The above is from Artists and Models, one of the best rewatches I had recently and the film that turned me on to Jerry Lewis. I saw a lot more movies in the last three months than I normally would have, many of which I found great. The ones below, except for the last one, are the ones I'd recommend to just about everyone. I wouldn't expect everyone to like them, but these ones helped me to understand other films in new ways. As for the last one, I suggest you read this if you need context.
Aag (1948)
If you decide to watch any of Raj Kapoor's films, I recommend you also see this one. His films show recurring misfortunes that happen throughout their central characters' lives. The musical numbers are often about how the characters respond to this, how they create identities, catharsis, or moments of escape for themselves. In 1978's Satyam Shivam Sundaram, the main character sings to express the spirituality that helps her make sense of her life, and 1970's Mera Naam Joker is all about a man's journey to become a successful entertainer so he can make the world laugh.
Aag's main character, Kewal, also attempts to create beauty in his life. What makes it an essential companion to these other films is the level of suffering he inflicts on himself for his vision. He subjects himself to ridicule, throws away the promise of a successful career, and damages his own body for the chance to achieve his ideal theater performance.
There is no single source of his obsession, but the film's dark expressionism gives you a sense of the agitation that drives Kewal to his art. Outside of its musical sequences, Aag often looks like a film noir. The conclusion Kewal reaches is paradoxical: he insists his theater productions be beautiful, yet he dwells on the scars left by the unease in his life. He finds the beauty he's looking for never comes out in the work of performers who don't understand the suffering he's trying to respond to with his art. The film has a happy ending that seems like something out of a fairy tale, but what it took to get there also makes it unnerving.
Charisma (1999)
A disgraced police officer, Yabuike Goro, finds himself lost in a forest where he meets three factions of people. They're holed up in a few derelict buildings which are the only signs of civilization out in the wilderness. It doesn't feel like people belong in those buildings,
and it doesn't feel like the buildings belong in the forest. Everyone is fixated on a tree called "Charisma" in the middle of a large clearing. Yabuike bounces between the different factions throughout the film, never finally taking a side. Over time, everyone's behaviors become increasingly nonsensical and violent.
Every reason the characters give for their actions crumbles in time. The forest itself rejects them. In many of Kurosawa's horror films, you can sense some forgotten, ignored, or repressed influence coming from outside what the characters can understand, or are willing to understand. Charisma isn't exactly a horror film, but this happens anyway. The subterranean forces break down assumptions of unity and constancy in the ecosystem. Everyone wants the forest or Charisma to tell them what to do, but it can't. It just silently eats away at the abandoned buildings, and the base falls out from under everything. There is life in this forest, but it exists alongside decay.
In Cure and Retribution, the imagery is urban and industrial, and the sounds are anxiety-inducing. Charisma's forest is often beautiful, and the soundtrack repeatedly uses this jaunty, whistling tune that makes a joke of whatever's going on. On the other hand, unexpected movements in the background sometimes come along to creep you out. Kurosawa meant for this to be a film for the end of the millennium, something to undermine the claims of legitimacy made by cops before Yabuike throughout the 20th century.
Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979)
This is the adaptation of a memoir of the same name by Carlo Levi, a doctor and painter who was exiled to Aliano, a remote town in Mussolini's Italy, for his anti-fascist activism. The title comes from a figure of speech describing Aliano as a place that's been neglected, left without blessings. After he arrives, he learns of recent deaths, areas where the land is losing its integrity, and the corruption of the community leaders. When he starts practicing medicine, he encounters the superstitions of the townspeople and the other doctors. Aliano is in the middle of a mountainous landscape that reaches all the way to the horizon in every direction.
Like another film discussed here, Entranced Earth, this film focuses on a petit bourgeois figure observing an oppressed people and their leadership. He finds he can't do anything he wishes he could, but he also can't separate himself from it all. But while the character in Entranced Earth is a buffoon, Carlo catches onto what's happening to him.
He has a conversation with the mayor, a stooge for Mussolini's government. It happens after the mayor intercepts one of Carlo's letters for being offensive to the state. The mayor constantly talks about how much he respects Carlo as a scholar, but he confiscates Carlo's books and even refuses to let him practice medicine. To the mayor, a scholarly friend like Carlo is an accessory. People like this are an asset to Mussolini, men preoccupied with convincing themselves of their own status over the peasants. Carlo starts out as one of these people himself. That's why he even bothers to try to reason with the mayor.
In that conversation, Carlo compares Aliano's situation to that of a medieval village he read about. That village had been conquered and reconquered, and changed hands between all kinds of nobles. The people who actually lived there didn't care who was in charge, just that the turmoil was endless. Their names never made it into the history books.
The Earrings of Madame De... (1953)
The first parts of this film are light in tone. It opens with Louise, the title character, reviewing the contents of her many closets and jewelry chests, humming and making comments about them as she tries to pick something she doesn't mind selling. She finally decides to sell earrings her husband gave her, as she likes them the least of anything in her collection. She stops by a church to make a seemingly frivolous request. There's a gag involving doormen as her husband wanders about an opera house, and another involving the jeweler who buys Louise's earrings.
Even in this first part of the film, the way the camera and the characters move is restless, pacing about. But then there's a scene in which the pacing gives way to a dance between Louise and her lover, Donati, that gracefully transcends time and space. The tone changes from airy and comic to romantic, and the romance eventually leads to tragedy.
Louise's earrings end up playing an almost magical realist role. They change hands by series of unlikely coincidences. Sheer chance overcomes the attempts of Louise's overbearing husband, André, to control where the earrings end up. At the same time, Louise comes to associate the earrings more with Donati than André, and they become much more valuable to her. It makes the final parts of the film, in which Louise struggles to obtain and hold onto the earrings, especially poignant. To her, they're a reminder of the one she really loves. To us, they're also proof of the impartiality of chance.
Entranced Earth (1967)
This film is about a man named Paulo in a fictional South American country called Eldorado. He's a poet and journalist who sees himself as a radical in his aesthetics and politics, but he doesn't actually have a clear idea what that's supposed to mean. He's personal friends with the two politicians angling for control of Eldorado, the left-liberal Vieira and the populist conservative Porfirio Díaz (no relation to the Mexican president). He vacillates between supporting each of them. Late in the film, Díaz mocks Paulo behind his back, declaring "Paulo has no political coherency!"
Paulo thinks a lot about how Eldorado's poor live in great suffering, though he barely talks to them and his attitude about it fluctuates wildly. As stated before, he's a petit bourgeois figure, and one with significant connections to Eldorado's wealthiest businessmen and most influential lawmakers. He struggles with three things: he knows that the people have reason to cause social upheaval, he's baffled that they haven't done it already, and he fears the havoc it would wreak on his life.
The film illustrates its setting using shots of massive crowds or landscapes from high above. The camera roves in scenes where political operators confront each other, encircling and pushing in on them. It makes Eldorado feel like a pressure cooker. Faced with this, Paulo tells himself Vieira will fix everything. When that doesn't happen, he tells himself that the fact that the people haven't revolted yet is evidence of their weakness, and joins up with Díaz.
In Glauber Rocha's first film, Barravento, there is a character who tries to incite resistance, and the reason he struggles to make it happen is simply that it's hard. People don't change their whole livelihoods overnight and even if they did, a great deal of pain and loss would ensue. Paulo, from his seat at Díaz's dining table, fails to see this. He calls himself a "radical" because he's consciously looking for a way out of the situation he sees Eldorado in. But he won't confront necessity, even as it lurks in the back of his mind, menacing him. The result is a perfect mix of farce and political epic.
The Fate of Lee Khan (1973)
This film spends a great deal of time developing its setting before the plot properly gets started. It starts with an extended sequence showing us an average workday at the seedy inn in 14th Century China where most of the film takes place. The women who staff the inn sometimes have to deal with mundane burdens like drunks and unreasonable complaints about the food. Other times, they use kung fu to disarm robbers and cheating gamblers. This whole section of the film lets us get familiar with the inn's layout, which the film goes on to use in increasingly imaginative ways in its action scenes.
Many of King Hu's films use the formula of underdogs versus an oppressive government. This film, because it takes its time to get started, creates a stronger sense that the underdogs possess on-the-ground knowledge that gives them the edge they need. At the same time, it feels darker than King's other films. The drab interior of the inn and the desert outside of it are far from the beautiful mountain and forest landscapes the other films often feature. The underdogs also sustain heavier losses.
There isn't really a central character. Each of the protagonists has a unique role to play and has equal significance. In fact, the way the villain's arrival makes everything start revolving around him feels like a major break in the film. This film has a lot of unusual traits compared both to the rest of King Hu's filmography and the genre more broadly, but it turns out they all go to the perfection of the formula.
Lonely Heart (1985)
Nobuhiko Obayashi made several films in Onomichi, each one relishing everything about the town. Across these films there's a recurring character: the son of the local priest, who knows everyone by virtue of his family's work. In Lonely Heart, this is the main character, Hiroki, who opens the film by surveying the town from above, zooming in on the people who catch his interest.
Lonely Heart, The Girl Who Conquered Time, and The Rocking Horsemen are the purest coming-of-age stories among these films. Lonely Heart pays a little more attention to the differences between its adult and adolescent characters, and Hiroki is more conscious of Onomichi as a whole and its effect on him, rather than just his close friends and their ambitions.
These things helped me to grasp the attitude Obayashi's films take toward Onomichi. There are scenes in these films where Onomichi's streets resemble a maze, but the characters always know how to get around. Their familiarity with Onomichi gives them a foundation for growth. They have nostalgia without backwards fantasy or navel-gazing. They look back with fondness not on something they'd like to return to, but on something that made the present possible.
All three films end on a bittersweet note. In the other two, it's saying goodbye to old friends when moving onto something new. But in Lonely Heart, it's a lack of moving on. It's an ending that sneaks up on you to produce the deepest sense of loss in any of these films.
Looking for Witch Apprentices (2020)
If you know, you know. I've read reviews of people complaining that this is basically just an advertisement for the TV series Ojamajo Doremi, which is a rather strange complaint considering that no one is really trying to sell Doremi these days. But even if it were true, who cares? Doremi should be advertised. It was a show that respected both the intelligence and the curiosity of children. It engaged a wide variety of issues naturally by tying them back into the community between an entire classroom's worth of characters, each of whom gets their due. Some episodes featuring talents like Shigeyasu Yamauchi or Mamoru Hosoda are particularly beautiful. Hosoda's two episodes may be his best work, with their lighting, blocking, and colors clearly meant to imitate Edward Yang, one of Hosoda's biggest influences.
But there is still more to this film than that. This is a film for children, but unlike Ojamajo Doremi, it's about adults. As such, the problem they face is not one that turns up in the TV series: apprehension about giving up present stability, even if your life as it stands should change. There is no magic, though there is the same jubilant animation that you see in the show. If there is one thing that characterizes Doremi, it's the application of this style, as the article linked above says, "foregoing any allegory." It wants to be joyful, but will accept no retreats from reality.
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