Aparajito (1956) / The World of Apu (1959)

Aparajito
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

The World of Apu
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) is one of my favorite movies of all time. Based on the autobiographical first novel by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (Banerjee), it is the story of Apu, a young boy living in the impoverished countryside of Bengal in India in the early part of the twentieth century. Pather Panchali is one of the great movies about childhood, a film that at the same time graphically depicts a land and way of life wholly alien to most Americans and that also introduced the music of Ravi Shankar to the West. "Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen," wrote Pauline Kael about the film. I've waited for years to see the two sequels to Pather Panchali based on Bandopadhyay's second novel, Aparajito, films that pursue the story of Apu into his teenage years and young adulthood. I was recently able to see them at last, and the wait was certainly worth it, confirming my intuition based on seeing only a handful of his movies that Ray (1921-1992) was one of the greatest of all film directors.

Pather Panchali ends with the departure of Apu and his parents from their home in the countryside for a new life in the city. Aparajito picks up the story with their arrival in the holy city of Benares. Here Apu's father, a poet and priest, hopes to have greater opportunity to practice his profession, and spends much time on the banks of the Ganges teaching religion and reciting his poetry. Life is not much better for the family in Benares than it was in the country, though, as they continue to struggle against adversity and poverty. Apu's father has many competitors in the holy city, and his mother does not really seem at home in her new urban environment. The city does, however, prove to be an exciting place for young Apu, giving him many opportunities to observe people more colorful, and to visit places more exotic, than those of his former rural life.

The young Apu explores Benares

But not long after their arrival in Benares, Apu's father falls ill with a fever and dies, and Apu and his mother must return to the countryside. Here Apu develops a lifelong passion for education after he is allowed to attend the village school. At one point, he is presented with a tiny globe as a prize for his outstanding performance on his exams, a globe that he keeps with him always, a symbol of the craving for knowledge and experience that becomes the driving force in his life. An exceptional student, he is offered a scholarship to attend secondary school in Calcutta. The second half of the film details Apu's teenage years as a student in Calcutta, where he attends classes by day and works in a printing press at night to earn his living expenses.

The teenage Apu (with his globe) arrives in Calcutta to begin his studies

During this time, it is clear that Apu's mother is deeply affected by his absence and that Apu on his part experiences great conflict between his devotion to education and the concern he feels about leaving his mother. Trains become a recurrent reminder for both the boy and his mother of the hardships of their separation. Many times a train passes by in the background as his mother stands outside, and several scenes take place in trains as Apu travels between Calcutta and the country during his school holidays. For his mother the trains serve as both a hopeful image of Apu's infrequent visits and a melancholy portent of his inevitable departure, while for Apu they come to represent his divided existence, in the country as a dutiful son and in Calcutta as an independent, ambitious young man. Aparajito ends with two nearly simultaneous events that determine the direction of Apu's future—the death of his mother and his graduation from secondary school. He is now free to leave his former life completely behind and begin a new life as a permanent resident of Calcutta and student at the university there.

The World of Apu is a less diffuse film than Aparajito, most of it taking place in a relatively brief span of time. Apu is now a grown man, a university student. (Apu is brilliantly played by 24-year old Soumitra Chatterjee, in his first movie role. He would go on to appear in fourteen more of Ray's films.) Forced by his financial situation to quit school just before he graduates, Apu is a dreamer, a young man who habitually avoids responsibility and can't seem to focus on the mundane, practical side of life, like getting a job and paying his rent, preferring instead to work on his novel. When his best friend and university classmate Pulu gets in touch with him and takes him out for dinner, on the way home Apu breaks into an exuberant ode to freedom and spontaneity. Pulu tells him he acts like he has been drinking, and Apu is in a sense drunk—on the simple joy of being alive.

Pulu's friendship becomes instrumental to Apu's future when he invites Apu to come with him to the countryside where his wealthy family lives, for during this visit Apu meets his future bride, Pulu's cousin Aparna. The marriage is a sudden one, essentially an arranged marriage, and at first the newlyweds barely know each other. In time, though, as they develop a deep love for one another, Aparna becomes the catalyst for profound changes in Apu's casual and self-indulgent attitude to life.

The adult Apu and Aparna

Apu's life undergoes another radical change when Aparna dies giving birth to their son, Kajal. Overwhelmed by grief, Apu rejects his newborn son, leaving him with Aparna's family, and spends the next several years wandering India in a state of intense depression. He even gives up writing the novel he has been working on for so long and one day on the top of a mountain impulsively tears it to pieces, tosses it into the wind, and watches impassively as it flutters away, an evocative reminder of the way youthful dreams and ambitions can be so drastically altered by time and circumstance. Five years later Pulu locates Apu working in a coal mine in an isolated mountain community and persuades the reluctant Apu to return to Bengal with him and finally meet his son. The reunion is an uneasy one for both father and son, but when Apu sees how little love Kajal receives from Aparna's aged parents, he leaves, taking Kajal with him. Recognizing that his son's needs are more important than his own sense of loss, Apu at lasts grows beyond his despair and finds in his role as a father a new meaning to his life.

Apu and Kajal embark on a new life together

So many powerful themes are concentrated in the Apu trilogy that it's difficult to know where to begin a discussion of them. Perhaps a good place to start is with the universality of these films. Taken together, they cover nearly three decades in the life of one man, telling the story of one individual set in the context of a specific time—the early twentieth century—and a specific and quite distinctive culture. Yet it is a story whose essentials transcend the boundaries of place and time, for it is largely a story of change and growth, what psychologists call individuation, or the development of a person's unique and individual identity. It is the story of the transitions in Apu's life—from a rural agrarian way of life to a modern urban life in a commercial economy, from following the traditional family vocation in the priesthood to finding a new role in life as a scholar and writer, from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood and eventually parenthood, from the self-absorption of immaturity to the selflessness elicited by the transformative power of love.

Yet concurrent with the idea of the constant flux of life is the theme of its continuity. The river, that simple and archetypal symbol of life's flowing continuity, is an image that appears time and again in these films. One of the most memorable sequences in Pather Panchali occurs when the monsoon finally arrives and ends the drought, as the raindrops gather, accumulate, and become a rushing torrent. The holy River Ganges is a vivid image in Aparajito. In The World of Apu, Aparna's family lives near a large river, and the last scene in the film is of Apu leaving Aparna's family home with Kajal on his shoulders and a smile on his face, walking beside that river as he follows its current towards the sea.

Another important element in these films is the notion of the cyclical nature of life and the way opposing forces in life tend to balance each other, concepts found in many Eastern religions and philosophies. The films are punctuated by birth and death, departure and return, separation and reunion, alienation and reconciliation. In each of the three films death is a significant event, yet loss is always balanced by regeneration: The deaths of Apu's sister and his elderly aunt in Pather Panchali are balanced by the prospect of a new beginning for the family that concludes the film. Aparajito is framed by the deaths of Apu's father at the beginning and of his mother at the end, yet in this film Apu's appetite for knowledge is awakened and he begins the process of forging a new identity for himself. The World of Apu is dominated by the devastating loss of Aparna, yet it also includes the birth of Kajal, with whom Apu is reunited at the end of the movie as he begins yet another phase of his life. By the end of the cycle of films, life has come full circle: one small boy has grown to manhood, and the story continues with his own son, now about the same age as Apu in Pather Panchali.

Satyajit Ray—like John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Jean Renoir—is often called a humanist filmmaker. It's a designation that seems wholly justified, for Ray shares with those other esteemed directors a set of traits that I would say are characteristic of that rather nebulous label: the universality of his themes, the emphasis on characters and how they relate to nature and the world around them, his fascination with the ways in which people in specific circumstances react to those circumstances and interact with one another, and his dispassionate acceptance of the fact that both the noblest and the most petty human drives can coexist in one person. All of these traits are plainly displayed in the Apu trilogy, as glorious and moving a celebration of the complexities of human experience as can be found in all of cinema.

Charulata (1964)

****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

In colonial Calcutta in 1879 a young married woman named Charulata lives the sheltered, pampered life of the idle rich. She spends her days in an opulent house—a traditional two-story dwelling built around an open courtyard but furnished in the style of Victorian Britain—playing cards, doing embroidery, and reading romantic novels, her needs seen to by servants. Her husband, Bhupati, who is several years older than Charu, is completely occupied with publishing his political newspaper. Charu's boredom and loneliness and the distance between her and her husband are established in the first sequence of the film as she listens attentively to the street noises outside for signs that he is returning home. Each time she hears someone passing, she runs to the window, flicks open the shutters, and peers at the passerby through a pair of opera glasses. Finally Bhupati arrives home—and goes directly to his study with a book in his hand while Charu looks on in silence from down the corridor. Later that evening he tells her that a young cousin who has recently graduated from university, a relative so close that Bhupati calls him "Brother," is coming to stay and asks her, "You feel lonely, don't you, Charu?" "I've got used to it," she answers.

The lonely Charu finds the playful, high-spirited cousin, 23-year old Amal, a poet and musician and student of literature, a fascinating antidote to her sober, unimaginative husband. Basking in the attention Amal shows her—discussing poetry, music, and literature with her, singing to her, sitting with her in the garden while he writes poetry, encouraging her to take up writing—she soon develops a romantic passion for him, which she believes he secretly returns. When he reveals that Bhupati is paying him to "educate" her, she is crushed. Then when his poetry is accepted for publication, she is devastated by the prospect that he might be lured away from the household by literary ambition and in frustration takes up his suggestion that she write about events from her life. So good is her writing that Amal begins to see her in a new light, finding himself attracted to her.

Adapted by Ray from a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata shows Ray's decidedly literary approach to cinema, with a carefully engineered plot, characters of great complexity, and clearly delineated themes. All three main characters are memorably conceived and interpreted, but this is really Charu's story, a sort of pre-Women's Lib feminist tale of an unfulfilled young woman's initiation into consciousness. By the end of the film, Charu has experienced liberation of her emotions and her creative impulse and has reached a new understanding with her husband, each now more aware, and respectful, of the other's needs. Encircling this story is Ray's perennial fascination with the dialectic of opposing forces in life—politics and art, intellect and emotions, the outside world and the inner lives of individuals. At one point Amal turns philosophical: "Birth and death. Day and night. Joy and sadness. Unification and separation." Each of these things exists, he tells Charu, because of its opposite. That idea seems to sum up Ray's humanistic view of the way the oppositions in life, and the oppositions of human personalities, play against each other but in the end inevitably reach a state of equilibrium, each complementing and sustaining its opposite.

In Charulata Ray takes his style further into experimentation than one might expect from his earlier work. At one point, Charu comes into the room to find Amal sitting at the piano playing and singing a tender love song that begins, "I know you, I know you, O foreigner." Within a few moments the scene has become a dreamy musical interlude, the piano replaced with an offscreen orchestra, and Amal singing directly to Charu, ending the song with a spontaneous alteration of the opening line of the lyric: "I know you, I know you, O sister-in-law." Charu reacts to Amal's performance with the rapture of a woman being serenaded by her beloved. In this stylized sequence, a directorial flight of fancy in an otherwise realistic film, Ray seems to enter into Charu's mind, showing an embellished version of reality colored by her romantic longings.

Ray also experiments with photography and editing. The camera seems to move and track a great deal. Several times Ray discreetly zooms toward or away from an object. When Charu is sitting in a swing in the garden, the camera swings back and forth with her. He also uses the subjective camera at a couple of conspicuous points, one time when the characters are looking through a kaleidoscope and again during that love song when Amal is stepping towards Charu in rhythm to the song and we briefly see her from his point of view, the camera jarring at each step. And when Charu finally sits down to write her autobiographical story, superimposed over her face is a brief montage of scenes from her childhood, scenes that suggest a more rural and less privileged background than that of her husband.

Twenty years later Ray returned to the same themes in The Home and the World (1984), a movie with many similarities to Charulata and also adapted from a novel by Tagore. (Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Amal in Charulata, would take the role of the neglectful older husband in the later film.) As much as I like The Home and the World, I have to admit that Charulata strikes me as a more passionate, adventurous, and emotionally involving film, one of the best I've ever seen by Ray, very close in quality and appeal to Pather Panchali, one of my favorite movies of all time. (One caveat: although the version I got from Netflix, released by Bollywood Films Ltd., has an adequate film transfer, there are many annoying shortcomings in the subtitles—the most amusing of which is calling the Liberal Party the Libel Party—that you have to be prepared to bear with.)

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For more about the life and films of Satyajit Ray, see the website Satyajit Ray World.

No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)

***^½
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa

Seeing this early film of Kurosawa recently was for me a revelation. I was immediately struck by how dissimilar it is to most of the later films I'm familiar with. Those later works are almost exclusively male-centered. The women in those movies not only are few in number, but also tend to have secondary roles and to lack the complexity of the male characters. Like his idol John Ford, the subjects that interested Kurosawa—honor, loyalty, betrayal and revenge, shrewdness of thought and strategy, physical prowess and the use of force to ensure that personal might and moral right prevail—are male preoccupations explored through problems faced and resolved by male characters. Yet according to David Thomson, this is not typical of classic Japanese cinema: "Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese cinema is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men." What is so surprising about No Regrets for Our Youth is how closely it corresponds to Thomson's description of mainstream Japanese cinema, unlike the bulk of Kurosawa's work.

Like many of the films coming out of China in the last twenty years, No Regrets not only places its story in the context of recent historical events, but actually links its plot to those events, in itself unusual in a Kurosawa movie. The main character is a young woman, Yukie (Sestuko Hara), the daughter of a professor of law at Kyoto University when the movie opens in 1933. Professors and students at the university are embroiled in agitation against the suppression of academic freedom by the minister of education, specifically the suppression of their protests against the war-mongering of the government in the run-up to the invasion of Manchuria—a situation strongly reminiscent of the controversial protest movements at universities in this country in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Yukie is torn between two suitors, Itokawa and Noge. Both of these young men begin as student rebels but later follow different paths. Noge drops out of school just before graduating, spends five years in jail because of his political dissent, and after his release becomes an anti-war writer, publisher, and activist. In contrast, Itokawa abandons his rebellion, remains in school, and after graduation becomes a government prosecutor and member of the establishment.

Yukie, raised in a very Westernized household, rejects the traditional, subservient role of Japanese women and spends her life searching for meaning. In a house filled with books and Western furniture, she wears Western clothing, eats with a knife and fork, and plays Russian piano music, expressing her inner turmoil by intense sessions at the piano playing "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. At one point she shocks the other young women in her flower arranging class by telling them she hates the arrangement of hers they are admiring because she despises having to follow the rigid rules they are taught, preferring to follow her own inspiration. She then impulsively destroys her arrangement by tearing it from its vase, ripping the flowers off their stalks, and dropping three flowers into a large bowl of water, where they float in beautiful isolation (an unconscious representation of Itokawa, Noge, and herself adrift?) in an image that would not seem out of place in a film by Ozu.

This is just the beginning of Yukie's journey of self-discovery. She rejects Itokawa's marriage proposal, leaves home and supports herself working at a series of menial secretarial jobs in Tokyo, reconnects with Noge, marries him, sees him arrested as a traitor literally on the eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is herself interrogated as a subversive (the arrogant interrogator is played by Takashi Shimura, who worked in at least twenty of Kurosawa's films, becoming one of his main male actors, second only to Toshiro Mifune, and in Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru gave one of the great screen performances of all time), jailed, widowed, estranged from her family, and finally ends up spending the duration of World War II as a permanent uninvited guest of Noge's resentful peasant mother and father.

This is certainly the closest thing Kurosawa ever made to a "women's picture," and the amazing thing is how well he does it. No Regrets was only his sixth movie as director, yet already he seems in full command of both the Western techniques of cinematic storytelling and the brilliant way he had of pursuing theme through character. No Regrets may be about a young woman, but its sensibility is in no way feminine. By concentrating on Yukie's quest for meaning in her life—even the romantic complications of her life are an offshoot of this—Kurosawa avoids the sentimentality that traditionally devalues the genre, elevating the film to a sort of female bildungsroman—the chronicles of the ethical, emotional, and spiritual development of a young woman who defies her culture's veneration of conformity over self-expression.

The picture is beautifully framed by two scenes: an idyllic picnic at the beginning of the movie and a scene near the end where Yukie revisits the site of the picnic and sees a new generation of students doing the same things she and her friends did all those years ago, a poignant reminder of how much her life has changed and how much she has grown in the intervening years. Like Shimura's dying civil servant in Ikiru, Yukie ultimately comes to the realization that the key to finding meaning in her life is to free herself from her own self-concern.

Kurosawa is aided immensely by the casting of Setsuko Hara as Yukie. The intelligence and spirit she brings to the role—what Thomson calls "her outward modesty and inner strength"—make the character come alive. She was only in her mid-twenties when the film was made, yet she was already an expert movie actress. (She had been acting in films for ten years.) The expressiveness of her voice, the subtlety of her facial expressions and body language, the independence of thought and strength of character she projects are tremendously affecting, reminiscent of the controlled intensity of the young Katharine Hepburn but without the exaggerated mannerisms. The way she holds her head perfectly still, looking slightly down and straight ahead as another character speaks to her, and then at just the exactly judged moment lifts her head, turns it, and gazes wistfully at the speaker with those soulful eyes is just hypnotic. She carries the entire movie, and her amazing work here prefigures the great performances for Ozu in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and Late Autumn.

In No Regrets for Our Youth, as in only a few of his films like the great Ikiru, Kurosawa uncharacteristically downplays his trademark visual grandeur and stylization to concentrate instead on the inner life of a character. The result is a sensitivity and depth of feeling not typically associated with Kurosawa.

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Spring in a Small Town (1948)

****
Country: China
Director: Mu Fei

I had never heard of this movie before I spotted it in the library recently. Reading on the DVD case that it was chosen the best Chinese film of all time by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society in 2002, I just had to watch it. I haven't seen many films from Mainland China, and those I have seen were all made in the last twenty years or so. But I must say that this one is an unpretentious gem which deserves its status as a classic.

Spring in a Small Town—the last of only six movies directed by Mu Fei, who died in Hong Kong in 1951—seems on its surface quite simple. There are only five characters in the movie and just a handful of locations, and the plot can be summed up in a few sentences. In China just after the end of WW II a man weakened by illness (it is described at various times as tuberculosis, a heart condition, and depression), the son of a family that has lost its wealth, lives in the half-ruined family home with his unhappy wife, his 15-year old sister, and an elderly family servant. Into this placid existence comes a visitor whose presence brings the somber household to life but at the same time causes a great deal of emotional tension. The visitor, a medical doctor, is the best friend of the husband but also happens to have been the first love of the wife.

The action in the film is largely psychological and interior, and much more is suggested than openly expressed. This is a movie where an apparently calm surface conceals turmoil and unsuspected depths just underneath, where the characters' emotions are reined in and rarely revealed to one another, where the most commonplace things—unemphatic gestures, brief glances, ordinary conversations—can hold great meaning. Yet these small things evoke strong emotional responses in the viewer—no easy thing to accomplish in such a circumscribed narrative context.

Mu Fei's subdued direction shows great confidence in the power of location, situation, and acting rather than directorial flourishes to put across evocative emotions, yet in no way does the movie seem impersonal. This unobtrusive style applied to an uncomplicated story resembles in spirit the postwar humanist realism of movies like Forbidden Games, Umberto D, and Pather Panchali. The few outdoor locations are particularly well chosen. The ruined city walls where the movie opens and where characters often meet are a reminder of the isolation of these people and of the precariousness of their existence amidst encroaching decay. The river where, in an especially lovely sequence, the principal characters spend a day out boating suggests liberation from the tedium and limitation of their daily lives. In interior shots the director shows great attention to architectural pattern and detail and also great care with the atmospheric use of lighting, especially in scenes that take place at night.

Equally responsible for the film's greatness are the restrained, naturalistic performances of the three main actors, each of whom immediately establishes a dominant mood for his or her character that never wavers. As the visitor, Wei Li is a bundle of repressed conflict between the loyalty and sympathy he feels for his sick friend and the powerful emotions caused by unexpectedly encountering his first love again. Wei Wei, superb as the wife, is also torn between conflicting feelings—on the one hand resignation to the barrenness of her present life with her husband, on the other the longing for emotional fulfillment awakened by the reappearance of a more vital man from her past. Perhaps most impressive of all is Yu Shi as the sickly husband, a non-reactive man fading away from his own passivity, but acutely aware of his responsibility for his wife's disappointment and of the hopelessness of their situation. His facial expressions, his posture and bearing, his lethargic movements all deftly portray a man defeated and profoundly sad. In one poignant scene he sneaks into his wife's empty bedroom, walks to her bed, gingerly caresses her pillow for an instant, then, overcome with emotion, flees.

One final comment: The visual transfer of this movie is only fair; you have to imagine how splendid it would look in a pristine, restored state. Even so, Spring in a Small Town is so affecting and so subtly nuanced that I really can't recommend it more highly.

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For another view of Spring in a Small Town read Allan Fish's excellent review at Wonders in the Dark.

Brief Reviews

THE SON (2002) * * *
In my continuing efforts to update my knowledge of the foreign language films of the last twenty years, I recently watched my first work by the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, from Belgium. It's the thirteenth film of fifteen they've co-directed, most of them also written and produced by the Dardennes. It's also one of their most highly lauded, having received a special jury prize at Cannes and been nominated for the Palme d'Or.

The main character is Olivier (Olivier Gourmet, above, who is excellent and received the best actor award at Cannes), a carpentry instructor at a school for troubled teenagers, and the film opens with the director of the school proposing to enroll a new student, Francis (Morgan Marinne), in Olivier's program. But when Olivier sees the student's dossier, he has a strong reaction and tells the director his class is full. Olivier eventually relents but seems obsessed with the boy—stalking him, stealing his keys from his locker and sneaking into his apartment, and behaving bizarrely whenever around him.

Olivier seems to have no life outside his work, although we do get a glimpse of his austere apartment, where we witness an uncomfortable encounter with his ex-wife. He also seems to have no emotions aside from the extreme agitation he expresses when alone or around Francis. Francis, on the other hand, grows more attached to Olivier despite his cold treatment by the older man and at one point even asks Olivier to become his legal guardian.

For nearly the first half of the film, we are given no context for the relationship between the two or for Olivier's strange attitude toward the young man. So reticent is the film on this point that it almost seems Olivier might be a pedophile trying to resist his impulses toward Francis. He's not, but the exact nature of the relationship is only hinted at in a couple of places before being revealed midway through. For the first half of the film we are given little but Olivier's unrelenting anxiety around Francis and the mystery of its cause. This rather contrived approach strikes me as less ambiguity than coyness on the part of the directors, and I think it is a misstep that weakens the movie by forgoing any attempt at engaging the viewer's emotions in favor of piquing our curiosity and testing our patience by withholding information, a strategy I found more tedious than suspenseful.

The look of the film is certainly startling, though, and along with Gourmet's intense performance is one of the movie's great strengths. The directors shoot almost everything in tight close-up, following the actors with a hand-held camera. This might sound gimmicky but doesn't come off that way, instead lending the movie a sense of immediacy and authenticity and keeping the focus firmly on characters rather than on events or pictorial composition. It also emphasizes the emotional repression of Olivier.

I did observe that the movie was co-financed by Belgian television (which might partly account for the talking heads style) and also read that it was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm. The version I watched was in widescreen (with a 1 : 1.66 aspect ratio), and I couldn't help noticing that the tops of the characters' heads were often out of the frame. I'm wondering if the movie was originally filmed in an aspect ratio of 1 : 1.33 and later cropped for theatrical distribution. This would tend to emphasize even further the closeness of the camera to the actors and could account for the awkwardness in framing that was frequently noticeable.

The acting and direction of The Son are unquestionably impressive. The script, however, has weaknesses that are impossible to overlook. That the movie becomes so much more compelling in its second half makes the first half seem all the more obscure and padded. On the whole, I would say this is a good movie whose potential greatness is undermined by some of the artistic decisions of the Dardennes in their capacity as screenwriters.

YI YI (2000) * * *
If The Son gives us too little information, this movie, a multiple-prize winner from Taiwan, goes in the opposite direction and gives us too much. I knew I was having problems with this narrative overload when halfway through the nearly 3-hour long film I began fidgeting and checking to see how much longer it was going to run. The movie opens with a wedding that introduces us to the main characters, an upper middle class Taipei family, each of whom is confronting his or her own problems.

The father is coping with strains not uncommon to middle-aged professionals everywhere: a marriage that has grown stale, ethical problems at his work (an IT firm), doubts about the life decisions he has made, and the nagging feeling that his life is going nowhere. The wife, a lawyer, is dealing with both her seriously ill mother and severe depression. The teenaged daughter experiences a disappointing first love, while the young son is being bullied by schoolmates and family alike.

The problem is that with all this potent material to work with, the director, Edward Yang, simply doesn't know when to stop. For one thing, he tends to overindulge a fondness for slow, lingering shots. (Perhaps it's understandable that Antonioni was reportedly one of Yang's favorite directors.) These can be quite effective when used sparingly—for example, when a character who has just had a moving experience simply sits for a while and absorbs it—and as one who generally abhors aggressively kinetic music video-style editing, I feel guilty complaining about this.

But Yang uses the dilatory approach even when there is no good reason. For instance, someone opens the door to the apartment and walks in: First we have a shot of the empty hallway lasting several seconds. Then we hear a door off the hallway open and close, and a few seconds later someone walks into the hallway, turns, and walks toward the camera for several more seconds. Now we cut to the same person walking into the living room, who then walks away from the camera for several seconds before putting down his things, wandering around the room for a few seconds, and slowly sitting down on the sofa. None of this is in aid of any discernible thematic or even dramatic purpose: these people have problems, but ennui doesn't appear to be one of them. What should have taken a few seconds has lasted 30-60 seconds. Calling Jean-Luc Godard!

Even more distracting is the overdevelopment of subplots that eventually become full-blown digressions that divert attention from where it should be—on the father re-evaluating his life. In particular, far too much time is devoted to rambling subplots about the flaky brother-in-law and the young son (after all, the movie isn't The 400 Blows). Not content to show us the touching story of the daughter's unhappy first romance, in a startling shift of tone Yang embellishes it with a gratuitous and sensationalistic conclusion that involves sexual abuse of a student by a teacher and a triple murder. These and other divagations at times turn into soapish melodrama that undercuts the film's otherwise mature and thoughtful tone.

The strong parts of Yi Yi are very good indeed, and it is well worth watching just for these. But at points the film seems in danger of foundering under the weight of its accretion of superfluous detail. There is no denying that Yang, who died in 2007 at the age of 59, was a director of great talent. But Yi Yi, his eighth and last film, is kept from greatness by its overly ambitious desire to include everything and leave out nothing.
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Contemporary Kurosawa: The Bad Sleep Well and High and Low

NOTE: I am reprinting this post from September 2008 as part of the LAMBs in the Director's Chair event on Akira Kurosawa. To read more on Kurosawa at LAMBs in the Director's Chair click here. For a link to the LAMB website click here.

The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. He first came to international prominence with his eleventh film, Rashomon (1950), which received both the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and a special Oscar as the most outstanding foreign language film released in the U.S. in 1951. Kurosawa worked steadily in the 1950s and early 1960s; from 1965 on, his output slowed to about one movie every five years.

Kurosawa seemed to be drawn to stories that take place in historical times, and when thinking of a typical Kurosawa movie, one most often thinks of a story set in feudal Japan, like The Seven Samurai (1954). He did, however, from time to time make films with contemporary settings and in the early 1960s made a pair of dark and thematically challenging thrillers set in contemporary Japan. Both are visually and dramatically striking works that show Kurosawa successfully applying both the technique and the thematic preoccupations of his historical films to modern plots.

The Bad Sleep Well (1960) concerns a huge construction company that develops real estate projects on land controlled by municipal governments. The company is a hierarchical organization of interlocking fealties not unlike the feudal clans and their samurai of Kurosawa's historical epics. The company acquires the rights to develop the properties by bribing corrupt government officials to manipulate the bidding process in its favor. The movie opens with a wedding—a long, elaborately staged sequence in which the daughter of the second-in-command of the corporation gets married to her father's personal assistant.

Several unexpected and dramatic things happen during the wedding. First, the police delay the beginning of the ceremony when they arrive and arrest a prominent director of the company for bribery and corruption. Then the bride, dressed in a traditional kimono, collapses on the way to the altar, and it is revealed that she is actually lame. Her brother ends up carrying her in her arms the rest of the way as Mendelssohn's Wedding March plays in the background.

At the banquet after the ceremony, an executive of the company makes a bizarre toast to the newlyweds that is actually a statement of his innocence in the developing scandal. The drunken brother of the bride, in his toast, threatens to kill the groom if he ever does anything to cause harm to his sister. When the wedding cake is wheeled out on a trolley, a second mystery cake appears at the same time. This cake is a replica of a large office building constructed by the company, a building that became the object of a scandal when a public official implicated in bribery committed suicide by jumping from the building. The window he jumped from is indicated on the cake by a small black flag. All the while, a large group of reporters, drawn by the arrest and the notoriety of the company, lounge about in the background and act as a chorus, commenting on the action and supplying expository details. Careful viewers will be aware of how skillfully and unobtrusively Kurosawa arrays these large groups of players in the frame and moves back-and-forth and among them.

The part of the bridegroom, Nishi, is played by the great Toshiro Mifune. Gradually it is revealed that the strange goings-on at the wedding are part of an elaborate revenge plot by Nishi, who, unknown to the others, is actually the son of the unjustly accused official who jumped from the window. He has changed his name, insinuated himself into the corporation, and married his boss's daughter as part of this elaborate scheme. Critics have noted that The Bad Sleep Well is based on Hamlet, and although the picture is not a faithful transliteration the way Throne of Blood (1957) is of Macbeth, it clearly uses many elements of Hamlet. Nishi's bride is an innocent pawn much like Ophelia. Nishi even manages to gain control of one of the company executives who is believed to have killed himself and stages eerie "ghost" scenes for another executive in an effort to persecute and unnerve him. And as in Hamlet, Nishi's machinations end up backfiring on him and bring about his downfall.

Although presented as a mystery thriller, the movie actually examines serious ethical issues, in much the same way Kurosawa's samurai action movies do. In The Bad Sleep Well Kurosawa explores the distinction between justice and revenge. He asks the viewer to judge how far one should go to exact retribution, and if a wronged person is justified in harming the innocent (here Nishi's bride, who actually is in love with him) to punish the guilty (her father and his associates). He also shows the conflict Nishi feels between his use of others as cat's paws and his dawning recognition that they too are human beings with feelings. Kurosawa doesn't really answer the questions he poses so much as examine the effect on Nishi and others of his obsessive need to get revenge and to erase the shame he feels has befallen his family.

Kurosawa returned to a contemporary setting in High and Low (1963), based on a novel by Ed McBain. From the moment it begins, it is apparent that this movie is something special. Behind the credits we see a leisurely montage of scenes of a bleak, deserted industrial landscape—factories, rail yards, and docks—while spooky theremin-dominated music that seems to belong in a science fiction film plays. Like The Bad Sleep Well, this movie also opens with an extended tour de force sequence. The entire first hour of the movie takes place in two rooms of what appears to be a penthouse apartment overlooking a harbor and docks. The apartment belongs to Kingo Gondo (again played by Toshiro Mifune), a director of, and major stockholder in, a large company that manufactures shoes. The movie opens with a meeting in Gondo's apartment of several company directors soliciting his support in an effort to gain control of the company from its founder by joining Gondo's shares in the company with theirs, giving the group a controlling interest.

Gondo refuses to cooperate in the scheme, giving the others the impression that one reason is loyalty to "the old man." Already Kurosawa has introduced the element of the struggle for power within a closed organization not unlike the feudal power structures of his samurai movies, as well as the elements of loyalty and conspiracy, again not unlike the subjects of many of his historical films. The other reason Gondo refuses to go along with the scheme is that he despises the group's plans to lower the quality of the company's product in order to increase profits. In one dramatic scene he takes one of the shoddily made shoes they plan to produce and rips it to pieces with his bare hands to show how poorly made it is.

After the others leave, we find that Gondo himself is scheming against them and plans to use all his financial assets to purchase enough stock to give him control of the company. The reasons for this are complex. He began as a worker on the floor of the shoe factory, but when he married well used his wife's dowry to buy stock in the company and engineer his rise to executive status and financial success. Within just a few minutes, Kurosawa has established Gondo as an aggressive and competitive man ("You have to attack or get attacked," he tells his young son, who is playing cowboys and Indians with the chauffeur's son) who nonetheless genuinely cares about the quality of his product, a man motivated equally by ambition and principle.

It is these two things—ambition and principle—that collide when the movie takes two completely unexpected turns just a few minutes after it opens. As Gondo is happily contemplating his business plans, he receives a telephone call telling him that his young son has been kidnapped and demanding a huge ransom that will wipe out his fortune. For Gondo there is no question that he will pay the ransom. Gondo contacts the police, who come to the apartment to await the kidnapper's further instructions.

Then the movie takes another unexpected turn when Gondo's son turns up and it becomes clear that the chauffeur's son has been kidnapped by mistake. Gondo is adamant that he will not pay the ransom. His wife, however, does not agree. "Success isn't worth losing your humanity," she had earlier warned him. As he waits for the telephone call from the kidnapper, the stubborn Gondo, frustrated by his helplessness, wrestles with his conscience: Is it worth ruining himself financially to save the life of the son of a servant?

During this section of the movie Kurosawa makes brilliant use of the widescreen format to convey the claustrophobic tension of the situation and Gondo's isolation. The action is confined to the main room of Gondo's house. The police team and Gondo, along with his wife and chauffeur, are often arrayed across the screen in tableau fashion. In these scenes Gondo is shown separated from the others—often positioned apart from them in the foreground or the background, isolated from them on one side of the screen, and facing away from them in the opposite direction.

When Gondo finally makes his decision, it is the ethical one: He will pay the ransom and suffer the financial consequences. At this point, about an hour in, the movie shifts gears and becomes less an exploration of ethical conundrums and more a straightforward police procedural. Yet even these more action-oriented sections are handled brilliantly, with equal emphasis on character, realism, narrative excitement, and visual panache, an exemplary version of a familiar genre. The police briefings are reminiscent of those in Fritz Lang's M. One sequence in which the police follow the kidnapper to Dope Alley, where Tokyo's heroin addicts congregate, is so dreamlike that it wouldn't seem out of place in a Buñuel or David Lynch film. It is also in this section of the movie that we finally see Gondo's residence from the exterior. It is not a penthouse apartment at all, but rather an ultra-modern house standing alone on a high, barren hill overlooking the harbor.

This actually turns out to be key in the kidnapper's explanation of his motivation for his crimes when he is finally captured. (In the meantime he has coldly murdered three people.) The police had speculated from the beginning that because of the exorbitant amount of ransom demanded, this was a crime motivated by personal hatred, not financial gain. The kidnapper has never even met Gondo, though. His motive is pure and simple envy. When Gondo later visits him in jail, he explains how every day he sat in his dismal hovel on the docks and looked up to the great man's house looming on the hill above (the high and low of the title?), until all of his dissatisfaction became obsessively focused on Gondo. If Throne of Blood is Kurosawa's version of Macbeth, and The Bad Sleep Well his version of Hamlet (as 1985's Ran would be his version of King Lear), then perhaps High and Low is his version of Othello: The wealthy, self-made man who married into society becomes the object of the irrational hatred of a person who sets out to destroy him.

This version of Othello, however, has a happier ending. As in most of Kurosawa's movies the villain, driven by overpowering obsessions, ends up badly. But he does not succeed in destroying the victim of his obsessive hatred. The experience causes Gondo to re-examine his values, and instead of pursuing his power grab, which he is once again able to do, he decides to sell his shares, start over again, and found his own shoe factory. In the future he will be free and independent in more ways than one.

In High and Low Kurosawa redirects the conventions of the thriller-police procedural genre to his own preoccupations. The purpose of the movie is not just to solve the mystery, to reveal and clarify the meaning of the mystifying things that have been happening. Its true purpose is less to thrill—although it does this quite well, both narratively and cinematically—than to detail the effects of events on the people involved. In this way, even in modern genre films like this one and The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa is working in the tradition of the great humanist filmmakers like Jean Renoir, John Ford, and François Truffaut. For Kurosawa, as for those directors, all of whom were also visual masters and compelling storytellers, it is ultimately the people—the internal and external forces that drive their actions and the results of those actions on themselves and others—that are the most important thing in the movie.
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Regret, Hope, and Acceptance: Ozu's Last Three Films

In the 1950s the glory of Japanese cinema was discovered by Westerners. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon received the Golden Lion, the top prize, at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 and the next year a special Oscar as the best foreign language film released in the US in 1951. Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu received the Silver Lion at Venice in 1953, and the next year his Sansho the Bailiff shared the Silver Lion with Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. Yet the great contemporary of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), who directed 54 movies, remained largely unknown outside of Japan until the 1970s.

Since then Ozu has developed an ardent following. But he is a curious director, one who typically inspires not love or hate, but rather either love or indifference. One reason for this is his totally unique style. D. W. Griffith, the man universally considered the progenitor of the ways of using the language of film to tell stories, was not studied in Japan as a model as he was elsewhere in the world. Thus Ozu developed his own personal ways of telling stories on film, ways that changed little in the 35 years he made movies. As Roger Ebert puts it: "Ozu fashioned his style by himself, and never changed it, and to see his films is to be inside a completely alternative cinematic language."

Ozu leaves many viewers indifferent because his movies can seem so similar to one another. Probably the main reason for this apparent similarity is his highly idiosyncratic and unvarying style. He rarely tried to push his own self-defined visual boundaries, seeking instead to polish his existing artistic vision with each new film. Another reason is that like many of the great directors, he acquired a repertory of actors, using the same favored performers over and over. And he confined himself to similar, quite limited situations and themes in film after film. In fact, he remade several of his early films later in his career.

"There is an easy joke that no one can tell one Ozu film from another," writes David Thomson, "but is that a failing or a virtue?" The answer to that question depends on the individual viewer's reaction to Ozu's style. What some viewers see as repetition, others see as unity and continuity. For admirers like myself (and I'm a latecomer to Ozu, having seen my first Ozu movie just a little over a year ago), it is a virtue: I love his movies, and to see another Ozu is for me like having another helping of a favorite delicacy. Watching one Ozu movie after another is a bit like reading the complete novels of Jane Austen or listening to a set of concerti grossi by Handel or Corelli. On the surface they may seem awfully similar, but look closer and beneath the surface you will find subtle variations that lend each iteration its own distinctive character.

Between 1960 and 1962 Ozu made his last three films, works that David Thomson calls "late masterpieces, still lifes of hope and yearning." Late Autumn (1960), a reworking of Ozu's 1949 film Late Spring, opens at a temple where a group of middle-aged men have gathered for the ritual observance of the anniversary of the death of their former classmate and work colleague. Also present are the widow and daughter. The gossipy and slightly tipsy men observe that the daughter is now of marriageable age and that the widow, who married young and still looks quite youthful, would seem a prime candidate for remarriage. (She is played by Setsuko Hara, who appeared in many of Ozu's films, including the one on which this one is based, and was especially memorable as the daughter-in-law in Tokyo Story.) The men soon devote themselves to matchmaking for the pair, choosing for the mother one of their own group, a widower. The problem with the scheme is that the daughter is strongly resistant to leaving her mother, and her headstrong attitude causes a great deal of conflict with her mother, who is constantly trying to persuade her daughter to find a suitable man and marry. In the end the men's scheme comes to nothing. The daughter ends up marrying a coworker after the mother indicates she will marry the widower friend of her late husband. At the last moment she changes her mind, preferring her independence and teaching career to remarriage.

Mother and daughter in Late Autumn

In The End of Summer (1961), which takes place during a heat wave, an elderly widower, the owner of a sake factory, lives with his daughter and her husband, who manages the factory. A younger daughter and the widow of his late son are unmarried, and finding them husbands occupies the minds of the other members of the family. The father is a stubborn rascal who insists on ruling the family and making all the decisions about the business. His son-in-law constantly tries to convince him that small family-run sake breweries are no longer profitable in postwar Japan and that he should sell out to a larger company, but his father-in-law refuses even to consider this. He has also begun secretly seeing his former mistress and her vapid teenaged daughter, whom he believes is his and whose main interest in him is to wheedle him into buying her a fur coat. (Others are skeptical of his paternity; apparently the mistress had quite a reputation for promiscuity.) The daughter with whom he lives, a shrewish control freak given to self-dramatization, is constantly criticizing her father and is outraged when she discovers he has resumed relations with his former mistress. The family gets a scare when the father has a heart attack, but he seems to recover, then suddenly dies of another heart attack after sneaking off to the dog races in the sweltering heat with his mistress. As the funeral procession crosses a footbridge on the way to the crematorium on a small island, two peasants gathering reeds on the bank of the river remark impassively that someone must have died, while smoke pours from the smokestack of the crematorium in the background.

The funeral procession crossing the footbridge

Ozu's final movie, An Autumn Afternoon (1962), again concerns a middle-aged father, Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu, who also appeared in several of Ozu's movies and was so memorable as the elderly father in Tokyo Story), a widower trying to marry off his grown daughter, who like the daughter in Late Autumn is devoted to her widowed parent and doesn't want to leave. When he and his two school chums arrange a reunion with their now-retired middle-school teacher, whom they have nicknamed The Gourd, they get a shock. The man is a depressed alcoholic who owns a shabby noodle shop in a run-down part of town with his middle-aged unmarried daughter. In one especially poignant sequence, Hirayama takes the drunken ex-teacher to his daughter in the shop, and leaves them sitting next to each other. The father nods off; the daughter glances at him for a moment, her face crumples, and she buries her face in her hands and quietly weeps. When the teacher confesses to Hirayama his regret for ruining his daughter's life and warns Hirayama not to do the same, Hirayama becomes determined to find his daughter a husband and persuade her to marry. In the end he succeeds. On the way home from the wedding he stops in a bar for a drink and another patron, seeing the expression on his face, jokingly asks, "Where have you come from? A funeral?" "Something like that," Hirayama answers.

Hirayama (right) and his school chums

Ozu's last three films deal with closely related and sometimes overlapping subjects and themes that seem to have preoccupied him for much of his career. All three deal with matchmaking as either the main plot or a major subplot, so much so that it sometimes seems as though one is watching the ruminations of a Japanese Jane Austen. Parents seem almost obsessive about marrying off their daughters, while the children, like modern young people in traditional cultures everywhere, resist arranged marriages, seeing the practice as an outmoded vestige of the days when young people had no life outside the family home. But as in Austen, this preoccupation with matchmaking is about more than just a suitable marriage. It is about the desire for stability and for securing one's place in life, and the hope of parents to assure these things for their children.

Like so much in Ozu's movies, this attitude of the older generation toward marriage suggests an underlying anxiety about the inevitability of change and the realization that life is always moving on. In the last three movies we are always aware of the difference between the old and the new, the traditional and the postwar modern, the past and the present. The middle-aged characters cling to the past and to their cultural traditions and resist change. Mothers wear traditional clothing and stay at home caring for the family, while their daughters wear Western clothing and makeup and work in offices. Fathers remain closely bonded to men they went to middle school with 40 years earlier, or try to resume romantic relationships that ended decades ago. Sons and daughters ignore their parents' desire that they selflessly conform to traditional values, following instead independent courses of action that for them signify modernity.

In his last film, An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu seems especially to dwell on the corrosive changes in postwar Japanese culture. The predominant color in the movie is gray. "People have become so cold since the war," The Gourd observes to Hirayama. The responsible and conservative Hirayama's married son is an immature, self-centered spendthrift who lives in a dreary modern concrete apartment block and whose greatest ambition is to own a set of expensive golf clubs. One of the most distinctive features of Ozu's style—what has been referred to as "pillow shots" or "curtain shots"—also reflects this postwar malaise.

Ozu's pillow shots are brief montages, usually of outdoor scenes, that signal transitions in place or time, but not necessarily in the conventional way of establishing a precise change of setting or the passage of a precise amount of time. They are instead an abstract series of images that indicate events or time progressing in a general rather than in a specific sense. These interludes are normally peaceful and sedate, with a haunting, self-contained beauty of their own. But in An Autumn Afternoon, Ozu's pillow shots show postwar industrial Japan in all its blighted disfigurement: the skyline riven by stark power poles, snaking utility lines, and the smokestacks of factories spewing toxic smoke; the landscape littered with unsightly sheet metal fences, piles of rubble, barbed wire, and rusty barrels. These pillow shots are not without their own grim beauty, but it is the grimness that lingers, not the beauty.

A stark pillow shot in An Autumn Afternoon

In his last three films, Ozu takes his lifelong interest in the subject of generational conflict and by focusing more closely on the older generation makes the theme of the inevitability of aging and death that he explored so poignantly in his best-known work, Tokyo Story (1953), the central element of these movies. And he makes it clear that the proper response to this inevitability is not unseemly resistance or self-pity, but stoical acceptance of the situation. In Late Autumn, the middle-aged couple who decide in the end not to get married after all retain their dignity by taking the sensible course. In An Autumn Afternoon, Hirayama can finally face his old age with equanimity, knowing that he has chosen not to selfishly keep his daughter from pursuing her own happiness. By contrast, in The End of Summer, the defiant sake brewer makes a fool of himself and dies ignobly, while in An Autumn Afternoon, the alcoholic ex-teacher's morbidity and regret make him seem merely pathetic.

As in all of Ozu's films, the action in his last three movies takes place largely indoors—in the rooms and hallways of houses, in the corridors or offices of workplaces, in restaurants, noodle shops, or American-style bars. In film after film, we see what appear to be the same rooms in the same houses, the same offices, the same corridors. The overhead light fixtures, the wall coverings, the colors and furnishings may change, but the spaces seem the same in each movie. And they are photographed in the same style and lighted in the same way, the flat lighting with no obvious light source and few shadows giving these spaces a timeless and insular feel.

Because nearly all of the action takes place indoors, when the film does move outside, the effect is all the stronger. The sequence in Late Autumn where the mother and daughter take a last holiday together before the daughter's marriage and walk quietly beside a mountain lake, the funeral procession to the crematorium in The End of Summer, the opening shots of An Autumn Afternoon showing the factory in Yokohama that Hirayama manages—each of these sequences is rendered more forceful by its complete tonal contrast to the enclosed interior settings that dominate the rest of the film.

Each shot is meticulously composed. Right angles predominate: Ozu favors horizontal and vertical lines, squares and rectangles; he only occasionally uses diagonals, and hardly ever curves or circles. His compositions have a classic sense of order, balance, and symmetry, with great attention to form and pattern in the arrangement of people and objects within the frame. His actors are usually photographed facing the camera, facing away from the camera, or in profile. They are most often photographed seated. When they do move, they tend to move directly toward the camera or away from it, or across the frame. That Ozu prefers not to move the camera, to hold his shots so long, and to use flat cuts gives his compositions an especially painterly quality.

This painterly way of filming creates an overall air of stillness in Ozu's films. Yet the serenity of his surfaces masks currents of emotional turmoil just beneath the surface, and this is the source of conflict in his films. This is a turmoil not of agitation, but of controlled disturbance, for in Ozu's world there is no place for turbulent emotions. This is an outwardly placid world where grace and restraint are prized above all else, where even strong-willed people perceive the difference between strength of resolve and unseemly stubbornness and behave accordingly. If they don't, they become objects of gentle pity or derision. Ozu's films achieve their quietly moving emotional impact not through big dramatic moments, but through the cumulative effect of many small moments. His movies are canvases painted with small, delicate brushstrokes: a facial expression, a brief glance, a gesture, a boat or train passing in the background.

Ozu's cinema is one not of action, but of contemplation, and in his last three films his object of contemplation is the end of life. In these films Ozu suggests that ultimately we must let go of regrets for the past and of hopes for controlling the future and simply accept what the melancholic Gourd tells Hirayama in An Autumn Afternoon: "In the end we spend our lives alone . . . all alone."
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The website Ozu-san.com is devoted to the life and films of Yasujiro Ozu. All the images above come from this site.