Belle (2021)
I had limited expectations for this movie. I respect Mamoru Hosoda, but his greatest work remains the short movies and TV episodes he directed between 1999 and 2003, plus maybe The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. His Studio Chizu movies have many of the same qualities that made those films great, but before Belle they generally shared some of the same basic elements: they start out with focus on the everyday life of a family, then through some encounter with the supernatural, they seek to show that the overwhelming power of idealized familial love can overcome anything. It sometimes works.
Since Belle is Hosoda's third movie about how people use the internet, I didn't expect any surprises from it. I was wrong. Its hopeful but tentative approach to online life is something I would have expected from the late-90s Hosoda much more than Studio Chizu. It also takes a step back from the emphasis on family, though Hosoda does get his fix in the first 30 minutes or so.
Hosoda's best movie to deal with the internet, and maybe his best overall, is 1999's Our War Game, in which computers are unwieldy, mysterious machines that take significant effort to use. Summer Wars essentially remakes Our War Game, but without that movie's sense of confusion about how computers work. Computers in Summer Wars are really just a science-fictional element to increase the scale of the story, so it can better emphasize the significance of family bonds.
Hosoda is a big fan of the great Nobuhiko Obayashi. Belle made me remember this, with its freewheeling through time and alternating between fantasies and mundane moments of routine travel along riversides. Obayashi's films often get into how nostalgia and romantic dreams affect their characters' aspirations and social lives. The way Belle depicts the effects of online life faintly resembles this.
It's definitely a Studio Chizu movie, in that it's corny and full of very loud pathos. It's uneven, and I'm not sure yet if it coheres. But I didn't mind much, as this was their first film in a bit to convey that something mattered enough for its overstatement to make sense. I was happy to see that Hosoda apparently still has some interest in the things that drew me to his earlier work.
Café Noir (2009)
100 minutes of this 200-minute film take place before the title card drops. During that stretch, we often see the characters head-on, arranged in a row next to each other. Behind them, we see deep, wide-open environments. There's one scene consisting of nothing but a lengthy take of buildings in a city, the camera moving laterally across them. It feels dissociated, as if the characters are pressed up against a glass pane keeping them apart from the real world.
The second half of the movie is funnier. Most of the characters are different, though one carries over from the first half. They share much more with each other, and we see more movement into and out of the depth of the frame, not just lateral movement. The end of the film informs us that its two halves are loose adaptations of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and Dostoyevsky's "White Nights." The second half of the film begins with the main character in a bookstore and finding multiple copies of both these books.
The long, dramatic monologues of the second half provide a bit of release from the mood of the first half, but it feels indirect and somewhat artificial. (In this respect, Café Noir resembles many other movies made by film critics.) This ambiguity speaks to the influence the literary references in this film have on the main character. The way he embodies them has a destructive effect on him, but they provide him with a rare kind of emotional resonance he couldn't go without.
The French Dispatch (2021)
This film, like The Grand Budapest Hotel, sets itself up as reminiscing about better times that have left and won't come back. Peter Labuza points out an important detail from the film's third segment: that a character assigned to write about a famous chef and the quality of his food cannot help but end up making his story about police violence. A friend of mine noted his fondness for a scene in which actors stand frozen in a series of tableaux, but you can see them moving just a little bit, unable to hold perfectly still.
Anderson's
films are often compared to dollhouses. Things move in strangely rigid
ways. Normal objects look like decorations, fastidiously organized. Their worlds are sealed off from incident and practicality. This film, though, is rather self-conscious: in each of the three stories it tells, someone struggles to perfect some work of art or political program, and some writer who observed them struggles to perfectly capture what they think was most important about it. The cracks always show.
When the Tenth Month Comes (1984)
This film opens with a wordless sequence in which a woman named Duyen receives a letter. She learns her husband, a soldier, has been killed. To protect her father-in-law and her son, she decides to hide her husband's death. She asks the local schoolteacher, Khang, to write letters to her family pretending to be her husband.
In one scene, Duyen performs in a play with the whole town in attendance. She acts out a scene in which a woman sees her husband off to war and promises to take care of their family while he's gone. The camera moves in close on certain moments of her performance to capture gestures which are imperceptible to her audience, but which we know are coming from her personal relationship to the play's subject matter. The scene is lit perfectly for us to see the traces of tears on her face.
The play reveals the paradox that drives this film. Her lie isolates her from the people she loves, only for the sake of protecting them. And beyond that, it comes from values that people have contemplated for generations. You can feel the impact of an irremediable loss on the personal level. But on the global level, you can see the whole culture's response to the personal impact. It can impose the loneliness of stigma, or it can foster in each person the potential for strength and compassion. And it's by offering compassion that gives us a remote chance of making life bearable and materially sustainable in the wake of irreparable loss.
Losing Ground (1982)
The main character, Professor Sara Rogers, says that when she understands something new, when thinking opens new doors, she feels ecstasy. She's a philosopher, and her husband Victor is a painter. Her husband is starting to open a new door in his own thinking: where he used to seek the "purity" of purely abstract paintings, he turns to representing people and things.
The film sees art and philosophy both as ways of achieving new, exhilarating forms of thought. The joy Sara, Victor, and others derive from them comes through in several scenes. But it also finds a destructive side to this. The promise of ecstasy through these practices can obscure more insidious tendencies. People can use their roles as artists to rationalize or absolve their exploitative behaviors.
It's a delicate balancing act between capturing the ecstasy that can arise from making art and how it can be abused. The film's final scene ties everything together brilliantly, in which Sara channels her feelings toward Victor's callous, manipulative actions into a new art form.
Nostos: the Return (1989)
This movie has very little dialogue, and what little there is is in a nonexistent language made for the movie. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the Odyssey could tell you this was an adaptation. That said, characters besides Odysseus, the more violent events in the story, and the wrath of Poseidon have all been removed. Instead, the film focuses on obscure renditions of Odysseus's journeys into the underworld or the islands of Circe and the Lotus Eaters. Characters other than Odysseus are present, but not active.
The film's lingering, illogical way of proceeding makes everything mysterious. The film focuses on fluid movements and fades from one environment into the next. In one scene at the end of the film, this gives the very loose impression of land emerging from the ocean. The film's hypnotic mystery makes it feel like it takes place inside someone's head. Odysseus, stripped of his other characteristics, appears as an introspective figure, forming a new way of thinking in his encounters with environments he has never seen before.
Occasionally, the film gives us glimpses of what appear to be memories from his childhood. The significance of his return home no longer has to do with overcoming his wife's suitors, but with bringing back what he's learned about the scale of his home compared with that of the world, and passing it on to prompt the journey of a new generation.
Strangers in Good Company (1990)
When I watched this with friends, some of them described the forest it takes place in as feeling otherworldly and phantasmal. I agree for the first parts of the movie, but as it went on, I lost this impression. The characters move in a consistent, repeated way between key points in the setting. They talk about the sounds of birds and other animals they can hear coming from the forest. Eventually, you understand that this place isn't phantasmal, but a unique, physical place on planet Earth.
The actors in this film are seven elderly women and one younger woman, all playing themselves. They've led diverse lives as artists, activists, parents, immigrants, nuns. As they talk to each other, the wealth of experience each of them possesses comes out. They come into focus the way the world around them does. Sharing a setting and feeling out its specificity gives them common ground to disclose themselves to each other.
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