(Dave Boyle, 2015)
In what feels like direct opposition to much modern neo-noir, Boyle's film does noir in an old-fashioned, serious manner: slowly, patiently, methodically. That's not to suggest it isn't stylish. It is visually lovely, filled with strong compositions and a palette of muted colours. Boyle's storytelling adds to the strong sense of atmosphere created - this is a quiet, thoughtful piece of cinema.
It centres on best-selling Japanese mystery writer Aki (Ayako Fujitani) who returns to her college hometown of San Francisco, depressed and somewhat suicidal. There she meets a mysterious man, they connect, and then he abruptly disappears. Her halting investigation into his sudden absence eventually intersects with that of a small-town sheriff (Pepe Serna), searching for a man he hit with his car one misty night who later absconded from hospital. This leads them into a murky world of smuggling, money, and identity theft, and it quickly becomes obvious that neither of them really knows what they are doing.
It is refreshing to find a genuine mystery in a noir - one with plenty of dead ends and false starts - but then so much about Man From Reno is surprisingly refreshing. The story starts off as a drama, building the character of Aki, giving us a few glimpses into her past, and making her sympathetic. Likewise the sheriff - a nice man who seems to be good at his job, and who loves his daughter. The mystery only comes into focus about 30 minutes in, and it is almost another hour before the two leads meet. Fujitani and Serna are inspired casting choices; she is all sad eyes and watchful regret, he all laid-back, aged wisdom and nagging worries. The few moments of suspense are nicely-handled, increasing Aki's sense of paranoia.
The whole thing has a quality lacking in modern neo-noir: soulfulness. There are few references to pop culture, barely any violence. Instead there is some emotion in these characters. Aki misses the love of her life, long dead, whose writing gave her the career she has today. The sheriff seems resigned to his daughter leaving him for a place at the FBI. Violence seems to exist in a different cinematic universe from these people.
This means that when it comes, it has devastating, jarring impact. The ending is fantastic.
Showing posts with label Japanese Cinema. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japanese Cinema. Show all posts
Saturday, 2 January 2016
Sunday, 10 February 2013
I WISH
(Hirokazu Koreeda, 2011)
Koreeda has emerged over the last decade as one of the leading directors in world cinema, with a distinctive, subtle voice. Still Walking, his Ozu-like 2008 family drama, may well be his masterpiece, but even when working in a more minor key, as in I Wish, he proves more than capable of crafting an immensely poignant, beautifully observed story of childhood and family.
I Wish centres on two young brothers, Ryu and Koichi. Their parents separated 6 months before and they live apart, in different cities, with one parent each, talking on their mobile phones every week or so. Koichi is older and more sensitive; he wants the family back together again. Ryu is wilder and more happy-go-lucky - though he misses his brother and mother, he enjoys his new life and friends. Still, he supports Koichi's plan to observe the moment when the new bullet trains linking their cities will pass for the first time, believing that at this moment, wishes will be granted. From this premise, Koreeda spins a story which is wide-ranging and intimate, taking in dozens of minor characters and illuminating their lives for a few moments at a time as he depicts the boys different lives, their relationships with friends, parents and teachers, as well as their friends' families and parents. We watch Koichi's grandfather - a retired baker - attempt to create a new cake to compete with a popular new bakery chain after a drunken night with his friends, and his father's band endlessly tune up. Meanwhile one of Ryu's friends wants to be an actress but is jealous of the pretty girl in her class with similar ambitions, being denied the consolation of disliking or badmouthing the girl, since she is so pleasant. Then there is the elderly couple who take in the children on the night of their adventure and are reminded of their own daughter, long grown up and gone. All of these stories and more move slowly across the screen, and Koreeda gives each character some inner life, a spark of truth and mystery which is utterly convincing and affecting.
As ever, his gaze is calm and precise, his storytelling measured. He keeps his visuals cool and neutral, without a single showy element, alternating nicely composed medium and close-up shots, emphasising the ordered, layered world of the Japanese suburbs the boys ands their friends move through. The acting is beautifully naturalistic throughout, not least from the fantastic children in the cast. They create some big laughs with their immediate responses - there is a lot of Edward Yang in this film, from its effortlessly multi-stranded narrative to its warm, gentle tone of quiet amusement and melancholy.
The sequence where the children arrive at a vantage point to observe the trains passing - which has a little deadpan suggestion of childrens adventure films to it, with its detailed account of their heist-like preparations and their mildly desperate search for shelter at night - is marked by a lovely montage of images of the moments and objects which have led Koichi to this instant, signalling a moment of growth, maturity and acceptance for him.
The film is full of moments of quiet truth and beauty, of emotions held in check and little acts of kindness, of affection and understanding. Koreeda may well be the greatest humanist at work in contemporary cinema, and we are blessed that his skill as a writer and director is so well-matched with his sensibility.
This is a lovely film.
Koreeda has emerged over the last decade as one of the leading directors in world cinema, with a distinctive, subtle voice. Still Walking, his Ozu-like 2008 family drama, may well be his masterpiece, but even when working in a more minor key, as in I Wish, he proves more than capable of crafting an immensely poignant, beautifully observed story of childhood and family.
I Wish centres on two young brothers, Ryu and Koichi. Their parents separated 6 months before and they live apart, in different cities, with one parent each, talking on their mobile phones every week or so. Koichi is older and more sensitive; he wants the family back together again. Ryu is wilder and more happy-go-lucky - though he misses his brother and mother, he enjoys his new life and friends. Still, he supports Koichi's plan to observe the moment when the new bullet trains linking their cities will pass for the first time, believing that at this moment, wishes will be granted. From this premise, Koreeda spins a story which is wide-ranging and intimate, taking in dozens of minor characters and illuminating their lives for a few moments at a time as he depicts the boys different lives, their relationships with friends, parents and teachers, as well as their friends' families and parents. We watch Koichi's grandfather - a retired baker - attempt to create a new cake to compete with a popular new bakery chain after a drunken night with his friends, and his father's band endlessly tune up. Meanwhile one of Ryu's friends wants to be an actress but is jealous of the pretty girl in her class with similar ambitions, being denied the consolation of disliking or badmouthing the girl, since she is so pleasant. Then there is the elderly couple who take in the children on the night of their adventure and are reminded of their own daughter, long grown up and gone. All of these stories and more move slowly across the screen, and Koreeda gives each character some inner life, a spark of truth and mystery which is utterly convincing and affecting.
As ever, his gaze is calm and precise, his storytelling measured. He keeps his visuals cool and neutral, without a single showy element, alternating nicely composed medium and close-up shots, emphasising the ordered, layered world of the Japanese suburbs the boys ands their friends move through. The acting is beautifully naturalistic throughout, not least from the fantastic children in the cast. They create some big laughs with their immediate responses - there is a lot of Edward Yang in this film, from its effortlessly multi-stranded narrative to its warm, gentle tone of quiet amusement and melancholy.
The sequence where the children arrive at a vantage point to observe the trains passing - which has a little deadpan suggestion of childrens adventure films to it, with its detailed account of their heist-like preparations and their mildly desperate search for shelter at night - is marked by a lovely montage of images of the moments and objects which have led Koichi to this instant, signalling a moment of growth, maturity and acceptance for him.
The film is full of moments of quiet truth and beauty, of emotions held in check and little acts of kindness, of affection and understanding. Koreeda may well be the greatest humanist at work in contemporary cinema, and we are blessed that his skill as a writer and director is so well-matched with his sensibility.
This is a lovely film.
Thursday, 6 October 2011
HARAKIRI
A.K.A SEPPUKU
(Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)
It's only when you see a film as set upon savaging the assumptions and hypocrisies of the Samurai class - and by extention, of the Samurai genre - that you realise just how romanticised the Samurai has been by popular culture, and primarily, by Japanese cinema. The noble Warrior, living and dying according to a strictly defined code of honour, is an attractive and romantic ideal, and one many films have celebrated and underlined. But Samurai, like Knights in Medieval Europe, were trained warriors whose chief purpose was to maintain the status quo in the class structure, protecting the Rich and their interests from the mass of the people, who had nothing.
In Harakiri, Masaki Kobayashi approaches this truth. His film positively bristles with an angry contempt for the way of the Samurai. The story is folded into quite a complex double-flashback structure, following the hard times that have befallen a samurai and his family, which drive him to ask at a clan's house for permission to commit seppuku in their courtyard. Then the same happens with another Samurai; older and calmer, he seems to have another agenda. Once he has a captive audience awaiting his dramatic act, he recounts his life and reveals his real reason for requesting seppuku, and it involves revenge..
Kobayashi is a supreme stylist and this film is quite magisterial. Beautiful compositions make the most of the hard lines and grids of period Japanese rooms and brilliantly express the power dynamics in the many intense conversations captured by his camera. That camera moves in slow, slight increments, helping to build up the tension through over two hours of patient, precise storytelling. And that storytelling damns the samurai, exposing the injustice, cruelty and inflexibility at the heart of a society in thrall to such a violent and restrictive cultural phenomenon.
That would not be enough if the dramatic elements did not work in their own right, but work they do. This is primarily a tragedy, driven by the samurai code, and it contains a couple of agonising sequences: the first, almost unwatchable seppuku, performed by an impoverished young samurai with a bamboo sword, and later, the discovery of his fate by his wife and father-in-law. The performances are slightly overheated but that seems operatic through the lens of Kobayashi's surgical directorial vision, and it all leads up to an inevitable and incredible climactic explosion of violence and swordplay, which manages to be both cathartic and tragic.
Most importantly, it's a tremendous ending to an extraordinary film, a film which is moving, beautiful and riveting.
(Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)
It's only when you see a film as set upon savaging the assumptions and hypocrisies of the Samurai class - and by extention, of the Samurai genre - that you realise just how romanticised the Samurai has been by popular culture, and primarily, by Japanese cinema. The noble Warrior, living and dying according to a strictly defined code of honour, is an attractive and romantic ideal, and one many films have celebrated and underlined. But Samurai, like Knights in Medieval Europe, were trained warriors whose chief purpose was to maintain the status quo in the class structure, protecting the Rich and their interests from the mass of the people, who had nothing.
In Harakiri, Masaki Kobayashi approaches this truth. His film positively bristles with an angry contempt for the way of the Samurai. The story is folded into quite a complex double-flashback structure, following the hard times that have befallen a samurai and his family, which drive him to ask at a clan's house for permission to commit seppuku in their courtyard. Then the same happens with another Samurai; older and calmer, he seems to have another agenda. Once he has a captive audience awaiting his dramatic act, he recounts his life and reveals his real reason for requesting seppuku, and it involves revenge..
Kobayashi is a supreme stylist and this film is quite magisterial. Beautiful compositions make the most of the hard lines and grids of period Japanese rooms and brilliantly express the power dynamics in the many intense conversations captured by his camera. That camera moves in slow, slight increments, helping to build up the tension through over two hours of patient, precise storytelling. And that storytelling damns the samurai, exposing the injustice, cruelty and inflexibility at the heart of a society in thrall to such a violent and restrictive cultural phenomenon.
That would not be enough if the dramatic elements did not work in their own right, but work they do. This is primarily a tragedy, driven by the samurai code, and it contains a couple of agonising sequences: the first, almost unwatchable seppuku, performed by an impoverished young samurai with a bamboo sword, and later, the discovery of his fate by his wife and father-in-law. The performances are slightly overheated but that seems operatic through the lens of Kobayashi's surgical directorial vision, and it all leads up to an inevitable and incredible climactic explosion of violence and swordplay, which manages to be both cathartic and tragic.
Most importantly, it's a tremendous ending to an extraordinary film, a film which is moving, beautiful and riveting.
Thursday, 5 May 2011
13 ASSASSINS
(Takashi Miike, 2010)
While 13 Assassins may well be Takashi Miike's most accessible and conventionally entertaining film, it is still quite firmly a Miike production. Which, given the generic stateliness of the material - this is the story of a motley band of Samurai assembled to kill the Shogun's gleefully evil step-brother before he gains any real power with which to damage Japan - makes it a fascinatingly complex and almost contradictory film. For while Miike dutifully details the political machinations and manoeuvring in the lead up to the attempted assassination and also records the preparations for the ambush, his interests seem to lie elsewhere: in the insane cruelty of his villain, murdering children, and raping and mutilating women out of pure boredom - the image of one damaged plaything, her limbs and tongue all cut off, writing a note with a brush in her bloody mouth seems inimitably Miike - but also in the digital photography vividly recreating the period he depicts and in introducing characters without any information or explanation.
The last reel of the film is one long, brutal, bloody battle scene as the 13 fight 200, and here Miike's desire to undercut the Samurai genre even as his film honours and reinvigorates it is at its most pronounced. He shoots these massively involved, complex action sequences With long lenses, visually flattening the action and robbing his scenes of any depth, an oddly undynamic way of shooting some fantastically dynamic action, it might seem. But as the finale goes on and on, an orgy of sword-slashing and blood spattering set to a Symphony of sword upon sword strikes, the action becomes repetitive and even a little comic in its grotesquely sustained brutality. Thus Miike can make a point about the senseless, deadening obscenity of such violence in the genre even while indulging in almost an uninterrupted hour of it.
And that hour is admittedly filled with numerous satisfying genre moments even while Miike seems to be teasing the Samurai film; he gives half of the 13 no discernible personalities, entirely disregards any sense of physical geography during the climax, films the death of a key character from the p.o.v of another, his view obscured and askew, dying nearby, utilises some shoddy cgi, ridiculously resuscitates a seemingly dead character without any explanation and literally portrays a rain of blood at one point. But there are also some fabulous shots and brilliantly choreographed sword fights, a few memorable deaths, and a satisfying, grim conclusion.
Closer to the Action-Samurai work of Kihaci Okamoto than that of Akira Kurosawa (to whom it's been often compared), 13 Assassins is a fine surprise from Miike at this point in his career and one of the best Samurai films of the last two decades.
While 13 Assassins may well be Takashi Miike's most accessible and conventionally entertaining film, it is still quite firmly a Miike production. Which, given the generic stateliness of the material - this is the story of a motley band of Samurai assembled to kill the Shogun's gleefully evil step-brother before he gains any real power with which to damage Japan - makes it a fascinatingly complex and almost contradictory film. For while Miike dutifully details the political machinations and manoeuvring in the lead up to the attempted assassination and also records the preparations for the ambush, his interests seem to lie elsewhere: in the insane cruelty of his villain, murdering children, and raping and mutilating women out of pure boredom - the image of one damaged plaything, her limbs and tongue all cut off, writing a note with a brush in her bloody mouth seems inimitably Miike - but also in the digital photography vividly recreating the period he depicts and in introducing characters without any information or explanation.
The last reel of the film is one long, brutal, bloody battle scene as the 13 fight 200, and here Miike's desire to undercut the Samurai genre even as his film honours and reinvigorates it is at its most pronounced. He shoots these massively involved, complex action sequences With long lenses, visually flattening the action and robbing his scenes of any depth, an oddly undynamic way of shooting some fantastically dynamic action, it might seem. But as the finale goes on and on, an orgy of sword-slashing and blood spattering set to a Symphony of sword upon sword strikes, the action becomes repetitive and even a little comic in its grotesquely sustained brutality. Thus Miike can make a point about the senseless, deadening obscenity of such violence in the genre even while indulging in almost an uninterrupted hour of it.
And that hour is admittedly filled with numerous satisfying genre moments even while Miike seems to be teasing the Samurai film; he gives half of the 13 no discernible personalities, entirely disregards any sense of physical geography during the climax, films the death of a key character from the p.o.v of another, his view obscured and askew, dying nearby, utilises some shoddy cgi, ridiculously resuscitates a seemingly dead character without any explanation and literally portrays a rain of blood at one point. But there are also some fabulous shots and brilliantly choreographed sword fights, a few memorable deaths, and a satisfying, grim conclusion.
Closer to the Action-Samurai work of Kihaci Okamoto than that of Akira Kurosawa (to whom it's been often compared), 13 Assassins is a fine surprise from Miike at this point in his career and one of the best Samurai films of the last two decades.
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