larger über-text of mothers, fathers, widows, bosses, teachers, barkeepers, and bar patrons, and vast networks of family members that grew up on screen, playing different generations. Seven-year-old Takamine Hideko, who became a huge star in the 1950s, appears in her first screen role in Tokyo Chorus.
One of the recurring sights in these three films is the suburban landscape crossed by telephone poles. The families in both Tokyo Chorus andI Was Born But... live out in desolate new developments where the houses appear to be cramped yet widely scattered across the empty fields on the outskirts of Tokyo. The empty lots are the terrain where gangs of young boys roam and fathers trudge back and forth from train stations. Factory chimneys mark the horizon and commuter trains slice across the screen. Passing Fancy is set in a warren of back alleys, probably close to a suburban train station, and the children in that film also spill out into the empty telephone-pole-studded lots. This is in many ways an emblematic landscape of Japanese modernity, a landscape that seems to be waiting for something to happen. But all that happens in these films is that problems are overcome, forgotten or reconciled, and life goes on under sunny skies.
In Ozu’s cinematic language, the homes and public spaces take on an aspect of familiarity through repetition, and through his pictorialist framing. Among the most distinctive features of his style in this period are lateral pans over people and objects. In the opening scene of Passing Fancy, the camera pans over an audience watching a show, fanning themselves in the heat. Later in the film, a scene opens with a pan over an array of household objects, which we learn Kihachi is hoping to pawn. Tokyo Chorus opens with rows of college students performing drills badly, and the clowning around is punctuated by a tracking shot over the line of men. Because Ozu rarely moves the camera, the occasional pans and tracking shots tend to stand out. Moving slowly over the empty desks in Shinji’s office in a subsequent scene in Tokyo Chorus, the camera movement echoes the previous line of men; now they are lined up for their bonuses outside the boss’s door.
The introduction to the insurance office in Tokyo Chorus moves over an array of objects—fans, typewriters, messy desks—and is then broken down into discrete close-ups of less businesslike objects: a soda with a straw, a pair of shoes on a desk. These collections of objects, featured in camera pans or in series of shots, exaggerate the everydayness of Ozu’s cinema. They underline the way that the characters in these films are constructed through their mise-en-scène: the spaces and objects around them. In each film only one or two actors are more expressive than the décor. The others, including wives, children, and fellow workers, are little more than props. Ozu’s world is by and large a friendly one, in which the detritus of material culture speaks plainly and openly. His father figures struggle within this world of things to sustain their sense of paternal authority, even while that authority is relentlessly given over to the systems of modernity that lie beyond their grasp.
The Criterion releases are all scored by Donald Sosin, and I Was Born But... features a particularly fun ragtime score that compliments the nansensu (nonsense) elements of Ozu’s comedy. The print quality of Passing Fancy and I Was Born But... is fair, but Tokyo Chorus is somewhat damaged, although the patina of decay is not terribly obtrusive. Passing Fancy is the most burdened of the three films by a plethora of intertitles, almost as if it had been written as a talkie. Nevertheless, Ozu plays with these as well, often leaving the viewer in doubt as to who is speaking—starting with the opening stage performance. All three films open with lovely sequences of stylish flourishes which have tangential bearing on the subsequent stories. In these prologues—a moving truck in I Was Born But..., a naniwa-bushi variety show in Passing Fancy, and the phys-ed college scene in Tokyo Chorus—Ozu establishes a comic tone that is embedded in the idiosyncratic detail of everyday life. These prologues with minimal dialog are each also, in their own way, tributes to the language of silent film which Ozu undoubtedly recognized as a medium on the verge of disappearance.
1. David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
2. Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 5.
Eclipse
Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family
Comedies Criterion essay by Michael
Koresky,
Tokyo Chorus Criterion Collection
Only the
Cinema: Tokyo Chorus Ed
Howard
A Journey Through the Eclipse Series: Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Chorus David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast, January 10, 2011
The Criterion Collection Database -
Eclipse Series 10 [Dan Callahan]
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] also seen
here: Criterion Confessions also reviewing I WAS BORN BUT…, and PASSING FANCY
DVD Verdict- Silent Ozu: Three Family
Comedies [Bill Gibron]
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] also reviewing I WAS BORN BUT…, and
PASSING FANCY
Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] also reviewing I WAS BORN BUT…, and PASSING FANCY
Tokyo Chorus The Auteurs
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
SPRING
COMES FROM THE LADIES (Haru wa gofujin kara)
Thoughts from Ozu:
I made this at a stage when I was still full of doubt about filmmaking. I
cannot remember the work in detail. Since The Lady and the Beard, I had been
shooting without continuity. Admittedly, one feels more reassured with
continuity at hand, but I eventually found out that it made no difference at
all. Perhaps not having continuity actually allows me to visualize each
successive shot more clearly.
I WAS BORN, BUT… (Otona no miru ehon - Umarete wa mita keredo) B 84
Japan
Despite the film breaking down 4 times
during the middle of the screening, each time leaving us a view of burning
celluloid, this performance of Ozu’s silent film featured a benshi, or a
Japanese film interpreter, who sits by the side of the screen and improvises
words, expressions and emotions to help the audience along in understanding the
context of the film’s message. Midori
Sawato was flown in from Tokyo, is considered one of the leading benshi’s in
Japan, and carried on a running dialogue with the film, even with moments of
broken English during the breakdowns in an attempt to explain in English what
she was saying in Japanese during the film.
Interviewed by Roger Ebert afterwards, she explained Japan has a
fascination for narrative storytelling, that Noh and Kabuki theater, even
puppetry, is replete with this art form, and suggested the introduction of
foreign films to Japan required interpretive help for the audiences. Japanese audiences preferred silent films
late into the 1935’s, some 5 years or so after the U.S., preferring their
favorite benshi’s along with this style of film to talking pictures.
Ozu, at this stage in his career, was fascinated by moving trains, which were seen throughout this film, so constant motion drove this story of two rather spoiled middle class brothers who, when challenged by other boys, tried to brag that their father was better than all others. However, prompted by what they witness in a family film shown during a social gathering, they grow indignant seeing their father bow to someone else’s father, who happens to be their father’s employer, suggesting that their father should stop receiving his employer’s salary and that he pay a salary to that father instead, and they promptly initiate a hunger strike in protest. The family resolves this social protest with the always inducing rice-balls, and a few words about how people need money to eat such delicacies, revealing a child’s inevitable, yet crushing discovery of the imperfection of a parent. Even though she was speaking in a foreign tongue, the benshi's various voice inflections matched the mood of the film’s facial expressions and added a great deal of humor to the silent film experience.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
This is the original version of the story about rebellious kids who feel betrayed by their father that Ozu remade as Ohayo thirty-seven years later. I Was Born, But... doesn't have the later film's oscillations between comedy and a tragic sense of defeat; rather, it begins as a particularly riotous comedy, and then abruptly switches to a darker tone when the boys lose their respect for their father. It's silent (Ozu resisted talkies until 1935), but its visual style is so dynamic that you hardly notice; both the gags and the emotional disappointments are anchored in a sure sense of characterisation that remains wholly fresh, and the pace of the whole film is worthy of Buster Keaton at his best.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: alsolikelife from
Put in simple terms, this is one of the greatest silent movies ever made. Though the film was intended to be screened with live voice-over by a benshi narrator, this masterpiece works stunningly well without sound, because Ozu's unparalleled sense of visual rhythm, choreographed movement, and humor keep one's eyes dancing in delight. The story concerns two boys who fight their way to gain status and respect among the local bullies, only to realize that their father is a bottom-feeder among the adults. As such it's loaded with acute observations of Japanese society, and not without Ozu's penchant for subtle but potent criticism. For people who are used to the "slow" Ozu of the 50s, this film will be a revelation, inspiring speculation as to how and why he changed a style that already was exceptional.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Ozu was a great director of children who resisted easy sentimentality and the temptation to reduce kids to cuteness. It follows that I WAS BORN, BUT... is not so much a children's film as a film about childhood, the rules of that peculiar universe and its antagonistic relationship with an adult world it at times uncannily mirrors. (Ozu hints which side has lessons to learn from the other by subtitling his film A Picture-Book for Adults.) When Yoshi (Tatsuo Saito) moves into his boss's neighborhood, his two young sons (Hideo Sugawara and PASSING FANCY'S Tokkan Kozo) find themselves mercilessly bullied. They fight their way back, claiming inspiration from their authoritarian father, only to be shocked one day when they observe his obsequious manner in front of his boss. Determined to rid him of his self-demeaning ways, the boys take on a hunger strike. Ozu's caustic commentary on social hierarchies and the essential injustice of power relations was sufficiently dark for Shochiku to delay its initial release for two months. Ozu later remade the film in color and sound as GOOD MORNING / OHAYO.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
Yasujiro Ozu was only 29 years old when he directed I WAS BORN, BUT..., but more remarkable is that he had nearly 30 features to his credit at this point. As a result, the film embodies a breezy, youthful quality (of both the filmmaker and the Japanese studio system, which put even the productivity of early Hollywood to shame) while advancing a sophisticated understanding of film style. Those who know Ozu solely from his subdued post-war movies will be surprised by how lively this is: Though the subject matter is Ozu's favored realm of middle-class family life, he approaches it with some out-and-out sarcasm and tracking shots as ambitious as those in contemporaneous movies like King Vidor's THE CROWD and Mizoguchi's SISTERS OF THE GION. Jonathan Rosenbaum has written of the film: "Though regarded in Japan mainly as a conservative director, Ozu was a trenchant social critic throughout his career, and the devastating understanding of social context that he shows here is full of radical implications." Just as radical is the film's undifferentiated depiction of children and adults, which suggests a utopian approach to family dynamics. (1932, 100 min, 35mm)
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Hailed by film critic Donald Richie as “a masterpiece,” I Was
Born But … was financial and critical hit in its original release (winning the
Kinema Jumpo poll as best Japanese film of the year) and remains a favorite of
such Ozuphiles as director Wim Wenders and writer Phillip Lopate. In this
darkly funny look at the conflict between parents and their offspring, an
office clerk moves to the suburbs with his wife and two sons. Bullied by the
other kids, the two boys turn into truants and begin to see in their father’s
toadying ways with his boss the seeds of a life of flunkeyism. Their impatience
with their parents and the hypocrisy of the adult world leads them to an
intriguing form of civil and social disobedience.
Benshi were the “narrators” of silent-era films in
User comments from imdb Author: Howard Schumann
from
To say that I Was Born, But…is funny and charming is like saying
The Godfather is a crime drama. It is that but much more. Featuring outstanding
child performances, this silent film by the great Yasijiro Ozu is both a satire
on the rigid structure of Japanese society and a coming-of-age story about
children learning to live in a less than perfect world. It is an enduring
masterpiece that has maintained its universal appeal over the years.
In the film, eight-year old Keichi (Tomio Aoki) and his ten-year old brother
Ryoichi (Hideo Sugawara) come to live in a small town in the suburbs of
The two boys' are in awe of their father and consider him great; however, their
loyalty is tested when they see him clowning and acting like a buffoon in front
of his employer while watching home movies at Iwasaki's home. Mr. Yoshii
explains later that as Iwasaki owns the company where he works, he has to treat
him with respect. In disgust the boys ask if they will have to bow to their
friend Taro, the boss's son, when he grows up. Resentful after a spanking and
dissatisfied with the answers they have received to their questions, they go on
a hunger strike but it is short lived. After the father talks with them about
the meaning of being an employee, everyone learns something about the realities
of life.
Ozu seems to endorse acceptance of the status quo but, on reflection, it seems
he is merely making observations rather than judgments. He is critical of the
father for kowtowing to his employer, yet also sympathetic with the realities
the family must face. The children have lost their innocence and must accept the
fact that life isn't fair, but they also see that happiness can be achieved by
rising above their prescribed status. Sadly, many of the boys shown in the
movie had to fight and die in a bloody war only ten years later, in part a
consequence of the rigid social structure Ozu satirized in the film.
Midnight Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Jasper Sharp
Yasujiro Ozu has been described by more than one writer as having
the ability to take simple soap opera scenarios and elevate them to the realms
of High Art. Working entirely within the gendai-geki genre of films that dealt
with contemporary subjects, he made these whimsically low-key depictions of
family life with such an intricate attention to nuance and detail that any
apparent absences of tangible plot are barely noticeable. One always comes from
an Ozu film feeling as if you've witnessed some fundamental truth about
humanity, and this early silent film proves the point perfectly. Not only did
it win the director the first of his six Kinema Jumpo Best Film of the Year
awards, but it also paved the way for a style which would be developed and
refined until his death on
The Yoshii family have just moved to their new family home in the
suburbs of
Amongst the neighbour kids is Taro (Kato), the son of their father's boss, permanently dressed in a pristine black shorts suit and the object of some degree of envy from the Yoshii boys. Not long after an argument about who has the most important father, the entire Yoshii family are invited to a social evening at the Iwasaki household where the two new kids on the block are humiliated in front of their smug classmate as they witness their father kow-towing to his superior and playing the buffoon in a series of home movies shot by the boss.
Later, the devastated Ryoichi and Keiji berate their father for his obsequious antics in front of his employer and their own loss of face with Taro. Father explains that as Iwasaki owns the company where he works, he is obliged to treat him with respect. The boys ask whether Taro will own his own company when he grows up, and if so, will they have to bow and scrape to him too, pointing out that not only are they both receiving higher grades at school but they are also tougher in the playground. With the angry father explaining that this is the way of the world before retreating to his saké, the boys leave in disgust and go on hunger strike. However, it is not long before they both give into their empty stomachs as mother Eiko (Yoshikawa) calls them to the dinner table. The next day, the children depart for school. Father departs for work. Life goes on.
Scripted by Akira Fushimi, a highly regarded scriptwriter of the day who wrote a number of successful screenplays for amongst other directors, Heinosuke Gosho (the 1933 film adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata's The Izu Dancer / Izu no Odoriko), and Ozu (I Got Left Back, But... / Rakudai wa Shita Keredo, 1930), I Was Born, But... was shot at Shochiku's Kamata studios before the company relocated their production facilities to Ofuna in 1936. It's approach and subject matter is typical of the type of films the company, who only entered the market in 1920, were trying to promote under the guiding hand of producer Shiro Kido; life-affirming and optimistic whilst broaching at least a few social issues. According to Donald Richie, Kido later described his goal as "to look at the reality of human nature through the everyday activities of society", nurturing such talents as Ozu to fulfil this dream. At any rate, the Kido approach rapidly led the company to become one of the most successful of the Japanese major studios.
As much as any of Ozu's films, I Was Born, But... takes the intimate internal dynamics of the family unit as his point of reference to draw out broader generalistions about society as a whole, presenting us with a detailed yet non-judgemental snapshot of the customs and concerns of the time. Father is seen departing to work alongside his children, the youngsters balancing their packed lunches on their heads as mother Eiko sees them all off at the doorstep. Later on Ozu indulges us with a long pan of the father sitting at a row of desks populated by white-collared salarymen, immediate followed by a similar shot of the children's rowdy classroom as they scrape away at their slates. There the similarities between the two lifestyles seem to end, as the kids are later seen bunking off school, coughing and spluttering on a cigarette and kicking sand in each others faces, though such antics do not go on unnoticed for long, and they are soon back behind their desks.
Though the director later stated that it was with I Was Born, But that he decided to consciously eschew all usage of fade ins and fade outs, setting in motion the continuing simplification process of his film grammar that reached its apogee with the trademark minimalism of director's better known work of the 50s, all the staples we come to recognise in the director's later work are here : The put-upon salaryman stoically hiding behind his newspaper whilst mother acts as a silent yet sympathetic intermediary as her children play up to him (a very similar scene exists in the director's much later Good Morning / Ohayo, 1961), with the trademark low angle camera shots capturing these private scenes of domesticity. However, there's a slightly more slapstick element in this early film, as can be seen early on as Iwasaki helps out when the Yoshii's car gets stuck in the mud outside the new dream house they are moving into, further underlining father Yoshii's ignominious status in his relationship with his boss.
More than anything I Was Born, But is an elegy to the lost innocence of youth, depicting, as it does, the first stages of the process of erosion in which the youthful subjects' naïve idealism comes head to head with the harsh, unjust realities of the adult world. It is made all the more poignant by the fact that it portrays a generation whose lives would soon be shattered by the Pacific War in which they would be fighting. Worth mentioning is that child actor, Tokkan Kozo, playing the balloon-faced younger son (the one on the left hand side of the film's most frequently seen publicity still, see photo top left) would later change his professional name to Tomio Aoki, and is still acting to this day. Amongst his most recent roles is the exuberantly amorous octogenarian who made Makoto Shinozaki's Not Forgotten so unforgettable. Viewing these two films that bracket the hopes and achievements of an entire generation side-by-side suggests that despite the rugged path that destiny maps out for us and the hardships that fate throws in our path, a return to a state of such carefree innocence is well within our grasp.
Ozu stuck with the silent format up until 1936, the last major
director in
Eclipse
Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family
Comedies Criterion essay by Michael
Koresky,
I Was Born, But . . . Criterion Collection
Silent
Ozu: Three Family Comedies — Cineaste Magazine Catherine Russell from Cineaste, Fall 2008, also reviewing
The Films of Yasujiro Ozu - by Michael Grost Classic Film and Television, also here: I Was Born, But...
Now on DVD: “I Was Born But…” (Ozu, Japan, 1932) Dave McDougall from The Auteur’s Notebook, May 5, 2008
Tokyo
no Korasu (1931) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker, also reviewing TOKYO CHORUS and PASSING FANCY
The Criterion Collection Database -
Eclipse Series 10 [Dan Callahan]
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] also seen
here: Criterion Confessions also reviewing
DVD Verdict- Silent Ozu: Three Family
Comedies [Bill Gibron]
I Was Born, But… Helen Geib from Commentary Track
Passport Cinema [Andrew Guarini]
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
Old School Reviews [John Nesbit]
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
[A]
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] also reviewing
Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] also reviewing
Epinions capsule [Stephen Murray]
I Was Born, But . . . The Auteurs
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
WHERE NOW ARE THE DREAMS OF
YOUTH? (Seishun no Yume Ima Izuko)
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Set in
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Interrupted by a child actor's injury during the shoot of I WAS BORN, BUT·, Ozu made this hybrid of the student comedy and the salaryman film. Four fellow graduates find their friendship tested when one of them, Horino, inherits his father's firm and offers the others employment. His buddies suddenly turning meekly deferential, Horino comes into particular conflict with the impoverished, cowardly Saiki, who happens to be in love with the same woman as him. For this stinging critique of class divisions, screenwriter Kogo Noda modeled his script on the German play Old Heidelberg, the story of a student prince in love with a bakery girl that also served as the basis of Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Ozu revisits the dichotomy between schoolboy idealism and working world realities, this time focusing on four college friends, one of whom (Tatsuo Saito) happens to be the son of a corporate executive; the son takes over upon his father's death, and his friends come seeking employment. Their friendship clearly isn't the same under this new working relationship, the subordinates become yes-men to the point that one of them says nothing when Saito casts an eye on his fiance. This leads to a climax even more violent than those of A HEN IN THE WIND or THE MUNEKATA SISTERS, a minute-long beating served by one friend to another that is all the more stunning in that the other two friends passively look on. Startlingly raw and deeply unresolved, this is perhaps Ozu's most disturbing exploration of social inequality and the damage it unleashes even among the most loyal friends.
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
On a college campus
students are seated on the ground. A tracking shot surveys them as they watch a
tennis match—a metaphor for the competition in the workday world that they
presume they will face once they graduate. Cheerleaders stand in front of the
seated students. Off alone, another boy is studious, his nose in a book.
Crosscutting shows the comradery between three of the male cheerleaders and
this serious student. Ironical, the crosscutting undercuts the impression of
comradery and solidarity even as it establishes it. Yasujiro Ozu’s silent Seishun
no yume imaizuko has begun.
Elements of Kôgo
Noda’s script somewhat resemble Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. Upon
the death of his business executive father, Taichiro chooses his own
“succession” above his ties with college friends, whom he hires when they apply
to his company, but upon whom he imposes subservience. In effect, Taichiro
chooses tradition over the future, family over friendship. Consider the framing
of the shot of Taichiro and his father. Taichiro holds his father’s hand to his
cheek, but otherwise the father is excluded from the shot. Perhaps the death
provides mere occasion for Taichiro’s doing what he would have done in any
case, which is to assert his classism at the expense of those he considers his
social inferiors. In retrospect, our first glimpse of Taichiro revealed a boy
who was submitting his humanity to a cultivated image. The stoppage of a ceiling
fan at a gathering of the four musketeers signals the ripping of Taichiro’s
bond with the other three. (A working fan was a feature of Taichiro’s reunion
with his dying father.) Sealing this, later, is an eruption of violence in near
darkness.
A 21-year-old Kinuyo Tanaka claims a supporting role.
UNTIL THE DAY WE MEET AGAIN (Mata au hi made)
Thoughts from Ozu:
Okada Yoshiko appeared in my film for the first time. Already I thought she was
pretty good. This was also my first sound film. With Kamata Studios release of
WOMAN OF TOKYO Tokyo
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
One of the director’s most powerful films, Woman of Tokyo
tells the story of a young woman who supports her student brother by working as
a translator by day and a prostitute by night. Discovering the source of her
illicit income, the brother is driven to a desperate act. Mizoguchi comes to
mind often in the film, especially in the devastating sequence in which the
prostitute confronts the brutal hypocrisy of her brother. Rediscovered in the
early 1980s, Woman of
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
One of Ozu's preferred ways to present intergenerational conflict
was by pitching self-sacrificing parents against progeny of various degrees of
self-absorption. Rarely, though, did he dramatize that clash with such
intensity as here. Elder sister Chikako secretly moonlights in a sleazy
nightclub in order to put her brother Ryo through college. When the unsuspecting
Ryo finds out, he attacks her for bringing shame to the family, and comes
rapidly unhinged with guilt. The usual parent-child relationship takes on a
sibling variation in this remarkably concentrated short. Ozu recalls embarking
upon his systematically unorthodox form of coverage with WOMAN OF TOKYO, the film featuring
many of the stylistic hallmarks (low camera angle, matching compositions,
across-the-axis cuts, and duration-based editing) that would make his cinema
increasingly one governed by formal, near ritualistic, rigor. It also gave him
yet another opportunity to pay tribute to his favorite
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Seeing this a second time in a healthy restored print, I still
can't say I'm entirely won over by this early melodrama involving a woman who
is scandalized when her brother's girlfriend learns of her prostitution to help
cover his student expenses. The chief interest of this film lies in its unusual
structure: as J. Hoberman notes, the film is "a subtle riot of discordant
formal devices -- two- character crosscutting is complicated by weird eye-line
matches and bizarre special jumps, inexplicable interpolations, and exreme
close-ups." (There's also some interesting non-matching of dialogue intertitles
with the characters speaking them, which David Bordwell discusses in his study
on Ozu.) Hoberman concludes that "inadvertant or not, it's a
masterpiece," though I think one would have to appraise the film on
strictly formalist experimental grounds to come to that evaluation (Hoberman
was probably thinking of his favorite cut- and-paste classic ROSE HOBART as he
wrote this). There certainly is plenty to baffle over, such as the sudden wild
digression to two journalists bantering happily at the end of the film, which
seems to suggest Ozu's contempt at public indifference to a private tragedy, a
theme that gets a real workout in the much later masterpiece
User comments from imdb Author: GrandeMarguerite
from Lille, France
When I watched "Woman of Tokyo", I was struck by the
theme which reminded me of Mizoguchi's works which were often on prostitution
and its effects. With this film, Ozu also shares Mizoguchi's compassion for
self-sacrificing women. See for yourself : in a poor working-class district of
Tokyo, a woman named Chikako (Yoshiko Okada) shares a modest apartment with her
brother Ryoichi (Ureo Egawa). Chikako works every day as an office typist and
every evening on commissioned translations for a university professor, so
Ryoichi can devote himself completely to his studies. However, Chikako comes
under scrutiny when a police inspector pays an unexpected visit to her office
one day. The nebulous and undisclosed nature of the investigation leads to
speculation, and rumors begin to surface about Chikako's disreputable conduct
by working as a cabaret hostess. In an attempt to mitigate the embarrassment of
the brewing scandal, the well-intentioned Harue (Kinuyo Tanaka), Ryoichi's
girlfriend, decides to alert Chikako of the gossip, but instead, reveals the
information to Ryoichi. Outraged and ashamed by his sister's behavior, Ryoichi
rejects Chikako and leaves home...
There are many things to enjoy in "Woman of Tokyo" (the plot and the
acting, to start with), but first of all it is an interesting film for all
those who would like to see en early elaboration of Ozu's style, especially in
his use of domestic setting and confined, interior shots. There is also an
overt tribute to Ernst Lubitsch (much admired by Ozu) with a full-frame excerpt
from Lubitsch's short film entitled "The Clerk" taken from "If I
Had a Million". Ozu will get only better and better after this "Woman
of Tokyo".
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Michael Arnold
from
Possibly one of the more satisfyingly grim features in Ozu's
early career, Woman of Tokyo is certainly one of my highest recommendations
from the director's pre-war work. Ryoichi (Egawa) lives with his older sister
Chikako (Okada) in a small home in
Harue decides to tell her unknowing boyfriend. When she breaks the news Ryoichi reacts horribly, kicking Harue out of his home and breaking off their relationship. That night Ryoichi confronts Chikako about her activities and she confesses, saying that it was all to help Ryoichi get through school. Ryoichi however is unable to accept his sister's sacrifice and he runs out into the night. Chikako visits Harue the next day and the two fret over the decision to spill the beans to Ryoichi, until Harue receives a telephone call which, in the film's final devastating blow, informs her that Ryochi, unable to bear the reality of his sister's night work, has taken his own life.
While on the one hand successfully exploiting the 1930s trope of the so-called modern girl's social depravity and descent into decadence in the (sexual) working world, Woman of Tokyo mixes the tragic fate of the three young adults with a brilliantly evocative use of "abstractly" communicative imagery. Especially curious are a sequence that visually quotes a Lubitsch film when Ryoichi and Harue go to the movies, the odd matching of clocks on the wall between two locations when Harue receives the horrible telephone call, and the film's final, bleak travelling shot along the city sidewalk following the exit of the two police investigators, who have just amplified the horror with their own utter ambivalence. This one is all the more interesting for the treatment it received in Burch's ambitiously theoretical To the Distant Observer, and the attentive rebuttal that analysis inspired in Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema nine years later.
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
DRAGNET GIRL (Hijosen no onna)
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
This silent gangster picture by Yasujiro Ozu (1933), about a typist determined to make her criminal boyfriend go straight, is one of the most striking of Ozu's American-style silents. It stars the great Kinuyo Tanaka, who later played the title role in Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu and subsequently became a director herself (the first Japanese woman to do so). In Japanese with subtitles. 100 min.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Irresistibly titled, Dragnet Girl casts Kinuyo Tanaka against type as a Dietrich-style vamp whose days are spent as a typist and whose nights are dedicated to the underworld. She stops at nothing to keep her man, a one-time boxing champ and now two-bit criminal ringleader, and she resorts to desperate measures when a young innocent attracts his eye. Influenced by American gangster films and by the baroque visual style of Josef von Sternberg, Dragnet Girl ,with its chiaroscuro, refracted images, chockablock compositions, and sweeping camera movement, is a densely stylized and engrossing work.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Like WALK CHEERFULLY,
Ozu's earlier gangster film, the exuberant DRAGNET GIRL is a stylish compendium of cleverly reworked
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Josef von Sternberg doesn't get as much mention as Frank Borzage or Ernst Lubitsch as an early Ozu influence, but those familiar with the dense arrangement of objects onscreen in Sternberg films may see the resemblance in both early and late Ozu films. This moody, expressionist pre-noir potboiler exhibits plenty of inspired clutter (most memorably the RCA Victor dog) and stylistic fluorishes (tracking shots, pull shots, and memorable use of shadow) as it tells the story of a gangster and his good-girl-gone-bad moll (Kinuyo Tanaka) as they experience an spiritual awakening through the good graces of an innocent girl. Redemption seems to be a recurring motif in Ozu's gangster movies (WALK CHEEFULLY, THAT NIGHT'S WIFE), and one wonders if bad guy heroes turning themselves in is a convention of the genre or indicative of Ozu's feelings about the criminal life he was assigned to depict. Whatever the case, the climax (involving the single gunshot fired in the entire existing Ozu canon) is as suspenseful and emotionally powerful as anything Ozu filmed.
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann
Dragnet Girl, a 1933 silent film by the great Yasujiro Ozu, pays tribute to the Western gangster films of the 30s such as Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and Scarface. The story, about a young typist who will stop at nothing to have her gangster boyfriend go legit is credited to James Maki, an Ozu pseudonym, and the screenplay is attributed to Tadeo Ikeda who wrote Floating Weeds. The film stars a young Kinuyo Tanaka who was to achieve fame in later Mizoguchi films including The Life of Oharu. Dragnet Girl develops considerable tension in showing the relationship of four people: the gangster Joji (Joji Oka) and his girl friend Tokiko (Tanaka), Hiroshi (Hideo Mitsui), a boxer and hoodlum wannabe and his attractive sister Kazuko (Sumiko Mizakubo).
Both women want to save their men from a life of crime. Kazuko wants to rescue Hiroshi from Joji's inner circle but ends up falling in love with Joji herself. Tokiko jealously decides to kill Kazuko but ends up falling for her considerable charms. She then pleads with Joji to give up his way of life and go away with her to begin a new life. When Hiroshi steals his sister's money, however, he enlists Joji and Tokiko in committing one last crime to pay her back. The crime and its surprising consequences take up about the last quarter of this very entertaining and highly dramatic film.
DVD
Talk (Stuart Galbraith IV) dvd review
[3/5] [Region 3]
Those who think of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu only in terms of his favorite subject matter and distinctive style - films about eldest daughters of aging families reluctantly persuaded to marry and leave behind the parents they love, told in static, sitting-position shots filmed a few feet off the ground and cut together in straight cuts with the actors often looking directly into the camera - will be quite surprised by Dragnet Girl (Hijosen no onna, 1933) a stylish silent crime thriller with much to recommend it.
The picture is Ozu by way of Fritz Lang, closer to that
director's German Expressionist crime films than, say, the Warner Bros.
gangster movies being made in
The gang's latest addition is another washed-up fighter, a featherweight named Hiroshi (Koji Mistui, billed here as Hideo Mitsui), whose very traditional sister, Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo) is appalled by her brother's new lifestyle. She persuades Joji to kick his recruit out of the gang before it's too late. He acquiesces partly because he's attracted to Kazuko's unspoiled, virginal nature. Tokiko rebels and considers bumping Kazuko off (she carries a pistol) before deciding that she's attracted to Kazuko's genuine nature too, and thus inspired tries to adopt a like-minded manner toward Joji, hoping to win him back.
Dragnet Girl isn't much more than a stylishly-directed crime melodrama, but style it has, in spades, with more tracking shots for instance than probably Ozu's last 15 films combined. (One particularly good shot has the camera strapped to the fender of a speeding car, the reflection of the road and surrounding buildings seen on the backside of one of the vehicle's headlights.) The emphasis is on the two women's efforts to make their men go straight and Tokiko's longing, tough-taking aside, to live like an ordinary women, and especially to be regarded by Joji as something other than a delinquent.
The picture was made just as Japan's growing militarism was beginning to squelch the country's growing fondness with all things western, though the picture is so starkly western in appearance one guesses that Ozu deliberately opted to suck everything Japanese out of it, the significant exception being Kazuko's traditional kimono and distinctly Japanese manner. The film abounds in western signage; except near the end, English writing is everywhere while Nihongo is nowhere to be found. At the TOA Boxing Club, the house rules are written in English, for instance, not Japanese. Hiroshi has a French poster of Lewis Milestone's 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front on his wall.
Joji Oka, whose large, intense yet soft eyes and thin lips recall actor Jeremy Brett, was a big star in the 1930s but probably better known to American viewers as the sneering Phantom of Krankor in the bizarre Japanese sci-fi extravaganza Prince of Space (Yusei oji, 1959). Kinuyo Tanaka, even at 22, gives a mature and sensitive performance in the tradition of great silent actresses like Lillian Gish rather than what one finds in American gangster films of the early-'30s. Koji Mitsui, later known for playing hardened, cynical characters (he played the acid-tongued reporter in The Bad Sleep Well, for instance), appears here in a role 180-degrees from the sort that would eventually make him famous.
Dragnet Girl (Hijosen
no onna) • Senses of Cinema Freda
Freiberg from Senses of Cinema,
September 2004
Three Imaginary Girls [embracey]
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
PASSING FANCY (Dekigokoro)
Film Diary Kevin Lee from Also Like Life
Takeshi Sakamoto and Tokan Kozzo team up memorably yet again as an unemployed illiterate drunk and his resentful son, in this sentimental study of working class father-son relationships. As in I WAS BORN BUT... and TOKYO CHORUS, Ozu explores how children measure their self-esteem in their parents.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Set in old
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Ozu grew up in Fukagawa, one of
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
Dekigokoro (Passing Fancy), is one of Ozu's 3 masterpieces from
1933. It stars the second of cinematic Ozu's "alter egos", Takeshi
Sakamoto. Sakamoto typically plays a down and out working class father. Here,
he is especially dense, to excellent comic effect. Tomio Aoki (in probably his
most significant child role) plays a kid who seems to be considerably brighter
than his father -- and who does more to keep the household running. Aoki is (of
course) quite funny. But he also does an excellent job of showing a child's
response to unwanted change. He and his father have long depended solely on
each other -- but now his father has his eye on a young woman who has moved
into their slum neighborhood. Aoki very much resents his father's interest in
the woman -- and resists her attempts to win his affections.
This is an extremely visual film, with lots of completely "wordless"
humor. The film starts out with an extended scene in a music hall (Chishu Ryu
performing as the "singer") in which first a lost wallet circulates,
and then a flea (or fleas). Probably not as great a family drama as the prior
"I Was Born But" or the subsequent "Tokyo Inn", but
nonetheless quite enjoyable.
While in
Takeshi Sakamoto stars as Kihachi, a single father of a boy called Tomio (Tomio
Aoki aka Tokkan Kozo) who is just barely able to look after himself and his son
because he is illiterate and has a weakness for sake. One night as he stumbles
home from a drinking binge with his friend and co-worker Jiro, he happens upon
a jobless girl called Harue who is desperate for help. He takes Harue to Otome,
the woman who runs the local eatery/izakaya. Otome takes Harue under her wing
and soon a three way love triangle develops. Kihachi fancies Harue, although
she is much too young for him, but Harue likes Jiro, who keeps his own feelings
hidden out of loyalty to Kihachi.
Passing Fancy is the first of a series of films Ozu made featuring the
working poor. As movies during the pre-war period were cheap entertainment, the
nagaya-dwelling characters likely represent a large swath of the viewing
audience of Ozu’s films during this time, in contrast to the post-war
middle-class families of his later films like Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo
Story (1953).
Another cheap form of entertainment, naniwa-bushi storytelling takes place in
the opening scene of Passing Fancy and provides conceit on which the film is
based. Tomio's jokes are a running gag throughout the film, Kihachi tells a lot
of tall tales, and Kihachi twice cites the the traditional story of Ohan and
Choemon as evidence that Harue might be persuaded to marry him. Although the
story is not told within the film, Ozu’s audience would have known the story of
forty year old man, Obi-ya Choemon who falls in love with a fourteen year old
girl called Ohan who loves him in return. Her family opposes the relationship
which ends in elopement and double-suicide. Based on a true story, the tale of
Ohan and Choemon has appeared on woodblock prints and was a popular oral tale
throughout the Meiji period.
One has to admire the subtlety Ozu employs in order to give nuance to the
story. Ozu is known for his use of a static camera, so when a camera does move
it acquires an added significance. I noticed two tracking shots in the film.
The first occurred at the very beginning, tracking slowly along the floor to
reveal the extent of the audience watching the naniwa-bushi performance. I
recall identical shots of a theatre audience being used in Ukigusa
Monogatari (1934), which also featured Kihachi and Tomio, and its remake Ukigusa
(1959). The second tracking shot was of Kihachi's meagre possessions laid out
on the floor as he looks for things to pawn to pay for Tomio's medical
treatment. This scene, and the scene when Tomio's teacher visits him at the
medical center, are perhaps the two most humbling moments for Kihachi in the
film.
The seasonal setting of the film is also referred to through subtle visual
hints. Kihachi spends much of the film in his underwear and is often scratching
himself: a sure indication that it is midsummer in a humid, mosquito-ridden
Passing Fancy is truly a delight to watch. Even my six-year-old son
enjoyed it, laughing out loud at all the slapstick humour. It also reminded me
that Ozu is often unfairly put into a box labeled `traditional`, `Japanese`,
and `minimalist` when his films are much more complex than meets the eye.
Eclipse
Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family
Comedies Criterion essay by Michael
Koresky,
Passing Fancy Criterion Collection
A
Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Yasujiro Ozu’s Passing Fancy David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast,
Passing Fancy
(Dekigokoro) • Senses of Cinema Michael
Kerpan from Senses of Cinema, July
26, 2004
Silent
Ozu: Three Family Comedies — Cineaste Magazine Catherine Russell from Cineaste, Fall 2008, also reviewing
Tokyo
no Korasu (1931) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Sean Axmaker, also reviewing TOKYO CHORUS and I WAS BORN BUT…
The Criterion Collection Database -
Eclipse Series 10 [Dan Callahan]
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] also seen
here: Criterion Confessions also reviewing
DVD Verdict- Silent Ozu: Three Family
Comedies [Bill Gibron]
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] also reviewing
Metroactive.com [Richard von Busack] also reviewing
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Passing Fancy The Auteurs
DVDBeaver Eclipse 'Silent Ozu' DVD
review [Gary Tooze]
A MOTHER SHOULD BE LOVED (Haha o
Kawazuya)
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Often analyzed despite its missing first and final reels, A Mother Should Be Loved centers on the aftermath of the death of the patriarch of the Kajiwara clan. Eight years after the father’s passing, one of his sons discovers that he is actually the issue of his father’s first, long-dead wife and that his stepmother has been guarding the secret for many years. The ensuing turmoil reveals several other blots on the family’s supposedly “stainless” reputation. For Ozu, whose own father died during the production, the film’s theme of the decline of masculine authority may have had a deeply felt personal resonance.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
After her husband dies of a heart attack, widowed Chieko selflessly devotes herself to the raising of son Kosaku and stepson Sadao. Her unconscious refusal to deal with Sadao as strictly as her own son causes resentment in both. When, as a college student, Sadao finally uncovers the secret of his parentage, he tries to quit the family and live on his own. Originally planning to make a film about the decline of a wealthy family, Ozu instead delivered this characteristic, moving ode to selfless motherhood. The first and last reels of the film - a prologue depicting life with the father and an epilogue bringing about a family reconciliation - are missing. The anniversary print fills in the lacunae with summaries from Tadao Ikeda's screenplay.
Film Diary Kevin Lee from Also Like Life
Sadly, the first and last reels are missing from this story of the turbulent relationship between a single mother and her two sons, one of whom is deeply jealous of the attention lavished on his brother by their mother, which in turn causes the other brother to resent his mother as well. The missing ending is supposed to present a happy resolution, but what still exists in print is a bizarre quasi-Oedipal melodrama that strongly hints at psycho-sexual tensions between family members, something I've never seen anywhere else among Ozu's numerous family studies. Several scenes take place in a brothel, a "home away from home" for the brothers, further adding to the weirdness. But perhaps most beguiling of all is a German poster celebrating the tricentennial of a passion play that hangs prominently in the family's living room. All in all, a most bizarre entry in the Ozu canon.
Ozu-san . Films - A Mother Should Be Loved (1934)
Thoughts from Ozu
This film, whose leitmotif is the decline of a distinguished family, could do
with a more refined script. One might have got away with it today, but back
then, such a flimsy plot couldn't have passed for a movie. For this reason, I
fleshed out the narrative by introducing a pair of brothers whose relationship
becomes strained because they don't share the same birth mother. Such a
contrivance actually mars the film, but it still left a deep impression on me,
as my father passed away during the filming.
Personal Thoughts and Comments
A Mother Should Be Loved is more melodramatic material then Ozu’s best work.
The story centers around two brothers that are alienated after the older one
secretly discovers their widowed mother is really his stepmother. The film is
missing the first and last reels (a lot of which are titles), which detailed
the joyful routines of family life with the mother, two sons, and the father,
who dies of a heart attack. What survives centers around the central story of
the two sons. Made during the death of Ozu’s father, A Mother Should Be Loved
takes a look into the separation of the family, a theme he would continue to
develop throughout his postwar masterpieces. This film is more plot driven and
overall not as powerful as his greatest work, but it is an interesting film to
see the early developments of his themes and style.
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (Ukigusa Monogatari) B+ 92
Floating
weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives. —Japanese
expression
Ozu’s films were rarely seen outside Japan until a decade or more after his death from cancer in 1963, so he was a late bloomer in the West which lauded the earlier works of both Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, which were more accessible in the 60’s when America was also under the thrall of discovering European films. Unlike Mizoguchi’s more theatrical use of long takes and exquisite camera movement or Kurosawa’s notorious art direction and action sequences, Ozu is among the most understated directors in film history, one of the original minimalists, refusing to embellish his works with close ups or pans, using fixed objects for his transition shots instead of fades or dissolves. He shot almost solely from a fixed low camera angle, often called the tatami shot, reflecting the eye level of someone sitting on a tatami floor mat, quietly observing, using conversation, and the accumulation of character detail to advance the story. Often choosing a portrait of ordinary Japanese life, marriage and families, relationships and generational distance, many distributors felt Ozu’s stylistic restraint and passivity would never be accepted in the West, an argument that persists to this day since he’s only been embraced by true cinephiles. There is little accentuated distinction between Ozu’s heroes and villains, often seen as one and the same, where he developed a simple and contemplative style tinged with nostalgia and sadness. Like Chaplin, Ozu continued to make silent films during the early era of talking pictures, waiting for the audio technology to improve, up until 1936 when THE ONLY SON (Hitori Musuko) was his first to utilize sound. Coming after the success of the incisive family comedy I WAS BORN…BUT (1932), this was Ozu’s most acclaimed silent film, both critically and commercially, one that he remade in 1959 as FLOATING WEEDS, where he transports the same story into a different setting.
This is one of the earliest Ozu films that explores not only
the family, but offers a variation on the typical family structure, where the
aspirations are influenced by class division and social status, and in
particular a patriarchal Japanese society, which can be both fascinating and
revolting, where disappointment and disillusionment become key thematic
elements. This deconstruction of a
typical Japanese family would become a prevalent theme throughout his
career. Strangely, the actors all wear
kimonos throughout the film, where up to this point in Ozu’s career, people
lived in
However, when Itaka (Rieko Yagumo), the leading actress and current lover of Kihachi finds out what he’s been up to, she devilishly plots a scheme of revenge, setting the unsuspecting son up with another one of the troupe’s actresses, Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), hoping to hurt both the father and the son for toying with and underestimating her emotions. Itaka’s continual chain-smoking throughout has a way of shedding a dark light onto her character, as she’s singled out as the conniving, behind-the-scenes instigator. Otsune, by contrast, is the wronged woman, older and certainly no threat to the younger Itaka’s vanity, as she’s done nothing to deserve the melodramatic wrath of an indignant and jealous actress. Surprisingly, however, Otoki changes her mind about her initial motives and discovers a newfound love in the arms of Shinkichi, where Ozu uses a recurring motif of his parked bicycle to reflect both the passing of time as well as time offscreen spent together. With his troupe’s leading women conceiving a plot against him, Kihachi finds himself thoroughly humiliated and outmaneuvered, inflicting blows to all participants involved. But his feeble efforts only reveal the futility of his position, as despite sending money, he’s literally abandoned his son for twenty years, creating a chasm of inconsolable emptiness between father and son, while the desperate financial straits of his theater troupe force him to sell all the costumes and props, effectively breaking up his business and substitute family as well. Ozu’s startling emotional resolution is surprising for its abrupt change of tone, where the one shining light in this film is the gorgeously restrained performance of Chôko Iida, confined to the background through most of the film, overshadowed by the prominence of showier roles, yet her gentle expression of bleak despair is hauntingly penetrating.
Chicago Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
One of the last of Yasujiro Ozu's silent films, which he remade toward the end of his career, this 1934 feature has a fairly standard soap-opera plot—the lead actor in an impoverished acting troupe returns to a remote mountain village to meet his illegitimate son for the first time—but, needless to say, the Japanese master works wonders with it. Like other Ozu films of the period, this has a great deal of camera movement; stylistic purification would later lead him to eliminate such expressive devices. 86 min.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
A pinnacle film from Ozu’s silent period, A Story of Floating
Weeds concerns the leader of a ragtag Kabuki troupe who is stranded in a
remote mountain village, where he encounters his forgotten illegitimate son.
Believing his father long dead, the son falls in love with a young actress who
has been bribed by the old man’s mistress to seduce him. In Ozu’s hands the
reversals and revelations that follow transcend mere melodrama. The poet of
urban, domestic
A Story of Floating Weeds Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ...
Ozu remade this story of travelling actors in 1959, but even without sound or lustrous colour the earlier version’s by no means second best. The change of location’s instructive, since here the kabuki troupe are visiting chilly northern climes (rather than sunny Shikoku in the later incarnation), and the whole story’s more a matter of subsistence, both financial and emotional, as actor-manager Sakomoto’s encounter with his former lover and their grown-up son causes ructions with his current actress girlfriend. With the camera alert to every nuance in the performances, and the direction a masterclass in effortless transitions, it’s clearly the work of a master-in-the-making. The final shot of the resilient child actor in the hard-pressed band powerfully underscores the theme of the parents’ misfortunes and betrayals having the fullest impact on the next generation.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
One of Ozu's favorites of his silents that he later remade in sound and color, STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS was itself a reworking of George Fitzmaurice's The Barker (1928). Ozu reintroduces his proletarian Everyman, Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), this time the head of an itinerant acting troupe visiting a small town where he fathered a son with the local café owner years before. Kihachi endeavors to hide his identity from his now college-educated son lest his lowly status shame him. But his jealous mistress has other ideas in mind: bribing a young actress from the troupe to seduce the son, she schemes to bring about a confrontation. In the meantime, the troupe struggles to survive in a season of heavy rains and low attendance. With its rural village setting and entirely kimono-clad cast, STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS represents a departure for Ozu the urban filmmaker, for once entirely removed from the rhythms and textures of city life and setting his sights on poeticizing life in the countryside. The result is one of his most intensely atmospheric and sheerly beautiful films.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Remakably similar in structure yet different in tonal effect to Ozu's more famous 1959 remake, this story of a travelling troupe's last days in a seaside village was one of Ozu's first forays into a quiet, rural background, though it still feels brisk compared to the more staid and sumptuous remake. The depictions of stage life are more slapstick-oriented than in the remake (most notably in Tokkan Kozo's hilarious turn in a full-sized dog costume), but are counterbalanced by sensitive portrayals of all the characters, especially the great, dignified lead performance by Takeshi Sakamoto. The romantic interludes are as powerful as in the remake, though without employing the overt sensuality of on-screen kissing; instead there appears to be the use of a filter or gauze to give the scenes between the young couple an otherworldly effect, which gives more emphasis of the idea of the actress employed to seduce the troupe leader's son enacting a "performance", an idea that I would have like to have seen developed even further. Even so, this is a marvellous work with a set of wonders distinguishable from that of the remake.
Gapers
Block: Airbags - Yasujiro Ozu, Part Two: <em>The Story of ... Gordon McAlpin from the
The Story of Floating Weeds is, like most of Ozu's film's, what the Japanese master would call a "home drama," in the sense that it deals with a family. In this 1934 silent, an aging actor and his troupe stop in a small mountain town, and the actor pays a visit to an old friend and her son. That the boy is his illegitimate son is almost immediately obvious, though it is not immediately addressed. When his current lover, an actress in his troupe, learns he has been visiting his ex, she becomes jealous and takes steps to destroy his hopes for his son's future.
When viewed with Floating Weeds, the film's 1959 color remake (also directed by Ozu), it's somewhat surprising to note that the two stories are only very subtly different. These subtle differences are largely the result of Ozu's evolving directorial style and the differences in technology. The wonderful story, which remains almost completely unchanged aside from a change of setting—from a mountain town to one by the ocean. While I prefer the slightly more poetic, langorous look and tone of the later version, which was shot by Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon), the cast of the original film is easily the superior of the two.
The two versions remind me of the famous statement by Hitchcock regarding his own remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much: "The first was the work of a talented amateur, while the second was the act of a seasoned professional." And, perhaps, to some extent, this statement applies to Ozu's two Floating Weeds films, even though, with over twenty films to his credit by the time he had shot The Story of Floating Weeds, Ozu could hardly be called an "amateur." Perhaps Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much was an influence in Ozu's decision? Hitchcock's original was released in 1934, as well, and the remake debuted in 1956, only a couple of years before Ozu would have begun work on his own revisitation. Whatever the actual reason, the minute differences, for film lovers or Ozu fans, are enough to pore over for hours. But what's more important than any comparison between the two is simply seeing them: each of the stories of Floating Weeds is a bittersweet masterpiece in its own way.
The Story of Floating Weeds is also available in a two-disc set, Stories of Floating Weeds, from the Criterion Collection, which pairs it with its 1959 remake and also features commentaries by Ozu scholar Donald Richie (on A Story of Floating Weeds) and Roger Ebert (on Floating Weeds). The Criterion Collection version of The Story of Floating Weeds sets the film to a terrific piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin (although you can play it without the accompaniment, in case you want to listen to Dark Side of the Moon instead).
User comments from imdb Author: Cosmoeticadotcom
(cosmoetica@gmail.com) from
Yasujiro Ozu was perhaps the greatest obsessional filmmaker in
history. Thus, it's no surprise that not only did he rework the same themes
over and again in his films, but that he also redid earlier films of his own
years later, such as 1932's I Was Born But... as 1959's Good Morning. The most
famed examples of this trait are 1934's silent black and white A Story Of
Floating Weeds (Ukikusa Monogatari), written by Ozu and Tadao Ikeda, and 1959's
sound color film, Floating Weeds (Ukigusa), written by Ozu and Kôgo Noda. Both
films, whose titular metaphor revolves around the lives of itinerant actors,
tell basically the same tale, in slightly different ways, with differently
named characters. They follow the ups and downs of the leader of a really bad
theater troupe, on its last legs (not unlike the characters from Federico
Fellini's first film, Variety Lights), who lands in a town and visits an old
girlfriend who bore him a son. In both films, the son believes his father is
really his uncle, and the major development in the films is how the father's
jealous actress girlfriend tries to sabotage things by having a pretty young
actress seduce the son, thus recapitulating the father's key moment in life,
one the father believes ruined his chance at stardom and happiness.
If one is thinking that this is the stuff of pure melodrama, it is. But that's
true only on the surface. This is where depth and execution of an art come into
play. It also abnegates claims that Ozu eschewed plot in his films for
melodrama is about nothing if but plot. While it's true he did not strive for A
to B to C narratives, and preferred 'organic' story growth, the fact is that
all his films had plots, and good ones. But they were not plot driven, nor
dependent upon the heavyhanded machinations most drama and films rely upon. The
difference between having a plot and being plot driven is something most critics
seem to not understand. Ozu simply removes the superfluous plot moments and
adds contemplative, poetic, and metaphoric shots in their place, what are
termed 'pillow shots.' The emphasis is thus not on the driving, but the driver,
of plot. After all, the tale of a parent who has a long lost child is not
fresh, although the way it's told can be.
As for the films, the earlier one is actually the slightly better film, mostly
because it's more concise- clocking in at 86 minutes vs. the two hour
remake….In defense of the later film, it has more humor (one character from the
troupe claims his name is Toshiro Mifune- the great star of so many Akira
Kurosawa films; a nod to Ozu's rival), and the son's reaction to the news about
his father seems a bit more mature and realistic than in the earlier film,
while the mother seems more resigned to her lover's leaving, rather than being
devastated- as in the earlier film. But the ending of the earlier film, on the
train, is better, for when we see the troupe leader reunited with his love, and
see the sleeping child, the earlier film leaves no doubt that the leader is
wistfully thinking of his son, while the later film does not. Another plus that
the later film has is its use of color and symbolism, which is far more striking.
The opening scene contrasts a lighthouse in the background with a foregrounded
bottle. It is a stunning visual image, and such phallic symbols abound in the
film, as bottles are repeatedly seen, and there is a scene where the local
prostitutes tease the male troupe members as they suck on popsicles. We then
see the lighthouse from other perspectives over the course of the film. The
earlier film is not set at a seaside town, but in a rural area, and the scene
of the father and son fishing is superior in the later film, for there is no
oddly stylized synchronization of the pair tossing their fishing lines into the
river, over and again, as in the 1934 film, and what the duo speak of- their
views on the father's approach to acting, is far more cogent than in the silent
version, whose major moment is when the father drops his wallet into the
running water. The later version also mimetically puts the father and son in
the position of the bottle in relation to the lighthouse at the film's opening.
What this means, from a phallic perspective, is open to several
interpretations. Another major difference between the two films is that the
earlier film has more motion in it- literally. It was made before Ozu got
caught in his tatami mat point of view mode, and therefore the emotion of the
drama is recapitulated better in the earlier, more kinetic, film….Both A Story
Of Floating Weeds and Floating Weeds are proof that not all obsessions result
in negativity, a thing one might remind oneself of the next time someone speaks
ill of that trait. They are also fine examples of what made Yasujiro Ozu a
great artist, even if the art in them might fall just a bit shy of overall
greatness. Viva obsesión!?
Stories
of Floating Weeds Criterion essay by
Donald Richie,
Donald
Richie Live!
A Story of Floating Weeds Criterion Collection
Dan Schneider On A Story Of Floating
Weeds & Floating Weeds A
STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934) & FLOATING WEEDS (1959), Dan Schneider at
Cosmoetica, also a shorter version from Hackwriters, March 2007: hackwriters.com - Yasujiro
Ozu's 'Floating Weeds' - Review by Dan ...
A
Story of Floating Weeds (1934) - Articles - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
Criterion Reflections: A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) - #232 David Blakeslee
Silent Volume: A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) Chris Edwards
Colin Marshall: A Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934) and ...
Best Pictures of 1934 (#1) – A Story of Floating Weeds | Movies over ... Movies Over Matter
A
Story of Floating Weeds (1934) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffan, also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5] Criterion
Collection, also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
DVD
Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
Images Journal Derek Hill, Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING
WEEDS (1959)
DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING
WEEDS (1959)
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING
WEEDS (1959)
HTF REVIEW: A Story Of Floating Weeds (1934) and Floating Weeds ... Home Theater Forum, Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen, Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
Passport Cinema [A.J. Hakari] Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
About.com Home Video/DVD [Ivana
Redwine] Criterion
Collection, also reviewing
FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
Film-Forward.com - DVD review Yancha, Criterion Collection, also reviewing FLOATING WEEDS (1959)
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing EARLY SUMMER,
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
A Story of Floating Weeds Kellie Haulotte from Examiner, also seen here: A 5-Star Silent: A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) « Green Bay ...
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Brandon's movie memory » A Story of Floating Weeds (1934, Yasujiro ... November 18, 2008
filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]
The
Disc Jockey Noel
Murray
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] Much Ozu About Everything: An Essential
Retro's Encore Run,
Silent Era : Home Video : A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) Review
A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) + Live Score | Squeaky Wheel ...
A Common Reader: A Story of Floating Weeds (1934 movie)
User
reviews from imdb Author: chaos-rampant from
AvaxHome -> Yasujiro Ozu-Ukikusa monogatari ('A Story of Floating ...
rain, landscape and light in ozu's a story of floating weeds, 1934 still images, from The Art of Memory
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Story of Floating Weeds (1934) - Yasujiro Ozu (Ozu-san.com) Ozu website
A Story of Floating Weeds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
STORY OF
FLOATING WEEDS (Ukikusa ... YouTube (
A Story
of Floating Weeds - YouTube (
AN INNOCENT MAID (Hakoiri musume)
Thoughts from Ozu:
I was told An
Innocent Maid was to be made as a series, but in the end, this was the only
film that materialized. As it was a festive film, it was planned for a two-week
screening during New Year. Crank up date was set for December, 30 but the
camera was out of order, so we worked through New Years Eve and finished on the
morning of New Years Day. I still remember how everyone looked - their faces
unshaven, eating celebratory zoni (rice-cakes boiled with vegetables).
AN INN IN TOKYO Tokyo
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Often compared to the later neorealist classic The Bicycle
Thief, An Inn in Tokyo chronicles three days in the life of an
unemployed factory worker who wanders through
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
This early great work from The Master is a sobering melodrama honed squarely on a single unemployed, homeless father struggling to feed and shelter his two sons. Ozu does a fine job capturing the dynamic between the two boys by themselves and with their father, but the film really gets interesting when two women enter the story: a young single mother, also homeless, and an old friend who finds the father a job. The maudlin climax seems to anticipate Ford's GRAPES OF WRATH and DeSican melodrama -- though in the wrong ways -- but prior to that Ozu comes up with an quirky expressionist sequence to reflect the father's unraveling moral state.
User comments from imdb Author: Martin Riexinger
from
This film deals with an unemployed man and his two sons who rove
through the industrial areas of
After some bad luck the father is able to find a job but then the pity for a
single mother and her sick little daughter makes him do something he should not
have done.
This is the very simple story but this is not what makes the film a
masterpiece. The great achievement is that Ozu shows how poverty affects the
human mind. He depicts the fear and the feeling of senselessness in a way that
nobody else has ever done. Many of the devices him employs are very
imaginative. Many people might compare this film to de Sica's "Ladri di
biciclette" which was made 12 years later. But without doing a disservice
to de Sica's masterpiece: "
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
I would argue that "
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
The grimmest of Ozu's Kihachi films, AN INN IN TOKYO reflects the
post-Depression reality of '30s
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
KAGAMIJISHI
Kagamijishi Acquarello from Strictly
Kagamijishi is a short performance film intended to introduce non-native viewers to Kabuki theater and also to showcase the skill of Kikugoro IV, a legendary, multi-generation Kabuki artist. Ozu's repeated fixed position shots (one on center stage, a second to the side of the stage, and a third from an upper balcony) are evident throughout the film. Although I'm unfamiliar with the vernacular of Kabuki theatre, the then middle-aged Kikugoro's ability to transform himself from delicate maiden to possessed, ferocious beast by donning a lion mask is remarkable.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
This short documentary by Ozu was intended to present the artistry of kabuki dancer Kikugoro Onoe IV to both Japanese and foreign audiences. A voice-over narration introduces Kikugoro as well as the dance he performs in the film's second half, in which a young girl is transformed into a resplendent lion (the imagery of which apparently inspired Jean Cocteau as he conceived his own BEAUTY AND THE BEAST). Watching Kikugoro imitate the gestures of a demure maiden you see how he deserved his fame. Ozu shoots the performance in three simple set-ups: a roving frontal shot of the performers on stage, an angled shot from the side of the stage, and an angled longshot that acknowledges the presence of the audience in a way that is unmistakably Ozu.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu Derek Lam, October 4 –
KAGAMIJISHI is a lion dance in kabuki theater, about a court dancer possessed by the spirit of a lion mask, transforming from a shy maiden to a ferocious creature. One of a number of bunka eiga "cultural films" commissioned by the Japan Cultural Association to promote indigenous culture abroad, Ozu's only documentary showcases celebrated kabuki performer Kikugoro Onoe IV (whose performances apparently inspired Cocteau's The Beauty and the Beast). Divided into two parts, one a silent segment documenting the actor behind the scenes, the other capturing Onoe's famed dance in sync-sound, KAGAMIJISHI testifies to Ozu's lifelong interest in traditional theater (see the two versions of FLOATING WEEDS), and anticipates the memorable kabuki sequences in LATE SPRING as well as THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE.
User comments from imdb Author: GrandeMarguerite
from
"Kagamijishi" is a 24-minute film intended to introduce
audiences to Kabuki theater and also to showcase the skill of Kikugoro IV who
was a legendary Kabuki artist. When I am almost never bothered by black and
white films (I can't imagine for instance Kurosawa's "Rashomon" or
Allen's "
Of course this is not enough for true Kabuki connoisseurs. As for Ozu's
admirers, they will enjoy this short film as the only documentary shot by the
master, but I believe it is to be watched when you have seen most of Ozu's
great works.
COLLEGE IS A NICE PLACE (Daigaku yoi took)
Thoughts from Ozu:
The plot evolves around some students staying at the same boarding house. The
student life depicted was not happy at all. It was a dark film.
THE ONLY SON (Hitori Musuko)
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
This film starkly depicts both rural and urban poverty in
depression-era
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Ozu’s first “talkie” was also, according to critic Donald Richie,
“one of Ozu’s darkest.” A peasant mother sacrifices everything to pay for her
only son’s education in
Strictly Film School [Ozu Centenary
notes] Acquarello
The Only Son
is a quintessential Ozu home drama on the relationship between a widowed mother
(Choko Iida) and her son, Ryosuke. Encouraged by her son's ambitious elementary
school teacher (Chishu Ryu), the mother slaves at a silk manufacturing factory,
sacrificing personal and financial comfort and security, in order to support
Ryosuke's education so that he may grow up to be a "great man".
Thirteen years later, she travels to
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Ozu's first complete talkie, as well as one of his finest films, THE ONLY SON is among the most
disquieting depictions of parent-child discord. As a child, Ryosuke's promising
achievement at school prompts a teacher to recommend him to middle school.
Initially refusing, his mother, the widowed Otsune (Choko Iida), eventually
agrees to support his education by forsaking retirement and continuing to work
in a silk mill. Thirteen years later, she visits Ryosuke in
User comments from imdb Author: ky_chong
"The Only Son" is Ozu's first talkie, made in 1936, and
it's a small masterpiece. Here, the story is a little like that he made decades
later in "Tokyo Story", except that here the visiting party is only
one person (a widow) and her only son with daughter-in-law are dutifully filial
instead of a careless bevy. Chishu Ryu also plays a part in this film, as a
schoolteacher-turn-eatery-owner who persuades the mother to educate her son.
The mother works hard to provide for her only son's education, but goes to
Ozu is one of the world's great directors, and "The Only Son" is one
of his earlier masterpieces. What makes the film so memorable here is the
acting itself. Chouko Iida plays the aging mother very well, exactly like how
such a person would act out in real life. Her final act of despair affects the
viewer as much as Ryosuke's promise to make it big to his wife. Ozu is probably
making as much of a social statement with these final gestures. While the son
has proved himself to be selfless, society still measures a person by how high
the social hierarchy one has climbed. Although Ozu didn't pursue this point
relentlessly, it's still clear that's how the couple's standing is despite them
working hard to better their cause. As such, this film has similarities with
earlier Ozu films like "Tokyo Chorus", "Passing Fancy" and
"An Inn in
The
Only Son: Japan, 1936 Criterion
essay by Tony Rayns,
The Only Son Criterion Collection
The Only Son (Hitori
Musuko) • Senses of Cinema James
Leahy from Senses of Cinema, July 26,
2004
The Only Son The Auteurs
WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET? (Shukujo
wa Nani o Wasuretaka)
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule
review
Yasujiro Ozu's second
sound film (1937) is a satire on the Tokyo middle class. A professor of
medicine uses his weekly golf game as a cover to escape from his forbidding
wife into the bars of the Ginza district; a visiting niece from Osaka discovers
his secret and brings about the couple's reconciliation. With Sumiko Kurishima,
Tatsuo Saito, and Michiko Kuwano.
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
A funny, lighthearted, but nevertheless, astute social satire, What Did the Lady Forget? centers on a genial college professor who, forced by his stern and domineering wife to play golf, fabricates an alibi and arranges to spend the evening at a student's house. However, his plans are compromised when his assertive and progressive thinking niece decides to accompany him. Loosely reminiscent of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Master of the House (without the imposing governess), the film is a highly engaging comedy on the need for reciprocity and mutual respect in human relationships.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
This mordant comedy has gained a reputation as top-flight Ozu. A
professor of medicine and his bossy society wife play host to their niece, the
brash daughter of an
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Following THE ONLY SON, Ozu proposed an even bleaker film, WHAT A CHEERFUL GUY, THIS MR. YASUKICHI, about an aging salaryman who loses his sanity. Shochiku demanded something lighter, and Ozu responded with this sparkling comedy that takes him from his usual downtown milieu to the well-appointed dwellings of the privileged classes. The plot revolves around the henpecked Professor Komiya as he's prompted to rebel against his overbearing wife during a visit by his high-spirited niece Setsuko. Ozu has great fun à la Lubitsch skewering bourgeois niceties, while the comic disconnect between carefree youth and their often stuffy, intractable elders looks forward to such postwar work as EQUINOX FLOWER, AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON, and THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE.
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
Yasujiro Ozu's 1937 "Nani wa shokujo wa wasureta" (What
Did the Lady Forget) is probably his closest approach to screwball comedy. Set
in (probably) the most affluent milieu of any of Ozu's film, this involves a
bossy wife (
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
One of Ozu's most delightful comedies involves the minor
household upheaval caused by a freewheeling Japanese debutante's visit to her
henpecked professor uncle and his fussy wife. This film is blessed with a
surfeit of small, droll gestures that amply demonstrate both the whimsicality
and the sharpness of Ozu's observations of human behavior: the clucking
communion of housewives, clever games played by singing schoolboys and the
subtle, playful banter of relatives who know each others' foibles all too well.
The schoolgirl character is of particular interest as a prototypical
"liberated woman" who gets her uncle to take her to a geisha house
and isn't afraid of letting her leg show under her skirt (here I wonder how
much of this was influenced by the '30s Hollywood screwball comedies Ozu loved,
or if it was truly indicative of emerging behavioral trends among Japanese
women). Things come to a head though as the girl and her uncle conspire for a
night away from her aunt, only to be confronted for their deception, leading to
an unsettling moment when the aunt gets slapped. I'm not entirely satisfied
with how Ozu's characters later shrug off this instance of domestic abuse as
just another quirky behavior that can be turned on its ear. Nonetheless the
film stands as a provocative exploration of male-female relationships amidst
the shifting mores of modern society.
User comments from imdb Author: ky_chong
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
BROTHERS AND SISTERS FROM THE TODA FAMILY (Toda-ke no Kyodai)
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
This 1941 film is one of the few upper-class family dramas by Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, and the domestic furnishings and how they're framed help make it one of his most visually ravishing works. The events center on the untimely death of the father. In Japanese with subtitles. 105 min.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Following the death of their father, the brothers and sisters of
the Toda family find themselves laden with debt. Mrs. Toda, with her youngest
daughter in tow, tries to set up residence with one her married children, only
to be shunted around from one household to the next. The youngest son Shojiro,
returning from work in
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
The decline of a once-important family is the subject of many
great films, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Written on the Wind, and this is
Ozu’s powerful assay of the theme. Foreshadowing
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Ozu enters William Wyler terrain with a somber upscale family
drama about a mother and daughter who are shuttled in unwelcome fashion from
one family member's home to another following the death of the family
patriarch. The thematic elements of displacement within a family unit
anticipate TOKYO STORY -- there's even a bedtime scene between the mother and
daughter that echoes one in the later film. There's a startling lack of music
in this film, esp. during Ozu's normally music-filled transitional shots, that
contribute to an overall sense of tense unease that touches on what might have
been the general wartime state of mind among Japanese at that time. The war
makes a subtle appearance in the form of the youngest son who offers to take
the unwanted family members with him to settle in
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
On the occasion of the family patriarch's 69th birthday, the
noble and privileged Toda family has assembled for a formal commemorative
photograph and a dinner banquet that would prove to be their father's last.
Forced to sell the family home in order to settle their father's unresolved,
business-related debts, Mrs. Toda (Ayako Katsuragi) and the youngest daughter
Setsuko (Mieko Takamino) - with a devoted domestic servant (Choko Iida) and
mynah bird in tow - are sent to live with the oldest son, Shinichiro (Tatsuo
Saito), before being politely passed off from one sibling to another.
Expounding on (and prefiguring) similar themes of filial duty and respect to
elders as Tokyo
Story with the social commentary on the vanishing way of life of the
feudal era, socially prominent merchant class (note the samurai clan armor that
decorates the hallway of the Toda residence), The
Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family is a poignant and
graceful film that exemplifies Ozu's later, more insular, understated, and distilled)
gendai-geki home
dramas.
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston)
capsule review
Ozu’s social/political
conservatism can be something of a barrier, but at least it’s to his credit
that this conservatism evolved with the times. So, in 1937 the role of the
young female character in What Did The Lady Forget? is to teach the male
protagonist the virtues of slapping his stroppy wife, but twenty years later in
Equinox Flower it is to teach the paterfamilias how he must accept his
daughter’s own choice of a husband, rather than insist on an arranged marriage.
Shin Saburi, the actor playing Equinox Flower’s father, turns up as the
initially feckless younger son in Toda Family, and one of the
fascinations of the film is the glimpses of actors whose faces are more
familiar as their older selves in the more famous Ozu classics of the fifties.
But Toda Family
truly reflects the time of its making, a product of Japanese militarism’s wartime
propaganda — but one which never mentions the war, although China is bizarrely
offered as a destination for the morally pure characters to escape to. The best
part of the film is the middle section, depicting with humour and understanding
the way the widowed mother and younger daughter and shunted from one family
household to another. It clearly looks forward to aspects of Tokyo Story.
The moralism of
Shojiro’s attack on his siblings is too narrow in conception and is one that a
modern audience is resistant to. And it seems that the ideological weight was
too much for Ozu himself. The final section collapses into an arranged-marriage
comedy, with Shojiro in the very last shot literally running down a beach away
from us and the film.
Brothers and Sisters of
the Toda Family • Senses of Cinema Adam
Binham from Senses of Cinema, July
26, 2004
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
THERE WAS A FATHER (Chichi Ariki)
Chicago Reader (Don Druker) capsule
review
A quietly moving 1942 Japanse feature by Yasujiro Ozu chronicling the mutual devotion of a father (Chishu Ryu, in another of his exquisite, subtle performances) and his son over a 13-year period—from the father's resignation from teaching to his peaceful, triumphant death and the son's subsequent marriage. A delicate, straightforward exhortation to duty and sacrifice, presented with both humor and a kind of unforced serenity. In Japanese with subtitles. 88 min.
User comments from imdb Author: Daryl Chin (lqualls-dchin)
from
Most of the films of Yasujiro Ozu take a very restricted time period: a few days at the most. "There Was a Father" is unusual in that the time span is actually quite long: it stretches over a number of years (this is also the case with "The Only Son"), as it chronicles the relationship of a widower with his son. The father, a schoolteacher (played by Chishu Ryu), struggles to make sure that his son has advantages that he never had; in this case, the son is appreciative of all that the father has done, and the relationship is one of the most heartwarming of all familial relationships in Ozu's work. "There Was a Father" represents one of the most beautiful depictions of a good parent in all of world cinema.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
There Was a Father chronicles the relationship of a
widower and his son over two decades. The father is a strict, unyielding
teacher who reflects the wartime ideology of self-sacrifice and stoicism in his
belief that “everyone must do his duty.” When a student drowns on an outing,
the teacher takes responsibility, quits his profession, and takes his son to
live in his hometown in the country. Father and son are soon separated, their
visits becoming less frequent as the ambitious boy moves to
Among Ozu's best-loved films in Japan is this touching saga of filial love set against adverse circumstances and social duty. Although only 38 at the time, Ryu ages gracefully through decades as a widowed mathematics teacher parted initially from his only son when a fatal boating accident on a school trip causes the father to resign his post, leaving the boy to continue his studies. Their paths remain separate when the latter's own teaching career takes him to Akita in the north, even though his father is now a successful company man in Tokyo. Ozu displays a Renoir-like understanding of both sides, as the brief holiday time the two spend together proves precious indeed - look for the symbolic harmony in the fly fishing scenes. The issue of separation acquired a particular poignancy in wartime, it goes without saying, but Ryu's stoic underplaying offers a heartbreaking performance for the ages.
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
The second of Ozu's war-era films -- and the first to feature
Chishu Ryu as "star". This film starts with the story of a teacher
and his young son (in the 1920s). After one of the students under Ryu's care
drowns on a school outing (after disobeying orders), Ryu resigns as a teacher
due to his "failure". Ryu and his son then must split up, the son to
go to middle school and Ryu to go to
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Throughout his career, Ozu demonstrated great sympathy for the
plight of schoolteachers. Often, he would sketch them as sadly impoverished
retirees, their down-and-out status incommensurate with the efforts they've
made in educating children. Normally giving them a secondary role, Ozu only
once placed a teacher center stage, in this wartime father-and-son drama.
Chishu Ryu plays a self-abnegating schoolteacher who sternly insists on placing
duty above personal feelings. Once again, as in THE ONLY SON, a parent is separated from his child in order to
provide for his education: Horikawa (Ryu) places his son Ryohei in a boarding
school while he looks for work in
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Another sober wartime drama, this time a sort of reworking of THE ONLY SON as a widower schoolteacher decides to send his boy to a boarding school to give him the best education possible and seek a higher paying position to afford tuition. The film takes a sudden leap forward in time as the grown son desires to take care of his aging father, but the father forbids the son to compromise his own career. The war is barely mentioned but the film can easily be read as a propagandistic statement about self-sacrifice and devotion to duty, even at the cost of family unity. However, the pensive, tentative mood Ozu captures at the end, embodied in the son's distant, troubled look as he thinks about his father, hints at Ozu's own reservations with the moral message being issued. The scenes of father and son together in both halves of the story have a gentle perfection that gives the film all the beauty it requires, thanks to great performances by Shuji Sano as the grown son and Chishyu Ryo as the father. Amazingly, Ryu was only 38 when he gave this totally believable performance as an aging patriarch -- in fact he barely looks any different than he does in AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON twenty years later!
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Ben Sachs
“The film is uncompromisingly didactic in its fidelity to Japan’s wartime ethos,” writes Tony Rayns for the Criterion Collection about THERE WAS A FATHER, one of just two films that Yasujiro Ozu directed during WWII. “Besides promoting the cardinal virtues of loyalty and obedience, it teaches that every man should be content with his role in society, however modest, and should find fulfillment in doing his best.” FATHER tells the story of a humble widower (Chishu Ryu at his most heart-rending) who denies his son the affection he longs for in the process of working to the bone to put him through school. There is much speechifying about the importance of hard work and self-sacrifice, but because Ozu presents them with such sincerity and restraint (and because the film makes no overt reference to the war), the calls to duty feel less like propaganda and more like (very moving) proclamations of spiritual fortitude. And then there are the scenes concerning one of Ozu’s perennial themes, the sense of disappointment that’s integral to coming of age and to adult life in general. Shuhei, Ryu's character, puts his son Ryohei in boarding school in small-town Ueda, paying for it by working in Tokyo. The film is as observant of Ryohei's disappointment at living away from his father as it is of Shuhei's nobility, resulting in an emotional complexity that's typical of the director's work. Rayns writes: “Ozu’s possible ambivalence [about FATHER’s overt messages] is felt most keenly in the way he dramatizes Ryohei’s emotional longings for his father, expressed not only in the protracted scene of the boy’s tears when he first learns that they are to live apart, but also in one of Ozu’s highly characteristic pieces of dramatic patterning. There are two scenes in which father and son go fishing together, the first when Ryohei is a boy, the second when he is a young man. On both occasions, they cast their lines in perfect sync with each other, a ‘replicated motion’ shot of the kind Ozu found so amusing and used in many of his films. But the boyhood version of the scene shows first father and son casting their lines in unison and then the boy standing stock-still as his father casts again. The effect of that momentary refusal to act in sync is indescribably poignant, and it reflects Ozu’s mastery of the poetic film language he had developed.”
There
Was a Father - TCM.com Sean Axmaker
Yasujiro Ozu has been called the most "Japanese" of
Japanese directors because of the restrained style and quietly contemplative
tone of his family dramas. And while it is true that the films Ozu directed
from the late thirties to the end of his career reflect traditional,
conservative Japanese ideals and mores ("restraint, simplicity and
near-Buddhist serenity" is how film historian Donald Richie described his
cinematic aesthetic), this rather simplistic brand misses a defining component
of his films, namely that they are utterly contemporary to their times. Where
Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi found international recognition with
historical adventures and elegant period dramas about samurai warriors, royal
figures, and fallen heroes, Ozu exclusively made contemporary films and set his
quietly understated family dramas and comedies in the modest homes and
workplaces of everyday citizens trying to make a life for themselves and their
children. His films are a veritable survey of Japanese society from the late
1920s to the early 1960s, a society straddling an age-old culture of
expectations and codes of conduct on the one hand, and the stresses and demands
of the modern world and its international influences on the other.
The story of his 1942 masterpiece There Was a Father is simplicity
itself and the direction placid and restrained, but under the gentle rhythms
and emotional suppression in the name of duty is a complex portrait of
sacrifice and responsibility that is endured with obedience but little reward.
The father, Shuhei (Ozu's longtime leading man and cinematic alter-ego, Chishu
Ryu), is a doting widower and proud father of a respectful boy, Ryohei
(Haruhiko Tsuda), an intent student who wants nothing more than to make his
father proud. A respected teacher with a class of older students at Ryohei's school,
Shuhei gives up teaching after one of his students drowns while on school
excursion (Ozu's direction is a model of restraint here: a shot of a shrine,
followed by the calm lake, a capsized boat in the water, and then a funeral).
It's a matter of responsibility for Shuhei, but after a summer of
introspection, he realizes that his duty is to see to his son's education and
success. He moves to
The story is not autobiographical by any stretch of the imagination, but
certain elements of the story reverberate with Ozu's own life. Though he was
one of three children with two parents, Ozu and his siblings were separated
from their father for ten years, sent to Mie Prefecture for school and raised
by their indulgent mother while father stayed on to work in Tokyo. His silent
and sound early films often made fun of father figures (in his 1932 comedy I
Was Born, But…, a pair of young brothers go on a hunger strike to protest a
social order where their father must act subservient to his boss). After his
father died in 1934, Ozu's perspective on families and paternal responsibility
and sacrifice started to shift. So did his choice of subject matter (no more
gangster films and youth comedies) and his directorial style. With his thematic
shift came a concerted makeover of his entire approach to filmmaking.
Where Ozu once employed impressive tracking shots and mobile camerawork, by the
time of There Was a Father he shot scenes almost exclusively from
stationary set-ups in the "tatami mat position" (about 36 inches from
the floor, as if viewed from the position of a person seated cross-legged on a
floor mat). Where he once edited brisk action sequences with dramatic visual
contrasts and built tension by cutting into tighter and tighter shots, he
slowed the pace of his editing and pulled his camera back to watch scenes play
out in full shots. His direction of actors became exacting, focused on minute
gestures while he imposed a rigorous, formal performing style that masked all
emotions behind a polite smile and a calm resignation. And in his most unusual
stylistic change, he would shoot conversation scenes by placing his camera
directly in front of the actor (instead of at an angle) and direct him or her
to look just off-center, creating a visual dissonance that wasn't always
identifiable but never quite matched our expectations.
There Was a Father was only Ozu's fourth sound film (he resisted making
the transition longer than many fellow directors), and it was his first film to
bring together all of the defining elements of his mature style, including his
famed "pillow shots," still life scenes of the world around his
characters that serves as visual "cushions" in the transition from
one scene or sequence to another. Here they are the perfect complement to
scenes of father and son in the quiet company of one another, sitting on a
hilltop taking in the view in the silence after Shuhei has told Ryohei of his
plan to move to
Released in 1942, There Was a Father was both a critical and commercial
success. Critic and Japanese film expert Donald Richie called it "one of
Ozu's most perfect films. There is a naturalness and a consequent feeling of
inevitability that is rare in the cinema." Chishu Ryu's performance has
been hailed as one of the best in Japanese cinema. It remains one of Ozu's
masterpieces. Interestingly, he made the film during World War II, while the
war in the Pacific was raging. The Japanese film industry was openly controlled
by the government, which insisted on propaganda and patriotic themes. Ozu
refused to make propaganda and makes no reference to the war, but his own
sensibility of personal sacrifice in the name of a greater responsibility fit
the needs of government. But was the call to duty and sacrifice what audiences
responded to? Or was it Ozu's understanding of the cost of such sacrifice?
If There Was a Father celebrates obedience as a virtue and duty the
highest calling on the surface, there is an ambiguity in Ozu's tone. Which is
not to say that duty carries no reward. After years in
There
Was a Father: Duty Calls Criterion
essay by Tony Rayns,
There Was a Father Criterion Collection
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
RECORD OF A TENEMENT
GENTLEMAN (Nagaya Shinshi Roku)
A widow, Tane, reluctantly shelters a young boy for the night when her neighbour discovers him lost and alone in the city. On further investigation, it seems that the boy's father, a carpenter, has abandoned him out of poverty. Tane tries to do the same, but the boy will have none of it. They strike a deal - as long as he stops wetting his bed, he can stay. This is Ozu in optimistic mood, which is not to say that loss and resignation don't figure in large part (no film-maker ever had a surer grasp of the melancholy of everyday things), just that here the generosity of spirit seems irresistible - and irresistibly comic. (And Chishu Ryu sings!)
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Ozu returns to the downtown milieu of his Kihachi films for this Occupation-set tribute to loving motherhood and the communal spirit. Widowed Otane (Ozu stalwart Choko Iida) is initially reluctant to take care of the homeless boy her neighbor puts in her charge. But eventually she takes to him, and when the boy runs away in fear of punishment for wetting his bed, she goes on a frantic search. The war left in its wake many orphans, and RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN represents Ozu's contribution to the genre of films depicting that problem. It also harkens back to the warmhearted, "just folks" neighborhood drama that was the specialty of Ozu's studio, Shiro Kido's Kamata division, in the 1930s. The film's stylistic rigor and humanist concern prompted scholar David Bordwell to remark: "If Ozu had made only this seventy-two minute film, he would have to be considered one of the world's great directors."
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
A neglected Ozu masterpiece, The Record of a Tenement
Gentleman has the ineffably sad, timeless quality of his best films. Set in
bombed-out postwar
Film Diary Kevin
Lee from Also Life Like
Ozu's first film after the War is a moving and highly effective piece whose plea on behalf of the underprivileged feels remarkably akin to what the Italian Neo-Realists were doing contemporaneously. Choko Iida gives a marvelous performance as a dour widow who finds herself in custody of a stoic orphan boy with a nasty bedwetting habit. For much of this film Ozu is at his best, when narrative concerns take a back seat to the unbridled joy of witnessing the rhythms of human interaction with all its quirky mannerisms: you're no longer following a story, you're watching life unfold before your eyes. Towards the end, the social agenda upsets this rhythm somewhat, but the last shot of numerous orphans lying about in a playground has a deeply troubling quality that lingers in the memory.
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Tom Mes from
Record of a Tenement Gentleman is the relatively short but very likeable tale of a middle-aged widow unwillingly burdened with a stray child. The boy, who lost his father in the city ruins, says little and simply follows her around wherever she goes. Annoyed by the boy's constant presence, the woman puts him to work with various menial tasks and calls him an idiot for the slightest thing he does wrong.
Made and set in the immediate post-war (the city is shown as a deserted ghost town, full of litter on the breeze but no people) Ozu's concerns with the effect of the reconstruction on family life are already present here. Here however, the widow's treatment of the boy changes from disregard to compassion and the film expresses a strong sense of hope and solidarity. Record of a Tenement Gentleman is rendered quite irresistible by its two leads, the cranky Iida and the wordlessly endearing Sakamoto. The director's remarkable talent for composition is very much in evidence here, particularly in the beach sequences.
User comments from imdb Author: Howard Schumann
from
Record of a Tenement Gentleman by Yasujiro Ozu is a heartwarming
story of the power of love to heal the hardest heart. In this case the heart
belongs to Tane (Shoko Lida), a stern and unforgiving middle-aged widow whose
life is turned upside down when a taciturn little boy is brought to her home by
a fortuneteller, Tashiro (Chishu Ryu). The boy, Kohei (Hohi Aoki) was lost or
abandoned in Chigasaki and followed Tashiro all the way home. After Kohei wets
his bed, Tane scolds him in a gruff manner and tries to pass him off to her
neighbors but nobody seems to want to care for him.
Tane takes the boy back to Chigasaki to look for his father (Eitaro Ozawa) but
learns that he has left for
Future
Movies (Matt McAllister) review
[9/10]
The daily routine of a lower-middle class tenement block is put
the test with the arrival of a diffident young boy, apparently abandoned by his
father. Everyone is reluctant to take the boy in but, after drawing lots, sour
widow Tane ends up saddled with the child. Unable to track down his father (and
after making more than one attempt to shake him) Tane reluctantly lets the boy
stay at her apartment for a few days. Initially the only interaction she can
offer is berating the child for wetting the bed or getting in the way, but
slowly she becomes attached to having him around - and eventually lets him
refer to her as "mother."
What could have been a trite, mawkish tale in lesser hands - you know, watch
how a mean old prune's heart is melted by a charming young tyke! - is moulded
into a typically moving human drama by the great Yasujiro Ozu. The film remains
resolutely low-key and steers clear of melodrama, Ozu (as always) instead
delving into the small dramas of ordinary lives. Ozu manages to extract much
from the subtlest of facial tic or throwaway exchange and the results are warm,
witty and moving - without becoming manipulative. What initially seem like
cold-hearted, cynical characters who reject a grubby kid are gradually revealed
as warm, caring people who just need a little bit of prompting to bring the
best out in them. The film does close with a 'moral' of sorts, the characters
lecturing each other on what they've learnt through the preceding events; but
even then it's not over-the-top and doesn't feel forced upon the story.
Ozu's movies languidly explore the pain but more importantly the joy of
everyday life, and he manages to make it seem a fresh and funny experience that
could compete with any fantastical extra-planetary adventure. The story is
casual and slow-moving, giving Ozu a chance to examine the minutiae of tenement
life that encircle that characters - from blankets blowing in the breeze to (in
one of the most winning scenes) tenants gathering for an impromptu singsong -
and its these details that really make the film come alive. The performances
are universally natural and endearing (apparently the result of Ozu's fervid
insistence on multiple takes), but special mention must surely go to Hohi Aoki
who delivers a masterclass in charming-but-honest child thesping that should be
made compulsory viewing for every kid actor working in Hollywood.
The superlatives run dry here. Go buy it.
Record of a Tenement Gentleman • Senses of Cinema Michael Price from Senses of Cinema, July 26, 2004
Record
of a Tenement Gentleman – 1947, Yasujiro Ozu | Wonders in ... Allan Fish from Wonders in the Dark
The Films of Yasujiro Ozu - by Michael Grost Classic Film and Television, also here: Record of a Tenement Gentleman
DVD Times Noel Megahey, also reviewing THE FLAVOR OF GRREN TEA OVER RICE
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
YASUJIRO OZU «
Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews,
April 20,
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis
Schwartz]
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
A HEN IN THE WIND (Kaze no Naka no Mendori) A- 93
A rarely seen,
postwar Ozu film depicting Japan as a moral wasteland, a film haunted by the
regrettable actions of the past, showing great difficulty finding
reconciliation within one’s own life.
Shot just three years after the war ended while still under the American
occupation, the sound of industrial reconstruction can be heard throughout,
showing signs of rebuilding both outwardly and inwardly, reminiscent of
Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), which uses a similar industrial sound design to
show how humans have been alienated by modernization. This film is unlike any other Ozu film, as it
shows the damaging psychological effects of the brutality of war, including
disturbing behavior within a marriage that includes a rape and domestic
violence. The wrenching melodrama might
seem more at home in a Mizoguchi film, but Ozu does an expert job framing and
editing the scenes. Set in the cramped
quarters of a rundown factory district, the film is bookended by images of a
gigantic, unfinished steel frame that looms high above the populace that
resembles a roller coaster ride at an amusement park, but is more likely the
leftover ruins of something that once stood there, but was demolished during
the war. Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), along
with her young son, live in a rented second story room up the narrow stairs in
someone else’s home, in desperate financial straits while her husband Shuichi
(Shuji Sano) has been away from home for the past four years serving in the
Japanese Army. Having sold nearly her
entire wardrobe, including her last ceremonial kimono’s, she has nothing left
to pay for the needed hospital care when her son falls seriously ill. At the advice of one of her benefactors,
Madame Orie (Reiko
Mizukami), who bought her last kimono, she agrees to take a customer at a local
house of prostitution in order to pay the bill, an event taking place entirely
offscreen, where the audience sees a friendly card game with American jazz playing
in the background and only hears about it afterwards when she painfully
confesses her shame to one of her friends.
Similarly, the
husband’s war efforts are also offscreen, so Ozu makes no effort to dramatize
the actions that drive the narrative, as they speak for themselves. Instead he delves into each individual’s
personal reaction to this blunt trauma, where Tokiki couldn’t be more ashamed,
especially having waited faithfully for her husband all those years, not
wanting to upset him and cause more strain when he comes home, but that’s
exactly what happens, as no sooner does Shuichi arrive back home, but he grows
defiantly distant and angrily suspicious, losing faith in his wife, finding her
actions incredulous, grilling her with incessant questions about exactly where
she went, curious about the kind of man she was with, eventually raping her in
a dark corner before getting up and leaving in the middle of the night. This marital tension contrasts with the earlier
pastoral scenes of Tokiki walking to the riverside with her son, spending her
afternoon having a picnic watching her son play in the high grass as she
watches the boats go by in a timeless reverie waiting for her husband to return
from the war. Shuichi literally walks
through the debris and burnt out ruins of war, where signs of demolition are
everywhere, but Ozu uses corroding cylinders lying on the ground as new lens or
prisms to see through, where people can be seen passing by in the distance,
which is simply a different or new way of looking at something. Shuichi finds the house of prostitution,
pretending to be a client, asking about someone resembling his wife’s
description, learning she worked an evening but never came back, before a young
21-year old is sent to his room, Fusako (Chiyoko Fumiya). In one of the scenes of the film, the brothel
is across the courtyard from an elementary school, where a children’s choir can
be heard through the open windows.
Shuichi chides the young woman for her choice of profession, suggesting
she needs the willpower to do more with her life. When Fusako acknowledges she once attended
the school, Shuichi leaves her money and quickly leaves the premises.
In an empty
landscape overlooking the river, the two meet again, as Shuichi is sitting alone
collecting his thoughts when Fusako joins him, as she often takes her lunch
there. Without acknowledging anything,
it’s clear Shuichi is struggling to understand the young woman, and in doing
so, his wife, understanding perhaps for the first time how women (like men in
the Army) are often forced into undesirable work, often against their will,
enduring great hardships for little gain.
With a backdrop of Japan’s defeat in the war, this is heady stuff, as
it’s a poetic recapitulation of a loss of noble purpose that had been used to
justify the war, where in the end survival is all that matters. In one of the more highly original cinematic
expressions, Shuichi is having a discussion with his employer trying to find a
job for Fusako while the slightly clouded and unclear windows behind them
reveal a couple’s dance class taking place with American jazz playing softly in
the background, where his boss notices Shuichi is ready to forgive the young
girl, but not his wife. It’s clear the
war has left him a battered and bruised man, where he takes out his own
frustrations on his wife. Even as we
sense he’s ready to forgive her, when he hears her apologetic pleas, it recalls
his sense of dishonor and shame at their agonizing humiliation, and loses it,
throwing her down the stairs. Out of
shame, Tokiki lies to the landlady, claiming she clumsily fell down the stairs,
a desperate act to protect what’s left of the marital sanctity and their honor,
even as they’ve been forced to lead such broken lives. Her fall is prefaced by an earlier moment
when Shuichi angrily kicks a tin can down the stairs, where the sound
reverberations play in our heads as we recall the can noisily falling down the
stairs. The image of Tokiki slowly pulling herself back to her feet and limping up those
stairs, with what appears to be a sprained or broken ankle, while her husband
simply watches and stares in amazement, offering no help whatsoever, is an
unsettling reminder of the painful difficulties that lie ahead, a reflection of
the broken spirit of the nation that must heal itself from the disastrous ruins
of war. This disturbing finale is
heartbreaking for its lack of resolution, as there remains unfinished business
at hand. The unusual openness in exposing the disgrace and humiliation of defeat in
this film led to Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949), another national reconstruction
film that becomes an extension of the nation’s quest for identity and a
restoration of moral order.
Time Out review also seen here: A Hen
in the Wind
Ozu himself considered this a failure, but its tale of a soldier who returns home from the war to find his wife has resorted to prostitution in order to nurse their sick child shames many a lesser director's manifest successes despite its overtly melodramatic elements. The symmetrically structured narrative, concentrating first on the woman's plight, then on the husband's rejection of her and eventual reconciliation, and the outbreak of angry violence extraordinarily heightened against the placid domestic background, leave no doubt where Ozu's sympathies lie and of his concern for the erosion of the traditional family system.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
This postwar drama stars Mizoguchi’s favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, as a woman driven to prostitution for survival. Destitute as she awaits her husband’s return from the army, she tries to make a living first as a seamstress and then by selling the few goods she has. But when her son falls ill and she has to pay the hospital bills, a neighbor advises her to start working the street. More complex and ambiguous than many of the other Japanese films made under the American postwar occupation, A Hen in the Wind marks the onset of Ozu’s celebrated late style, which emerges in the film’s strikingly crisp photography and its singular patterns of narration, composition, and editing.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
A sensitive and powerful examination of the moral compromises made during World War II and the toll they take on families. Kinuyo Tanaka gives another of her sensitive and compelling performances as a woman forced into prostitution to care for her sick child, and is unable to keep her secret when her husband returns from the front. Ozu takes on the topic of prostitution while steering well clear of its potential for sordidness (something I find both a virtue and a limitation... in some ways it's *too* tactful). The scenes between the two exceptional leads contribute to a film blessed with some of the most uncomortable scenes Ozu has filmed, delving deep into raw unresolved emotions of guilt, honor and devotion.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
This dark foray into seemingly Mizoguchian territory in fact revisits the storyline of Ozu's own WOMAN OF TOKYO. In the earlier film, a woman secretly supports her brother's education by working at a bordello, only to be violently reproached when he finds out. Here, with her husband away at the battlefront, a young mother (Kinuyo Tanaka, heartbreaking) prostitutes herself for one night in order to save her ailing child. Learning her actions upon his return, her husband responds with a shocking, physical savagery. Even more atmospheric in its depiction of Occupation Tokyo than RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN, A HEN IN THE WIND finds the postwar metropolis littered with tawdry film posters, army ration tin cans, and cartons of penicillin.
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
Ozu's late film are far more varied than "common wisdom"
would have it -- but, by any measure, "Hen in the Wind" (from 1948)
is especially "atypical". This is the only Ozu film I've seen (out of
21 or 20) that has a tangible (and even raw) physicality -- it is more like
proto-Imamura than "standard" Ozu (no -- Imamura was not yet working
as Ozu's assistant -- that only began around 1951). Characters crawl, slither,
and slide about. Sometimes, visually oversized bare feet stick into the
foreground. Kinuyo Tanaka loses all self possession at the climax, and practically
keens her dialog -- at a much higher pitch than I've ever heard her use in any
other film.
This is an interesting story that deals with the collateral damage caused by
WW2 (and the ensuing occupation) -- as it affected the lives of one young married
couple. It was a flop with the audience, I guess -- so it became a path not
traveled further. Artistically, it may not be completely successful, but it was
a worthy effort.
User reviews from imdb Author: ky_chong
"A Hen in the Wind" would be an incredible addition to any
director's oeuvre, not least Ozu's, although unlike what some reviewers say
here, this film doesn't exactly feel to me to be atypical of the director. A
caring mother whose husband isn't back from WWII has to deal with the rising
costs and difficult conditions of immediate postwar
CultureCartel.com
(Dan Callahan) review [4/5]
A Hen in
the Wind is one of Yasujiro Ozu's most painful movies. It's also one
of his best.
This Japanese master, a mysterious prince of the art of resignation, has been
known in the West for a handful of 1950s movies dealing with the essential
themes of time, loss and, specifically, sons and daughters leaving the nest of
the family. The New York Film Festival is in the middle of showing every extant
Ozu film, and the gaps that are being filled in are quite fascinating.
A Hen in the Wind
was made in 1948, just a few years after World War Two. Ozu begins this film
with shots of towering industrial buildings and shabby little shacks. Finding
beauty amid the aftermath of war, searching out the poetry in ugliness, this is
what Ozu is trying to do in this film, and much more.
Kinuyo Tanaka, arguably the greatest actress
Ozu punctuates her dilemma with shots of empty rooms that grow ever more
desolate. He seems shy of this material, as if he wants to retreat from
Tanaka's pain into visual abstractions. Perhaps, though, he is trying to
support his heroine with these shots, too.
After her ordeal is over, Tanaka has a yearning talk about time passing with an
old girlhood friend, and she finds a certain relief in looking up at the sky.
Still, she wishes that her son would grow up quickly. This is not a self-aware
woman. This is a woman who is not given to independent thought. Yet she feels
the injustice of her situation.
Her husband returns. She has always told him everything, and so she blurts out
what she has done. After this confession, Ozu uses wild changes of perspective
to show the couple in the same hunched over position on opposite sides of the
room.
The husband finally shoves her roughly, and their child shoots them a
reproachful look. Then, in a masterful series of cinematic ellipses, Ozu gives
us the sense that Tanaka's husband fucks her purely out of spite and wounded
vanity. A moth buzzes around a light bulb, and the moth's shadow is reflected
on the husband's face, a perfect visual symbol of his rage and discontent.
In the film's most lyrical scene, the husband goes to the whorehouse to see
what his wife has been through. He talks to a sweet, hard-up young girl. She
shares her lunch with him by a river, and Ozu emphasizes their separateness and
their longing to connect to each other (it's like Antonioni without the
rhetoric). When the girl gets defensive and turns her back to the camera, the
wind blowing through her thin flowered blouse is enough to break your heart
forever. He promises to get her a job, and follows through on this promise. His
friend at work tells him, “Use your will instead of your feelings. Control
yourself.”
Though he tries to follow his friend's advice, the husband's outrage is so
severe when he returns home that he knocks Tanaka down the steep stairs of
their house. The actress herself looks like she takes quite a tumble, which
adds to the shock.
On one hand, this climax is unacceptable to a modern audience, even ludicrous
as the husband stands at the top of the stairs and casually asks Tanaka if she
is alright -— that he doesn't go down to help her seems absurdly harsh. Lifting
her twisted limbs up off the floor, Tanaka's weak assurances to him that she is
fine would be funny if they weren't so appalling and if we hadn't invested
ourselves emotionally in the film. With Ozu behind the camera and Tanaka in
front of it, not involving yourself in this film is not an option.
On the other hand, the image of Tanaka limping up the stairs is a powerful
metaphor for the broken spirit of
Perhaps in that time and in that culture this brutal ending played differently.
Today, A Hen in
the Wind manages to be the transcendent Ozu's most disturbing movie.
It is the one Ozu film I have seen that leaves a bitter aftertaste.
Building
from Ground Zero: A HEN IN THE WIND
Jonathan Rosenbaum,
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] Region 3
Next Projection [Matthew Blevins]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
A Hen in the Wind (1948) - Yasujiro Ozu (Ozu-san.com)
Strictly
Film School [Ozu Centenary notes] Acquarello
Woman of Tokyo and A Hen in the Wind - BAM/PFA - Film Programs Judy Bloch
The Portage Theater: Events - A Hen In The Wind
A Hen in the Wind | Chicago Reader Reece Pendleton
A Hen in the Wind (1948) Directed by Yasujiro Ozu - The World of ... Jon Avo
The Digital Fix [Anthony Nield] review for final film, AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON
A Hen in the Wind The Auteurs
A Hen in the Wind - Time Out Chicago
LATE SPRING (Banshun)
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
The first and finest telling of a story Ozu was to remake with
variations many times, Late Spring focuses on the dilemma faced by a young
woman (Hara) who lives with her widowed father. She refuses several marriage
offers, preferring to keep her father company rather than assume the duties of
a housewife and mother. Determined that she will wed, he lets her think that he
plans to remarry. Hailed by Donald Richie as “one of the most perfect, the most
complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese
cinema,” Late Spring was also one of Ozu’s personal favorites.
User comments from imdb Author: Daryl Chin (lqualls-dchin)
from
"Late Spring" remains possibly Ozu's perfect depiction of postwar Japanese family life; this study of a widower (Chishu Ryu) and his unmarried daughter (Setsuko Hara) and the societal pressures to conform (they are happy with their lives, but all their friends and relatives think the daughter must get married) is full of subtle humor, gentle poignancy, and sharp insights. The ending, with the father left all alone, is devastating: it is difficult to express in words how the act of peeling an apple can be made to convey so much emotion, but Ozu's mastery is such that he is able to make this gesture seem as earth-shattering as the most special-effects laden action climax.
A widowed professor (Ryu) and his grown-up daughter (Hara) share a life of domestic tranquillity in a Tokyo suburb, but when he is made to realise that this girl should now be married, Ryu gently overrules her reluctance and arranges a suitable match - a Gary Cooper lookalike! Some rate this simple, affecting film even above Tokyo Story. Certainly it contains passages of great beauty and humanity, and there can be no faulting the heartbreaking performances of Ryu and Hara in roles very similar to the ones they play in the later picture. It was a favourite of the director's too (Ozu lived with his own mother throughout his life) - but it must be said that while the emotions are universal, the social customs which engender them seem more 'foreign' here than in most of the oeuvre. Hara's disgust at the thought that a widower should remarry, for example. Nevertheless, this is a remarkable, piercing film, and central to an understanding of Ozu's work. He tackled much the same story in colour in 1962's An Autumn Afternoon, his last film.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Ozu's favorite, LATE
SPRING brought about a fruitful reunion with screenwriter Kogo Noda that
would last for the remainder of his career. It also marked the Ozu debut of
Setsuko Hara, in the first of many classic pairings with regular Chishu Ryu.
Hara plays Noriko, a loving, uncommonly old-fashioned daughter who refuses to
marry so that she can take care of her widowed father, Professor Somiya (Ryu).
When Somiya begins to worry that she might grow despondent once he passes away,
he devises a ruse to incite her to marry - namely, by pretending to consider
remarriage himself. A film of subtle glances and quiet, eloquent gestures, LATE SPRING contains one of the most
indelible images Ozu ever put to screen: the sight of Ryu returning to an empty
house following his daughter's wedding, sitting alone and peeling an apple.
With its prototypical late Ozu storyline, the seminal LATE SPRING set the template for such later reworkings as EARLY SUMMER, LATE AUTUMN, and AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON. It can also lay
claim to being one of the director's most influential films, counting among its
many admirers directors Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien (who incorporated a
clip into his historical epic, Good Men, Good Women).
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Jasper Sharp from
Late Spring is perhaps the archetypal Ozu story. A widowed
college professor named Shukichi (Ryu) lives with his daughter Noriko (Hara) in
the city of
Donald Richie states that this is the first film in which what is now recognised as Ozu's unique style came to the fore. The plot, which is similar in set up to that of Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951) and An Autumn Afternoon (Samma No Aji, 1962) is condensed to little more than a series of incidents, and the editing style, complete with the famous low camera angles and non-matching eyeline shots, is slow but assuredly paced. Even the names of the characters would be used again in his later films to represent specific character archetypes - for example, in Tokyo Story, Hara would again play a vibrant single daughter past usual marrying age named Noriko, and Ryu would reprise his role as the patient and philosophical patriarch Shukichi. The picture composition is perfect, as we are led through a series of locations, which are a mixture of Western-styled Ginza cafés and the more traditional family seat in Kamakura, Japan's ancient capital in the period of the same name (1188-1333), one hour south of Tokyo and close to Shochiku's Ofuna studios, where many of Ozu's films were shot. With Noriko's modern Western clothes at odds with the kimonos of the other women that surround her, including her aunt, Ozu's poignantly portrays of the inevitable break-up of the family as the lifestyles of the two generations become necessarily pushed further apart.
Raging
Bull Movie Reviews (Vanes Naldi) review
[4/4] also seen
here from Metal Asylum: Banshun (Late
Spring) - Yasujiro Ozu Film Movie Review
Every time I watch a work by Yasujiro Ozu, I don't feel like I'm
watching a film but instead a documentary on
Noriko (Setsuko Hara) lives with her father (Ozu's veteran Ryu Chisyu), a widower who spent his life studying while leaving the role of "housewife" to his daughter. The environment in which she grew up in, with a great deal of attention and love from her father (trying to balance off the loss of her mother) provides her with all the love she needs. She has, in fact, a great relationship with her father. It's not all patriarchal, but instead based on faith and understanding. Her father Shukichi is a good man, honest and loving. It seems like everything is perfect in Somiya's house; the only problem is, although it doesn't seem to bother Noriko, Shukichi realizes she's still unmarried.
One day, an old friend of Shukichi pays him a visit to give him news that he just remarried. Onodera-san asks Shukichi if Noriko was married yet, and is surprised to find out she isn't. He reminds him about his duty to let Noriko leave the house and experience her life as a wife. Shukichi's sister, entering the conversation, suggests that a good candidate for Noriko's hand would be Shukichi's assistant Hattori. He's young, intelligent, gentle, and of good spirits.
After spending an afternoon together with Hattori, Noriko is asked by her father what she thinks about him, if she'd picture him as a good husband. She certainly would be interested, but confesses that he's already engaged. Hearing the news, her aunt Masa proposes a new "prospect," a young student who seems to resemble Noriko's favorite actor Gary Cooper. She goes so far as to lie, saying that she'd be the "matchmaker" for Shukichi's upcoming marriage with a young widow named Mrs. Miwa. This is obviously not the case, but Shukichi is so pressed by his social "duty" that he keeps the deception alive to help Noriko make her choice and marry the young prospect. He knows that she'll take a husband if she believes her father won't need her attention because he'll get attention from his new wife.
What was once an ever smiling, happy, and excited Noriko is transformed into a sad caricature of her former self. Noriko slowly realizes that she has to move on with life, leave her father. This makes her terribly sad, but she decides to go on and marry, to make her father proud and fulfill her (and his) social duty. The last scenes are both beautiful and moving, when father and daughter realize they've got to leave each other even though they regret it.
The sheer beauty of this film lies in its simplicity. It shows the inner beauty of everyday life, the simple and loving relationship between a father and his daughter. We understand how the codes of society can be brutal at times, how LIFE can be brutal at times. This is done gradually, without any manipulation or major event that causes Noriko to rethink, to change her vision. Like the Late Spring, Noriko realizes too late what she has to do. Even if it's painful, she decides to go through with it because ultimately she loves her father and respects him too much to give him displeasure. She wants to see him happy, and finally decides to go on with life.
Late Spring is as honest as they come. It's an uncliched look at life, relationships, and how they evolve. It accomplishes its goal without any overly dramatic tearjerking scenes. The mood is lighthearted, but gradually turns sad when we realize with them that there's no escape from the social "trap" of marriage. Conformism is a duty in this kind of society.
The film features the incomparable style of every Ozu production, with minimal movement and action, but great focus on emotions, both facial and vocal. The actors portray happiness and sadness in such a believable and effective way. Setsuko Hara is particularly excellent in this regard, having light in her face and smiling, but gradually and believably showing how it can turn to tears. Ryu Chisyu is reliable as always, showing the warm and worried side of a loving father. The tremendous realism and the honesty it's presented with makes this film one of Ozu's best works, and one of the best societal portrayals of love, devotion to family, separation, and the passage of time. Beautiful in its simplicity.
Late
Spring: Home with Ozu Criterion
essay by Michael Atkinson,
Late Spring (1949) - The Criterion Collection
Late
Spring (1949) - #331 David
Blakseslee from Criterion Reflections,
Umbrella: Issue 2, Spring 2007 - Dan Schneider on Yasujiro Ozu's ... Dan Schneider on LATE SPRING from Umbrella Journal, Spring 2007
The Films of Yasujiro Ozu - by Michael Grost Classic Film and Television, also here: Late Spring
not coming to
a theater near you (Ian Johnston) review
Colin
Marshall: Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann and Alan Pavelin, also seen here: CineScene.com (Howard Schumann) review
The Onion A.V.
Club dvd review
Scott Tobias
Movie
Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review
[4+/4]
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4.5/5]
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
YASUJIRO OZU «
Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews,
April 20,
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
DVD Times Noel Megahey, Criterion Collection
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5] Criterion
Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection
Film Freak Central Review [Travis
Mackenzie Hoover] Criterion Collection
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] Criterion Collection
DVD
Verdict (Steve Evans) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
Cinema Blend dvd review [Criterion
Collection] Jason Morgan
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Criterion Collection
User comments from imdb (Page 3) Author: Cosmoeticadotcom
(cosmoetica@gmail.com) from
User comments from imdb Author: Ed Uyeshima
from San Francisco, CA, USA
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
DVD Times Noel Megahey on The Noriko Trilogy, also
EARLY SUMMER and
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Late Spring The Auteurs
Late Spring Image page
Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
Screen:
Japanese Life:'Late Spring' by Ozu Opens at New Yorker Vincent Canby from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
THE MUNEKATA SISTERS (Munekata Shimai)
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
When a group of top-ranking actors left Toho during a strike to form their own production company, they engaged Ozu to direct this prestigious adaptation of Jiro Osaragi's serialized novel. Tradition-bound Setsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka) stays faithful to her husband Mimura despite his violent, drunken rages. Her liberated sister Mariko (Naruse regular Hideko Takamine) encourages her to leave him and rekindle a romance with a former lover, Hiroshi, whom she herself is secretly in love with. Meanwhile, their aging father (Chishu Ryu) is diagnosed with cancer. Billed at the time as the most expensive movie in Japanese film history, THE MUNEKATA SISTERS is a high production-value heritage film, shot on picturesque locales throughout the country that Ozu presents with adoring reverence as sites of Japanese tradition.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Two of
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Tom Mes from
Ozu's first film for Shintoho studios veers towards melodrama in a story of two sisters in love with the same man. Both bar owner Setsuko and her younger sister Minako have feelings for Hiroshi, a dealer in European antiques. Minako, who adores anything Western, is immediately drawn to his smart suits and sophistication, but discovers that Setsuko, who is married to an ailing alcoholic, once had an affair with Hiroshi and that the two still carry a torch for each other.
Ozu renders the sibling rivalry not purely in melodramatic terms,
but portrays Minako as a woman who embraces Western influences with such abandon
as to dismiss anything to do with her own culture. She loves the trinkets
Hiroshi brought from
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
The film follows the plight of the upper beautiful, middle-class
Munekata sisters - the conservative and traditional married older sister,
Setsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka) (dressed in a kimono) and the liberal minded and
free-spirited younger sister Mariko (Hideko Takamine) (dressed in Western
attire) - as they struggle to build a new life in postwar Tokyo away from their
beloved, ailing father (Chishu Ryu) by running a small bar. While visiting the
temples of
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
From what I've heard, this is one of the least revered Ozu films, but after first glance I find it to be one of the most fascinating. A naive but zealous girl (Hideko Takamine) proposes marriage to a man who is in love with her sister (Kinuyo Tanaka) who is trapped in a loveless marriage; this is the girl's way of showing concern for her sister, by keeping the man she really loves but cannot have close at hand. It's an odd mix of high comedy and stark social commentary on the social boundaries that define women's roles, and for me it shows as much tonal range as anything I've seen in other Ozu films -- frivolous flirtatious interludes, sincere and tender romantic exchanges, and stark moments of violent rage are held in precarious balance thanks to Ozu's rock solid powers of observation. It's worth seeing this film as Ozu playing as self-consciously and inventively with genres as he did in the 30s -- the girl in some scenes narrates the action like a benshi. I definitely see this as a reworking of WHAT DID THE LADY FORGET?, revisiting the setup of the liberated meddling gamine overturning the fragile co-existence between a hapless housewife and the helpless husband; this time the scene of domestic violence is given the full measure of subtext and consequence that was lacking in the earlier film, adding resonance to what otherwise might be misjudged as straight melodrama. A difficult film to pin down, but no less alluring for it.
User comments from imdb Author: quinolas
This is Ozu's first film produced outside Shochiku. That might
the reason why the story is rather unconventional for an Ozu's film, too
melodramatic and romantic (rather sickly is Mariko's insistence on marrying
Hiroshi and asking her sister to divorce her husband). Also, never before or
after generational differences have been so overtly exposed as well as there
are too many, for an Ozu film, references to the war. Ryu , playing the
sister's father, acts as a mediator (Ozu's alter-ego?) between the two, and
tries to be just, even though his preferences are for old Japan. Whoever
believes that Ozu's films philosophy isn't essentially Buddhist should pay more
attention to Ryu's words of accepting different ways of life and Tanaka final's
refusal to marry Uehara (sign of transcending the material world and personal
desires or just pure old fashion?) and the ultimate death of Yamamura right
after he gets his long sought job (Karma in action). Takamine Hideko ( a
Naruse's regular) ,playing the role of Munekata Mariko, is extremely funny at
some points. Her outrageous (specially when she visits Hiroshi 's girlfriend
Yoriko or her habit of sticking out her tongue, bodily ticks are essential
elements of the characterisation of Ozu's film actors) behaviour reminded me of
my shock when I first saw I Was Born But… Nevertheless her character gets a bit
boring with her parody of some sort of Noh narrator (the joke just goes for too
long). Also Setsuko Munekata might not be a suitable role for Tanaka Kinuyo, in
particular when she's got to keep smiling (something typical in actresses
working with Ozu) while telling her sister that she decided not to marry
Hiroshi. Technically is what you'd expect from Ozu, interesting matching cuts,
even though I have to say that some shots were very predictable (cut on action
shots) and not as perfect as for example the ones in Tokyo Story (technically
an almost perfect film). Quite unusual for Ozu's work, at least during this
period, are some tracking shots of Hiroshi and Setsuko walking down the street
ending in a beautiful long shot of her disappearing around a corner. Specially
weird is an unmotivated tracking shot to the right, moving away from the
sisters at the entrance of a
The Munekata Sisters might not be the very best of Ozu but I found it
intriguing and funny enough to watch again.
EARLY SUMMER (Bakushû)
User comments from imdb Author: Daryl Chin (lqualls-dchin)
from
"Early Summer" is the second of three films in which Setsuko Hara played a character named Noriko (the first was "Late Spring"; the third was "Tokyo Story"); in all three, the martial status of Noriko is a major plot device. In "Early Summer", as in "Late Spring", the problem is that Noriko is still unmarried, but in "Early Summer", Noriko is part of a large extended family, and their interactions, constant bickering, jovial meddling provide humorous counterpoint. "Early Summer" remains one of the most buoyant of Ozu's films, and shows how he can take the same theme and storyline, and create a comic as opposed to a dramatic work.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
A family drama set in Kamakura, the leisurely, poignant Early
Summer ends, as do so many Ozu films, in tears—theirs and ours. The Mamiya
family takes up the challenge of finding a husband for Noriko (Setsuko Hara), a
happily unmarried “working girl.” Her boss suggests a middle-aged businessman
as a suitable prospect, but Noriko impulsively accepts another proposal and the
family begins to disintegrate—ever so quietly —in the wake of her marriage.
Consistently ranked with Late Spring and
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
Another of Ozu's
poignant dramas concerning the marrying off of an 'old maid' daughter (Setsuko Hara,
superb as ever), though here (unlike in Late Spring and An Autumn
Afternoon) she's subjected to pressure from the whole family, not just a
widowed father. That's about it plot-wise. Typically, Ozu seems more interested
in the texture of family life in the immediate postwar years (with Western
influences affecting a woman's right to choose), in the opportunities for
gentle comedy (particularly involving a couple of kids), and in the film's
formal qualities. The camera is surprisingly mobile at times, but what really
impresses is the use of omission and repetition. Intriguingly, we're kept in
the dark as to what Hara is missing out on, while a simple shot of the sky,
devoid of a balloon seen earlier, speaks volumes about loss, tolerance and
resignation.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
The Mamiya family, boisterous grandchildren and all, enjoy a contented existence and a lively household. They worry, though, about the future of daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who, at twenty-eight, has passed the conventional age of marriage. While her parents and elder brother mull over a marriage prospect, Noriko makes a sudden, impulsive decision of her own. The move befuddles her parents and meets with furious objections from conservative brother Koichi (Chishu Ryu). Ozu seldom depicted three generations living under the same roof, but here he provides an elegy mourning the loss of that traditional ideal in the face of changing social economics. When Noriko marries, the loss of extra income triggers the breakdown of the idyllic, extended household into more modern, nuclear units. The film's original Japanese title, WHEAT HARVEST SEASON, refers to the film's haunting final shots of a wheat field in harvest, an oblique memorial to the war dead, and a reminder from Ozu that Shoji, the Mamiyas' missing son referred to throughout the film, was also a casualty of that disastrous conflict.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
Not only are no two Ozu movies the same, but each marks a notable development along the continuum of one of the most formidable artistic visions in film. This mid-career masterpiece is no exception -- its unique qualities lie partly in its assiduous exploration of interior space in an ingenious opening sequence, beautifully capturing the rhythms and choreography of a family household as they go about their morning routine. It's no wonder that this is the favorite Ozu movie of formalist film scholar than David Bordwell -- Ozu frames and re-frames his compositions, reinventing spaces with each cut and shot, turning an ordinary house into a cinematic funhouse -- only PLAYTIME, IVAN THE TERRIBLE and LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD have offered similar wonders as far as I'm concerned. Neither is this style for style's sake: as we follow the story of how this family is pressured by social convention to marry off their daughter, the inevitable disintegration of this family makes the synchronicity and synergy of that marvelous opening sequence all the more poignant. In between, there is a rich variety of interactions between three generations of families and friends as they meet their fates, individually and collectively, one exquisite, fleeting moment at a time.
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Postwar Tokyo;
Noriko’s family prevails upon her to marry, but she chooses a man of whom they
disapprove. He is twelve years her senior, has a child, and is relocating to
Akita. Noriko’s family worries that she will not end up
happy.
In the aftermath of
war, with Japan’s authoritarian ruler deposed and democracy dawning, the
structured, stable Japanese family, as a social force, has devolved. A small
child tells his grandfather (twice) that he hates him; her older brother
(Chishu Ryu, superb) tells Noriko she is impudent to men—to which Noriko
counters, “Men used to be too important.” “Our family has scattered,” the
father will say once Noriko has left. “We shouldn’t want too much,” he tells
his wife (twice). Is this the path to happiness—being content with what life
gives rather than asking for more? Perhaps an attitude of acceptance provides
the only consolation and relief for life’s disappointments, and life’s
transience.
Bakashû, delicately composed, is sensitive to
light and to nuances of feeling; yet the accumulated result is overwhelming. No
film more powerfully conveys the passage of time—here, a paradoxical, slow,
inexorable rush. Sisters walk the beach, talking, the camera following, or the
father and mother sit outdoors side by side, discussing family, the low, angled
camera favoring their backs. Much of their anxious conversation is pressured by
time—human time measured against eternity.
As ever with Ozu,
human beings are paramount. In a beautiful long shot, a loose balloon scales up
the sky. “Some child must be crying,” the father
notes.
Ozu’s characters experience happiness, when they do, not because of good fortune but from the way they engage life: with humility, and with their philosophical stance. This life is gently moving, always, imperceptibly, towards the last end.
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review
[5/5]
Yasujiro Ozu was still largely unknown to Western audiences when
his delicate family drama Early Summer was released in 1951. Since that
time, new prints of the film have no doubt been made; still, I imagine that
most Americans will never have seen an Early Summer in any format as
radiant as the new Criterion DVD release of the film. It matters; Ozu’s studied
composition and luminous black-and-white cinematography invite adjectives such
as “luscious,” even as his content refutes the extravagance and sensuality of
the term. Criterion’s Early Summer is a marvel of contrast, restoring to
the screen a full palette of blacks, whites, and grays; a scene such as that
near the end in which two women walk the dunes by the sea reveals a visual
artist working at the peak of his form. You could lose yourself in such images
indefinitely, even if the proceedings offered nothing to hold your mind.
But they do. Early Summer, like many of Ozu’s “home dramas,” is the
story of a family – three generations of it – that struggles to find serenity
within the cycle of life that the state of being human embodies. (Ozu’s titles
often find a metaphorical connection in the cycle of the seasons: Late
Spring, Early Autumn, Late Autumn.) The central figure is
28-year-old Noriko, an attractive young single woman who lives with her brother
Koichi, his wife Fumiko, their two young boys, and her elderly parents. We also
meet her neighbors (a widower her age and his mother), her three girlfriends, a
great-uncle who comes for a visit, her employer, and her brother’s co-worker.
Present in the thoughts of the family, though never pictured, is Noriko’s
brother Shoji, a soldier who remains unaccounted for from the war.
I didn’t count, but David Bordwell, who wrote one of the accompanying essays,
did: 19 main characters, 20 if missing Shoji is counted. Bordwell makes the
intriguing point that in Early Summer Ozu foretells the kind of ensemble
drama, propelled by the interactions and encounters common to any community of
people, that contemporary audiences find in Amores
Perros, Traffic,
and almost any film of Robert Altman’s. The various plot threads are gathered
loosely into a rich depth of narrative, so that an event affecting one
character – the widowed neighbor is transferred to a distant town, for instance
– reverberates throughout the film.
At the film’s core are the efforts of Noriko’s family to find her a husband.
Noriko herself, infallibly good-natured, seems oblivious to the undertaking and
indifferent to its outcome. When, ultimately, this proves not to be true, the
decision she suddenly makes changes the life of her family forever. Part of the
brilliance of Early Summer is the extent to which this decision affects
the viewer as well; the film moves along with the seeming ease of a Leave it
to Beaver episode, and it’s astonishing to suddenly find yourself at the
brink of these unforeseen emotional depths.
This illusory ease is what’s greatest about Ozu in general and Early Spring
in particular. The film’s style, as serene as a sand garden, is the perfect
vehicle for chronicling the small pleasures and disappointments that comprise
the bigger enterprise of life. Ozu’s genius was to capture these moments in a
way no other filmmaker has.
The Criterion release also includes an essay from Jim Jarmusch, a commentary
track by Donald Richie, and a video remembrance of the director by former
members of his cast and crew.
Early
Summer Criterion essay by David
Bordwell,
Early Summer Criterion Collection
Early
Summer (1951) - #240 David Blakeslee
from Criterion Reflections,
Early Summer -
Reverse Shot Andrew Tracy,
April 4, 2005
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
Colin
Marshall: Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)
The Films of Yasujiro
Ozu - by Michael Grost Classic Film
and Television, also here: Early Summer
The
Listening Ear an analysis of the crane shot in Ozu's Early
Summer, October 4, 2008
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Robert Edwards) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD
Verdict (Mike Pinsky) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon) dvd
review [4/5] [Criterion Collection]
KQEK
(Michael John Derbecker) dvd review [Criterion Release]
Film-Forward.com [DVD review] Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
Gapers
Block: Airbags - Yasujiro Ozu, Part Two: <em>The Story of ... Gordon McAlpin from the
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
User comments from imdb Author: Ed Uyeshima
from
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Cosmoeticadotcom
(cosmoetica@gmail.com) from
DVD Times Noel Megahey on The Noriko Trilogy, also LATE
SPRING and
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing
Early Summer The Auteurs
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
THE FLAVOR OF GREEN TEA OVER RICE (Ochazuke no Aji)
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice has one of the great film titles, even though it might have more appropriately been called “Contempt.” Ozu set out to portray a man from the viewpoint of a woman, and produced this subtly painful comedy about a married couple drifting apart. He is a stolid, quiet country-bred businessman; she’s a city-bred snob bored with domestic life and scornful of her husband’s rustic ways (including his taste for the eponymous treat). When a favorite niece comes to visit, the unhappy couple is confronted with the possibility of reconciliation.
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
An unassuming husband finds the nerve to employ non-violent resistance against his contemptuous wife after hanging out for an evening with a rebellious niece who skipped her own interview with an arranged fiance. I really could have cared less about the story as the characters were so lovingly drawn and their interactions were a joy to listen to, and that's really where the action is in Ozu movies, the sounds and spaces between people as they repeatedly bump into each other and modify each other's state of mind in ways both large and small. Masterful as is almost always the case with Ozu, the film only let me down at the end when it seemed to side firmly with the henpecked husband, as if this were a wimp's rendition of TAMING OF THE SHREW.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Tired of her husband Mokichi's unsophisticated, earthy manners,
spoiled, snobbish Taeko escapes on a hot spring getaway with her friends from
the rich wives club. In her absence, Mokichi encourages her young niece to run
away from an arranged date. The unpardonable faux pas provokes Taeko to unleash
her full fury, daring any further breaches of propriety. Ozu returned to
Raging
Bull Movie Reviews (Vanes Naldi) review
[3.5/4]
Yasujiro Ozu was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but he never got the credit he deserved for many reasons. He was the most "Japanese" of the country's famous directors, the biggest traditionalist, thus his movies "weren't too marketable" because they catered mostly to Japanese culture, habits, & social behavior. Another reason he didn't get his due might be his style of directing, which is like slow motion with minimal movement from the actors but a lot of dialogue and facial expression.
The main theme Ozu's films portrayed was
Ochazuke no aji explores marriage and its hurdles, with a subplot involving arranged marriages. Taeko is frustrated by her marriage with a steady businessman. She is tired of the continuity and repetitivity of her husband's job, of their bland relationship and its rules. She grows distant from her husband's lack of class and trivial habits, and talks about it with her friends. She has an argument with her husband over their niece Setsuko, who just walked out of her marriage because she felt uncomfortable with the rules of arranged marriages. Setsuko feels optimistic about love and wants to find the right man instead of someone who was "assigned" to her by social virtues. While Sadao is understanding and nice, Taeko is full of rage while trying to explain to his niece that what she did was wrong. Something eventually will make her understand that the most important thing about a husband is his reliability, not his class or demeanor, and their relationship will tie back together.
Due to the way he tells his stories, Ozu is a really difficult
director to get into unless you're Japanese or understand their culture.
There's no manipulation to make the plot more "
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Future
Movies (Matt McAllister) review
[10/10]
User comments from imdb Author: GyatsoLa
from Ireland
DVD Times Noel Megahey, also reviewing RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Screen:
A Domestic Comedy by Ozu:The Cast ' Flavor of Green Tea,' 1952 Film, Arrives
Effect of Time Makes It Social History
Vincent Canby from The New York
Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Henrik Sylow
TOKYO Tokyo
a thoughtful meditation on the
transitory nature of life
Very much in the same vein as Kurosawa’s IKIRU, which was released one year earlier, this slowly evolving story captures the small moments in each day which comprise the day, as grandparents from the country decide to visit their grown children in Tokyo, and by extension the younger generation, postwar Japan, whose middle-class lives are too busy for them, two married children and a daughter-in-law, the widow of another son killed in the war, as they have their own lives where their schedules are full, leaving them little to no time at all for their parents, who are grateful for even the brief moments they can spend together. But when they sense they are a burden, they decide to cut their visit short and return home, but the grandmother falls critically ill. A telegram to each child communicates the urgency and they all rush to her bedside, one son too late, but the others are there as she dies peacefully in the night. What happens afterwards resonates, etched in our perception of family and becomes the poetic beauty of the film.
Moments of kindness appear effortless, and happen all too infrequently, but they are appreciated with a great sense of awareness and dignity by this elderly couple. Chishu Ryu plays the grandfather, a former school administrator, with an extraordinary degree of gentility and grace, who actually goes out with friends and returns home drunk one night, as no one offered him a place to sleep, so it was perhaps his own delicate sense of not having to ask, yet he was scolded for this behavior many times over by his children. Grandchildren are spoiled and disinterested, thinking only of themselves, whose behavior causes brief laughter, as the parents smile to cover up their own embarrassment. Setsuko Hara plays the considerate daughter-in-law who always places the grandparent’s concerns above her own, who is trapped in her world of showing kindness to others, but is honest enough to know her limitations are keeping her lonely, still grieving for a man who has been dead for nearly a decade. A younger daughter, a local school teacher, still lives with her parents and is appalled at the rudeness and self-centered behavior of her older siblings who can’t rush home fast enough after their mother’s death, asking the daughter-in-law at one point, “Isn’t life disappointing?” And her answer, quite simply: “Yes, it is.”
A brilliantly directed film, the austere, “deceptively simple” look builds the details of everyday life into a moving climax that couldn’t be more honest and unpretentious, looking underneath the politeness and quiet smiles to find sad, alienated voices lost in the modern world, establishing a beautiful pace through transitory images of shrines, train stations and railroad tracks with trains passing by blowing their whistles, a home overlooking rooftops below, and beyond, a tranquil river where boats off in the distance can be heard puttering by. The minutiae of moments are recorded using Ozu’s fixed camera positions, which pass no judgments but simply observe, familiarizing us with the ordinary through observations of great detail, rhythm, and restraint.
Geoff Andrew from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
“Isn’t life disappointing?” asks a teenage girl of her
widowed sister-in-law at her mother’s funeral; “Yes,” comes the answer – with a
smile. This brief exchange, near the
close of Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece TOKYO STORY, typifies the unsentimental
mood of becalmed acceptance that distinguishes his work. The performances, setting – the middle-class
home the girl has shared with, until now, both of her elderly parents – and
dialogue are wholly naturalistic in tone, and never for a moment seem as if
they’ve been arranged as part of some grand climax, yet by the time the words
are uttered, they carry enormous emotional and philosophical weight. Ozu’s films were marvelously understated,
deceptively simple affairs, mostly depicting the everyday domestic and
professional rituals of middle-class Japanese life with an idiosyncratic lack
of emphasis (dramatic or stylistic) that might mislead the inattentive into
believing them banal. Here, all that happens
is that old folks leave their youngest daughter at home in the provinces to
visit their other children in Tokyo; they’ve never been to the capital, but
make the effort in the knowledge that time is running short. But the kids have their own families now, and
shunt their parents around, barely disguising their need to get on with their
busy lives in postwar
All this is observed, as was
Ozu’s custom, with a static camera placed a couple feet off the ground; there
is only one shot in the film that moves – and even then it tracks with
inconspicuous slowness, albeit at the very moment when the old folks decide to
go home. So how does Ozu hold our
attention, when what we see or hear is so uninflected by what most viewers
consider dramatic or unusual? It all
comes down to the contemplative quality of his gaze, implying that any human
activity, however “unimportant,” is worthy of our attention. In contrast to his own particular (and
particularly illuminating) cinematic style, his character’s experiences,
emotions, and thoughts are as “universal” as anything in the movies – a paradox
that has rightly enshrined this film’s reputation as one of the greatest ever
made.
Time Out review Tony Rayns
Ozu's best known (because most widely distributed) movie is
a very characteristic study of the emotional strains within a middle class
Japanese family that has come to Tokyo from the country and dispersed itself.
All that happens in dramatic terms is that the family grandparents arrive in
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Tokyo Story has regularly placed on the top ten lists of greatest
films of all time, along with Rules Of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc,
and Citizen Kane. It should be seen at least once, if not once a year. An
elderly couple journeys to
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: Daryl Chin (lqualls-dchin)
from
"Tokyo Story" is considered Ozu's masterpiece; it continues to be one of the most widely admired of Ozu's films, and one of the most immediately accessible. The theme of the disintegration of a family as a microcosm of societal changes is one which is universal: this is the theme of Ford's "How Green Was My Valley", of Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons", of Satyajit Ray's "The Music Room", but Ozu is able to tell his story without the usual paraphernalia of melodrama. The story unfolds in an almost lifelike fashion, and we in the audience feel as if we are eavesdropping on this family. Gradually, small details and little incidents build, until such scenes as the widowed daughter-in-law's confession of loneliness create an overwhelming empathy.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Borrowing its premise from Leo McCarey's Depression-era
masterpiece Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), as well as incorporating
elements from Ozu's own BROTHERS AND
SISTERS OF THE TODA FAMILY,
TOKYO STORY follows an elderly rural couple (Chishu Ryu and Chieko
Higashiyama) whose visit to the city finds them callously treated by their
self-absorbed offspring. Only the surprising kindness of their widowed
daughter-in-law (a luminous Setsuko Hara) provides a measure of spiritual
relief. The occasion for the most inspired pairing of Hara and Ryu since their
collaboration in Late Spring, TOKYO
STORY climaxes with a poignant, electrifying exchange between the
in-laws acknowledging life's inevitable disappointments that Ryu's otherworldly
serenity renders little short of sublime. Deservedly a perennial favorite when
it comes to polls of the Greatest Films Ever Made, TOKYO STORY counts among its many partisans Jim Jarmusch, Paul
Schrader, Lindsay Anderson, and Aki Kaurismaki.
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Jasper Sharp from
Aging couple Shukichi (Ryu) and Tomi (Higashiyama) leave their
home by the
Reducing Tokyo Story to a straightforward synopsis does little to indicate the power and beauty of the best known of Ozu's works. With drama kept to a bare minimum, Ozu's films rest on nuance, observation and character, as well as the unobtrusively immaculate nature of his celebrated technique that has had him labelled as "the most Japanese of directors". Though the long running time and slow pacing are not going to appeal to all audiences, Tokyo Story is a true classic of world cinema.
MoMA | The Collection | Yasujiro Ozu. Tokyo Story (Tokyo ... 1999, revised 2004
Tokyo Story is one of the greatest masterpieces of
Japanese cinema. Its director, Ozu, is more firmly rooted in the twentieth
century than any other Japanese director. His films do not rely on exotic
historical spectacle, elaborate costumes, and tales of honor and conquest. He
is also the filmmaker most committed to the traditional values of institutions
such as the family. There is no exoticism in Ozu's Tokyo Story, and no
sweeping action, no horses, no historical reenactments, only people. But the
viewer is compensated by the intensity of feeling his domestic dramas engender
and by the sincerity of his message. People sit around drinking green tea; they
sit at noodle bars; they sit in offices. Ozu's contemplative camera hardly ever
moves, and his actors seldom emote.
The understated
performances of this film's well-matched actors complement the serenity of
Ozu's atmosphere and the sparseness of his naturalistic dialogue. The film
explores family dynamics and the conflict of the traditional versus the
contemporary through an aging couple's visit to their adult children in the
city. Although Tokyo Story is about tangible loss, its radiant
spirituality transcends death.
Derek Malcolm's Century of Films (2000) Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, May 4, 2000
Those brought up on
the energetic diet of American cinema may find it hard to appreciate the
quietist art of the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. He has been called
the poet of family life, capable of taking the seemingly trivial and making
great drama of it. Nothing was too small to be significant.
Ozu steadfastly peers
into the hearts and minds of his characters until we feel we know them
intimately. And the loyalty of those who love his work is as absolute as his
own conviction. The number of film-makers who have made pilgrimages to his
grave (marked simply by the Japanese word for nothing) runs into dozens.
Ozu started making
films in 1927 and was one of the last to forsake the silent cinema. Much of
this early work has been lost or destroyed. But we know from examples that he
wasn't always as calmly contemplative as he was in his late work, which reached
the west only in the 60s. He could make boisterous comedies and earthy chronicles
of family life, containing outrageous sight gags. In the last stretch of his
life, however, he had refined his art so much that it hardly seemed like art at
all.
His most famous film,
and certainly one of his masterpieces, is Tokyo Story. In it an elderly couple
are taken to visit their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain
them, the children pack them off to a noisy resort. Returning to Tokyo, the old
woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the old man
gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realise they are a burden,
and simply try to smooth things over as best they can. By now the children
have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when their mother is taken ill
and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after attending the funeral. A simple proverb
expresses their failure: "Be kind to your parents while they are alive.
Filial piety cannot reach beyond the grave." The last sequence is of the
old man alone in his seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops
of the town and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.
The film condemns no
one and its sense of inevitability carries with it only a certain resigned
sadness. "Isn't life disappointing," someone says at one point. Yet
the simple observations are so acute that you feel that no other film could
express its subject matter much better.
Ozu shoots his story
with as little movement of the camera as possible. We view scenes almost always
from the floor, lower than the eye level of a seated character. He insisted
that no actor was to dominate a scene. The balance of every scene had to be
perfect. Chishu Ryu, who often played the father in Ozu's films about family
life, once had to complete two dozen devoted to raising a tea cup.
Tokyo Story was followed
by eight other films, all of them as masterful, and a group named after the
seasons, including Early Spring and An Autumn Afternoon. Each was about the
problems of ordinary family life. While their conservative nature made younger
more polemical Japanese directors, such as Imamura and Oshima, impatient, their
universality has come to be recognised the world over. Ozu was the most
Japanese of film-makers, but his work can still cross most cultural barriers.
Tokyo
Story - TCM.com James Steffen
Synopsis: Shukishi and Tomi Hirayama, an elderly couple,
make a trip to
Virtually unseen in the West for a decade after its initial release in
This critical reappraisal is all the more notable since Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63)
didn’t specialize in the kind of costume pictures that initially attracted
audiences in the West to Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi. Although Ozu
himself was a great admirer of Hollywood directors, among them Ernst Lubitsch
and John Ford, his seemingly mundane “home dramas” were at first considered
“too Japanese” for Western audiences.
The impression of “Japaneseness” was no doubt encouraged by his severely
restricted visual style. It consisted of low camera placement, usually from the
perspective of someone seated on the floor, with virtually no camera movements
and only straight cuts between shots. Especially characteristic of Ozu’s style
are the carefully composed shots of landscapes or domestic interiors that often
serve as pauses or transitions in the narrative. But in retrospect, Ozu’s
loving attention to the textures of everyday life is precisely what gives his films
their universal emotional resonance, and his rigorously formalized visual style
invites the most subtle analysis.
Ozu’s most important collaborator was no doubt the scriptwriter Kogo Noda
(1893-1968). Noda had worked with Ozu since the latter’s first feature in 1927
and with some frequency during the Twenties and Thirties. After the war, Ozu
brought him back to work on Late Spring (1949), another great
masterpiece, and he worked on every subsequent film that Ozu directed. It was
in fact Noda who had initially suggested the plot for Tokyo Story, which
was loosely inspired by Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). Ozu
hadn’t seen the film, but Noda recalled it from its initial release in
Typically, Ozu and Noda would work on the script over much food and drink. In
his diary, Noda noted that the writing of Tokyo Story took 103 days and
43 bottles of sake. Having already identified which actors would play the
parts, they strongly emphasized character over plot, building the characters
painstakingly through dialogue. In an article published in the 1964 issue of Sight
and Sound, the lead actor Chishu Ryu recalled: “By the time he had finished
writing a script, after about four months’ effort, he had made up every image
in every shot, so that he never changed the scenario after we went on the set.
And the words were so polished up that he would not allow us even a single
mistake.”
Ryu also emphasized Ozu’s close control over the performance of actors in
general: “[He] had made up the complete picture in his head before he went on
the set, so that all we actors had to do was to follow his directions, from the
way we lifted and dropped our arms to the way we blinked our eyes. […] Even if
I did not know what I was doing and how those shots would be connected in the
end, when I looked at the first screening I was often surprised to find my
performance far better than I had expected.”
Ozu’s favorite actor, Chishu Ryu (1904-1993), had worked with the director
since the late Twenties, at first mainly in bit parts. While his best-known
roles in the West were with Ozu, Japanese viewers also recognized him for his
role as the Priest in the phenomenally popular and long-running Tora-San
series, from 1969-1992.
Setsuko Hara (b. 1920), who played the role of Noriko, the sympathetic
daughter-in-law, was one of
The first public screening of Tokyo Story in the
Tokyo Story Criterion essay by David Bordwell, October 27, 2003
Family
Affairs Criterion calendar image
from Chris Ware,
Tokyo Story Criterion Collection
Tokyo
Story (1953) - #217 David Blakeslee
from Criterion Reflections,
Wellington Film Society - TOKYO STORY Tony Rayns from Sight & Sound, February 1994
Film
Reviews | Tokyo Story - Yasujiro Ozu | No Ripcord ... Dan Schneider from No Ripcord,
Tokyo Monogatari - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications Douglas Gomery from Film Reference
Film Diary Kevin Lee from Also Like Life
Jonathon
Delacour: Tokyo Story
Culturazzi
[Daniel Montgomery]
In Review (Adam Suraf) dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Tokyo Story, Classic Movie Reviews, Greatest Films Ever, Yasujiro ... WILDsound
Errata:
Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story Robert
Davis from Errata,
Week
XV: Part 2 MODERN ART: JAPANESE FILM
Ozu and
Cinema Autopsy (Thomas Caldwell) review [5/5]
Film School Rejects (Clayton White) dvd review [A+] also seen here: Film School Rejects [Clayton L.
White]
Tokyo
Story (no 1) « Wonders in the Dark
Allan Fish from Winders in the Dark,
Yasujiro Ozu :: Tokyo Story :: Japan Visitor Joe Sinclair, March 2004
tokyo story film review Screen Fanatic
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
100 films Lucas McNelly
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Xiibaro
Productions (David Perry) review
[4/4]
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review Arthur Lazere
Talking
Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann
filmcritic.com (Jake Euker) review [5/5]
Bill's Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Apollo
Guide (Dan Jardine) review [93/100]
User comments from imdb Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA,
USA
User comments from imdb (Page 6) Author: Cosmoeticadotcom
(cosmoetica@gmail.com) from
DVD Journal Clarence Beaks, Criterion Collection
DVD Savant
(Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[4/5] Criterion
Collection
Tokyo
Story Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film Paul
Tatara, Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jon Danziger) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Talk (Matthew Millheiser) dvd review [5/5] [Criterion Collection]
DVD
Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Matt Peterson) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen, Criterion Collection
homevideo.about.com
(Ivana Redwine) dvd recommendation Criterion Collection
Eye for
Film (Scott Macdonald) review [5/5]
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
MediaScreen.com
dvd review
Deborah Nicol
eFilmCritic.com (Mel Valentin) review [3/5]
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Movie-Vault.com (Vadim Rizov) review [8/10]
DVD Times Noel Megahey on The Noriko Trilogy, also LATE
SPRING and EARLY SUMMER
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing EARLY SUMMER, A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS, and FLOATING WEEDS
AvaxHome -> Yasujiro Ozu-Tokyo monogatari ('Tokyo Story') (1953)
MoMA | The Collection | Yasujiro Ozu. Tokyo Story (Tokyo ... 1999, revised 2004
Tokyo Story - ALL-TIME 100 movies - TIME Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel from Time magazine (2005)
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [5/5]
Classic Film Club: 'Tokyo Story' (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) - Time Out ... Tom Huddleson
BBCi - Films Jamie Russell
"The
quiet master" Peter Bradshaw
from The Guardian,
Yasujiro Ozu: an artist of the unhurried world Ian Buruma from The Guardian, January 10, 2010
Setsuko Hara, Ozu's quiet muse Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, June 16, 2010
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
Yasujiro
Ozu's 'Tokyo Story' Opens Roger
Greenspun from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
Tokyo Story - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
EARLY SPRING (Soshun)
Time Out review Tony Rayns
A typically low-key domestic drama in Ozu's mournful,
defeatist vein: it deals with the break-up between an office-worker and his
wife when the husband embarks on a tentative affair, and surrounds both partners
with extensive webs of friends, relatives, acquaintances and colleagues. It's
shot and edited in Ozu's characteristic 'minimalist' style, with hardly any
camera movement, a carefully circumscribed syntax, and an editing method that's
as unconventional by Japanese standards as it is remote from the Western norm.
Ozu's pessimism is deeply reactionary, and the idiosyncrasy of his methods is
more interesting for its exoticism than anything else; but anyone who finds the
socio-psychological problems of post-war
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Ozu’s longest film, and one of his richest, Early Spring
followed Tokyo Story after a three-year hiatus. The hope promised by the
title quickly fades as Shoji, a recent graduate, becomes an office worker and
gradually realizes that he is trapped—in his job, his marriage, his predictable
life. His attempt to forestall the inevitable future of disillusionment and
loneliness by dallying with a young, flirtatious typist named Goldfish leads to
separation from his wife and, finally, a new position in a rural outpost. Ozu
treats what he called “the pathos of the white-collar life” with characteristic
reticence and clear-eyed sympathy; his meticulous portrayal of the rhythms of a
“salaryman’s” life—the endless cycle of commuting, office hell, and
drinking—achieves a kind of quotidian grandeur.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Bored with his marriage and the routines of office life, young
salaryman Shoji has a brief fling with a commuter friend. The liason estranges
him further from his wife and threatens their already precarious relationship.
The rituals of workaday life, from the morning commute to the banal gossip
among bored coworkers, have rarely been observed with as much patience and
attention to diurnal rhythms as here. "I wanted," said Ozu, "to
portray the pathos of the white-collar life within the context of a
transforming society." The object of critique may remain the same as Ozu's
prewar, salaryman silents, but the method has changed, from overt, comic satire
to something more minimalist and expansive: "The film may be the longest
among my postwar work, but I wanted to avoid any sense of dramatic plotting,
instead to relate a number of seemingly disconnected episodes where nothing
much happens, so as to let the viewer experience the peculiar sadness of the
office man's existence."
Film Diary Kevin Lee from Also Like Life
Ozu's longest feature is a tricky one to read, and quite possibly one of his best works. The running time would indicate some kind of epic statement being made, and Ozu is certainly aiming high by offering a comprehensive examination of how the corporate salaryman mentality has deeply affected the lives of ordinary Japanese people. The film, which centers around a frustrated salaryman, his failing marriage, his dalliance with a younger co-worker and his co-workers increasing concerns, is often solemn and staid but not humorless in the least; in fact I can think of few Ozu films that do a better job of capturing communal ritual in all its highs and lows, which the 2 1/2 hour running time accomodates splendidly. Typical of Ozu, the story moves in a ritualistic pattern through interactions between friends and family, in homes, offices, bars and group outings. There is the recurring instance of a group getting together to eat dinner, often breaking out into song as they celebrate each other's company -- these scenes for me are clearly a highlight of the entire Ozu oeuvre, they shine with spontaneity.
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Jasper Sharp from
Marital infidelity and the lot of the disillusioned salaryman form the backdrop of Ozu's prescient follow-up to Tokyo Story, as young white-collar worker Shoji Sugiyama (Ikebe) falls for the charms of vampish office associate Chiyo (Kishi), all but ignoring his wife Masako (Awashima) at home. A slight departure from his work during the period, the longest of Ozu's post-War films sees his focus shifting away from the home towards the office environment, portraying it almost as a surrogate family as Shoji opts to spend more time drinking with his co-workers than in the heart of a marriage that has grown increasingly cold since the death of their only child several years before. In accordance with the subject matter, Early Spring lacks the warmth of the best known of the director's work, the domestic scenes noticeably empty of life, but whilst the film could easily be seen as a critique of Japan's increased modernisation, Ozu's non-polemical approach instead evokes the pathos of an intelligent young man at odds with his environment, trapped in a lifestyle in which the dreams of his past have been long forgotten, as he suggest that these two separate worlds of work and family are irreconcilable.
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Kerpan (kerpan)
from
Soshun aka Early Spring (Yasujiro OZU, 1956)
This was made after a more than two-year gap following his preceding film,
"Tokyo Story" (during which period he spent a lot of time working on
a film that was to be directed by Kinuyo Tanaka -- which had become bogged down
by all sorts of business politics). Ozu re-visits the world of the young "salaryman"
for the first time since the 30s -- and doesn't particularly like what he
finds. Ozu looks at the corrosive impact of the transition to a
corporation-centered existence on white collar working men.
Shoji Sugiyama (Ryo IKEBE) and Masako (Ckikage AWASHIMA) have been married
around 7 or 8 years, but are childless (their only son having died several
years earlier). Shoji has shifted his focus to his career and pretty much
disregards his wife (or at least takes her very much for granted). After Shoji
becomes involved in dalliance with a co-worker, Chiyo, better known as
"Goldfish" (Keiko Kishi), Masako decides she's had enough...
This film is one of Ozu's most earnest. While there are some touches of humor
(for instance, Shoji's reunion with his army buddies, after which he is
followed home by two of them), the overall tone is serious. Kumeko Urabe
provides some earthy practicality as Masako's mother (now a noodle shop vendor
-- unclear what she did prior to her husband's death years before) and Chishu
Ryu (as Shoji's mentor, in business exile in the boondocks -- but not entirely
regretting it) provides quasi-paternal guidance.
This film teaches a message
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
If you want to know who Yasujiro Ozu was and what he was all
about, this is a great place to start. Early Spring is a beautifully
crafted distillation of all of Ozu's themes and techniques, a textbook example
of what made him Japan's cinematic king of the domestic drama. The film runs
long -- 2 hours and 28 minutes -- but it never feels boring, even as it deals
with the most mundane of concerns.
Shoji Sugiyama (Ryo Ikebe) lives the bleak life of Tokyo salaryman, slaving
away at the Toa Fire-Brick Company in a clerical role and staring out the
window with his colleague to marvel at the "340,000" white-shirted
office workers they watch scurrying to their jobs. At home, Sugiyama's very
patient wife Masako (Chikage Awashima) doesn't mind when her husband spends his
down time on company outings, at bars with his co-workers, playing mah-jong, or
visiting a sick friend. She rarely joins in the fun, choosing instead to stay
home and take care of the skimpy family budget.
Disruption arrives in the form of Chiyo (Keiko Kishi), a fellow commuter who
earns the nickname of "Goldfish" and whose flirtation with Sugiyama
quickly blossoms into a PG-13 rated affair. Although they try to keep it on the
down low, Chiyo and Sugiyama's close friendship is obvious to his co-workers,
and the gossip starts to fly around the office corridors. Will Masako find out?
And if she does, will she care, given the airlessness of her marriage? When
Sugiyama neglects to join her on an anniversary trip to the grave of their dead
son, she's far more resigned to than angered by his thoughtlessness.
Ozu's preoccupation with the small dramas of daily life is in full effect here,
as is his fascination with group dynamics,
And as all this goes on, daily life in Tokyo just flows by, shown to us in
scenes of crowded intersections, office windows, laundry on the line, and, as
always in an Ozu film, trains, trains, and more trains zipping down the tracks.
As usual, cramped interior scenes are shot from tatami-mat level, as if you the
viewer were sitting on the floor alongside everyone else.
"Salaried workers are a dime a dozen," one of Sugiyama's friends
laments. Maybe so, but Ozu has a unique talent for elevating their humble
concerns to an almost epic scale.
DVD Note: Early Spring is one of five films included in Late Ozu,
a Criterion Collection box set of Ozu's best final films that's worth seeking
out.
Eclipse
Series 3: Late Ozu Criterion essay by Michael Koresky,
Early Spring Criterion Collection
A
Journey Through The Eclipse Series: Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Spring David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast,
Strictly Film School Acquarello
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection, also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict [Joel Pearce] Late Ozu, Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Early Spring The Auteurs
Screen:
'Early Spring,' From Japan: Ozu's Modest Classic Seems Utterly Fresh Nora Sayre from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver Late Ozu Box [Gary Tooze]
TOKYO TWILIGHT (Tokyo Boshoku)
Japan (141
mi) 1957
Tokyo
Twilight Fred Camper from The Reader
This rarely screened, melancholy 1957 film, Yasujiro Ozu's last in black and white, is one of his best. Two sisters whose mother has left the family years earlier live with their businessman father, portrayed with magisterial stoicism by Chishu Ryu. The elder has fled an alcoholic husband; the younger is pregnant, and her feckless boyfriend won't help her. Ozu makes superb use of background sounds such as ticking clocks and a boat?s motor to mark the passage of time. The father and elder daughter try to meet the world with a gaze as steady as that of Ozu's static camera, ultimately resigning themselves to accepting tragedy, which is presented as inevitable in the flow of life. In Japanese with subtitles. 141 min.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Some of Ozu’s most striking compositions grace Tokyo Twilight,
whose dusky title suggests sadness, transience, ambiguity—appropriate for this
tale of a family’s downfall. Setsuko Hara is magnificent as a woman who leaves
her abusive, alcoholic husband and returns home to her father (Chishu Ryu) and
younger sister. The latter, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend, undergoes
an abortion before both sisters discover a family secret that has devastating
consequences. Set in a
User comments from imdb Author: alsolikelife
from United States, also seen here: Film Diary
A deeply, uncharacteristically dark film, even among other "dark" Ozu films (i.e. A HEN IN THE WIND, EARLY SPRING) that may require a theatrical setting for the viewer to be fully absorbed in the strange, dark textures of the world Ozu presents. I myself was pretty alienated for the first 1/2 hour or so until the wintry chill of the mise-en-scene (brilliantly suggested in the slightly hunched-over postures of the characters) found its way into me instead of keeping me at arm's length. And from there this story builds in unwavering intensity as it follows a family on a slow slide into dissolution: a passive, judgmental patriarch (played by Chisyu Ryu, subverting his gently accepting persona in a way that is shocking), his elder daughter, a divorcee with a single child (Setsuko Hara, playing brilliantly against type -- who'd have thought the sweetest lady in '50s Japan had such an evil scowl?), and his younger daughter (Ineko Arima, a revelation), secretly pregnant and searching for her boyfriend, get a major shakeup when their absent mother, who the father had told them was long dead, re-enters their lives. Ozu's vision of post-war Japan and how the sins of one generation get passed on to the next, illustrated brilliantly by a series of parallels drawn sensitively between characters, manages to be both compassionate and scathing -- even a seemingly cop-out happy denouement is embedded with a poison pill. A masterpiece, without question, one that throws all of Ozu's depictions of modern society in a beautifully devastating new light.
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]
The title Tokyo Twilight gives a subtle hint that this
story is one Yasujiro's darker efforts. Once again focusing on the crumbling of
a middle-class
Mr. Sugiyama (Ozu favorite Chisyu Ryu) is an aging father of two adult
daughters. Older daughter Takako (Setsuko Hara, another Ozu regular), is
separated from her boozing husband, while younger daughter Akiko (Ineko Arima)
has slid into what is considered bad behavior in 1950s Japan: hanging around mah-jongg
parlors in the bad part of town and getting herself pregnant.
It's at a mah-jongg parlor where Akiko first encounters an older woman who, she
later learns, may be her mother, a woman who abandoned her young family years
earlier under mysterious circumstances. That abandonment has clearly left its
mark not only on Sugiyama but also on both daughters. Takako may not overtly
blame her father for arranging her unhappy marriage, but he feels that blame
anyway. Akiko, suspecting that her father may not be her real father,
seems plagued by the metaphysical question of "Who am I?" and she's
so out of sorts that she even borrows money from family friends and marches off
to get an abortion, touchy stuff for a film of this era.
"Bringing up a child isn't easy," says Sugiyama. That's for sure, and
Ozu doesn't cut him any slack. In his other films, Ozu is usually sympathetic
to the cares and woes of the older generation, but this time around he makes
Sugiyama suffer, suggesting that the sins of his past have come back to poison
the next generation. As you look at Takako's adorable two-year-old daughter,
you can't help but wonder if some kind of family curse is going to come down
upon her too.
As usual, Ozu deploys all his stylistic quirks. There are train rides (not to
mention a deadly train crossing), group singing, seedy sake bars, and even a
visit to The Eel, a charming little restaurant down an alley that appears in
many of Ozu's films. (One wonders how a restaurant called The Eel would fare in
your average American city.)
Ozu's knack for the microscopic dissection of family dynamics is as powerful in
Tokyo Twilight as ever. Watch it and be reminded that open lines of
communication between generations are vital if an extended family is to remain
intact.
DVD Note:
Eclipse
Series 3: Late Ozu Criterion essay by Michael Koresky,
Tokyo Twilight Criterion Collection
Archive -
Reverse Shot Sadness
Squared, Daniel Witkin, April 2, 2015
Tokyo Twilight John White from 10k Bullets
Laramie
Movie Scope (Patrick Ivers) review
VideoVista
review Jonathan
McCalmont
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection, also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict [Joel Pearce] Late Ozu, Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection
DVD Times Noel Megahey also reviews EQUINOX FLOWER and GOOD MORNING
A Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
User comments from imdb Author: ky_chong
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Tokyo Twilight The Auteurs
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
EQUINOX FLOWER (Higan-bana)
Japan (120
mi) 1958
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Ozu’s first film made in color is both a delicate elegy and delectable comedy—the portrait of a domestic tyrant at odds with his liberated daughter, who shuns the idea of arranged marriage. A succession of quietly implosive epiphanies, Equinox Flower combines the director’s signature visual precision with color coding (with special use of Ozu’s favorite, red) that underscores key elements of the environment. As the father is slowly won over, he sums up the director’s own sense of life’s capriciousness: “Everyone is inconsistent now and then, except God. Life is full of inconsistencies. The sum total of all the inconsistencies of life is life itself.”
Ozu's first film in colour, and he uses it sparingly. Subdued dress sense and domestic interiors are set against splashes of significant red (look out for the kettle!), representing the amaryllis which blooms around the autumn equinox - the perfect image for a film about transition. Saburi's the father fretting over the marriage of eldest daughter Arima, who's fallen in love and become engaged without involving her dad in the decision. In many ways, he's a figure caught between Japanese traditionalism and liberalising western influence, since he's perfectly happy to advise other people's children to find their own way in life. It's an irony not lost on the director, who marshals the progress towards harmonious resolution with his usual mastery. The cut from satisfied spouse Tanaka sitting in her favourite chair to a brightly fluttering washing line is a moment of truly exquisite transcendence.
Film Diary Kevin
Lee from Also Like Life
Ozu's first color feature, following the harsh, pessimistic black-and-white worlds of EARLY SPRING and TOKYO TWILIGHT, returns to the more whimsical disappointments of domestic life, and the use of color adds to the film's soothing quality and delight in everyday details vibrantly observed, qualities that Ozu would continue to develop in his remaining color films. A father butts heads with his oldest daughter when she refuses to comply with his wish to arrange her marriage. Another quality to this film that Ozu would develop to better effect in his later works is a movement away from overt narrative -- things happen in this film in a static, almost incidental manner, which seems to reflect the experience of the father, insisting on things being the same as always, and yet perceiving gradual shifts almost in spite of himself. There's one beautiful sequence, the father's college reunion party, where Chisyu Ryu sings a patriotic song from their youth that is something of a epiphany, where youthful idealism and traditional values finally merge in a manner that is poignant, tragic, and truly sublime.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Stern, workaholic businessman Hirayama (an outstanding Shin Saburi) denounces the unromantic arranged marriage his parents imposed on him, yet recoils in anger when his own daughter, Setsuko, decides whom to marry without consulting him. Accused of being inconsistent, he angrily protests: "Everyone is inconsistent, except God. The sum total of inconsistencies is life!" With this ambivalent, seemingly hypocritical patriarch, Ozu fashions one of his most memorable characters: a sad, remarkably dour pater familas of conflicted impulses stubbornly clinging to preordained, conservative thinking in spite of his own better judgment. Ozu's first full-fledged comedy in over twenty years, the gorgeously shot EQUINOX FLOWER was also his first film in color. Though he remained steadfast in opposing widescreen, which to him resembled "a roll of toilet paper," Ozu took to color with great enthusiasm. Particularly enamored of the way red tones reproduce on Agfa film, he playfully populates his shots with objects possessing various shades of the color. "There are about ten different shades of red," he told one interviewer. "People who like red are either geniuses or madmen."
Eye for
Film (Martin Fitzgerald) review
[4/5]
Is there a director in the history of cinema with a more distinct style than Yasujiro Ozu?
Equinox Flower was Ozu's first colour film and concerns itself
with one of his favourite themes - the family and its discontents. The film is
set during a time when arranged marriages were being challenged in
A
However, when a young man he has never met enters his office and asks for his daughter's hand in marriage, he finds it difficult to adopt this approach for himself and his family. On the one hand, he is initially hurt by the apparent lack of respect and involvement that he feels he should have been afforded by the young couple. He questions his role as a father and feels castrated by this power being taken away, as well as suffering a sense of loss. He has nothing personal against the young man and, after making enquiries, is assured of his good nature. Nevertheless, rather than gaining a son, he's acutely aware that he is losing a daughter and, with that, some of his own identity. Not only losing her in marriage, but also to a new way of life, a new culture in which Hirayama is unsure of his role.
In a broader sense, Equinox Flower also offers an insight into
the fast socio-cultural changes in post-war
Stylistically, Ozu's work is remarkable for those willing to give it a chance. All his trademarks are here - zero camera movement, single character shots and evocative editing techniques. His unwillingness to move the camera allows him to frame scenes as if they are photographs, or paintings, where the characters suddenly come to life. His use of colour is accomplished to say the least. Combine that with some wonderful sets and scenery and you would be forgiven for thinking you're watching an old MGM musical. Most remarkable of all, though, are Ozu's trademark tatami-level shots. Using a special camera dolly to simulate the three-foot height of the average person kneeling or sitting on a tatami pad, Ozu creates a way of seeing the world that is specifically Japanese, specifically Ozu.
The style is so unique and effective that it's difficult to imagine films being directed any other way. Buy the DVD boxsets from Tartan, ration yourself to one film a year and you're in for a rare treat.
Eclipse
Series 3: Late Ozu Criterion essay by Michael Koresky,
Equinox Flower Criterion Collection
Eclipse Series 3: Late Ozu Criterion Collection
A
Journey Through the Eclipse Series: Yasujiro Ozu’s Equinox Flower David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast,
Equinox Flower • Senses of
Cinema Michael
Koller from Senses of Cinema,
November 20, 2001
Only The Cinema: Films I Love #12: Equinox Flower (Yasujiro Ozu, 1958) Ed Howard, with exquisite photos
The Films of Yasujiro Ozu - by Michael Grost Classic Film and Television, also here: Equinox Flower
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
VideoVista
review Jonathan
McCalmont
CineScene.com
(Chris Dashiell) review
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection, also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict [Joel Pearce] Late Ozu, Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection
DVD Times Noel Megahey also reviews
User comments from imdb Author: ky_chong
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
Brandon's
movie memory » Equinox Flower (1958, Yasujiro Ozu)
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Equinox Flower The Auteurs
Screen:
Tempest In a Tokyo Teapot Vincent
Canby from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary
W. Tooze
DVDBeaver Late Ozu Box [Gary Tooze]
GOOD MORNING (Ohayô) B 85
This is Ozu’s loosely made remake of I WAS BORN, BUT… (1932), a Silent film about rebellious kids that feel betrayed by their father when they see him bow in front of his boss, going on a hunger strike and demanding the boss offer him an apology, made 37 years later with sound, his second film in color, with a slight story variation. Here it is no longer a labor dispute, but reflects a changing attitude towards the impact of television, which in 1959 is a radical instrument of change uniformly westernizing Japan. A shot of a hula hoop near the end further dramatizes this point. Two spoiled kids, brothers Minoru and Isamu (Kôji Shitara and Masahiko Shimazu), ages 8 and 4, are upset their neighbor has a television while his family has no intentions of buying one, wanting to watch wrestling and baseball, throwing temper tantrums when they don’t get their way, chided by their father (Chishû Ryû) for speaking loudly instead of listening, telling them “TV will produce 100 million idiots,” so the two brothers decide to go on a vow of silence until they get their way, continuing this habit at school as well, which causes quite a commotion in their small community. Taking place in a small, closely congested, working class neighborhood where the blue-roofed houses compete for space with the nearby power lines hovering above, each indistinguishable wooden framed house is merely a few feet away, where neighbors often wander in and out of each others homes through sliding doors, always greeted with a polite welcome. In fact, people in their own homes announce their arrival as well as their departures with a greeting to the family. Ozu, more than any other Japanese filmmaker, pays attention to these customary details, observed through a series of repetition from fixed points of reference, where each home has an interior floor table where families eat and drink, a long hallway shot showing a room at the end of the hall, the narrow corridor between two exactly similar rows of houses, with a nearby hill just a short distance away with a walkway at the top, or a restaurant counter sequence where patrons talk and drink sake. The social dynamics are revealed within this self-contained world, offering a glimpse of how ordinary people live their lives. So when the two children alter this routine, failing to announce their morning greeting of “ohayo” (good morning), this minor detail disrupts the neighborhood harmony, producing a comedy of misunderstanding when people attribute invented motives that have nothing to do with reality.
More so than other Ozu films, this is an
ode to materialism and the effect of Americanization in contemporary Japanese
life, something Kurosawa expressed quite differently in STRAY DOG (1949), IKIRU (1952), and HIGH
AND LOW (1963), where his camera moves fluidly through
crowded streets, bars, nightclubs,
and amusement areas, showing a city teething with life. Ozu on the other hand makes family dramas, where
the streets are always off in the distance, as it’s the customs of the family
that draw center attention, where the accumulation of material things has
changed the behavior of the next generation, as they’ve selfishly learned to
expect things, and parents are usually generous enough to buy what they want,
as providing for their children’s happiness is their ultimate goal. Nonetheless, despite this obvious shift from
post-war poverty and sacrifice to 50’s materialism, the children have no
concept whatsoever of hardship or personal sacrifice, which is what makes their
war against grown-ups, the ones who have given them everything, all the more
amusing. While the film treats them as
cute and adorable children, Ozu’s message is a broader one, suggesting the
invasion of Western values has produced some troubling results, where parents
are forced to buy their children’s love instead of earn it, and children learn
to value materialism in the already conformist Japanese society, where everyone
wants what their neighbor has, treating commercialism as a substitute for
genuine love. Enhancing this theme is
Ozu’s use of Western orchestrated music from composer Toshirô Mayizumi,
sounding very much like Mozart by the end, integrating Western influences
throughout the film, where Ozu actually shrinks the stage of actual Japanese
life, showing the diminished effects of their own culture, yet at the same time
accentuating, through fixed point repetition, the very essence of what is
customarily Japanese.
Ozu’s signature
style is expressed by longtime cinematographer Yuharu
Atsuta,
working with the director since the 20’s, placing the camera very low, almost
to the floor, at the height of a coffee table, the tatami shot replicating the
Japanese style of sitting on the floor, usually on a pillow. Due to the simplicity of the lifestyle of the
characters presented, no impressive sets or special effects are needed. Nonetheless, as was Ozu’s habit throughout
his lifetime, he preferred to shoot in a studio, even though by the late 50’s,
there were New Wave Japanese directors like Nagisa
Oshima, Shohei Imamura, or Kon Ichikawa who preferred shooting outdoors. In fact, there is not a single camera
movement in the whole movie, quite a contrast to Ozu’s contemporaries Kenji Mizoguchi
or Akira Kurosawa who preferred long shots with breathtaking camera movements. In this manner, Ozu retains the essence of
Japanese art, as it resembles the concise form of Japanese Haiku poetry. Ozu seems to delight in updated progress reports in the
children’s ongoing war against grown-ups, where they have to resort to secret
reconnaissance missions to steal food, as despite playing charades with their
parents, they were unable to communicate their need for school lunch money. While there are developing storylines,
including feedback from unsuspecting teachers at school, or neighbors who
spread rumors and gossip, like suggesting the parents have instilled a
superiority complex into their children, there’s another intriguing romance
developing between two lovers, Heichiro (Keiji Sada) and Setsuko (Yoshiko
Kuga), who formally meet due to work assignments, but who brighten up at the
sight of each other. The children’s
argument about adults using banal phrases and words certainly applies to this
couple, as they continually avoid any sign of serious conversation, never
expressing any feelings, as instead they communicate in smiles and small talk,
always overly polite to one another, gracious to a fault, yet they remain
overly restrained and physically apart, where there is an obvious spark that
just refuses to be lit. Anyone watching
them recognizes their interest, which Ozu saves for the end of the film, framed
at one of his beloved railway stations with gigantic power grids dominating the
skyline. Neither one dares go beyond the
basic courtesies, talking about the weather, the beautiful day, but never each
other, an old-fashioned courtship ritual that hasn’t changed perhaps for
centuries.
Film Diary Kevin
Lee from Also Like Life
The story, which at times feels incidental, centers around two boys who refuse to speak when their parents refuse to buy a television set. What appears at first to be a lightweight effort is actually a remarkable meditation on human communication in all its forms: the "good mornings" of the title, insidious gossip, fart jokes, hand signals and awkward romantic conversation all figure into the cavalcade of brilliantly rendered interactions between parents, children and nosy neighbors.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
A comedy of manners and satirical critique of 1950s consumerism,
Good Morning updates the silent I Was Born, But … and broadens its humor. Two
rambunctious boys living in a
Time
Out review
Tom Milne
An enchanting update of Ozu's own silent I Was Born, But..., dedicated to the proposition that small talk, however tedious and repetitious, is a necessary lubricant for the wheels of social intercourse. The setting is a residential suburb of Tokyo, in the process of transition to Western consumerism, where two small boys send the entire world to Coventry because their parents, fearing TV will breed idiocy (killing the conversation that the boys cruelly dismiss as small talk), refuse to have a set in the house. Radiating out from the resulting tensions and resentments in the community comes an extraordinary cross-section of tragi-comic incident. An old man gets drunk because he cannot get a job; a middle-aged man is brought face to face with his approaching retirement; a young couple are inspired to declare their love entirely in terms of the weather; an unwanted grandmother broods about filial ingratitude; a kindly woman is forced to move by neighbourly doubts as to her morals. A brimming sense of life, in other words, gradually transforms the small talk into a richly devious portrait of humanity being human.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
Predicting that "TV will produce 100 million idiots," Hayashi (Chishu Ryu) refuses to buy his two young sons their much-desired boob tube. When he quiets their protest by scolding them for talking too much, the boys take a vow of silence, arguing that, after all, most adult talk is meaningless, idle chatter. And indeed, they are right. The housewives in the neighborhood circulate rumors through their daily gossip that would be malicious if they weren't so ridiculously trivial, while prospective lovers discuss the weather instead of declaring their affections for one another. Exactly how effective are those casual addresses like "Ohayo!" as a "social lubricant?" An amiable, at times sparkling comedy demonstrating once again Ozu's mastery working with child actors and his wry view of consumerist Japan, GOOD MORNING revisits the basic premise of I WAS BORN, BUT· with an undimmed youthful enthusiasm for childhood rebellion and flatulence gags (this shortly after Ozu received the government's Purple Ribbon Medal, one of Japan's highest honors!)
Midnight
Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Nicholas Rucka from
If Yasujiro Ozu
were alive today, 2003 would mark the 100th anniversary of his birth year.
Regrettably, Ozu passed away in 1963, but not before gifting the world with 54
films (of which, purportedly, only 33 survive): works of masterly craft,
execution and unique insights into the human condition. Though regarded as a
staple of Japanese cinema and a major influence on filmmakers both within
Were one to try and define the common element within all Ozu films, they would discover that he had an eye for human tales about daily life. In choosing to capture this quality, Ozu used many diverse genres and their conventions to highlight specific points he was trying to make. Though perceived as being a filmmaker with a penchant for slow moving, conventionally lensed films, the reality proves to be far different. While it is true that Ozu has largely made dramas, he also shows, in Good Morning, that he is a skilled director of comedy. Naturally, the comedy has a larger emphasis on character interaction and quirks, as opposed to slapstick and absurdist humor, but it is unique in its depth of view into human nature.
Shot in primary colors and filled with Ozu's trademark rigid
framing, Good Morning tells of a small working-class community and their
interactions in (then) contemporary
The action begins with the wives embroiled in a debate about who embezzled the Wives' Club dues. Fingers are pointed and friendly allegiances are abandoned over misconstrued actions and comments. The husbands, on the other hand, are happily oblivious, instead meeting up at a local snack shop and getting blotto together. Concurrent with this, the children in the neighborhood would rather not do their homework, but instead watch Sumo at the neighboring young hipster couple's house who has the lone television in the community. Naturally the parents disapprove of this shirking of homework responsibilities, but they additionally object to the young hipster's lifestyle and fashion, and, as a result, keep the children from going there to watch TV. After begging, pleading and yelling, Minoru and Isamu are admonished for making such a big fuss and talking too much about such frivolity as a TV. They, in turn, complain that adults fill their day with useless small talk and refuse to speak directly to one another about important issues. As a result, Isamu and Minoru vow to not speak again until their wish for a TV set is granted.
The parents are confident that the silence strike will be short-lived. When it becomes apparent that the children are serious and will not renege on their vow of silence - to such an extent that they cause trouble for themselves both in and out of school - the parents become aware of their own use of empty conversation in their daily lives. Once the children go missing, the parents realize that they have to address their children directly and not ignore them. And that maybe they can learn something from the children after all.
Part of what makes Good Morning so amusing is the fantastic performances of the two young boys who play Isamu and Minoru. Children can be the best and worst aspect of a film about family. On the one hand, children are natural actors due to their penchant for make believe, but due to the amount of time, repetition, and distractions that there are in making a film, guaranteeing that one will be able to get a good performance out of a child is extremely difficult to do. Children's attention flag easily and if they aren't having a good time on set, then tough luck, there won't be anymore good scenes with them. Ozu obviously has a gift for working with child actors, as illustrated by the number of films with children in them, and Good Morning is certainly a triumph in this regard.
The children in the film are, by and large, incredibly sincere in their performances. What we find amusing are the little truths that we spot about growing up, the things that are important kids, and what they'll do to acquire them. Further detailing this quality in the film is a hilarious take on the oddball fixations of little boys. For me it was snails, spiders and the like; for Minoru, Isamu, and friends it's eating pumice rock shavings to help them fart. They idolize one of the dads for his incredible ability to pass gas and ridicule a boy who soils his pants when he tries to break wind on command - some, it seems, just don't have what it takes. Rather than being treated as a simple fart joke and left at that, Ozu shows it as an adolescent bonding mechanism, illustrating to what extent boys will compulsively go to do the thing they love. In this case it's eating rock shavings.
In so far as the silence strike is concerned, as a result of watching it for a large portion of the film, the audience becomes more sensitive to the nature of adult conversation and, quite frankly, the inanity of some of it. In a particularly profound moment towards the end of the film, we see how inept adults can be in trying to make imaginative conversation, when they are aware of how bereft of substance much of their casual conversation actually is. The adults are too self-conscious and Ozu leaves us wondering whether people can really change how they talk and interact, and whether adults are capable of a quality conversation. Ozu seems to feel that some change is better than no change, but he never goes so far as to show explicitly that this change will be permanent nor complete. Like a good artist, he shows the audience the world around us and then allows us to consider how we can change it.
From a technical standpoint the craft is solid in the film. The production design, make-up, and costume design are first rate and the entire color palate seems to have been derived from a box of crayons. The lighting is subtly beautiful at times and practical at others, but it never gets in the way of the storytelling by drawing attention to itself. The formality of the shot framing and mise-en-scène is typical of an Ozu film and the editing is comprised of simple broad cuts primarily based on who is speaking, from which direction they are coming from, and montage. Ozu's penchant and incredible skill in jumping the 180-degree line is almost like magic at points. Though long a no-no of basic filmmaking, Ozu's films are a good argument for how it can be done successfully without totally disorienting your audience. I was impressed with the craft of this film, how all of the elements existed primarily to tell the story, and the value of the story that was told. This is great filmmaking.
Good Morning Criterion essay by Rick Prelinger,
Good Morning Criterion Collection
Is Ozu Slow? | Senses of Cinema Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 2000
Architectural mise-en-scène in Yasujirô Ozu's "Good Morning" | 24 ... 24 Désirs par Seconde
Ozu’s Good Morning on DVD Gary Morris, January 1, 2001, also here:
Images
(Gary Morris) review
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4] also from Metal Asylum, March 3, 2004: Ohayo - Yasujiro Ozu Film Movie Review
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew
Dessem]
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
User comments from imdb (Page 3) Author: Cosmoeticadotcom (cosmoetica@gmail.com)
from
Apollo
Guide (Scott Renshaw) review [66/100]
VideoVista
review Jonathan
McCalmont
Movie
Martyr (Jeremy Heilman) review
[4/4]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
DVD Talk (Chris Hughes) dvd
review [4/5] [Criterion Collection]
Q Network
Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review
[3.5/5]
Criterion Collection
DVD MovieGuide
dvd review [Criterion Collection] Colin Jacobson
DVD
Authority.com ("Fusion3600") dvd review [Criterion Collection]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review Criterion Collection
DVD Times Noel Megahey also reviews EQUINOX FLOWER and
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Eye for Film (John Gallagher) review [3.5/5]
Decent
Films Guide (Steven D. Greydanus) review
[A-]
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
A Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Adam Lippe
User comments from imdb Author: bartman_9 from Belgium
User comments from imdb Author: eva25at from Vienna, Austria
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: ky_chong
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
The Portage Theater: Events - Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning in 35mm Julian Antos
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Good Morning The Auteurs
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze
FLOATING WEEDS (Ukigusa) B+ 91
A man who is ungrateful is not a human being at all. —Kichinosuke (Kôji Mitsui)
Following Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his own 1934 film, The
Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Ozu followed suit where this story is virtually
identical to the original, A
Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari) (1934), changing the
setting from a remote mountain town in northern Japan to an island town in
southern Japan, where the closeness to the sea offers not only a sense of
reflection and longing, but some of the most beautiful shots in the film. This is one of the few films in Ozu’s career
that was not made by his parent Shochiku Film Studio where he was employed for
thirty years, instead choosing the Daiei Motion Picture Company. Perhaps one of the reasons was the
opportunity to work with actress Machiko Kyô from Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950)
and Mizoguchi’s UGETSU (1953), a longstanding member of the Daiei Production
Company since 1949, while also availing himself the opportunity to work with
Mizoguchi’s renowned cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa who also happened to shoot
both of those films. For many viewers
this may be the most beautiful film they’ve ever seen, even on a DVD
Technicolor transfer, where what’s most startling about the remake is the
brilliant use of color, the second of only six color films in his entire
career, where every transitional composition is a stand-alone work of art
literally saturated with color, offering a connected series of unforgettable
still life images spread throughout the film, adding a heightened sense of
drama to the portrayal of ordinary moments.
The story again follows the exploits of a barely surviving traveling
theater company headed by Komajuro (Ganjirô Nakamura) and his lead actress
Sumiko, Machiko Kyô, one of the greatest of all Asian actresses, brilliant and petulant
as always, easily the best thing in this version. Kôji Mitsui, who played the son in the
original version, plays a fellow actor in the theater company, the only one in
both versions. The Floating Weeds of the title refers to the drifting quality of the
wandering troupe itself, where Kyô ‘s character in one of their plays refers
nostalgically to a group of disbanding comrades as “roaming aimlessly to the
end of the world.”
The similarities between the films are endlessly comparable, from the
arrival of a train to the arrival of a boat, from characters complaining of the
rain to similar complaints about the heat, to the use of banners waving
announcing the arrival of the theater in town, where there is even a similar
humorous use of an introductory shaving sequence. In this scene there is an intentional
subtitle error, making humorous reference to internationally renowned Kurosawa
actor Toshirô Mifune, though his name is never spoken,
instead there is likely a reference to little known (outside Japan) Japanese
actor Kinnnosuke Yorozuya. The opening shot,
however, recalls Kiarostami’s FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU (2003), a beautiful shot of
the distant sea that juxtaposes the similar shapes of a lighthouse and a sake
bottle to the chugging sounds of an unseen motor heard from a boat moving
through the harbor. Of
interest, one slow moving shot from a boat at sea shows the lighthouse on the
beach, the only moving camera shot in all of Ozu's color films.
The use of sound is immediately apparent in the choice of percussive
theater music played by the actors as they arrive in town, accompanied by a
wordless procession of marching children following them down the sidewalks and
narrow streets, offering a unique claustrophobic intimacy with houses literally
on top of one another, where the musical theme plays throughout like a
recurring Nino Rota Fellini theme. As
this film is 35 minutes longer than the original, the dialogue is more
extensive, allowing greater background detail than in a silent film, where the
meeting between Komajuro and Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), the woman he left behind
with a grown son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who still thinks of him as his
wayward uncle, accentuate a theme of growing old, where Komajuro fears she will
become lonesome. The overblown
theatrical production itself shows Kyô interestingly playing a man’s role,
reflective of exaggeration and a relatively crude form of old-fashioned
populist nostalgia, where the audience largely consists of smoking grandparents
and bored grandchildren continually munching on candy.
When Sumiko gets wind of Komajuro’s secret visits to another woman, the
conflict between the two is similarly expressed through a protracted argument
on the street in the rain, where in each version he tells her “My son
belongs to a better world than yours.”
The reason he’s never identified himself as the father is he’s too
ashamed of his lowly position in life, where his only hope is that his son will
not follow in his footsteps and instead get educated, where an entire new set
of opportunities present themselves to him.
Like the original, there is an identical backstage scene of Sumiko
sitting in front of a mirror applying kabuki makeup alongside actress Kayo
(Ayoko Wakao, another frequent Mizoguchi actress, positively gorgeous seen
here: Full-size
image), urging her to seduce Kiyoshi and poison his bright future. One huge difference here is Oyoshi’s
attitude, heartbroken and grief stricken in the earlier version, but more
openly accepting of the circumstances here even after the possibilities of
having a real family start to unravel.
Her acceptance of the loss and resignation that comes from living so
many years as a broken family completely alters the tone of the finale,
shifting the emphasis of the ending from bleak tragedy, even as it similarly
takes place in an empty train station after the troupe has disbanded from
financial hardship. In the original, the
psychological horror included the father’s humiliating realization that he
could never be accepted as a real father because he abandoned his child for
twenty years, creating an insurmountable emotional void, but while
acknowledged, that’s not the emphasis here where the focus shifts from the
tragedy inflicted upon the real mother to the abandoned theatrical mother, Sumiko,
who has also been tossed out of her makeshift family and also finds herself
childless and alone. While this updated
version features a gorgeously improved
aesthetic that is quite unlike anything else, the more concise original contains the
superior storytelling, better acting, and a greater impactive sense of tragic
loss, as the drama lags in this overlong version where time literally stands
still, where the bittersweet sadness doesn’t come so much from the emptiness of
opportunities lost, but from the vantage point of an aging, more mature man who
can overlook the vast horizon that has been his entire life, knowing full well
that life’s greatest fulfillments are likely behind and not ahead of him.
Adrian Danks from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Yasujiro Ozu’s second color film, exquisitely shot by Kenji
Mizoguchi’s favored cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, is a beautifully composed
and staged late work, demonstrating the director’s growing mastery of an
expanded tonal palette. One of a series of explicit remakes Ozu undertook
around this time, it concentrates on the activities of an itinerant acting
troupe (“floating weeds”) while maintaining the director’s characteristic
fascination with familial and generational interaction. In contrast to Ozu’s
1934 film A Story of Floating Weeds,
which was more comic and dramatic, this one has a decidedly autumnal,
nostalgic, and philosophical air, a quality illustrated by many of its serenely
staged compositions and “distilled” combinations of image and sound.
Although Ozu’s films generally contain a surprisingly large
number of shots and routinely experiment with the construction of cinematic
space, the predominant impression one takes from Floating Weeds is a series of interlocking still lifes, and a
rhythm matched to the lulling repetition of everyday life. The film’s opening
shot—contrasting and comparing the volume, shape, and color of a bottle and
lighthouse—suggests no further movement, the chugging beat of a boat’s motor on
the soundtrack reinforcing the “completeness” or “fullness” of the image on
display. In these moments the film achieves, a kind of stillness, a resigned,
gestalt serenity which accompanies even Ozu’s most tragic work, such as 1953’s
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Shot by
Film Diary Kevin
Lee from Also Like Life
Late period Ozu at his most resplendent. A travelling theater
troupe sets up on a coastal village, where the troupe's leader's old flame
lives with their son, who doesn't know his father's identity. The leader's
current mistress (the ever-alluring Machiko Kyo) learns his secret and in a
jealous fit conspires with a fellow actress (Ayako Wakao, painfully gorgeous)
to seduce his son. As always, Ozu's late period wisdom lies in his ability to
depict the varying degrees and ways in which people refuse, consciously or
otherwise, to be bound by role-playing constraints, even if it leads to
irreconcilable rifts between loved ones. Filmed in gorgeous color, all of this plays
so naturally, so effortlessly, that for long stretches one forgets that they're
watching a movie and are simply witnessing the casual unfolding of life in all
its quiet ritualistic joys, sudden excitements and inexorable disappointments.
It may very well be the most sensual of Ozu's films, with at least a couple of
scenes filled with breathtaking romantic passion, and many other scenes that
vividly capture the numberless beautiful details of people, of places, of life.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
To fulfill a promise he had made to Kenji Mizoguchi, Ozu took
leave from Shochiku for this Daiei production. Remaking his own 1934 film, STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS, Ozu changed
the setting to a seaside town and exploited the palette of Mizoguchi's regular
cinematographer, Kazuo Miyagawa, for some of the most gorgeous images in his
color work. The story remains largely the same as before: when the head of an
itinerant troupe (Ganjiro Nakamura) visits the small town where he fathered a
son years before, his mistress (Machiko Kyo) attempts to bring about a
confrontation with his former lover and now adult son. Avoiding historical
reconstruction in his attempt to evoke the spirit of the Meiji era, Ozu unfolds
his tale in an anachronistic, vaguely contemporary setting, suffused with
nostalgia for a long-lost world. FLOATING
WEEDS features an outstanding lead performance by celebrated kabuki
actor Nakamura, and is Ozu's sole collaboration with the stunning Machiko Kyo,
by then world famous and the veteran of such works as Mizoguchi's Ugetsu,
Kon Ichikawa's Odd Obsession, and Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.
The Front Row: DVD of the Week: Floating Weeds : The New Yorker Richard Brody
Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film “Floating Weeds,” which I discuss in this clip, is a drama about the romantic entanglements of members of an itinerant theatrical troupe with residents of a small seaside town, and offers a bright and flamboyant palette of cinematic color to match the emotional intensity of the action. Ozu is often considered to be a director of sober restraint; in fact, sober restraint is his main subject, and the subject of his critique. If he tones down the emotional temperature of his characters’ outward expression and keeps his image-making within a narrow spectrum of visual variety, it’s to heighten the power and scope of nuance. The changes of shots in Ozu are as audacious and jolting as those in, say, the films of Nicholas Ray, and the struggle for personal expression and freedom—inner and outer—in a convention-bound, tradition-burdened society is Ozu’s main subject, as it is for Ray. In this film, Ozu lets fly with more flagrant furies than usual. In his quiet (and, here, a little less quiet) way, he was an angry Expressionist, a permanent exile, who didn’t need to show his turmoil in a tumultuous way in order to capture and convey turmoil even wilder than that of some overtly agitated filmmakers.
Time Out review Geoff Andrew
This remake of Story of Floating Weeds, a movie Ozu made in the '30s, is unusual for being one of the Master's few films in colour, and in having a relatively dramatic plot that even allows for suspense, violence and mild sexual activity. A kabuki troupe visits a small coastal town; poor audiences only add to the trouble caused when ageing actor-manager Komajuro (Nakamura) arouses the suspicions of Sumiko (Kyo), his leading lady and mistress, by repeatedly disappearing to spend time with an old flame and Kiyoshi, a son of marriageable age who's always thought of Komajuro as his uncle. Forget the clumsy subtitles - the sheer beauty of Ozu's exquisite (and typically eccentric) compositions and the expressive use of sound tell all you need know about the characters, their emotions and relationships. Right from the opening montage of lighthouse shots, the director mixes formal playfulness - resulting in many lovely subtle visual gags (why do those paper petals keep drifting down at inopportune moments?) - with near abstract painterly elegance, doing justice to light-hearted and serious material alike. Hard, here, to stick with Paul Schrader's idea of Ozu as a primarily 'transcendental' artist. The three lecherous thesps, not to mention a wonderfully funny but touching reconciliation involving a cigarette, suggest a more versatile, even discreetly subversive talent. Come to think of it, that cigarette, and that lighthouse, in a movie about patriarchal authority...
Raging Bull Movie Reviews (Mike Lorefice) review [3.5/4]
Technically speaking this is a remake of Ozu's own 1934 film, this time with talking and color. However, Ozu is one of those body of work directors who focuses on the same few themes so the term remake is almost irrelevant. The title is a metaphor referring to the itinerant actor who suddenly returns, his constant movement in contrast to the static lives of the locals. Amongst the locals lives his old flame and his son who was always told he was his uncle to hide the shame of being a poor actor in the bad plays they are allowed to put on. Of course, Ozu punctures the glamour of the acting profession, showing why it is anything but the great life the media portrays it as (to avoid delivering any real news). This involves the actor's vain current flame, who quickly becomes so jealous of any interaction with the aging older flame that she bribes the best looking actress in the troop to seduce the old flame's teenage son. What's amazing about Ozu's stories is though they seem to represent the most mannered and traditional side of middle class Japan, every character is all too familiar in modern day America, Ozu's just have nicer hair and aren't ridden with advertisements and logos. The story remains the same, but Ozu's technique is now refined, eliminating all camera movement. Technically it's one of Ozu's best, as he worked with the great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. One aspect that makes Ozu's family dramas so strong and so different is he not only identifies with every character, but within that he favors the older (generally more knowledgeable) characters. Virtually every film about a child ready to leave the nest is a coming of age film that sees things almost entirely from the child's perspective, but Ozu goes so far as to argue it might be a bad thing for the children to leave because their parent(s) will have no one. While we might not agree with all his ideas, Ozu's films are among the richest in wisdom and incite into the human condition because he's able to understand so many perspectives, sometimes selfish and silly sometimes judicious and prudent.
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Michael Arnold
from
A travelling theatrical troupe visits a small seaside town for a
series of performances. The leader, Komajuro Arashi (Nakamura), uses the trip
as an excuse to visit his ex-lover Oyoshi (Sugimura) and their son, Kiyoshi (
Ozu's first film outside of Shochiku studios was The Munakata Sisters at Shintoho in 1950. Floating Weeds was the second, and it was the only film Ozu produced through Daiei. Somehow the presence of the Daiei leads - Nakamura, Kyo, Wakao, Kawaguchi, Nozoe and other actors we probably identify more easily with Masumura, Ichikawa or even Kurosawa - adds a breath of fresh air into the chemistry on the screen... a breath that comes out in a truly Ozu-worthy flowering of bad words, sexual innuendo and confrontation. Compositionally, the color photography by Daiei's Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon) is impeccable, and one marvels at Ozu's own comfort and fluency in and out of his system of rhythmical editing and 180 degree cuts. This is without a doubt one of the director's very best films, enough to convince the viewer that film - while maintaining the full potency of Ozu's fascinating and unique system - can still be "drama" after all. Based on Ozu's 1934 Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari).
Floating
Weeds - TCM.com James
Steffen, Criterion Collection
Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959), a contemplative tale
about a traveling Kabuki troupe on its last legs, is arguably Yasujiro Ozu's
most beautiful color film thanks to the great Japanese cinematographer Kazuo
Miyagawa and Ozu's meticulous visual design. In fact, it was not Ozu's first
color film; Equinox Flower (1958) and Good Morning (1959), both
photographed by his regular collaborator Yuharu Atsuta, gave the director the
opportunity to develop his own, very distinctive color aesthetic before
approaching this film.
Originally Ozu wanted to make Floating Weeds with Shochiku, the studio
where he was under contract. Masaichi Nagata, the President of Daiei, had
invited Ozu earlier to direct a film there; since Ozu had finished up his
annual quota for Shochiku that year, he seized the opportunity to make the film
with Daiei instead. The script was a remake of one of his silent features, The
Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari, 1934). At first he
wanted to title the remake The Ham Actor (Daikon Yakusha,
literally "radish actor") but he ended up staying with Floating
Weeds. Ozu and his regular scriptwriter Kogo Noda had set this new script
in the winter, but by the time shooting began Ozu moved the location to the
seaside, the Kii peninsula in southern
A legendary drinker, Ozo liked to stay up late drinking whisky or sake with
Noda as they hashed out story ideas and dialogue. This was true regardless of
whether they were frequenting bars in
Producing Floating Weeds at Daiei meant that Ozu worked with a different
cast and crew than his regulars at Shochiku, though he did bring along Chishu
Ryu, one of his favorite actors. The lead actor Ganjiro Nakamura (Komajuro)
later worked with Ozu again in The End of Summer (1961). Machiko Kyo
(Sumiko), one of Daiei's leading actresses, had appeared in numerous films by
Kenji Mizoguchi and Kon Ichikawa, as well as Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950).
Nakamura later recalled that the notoriously perfectionistic Ozu required the
two actors to spend an entire day in the rain filming one scene, and that both
of them fell ill afterwards.
The most important new member on the production team was undoubtedly Kazuo
Miyagawa, who had worked with Kyo and Nakamura earlier in the same year on Kon
Ichikawa's adaptation of the controversial Junichiro Tanizaki novel The Key;
that film was released in the
While Floating Weeds is not exactly the type of domestic drama which Ozu
usually made and it has a relatively lush visual style compared to most of
Ozu's later films, it still displays the characteristic rigor of the director's
mature style: low, sometimes floor-level camera placement, static camera
setups, various red objects arranged as decorative elements within shots, doors
and windows employed to break up the space visually with internal frames, and
characters facing the camera directly during dialogue exchanges. Indeed, Ozu
has one of the most consistent and immediately identifiable visual styles in
all of cinema. For those who have never seen an Ozu film, Floating Weeds
offers a captivating introduction to his world.
Floating Weeds Criterion essay by David Ehrenstein, August 24, 1989
Stories of Floating Weeds Criterion essay by Donald Richie, April 19, 2004
Ozu Season January 05, 2010
Floating Weeds Criterion Collection
Dan Schneider On A Story Of Floating Weeds & Floating Weeds A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934) & FLOATING WEEDS (1959), Dan Schneider at Cosmoetica, also a shorter version from Hackwriters, March 2007: hackwriters.com - Yasujiro Ozu's 'Floating Weeds' - Review by Dan ...
User comments from imdb (Page 2), edited from above article, Author: Cosmoeticadotcom (cosmoetica@gmail.com) from United States
Criterion Reflections: Floating Weeds (1959) - #232 David Blakeslee
Film Notes - Floating Weeds Kevin Jack Hagopian from the New York State Writers Institute
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams] also reviewing EARLY SUMMER, TOKYO STORY, and FLOATING WEEDS
eFilmCritic Reviews Elaine Perrone
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5] also sen here: filmcritic.com
A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com James Steffan, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick) dvd review [4/5] Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
DVD
Verdict (Dan Mancini) dvd review [Criterion Collection] also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
Images Journal Derek Hill, Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
DVD
Journal Clarence Beaks, Criterion
Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) dvd review Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
HTF REVIEW: A Story Of Floating Weeds (1934) and Floating Weeds ... Home Theater Forum, Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
DVD Movie Central Ed Nguyen, Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
Passport Cinema [A.J. Hakari] Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
About.com Home Video/DVD [Ivana
Redwine] Criterion
Collection, also reviewing A
STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps] Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
Film-Forward.com - DVD review Yancha, Criterion Collection, also reviewing A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS (1934)
DVDTimes Noel Megahey
KQEK
(Michael John Derbecker) dvd review [Criterion Release]
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Ruthless Reviews review Matt Cale
Talking Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann, also seen here: Floating Weeds - Talking Pictures
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] Much Ozu About Everything: An Essential
Retro's Encore Run,
The
Disc Jockey Noel
Murray
Arts & Faith Top 100: Floating Weeds Tyler Petty
filmsgraded.com [Brian Koller]
MyFilmReview Reinier Verhoef
User comments from imdb Author: bandw from Boulder, CO
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: bartman_9
from
BBC Films review Tom Dawson
Floating Weeds :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies akso seen here: Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) recommendation [Great Movies]
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun) review
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W.
Tooze]
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Nick Wrigley]
Floating Weeds (1959) - Yasujiro Ozu (Ozu-san.com) Ozu website
Floating Weeds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Floating Weeds: Information from Answers.com
Floating
Weeds - YouTube unsubtitled long
awaited kiss sequence (
LATE AUTUMN (Akibiyori)
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
In this light-hearted reworking of LATE SPRING, Setsuko Hara returns, not as the daughter whose reluctance to marry makes her father anxious, but as a widow who frets over her daughter's unwed status. To the generally somber tone of the earlier film, Ozu adds much comedy in the form of a trio of aging, emasculated businessmen, friends of the family who try to goad the widow into marrying one of them. Mariko Okada, daugher of Tokihiko (star of such '30s Ozu classics as THE LADY AND THE BEARD and TOKYO CHORUS), gives a sparkling performance as the daughter Ayako's free-spirited friend, her modern, liberated attitude a foil to Ayako's stiff conservatism. One of Ozu's loveliest films.
Late
Autumn Fred Camper from The Reader
I'm not the world's biggest Ozu fan, but this late work (1960) is one of his finest. Three middle-aged men who once wooed the widowed Akiko (played with a wonderfully subtle mix of emotions by Setsuko Hara) conspire to marry off both her and her daughter, who declares herself happy as she is. The gentle comedy that ensues makes some good feminist points, but Ozu's deepest theme emerges out of the contrast between the bumbling, sometimes silly strivings of the characters and the stately tranquillity of the spaces around them. Occasional shots of interiors emptied of people are key: human dramas are seen from a distance, as blips within the inexorable passage of time. In Japanese with subtitles. 129 min.
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
As the title suggests, Late Autumn is tinged with a sense of the inevitable end of things—especially happiness. In a variant of Ozu’s favorite theme, a widow (Setsuko Hara) lives quietly with her devoted daughter, who rebuffs any suggestion that she should be married. Three middle-aged businessmen, old friends of the family, try to act as matchmakers and decide that the widow must be married first, to “free” the daughter of her familial obligations. Ozu said of Late Autumn: “People sometimes complicate the simplest things. Life, which seems complex, suddenly reveals itself as very simple—and I wanted to show that in this film.” He makes of this situation both a comedy—as the well-intentioned schemes of the three businessmen go awry—and an elegy of transience.
Film Diary Kevin
Lee from Also Like Life
A trio of old buddies intervenes in the affairs of their old college crush, now a recent widow, and her daughter. The daughter won't marry, afraid to leave her mother alone; the guys attempt to arrange a marriage between one of them and the mother, with near-disastrous results. Ozu's attentiveness to the pleasure of small moments shared between good friends is at its peak of perfection -- as in all his best films, one forgets that they're following a story and is just "hanging out" with the people onscreen. However, there's much more to this film than a matchmaking lark -- the pleasure that the viewer gets as a fellow matchmaker conspiring among the men gives way to the quiet pain of mother and daughter as they face imminent separation, leading to an ending every bit as heartbreaking as that of LATE SPRING.
Eye for
Film (Merlin Harries) review [5/5]
With the auteristic verve that typified so many of Yasujiro Ozu’s films Late Autumn begins and ends with an almost tangible scene of human warmth. From the opening memorial service to the closing scenes, the film revels in the richly developed skill of its director in creating an atmosphere thick with irresistible humour and depth.
Like so many of Ozu’s great films Late Autumn has a wonderfully varied array of characters that lends the story a singular sense of connection to the real world. The charmingly inept efforts to arrange a wedding for Ayako (Yôko Tsukasa), daughter of Miwa, whose memorial service provides the opening scenes, are as moving as they are humorous.
The three bungling men in question are all deeply beguiled by Miwa’s widow Akiko (Setsuko Hara) and so they set about finding her a partner in the hope of convincing her daughter to also marry. The reluctant Ayako is increasingly prompted toward the glowing candidate for marriage Goto (Keiji Sada) but, try as they might, Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura), Mamiya (Shin Saburi) and Hiriyama (Ryuji Kita) are unable to seal the deal.
For any fan of Ozu’s work, the complex tapestry of human zeal and love will be familiar but the more touching aspects of the film are rooted in the clumsy and often awkward humour of the story. The central theme of the love between a doting child and grieving parent is central to many of Ozu’s films going back to Late Spring (1949) where Setsuko Hara plays the young daughter of a recently widowed father. Along with Late Spring, The End of Summer (1961) also embodied the characteristic mixture of warmth and woe that captivated so many audiences and, while Late Autumn opts for a more humorous feel, it is none the less one of Ozu’s finer pictures.
In typically masterful fashion, Ozu brings perfect balance and synchronicity to every detail of the film. The ironic humour of the memorial scene is in apt contrast to the pervading sense of melancholy during the wedding. The cinematography is perhaps among the finest of Ozu’s life with every element of the set, from lighting to colour, meticulously and purposefully rendered.
Beyond the more aesthetic details Late Autumn is, at heart, an undeniably humorous yet touching story about the cyclical nature of humanity. The loss of love and woe experienced by Akiko is almost seamlessly balanced by the blossoming growth of her daughter Ayako in what will ultimately be remembered as one of the greatest films Ozu created in the final years of his life.
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [3.5/5]
Ozu has fun with a group of old friends who bumble through some
ridiculous attempts at matchmaking in Late Autumn, a lighthearted yet
poignant look at how people with the best intentions can sometimes make a mess
of things on the way to a happy outcome. "Life by itself is surprisingly
simple," says one character. If only that were true.
We begin at a temple ceremony marking the anniversary of the death of Mr. Miwa.
His lovely widow Akiko (Setsuko Hara) is in attendance with her 24-year old
daughter Ayako (Yôko Tsukasa). Miwa's old friends show up, and we soon learn
that three of them were all once in love with Akiko, and they admire her to
this day. Now that the time has come to find a good husband for Ayako, they
plot among themselves to get this problem solved, with one of the men, Taguchi
(Nobuo Nakamura), taking the lead.
When Taguchi's pick doesn't pan out, his buddy Mamiya (Shin Saburi) comes up
with a young man named Goto (Keiji Sada), with whom he works. While Akiko seems
grateful for their efforts, Ayako is having none of it. She makes it quite
clear she has no intention of marrying anytime soon and is perfectly happy
living with her mother. So that's the problem, the friends realize. Ayako won't
abandon her lonely mother. The solution: Let's get Akiko married off too!
What follows is a round robin of crossed signals and confusion as the friends
hint to Ayako that Akiko will remarry even before they suggest it to Akiko
herself. Ayako is appalled that her mother would make such a choice and
confronts her, but of course Akiko has no idea what her daughter is talking
about. It's hard to predict whether Ayako will ever actually marry Goto and if
she does whether Akiko will be able to adjust to a new life without her
daughter. As is often the case in his later films, Ozu is obsessed with how
traditions are fading away in post-war
And Ozu definitely has a great handle on his color palette in this, one of his
first color films. Everything is color-coded to connote either optimism and
youth or tradition and stagnation. Watch for brief explosions of turquoise,
especially in the dress and hat of one of Akiko's friends. That's the Ozu
magic: No matter how mundane his concerns, there's always so much to pay
attention to. Life really isn't simple at all.
DVD Note: Late Autumn is one of five films included in Late Ozu,
a Criterion Collection box set of Ozu's best final films that's worth seeking
out.
Time and Tide: Yasujiro
Ozu's Late Autumn • Senses of Cinema
Adrian Danks from Senses of
Cinema, July 26, 2004
Late Autumn
Aquarello from Strictly
VideoVista
review Jim
Steel
User comments from imdb Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection, also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict [Joel Pearce] Late Ozu, Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection
DVD Times Noel Megahey, also reviewing AN AUTUMN
AFTERNOON
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
As
Yasujiro Ozu reaches Late Autumn he's become master of slow cinema John Patterson from The Guardian,
Late
Autumn Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian,
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Ozu's
'Late Autumn' Like a Day in the Sun:The Cast Nora Sayre from The New York Times,
DVDBeaver Late Ozu Box [Gary Tooze]
THE END OF SUMMER (Kohayagawa-ke
no aki)
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
An epic saga revolving around the decline of a bourgeois family, THE END OF SUMMER tells the story of
the Kohayakawas. Neglecting the family sake business that's fast running out of
steam, aging patriarch Manbei busies himself philandering with a former
mistress. His actions cause the resentment of his daughters, but when he suffers
a heart attack, the family rallies to his side. Ganjiro Nakamura gives a
lively, raucous performance as the untamable Mambei, a pater familias gone AWOL
into regressive, adolescent behavior. As with his two other films not made for
Shochiku, Ozu shoots outside Tokyo, this time in the Kansai region, where he
divides the film's geography between the contrasting cities of Osaka and Kyoto,
the one sparklingly modern, the other a sacred repository of tradition.
Midnight
Eye Feature (2003) Tom Mes from
The patriarch of the Kohayagawa family of sake brewers leaves the
running of his ailing business to his juniors, after a chance meeting with his
former mistress. He regularly travels to
Often quite funny, thanks to Nakamura's spot-on performance as the old man who bends over backwards to keep his excursion a secret when the viewer knows his family is well aware of his intentions. This main storyline is contrasted with two of the Kohayagawa daughters' own search for a husband, the spectre of their father's infidelity hanging over them. Akira Takarada, best known abroad for fighting Godzilla, has a small part as the love interest of one of the daughters.
Film Diary Kevin
Lee from Also Like Life
Quite unlike any other Ozu film, this chronicle of a wealthy patriarch's last days seems to float dreamlike as if conjured up within the dying man's subconscious: playing hide-and-seek with his grandchild, leaving his family to visit the house of an old flame. The uncharacterisitc score by Toshiro Mayazumi, with its use of chamber music and wind instruments, adds to the surreal quality, as do appearances made by white American boys (the only appearances made by non-Japanese actors in all of Ozu's oeuvre, I believe). As is typical of late period Ozu, there's not much apparent conflict driving the narrative, merely a weaving of isolated moments between several characters, but what gives this film its indelible effect is the succession of astounding images: a girl getting ready for a date while standing next to a dead man, a funeral procession of people dressed in black matched with a flock of ravens. A film about mortality devoid of pathos, it is a deeply disturbing work.
filmcritic.com (Don Willmott) review [4/5]
Yasujiro Ozu clearly had a lot on his mind as he wrote The End
of Summer, his penultimate film: the old vs. the new, generational shifts,
family loyalty, death. It's all in there in this wonderfully elegiac film.
Leave it to Ozu to make the smoke from a crematorium chimney look positively
poetic. "It's the cycle of life," someone watching the smoke
comments. Indeed.
Ozu introduces us to a widowed family patriarch Mr. Kohayagawa (Ganjiro
Nakamura) who is enjoying his merry widowerhood much to the consternation of
his three adult daughters, each of whom has a few issues of her own to work
out. One daughter, Noriko (Yôko Tsukasa), is trying to fight off an arranged
marriage while worrying that her boyfriend is moving all the way to
It's Fumiko who becomes outraged when she figures out that her father has been
venturing out to meet his former mistress Tsune (Chieko Naniwa), who has a
21-year-old daughter who may or may not be his. (Interestingly, the girl dates
Western boys, and the two blonde Americans who come around are a shocking sight
in Ozu's insular world. "Sometimes she brings home strange things,"
her mother says.)
Fumiko's petty concerns about her father's adventures fade quickly when he
suffers a heart attack and his possible death galvanizes the family into a
quick round of reflection and forgiveness. Luckily Dad recovers quickly and is
soon back in the company of Tsune, only this time his adventure has sad results.
Ozu's fascination with generational changes comes through loud and clear. The
film opens on a neon advertising sign proclaiming "New Japan," and
there are static shots of pagodas framed by TV antennas and temples side by
side with office blocks. "It's not much of a world anymore," laments
Tsune, who, like Mr. Kohayagawa misses the good old days before the war came
along and changed everything. Still, he has clearly enjoyed his life right up
to the literal last minute, and that lesson is not lost on his grieving
daughters, each of whom will have to choose wisely to guarantee an old age and
rich and happy as their father's.
As Ozu's career winds down (he died of cancer on his 63rd birthday, two years
after The End of Summer was released), he is more in touch than ever
with that cycle of life. He leaves us with the image of ravens perched on
tombstones, a sad vision but one that reminds us to make the most of the time
we have, just like Mr. Kohayagawa did.
DVD Note: The End of Summer is one of five films included in Late Ozu,
a Criterion Collection box set of Ozu's best final films that's worth seeking
out.
Kamera.co.uk review Ben Walters
There aren't many film-makers who demand or reward imaginative engagement to the same degree as Ozu. His films, like his most sympathetic characters, are so restrained, so respectful, so generous that their grief, regret and disappointment can be easy to overlook. Once observed they are impossible to ignore or ameliorate, and often quite overwhelming.
Returning again and again to the territory of family obligation, his career builds into a vast meditation on love, duty and resignation, always expressed in his quiet, dignified style of low angles, long takes and square, symmetrical compositions. Characters are arranged as if framed by their rooms, their conversation often directed to the camera; when movement is necessary they neatly arrange themselves into unobstructive tableaux. In later films, such as The End of Summer (his penultimate feature), the delicately judged use of colour is balanced by a virtual moratorium on camera movement - to have both, it seems, might appear profligate.
The constant subject matter combined with his repertory of actors cast in analogous roles chimes with the nature of that subject matter, the unending cycle of family interaction. This is further reflected in the seasonal titles: the Japanese title of this film more literally translates as Autumn of the Kohayagawa Family. The scenario here is based around the widowed patriarch Banpei, a brewing boss whose gently rekindled affair with an old mistress angers one of his daughters; there are plans to marry another two off. (A conversation in which two of his workers express confusion over the twists of the family tree is perhaps Ozu?s deadpan joke at his own plots? expense.) Incessantly fanning themselves in sweltering heat, the characters are of course as far from Tennessee Williams histrionics as one could imagine; the sharp tongue of Fumiko (Michiyo Aramata) apart, harsh words are rare, though the thoughtless egotism of Banpei?s supposed love child strikes us harsher than a serpent?s tongue.
They never meet, but her opposite is the widowed daughter Akiko
(Setsuko Hara, whose pained smile will be familiar to viewers of Tokyo Story,
where she played a similar role). Akiko dresses traditionally, not in the
western style, but Ozu?s approach to the seismic cultural changes in post-war
is as careful and balanced as in other areas.
The DVD presentation isn't especially good: the layer transfers were awkward on my machine and there are no extras at all, beyond a bare filmography.
Eclipse
Series 3: Late Ozu Criterion essay by Michael Koresky,
The End of Summer Criterion Collection
Associated Content DVD review
[Stephen O. Murray]
DVDTimes Noel Megahey
DVD Talk - Eclipse Series [Jamie S.
Rich] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection, also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Verdict [Joel Pearce] Late Ozu, Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid [Jeffrey M.
Anderson] Late Ozu,
Criterion Collection
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The End of Summer The Auteurs
BBC Films review Tom Dawson
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Nick Wrigley]
DVDBeaver Late Ozu Box [Gary Tooze]
AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (Sanma no
aji)
Yasujiro Ozu: A Centennial Celebration - Harvard Film Archive James Quandt retrospective introduction and brief reviews, April 2 – May 11, 2004
Ozu's last film and one of his most sublime, An Autumn Afternoon
was undoubtedly influenced by the death, during filming, of his mother, with
whom he had lived all his life. The film is suffused with an autumnal sense,
evocative of the end of things, that is countered by its gently satirical
portrait of contemporary
Ozu’s final film is a movingly valedictory affair, its familiar story of Ryu’s elderly widower marrying off daughter Iwashita carrying even more poignancy than usual as a poised and wise reminder of passing time and the inevitable approach of mortality. The gentle humour’s there as ever, but in the sub-plot showing Ryu’s former teacher’s twilight years beset by drink-sodden regrets, the emotions are darker and tougher than previously. The central performance is, of course, a marvel of no-nonsense, unspoken expressiveness, set against exquisitely arranged colour compositions and the director’s loveable repertory company in fine fettle. Whether the film’s making was affected by the death of Ozu’s mother and the onset of his own final illness is hard to quantify, but it does feel like a leave-taking. A year after its release he died on his sixtieth birthday.
The
New York Film Festival Celebrating Ozu
Derek Lam, October 4 –
As much a reworking as an updating of LATE SPRING, Ozu's final film recasts Chishu Ryu as an aging widower anxious to settle his daughter's marriage. Taking into account the social transformations of the intervening decade, Ozu recontextualizes the earlier story by making the female characters far more assertive (Shima Iwashita's Michiko flatly tells her father to do the dishes) and keeping an eye out for characters enamored of expensive golf clubs and refrigerators, thus extending the ironic commentary on growing consumerism laid down in OHAYO/GOOD MORNING. Ozu's mother, with whom he had lived all his life, died during the film's pre-production, and even more than usual AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON is suffused with a strong sense of nostalgia. The film's Japanese title, THE TASTE OF MACKEREL, alludes to the time in late summer when the delicacy is in season, and Ozu's wistful swansong is never less than poetic in its evocation of particular moods, flavors, and places, not least the hauntingly empty house to which Ryu once again returns in an unforgettable coda.
Film Diary Kevin
Lee from Also Like Life
Yasujiro Ozu's last film, about a middle aged man who gives in to his friends' urgings to marry off his daughter, has me making associations with, of all people, Howard Hawks. Not only is the theme of individual desire subjected to communal duty typical of both directors, but this film delights in the nuances of human interactions much in the way of Hawks' late masterpiece RIO BRAVO; both films seem to treat narrative as an afterthought for the sake of exploring and celebrating the ritualized behavior that blossoms when old acquaintances come together. The story seems whimsical, almost jazz-like, in how it follows various side characters before returning repeatedly to the stoic father (Chisyu Ryu, in perhaps his most affecting of all his performances with Ozu). And yet, all these various sides reflect on the whole in an ingenious narrative pattern. The virtues of Ozu's artistry may not be appreciated by most people ¨¢ and even those who do have trouble explaining his significance. It remains one of the great mysteries of the movies that Ozu's seemingly light, commercial entertainments can contain such an abundance of human experience, enhanced by an assiduously developed style that demands extended contemplation.
Midnight
Eye - japan_cult_cinema review Jasper Sharp from
Despite being loudly
praised back at home, throughout the thirty-six year period over which he
worked as a director Yasujiro Ozu's films were considered far too Japanese for
Western audiences to appreciate.
A major practitioner of the
gendai-geki genre of films about everyday life, his films were immensely
popular with both the general public and the critics in Japan, with a grand
total of six of them voted to the number one spot in Kinema Jumpo's annual
awards over the course of his career. However, it was generally assumed that
Ozu's cheery white-collar humanism would have little resonance with viewers in
the rest of the world. Subsequently his films were not widely released abroad
and during his lifetime the director never received the same worldwide
recognition as such contemporaries as Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi.
Nowadays Ozu's films regularly
appear on critics' "greatest films of all time" lists and the
director is now firmly canonised amongst the Kubricks and Fellinis as one of
the great figures of twentieth century world cinema. His immaculately
restrained editing technique and a distinctive visual style comprised of flat
frontal compositions with the actors often facing the audience and the camera
kept at uniformly low height, shooting from just below waist level (as is often
mentioned, as if the viewer is regarding the scene from the seated viewpoint of
the tatami mat), have been subjected to a great deal of analysis over the
years. His trademark Zen-like minimalism is often held up as a direct reaction
to the more melodramatic cinematic style of Western films of the time (as
embraced by Kurosawa in such films as The Seven Samurai / Shichinin No Samurai,
1954), an exemplar of cinematic purity firmly based within the aesthetic
tradition of the other Japanese arts.
I can't help thinking that this
constant focus on technique and the "Japaneseness" of Ozu's oeuvre
has come at the cost of shielding off casual viewers, seemingly reducing his
appeal to academics and high-brow film buffs. The art has been so lost in the
focus on the artistry that it distracts from exactly what made these films so
popular with the audiences of the time in the first place - their simplicity.
Certainly films such as Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) and Late Spring
(Banshun, 1949) have much to offer modern audiences, and I would strongly
advise any Midnight Eye reader not to be intimidated by Ozu's lofty reputation
- his films are actually a lot more accessible than one might think. After all,
great directors are not labelled great directors for nothing.
Ozu's final film, An Autumn
Afternoon, made one year before his death in 1963, may not be recognised as one
of his greatest works, but it's a remarkably watchable piece that sums up the
themes and approach of its director perfectly. Beginning with a 40th
anniversary school reunion in the sake bar that forms one of the film's main
locations, the basic scenario has Hirayama (played by Ryu, a regular actor for
Ozu, best known for his roles in Tokyo Story and The Flavour of Green Tea Over
Rice / Ochazuke No Aji) as the calmly authoritative patriarch at the film's
centre trying to find a suitable spouse with whom to marry off his 23-year old
daughter Michiko (Iwashita). One of his sons, Koichi, has already married and
his youngest, Kazuo, looks set to fly the nest one day. One of the secretaries
at the large company where he works is about to leave and settle down to a life
of married bliss too, and Hirayama seems anxious to escape the predicament of
one of his old schoolyard acquaintances Hyotan (Tono), who runs a tatty noodle
bar with a burly daughter who is now well past her sell-by date ("Ah,
she's not so pretty!", he drunkenly proclaims with a screwed up face to
his assembled former classmates). However, attempts at finding a suitable
husband for Michiko initially seem slim. Where do you find an eligible bachelor
when you need one?
An Autumn Afternoon is the type
of film that was encouraged by the head of Shochiku, Shiro Kido, possessing the
same "Ofuna flavour" that typified the studio's output during the
50s, coming at the tail end of the Golden Age of Japanese Cinema at a time when
theatres were losing admissions hand over fist to the newly arrived medium of
television (whose impact on family life was dealt with by Ozu a few years
earlier in Good Morning / Ohayo). Co-scripted with long-term collaborator Kogo
Noda, as is usual with Ozu, plot is reduced to a bare minimum. Though the story
revolves around the central axis of Hirayama, a good deal of the film is given
over to the other characters, charting the ups and downs of their daily
existence the film almost existing entirely in the form of a series of
vignettes.
This apparent lack of focus and
purpose may seem off-putting at first, but by avoiding the contrivances of
traditional dramatic narratives whilst sketching out a touching portrait of
everyday family life, Ozu creates a world that gives the impression of
stretching far beyond the limiting vista of the cinema screen. Coupled with his
meticulously simplistic visual language, which eschews even such basic
techniques as moving cameras, cross-scene dissolves and fades, it is this
aspect that gives all of Ozu's films such a timeless, universal appeal.
Ozu passed away in 1963, halfway
through making Radishes and Carrots (Daikon To Ninjin), a film that was
completed by Minoru Shibuya the following year. Whether he would have been able
to continue holding his own in a rapidly changing film market is debatable, as
by the time of An Autumn Afternoon, his easy-going light-hearted approach was
already becoming superseded by a new generation of filmmakers crying for a
stronger focus on the individual. One of whom, Shohei Imamura, a former
assistant to Ozu, seemed to be rebelling completely against his mentor, citing
the director's passive, rose-coloured view of society as unrepresentative of
the Japanese spirit. In 1964, Imamura's Intentions of Murder
(Akai Satsui) put an entirely different slant on an entirely different family
unit. One Golden Age of Japanese cinema had ended, another one, arguably, was
already well under way.
An
Autumn Afternoon: A Fond Farewell
Criterion essay by Geoff Andrew,
An Autumn Afternoon: Ozu’s
Diaries Criterion essay by Donald
Richie,
An Autumn Afternoon Criterion Collection
The Film Journal (Ian Johnston) review
Slant Magazine review Eric Henderson
Asia Pacific Arts [Clifford Hilo]
The Films of Yasujiro Ozu - by Michael Grost Classic Film and Television, also here: An Autumn Afternoon
BrokenProjector.com
» Blog Archive » An Autumn Afternoon by ...
Guatam Valluri on AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON, from Broken Projector,
filmcritic.com (Jason Morgan) review [5/5]
Eye for
Film (Merlin Harries) review [5/5]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
VideoVista review Jonathan McCalmont
Strictly Film School review Acquarello
Talking
Pictures (UK) review Howard Schumann
PopMatters (Erik Hinton) review
Passport Cinema [Chris Luedtke]
User comments from imdb Author: Ed Uyeshima from
DVD Times Noel Megahey, also reviewing LATE AUTUMN
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich) dvd
review [4/5] [Criterion Collection] also seen here: Criterion Confessions
DVD Town (Christopher Long) dvd
review [Criterion Collection]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Chuck Aliaga) dvd review Criterion Collection
DVD
Verdict (Daryl Loomis) dvd review
[Criterion Collection]
Dreamlogic.net [Chris Nelson] Criterion Collection
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
review
Criterion Collection
Metroactive.com [Michael S. Gant] Criterion Collection
YASUJIRO OZU « Dennis Grunes 22 Ozu film reviews, April 20, 2007
Ozus' World Movie Reviews (Dennis Schwartz) review
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
Screen:
A Profound Japanese Film:' An Autumn Afternoon' Was Ozu's Last Work The New
York Times,
DVDBeaver dvd review Gary W. Tooze