TOKYO SONATA

Just finished watching "Tokyo Sonata" by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. For me, the overall experience and message of the film was heart-wrenching, yet the story was so lightly and cleanly told that it never felt emotionally burdensome or psychologically stressful (as I've been experiencing lately in watching commercial films).

Without a doubt, the most joyful experience in the film is that of a little boy discovering music. From his first glimpse of another child studying piano at home on his way to school, to his entreaty of his father to study piano, denied; from his saving lunch money to buy a keyboard and pay for his own lessons, to the beating his father gives him for lying about it; and ultimately, to the discovery of his being a true prodigy (shimmeringly expressed through his performance of "Claire du Lune" in the end).

The end of the film seems to tell us that this was what the whole film was about, all along - that somehow, if the boy's father - (who argues that the piano teacher is only calling him a 'prodigy' because 'that's how they make money' and there's no way he and his wife could have had a child who is a 'prodigy') - had taken his son's instincts seriously, that none of the problems in the film would have had occurred in the first place.

Yet the music, in fact, is not what the film is about - or at least, that's not how it rolls out on screen. It appears to be about a man who has lost his job, who goes to great lengths to keep his family from finding out. Initially, he bonds with another man who has become an expert at pretending he has a job, who later ends up committing suicide and homicide when he and his wife die of gas poisoning in his house. Our protagonist then goes from one humiliating interview to another until his older son, who insists on enlisting in the American army as one of the hundred-some Japanese fighting in the Middle East, confronts him with the truth of his actions. And at that point he gets a job cleaning toilets.

Tokyo Sonata is chock-full of tongue-in-cheek drama, and halfway or so through the film, this begins to appear in a way that feels improvisational. The father bumps into his wife while wearing his sanitation outfit, runs from her, and somehow ends up getting hit by a truck, his body plastered against the curb throughout the night. In the meantime, we see via a "Run Lola Run" flashback-intersection that the wife had been fending off a robber who broke into their house and tied her up before taking her on the road. The little boy, out alone, stumbles upon another little boy hiding from his father, and they embark on a run together, with the second boy's father chasing, and colleagues in tow like government agents.

But all of this is painted in a humorous way. The robber turns out to be a harmless, incompetent failure of a man who's robbing for the first time, and he and the mother of the story end up bonding in a seashore shack. We start to understand that the story is about failure. The robber has failed at everything he's ever tried: "I don't get along with people," he says. The mother conjectures, "What if I could have a completely new life starting tomorrow? That would be wonderful," later sobbing at the sight of a star over the night ocean horizon.

And here, in the end, the "Claire du Lune" performance shows us that if the father had only trusted that he had a son who was a prodigy from the beginning, that none of the terrible things would have happened. He would have understood that as a family, they were not a failure, but a success.

There's one part of the film that I find mysterious and am still trying to connect to all else. It can't be a coincidence that Kurosawa decided to shoot the scene of the father falling asleep in front of a TV - with his wife calling his name gently - in a mystical way. There's a very gradual, floaty push-in shot towards him sitting in front of the TV, as if to say, 'something very important is being revealed,' while the newscaster notes that a few years earlier, China was #1 in the world in terms of producing coal, and #6 in terms of consuming oil. And that in recent years, China's oil consumption has gotten higher and higher. It's as if Kurosawa wanted us to pay close attention to this just before the man's wife reaches him and wakes him up, at which point he stares at her with fear, still worried about being discovered in his joblessness.

The next time a newscaster is saying something important, it's about the return of the 100-some Japanese soldiers fighting on behalf of America in the Middle East. Sometime later, the older son writes his mother a letter explaining that he wants to continue fighting. Earlier in the film, he criticizes his father for not being able to "give them security" (thus resulting in his father's taking the job as a toilet cleaner).

Surely there is talk in here of Japan having no military of their own, depending on the US, and squashed, in some sense, between the US and China. Maybe Tokyo Sonata, with its all-surmounting child musical prodigy, is a metaphor for creativity as a final outlet for Japanese strength?

PERMANENT VACATION

I had a lot of strong feelings about this film. I felt it was very spiritual and meaningful in a vague sort of way. And yet not vague at all - its meaning was specific to every encounter the young man in the film had with various people in his NYC setting. For the most part, every character appeared to be insane.

Basically, the film shows a young man - who appears to be transgendered, or close to it, with his slight-bonedness, his high-pitched voice - walking through the city reflecting on his life, how he's different from others. At one point he says he doesn't understand people who are driven to live by working hard and being ambitious; he says that that's not the life for him, while others think he's the crazy one.

I liked that statement because it reminds me of what it's like to truly live in the moment, observing or feeling, not trying hard to accomplish anything or to prove anything at all. It makes you think, where do those moments go?

It was inspiring to see Jarmusch in the interview that accompanies the film in this DVD, how mellow he is, how cool. Just being. It was a gift, the reminder of experiencing life that way, for anyone mired in the rush of work and society. A gift worth holding onto.

The memorable parts of the movie, for me, are where he turns on a record player in the middle of a creepy moment (there's eerie sounding music here that appears and reappears throughout the film employing some kind of Southeast Asian instrument that I hear as 'dark and shimmery') and dispels the fear or anxiety, as something maudlin and jazzy fills the room. And he starts to dance. His dancing is idiosyncratic; combined with his movement in other parts of the film, he emerges as a long-necked ballet swan with a slight fifties pompadour doing a solo that feels 40's jitterbuggy.

Sometime after that, it gets silent again, and then he tells his friend (a pretty girl with dark hair, big eyes and a profile reminiscent of a young Elizabeth Taylor) that he wants to go back to the house where he was born and grew up. But that because it was bombed 'in the war' (a fictional war, it seems), it's now just a bunch of ruins.

The memorable 'insane' people he meets are a war veteran who lives in the ruins of his old building, his mother who is actually living in a mental hospital (at which point they talk again about a war), an anxious woman wearing some kind of slip while sitting outside another building that looks like it's crumbling, who ends up screaming at him in fear, and a black man who somewhat jovially tells him the story of a man who jumped off a building and committed suicide.

Jarmusch's prnounced sense of space is already apparent here. He captured a unique NYC of 1980 (or of the one or two years previous) by isolating parts to make it look post-apocalyptic. My favorite images are the crumbly buildings and the shots in alleys and streets between tall buildings.

The end shot on the boat pulling away from the southern tip of Manhattan feels prophetic and gives me the heebie jeebies because it's a long lingering shot of the World Trade Center which reminds me of all the Super 8 footage my family took of NYC when we were kids and it was still around.

The spirit of this film suggests that Jarmusch was channeling something purely felt rather than trying to know anything, and that's where the mellowness, the 'just being,' the coolness, becomes ultimately more powerful than all the busy bees in the world.

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSAR by Werner Herzog

Kaspar Hausar is certainly memorable. The shot above is one of the things I love most. There are a few such exterior scenes that linger in a way that makes you feel you're really there - outside - with wind rustling through leaves, birds chirping around you. And it's more real and familiar, less painted, than the way someone like Terrence Malick does it. For me, it's as if one of my photos from childhood, when I was one with the grass and the trees, has just come to life.

The guy in this scene is one of Herzog's targets of satire. He tries to introduce a puzzle of logic about a village of liars and a village of truthtellers: if you ask either of them if they are truthtellers, there's no way of knowing if they're telling the truth. Kaspar Hauser, a feral child imprisoned, not freed to join the civilized world until a late age, answers that he would ask both villagers, "Are you a treefrog?" And thus the liar would say, "Yes," and the truthteller would say, "No." And the problem would be solved. The man in the picture, not wanting to agree with his solution, claims that it's more important to "deduce" and be "logical" than it is to find the truth. He's the perfect of example of what's ridiculous in the civilized world, and this is one of the best scenes in the film.

This mountain-climbing scene is visually fascinating and made me feel that it would be fun to work as a background actor on one of Herzog's bizarre expeditions. The vision of masses of people making their way up the slope is one that comes to Kaspar when he's been beaten and almost dies. He says that at the top of the mountain is death. An unusual way of looking at it.

The face above is Kaspar Hauser's. The acting style is of a performance art quality that reminds me of some of my own work in a way that I both like and dislike, as the behavior of the character, who is supposed to be raw, entering human society at a very late age in life, is not quite real. For a while, it feels too in between comedy and drama for me. But I guess after about a third of the film I start to simply enjoy it as comedy. And then I enjoy of the rest of the film because it's simply refreshing, doesn't take itself too seriously, and so I don't have to feel like I'm working at something the way I do when I (albeit fulfillingly) watch a Bergman film.

Here's another scene where Kaspar is surrounded by some uptight society people who seem to be looking at him as if under a microscope (this is one of the sad parts of the film, and the situation gets especially sad as we move towards the end).

A fun scene - a circus full of "Freaks," including Kaspar and an "Indian" guy named Hombrecito who I think is actually Filipino. A peaceful hippy playing his flute. Herzog was clearly making fun of the fact that they were supposed to be circus freaks when they were the really likeable people in the film.

Here's the logic guy again.

I need to watch more Herzog.

STRANGER THAN PARADISE

STRANGER THAN PARADISE by Jim Jarmusch

This is a film whose simplicity and whimsicality make me happy every minute that I'm watching it.

"Stranger than Paradise" is a great reminder that if a film has people you like, enough interesting locations shot from interesting angles, a progression of events that makes sense to you, and human interactions that are generally positive, it can work. It doesn't have to have an elaborate plot or script.

This is the kind of movie that makes one want to make movies. Eva visits her cousin in NYC, from Hungary, for the first time. The larger throughline of events is simply that the two become friends after initial conflict of a subtle sort.

Eva's cousin and his friend follow her to Cleveland after she leaves his apartment in NYC. She's happy to see them, and they end up taking her to Florida for a vacation. That's it. What makes the simplicity even more enjoyable is that it's flawed simplicity. Jarmusch tries to create a little conflict toward the end when Eva and her cousin take the two beds in the hotel, forcing the friend to take the cot. Yet throughout that 'conflict' and a few more that ensue, it doesn't feel like the actors want to be even that mean towards each other. Which adds to the whimsy.

PS One of the best moments is when they discover that Eva is working at a hot dog stand when they get to Cleveland.

PPS The film reminds: if a film is directed elegantly, one can get away with a lot. Its simple but strong visual language can easily be admired above great dialogue.

GERTRUD

GERTRUD by Carl Theodor Dreyer


originally posted 2/1/11. this is edited/updated 10/10/16.

This is an important film. Carl Theodor Dreyer thought deeply about women and their perspectives.

Gertrud's character can be disturbing because she's so traditional in her role as the "woman," the "wife," the object of beauty. Her depression, her understanding of love-seeking as the only purpose of existence, the way she experiences primarily conflict with men's interest in their life's work, are all real and haunting, most deeply expressed in the song she sings, accompanied on the piano by her young lover. 

Tragic is the scene where she talks with a previous lover, who had idealized her as the love of his life. He informs her of how her present lover has "dragged her name through the mud" by speaking of her as a sexual conquest publicly, at a party held by a woman of ill repute. He weeps while struggling to explain the impact this has had on him.

"Gertrud" represents what happens to women who are particularly willful, not in a position to utilize their intelligence, perhaps motherless. From the relationship with her younger lover - the solution to her haunting malaise - to endless talks with varying men about their varied feelings, to her eventual desire for solely education and solitude, this film speaks volumes about women from a more complete angle than we typically see.

Like with many great films, even while we are forced to wade slowly into the viscosity of its situation toward an understanding of its characters, we are left with a feeling of profound truth in the end.