Category Archives: Film

Happy End

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  • Happy End

5/11/24 (Sat)

Christopher Nolan, eat your heart out. Czech director Oldrich Lipsky’s time-bending 1967 feature opens with the words “The End” followed by the end titles, some in mirror image. Then a disembodied head jumps out of a basket and reattaches itself to a body slumped over a guillotine as the blade flies upward. The man revives and is led back into jail, and the story begins, or more properly, heads backward toward its beginning.

We learn eventually that, in real life, a butcher has caught his wife with her lover and murdered them, throwing the latter out a window and gruesomely dismembering the woman with a knife. But the narrator – apparently speaking from the dead, a la Sunset Boulevard – relates events only as he sees them: the un-guillotining of the man is his birth, and he is seen putting his wife’s sliced-off parts together and giving her life. Unlike other reversed stories like the later Memento or Betrayal, the film here is actually run backwards, so that a newborn child is shown being sucked back into the womb (the narrator says sadly that the child is dying), or a man thrown from a building is shown rising up to the original spot.

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All of Us Strangers

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  • All of Us Strangers

4/9/24 (Tues)

A British adaptation by writer/director Andrew Haigh of the Japanese novel Strangers (1987), which was also filmed in Japanese the following year under the English title The Discarnates. The original Japanese title in both cases, Ijin-tachi no Natsu (偉人たちの夏) is something like “Summer with Strangers”, the latter word (ijin) usually referring to foreigners. Whereas the Japanese film followed the novel closely, Haigh has different ideas.

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Forever a Woman (乳房よ永遠なれ)

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  • 乳房よ永遠なれ (Forever a Woman)

3/3/24 (Sun)

This 1955 work is Tanaka Kinuyo’s third directorial effort but the first that she started from scratch. (The first two were based on scripts by Kinoshita and Ozu and staffed partly by their assistants.) The film was formerly known in English rather startlingly as The Eternal Breasts, which is closer to the Japanese but makes it sound like a very different kind of film; the Japanese title would probably be rendered better as, “Breasts, Be Forever With Me”. The change in the English in this case was probably for the better. The real-life Fumiko was only famous for four months from publication of her efforts to her early death, but she is considered one of Japan’s three seminal female poets of the 20th century. She passed away only a year before the film. Continue reading →

Lifeboat

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  • Lifeboat

2/28/24 (Wed)

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film is a preposterous story very well done. An American ship and German U-Boat have sunk one another in the Atlantic Ocean. Eight American and British passengers manage variously to reach a lifeboat. They then rescue a man from the waters to find that he is not only German but, to make things worse, might even be the captain of the very ship that sank them. They debate whether to allow him to board, but the humanitarian side wins out on the belief that he is just an individual trying to stay alive as they are. Because of his piloting skill, he ends up with control of the vessel. It is only after some time that they realize that he isn’t steering them toward Bermuda as promised – but where exactly is he heading?

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Au Hasard Balthazar

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  • Au Hasard Balthazar

2/6/24 (Tues)

Having seen (and not quite comprehended) Pickpocket a few days earlier, I figured it was time to get more acquainted with Bresson. This 1966 film, roughly “Balthazar at Random” (I wonder why they kept the French title), is widely considered not only his masterpiece but one of the greatest films ever made. That immediately made me skeptical.

The movie follows the life of a French village as paralleled in the life of a donkey. It starts with the birth of the donkey, where he is baptized by village children with the name Balthazar, and ends with his quiet death in a field of lambs. In between, he is passed randomly from owner to owner, mistreated or at best ignored by all of them. The various people in the film have their issues as well, but they are humans able to act on their desires and react to events. In contrast, the donkey does not speak or think or have any of the human qualities typical for these films; it is a donkey throughout, and we can only guess at its feelings from the situation and its occasional braying. It is necessarily acted upon rather than acting, a passive player in its own life. Bresson finally found his perfect performer with no emotions or hints as to what he/she is feeling.

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Pickpocket

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  • Pickpocket

2/4/24 (Sun)

I picked this 1959 film as a Bresson primer because it’s reportedly fairly straightforward for him and is just 90 minutes. The English word “pickpocket” turns out for some reason to be the original French title.

Michel, an ordinary man with no steady job, has taken to pickpocketing as a way of filling his days. He gradually comes to enjoy the thrill of the game and turns down opportunities for legitimate work, ultimately joining with a team of thieves who work in tandem under the guidance of an expert crook. He holds the firm belief that a certain class of superior man should not be bound by the same laws as the common flock (I know the type). He sends money to his sick mother but refuses to see her despite his insistence that he loves her “more than myself” (though that may actually be true given how he despises himself).

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It’s Always Fair Weather

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  • It’s Always Fair Weather

2/23/24 (Fri)

The 1955 film is a follow-up of sorts to On the Town, co-directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The earlier show featured three sailors going off to war, whereas this opens with three soldiers returning to their lives after the war’s end. Comden and Green had conceived this, as with the earlier show, as a Broadway musical, but were convinced to write it directly for the screen instead.

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Okiku and the World (せかいのおきく)

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  • せかいのおきく (Okiku and the World)

2/25/24 (Sun)

When you hear a movie is about two guys peddling sh*t, you’d normally assume they were selling trivial products. But the guys in this movie are in fact dealing in excrement – and we learn that their job was an essential function in Edo society. Who knew?

The time is the mid 19th century at the tail end of the Edo Era, when the entire system of government is about to be overthrown – but the characters here don’t know that. Yasuke is a purveyor of manure, buying the product from homes (after digging it out of the outhouse pits) and selling it to farmers. The latter need the waste as fertilizer to grow food, which is eaten and processed through people’s bodies as new waste product in a virtuous cycle for the likes of Yasuke. The gathering and reprocessing of waste served a critical role in Edo in keeping the villages clean; while Yasuke was dirt poor and at the absolute bottom of the social rung, he was actually more important in the scheme of things then the higher-ranking samurai, who received money from the state for doing very little.

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Brigadoon (1954 film)

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  • Brigadoon (1954 film)

2/15/24 (Fri)

This 1954 film, made in the glory days of the MGM musical, falls well short of the dizzying standards that the studio had set. The wonderful Broadway version offers ample opportunity for big-screen treatment: it’s set in the lush highlands of an exotic locale with distinctive speech, clothing and culture, and has fantastic music and dance scenes that could easily be opened up for the movie. Unfortunately the filmmakers were apparently unable to film on location in Scotland because of weather and cost issues, so the production looks somewhat cheap, like The Sound of Music without the Alps. Also, Alan Jay Lerner’s dialogue comes across as dated and sappy. That’s not true of other MGM musicals at the time, including Lerner’s own films, and is certainly not the case for Lerner’s engaging stage script. The film feels of its time. Continue reading →