Category Archives: Film

Garden of Women (女の園)

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  • 女の園 (Garden of Women)

10/12/23 (Thurs)

Kinoshita Keisuke’s unusual 1954 work, which he wrote and directed, was ranked second in that year’s Kinejun poll only to yet another Kinoshita film, his smash hit Twenty-Four Eyes (and amazingly above The Seven Samurai, Chikamatsu Story, Late Chrysanthemums, Sansho the Bailiff, and An Inn in Osaka, among others). It is not nearly in the league of any of those and may have been helped by its sensational theme and starry cast. Still, it is extremely interesting as a portrait of a certain age. Oshima Nagisa says that this is the piece that inspired him to become a director, which makes sense considering the politics of his works. I assume the garden (園) is a reference to a school academy (学園), though the source novel is in fact called Artificial Garden (人工庭園).

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Freaks

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  • Freaks

10/20/23 (Fri)

Tod Browning’s 1932 film is usually described as a horror flick, but that doesn’t feel quite right. It deals with a deformed cast – Siamese twins, a man without a torso, another without arms or legs, pinheads, dwarfs – but they are not monsters: they are real people with normal feelings and emotions. The title is deceptive, as it’s not clear at the end just who the real freaks are.

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Tatami

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  • Tatami

10/29/23 (Sun), Tokyo Film Festival

A female judoka from Iran has a good shot at winning the gold at the world championships in Tbilisi, achieving the dream to which she has devoted her life. Blessed with size, strength, technique and deep determination, she quickly disposes of her opponents in what seems an unstoppable path to the finals and glory for her and her country. Things change dramatically, however, when it looks as if she might face an Israeli opponent in the finals. She comes under intense pressure from her government to throw the match, including threats to her family and her future. A fan asking for a selfie proves a government agent who shows her in a video that her father back home has been taken into custody. Her coach, warned by the government that she too will lose everything if she does not stop her protégé, tries desperately to persuade the girl to give up her ambitions and bow to reality, creating a serious rift between them. The coach herself, a former star, is known to have suffered an injury years earlier just before a big match against an Israeli that might have made her a world champion – but the judoka now comes to wonder if that was really an injury. The judoka reaches her own decision, and events spin out in an unexpected way.

This superb Israeli-Iranian co-production (you read that right), playing at the Tokyo Film Festival, is less a sports film than a thrilling suspense story set in the Japanese world of judo. Continue reading →

Through the Olive Trees

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  • Through the Olive Trees

9/3/23 (Sun)

This is the final film in Kiarostami’s so-called Koker Trilogy. The second was a recreation of the director’s search for the stars of the first film after the deadly earthquake in the region. This one deals with trouble that the director had when making the second film, especially that between the man and woman who played the newlyweds in that film’s most memorable scene. The unplanned trilogy is like Matryoshka dolls emerging from inside one another.

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And Life Goes On

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  • And Life Goes On

8/30/23 (Wed)

The alternative English title of this 1992 work is “Life and Nothing Else”, which appears (courtesy of Google Translate) to be the literal translation of the Persian. The official English title is taken from a line in the film.

The director revisited the location of his 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s House? after the colossal earthquake that decimated the area in 1990 to confirm if the children in the film were safe. His experience led him to turn that quest itself into a documentary of sorts. Continue reading →

Where Is the Friend’s House?

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  • Where Is the Friend’s House?

8/27/23 (Sun)

I happened upon Kiarostami’s 1987 work after seeing his fascinating Close-Up from a few years later. The devastating 1990 earthquake in Iran apparently led to two follow-up films, producing what is called the Koker Trilogy after the town in which they’re set. But obviously that wasn’t planned when this film was made.

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The Ear (Ucho)

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  • The Ear (Ucho)

8/21/23 (Mon)

Karel Kachyňa’s 1970 work, co-written by him with his long-time activist screen partner Jan Procházka based on the latter’s story, came at the wrong end of the Soviet invasion that put a halt to the Prague Spring and, consequently, to the subversive films of the Czech New Wave. Procházka’s good relations with the president were no help in preventing this film from being banned even before its release. It did not appear in public until 1989; it was entered into competition for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival the next year.

A bickering couple right out of Virginia Woolf, here the deputy minister of construction and his floozy wife, return from a party function late at night to find strange happenings at their home. Continue reading →

Yoyo

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  • Yoyo

8/17/23 (Thurs)

Pierre Étaix, who wrote, directed and starred in this 1965 comedy, is apparently considered a comic genius in France alongside the better known Jacques Tati. He had already won an Academy Award for Best Short Film by this time, but a legal dispute with his distributor prevented his full-length films from being seen by the world until well into the 21st century. This film is held to be his masterpiece. The English title seems to be Yo Yo, but I’m going with the French in this case. It refers both to the main character and his favorite toy.

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A Legend or Was It? (死闘の伝説)

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  • 死闘の伝説 (A Legend or Was It?)

8/13/23 (Sun)

Kinoshita Keisuke tries his best to be cynical in this 1963 film about a small village in Hokkaido in the closing weeks of WWII, but his sentimental streak inevitably intrudes. The unfortunate English title is sometimes rendered more literally as Legend of a Duel to the Death.

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Moulin Rouge (ムーランルージュ)

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  • ムーランルージュ (Moulin Rouge) 

8/12/23 (Sat), Tokyo

The two-month run was completely sold out well in advance of the opening. I was curious about the show because of the unusual use of music – not the original songs but the brief clips from well-known numbers that sprang up so often throughout the show. Those range from “Nature Boy” and “The Sound of Music” to “Lady Marmalade” and “Material Girl”, encompassing standards, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Queen and more, and I’m sure there were more up-to-date numbers that I simply didn’t recognize. Some were just a few seconds long, quoting a line or two, while others, most notably Elton John’s “Your Song”, were quoted extensively.

I was wondering if the older numbers would even be familiar to Japanese audiences, especially in the age group that they’re catering to. Because the songs are crucial to the action, they have all been translated into Japanese. As with Mamma Mia, the songs are fun to hear in a different context, but that assumes a knowledge of them in the first place; we know instantly what the song is referring to and thus respond to that memory, since the songs are rarely played in full. Translating them also takes the fun out of it. That said, Mamma Mia has been hugely popular here as everywhere, so what do I know?

The show, it turns out, is tremendous fun. Continue reading →

Immortal Love (永遠の人)

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  • 永遠の人 (Immortal Love)

8/11/23 (Fri)

The Japanese title of Kinoshita Keisuke’s 1961 film is literally “the everlasting person”, which would at first glance imply a soul mate or life partner. Here, however, it is used ironically to indicate someone that the protagonist can never shake off – the memory of her true love, the reality of her spiteful husband, or possibly the resentful person that she herself has become. The British title, Bitter Spirit, comes closer to the sense of this relentlessly bleak film.

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The Killing

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  • The Killing

7/30/23 (Sun)

Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 film was his third feature (though he refuses to acknowledge the first, like Biden’s seventh grandchild) but the first to gather some acclaim, at least critically if not commercially. He’s credited with the screenplay, but Jim Thompson seems to have contributed the key dialogue and cynical tone of the characters.

Johnny (Sterling Hayden) comes out of a five-year prison stretch immediately plotting one last heist before his retirement, aiming to relieve a racetrack of $2 million in bets (“Five years have taught me one thing, if nothing else: Anytime you take a chance, you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk. Because they could put you away just as fast for a $10 heist as they can for a million dollar job”). That starts proceedings off with a bang. He gathers a team of insiders and concocts a scheme in which the lead horse will be shot (preventing the winnings from being paid out), a man will cause a fight in the bar (allowing another to slip unnoticed into the back room), the cash will be taken at gunpoint from the betting area, and a truck will quickly take the cash away. Trouble arises when one of the co-conspirators blabs to his wife, who immediately calls upon her lover to steal the money for themselves. The end result is not pretty, forcing Johnny to attempt to spirit the cash away by plane. That effort comes undone in a most ingenious way. The dispirited Johnny doesn’t even try to get away at that point, shrugging, “What’s the difference?”

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