4.5 stars

Tokyo Story (1953)

André Crous

Japan
4.5*

Director:
Yasujiro Ozu
Screenwriters: 
Kōgo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Director of Photography:
Atsuta Yuharu

Running time: 130 minutes

Original Title: 東京物語
Transliterated title: Tōkyō Monogatari

In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, people go about their business in an orderly fashion, and when the main characters are a geriatric couple from the countryside who go to Tokyo to see how their children are getting on, they really do take their time.  Most of the time, they sit around the house, chatting or doing needlework, but if you looked closely, you’d see that they would rather be doing something else. And it is this subtle point that ultimately makes the film pack a powerful punch.

Widely considered to be one of the best films ever made, Tokyo Story is much more accessible than one would expect, despite the prevailing opinion that his films are slow and that his technique – his so-called “tatami” shots are taken from the position of someone seated on a small straw mat, and the camera is almost always static – might be alien to a Western viewer.

Tokyo Story impresses itself upon the viewer because the story, presented in a very straightforward manner (one could argue the camera’s distance and immobility give a sense of objectivity), seems to be very simple, when in fact the multitude of emotions is only gauged upon close examination of the film. Very little seems to happen, but our response to the events onscreen, and in particular the rather odious behaviour of the children (and grandchildren), would no doubt elicit strong reactions from most viewers.

The film is about an elderly couple, Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama, from the rural town of Onomichi, who goes to visit two of their children and their families in Tokyo. This is before the days of the bullet train, and the 600 km (370 miles) journey takes them almost a full day. But they are excited to see their children (and their grandchildren), whom they haven’t seen in a very long time, and explore the big city.

Even before their arrival, we can see tension at the home of their eldest son, Koichi, whose wife, Fumiko, is having trouble disciplining Minoru, her rebellious young boy, who has a temper tantrum whenever he doesn’t get his way. His reaction to his mother prepares the viewer to some extent for the relationship between his grandparents, for whom he shows the same kind of disdain, and their children.

Shukichi and Tomi have four children: Besides Koichi, they also have a daughter in Tokyo, called Shiage (a hairdresser who cares only about herself), a son in Osaka and a daughter who is about to leave home. Koichi and Shiage are both married to spouses who seem much more willing to care for and help out their in-laws than the couple’s own children. It also transpires that they had another son, Shoji, but he was killed during the war. However, Shoji’s widow, Noriko (played by Setsuko Hara), treats them like real family.

Noriko makes an indelible impression on the viewer. She is kindhearted, makes time to show the elderly couple around, always has a smile on her face and joins them at the drop of a hat. Of course, this happy-go-lucky exterior masks some deep-rooted heartache, and by the time the film addresses these emotions, she has already crept into our hearts.

By contrast, the four remaining children, with the exception of Kyoko, the youngest daughter, all behave rather despicably, and I can imagine that the film would be a challenge for most parents, who would prefer to think that their children would make time for them if they had to and not spend the bare minimum on them when they come for a visit.  Shukichi and Tomi grin and bear their children’s alienating behaviour, and while Shukichi, in a very touching moment, admits his surprise at how much his children have changed (and not in a good way), he also tries to be pragmatic about the changes and says that parents should learn that their children don’t always live up to the expectations they had for them.

The film is incredibly moving, despite its very simple visuals and a camera that moves only twice in the entire film: once at the train station, when Shukichi and Tomi are moving along the platform and about to board the train, and once a few moments earlier, when they make the decision to spend their last evening in Tokyo separately. Although we don’t learn much about the two main characters, beyond the smiles on their faces we do realise that they are much sharper than they seem at first. Certain moments, like Tomi’s recognition that her son and his family live far from the station, meaning they don’t live in a very good district, conveys a certain veiled concern on her part that reveals her care for her children.

And ultimately that is why her children’s ignorance of their parents’ love for them is so discomfiting and makes this quiet film so perceptive and powerful.

The Day of the Jackal (1973)

André Crous

UK
4.5*

Director:
Fred Zinnemann
Screenwriter:
Kenneth Ross
Director of Photography:
Jean Tournier

Running time: 145 minutes

Wiretaps, torture, terrorism… it seems like the OAS (“l’Organisation de l’armée secrète” or the Organisation of the Secret Army) was the 1960s version of al-Qaeda – at least, in the kind of behaviour they provoked in government and law enforcement officials. The OAS was a French nationalist group that resisted Algerian independence and was furious when General de Gaulle finally relented and granted the country its freedom in July 1962.

The Day of the Jackal, based on the book of the same name by Frederick Forsyth, stars Edward Fox as a killer for hire, codenamed “The Jackal”, who has been recruited by the OAS to assassinate de Gaulle. This part is fiction, but the story’s context is true to life, including the setup in August 1962 where de Gaulle’s motorcade comes under fire in an ambush staged by Jean Bastien-Thiry of the OAS. Bastien-Thiry is executed, in real life and on film; soon after, according to the fiction, the OAS started to hatch plans again to kill the general.

This is a quintessential thriller: It is all build-up to the climax. But the film gives us, the viewers, ample time to form our own questions about the events and to generate expectations: Will the Jackal be found out? Are we on his side or on the side of de Gaulle? Will the Jackal be successful (he himself says that de Gaulle has the best security service in the world), and will the film essentially rewrite history? Who is the Jackal really?

His main opponent is Claude Lebel, the very methodical deputy commissioner who is not used to the limelight and is often rather awkward in public, despite his formidable skills as a detective. Lebel is played to perfection by Michel Lonsdale.

The film is put together extremely well and has tantalising omissions all over the place, a result of fine editing, clever screenwriting and insightful direction. At a very early stage, we are made aware of certain papers that the Jackal has asked his specialist counterfeiter to produce, but it will only be at the end of the film that we realise precisely how well this professional killer has planned the assassination. That moment, when everything comes together, is not drawn out for the sake of the audience, because director Fred Zinnemann has made as many preparations as the Jackal himself, and we can easily keep up.

While the characters are English, French and Italian, they all speak perfect English, which was perhaps the most commercial option at that time (and would still be today), but the film never seems contrived, because the narrative itself keeps us interested and makes the events cohere into a very strong storyline.

The film uses very little music, and it is surprising, and very refreshing, to have many important moments played out in almost complete silence, which creates anticipation for sound and yet allows us to focus more intently on the visuals, which will be the only source of meaning.

The climax intercuts documentary and staged material very well and demonstrates Zinnemann’s skill as a director for the big screen, especially when he puts on scenes of de Gaulle during the city-wide celebrations of Liberation Day on August 25.

The Day of the Jackal may have a slightly stilted performance by Edward Fox as the Jackal, and it contains a rather ludicrous video recording of OAS member Viktor Wolenski in which the “hidden camera” is sometimes right in his face, but the film exudes a thrill that is difficult to equal by any other film that contains so little real action.

Fateless (2005)

André Crous

Hungary
4.5*

Director: 
Lajos Koltai
Screenwriter:
Imre Kertész
Director of Photography: 
Gyula Pados

Running time: 140 minutes

Original title: Sorstalanság

If you have any sense of compassion, films about the Holocaust are very difficult to watch. And yet, the stories that they tell must be acknowledged and absorbed by a generation that could easily forget the events of more than 70 years ago.

At the time I am writing this review, I haven’t seen a Holocaust film, either fictional or documentary, since I sat down to watch Claude Lanzmann’s staggering multi-disc Shoah (1985) six years ago. Lanzmann and Alain Resnais, whose Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is considered to be an equally impressive achievement reminding us of the need to remember, both constructed films of the Holocaust as reflections of the past that still have striking resonance in the present.

Fateless‘s main character, who features in every single scene and is somehow involved in every single shot, is Gyuri “Gyurka” Köves (played by Marcell Nagy), a teenage boy with a mop of curly black hair, who lives in Budapest with his father and stepmother, part of a Jewish community in Budapest at the beginning of the Second World War. First, his father is sent to a labour camp, and then he himself is picked from a bus and sent to concentration camps, where he stays for the duration of the war, along with thousands of other Jewish Hungarians.

The young actor playing Gyurka is perfectly cast: Exactly on the verge of adulthood, he conveys innocence without childishness, and sometimes he seems to look straight at us, engaging our sympathy without soliciting it. His ideas are still evolving, and during a conversation about the essence of Jewishness, he wants to comfort a girl he has a crush on, who doesn’t understand why being a Jew makes her the object of so much hatred, but he doesn’t quite have the experience to do that yet. It is a touching moment, despite the evident political slant (fortunately, the only time the film hammers home the point) and one that obviously relates to the film as a whole.

Fateless is beautiful. It is the debut film of cinematographer Lajos Koltai and is clearly the work of someone with an eye for visual impact. The film’s colours are very muted: Mostly, the images resemble sepia photographs, and often the colour scheme is almost completely monochrome, with only hints of colour in the frame, especially the colour yellow, which of course is the colour of the infamous Star of David badges sewn onto the clothing of the Jewish population.

The film’s many different moments are not filled with the horrors one usually associates with Holocaust films but add up to a very human portrait of the people in the concentration camps and their desire to support each other. The fragmentary nature of the narrative, especially in the second half, is not always entirely effective, but the fragments themselves are like small gems in the mud of the Second World War.

A few scenes stand out for the emotion they are likely to evoke and very often the soundtrack of Ennio Morricone (one of the best he has ever scored, with the always incredible Lisa Gerrard adding her voice to some very emotive pieces) plays a significant role. At one point, the prisoners are asked to entertain their fellow inmates, and they sing a song whose relevance to their plight is difficult to miss:

What does a girl dream on a moonlit night?
That her prince will come on a steed of pure white

It’s a dream so sweet, but soon she must wake
And princes are scarce, so it’s all a mistake

Fateless ends on a very different note from most of these kinds of films and may rub some people the wrong way, but the point that the film makes illuminates the human ability to find light in the darkness and to hold on to the goodness in some people and use it as a shelter against the dreadful acts of others.

Isle of Flowers (1989)

André Crous

isle-of-flowersBrazil
4.5*

Director:
Jorge Furtado
Screenwriter:
Jorge Furtado
Directors of Photography:
Roberto Henkin, Sergio Amon

Running time: 13 minutes

Original title: Ilha das flores

This short film appears to be a documentary, but it doesn’t really matter whether the characters are real individuals or not. The very loose storyline follows the journey of a tomato and examines the implications of human intervention while trying to capture exactly what it is that makes us human. The conclusions are rather pessimistic.

Isle of Flowers is set, if such a simple term may be used here, at a tomato plantation in Porto Alegre, where a worker named Suzuki (the recurring, matter-of-fact narrator informs us that he is Japanese) picks the vegetables. These tomatoes will be sold to a supermarket, where Mrs Anete, a perfume saleswoman, will buy them. When she prepares the tomato soup, she deems one of the tomatoes unsuitable and throws it in the garbage. One of Porto Alegre’s garbage dumps is situated on an island called the Isle of Flowers, where pigs and humans vie for a chance to retrieve items from the garbage in order to feed themselves.

The film’s importance lies not in its ability to trace the very banal journey of a tomato from the plantation to the garbage dump, but in its evocative presentation of human desperation at the heart of consumerism. Isle of Flowers uses the red vegetable as a red herring: The film, via many detours, finally deals with the poor of Porto Alegre who have to scavenge for food; they find themselves, in the scheme of things, situated even lower on the socioeconomic ladder than pigs. Everything has a price and can be exchanged for money, as the film clearly indicates, and since a pig can be bought for food, it is worth more than the poor scavengers, who cannot.

The Isle of Flowers, moving as it does from one train of thought to the next, is comical in its apparent digressions but ruthless in its depiction of the lives of human beings. When mentioning Jews, all we see are images of the Holocaust. A human being is defined, for example, as an entity with a highly developed brain and opposable thumbs. These traits are accompanied onscreen by an image of a mushroom cloud (a consequence of the workings of the brain) and the forbidden apple, picked by the opposable thumbs.

My only qualm with the film is its definition of the family as a unit that consists of a father, a mother and two children. While traditionally true, this convention is purely arbitrary and wholly simplistic. But this flaw does nothing to detract from the film’s enlightening and thoroughly entertaining perspective on the impact of exchange.

Shirley Adams (2009)

André Crous

South Africa
4.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriters:
Stavros Pamballis
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Jamie Ramsay

Running time: 90 minutes

Shirley Adams is a proud woman trying to cope as well as she can with her domestic situation. Nine months before the film starts, her teenage son, Donovan, had been hit by a stray bullet while he was returning home in a crime-ridden low-income area of Cape Town, South Africa, known as the “Cape Flats”. The incident left Donovan paralysed, a quadriplegic. A few months later, Shirley’s husband abandoned them, never to be seen again. From time to time, they do receive an envelope with some money, but Shirley never questions the origins of the support, having accepted the responsibility of caring for Donovan all on her own.

In the film’s harrowing opening scene, which takes place in the dead of night, the camera nervously hovers over Shirley’s shoulders while she tries to resuscitate Donovan; he is unconscious, and foaming at the mouth, and in the following scene, in case we couldn’t guess, a doctor tells Shirley that Donovan had tried to commit suicide.

Shirley has devoted herself to the well-being of her only child, but Donovan, who is frustrated by his own helplessness and ashamed at being cared for (his mother has to wash him in the bathtub, an event that Donovan considers the ultimate form of his own debasement), is already in a downward spiral – and his suicide attempt at the beginning of the film is a good indication of how low his self-image has fallen. As a result of his own demons, and probably without any cruel intentions, Donovan lashes out at this mother, and their relationship clearly suffers because of his apparent ingratitude for her help.

The word that best describes the film’s camerawork would be “intimate”. Director Oliver Hermanus and his DP, Jamie Ramsay, tend to show the events from behind Shirley and this stubborn focus on intimacy can cause some frustration in a viewer who – admittedly, by convention, but with good reason, in my opinion – expects an establishing shot now and again. However, despite this unrelentingly close experience of events, a number of self-conscious shots in which we only see the back of main actress Denise Newman’s head, and a story that is very simple, first-time director Hermanus succeeds in gripping his audience thanks to his self-assured direction that steers the film away from any fake sentimentality. His approach is entirely appropriate for the story he is telling, and it is plain to see that the film was a labour of love.

Shirley Adams does not contain any picturesque views of the Mother City (the locals’ nickname for Cape Town), but the accents and the slight shifts between languages make it a very clearly defined story from South Africa; at the same time, it seems odd to label it a South African film, not merely because it mostly eschews any mention of politics, but because, frankly, the country has never before produced anything like it. If any specific influence is to be discerned, it would be the films of the Romanian New Wave: The film contains a number of single takes, but one shot in particular, which occurs during Donovan’s birthday, is very reminiscent of the famous shot around the dinner table in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Hermanus’s Shirley Adams is an example of exceptional filmmaking and ranks amongst the best films his country has ever produced.

El Norte (1983)

André Crous

USA/UK
4.5*

Director: 
Gregory Nava
Screenwriters: 
Gregory Nava
Anna Thomas
Director of Photography: 
James Glennon

Running time: 139 minutes

At the house of a Guatemalan plantation owner, a dirt-poor worker betrays his friends for a wad of bills. These friends, meeting up at an abandoned hacienda, an old manor on the plantation that has all but crumbled to the ground, are taken out by a special force of men with machine guns. One of these men who are killed is Arturo Xuncax, but before he leaves for his last meeting, he has a very meaningful conversation with his son, Enrique – a conversation that makes it impossible not to empathise with him and the other plantation workers. Arturo says to Enrique:

It’s the same everywhere. For the rich, the peasant is just a pair of arms. That’s all they think we are, arms for work. They treat their animals better than they do us. For many years, we’ve been trying to make the rich understand that poor people have hearts and souls… that they feel. We are human, all of us.

Shortly after this scene, Enrique and his sister Rosa leave their small town of San Pedro, go across the border into Mexico and head north (El Norte means “The North” and refers to their end destination: the United States of America). Of course, the journey isn’t going to be easy, especially for these two youngsters who have almost impossible fantasies of the country up north. In a very well-chosen sequence in which the chaos of Mexico is juxtaposed with the green lawns, the sprinklers and the cars of suburban USA.

The film proceeds much faster than expected, which allows every scene to count. The editing is quick at times, although the director makes the very interesting decision to shoot many scenes in which a character delivers many lines of dialogue in a single take. This shows the director has a mind for connecting images into a comprehensible whole that enables the audience to grasp the physical nature of the story while slowing down the action on a human level to make us understand their words and their feelings.

Interestingly enough, the part of the film that evokes the most danger is the second half, which takes place in the USA. There is tension built into the premise that the main characters are working illegally, and while Immigration Services haven’t been successful in discovering them, the mere presence of these government officials, in very quick scenes that remind us of their function in society, plays on our fear that Enrique and Rosa will somehow be found out or reported.

No, the USA is not as easy as the brother and sister from Guatemala had expected; one scene that is clear in this regard takes places during Rosa’s first day cleaning a big house. The lady is nice, but when she explains how the functions of the washing machine should be used, she completely disregards the fact that she is speaking to someone for whom electricity is a foreign concept and whose English is less than rudimentary.

What is remarkable about the film is that it doesn’t paint its characters as victims of an unjust American context but shows how difficult life can be for a foreigner even when most things seem to be going smoothly. There are cultural, linguistic and historical chasms to overcome, and if these are not bridged before a green card is in the mail, there could be serious consequences.

The film is staged with amazing clarity, and while the situation is simple, and some of the events are predictable, the execution of the story delivers a very engaging experience. The only point at which the film falters is during the border crossing from Mexico to the USA. After what the characters have been told, we expect a sewer scene such as the famous one from The Shawshank Redemption. What we get, in comparison, is almost light enough to be laughable, and that is why the difficulties that they do face on this journey cannot be taken very seriously; and yet, their reaction is to be frightened to the point of being paralysed. This scene, stretched beyond its limits, is the only bad chord in an otherwise brilliant piece of work.

El Norte is an excellent film, its journey aspect similar to the one in Michael Winterbottom’s In This World; both films demonstrate the difficulty of international movement, especially when you look or speak in a certain way. As director Gregory Nava’s debut film, which he co-wrote with producer Anna Thomas, the film is consistently entertaining with wonderful characters who want to realise their fantasies. Though it was made 30 years ago, its central assessment of the life of a foreigner from south of the border still seems entirely credible and heartbreaking, and it should serve as a wake-up call to all those anti-immigrant rabble-rousers.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

André Crous

Germany
4.5*

Director:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Screenwriter:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Director of Photography:
Jürgen Jürges

Running time: 93 minutes

Original title: Angst essen Seele auf

Xenophobic sentiment is part of the fabric of Fassbinder’s classic, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but the film is by no means a political drama: It rather occupies a grey zone between politics, romance and a straight-faced delivery of very bad grammar. The speech pattern is even reflected in the grammatically incorrect German title, which translates as “Fear eat up soul”.

One of the two central characters is an immigrant worker from Morocco, whose real name, El Hedi ben Salem M’Barek Mohammed Mustapha, is too complicated for Germans to say, never mind remember, so he is called “Ali” by his German co-workers. Emmi Kurowski is a much older German woman, with Polish roots, who stops for a coffee at a local restaurant one rainy evening, where she sees Ali for the first time.

Both outsiders in their own way, both in need of love, their friendship quickly transforms into much more, to the great disapproval of their separate groups of friends. The setting is Munich, shortly after the chaos of the 1972 Olympic Games, and anti-Arab sentiment is rife among all members of society: Foreigners who have lived in Germany for a long time even forget that they themselves had been new immigrants once upon a time.

Fassbinder’s film was clearly an inspiration to Todd Haynes during the conception of his 2002 film, Far From Heaven, in which a 1950s middle-class white woman from New England strikes up a relationship with her younger, black gardener. Both directors, Haynes and Fassbinder, are gay, and the inevitable interpretation of their films as a pamphlet against prejudice is difficult to avoid. But Fassbinder is much more relaxed about his subject matter than Haynes, whose film dealt with both racism and the marginalisation of homosexuality.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is rather comically staged: Scenes sometimes consist of mere gazes that go on for a little too long. In this respect, the editing is well executed and very effective in its own unique way.

The film is as relevant and as entertaining today as it must have been upon its release in 1974. Socially, the same gossip is still the order of the day when there is an interracial – and in this case, also, an intergenerational –relationship between two people. Fassbinder does not go for heavy drama but focuses considerable time on the other women living in Emmi’s building and their responses to different situations that involve foreigners. His train of thought is clear but not too simplistic – and perfectly credible.

Fassbinder features as Emmi’s lazy son-in-law and, as all reviews will mention, the role of Ali is played by Fassbinder’s partner at the time, El Hedi ben Salem. While the film never reaches the melodramatic heights of an Almodóvar, a comparison between them might not be such a bad idea.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

André Crous

Japan/USA
4.5*

Director:
Paul Schrader
Screenwriters: 
Paul Schrader
Leonard Schrader
Chieko Schrader
Director of Photography: 
John Bailey

Running time: 115 minutes

An extraordinary film about an artist’s desire for political change brought about by his art. The multidimensional way in which the tale presented to us is vibrant but by no means attempts to give a complete picture of the man.

The story is played out in three distinct parts that are woven together throughout the film: present (1970), in colour; past (pre-1970), in black and white; imaginary, in very bright colours. Of course, it is no coincidence that the present and the imaginary are both shown in colour, and by the time the film reaches its climax, the pure expression of Mishima’s ideal that art and action somehow be fused is visualised magnificently onscreen, accompanied by the music of Philip Glass, without whom this film would not have had the same energy.

The film is based on the real-life individual, Yukio Mishima, a writer, director, actor and admirer of the samurai traditions. The content of his own novels forms the backdrops for the episodes in the film. These episodes – the four chapters of the film’s title – are labelled as “Beauty”, “Art”, “Action” and “Harmony of Pen and Sword”.

The different novels on which the film draws, and whose visual representations in the film are nothing short of breathtaking, are The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses. Naturally, the omission of such a novel in the final part of the film implies that the episode itself, directed by Mishima, is another kind of novel, although he seems to achieve in real life what had eluded him in his fiction: the fusion of words and action.

Director Paul Schrader’s treatment of Mishima’s sexuality does not aim for sensationalism; on the contrary, it provides one of many points of coherence between the different storylines, and the storylines do sometimes overlap, in the manner of the opening credits sequence of Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (whose soundtrack was also composed by Philip Glass).

While director Paul Schrader took great pains to portray this Japanese story with Japanese actors, performing in Japanese, he opted for an English voice-over because he felt the amount of subtitles would otherwise be unbearable for the viewer. Perhaps this is true, but his solution to the problem – an American voice-over whose speaker pretends to be Mishima – damages the film’s otherwise impeccable handling of the material.

The music, as much a contributing factor as Schrader’s direction, enthuses the viewer even when the thread of the present – and its inevitable conclusion (seppuku, or harakiri: suicide by disembowelment) – might have provoked a very different reaction. And in those closing moments, when the different stories finally culminate, the viewer will recognise that Schrader has a masterful grip on the material and that the transcendent power his main character speaks of during the film is powerfully evoked.