Gion bayashi

At the heart of Kenji Mizoguchi's Gion bayashi is the effect of changing sexual politics coming into contact with the traditional role of the geisha in Japanese culture. The film represents a dialectic between the traditional understanding of a woman's place as submissive and obedient and more modern attitudes regarding the ability of women to define their own desires and their own lives. Mizoguchi's film suggests that the reality of the world lags well behind these changing attitudes, as many expect the old ways to continue unchanged. This is a film, above all, about sexual exploitation, and it candidly examines the many ways in which women are exploited by the male-dominated society in which they must live. Eiko (Ayako Wakao) decides to become a geisha as a last resort: her mother was a geisha, and when she dies, Eiko is left with no one but an uncle who takes her in only on the condition that Eiko should sleep with him. Fleeing her uncle's sexual advances — forced upon her from a position of power and control — Eiko goes to the geisha Miyoharu (Michiyo Kogure) and begs to become a geisha. Miyoharu agrees to train the young girl, even though it would be at her own expense, because she sees that Eiko has nowhere else to go. The two women soon become embroiled in a complex set of pressures constricting them and limiting their choices, as they become pawns in the business plans of Kusuda (Seizaburo Kawazu) and Kanzaki (Kanji Koshiba).

The film's plot is relentless in documenting the pressures weighing down on Miyoharu and Eiko, as women whose sole role is to be desirable and solicitous, to tend to the needs of men as objects of beauty. Kusuda is a powerful older businessman who loves to be surrounded with young girls. He plays games with a harem of geisha like a little boy, running around and pantomiming baseball gestures, but he takes an especial liking to Eiko as soon as he meets her. Kusuda is also using Miyoharu as a tool in his attempts to get a lucrative contract, since the mid-level minister Kanzaki — who has the ability to make a decision on a business deal affecting Kusuda — falls in love with Miyoharu. Both women thus becomes objects in this business deal, ornaments to the negotiations between Kusuda and Kanzaki. The film carefully establishes the stakes, as Miyoharu and Eiko are manipulated into place by the powerful Madame Okimi (Chieko Naniwa), whose favor is necessary to find work as a geisha.

Miyoharu and Eiko are the only decent people in the film; everyone amassed around them is out to use them or exploit them in some way, especially but not only the cartoonishly lecherous Kusuda and Kanzaki. Eiko's father (Eitaro Shindo), an ailing and struggling storeowner, refuses to support his daughter, washing his hands of her and leaving her to either live with her sexually predatory uncle or to struggle wherever else she can. Later, however, when Eiko becomes a successful geisha renowned for her beauty, her father comes crawling around, begging Miyoharu for money, pathetically telling her that if she doesn't lend him some money he'll have no choice but to kill himself to escape his debt and his failing business. He tells her that he feels entitled to a share of his daughter's earnings — this despite his refusal to support her during the girl's training period to become a geisha, when Miyoharu was forced to borrow a great deal of money to establish Eiko as a geisha. Okimi, as well, is exploitative and predatory, with an old-school understanding of a geisha as basically a prostitute. Eiko resists the idea that she has to take on a "patron," and so does Miyoharu; the two women have more modern ideas, primarily the idea that they don't have to sleep with a man they don't like. This is anathema to Okimi, who tries to maneuver the two women into keeping Kusuda and Kanzaki happy.


The film's story is thus naturally melodramatic, with the character types deliberately exaggerated to maximize the horrors these women are subjected to. Mizoguchi's style, however, is low-key and unobtrusive, and the contrast between the direct, observational realism of his style — which captures in its delicate way the simple day-to-day lives of these people — and the passionate melodrama of the narrative creates a pleasing tension in the film's aesthetic. Mizoguchi's style doesn't call attention to itself, but in subtle ways he's constantly accentuating the film's themes, crafting striking compositions that guide the eye to the power relations that are at the heart of the film. One of the most suggestive images comes when Miyoharu, realizing that she has no choice if she wants to support herself and Eiko while keeping the younger girl pure, finally gives in and agrees to spend the night with Kanzaki. When she goes to see him, he's lounging on his belly on the floor, reading, and Mizoguchi shoots him from above, with Miyoharu towering above him as she walks in. The composition superficially suggests that the power relations are in favor of the woman, but the man's languorous pose and the gaze of entitlement he gives her as he says he's been expecting her work against the composition to suggest that in fact it's the man, languidly doing nothing and waiting for the woman to come serve him, who's in control here. The next shot, in which Miyoharu silently goes off into the corner to undo her complicated geisha robes and sashes, reinforces this impression. The geisha is a servant for the rich, and this scene subtly parallels Miyoharu's obsequious behavior with the many scenes of servants catering to the women throughout the rest of the film. If elsewhere the geisha is respected and served, treated with dignity, in the privacy of the bedroom she's expected to be a servant.

Mizoguchi's style is similarly effective in the scene where Eiko first hears that Miyoharu has spent the night with a man. Mizoguchi stages the scene in a single shot, from just outside the door of Eiko and Miyoharu's home. After Eiko hears the news, the door is closed, inserting a wooden grate over her, obscuring her reaction to the realization of what has been necessary to provide for her. The static shot, and the grating layered over it, simultaneously distance the viewer from Eiko's reaction and call attention to it. Mizoguchi's formalism is more restrained, more subtle than that of his contemporary Yasujiro Ozu, but there's still a clear sense of a constructed world in this film, not only in the artificial contrivances of the script but in the gentle aesthetic sensibility guiding the material. Ozu is an inevitable comparison here, since the theme Mizoguchi is addressing — the conflict between tradition and modernity in a changing postwar Japan — was Ozu's essential theme throughout his postwar work. In comparison, though Ozu is the bolder stylist, Mizoguchi is more overt and melodramatic than his peer, approaching this story as a big theme to be worked out, a message to be communicated, which is very unlike Ozu's method of allowing his themes to gradually emerge from the texture of ordinary lives. If in Ozu's films tradition and modernity are simply part of the fabric of everyday life, in Gion bayashi the script establishes these conflicts in broad strokes and constructs scenes and dialogues obviously intended to bring out one point or another.

This message-oriented perspective is sometimes grating and overbearing, but more often the delicacy of Mizoguchi's aesthetic and the warm, natural performances of his leads prevent the film from becoming too didactic. There's a tenderness and warmth between Miyoharu and Eiko that becomes more and more powerful the more the women suffer together, culminating in the late scene where Miyoharu tells the younger girl how much she loves and cares for her. Mizoguchi deliberately leaves the nature of this love ambiguous — Miyoharu doesn't say she loves the other girl like a daughter — because it's a multilayered bond that encompasses mother/daughter loyalty, friendship, and even a hint of attraction in the way he frames the two women so close together, their heads bowed toward one another in their shared grief. The film ends with them walking down the street together, side by side; in a world amassed against them on all sides, conspiring to sabotage the independent lives they desire, they can ultimately only count on one another.

Passing Fancy

Passing Fancy is an early silent comedy by Yasujiro Ozu. Although many of Ozu's silent films are quite different from his later works, in Passing Fancy Ozu's mature style already seems to be almost fully developed. The film is a charming family comedy about the single dad Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), his son Tomio (Tomio Aoki), and his friend Jiro (Den Obinata), and the tension that enters their simple lives when they meet the homeless and unemployed young woman Harue (Nobuko Fushimi). The middle-aged Kihachi immediately likes the much younger woman, helping her get a job and a place to stay at a neighborhood restaurant while courting her in his goofy but charming way. Harue, though, thinks of Kihachi as an uncle and prefers the younger Jiro, who makes sure to keep her at arm's length, though one suspects that despite his insistence that he doesn't like her, he's only pushing her away out of loyalty to his good friend.

The film is mostly shot from Ozu's familiar low vantage point, his aesthetic already well-established by this time. In his films with children, the low camera placement seems to take on an additional purpose, as the low-to-the-ground framings are perfectly suited to a child's proportions — Tomio fits comfortably within the frame no matter how low the camera is placed — while the adults seem to tower outside the frame, their legs entering the frame before the rest of their body begins to appear in view. The compositions of the film are as meticulous and deliberate as later Ozu, with a constant awareness of how objects and people are arranged within the static frames; there is no camera movement, an aesthetic choice that would be totally codified in Ozu's late color films. As in his later work, striking use is made of bottles and other household objects positioned to counterbalance the actors within the frame; often the actors are placed into the background with some domestic object highlighted in the foreground. Ozu also periodically inserts static shots of the surrounding buildings and water towers to establish the setting, early examples of the "pillow shots" that would become such a powerful aesthetic devise in the director's postwar oeuvre.

Though there are elements of drama and melancholy in Passing Fancy, the film is largely a comedy, not so much in terms of broad slapstick as in its gentle but pervasive comic tone. Even at the height of the film's downtrodden section, when Tomio falls ill and Kihachi worries that the boy might die, Ozu breaks the tragic mood with a comic series of intertitles when Tomio's teacher asks Kihachi how the kid got sick, causing Kihachi to respond that "he ate fifty sen worth of sweets all at once," then enumerating all of the different flavors of candy the boy had eaten. Obviously, the illness isn't meant to be taken entirely seriously, but Kihachi's worries are heartrending anyway. Similarly, there's a strain of comedy running through the film centering on economic concerns in Depression era Japan, a concept introduced in the most humorous possible way in the film's opening scenes. At a theatrical performance, several men in the audience see a coin purse sitting on the ground and discretely peek inside, realizing that it's empty and then discarding it, only to have another man pick it up in the hopes of finding something inside. Ozu milks this gag for its gestural comedy, and also for its suggestion of poverty so extreme and common that none of these men think twice about trying to scrounge for money anywhere they might find a few coins. The physical comedy is then extended with a sequence where several men get up and dance around as though they have bugs crawling around in their clothes, another sign of the squalor of this neighborhood.


That economic hardship defines the film in many ways. Kihachi is embarrassed by his lack of financial security, by his inability to give his child everything he'd like to, and his desire for more leads him to extravagantly give the boy a coin, which Tomio then uses to gorge on candy since he's not used to having any money at all. More seriously, Kihachi proves incapable of paying the doctor who cares for his son, and scraping together the money for the medical bills proves to be an exceedingly difficult task. It quite literally takes the efforts of nearly everyone he knows to pay the doctor, with his community of friends and neighbors coming together to help him and his son.

Ozu often seems constrained by the stylistic conventions of the silent cinema; Japan was slow to switch to sound, and though Ozu often gets by here through gestural acting within the frame, this is a rather dialogue-heavy film with a lot of information and emotion conveyed through the text. In the scene where Harue and Jiro argue over her lack of romantic feelings for Kihachi, Ozu unleashes an uncharacteristic barrage of dialogue intertitles, alternating between static, repetitive images of Harue and Jiro, with more or less the same closeup of each repeated over and over again in between titles. It's one of the moments when the limitations of silent style for Ozu become obvious, as his visual sensibility must be subsumed to the necessity of staging a lengthy and emotionally complex conversation entirely in text.

Such glitches aside, Passing Fancy is a warm and gently funny work. The film's story is minimal, which allows Ozu to develop his characters and to use his slow, observational visual sensibility to create a portrait of an era and a neighborhood. The rich sense of community, the half-comic depiction of economic woes, the emotional nuance of the characters as they make the best of their limited circumstances, it all adds up to a lovely film that's very much attuned to the social milieu in which it is set.

Sword of the Beast

Hideo Gosha's Sword of the Beast is a harsh, cynical samurai movie that questions the assumptions of the often glamorized samurai code. Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira) is an outcast samurai betrayed by his superiors, tricked into killing a political leader and then forced to go on the run. The film suggests that the much-vaunted samurai code is actually a tool of political control and oppression, a method of establishing a rigid hierarchy in which the poor are kept in their place, occasionally offered an opportunity to advance by superiors who seldom follow through on these promises. It's obvious that the film's dark satire of the feudal system is a parallel to 60s Japan, another transitional place and time. Gennosuke is seeking to reform the bushido code, to introduce new ideas that would allow for more social mobility and greater fluidity in the samurai ranks, reducing the extent to which the highest samurai positions were a matter of inheritance and wealth. Gosha clearly intended for the film's situation to apply more or less directly to his own era, to social inequities and the political exploitation of the lower classes, who in this film are used and manipulated and then discarded when their purpose has been served.

This is a very dark vision, a very negative perspective on the samurai code — there's little trace here of the honor and chivalry that so often characterize the relationships between samurai warriors in popular movie representations. Gennosuke is on the run from his old friend Daizaburo (Kantarô Suga) and Daizaburo's fiancée Misa (Toshie Kimura) because Gennosuke had killed Misa's father; they've vowed vengeance as a result. Again and again, the pursuers catch up to Gennosuke and he avoids them; he scandalizes and shocks Daizaburo by running away rather than standing up to them and fighting. The whole situation is so unbalanced that there's very little honor in it, anyway: the pursuers are accompanied by a samurai master and a squad of soldiers, and they engage in dirty tricks while trying to capture the fleeing ronin. During the opening credits, Gennosuke is seduced by a woman who turns out to have been hired by Misa's party to distract the ronin and lead him into a trap. Later, they bribe innkeepers and sneak up on their target, ambushing him when they believe he's sleeping or not on alert. There's no honor in this, no sense of the usual one-on-one samurai duel between two equals. Instead, the pursuers even hire criminal thugs to help them, and the samurai master justifies it by saying that, in matters of revenge, the samurai code deems these ordinarily immoral actions permissible.

The film's basic thrust is this consideration of what it means to be moral within such an immoral system. Gennosuke is considered an outcast, a ronin who committed an unforgivable act, and he is called a beast. In fact, though, he is the only character in the film who truly acts with decency towards the people he meets, particularly the young samurai Jurata (Go Kato) and his wife Taka (Shima Iwashita). They're looking for gold in the mountains, working on behalf of their impoverished clan, stealing gold from government land in secret; they too have sacrificed themselves for the sake of their superiors, and it's obvious that their reward, if there even is one, won't be worth the work they put in on behalf of their leaders. Gennosuke initially plans to steal the couple's gold, deciding to give in, to become the beast that everyone says he is, but he's too decent at heart to really go through with this scheme.


Gosha explores this moral conflict in heavy-handed dialogue scenes that spell out the film's themes in big block letters whenever possible. If there's one thing Sword of the Beast isn't, it's subtle. It's actually fairly crude and broad, and its treatment of its female characters is questionable, to say the least. The women in this film are often seductresses and betrayers, like the woman in the opening scene who uses her body to lure Gennosuke into a trap, or Osen (Yôko Mihara), an assassin who seduces men by suggestively baring her shoulders or stripping to bathe, then tries to kill the unsuspecting men. Misa is different, a strong-willed woman on a mission of vengeance, but Gosha subjects her to a vile and violent rape that eliminates her composure and self-sufficiency. The film contains numerous such scenes of violence against women, and in virtually every case, Gosha's cinematography seems to leer over the women as they're violated and assaulted, exploiting the way their clothes rip and their bodies are bared by the violence. It's apparent that Gosha intends for these scenes to portay the dismal treatment of women, but he can't resist ogling their bared flesh — and displaying them for audiences — even as they're being attacked and raped.

This rather contemptible disregard for women makes the film often difficult to watch, even if in other ways it's an interesting take on the samurai genre. Certainly, Gosha's feel for swordplay is admirable. He films the action sequences in a brisk, on-the-run style that captures the frenetic pace and confusion of these battles. The camera frequently tracks the fighters as they run, occasionally stopping for an exchange of sword thrusts. The battles almost all take place on the move, with very few static showdowns; the fighters are running and circling one another, chasing each other, doing battle while in motion, barely stopping once one opponent has been dispatched before moving on to the next. Gosha's camera frequently shoots the fighters in close quarters, where their sword thrusts are rapid blurs slicing through the air, or else obscured from within a field of high grass, the fighters just barely visible through the foliage. This approach gives the impression of real, messy battles playing out rather than carefully choreographed movie duels. The sword fights are thrilling and viscerally intense in a way that cleaner choreography wouldn't be able to accomplish.

The movie's dialogue also has a certain blunt economy that's refreshing, in the way that the pulpy dialogue of American film noir is refreshing. After dispatching a number of would-be gold poachers, Jurota flatly tells his wife, "Cheer up. I'll go take care of the bodies." The dialogue is often like this, sharp and almost funny in its offhand brutality, and there are stretches where the film can be appreciated as pulp trash, complete with over-the-top femme fatales and bracing scenes of violence. That's part of the problem, maybe, this conflict between different modes. On the one hand, Sword of the Beast is a serious-minded social satire, an examination of class oppression and the rigid hierarchies that prevent people from advancing in life. On the other hand, however, it's a gaudy exploitation picture, tantalizing audiences with hints of female flesh and bursts of violence. The conflict between these two tendencies isn't resolved here, resulting in a film that seems to be constantly fighting in two different directions at once.

I Was Born, But...

I Was Born, But... is an utterly charming, hilarious silent comedy of childhood by Yasujiro Ozu, displaying the lighter, more playful side of his sensibility. The film concerns itself almost exclusively with the child's point of view, focusing on the perspective of young brothers Keiji (Tomio Aoki) and Ryoichi (Hideo Sugawara). The boys have just moved to a new town with their father (Tatsuo Saito) and mother (Mitsuko Yoshikawa), since their father has moved to the suburbs so as to be closer to his boss. The film's genius is the way Ozu keeps unceremoniously cutting away from the film's adult dramas — the father's desire to advance at work and make a good impression on his boss — to follow the kids instead. It's like there are two entirely separate worlds coexisting here. When the father goes to visit his boss on the weekend early in the film, Ozu watches just long enough to establish that he's doing a little sucking up, looking obviously subservient with his stained jacket and nervous mannerisms, and then the camera chases off after the boss' son Taro (Seiichi Kato) as he runs away with some friends to go bully the new boys.

These scenes have an exuberance and energy that's nearly irresistible, as Ozu traces the way that small dramas can be of big consequence in a child's world. Keiji and Ryoichi must adjust to their new home, to new challenges from a bully and the gang he leads. They are dogged, too, by their father's insistence that they do well in school, even though they don't even want to go because of the bullies there. When asked if they like school, the boys immediately respond, "we like the walk there and the walk home, but in between is no fun." There's a real sharp wit in this film, a sense of pitch-perfect comic timing that's as present in the physical comedy as it is in the sporadic dialogue provided by the titles. When the bullies confront the two boys, it's staged like a dance, with each side stepping forward a little bit at a time, hesitantly posturing for one another, the leader gliding forward and the others behind him nervously inching up to support him or at least to see what's going on.

Ozu has great fun with all these scenes, enjoying the kids' mugging and goofing around, the way they make faces and stand on one foot, try to find sparrows' eggs because they think it'll make them stronger, and play a funny game of raising the dead, gesturing to make a kid fall to the floor, then crossing themselves and holding their hands out to bring him back to "life." There are plenty of wonderful comic set pieces and characters, like the beer delivery boy (Shoichi Kofujita) who teases the boys by pretending he'll forge a good grade on their faked homework assignment, then drawing a backwards character instead. Later, the boys convince the delivery boy to help them beat up the bully who's bothering them, because they tip him off when their mother wants to buy beer. Helping him get a sale earns the boys his temporary loyalty, but it's not enough to get him to also take on Taro: as he explains, Taro's family buys much more than Keiji and Ryoichi's family. This is a first indication, though the boys don't understand it at the time, of the concept of social status and hierarchies.

Their understanding of hierarchies is limited to the idea of who can beat up whom, of who's bigger and stronger, who's tougher. They don't get that the adult world has different priorities, that money and class dictate the separations and relationships between people once they grow up past childhood. Once the boys dispense with the bully, they take over leadership of the gang, including Taro, who becomes their friend and lackey. To them, they're equals at least, so it's puzzling to get some hints that things might be different for their parents. This conflict comes to the fore in the film's final third: after spending an hour dealing with light slapstick and goofy little set pieces involving the kids, Ozu unexpectedly introduces a note of pathos and drama when the boys see some amateur movies of their father acting like a fool at work, making funny faces and trying to amuse his boss. They had worshiped and respected their father, believing him to be an important man, defending him in the usual kids' arguments about whose father is the best. When they see these movies, they suddenly see him in a totally different light, as a clown, as someone who has to be obsequious with Taro's father, constantly bowing to him. And when their father tries to explain that he is only an employee, that Taro's father is above him in rank, the boys are only even more devastated, understanding in a flash that the world does not work the way they thought it did, that their father was not the "great man" they'd thought he was.


The film's final act is moving and nuanced in its treatment of this theme, replacing the humor of the earlier scenes with an honest, direct look at class and honor. The father sighs that coping with the limits of status, with settling for being just a lowly employee, is "a problem kids these days will face all their lives," suggesting that he sees a future, sadly enough, where his own sons will grow up to be just like him, cogs in the machine rather than truly important men. He watches them sleep, with tears drying beneath their eyes, and urges them to strive to be better, not to settle for a working man's life and status the way he had. It's deeply affecting, to see this man struggling with his emotions as he realizes how badly his sons' confidence in him has been shaken. He briefly sinks into despair, grabbing a bottle of liquor and threatening to drown his sorrow in it. Ozu captures this low point quite effectively, framing the image with the father leaning against the doorway in the right side of the frame, the liquor bottle in his hand hanging down into the foreground, as his wife sits in the center of the frame in the background. It's a wonderful image of resignation and sadness. It is also the payoff to Ozu's decision to stage the film so completely from the kids' perspective prior to this: this sudden shift to the father, to his long-subdued frustration and mild shame at his limited position in life, is striking in its emotional impact.

There are hints of this sympathy to the father's perspective earlier in the film, too. Ozu's editing frequently suggests the continuity between father and sons even before the theme comes up explicitly in the film's denouement, by drawing parallels between the generations through juxtapositions of images. At one point, the camera pans (a camera move much more frequent in silent Ozu than it would be later in his career) across a row of office workers hunched over their desks, writing. Ozu then cuts to a cluster of students at their desks, learning calligraphy while a teacher admonishes them for goofing around or staring off into space, and finally the camera pans across an open field where the two kids cutting school are sprawled out, also writing as they lie in the grass. In all three shots, the camera move is the same, even as subtle shifts in the angle calls attention to the cutting, preventing a smooth transition from one shot to the next. It is purposefully disjunctive and jarring, suggesting both that the generations are linked by similar behaviors and situations, and yet that there is some necessary break, some trauma, that leads from childhood to adulthood. That break, perhaps, is the children's later realization of their father's place in the social strata.

Ozu chronicles the changing relationship between father and sons throughout the film by returning several times to a particular primal scene, the father and the two boys leaving the house together in the mornings, walking together as far as a train crossing before splitting up, the boys going off to school and the father to work. When this scene recurs at the end of the film, after the boys have started to come to terms with their father's place in the world, it mirrors the earlier ones, in which the boys had unquestioned respect for their father. But there's a new emotional undercurrent here, a hint of hesitancy that's cleared up when the boys give their father permission to go greet his boss, confirming that they now understand and have once again gained respect for him, albeit a new, more realistic respect, one founded on simple love rather than a mistaken belief in the father as an idealized "great man." It is a poignant and warm ending to a wonderful film in which Ozu affectionately, sensitively explores the nature of familial bonds and the role of honor in a new world where social class is calcifying into a rigid hierarchy.

Tokyo Chorus

Tokyo Chorus is an early pre-war silent film from Yasujiro Ozu, whose silent work generally reveals quite a different director from the later static, patient sensibility of his mature oeuvre. Of course, there is still a continuity in terms of themes and subjects connecting these earlier silents to the sound films. Tokyo Chorus is, like almost all of Ozu's films, concerned with domesticity and family relationships, and with the changes wrought on the family by outside pressures and developments. In Ozu's post-war films, these pressures take the form of encroaching Westernization, of the old traditional ways transitioning into a new modern sensibility. Obviously, there are some slightly different concerns at the core of this pre-war film, made in 1931 with the Great Depression affecting Japan as much as any other country — as one character jokes early on, "Hoover's policies haven't helped us yet," a wry punchline made even more bitterly ironic by the retrospective knowledge that Hoover's policies didn't help anyone very much.

The film centers on one family struggling to make ends meet during this difficult economic time. Shinji (Tokihiko Okada) is introduced as a rebellious, goofy schoolboy, but a few years later he has a family: a wife (Emiko Yagumo), a son (Hideo Sugawara), a daughter (Hideko Takamine) and a baby. Ozu introduces Shinji in a lengthy and near-slapstick sequence as a stern school teacher (Tatsuo Saito) tries to maintain control over a rowdy line of students (though, admittedly, the fact that all these schoolboys look like grown men initially makes it hard for an outsider to figure out the context of this scene). Ozu pans across the line of students, his camera moving across a diagonal composition that is repeated several times throughout the film. Such motion would later become rare and uncharacteristic in Ozu's post-war work, but here his aesthetic is not pinned down to the static, low-height observation that would come to be his most salient visual characteristic. Instead, Ozu's camera tracks along with the characters as they walk, or passes along rows of people lining a street.

During the opening scene, Shinji and the other students goof around and play, as the instructor makes disapproving notes in a little book, calling them out to examine their outfits and their posture. Shinji gets in trouble for not having a shirt on under his jacket, and is left sitting alone, picking at something (bugs? stray threads?) on his pants as the rest of the students are led away. This introduction establishes the film's broad sense of humor, telegraphed through the loping gait of the students as they act surly towards the teacher, or the instructor's head-bobbing bounce as he surveys them. From this opening, Ozu cuts away to a few years later, when Shinji is working at an insurance company. It is not stated directly, but the gap is meant to represent the onset of maturity, the rowdy schoolboy gaining responsibility as he settles into life with a family and a respectable office job.


This stability is disrupted when Shinji loses his job after defending an older employee who he felt had been unfairly fired: his earlier insouciance towards authority manifesting itself again in an act of benevolent defiance. The scene is nearly played for comedy — Shinji and his boss get into a slowly escalating shoving match by tapping each other on the shoulder with fans — but there's no mistake that the consequences of this lost job are truly dire for a man with a wife and three children in the middle of a terrible depression, with no jobs available. The central theme of the film is this man's struggle to maintain his family's honor and his own self-respect when faced with the loss of his profession and, with it, his claim to respectability. Honor is central to the film, especially as expressed in the way that Shinji's wife looks at him; Ozu captures the impact of a look, the humiliation of seeing her husband in a menial job that is beneath his station, a job he only got because of a chance encounter with his sympathetic former teacher.

What's interesting, though, is that Ozu ultimately critiques, in his own indirect way, the concepts of honor expressed here. Shinji's wife at first resists her husband "stooping" to a job carrying banners to advertise his former teacher's new restaurant; when she sees him doing this, she is humiliated. In fact, it's a rare moment when Ozu reinforces her feelings with an intertitle that outright says she's humiliated; Ozu generally uses such titles sparingly, preferring to capture such emotional nuances in the actors' performances, using the editing to emphasize certain glances and expressions. This, apparently, was a beat that Ozu felt the need to hammer home more forcefully, however, hitting his audience over the head rather than risk anyone missing the wife's sense of disgrace. She tells Shinji that he should remain proud and not do anything so obviously beneath his status. But Shinji resists, insisting that he is doing the right thing, that all a man in his situation can do is take whatever opportunities come to him. His wife soon gives way as well, agreeing to help him in his new job and supporting him until, at the end, his former teacher comes through with an offer of a better job in education. The lesson seems to be that abstract concepts like honor and pride are not nearly as important as putting food on the table for one's family, just as keeping up appearances must be secondary to providing the necessities of life for one's loved ones.

Tokyo Chorus is a fine film if not a particularly distinguished one. It reveals Ozu's nascent sensibility in its earliest state, as he deals with his usual themes — family dramas, the conflict between traditional values and changing conditions, the rhythms of domestic life — in a less formally rigorous way than he would in later years. The film is unfailingly direct and straightforward in its approach, telling a simple story simply. It is thus not quite a peak Ozu film, but perhaps an important work in his development, a step towards the greater depth and aesthetic richness of his later films. It is, regardless, an affecting film, particularly in two scenes between Shinji and his teacher. In the first, when the teacher offers Shinji a job, the latter offers some token resistance based on honor, saying that if the teacher merely feels pity for him, then he can't accept, but that if it's a gesture of friendship instead, he can. Shinji is essentially constructing a way for him to take the job and still feel like he's not sacrificing his honor; Ozu captures the desperate yearning on Shinji's face as he fears that perhaps his teacher will withdraw the offer, and the knowing nod from the teacher as he accepts this face-saving gesture. Later, in the final scene, Shinji's former classmates have gathered together for a reunion, and are singing a song together. Shinji and the teacher both join in, but as Ozu cuts between closeups of the two of them, isolating them within the crowd, their faces are troubled briefly by sadness and introspection before they regain their composure and join the celebration. Even in a relatively straightforward and conventional film like this, Ozu asserts his mastery with shots like these, shots where complicated emotions arise from his probing of the faces of his actors, and the juxtapositions between uplift and loss that flow through this film.

Films I Love #48: The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)

The Face of Another is the third of four feature collaborations between director Hiroshi Teshigahara and novelist Kôbô Abe, based on Abe's novel of the same name. It's also arguably both Abe's best book and, partly as a result, the best film the duo made together: a paranoid, dreamlike examination of identity, sexuality, fidelity, disguises and superficial appearances. This haunting film centers around the businessman Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai), who is badly scarred in a fire. When he receives a realistic mask from his psychiatrist/plastic surgeon (Mikijirô Hira), he begins to become disassociated from his identity, discovering that his appearance is more intimately linked than he had suspected with his behavior, attitudes and identity. He not only looks like an entirely new man, but increasingly becomes one, once he sheds his bandages and takes on a new face. In this new identity, he seduces his wife (Machiko Kyô) but is hurt when she goes along with the advances of this stranger — even though she later insists she knew it was him.

The film is elliptical and slippery, boldly fragmenting its narrative as the hero muses with his psychiatrist — who also acts as his friend, his guide, his doctor, and his moral arbiter — about the nature of identity and the question of what constitutes the self. The cinematography has a startling clarity that lends force to Teshigahara's outrageous imagery. The film frequently seems to be a dream, flowing with casual absurdity from one bizarre set piece to another. This quality is especially apparent in the scenes taking place in the psychiatrist's office, in which disconnected body parts float in the air or serve as decorative flourishes. At one point, Okuyama leans back against a wall paneled with tiny ears sitting in tile boxes. The office is segmented with clear walls on which medical diagrams and geometric patterns are drawn, while replicas of body parts are inset into the surface of the wall, making them look like they're suspended in space. Within this surrealist office, the film's unsettling diversions and subplots seem almost like logical reactions to a ridiculous world.

The End of Summer

The End of Summer was Yasujiro Ozu's penultimate film, and it's thus perhaps fitting that the film's subject, at least in part, is the end of life: the English title refers not only to seasonal changes but to pivotal moments in life, particularly its cessation. (The Japanese title, literally translated as Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family, conveys the same sense of some doors closing while others open anew.) The elderly Kohayagawa (Ganjiro Nakamura) has had a full, busy life, and now that he's near its end, he wants only to squeeze out the last few drops of pleasure from his existence, and to leave this world believing that his family is going to be taken care of after he's gone. He doesn't dwell on death or show any overt signs of preoccupation with what happens after he's gone, but it nevertheless clearly motivates him. In particular, he wants to know that his daughters — young, unmarried Noriko (Yôko Tsukasa) and widowed Akiko (Setsuko Hara) — are settled and married. His eldest daughter, Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) is already married, to Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi), and for them Kohayagawa wants to know that his perpetually struggling business, which he's more or less passed on to Hisao, is well-maintained. Still, although Kohayagawa is in some ways getting his affairs in order and tying up loose ends, he's hardly given up on life, and he retains the sense of pleasure he feels in the company of Sasaki Tsune (Chieko Naniwa), who he'd had an affair with many years before and with whom he'd rekindled this affection in his dotage. He is an example of one end of the see-saw dichotomy that runs through so much of Ozu's work: the tension between personal happiness and the stability of the family or the larger community. It is the tension between the individual and the group, here realized as Kohayagawa's balance between doing what he wants and doing what his family, who are embarrassed of his philandering and his carefree lifestyle, would prefer.

This is a recurring topic in Ozu's films, many of which involve the kinds of marriage dramas that Noriko and Akiko face, in which the women must choose between the option that will make them happiest, and the option that will make their families happiest and most stable. Noriko and Akiko are both being set up with men who bemuse and entertain them but who they certainly don't love. Noriko, in fact, is in love with another man, a man who she worked with but who moved away before they could truly express their feelings for one another. Akiko, for her part, would prefer to remain a widow, raising her child by herself, rather than get married again. But both women nevertheless are seriously considering these arranged marriages for the sake of their family. The film's drama, quiet and understated as it is, revolves around the sisters' crucial choice between their individual happiness and their reluctance to disappoint or inconvenience their family. It's a plot Ozu returned to again and again, as he probed the changing dynamics of Japanese culture post-World War II, the infusion of Western influences, and the friction between old ways of doing things and new understandings of the possibilities open to individuals outside of traditional group structures.

Ozu's gentle aesthetic — static shots from a fixed, low perspective, arranged in patient rhythms — is perfectly suited to such introspective stories. He intersperses his inter-generational narrative, as usual, with unpopulated interludes, shots of these domestic settings denuded of their inhabitants. These interludes are lyrical poems, often three-line poems in which each "line" is an individual shot. These triplets serve multiple purposes for Ozu: they are dividers between dramatic, narrative, dialogue scenes; they establish a sense of place; they influence the film's rhythm and pacing; they enhance the impression that Ozu is a sublime documenter of everyday life in all its minutest details. But most importantly, these images are simply sensual and sensory, almost abstract in their oblique relationships to the narrative scenes.


Sometimes the syntax of these "poems" is clear enough: start with a medium shot of an empty room, then cut to a closeup of a pale blue lantern, a detail from the wider shot. That's a standard enough gesture. More unpredictable is Ozu's penchant for offering unusual angles on the same scene. The three shots shown above are a typical example of one of Ozu's poetic sequences: three views of wooden baskets lined up along a wall, but the relationship between the three shots is ambiguous and formal rather than straightforward. The first two shots rhyme against one another with opposing angles and slightly altered distance, together forming an uneven upside-down "V" shape, while the third shot unexpectedly pulls back down an adjacent alleyway. This shot sequence is mysterious and purely formal, a diversion from Ozu's documentation of his ordinary characters to examine the rich details and prosaic beauty of their surroundings. This particular tendency in Ozu is perhaps his most characteristically Japanese touch, derived from a rich tradition of such visual poetry, like Hokusai's famous "views" of Mount Fuji, each one drawn from a different angle and infused with different hues.

The film's opening sequence provides a stunning example of how Ozu's patient cutting from one static shot to another can subtly lead into the buried drama of his stories, as well as creating an overpowering mood through the rhythmic editing. The first two shots show the city of Osaka at night, its blinking neon lights and tall, dark skyscrapers instantly announcing the modernity of the setting. Ozu then cuts to a shot in the interior of a bar, looking from his typical low angle down a row of bar stools at the blinking neon sign out the window and the bar patrons sitting at the counter. The next shot is a two-shot of a man sitting at the bar with one of the hostesses, and then Ozu cuts to single shots of each of them in turn. It's a simple rhythm, but in just six shots Ozu has moved fluidly from the broadest possible context to the most intimate, from images of an entire city to closeups of individuals. His deliberate aesthetic creates a cumulative effect, with each shot adding to the mood established by the earlier shots; the intrusion of Setsuko Hara, as the traditional woman Akiko, into this modern world is especially startling, with her traditional garb clashing against the bright, stylish dresses and American-style makeup favored by most of the younger girls in this place.

All of this slow accumulation is leading towards a moving, complex denouement, in which Akiko and Noriko make their respective decisions as the older generation cedes its reign to the younger ones. The film's entire final act is comprised of Ozu's epic depiction of a funeral, a lengthy and emotionally intense sequence spread out across multiple different locations. His editing rhythms take on a sublime purposefulness at this point. A pair of peasants by a river are surrounded by crows, a harbinger of death, and they look up at the tall chimney of the nearby crematorium, which will emit clouds of smoke at the climax of the funeral. The peasants exchange pat clichés about the "cycle of life" and death as the passing of the torch from one generation to the next, but Ozu makes these values apparent more poignantly in his visuals, and in the more indirect conversation between Akiko and Noriko. The two sisters watch the smokestack from a nearby hillside, discussing their respective decisions and the importance of being happy in life. Meanwhile, the remainder of the family gathers in a restaurant for the funeral lunch, and though they chatter on about life and death, sometimes cheerful and sometimes distraught, the moment when they first see the crematorium's smoke is entirely silent, shot from behind, with one woman slowly rising to watch and the others solemnly following, until everyone is arranged at the window in a tight group, watching the last fragile wisps of a life being blown away by the wind. The film ends with another of Ozu's poetic interludes, on the subject of death this time: crows under a pier, crows on a sand bank, crows hopping from one grave marker to the next, cawing, their black feathery forms seeming like negative space against the pale blue of sky and water or the lush greens of the foliage.


What's especially unexpected about The End of Summer, given its big themes and serious subjects, is how light it is in its approach. Ozu's comedy is often broader and airier than one would expect from an artist of his general delicacy and deliberateness. In one scene, Akiko's would-be new husband pulls out a cigarette lighter that unleashes a massive flame, so that the act of lighting a cigarette is like sticking one's face into the path of a flamethrower; it's a gag of visual incongruity on par with Quentin Tarantino's recent pipe gag in Inglourious Basterds (and that's probably one of the few times you'll see anyone link Tarantino and Ozu in any way). More importantly, Ganjiro Nakamura in particular delivers a wonderfully comic performance as the family's spry, cheerful patriarch. When he walks through the streets, fanning himself to shield against the oppressive heat, there's a faint bounce in his step, a peculiar waddle that Ozu synchronizes with the jaunty soundtrack. There's great comic charm in Kohayagawa's attempts to elude his family so he can visit his mistress. At one point, while playing hide-and-seek with his grandson, he pretends to be looking for the boy but is actually stealthily dressing and preparing to go out. Sasaki, his mistress, provides some wry humor as well, particularly in her relationship with her daughter Yuriko (Reiko Dan), who she claims is Kohayagawa's daughter even though the girl's parentage is by no means certain. These two women are matter-of-fact gold-diggers, getting the most they can out of their relationships with men, but Ozu doesn't judge them harshly: they simply do what they have to in order to get by, to survive and experience some measure of happiness in their lives. Like Kohayagawa himself, they take life as it comes and enjoy it as much as possible. Despite Ozu's sympathies for older ways of doing things, for the bonds of tradition and duty and responsibility, it's apparent that he appreciates this more lackadaisical approach to life as well.

The End of Summer is a beautiful, graceful film, a resonant work that frankly addresses mortality and the shifting cultural status quo. It is a profoundly unhurried film, and yet there is an economy of gesture and movement in Ozu's aesthetic that makes the film seem very condensed. Each movement has a purpose: there are several shots in which two people sit into a crouching position together, their movements perfectly synchronized, as though they are both attuned to the world's invisible rhythm. This rhythm, so subtle and yet so powerful, is the rhythm of Ozu's films: slow, graceful, perhaps slightly melancholic, but also at times joyful and even exuberant, quietly exulting in the possibilities of the future or even just the sunny warmth of one of the final summer days before autumn.

Patriotism

[This review is posted in preparation for the latest discussion for The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club, which will be discussing Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters this month. Stop by Krauthammer's blog Crips and Mutes on November 23 to join the discussion.]

Patriotism, the sole film made by famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima, is a weird artifact, a thirty-minute short film with no dialogue. It's obviously a deeply felt film, a sensual and serious presentation of the ritual suicide of a soldier and his wife, with each detail lovingly examined. On the other hand, it's also an incredibly preposterous film, plodding relentlessly through a preset sequence of events, towards an unavoidable conclusion. The film's story is set up entirely in text with a scroll that appears before the film proper begins; the short was adapted from one of Mishima's own short stories, and it shows in this overly literary grounding. Mishima himself plays a soldier named Takeyama, who is in a tough position: having remained loyal to the Emperor during a failed coup attempted by his friends, he is now scheduled to preside over the execution of the rebels. However, he is unable to face killing his friends, and instead plans to kill himself by harakiri. His wife, Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka) vows to join him in the act, so that they might die and enter the afterlife together.

It's virtually impossible to watch this film without thinking about what it reflects about the film's director/writer/star. Only four years after this film was made, Mishima himself committed harakiri, so the film's meticulous, step-by-step depiction of the ritual suicide and the preparation for it comes across as a dress rehearsal for the act Mishima dreamed of committing in reality. It's no surprise, then, that the film is an almost erotic celebration of suicide. The film is derived from Noh theater and takes place on a minimalist Noh stage, where the setting evokes a bare frame of a house, its surfaces all white and nearly empty. The gestures of the two actors are also derived from Noh, and they're suitably overblown and stylized; Reiko and Takeyama both move slowly and deliberately, emphasizing every least movement as they make their preparations. This is sometimes affecting and sensual, but just as often comes across as forced and even kind of silly.

During the sex scene between the couple, their last carnal embrace for their last night together, the film vacillates back and forth between poignant sensuality — the quivering of muscles beneath taut bare skin — and overwrought goofiness. The images are crystalline and beautifully crafted, it's undeniable. The actors, set off from the stark emptiness of the stage, caress and lounge naked together, and lights twinkle in their eyes during the frequent closeups. It's perhaps unfortunate, but it comes across as a parody of an art film, taking itself too seriously, investing every image with over-the-top emotion and sentiment.


Of course, part of the problem is perhaps the short's very premise, its lush romanticism of ritualistic suicide. At the core of harakiri is a conception of honor, but this does not seem to be of interest to Mishima. He presents the entire justification for the act, the soldier's tale of woe about betrayal and divided loyalties, in the introduction as a scrolling text. It is as though he is in a rush to get to the ritual itself, ignoring its historical meaning and context, or rather taking them for granted. What he's interested in is a kind of sexual embrace of death. He wallows in the details of the deed with an intense focus, admiring the way the blade cuts through the soldier's stomach, the way the blood, black and sticky, pours out between his fingers, the way his guts spill out into his lap. And then, he dedicates the same attention to the wife's suicide — because, of course, the subservient woman must passively follow her man into death, killing herself so that she falls, swooning, on top of his disemboweled body for the film's morbidly romantic final image. Mishima isn't interested in why she does what she does, not really, and he's certainly not interested in considering the implications of a woman mutely following her husband into death for reasons that have nothing to do with her. He's only interested in her photogenic death, and in the copious, sparkling tears streaming down her cheeks as she watches her husband die.

This unquestioning acceptance of a death dictated by ancient rituals and concepts of honor is at the heart of Patriotism. As the sole film made by Mishima, an undiluted expression of his psyche and aesthetic, it's of course interesting at least for that. And its gorgeous black and white photography is expressive and frequently evocative, capturing such unforgettable images as Reiko lustily licking her knife's blade before putting it to her throat, or the overlapping collage of memories layered over her face as she thinks back on her happy marriage. As potent as some of these images are, however, the film as a whole is simply the overcooked morbid wet dream of a man obsessed by death, romanticizing the spilling of guts with his pristine imagery.

Tokyo!

Tokyo! is a multi-director anthology in which three directors — Frenchmen Michel Gondry and Leos Carax and Korean Bong Joon-ho — present three individual short films, linked only by their shared setting and their different approaches to odd, surrealistic storytelling. Gondry's film is first, a quietly moving short called Interior Design, based on the great short story "Cecil and Jordan in New York" by comic artist Gabrielle Bell, who co-wrote the film with Gondry. The film is about Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani) and her filmmaker boyfriend Akira (Ryo Kase), who go to Tokyo in order to screen Akira's low-budget film and to make a start for themselves in the city. When they first arrive, they move in with Hiroko's friend Akemi (Ayumi Ito), staying in her cramped apartment while trying to find a place for themselves as well. Things are difficult, however, since only Akira is able to get a part-time job, their car is ticketed and finally impounded, and every apartment they look at is tiny and miserable. Hiroko is increasingly aimless in the city, wandering around, growing frustrated, sensing Akira's growing distance from her (and attraction to her friend Akemi instead) and sensing also Akemi's aggravation that the couple has been taking advantage of her hospitality for so long.

At this point, Hiroko undergoes a startling change, turning into a plain wooden chair. She initially runs through the streets in a panic as her legs become thin wooden sticks, but she soon becomes used to her situation, accepting and even enjoying it. She's taken home by a young musician, and stays a chair at night when he's home, while transforming back into a girl during the day so she can do what she wants, puttering around his apartment. Gondry treats the offhand surrealism of the story with much the same attitude as Bell's original comic, in which the heroine's transformation into a chair is accomplished in three panels, accompanied by the casual narration, "and so I changed myself into a chair." Other than transplanting the characters from Brooklyn to Tokyo, Gondry expands upon the original story while keeping to its basic thrust. The actual initial moment of transformation is more dramatic here, with some stunning special effects to show Hiroko's gradual process of becoming a chair.

More importantly, however, Gondry fills in the subtexts of the original story, which is about loneliness and the feeling of being ignored. Hiroko feels like she is "just the girlfriend" to Akira, who isn't exactly a successful filmmaker but still gets more attention as an "artist," while Hiroko feels left out, useless, without purpose in her life. Her transformation is thus an attempt to become valuable, to become something with a concrete use. She becomes a chair, strictly utilitarian, essential and important and yet also ordinary. It's a bittersweet, clever little film, quiet in its emotions and subtle in the way it allows its metaphors to play out. The relationship between Akira and Hiroko is portrayed well by the two young actors, who laugh and joke with one another; their relationship seems to be built on in-jokes and goofing around. They're young and not yet taking life seriously. They turn everything into a game, even serious problems like checking their finances to see how they can afford an apartment. And they're ill-prepared to really talk to one another, particularly Akira, who's too tied up in his goofy art films to really pay much attention to his girlfriend.

Hiroko's transformation is thus an escape, from a life of being ignored, and also from a life of encroaching responsibilities. She has a childlike sense of play — she sits around cutting pictures out of magazines and making collages or awkward origami — and she doesn't want to lose her little "hobbies," which for her define what she wants from the world. She doesn't want to have "ambition," as Akira keeps urging her. She just wants someone to think she's useful; she wants to feel like she has a place in the world. By the end of the film, she does. This is a wonderful, affecting film, one that does justice to one of cartoonist Bell's best stories.


The second film in this anthology is Leos Carax's incredibly strange Merde. This short opens with the titular character (Denis Lavant), emerging from a manhole cover, filthy and wild-looking in a green suit, with frizzy hair, a milky white eye, and a red beard curving off to one side like a scythe's blade. He has been dubbed "the creature from the sewers," and like a true movie monster he terrorizes the city's inhabitants, initially in bizarre, amusing ways like grabbing their cigarettes, licking them, or stealing and eating flowers and cash. But Merde's reign of terror soon becomes much darker when he emerges from the sewers with a cache of grenades he discovered beneath the streets, and begins throwing them frantically around in the streets, killing and maiming dozens of people and destroying cars and property all around him. Merde is then captured and placed on trial, defended by a visiting French lawyer, Voland (Jean-François Balmer), who is his mirror image, with a milky white eye and curved red beard, and one of the only people in the world who actually speaks Merde's guttural, gibberish language.

This film is unsettling and ambiguous, making intentional references to Japanese monster movies and their relationship to Japan's history as the only nation to be hit with a nuclear bomb, as well as exploring obvious parallels to the modern American-led "war on terror." At one point, a news broadcast asserts that Merde had once been spotted at an Al-Qaeda training camp. At his trial, the audience is filled with people with burn marks on their faces, or their heads swathed in bandages, looking like Hiroshima survivors. The film is a dense collage of references and possible meanings, incorporating stereotypical Japanese images as conceived by a Westerner, like the people at the trial who wear surgical masks or the Japanese schoolgirl who drops her coat, revealing a skimpy outfit underneath, when Merde attacks her. These images are like fever-dreams of Japan, conceived in the West through the prism of the little Japanese culture — monster movies, anime and manga, J-pop — that's popularly visible outside of Japan.

This is fitting, because one of the film's primary themes is the disconnection that comes with multiple languages and multiple cultures. Throughout the second half of the short, the entirety of the dialogue is heard three times, once in Japanese, once in French, and once in the nonsense language spoken only by Merde and Voland. This constant translation and repetition is required for everyone to understand everyone else, and the process becomes even more complex when subtitles are incorporated for audiences who speak neither French nor Japanese. The film is at least partly about the difficulty of understanding others, of grasping the thought processes behind people who seem grotesque, threatening and unusual. Is Merde insane? Is he a "racist," as one Japanese lawyer calls him? Is he a misanthrope? Is he ugly, or is he, as he says his "gorgeous" mother called him, "a pretty little boy?" Carax leaves everything ambiguous and tonally confused, constantly vacillating between outlandish horror and offbeat dark humor. This is especially apparent in the bizarre ending, in which an intertitle, superimposed over an image of a five-dollar bill with Abraham Lincoln disfigured to resemble Merde, promises further adventures of Merde in New York: "Merde in USA," a deadpan riff on Godard's Made In USA. Carax's weird, open-ended short never settles its multiple allegorical meanings and ideas, but it's an interesting, unforgettable film nevertheless.


The final short here is the most traditional and straightforward, as well as the one short that engages in a serious way with the nature of Japanese culture. Whereas the first two shorts, both by Westerners, could probably have been set anywhere and made just as much sense, Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho's Shaking Tokyo is more explicitly a film about Tokyo and Japan as a whole. It's the story of a "hikikomori," a Japanese word for a recluse who lives off his parents and never leaves his house, keeping his garbage carefully organized in stacks, spending his time reading and doing nothing. The unnamed central character, played by Teruyuki Kagawa, has not left his apartment in eleven years. Every year he receives a wad of money from his father, and otherwise his only contact with the outside world is his limited interaction with the delivery people who bring food and other things to his home. He never looks anyone in the eyes, simply handing over money and getting a pizza or a package in exchange.

This changes when he happens to make eye contact with a pizza delivery girl (Yû Aoi) who comes to his apartment. While steadfastly looking down, handing over his money as he takes the pizza, he catches sight of her garter belt and the thin strip of bare leg below her skirt, and it startles him into looking up at her face. At this moment, as though this man's isolation was unable to withstand such bracing contact with another person, Tokyo suffers an earthquake that shakes some of the man's possessions out of their perfect arrangements, and causes the girl to collapse on the floor in his foyer. The film's first magical realist touch is the man's discovery that the collapsed girl, who can't be woken, has dotted her body with tattoos of various buttons, indicating moods and conditions: sadness, hysteria, fear. Intrigued, he discovers a button on her exposed thigh, the spot that had so distracted him from his usually resolute avoidance of eye contact, that is marked "coma." He presses the button and the girl promptly wakes up.

This event changes the man, who soon learns that the girl, after meeting him and seeing his compulsively neat apartment, his splendid isolation, has decided to become a hikikomori as well. He thus decides to break his eleven-year isolation and venture out amongst the people of Tokyo. Instead, he finds a surreally abandoned city, its streets empty, its people staying inside — only a smiley-faced robot, delivering pizza, is visible on the streets. The man sees a woman standing behind a frosted glass door and tries to speak with her, but she simply fades back into the darkness, her ghostly form dissolving behind the glass as she steps backward. The film is a low-key examination of the isolation and disconnection of people living in a big, impersonal city like Tokyo. It's a haunting vision of a city full of people who all decide, spontaneously and all at once, to withdraw from other people, to remain in their own self-contained spaces, to avoid the crowds and the sunlight and the noise of Tokyo when it's full of people. The man's journey through this deserted metropolis becomes an attempt to find some connection, some link with another person, a reason to leave the house.

This final film isn't as adventurous or unusual as the first two, and its ending threatens to be excessively cute and hokey, but it's still an interesting short, worthwhile for the way its clever touches of imagination blend with its deadpan chronicle of everyday routine. As a whole, Tokyo! is a great collection. Its three shorts have little to do with one another, and they don't exactly fit together into a comprehensive statement of any kind, least of all about the title city — but then, why should they? Taken individually, each of these shorts is intriguing and entertaining in equal measures, and that's more than enough.

Late Chrysanthemums

Mikio Naruse was, throughout the 50s, an unflinching chronicler of the often miserable conditions facing people — women, especially — in post-war Japan. Late Chrysanthemums is a particularly harrowing example of this director's hyper-detailed, nuanced, quietly moving portrayals of people suffering within a ruined and humbled nation. Naruse is concerned with the dismal state of the Japanese economy in the post-war era, and the ways in which the lack of money and opportunities affected the relationships between people. Everything becomes about money, every conversation has money at its root: how to get it, how to keep it, what to spend it on if one has it.

The film is focused on a quartet of middle-aged women friends, all of whom had been geishas together in their youth but who are now lonely and struggling. Of the four, Okin (Haruko Sugimura) is by far the best off. She is a shrewd moneylender, and when the film opens she is making her rounds of Tokyo, demanding payment from the various people — many of them her friends — who owe her money. She is obsessed with accumulating wealth, though she never seems to spend it on anything. She invests her money in real estate and accumulates more, and she earns interest on her loans, and her wealth keeps gathering as an aim unto itself. There is nothing she wants to buy, nothing she's saving for, and no one in her life who she can share her fortune with. She simply wants the money, and feels no guilt or hesitation in shaming her friends into paying her back faster, taking whatever they can scrape together for her from their meager salaries.

While Okin prospers, her friends Tamae (Chikako Hosokawa) and Tomi (Yûko Mochizuki) are just barely getting by, while Nobu (Sadako Sawamura) at least has her bar to earn a steady income. Tamae and Tomi are not so lucky, and they have to make do with whatever odd jobs they can hold onto, often doing hard and demeaning work as maids or cleaners. They both have grown children who are ungrateful and are now leaving to start their own lives, getting married and moving away, leaving their mothers lonely and without any real means of support. This is heavy, depressing material, draining in its effect, but Naruse treats it with a direct, no-nonsense style that accentuates the casual realism of the story. His unobtrusive style is quite distinct from the stylized framings of his contemporary Yasujiro Ozu, to whom he is so often compared. Naruse prefers not to call attention to himself, not to aestheticize his images in quite the same way. Rather, his style appears in the languid rhythm of his editing, which breathes with the flow of daily life. The film is comprised almost entirely of dialogue scenes in which the characters interact and bounce off one another, airing their problems and grievances. Naruse's crisp, intuitive cutting tends to circle around a scene from every angle, breaking up the dialogue so as to avoid conventional shot/counter-shot patterns that follow the speech. Instead, Naruse sometimes focuses on the speaker, sometimes on the listener, and sometimes cuts around the room to two-shots filmed from eccentric angles, as though hoping to catch these characters unawares.


Naruse's style shows itself in other subtle ways as well. He is particularly concerned with objects, with the concrete, and money appears constantly throughout the film: there are many scenes of Okin counting money, rifling through stacks of bills and then placing them inside her kimono. Later, she mimics the gesture when she receives a letter from her old lover Tabe (Ken Uehara), for whom she still fosters warm feelings and fond memories. Anything that she cherishes she keeps close to her heart, inside her garments, and she treats her wads of money and a letter from the man she loves with the same sacred reverence. Naruse is careful to accentuate the way these gestures — one of greed and one of desire — mirror one another.

He also finds the mirroring in the two men who visit Okin's home over the course of the film. The first is Seki (Bontarô Miyake), a man who had once loved Okin so desperately that he tried to kill her and then himself; he wanted them to die together as a gesture of perfect love. He failed, however, and destroyed the rest of his life in the process. Now it is many years later and he comes crawling back to her, begging for money, but she is scornful and sends him away. His departure is iconic. Naruse places his camera in Okin's entranceway, facing towards her door, behind her seated form as she watches Seki leave. After he closes her screened front door, his shadow is briefly visible through the door, while Okin turns to the side, unable even to look at this wispy fragment. Later, when Tabe visits, Okin is excited and is careful to make herself up nicely for him, but it turns out that he too has changed greatly, has been drained of his passion. He gets drunk over the course of the night and becomes pathetic, begging her for a loan, which she refuses. When he leaves in the morning, sobered up, his departure mirrors Seki's exactly, with Okin sitting on the opposite side of the entranceway, watching his shadow through the door as he leaves.

The utilitarian elegance of Naruse's imagery reflects his concern with the lives of average Japanese people, living in a society unbalanced by the shame of a lost war and the utter decimation of their economy. Further, he is documenting a culture on the verge of drastic upheavals: the geisha lifestyle that these women knew as young girls is no longer the same, and all around them are the signs of the steady encroachment of Western ways. They still dress in kimonos and cling to the old ways, but not everyone on the streets does. This is most strikingly demonstrated in the penultimate scene, in which Tamae and Tomi see a young girl in a tight sweater and slacks come bouncing along the street, doing the signature Marilyn Monroe walk, with her hips swiveling pneumatically. The older women giggle like schoolgirls and attempt an impersonation, but they know that this is "grotesque," that they are not a part of this new culture that seems to be developing. They have been left behind. Even the rare comedic moments like this are layered with a note of the bittersweet, the melancholy. This is a grim, dark film, a tragedy of minor failures and loneliness. There are no big tragic events, no devastating shocks, only small details from everyday life, an accumulation of insignificant incidents and conversations that together create a portrait of a society slowly drowning, desperately floundering and kicking to keep its head above the water.

Shintaro Kago short films

There are few things in this world stranger than the work of Japanese manga artist and filmmaker Shintaro Kago, whose bizarre contributions to both comics and extreme low-budget videos encompass Cronenberg-esque gross-out horror, pranky scatological humor, outlandish porn and dizzying formal experimentation. His 16-page comic Abstraction (which can be read in its entirety here) is one of the most formally ambitious works in the medium, a psychosexual mindfuck that seems to be desperately trying to break free of the two-dimensional constraints of the page. Unfortunately, none of Kago's willfully over-the-top comics work is available in official English translations, which has relegated most of his stories to being passed around the Internet in the form of fan-translated scans. Among the admittedly small number of admirers of avant-garde manga, however, his work has become legendary, an utterly unique fusion of comics' most advanced and original formal inventions with some of the most defiantly low-brow material imaginable.

Of late, Kago has also taken to posting his even less-known video work to his YouTube channel. In these jokey short films, many of them crudely animated, Kago's sick sense of humor reaches its full heights of absurdity. There's a playful surrealist sensibility to Kago's work, as well as a tendency to revel in the ridiculous, the crude and the disturbing. His work straddles a weird boundary between avant-garde experimentation and low-brow fart jokes — the punchline of one of these films is literally an oozing torrent of shit — although, admittedly, his videos seem to lean a bit more heavily towards the fart jokes than his comics. But hey, who doesn't appreciate a good fart joke once in a while?

Above, I've posted embedded links for two of my favorite Kago videos, two of the ones that made me laugh out loud with that mixture of shock, disgust and hilarity that often characterizes my reaction to his work. Attack of the Anteater's Tongue is exactly what its name implies: still images of an anteater are animated so that a wiggly pink tongue darts out towards the ground. Soon, the pink tongue is everywhere. It pokes up through the pants of a smiling Japanese politician, lounging around with George W. Bush. It sticks out of the tip of Dirty Harry's gun and then from the barrels of the cannons on a row of tanks — a flower in the barrel of a gun isn't nearly as effective (or funny) a surreal anti-war statement as a gun literally sticking out its tongue at the world. The film ends with an infestation of pink anteater tongues, taking over a city in a synchronized snake-like dance. Like all of Kago's best work, this video is basically an extended non sequitur, an absurd punchline that seems to be missing its joke; one senses, anyway, that only Kago would get the joke.

Terror of Golf Course is animated in more of a traditional, albeit crude, anime style, with static backgrounds and roughly moving figures. Accompanied by a soundtrack of eerie insectile hum and wheezy moans, the short starts as a typically silly gag, a golf hole neatly dodging a putter's attempts to sink a shot. The turn to horror at the end, telegraphed by the creepy soundtrack, is a cruel and nonsensical punchline. Not content to simply screw up this poor guy's golf game, this particular hole wants blood. One can imagine some kind of deadpan horror tagline for this film. On this course, it's par... or else.

Kago's weird work fits in naturally amidst the chaotic silliness of YouTube, where ridiculous amateur videos proliferate, some of them genuinely funny, many more puzzling or embarrassing or annoying. It's true that very little YouTube content has ever lived up to the tremendous promise of freely distributed online expression, but some of the stranger viral videos have seemed to illuminate unique sensibilities crafting weird little fragments of pop culture. Kago's odd short videos fit comfortably in this niche. Besides the two I posted above, there's also a wonderfully surreal mermaid sketch, a grisly new Olympic sport, and a frankly stupid cell phone joke. Check out YouTube for all the fun. (And don't forget to give Kago's comics a look, too. The great manga blog Same Hat! Same Hat! has scans of many of Kago's best stories, including The Memories of Others, Multiplication and Blow-Up. All NSFW, by the way.)

Woman in the Dunes

Hiroshi Teshigahara's collaboration with the novelist Kôbô Abe yielded a stunning, beautiful body of work centering around themes of alienation, modernity and identity. The most famous of these films is Woman in the Dunes, faithfully adapted from Abe's novel of the same name. As with all of Abe's work, both the novel and the film are infused with a spirit of deadpan surrealism, the character of which can especially be seen in Abe's male protagonists, who tend to accept whatever outrageous, outlandish occurrences happen to them with a degree of stoicism and a disarming lack of surprise. They may struggle against the cruel vagaries of fate that create their predicaments, but they never seem startled by the cruelty, never react with the visceral emotion one might expect. In one of Abe's later novels, a man begins sprouting vegetables from his skin and reacts only with a vague curiosity, happy to have such a convenient source of nourishment. The unnamed protagonist of Woman in the Dunes is not quite as unflappable, but he does seem strangely detached from the strangeness of the problem he faces.

He's an entomologist on a three-day vacation at the beach, hunting for rare insects in the sand — he wants to make a name for himself by discovering a new variant species of sand beetle. While at the beach, he discovers he's missed the last bus and is forced to stay the night at the home of one of the villagers. This village is rather unusual, however, buried beneath the sand, with solitary homes located at the bottom of deep sand pits, reachable only by rope ladders. The man spends the night there, in the deeply buried home of a local woman (Kyôko Kishida), but when morning comes he finds that he has been trapped: the rope ladder is gone, the sides of the pit are too steep and the sand too loose for escape. He is expected to be this woman's "husband," because now that her own husband and daughter have died, she needs a man in the house to help her with the village's nightly task of shoveling away the sand that slides down into the pit every day. The man rebels against his imprisonment, resisting in various ways, but the casual absurdity of Abe's writing carries through in the way this surreal situation is presented without fuss or drama.

In this respect, Teshigahara's lush, sensuous images are a perfect complement to Abe's sensibility. The understated surrealism of this story is enhanced by the director's tactile images, which give a sumptuous hyper-reality to everything that's happening. The texture of sand naturally defines the film, sand like a liquid, sand running in rivers and currents, pouring down slopes, oceans of sand stretching as far as the eye can see, striated with regular patterns. The sand is everywhere, forming the very fabric of the landscape, the fluid, shifting foundations of everything within sight, and yet it is also granular, composed of millions of tiny particles, clinging to the smooth surfaces of skin, dot-like grains of sand caked or dusted across every inch of open space. Teshigahara frequently inserts abstracted closeups, panning across the skin of his two protagonists, exploring the textures of skin roughened by the sand clinging to it, the grit filling the pores, running through the lines and indentations in naked flesh.


There's a sensuous, sexual quality to the film, which confines this man and woman in close quarters together, surrounded on all sides by the womb-like walls of the pit they live in. They are thrown together as though married, and their peculiar circumstances unite them in the shared work of keeping the sand from closing in — it is an enforced but powerful intimacy. The man initially resists this imprisonment, questioning this ridiculous way of living, which he likens to trying to build a house on water. His acceptance of his new situation is in some ways predicated on his acceptance of Abe's own central theme: that all ways of living are inherently absurd, that the conditions of life itself are ridiculous and surreal, that human civilization is in large measure a struggle to impose meaning and order upon chaos and insanity. Before his captivity, the man is already alienated from this society, feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of life, the obsessive cataloging of people. One of his internal monologues lists the prodigious number of ID cards and documents that society has produced to give people identities and specific places in the social order, to define what they can and cannot do, who they are and what their function is.

This man is a part of this system but feels lost in it, and his chosen profession is a pitiful attempt to find an identity for himself: he believes that by discovering a new species of insect, his name will be immortalized in science text books, in however small a way, and that his identity will be secure. The trap he finds himself in is thus a brilliant metaphor for life as Abe sees it: we're all just shoveling sand, biding time, throwing ourselves into pursuits that seem to us to have varying levels of usefulness or nobility, but which in fact are simply distractions, ways to pass the time of life. Woman in the Dunes is a deeply existentialist film, a film that deals with the question of what life means at its root level. Are we all just filling up the time while we're here? What does it mean to live? To do anything? If we're teachers or scientists, people whose lives have purpose and rationality, is what we're doing really of more value, ultimately, than shoveling sand?