The above image is from Heike Monogatari, the new TV series directed by Naoko Yamada. It hasn't been airing for long, buts so far I like it a lot. The subject and the Science Saru crew have made for something rather different from what Yamada's done before, but it still captures the unique bittersweet feeling Yamada realized in the best of her earlier work, like Tamako Love Story and Liz and the Blue Bird.
She depicts characters who look out into a world they yearn to be connected to, but who are unsure if anyone will see them in return and reciprocate their feelings. Heike Monogatari focuses on Biwa, an immortal, ageless character who can see the futures of everyone around her, up to their deaths. The show will skip over large periods of time during which the people she loves, trusts, hates, etc. all age while she stays the same. She's stuck in the role of a passive observer, and haunted by the knowledge that the moments she loves will be fleeting in the face of the violence wrought by the Taira clan's actions. This take on the source material turns out to be as perfect for Yamada as the high school settings she handled before. Also for Kensuke Ushio.
I realized over the last three months that I've been especially lucky this year in the selection of movies I watched. Compared to the last couple years, many more struck me as particularly great, and I got into some filmmakers' whole filmographies. Much of this is due to recommendations from my friends.
Cliff Walkers (2021)
This film is about a group of Chinese spies on a mission to expose atrocities committed by the Japanese military in Manchuria during World War II. It's relentless, showing us sequence after sequence in which the characters just barely manage to escape with their lives and their mission intact. It's also hard to follow. Everyone wears the same black coat and hat. Everything happens at night, in the snow, or in densely netted streets and alleys. There are over three double-agents in play. One is actually a triple-agent.
People really go through the wringer. They take a lot of damage before they finally can't fight anymore, and those who survive are clearly hurt by having to watch this happen. Cliff Walkers illustrates one thing first and foremost: being a spy is hard. Above all, it's effective thriller filmmaking, which is why it's so exasperating that American critics seem incapable of writing about it without using the word "nationalism" or "propaganda." It is, in fact, a perfectly normal World War II movie, a straightforward portrayal of military characters fighting historic evils. Cliff Walkers is propaganda only so much as the majority of World War II films are. Its primary effects are suspense and an uneasy longing to see if the people who survive will get to see anything good come from their ultra-hard-boiled struggles. If the critics can't see this, then I have to wonder if any kind of Chinese film about World War II could avoid their accusations.
Duvidha (1973)
Duvidha is based on the writing of Vijaydan Detha, which in turn was based on a folktale. A young woman, Lachhi, is about to be married to a merchant's son. The merchant's son plans to leave for five years immediately after the marriage. It's an auspicious time to conduct business, and he doesn't feel he can pass it up. One day, on their way home, they pass by a tree where a ghost resides, and the ghost falls in love with Lachhi.
I read about Mani Kaul after watching Duvidha,
and several people have noted the influence Kaul takes from Robert
Bresson. The resemblance is obvious: like Bresson's films, Duvidha makes
heavy use of narration, proceeds elliptically, and has actors recite
their lines without emotion. That said, while I certainly thought of
Bresson while watching the film, I only did so in passing. Overall, it
does something quite different. In Bresson, emotionless expression and ellipsis evoke confrontation with an oppressive, distinctly modern complexity. In Duvidha, these elements instead suggest that you're witnessing events only half-remembered, as if the things elided have faded over centuries. It feels ancient.
The film often uses freeze-frames of characters looking at each other or reflecting on something, sometimes with one freeze-frame dissolving into another. Rather than through performance, the film expresses emotion by clinging to moments out of time like this. It plays off how old everything feels. While the feelings involved are too distant in time for us to witness them first-hand, they were important enough for these moments to be singled out and persist through time.
Four Sisters (1985)
This film is as beautiful as any of Obayashi's films, and like many of those films it follows a particular social group through all kinds of situations. But Four Sisters is more tumultuous, a melodrama involving painful family histories and doomed romances. Montage, back projection, and dissolves in this film give it an ethereal, associative quality. You can also sense from some of its imagery that it was adapted from a manga. Many of Obayashi's films achieve a similar effect, but in Four Sisters it's even stronger. Its world feels like it could fall apart simply by the strength of emotion.
That precariousness suits this film, which confronts the characters with exposed secrets and twists of fate that strain their trust in each other. And yet they never totally break apart, even as the film follows them across great lengths of time and space. It can hurt to see them separated, but it's moving to understand how important their relationships are when they formed from little more than chance and proximity.
Ikiru (1952)
Many of Kurosawa's films have an uncomplicated humanist disposition, but he's a very earthy filmmaker, and in his films that take place in the modern day, it manifests as an odd fascination with disgusting environments. In both this film and Drunken Angel, a town is blighted by a toxic pool in a public area. But both films find beauty even there, in shimmering waves of light reflecting off the water's surface and landing on people's faces.
Everything we see in the first 90 minutes culminates in Takashi Shimura's character, Kanji Watanabe, deciding to do something new with his life. But then the perspective shifts for the last 50 minutes. In the first part of the film, watching Shimura's performance is painful, not only because his character's situation is so dire, but also because of sympathetic frustration. He'll start to speak but cut himself off. He stumbles through the few occasions when he starts to enjoy himself. By his own admission, he never has before. His body language is withdrawing. After the change in perspective, he no longer acts this way. At the same time, the physical deterioration of his body becomes more and more pronounced. He's slower, more hunched over, yet more persistent and readier to make eye contact.
On paper, Ikiru's story is uplifting, the tale of someone who gains a new appreciation of life that lets him accomplish something good. But the hesitation and physical difficulty of Watanabe's movements reminds us that the clock is always ticking on one's life. The film's ending is ambiguous: after depicting so much of Watanabe's hesitation, the film shows us another man questioning if he'll ever do something good before his time is up.
The Tall T (1957)
In one of The Tall T's early scenes, Randolph Scott's cowboy bets his horse for the chance to win a bull, if only he can ride the bull. He fails. Maybe he could have done it when he was younger, but he's lost some of his edge. Instead, he has informal connections. He knows the owner of the staging post and brings candy for the owner's son when he stops by. He knows the stage driver too, well enough that after losing his horse, he can sit by the road and wait to hitch a ride.
But these things don't last. Three bandits quickly and unceremoniously kill Brennan's friends. Brennan ends up their captive, alongside a married couple. The young wife, played by Maureen O'Sullivan, is the daughter of a rich man, and the bandits intend to ransom her.
The bandits' leader, played by Richard Boone, thinks he and Scott's character can see eye-to-eye. He's not a bandit, he's just temporarily embarrassed. He looks down on his partners: one is poor and gullible, the other is foreign and aggressive.
Unfortunately for Boone's character, this film takes very seriously the idea that we all end up in the same place. That's the only thing that feels certain in this film. The rest is frustration, and there isn't really any silver lining. Scott's abrasive delivery of his final line—"it's gonna be a nice day"—makes it ironic. Regardless of how it all ends, the damage is done.
The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)
Unquestionably, the most well-known and influential film about Joan of Arc is Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. What Bresson's film has in common with Dreyer's is that they both cover only her trial, not any other part of her life, and make extensive use of the actual trial transcript. While Dreyer's film presents the trial as a serious moral conflict between Joan and the judges, Bresson's sees it more conspiratorially. Everything is rigged against Joan from the start. She sits alone in her cell while the authorities talk about what to do with her from behind partitions, speaking a language she doesn't understand. Her words do challenge the judges, but cannot change their predetermined goal of punishing her.
This is in line with Bresson's other films from the 60s onward, when he dispensed with narration in favor of ellipsis, and turned away from stories about tests of moral character. As I've said before, it's as if he decided at some point that the world had become too complex and too governed by impersonal forces for personal character to matter anymore.
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