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Ugetsu: Hungry Ghosts

Hungry Ghosts - or Pretas - is a concept closely tied to Buddhism. It means “departed or dead one.” Hungry Ghosts are unfortunate in being reborn into existence with a ceaseless hunger. Ugetsu is a tremendous moral story of two hungry ghosts: Genjuro, a man who stops at nothing to work on his love of pottery and Tobei, a farmer who seeks the valour of a Samurai.

Mizoguchi offers us these two antithetical characters that diverge along their paths. One is so obsessed by his work and art, that he sacrifices everything dear to him to ensure its creation and sale. The other is so obsessed with the recognition and pride that comes with being a Samurai, but isn’t willing to sacrifice anything to achieve the accolades that come with it.

When war breaks out in their village, they find themselves and their loved ones at risk. Genjuro and Tobei take their families away to safety. The thought of traveling to the closest city to sell their goods emerges from the exile. It’s seemingly their only attempt at salvaging any success from the unfortunate circumstances. So it’s somewhat easy to understand why Genjuro would leave his family at shore in order to seek more for them.

But that’s where the sympathy for Genjuro ends. There’s an unrelenting descent into success and the seduction of the material world that renders Genjuro’s world more and more dreamlike with each passing scene. No other film has slowly walked down the staircase from reality into illusion quite so subtlety and with such horror.

Many filmmakers these days jump from someone sleeping and then into a dream or a music cue hits and suddenly the characters are somewhere fantastical. But with Mizoguchi, the transformation from reality to the unknown is so graceful and soothing, you nearly can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. And that’s the point.

The power of the odyssey into the dream in Ugetsu is where its true strength lies. It’s easy to tell the story of the dream, but to delicately lead the viewer into that place without them even knowing that they’ve departed is something short of a miracle.

When Genjuro arrives to the city, he sells beautiful bowls to the nobility of Japan, but they’re empty. There’s nothing to fill them with. Tobei uses money to don the wardrobe of a skilled Samurai, but behind the stories of his heroicism, there’s a liturgy of banal and lifeless philosophies about what makes a true hero. 

These characters slowly starve so much for the truth and spiritual nourishment that they abandon everything in their hunger for something outside of their souls.

What good is a bowl without the food of the soul to fill it with? Or worse, what good is a bowl of food without people to share it with? What good is the the shell of a Samurai without the fighting strength and willpower within it? Ugetsu tests these realms of the material world in a way very few stories do. 

It makes sense that this came towards the end of Mizoguchi’s career. It plays like a warning of many things, but I think mostly of losing sight of what you’re working towards and the sacrifices you make along the way.

The gentle spirit of Mizoguchi seems to whisper, “Be gracious for the food you have or you will always be hungry.” Tobei ends up falling from his pride into the depths of shame just as Genjuro inevitably welcomes the company of those whom he has become: phantoms in need of possessing someone or something.

Very few films take on this spiritual importance and even fewer are this haunting.

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1. Silence

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Once in a blue moon, you will have a major studio film that asks inscrutable questions, enveloping its answers into intangible moments that don’t sing or scream but quietly stare into you, begging to ask even more questions.

The last studio picture that comes to mind was Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. That was nearly five years ago. Today we have Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Both took over a quarter of a century to come into fruition, both offer the monumental prospects of seasoned directors fighting into their twilight years, and both happen to surround themselves with the questions around God.

God as Man is a repeated theme in Scorsese’s work, whether it’s Jordan Belfort being worshipped by his league of greedy young “pond scum” in The Wolf of Wall Street or Howard Hughes soaring through the Heavens in The Aviator or Jake LaMotta being crucified in the ring in Raging Bull.

But the subject around the responsibility of being God is never quite deliberated like it is through Andrew Garfield’s character of Father Rodrigues in Silence. A man who, despite being stripped away of everything he is, remains somehow intact.

Silence is essentially Scorsese also stripped away of the aesthetic panache to which he’s built his cult following around. No frenetic cuts, no colourful or outlandish characters, no offbeat visual trademarks, and no inundation of sound design.

With the exception of the subject matter and first person voiceover, this film feels distinctly un-Scorsese.

When going to camera for the film, Scorsese's cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto spoke of this minimalism:

“From the beginning, we talked about the restraints in terms of shooting. Marty is known for his elaborate cinematic language; designing complex shots comes naturally to him. He felt this story required a simpler language.”

What strikes me the most about Silence is its quiet sensibility of a bygone era of cinema, where directors didn’t draw roadmaps for you (even this year’s brilliant Toni Erdmann and The Salesman are comparatively perspicuous in their morality), when moments could breathe and where characters are truly challenged as is their audience. This confidence (or is it arrogance?) is markedly absent in filmmaking today.

It was this calm, rational style which distinguished Japanese cinema from the overly expressive European and North American cinema around the same time.

While American and European directors (sans Bergman or Dreyer) like Ophüls and Wilder were compelled to cram as much dialogue and camera trickery into a single frame, Mizoguchi and Ozu were producing films built on a type of objective minimalism.

This trend continued. American films became louder and commanded the senses with ostentatious authority. In 1993, after Scorsese sent a cut of Age of Innocence to Akira Kurosawa upon completion, Kurosawa wrote back:

“I must caution you. I must admonish you on the use of music. Like all Hollywood films, you’re using music too much.”

Silence is not only a letter back to the long-passed Master of Japanese cinema, possessing almost no music throughout, it is a love letter to all of Japanese cinema.

It bears the fingerprints of other past masters: the obsession over the perfect Ozu master shots, the Mizoguchian use of dissipating mist, the jump cuts from medium to close-ups that Kurosawa famously employed, the quizzical and unwavering focus of lower-class society Imamura longed for, the haunting tall reeds that shroud the close-ups in Shindo’s Onibaba, the explicit criticism of militaristic tyranny within Masaki Kobayashi’s work and of course the brutal slaughtering confined brilliantly within the wide 2:35 frames of Masahiro Shinoda, the director who first adapted Silence in 1971.

It is Scorsese as something he is not, adopting the style and etiquette of a far off land and bringing it into the West in hopes of transforming a few people.

One might argue that this film is at conflict with itself in that its form is of the East, but its story is of the West. But that would be a gross injustice to the nature of the film because in the same breath, you find the echoes of brilliant compositions found in John Ford’s The Searchers.

Also found throughout are the intimate moments between Garrpe and Rodrigues which mirror those of John Wayne and Montgomery Cliff in the seminal Red River by Howard Hawks, a film about a pilgrimage of its own.

One scene has Father Rodrigues and Garrpe escaping the confines of their cabin, a safe haven, only to find sight of yes that’s right, a Hawk floating effortlessly in the sky. They refer to him as a sign of “God,” just as Kurosawa spotted the Westerns of America and later openly worshipped John Ford.  

This fostering of the Western approach to cinema polarized directors within Japan. By the 1970s, directors like Oshima criticized Kurosawa, “That Kurosawa had brought Japanese film to a Western audience meant that he must be pandering to Western values and politics.” (Wild, 80).

Was there a dissolution, a watering down of one’s true Japanese identity by pairing the two styles?

The freedom to worship is at the root of this story and I think is the reason why this film will resonate for many years to come. It’s been hundreds of years since the Japanese forced their Christian converts to silence and apostasy. But has much changed?

Just this past week, we’ve been subject to zealous anti-immigration laws that force newcomers to disavow their faith if they want to live peacefully within the United States and a white supremacist who opened fire at a Mosque in Quebec.

Remaining silent in the name of religious prosecution is a mainstay for any Draconian establishment to wield power. It’s how Inoue (Issei Ogata) keeps civil obedience in his villages. He just asks that they “step on their Jesus," ensuring them that it's a mere “formality.” That is unless they want to be hung upside down and bled out.

Intolerance is the common quality to any major power’s treatment of their adversaries. It is how they justify censorship or worse, the execution of the infidel.

This is why Silence is important to me. Within its narrative, you don’t find a regaling thesis on colonialism, but rather a story that wrestles with the ideas of tolerance, mercy and acceptance.

The schism of beliefs studied in the film are beautifully married, rendering any distinction between the styles indistinguishable. One doesn’t know who Scorsese is lifting his values from. Is it the spiritual conquest of a Rossellini film or an exercise in the masochism which predominates the work of Oshima?

After watching it for the third time, someone told me, “It’s like a conversation between Jesus and the Buddha.”

Or maybe a disagreement. Whatever the case, the conversation can exist and film can offer an open dialogue between two variant philosophies, while respecting both.

Despite Inoue’s horrendous accounts of murder and torture, Scorsese’s portrayal of this “smiling Buddha” dictator begs us to empathize with his cause and despite Rodrigues’ selfless martyrdom, asks us if it’s truly as magnanimous as it appears.

Nothing in Silence is as it appears.

There’s an unparalleled sensitivity to this work in its performances, its pace, its camerawork, even its lighting. I’d like to rhapsodize for one moment about just how subtle and nuanced Prieto’s cinematography is in this film. Watch the eye-lights in the characters eyes throughout the film. Watch how masterfully Prieto isolates one eye from another by simply blocking the light or how he makes them gleam and shine when Rodrigues cries amidst the burning bodies.

These subdued and deliberate choices is evidence of a master in full stride who, despite his self-imposed limitations, is but redefining his visual flare in the minutiae.

The performances of Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are tremendous in their quietness. Starved of faith and food, they delicately portray these Jesuit priests with the cadence of a Handel concerto and their expressive eyes are something out of a Goya painting.

These are not the “oscar-bait” performances famous for forcing sympathy from their viewers. In fact, this story makes difficult any sympathy given their mission. Liam Neeson’s twenty minutes of screen-time could be the very best performance of the year. It’s chilling, deceptive and utterly convincing.

Given the moral ambiguity of the piece, its operatic pace, its asking to sympathize with colonial forces, and its conception of God, it comes to no surprise to me that it took Scorsese 28 years to produce and it comes as even less of a surprise that its having troubles finding its audience.

As the third act closes, Rodrigues’ hopeless pilgrimage prophetically mirrors Scorsese’s own at this juncture in his filmmaking career.

Does the audience want to accept his Gospel of “true cinema”? Has cinema been polluted over years, travelling further and further from “pure cinema”? Can younger generations flourish in this “poisoned soil” of blockbusters and sequels? Or is it all a narcissistic endeavour, an imposition of his “truth” in a world that seems to have already found it?

Just when we think we have the answer within the chambers of Rodrigues’ starved mind, the fog delicately dances into frame and all that’s left is the deafening burden of silence. Cut to black.

But then…some crickets.

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2. La La Land

Directed by Damien Chazelle

Sorry in advance. This review is stilted in politics given that every critic out there seems to want to tackle race politics with this film.

Despite all of the stuff I don’t talk about below, this film has memorable performances, tremendous editing and pace, and some of the most breathtaking cinematography of the year. But permit me to digress…

There’s a great moment when Ryan Gosling’s character Seb is awaiting Mia for their second date to watch "Rebel Without a Cause" after he finds out she’s never seen it. When she finally arrives with a wash of the Nicolas Ray film upon her silhouetted body, their eyes meet. It’s in the intimacy of the theatre that they share their first touch and almost their first kiss. That is until the film burns out.

The allusion to the classic film is obvious: both share narratives about two misfits who fall in love, both are shot in beautiful Cinemascope, and both are about the disenchanted youth of America.

The fundamental difference, though, is everything. Where "Rebel Without a Cause" is about Jim Stark’s resistance against authority, his latent homosexuality and the outdated modes of society imposing their will upon him, "La La Land" actually finds little to rebel against.

Damien Chazelle quite literally projects these images of rebellion upon Mia, a protagonist who’s intrepid disposition is stunted by the grind of Hollywood. True to the title, the character is, for all intents and purposes, a rebel without a cause. In fact, her dreams to succumb to the galvanized Hollywood system fall in line with the comforts of conformity. So what is she rebelling against?

Seb’s invitation to the film is a de facto attempt to have Mia embrace those who came before her, just as his gushing of the “jazz greats” is an attempt at having her embrace nostalgia. When Mia does commit to full homage, entrusting Seb’s “you can never be too nostalgic” advice, she produces a one-act play about her Aunt in Paris and it fails...miserably. Living in the past, it seems, is not all it’s cracked up to be.

This is a film about the dangerous relationship to one’s past, not one which celebrates it, like so many critics seem to confoundedly surmise.

As Mia starts embodying the “virtues” of the past and Seb surrenders to his future of living in a modern jazz band, they come to odds with each other and themselves. It erupts into an arguement over a meal between the two. Behind them an eerie emerald green light projects through the transparent curtains.

The image is a disturbing echo of Hitchcock’s own film about the danger or recreating the past, 1958’s "Vertigo," in which John (Jimmy Stewart) attempts to recreate his dead lover through the character of Madeline. After her successful transformation into John’s ex-lover, she’s illuminated by a green light which at both times represents a false recreation of all things living and the tone of a corpse.

Mia’s similar transformation through Seb’s obsession with the past is not as morbid as Hitchcock’s, but the sentiment is still there: why do we wish to hold so dearly onto the past that we end up destroying the present?

When John sees Madeline for the first time in "Vertigo," she adorns a beautiful green dress, one akin to the one worn by Mia when she first sees Seb at the old movie theatre.

But where Madeline falls prey to this recreation, Mia ascends to greater heights.

Her audition at the end has her reflecting on the past through song. It is Mia’s reflection of a reflection, one step removed from the past and, as any auditioning actor will tell you, steeped solely in the present that garners her triumphant success.

Critics seem to be decidedly drawn to the comparisons of the American Hollywood Musicals of the 1950s, arguing La La Land feels stuck in the past. But its influences cheekily span from the early 20th century musicals like "Dames" to the Jacques Demy musicals that were so popular in 1960s France to its opening scene reminiscent of the 1998 Bollywood film "Dil Se..." (translated to America as "From the Heart" a play on the title of Coppola’s infamous 1982 Musical flop, "One From the Heart"), where countless extras dance atop a moving train. Chazelle drives the cultural simile home, even going as far as opening the movie with an Indian actress.

The other parallel argument is that Seb is the “white savior” of jazz, despite him representing a form of antagonism to Mia: he misses her performance, he talks over Jazz (that which he loves), and essentially belittles Mia for “wanting to feel better about herself” when he won’t take responsibility for his own unhappy success. And after Legend offers him a seat in his band (a symbolic gesture of accepting the future of jazz), he arrogantly rejects it…twice. This character is by no definition a hero, let alone a “saviour.”

But don’t tell that to the pseudo-political critical circle who are convinced the film is nothing but a liturgy of “better times” and is expunged of any contemporaneousness or, better yet, any diverse representation.

More puzzling about the argument for racism in this film is the critical oversight of John Legend’s character, which one critic described as:

“a smoothie sell-out, who may not be the villain of the piece but doesn’t make much sense as a character anyway,”

 A sentiment that seems more racist than the racial rhetoric critics lazily apply.

John Legend offers Sebastian a position in his band, not only drawing the character out of his cobwebs, but ensuring his legacy to jazz isn’t tarnished. Legend, in an interview, described the song he wrote for the film as:

“a single that still has some jazz influence, but could tell it was leaning in more of a pop direction than most music you would call jazz.”

It’s because of Legend’s carrying of the torch that ensures Seb’s financial security which permits Jazz to have a place in both the mainstream audiences and the carved niches in obscure Los Angeles nightclubs.

You needn’t a film history degree to understand the roots of racism in the musical genre, the first ever of which produced 90 years ago, The Jazz Singer, not only featured blackface, but exploited the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur to guarantee its financial success. This type of cinema “divides America…” contributing nothing to the “cooperative creation of something new but assimilation to old inequalities.” (Rogin, 101)

These old inequalities can be seen challenged in Chazelle’s debut, "Musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench," which featured an interracial couple dancing throughout New York, made on a shoestring budget. And the same of which are being challenged in "La La Land," though admittedly much subtler. But the conspiratorial racist narrative wrapped around his work remains.

Rebels without a cause.

Despite the fact that Ray’s radical outlook on homosexuality and youth culture in his work set the tone for cinema for a century (even today, films like "Moonlight" harken back to similar themes), Chazelle is well aware that a mirrored attempt to project that radicalism upon a very inoffensive, parochial love story would render it as fake as the hollywood backdrops to which the act of Summer opens upon.

However both are aligned in their staunch rejection of their ancestral origins. When Mia is describing the show she's auditioning for to Seb, she remarks “it’s like the O.C. meets Dangerous Minds. No, wait, it’s more like Rebel Without a Cause.”

One is a television show which revolves around the rich white youth of Orange County, the other is about a Caucasian teacher (played by Michelle Pfeiffer) who tries to bring order and discipline to an inner-city school.

When she compares the blend of these to “Rebel Without a Cause,” it’s so perverted from either stories, Seb can detect she hasn’t seen it or worse simply doesn’t understand it.

“I guess the joke’s on history?” Seb would later jest.

And the present, apparently. Critics bemoan a film which is obviously hyper-critical of nostalgia and thus begs the audience to consider their time and place now, even in a cultural landscape obsessed with its own conception like Hollywood.

This is where the third act repels the phantoms of the "Hollywood ending." Mia doesn’t fall in love with Seb, a personification the past, she leaves him. But not before she descends into the catacombs of history once more at his Jazz nightclub.

Chazelle follows Mia's entrance with her new husband as they stroll past the colourful billboard of Mia's near-present alter-ego plastered upon the black and white brick wall of her ex-lover’s nightclub: a constant haunting reminder to Sebastian of both the tumultuousness of the past and the ever-fleeting present.

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3. The Salesman

Directed by Asghar Farhadi 

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4. Moonlight

Directed by Barry Jenkins

Few films are ever so bold in their withdrawn power. Even fewer are the accounts of the underrepresented, the marginalized and the ignored. The title Moonlight is apt given that it illuminates a part of America that largely remains in the shadows of cinema today.

Thanks to the brilliant screenplay by Tarell Alvin McCraney and the astonishing direction of Barry Jenkins, this story offers not only an intimate character study of a young Chiron through his adolescence, but an unwavering depiction of the social hurdles that beset Miami during the war on drugs.

As a result, it walks the tightrope of exposing intimacy in an impermissible place and a challenging social critique of the society which disavows the emotional self.

All of which is made more potent by the immaculate performances by the cast (Mahershala Ali, Shariff Earp, and Naomie Harris are particularly standouts) who, before being interviewed on stage at TIFF this year, arrived on stage with tears rolling down their face.

This film wasn’t a showcase of one single talent, it was one of the few this year that felt earnest in its shared respect for the material and the emotional strength it took to bring it all together.

But despite all of its emotional fortitude, Moonlight is bound as tight as a drum until its final breath.

I found it fascinating how Jenkins could approach this material with such tenderness and also such pronounced visceral style.

It’s one of the first digital films that really had me question whether it was 35mm Film or not. In fact, I asked Barry Jenkins what compelled him to shoot on 35mm, to which he laughed and replied, “It’s Alexa.”

After the Q & A, he spoke to me about the advantage of using Film Emulsion LUTS and vintage Hawk Lenses, “The Hawk anamorphics gave me the subjectivity I wanted,” he said quietly. 

These are the added touches to a small budget feature film (approximately a $4 million budget) that really helped carry the weight of this period piece.

Jenkins’ abilities not only are limited to his grasp of the material, but his ability to adapt it to the big screen.

His use of diegetic music in particular was refreshing in a climate of dramatic character studies that suffer from a certain hip-hop-phobia. The musical touches not only bring to life that time and place, but present an interesting musical conflict against Nicolas Brittel’s wonderful, chilling score (arguably my favourite score of the year), an evocative reflection of Chiron’s own inner-dialogue against his outer space.

I think Moonlight will go down in history. I’m certainly not the first acolyte for the film and I don’t think I’ll be the last. It will solidify itself in the pantheon of film history, not only because of its brilliance but because it reflects a major passage in the ethos of film audiences. It says to the film industry that yes, we want new stories about the marginalized and underrepresented. And we want them treated with respect and taste.

It’s about time. Thanks, Mr. Jenkins, for helping push open that door in a big way.

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5. I, Daniel Blake

Directed by Ken Loach

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6. Elle

Directed By Paul Verhoeven

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7. Manchester by the Sea

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

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8. Hail, Caesar!

Directed by the Coen Brothers

My love for this film knows no bounds. I’m going to keep this one succinct because I’ve already written a piece gushing about it.

To read more: http://markcira.tumblr.com/post/143851519193/hail-caesar-moving-pictures-polytheism-and

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9. Everybody Wants Some!!

Directed by Richard Linklater

You know, if you told me at the beginning of 2016 I’d have a frat-house film on my list, I’d say you were a liar. If you told me it would be the best frat-house film since Animal House, I’d call bullshit. If you told me it was written and directed by none other than Richard Linklater himself, I’d have probably laughed in your face. 

Joke’s on me. 

Everybody Wants Some!! is probably Linklater’s most divisive film to date, which isn’t saying much given he has a natural penchant for either crowd-pleasers (Boyhood, Dazed & Confused, School of Rock) and fringe pics (A Scanner Darkly, Tape, Fast Food Nation). 

This one kind of straddles both categories. Though, this time around, its story’s subversiveness is comparatively prosaic: a ragtag team of college baseball players live together in the first coming weeks of the school year.

My intrigue into this film lies where Linklater explores masculinity as both an outsider and insider. This film and his craft as a director is paradoxical. Here is a director who was playing State College baseball during the day and watching Robert Bresson during the night.

Linklater’s body of work harmonizes both sides of the male experience so masterfully. It feels Linklater is quite aware of the fact that this autobiographical and heteronormative story about a bunch of white male athletes living together doesn’t necessitate conflict because tacking on such would feel artificial, or worse feel like parody.

Seriously consider the story...an ensemble cast of muscular white guys who share a house together and party leading up to their Baseball season. There couldn’t be a cast further from the realm of danger in the world. 

Yet it’s engaging because Linklater defines the adolescent ego through its necessary, if not clunky components - the alpha male (McReynolds), the philosopher (Willoughby), the Id (Plummer), the Unconscious (Coma), the Fool (Brumley), the intellectual (Finnegan), the feminine rebel (Justin) and our confused Hero both embracing and resisting all of them (Jake) simultaneously in the middle. Jake doesn’t quite know where he belongs as he navigates through stoned philosophy, ping pong, country music, disco, punk, and experimental musical theatre. Linklater doesn’t define him (as is a staple within his repertoire of characters) because both Jake and Linklater are comfortable in not knowing. 

Where many director’s acquiescence of ambiguity is daunting in its dramatic form, Linklater embraces the quality in the least expected genre with the least expected characters. 

I spoke about this avoidance of defining terms in my piece about the Eastern approach to female narrative versus its Western counterparts and to some extent, the same holds true to the men in Everybody Wants Some!! To channel this kind of playful uncertainty within the alpha male arena is not only a bold stroke of genius, but a goddamned funny one.

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10. HyperNormalisation

Directed by Adam Curtis

There’s a poetry to Curtis’ exhaustive journalistic film essays. He’s one of the few directors these days that truly takes advantage of the fabric of time. 

As an editor, it’s the reason why he keeps showing up on my list every year. Here is someone who can fold wide expanses of time and still make it legible and interesting. The sheer amount of ground he covers within one minute would take most documentary mini-series full episodes worth of time. But we’re talking technique.

There’s no living filmmaker, fiction or non-fiction, who is so contemporary and yet so far ahead of his time. 

HyperNormalisation is of no exception. By traversing the narrative along stretches of time and places, he eventually ends up where he always does, steeped solely in the politics of present day, occasionally visually foot-noting the past in his recipe for prophecy.  

It’s a trademark, I don’t doubt, will prove him withstanding for many years to come. His previous film and my personal favourite, The Century of the Self already has its fingerprints on current global geopolitics in the worst ways possible. 

The worst ways possible made so comforting by Adam Curtis’ narration, which acts as this calm, soothing alarm bell repeating the jangling cries of danger and doom.

 It doesn’t help that he brilliantly pairs the voice of reason with Scubaz’s “The Vanishing American Family” throughout and suddenly, you don’t know whether to drift into a placid dream or awake from the whole frightening nightmare.

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11. American Honey

Directed by Andrea Arnold

I’m starting my list with this particular film because it made me feel partially spoilt when choosing what I loved this year. The chief luxury of the middle-class is just that: choice. And it’s the handling of that theme that struck me with American Honey.

The children in Arnold’s film listen to whatever’s played on the radio, travel to any door, eat anything that’s put in front of them. They are sponges without a shred of dissatisfaction. It’s a hard concept to wrap around given that the common label of this young generation is ever repeated as whiny ingrates.

By accepting the hands dealt to them, these characters are innumerably wealthier in spirit than the children that bathe in their parents wealth, dancing scantily clad in their paradisal backyards. Though never hyper-critical of the nouveau-rich, the film would rather spend time with the weirdos, the misfits and the rebels than the over-examined higher echelons of America.

Arnold accomplished something miraculous in that she’s brutally unapologetic in her outlook, borrowing this purview from her native predecessor Ken Loach’s Kes. But her style is truly American, like a modern-day Dead End by William Wyler or Larry Clark’s blowout debut Kids, it carefully sympathizes without romanticizing the nature of poverty in America.

With subtle imitation of the Maysles Brothers brilliant documentary Salesman in both style and form within its first act, a type of meta-narrative emerges. The haggard machine as personified by Krystal exploits her fellow youth to sell some magazine-thin truths at the doorsteps and truck-stops of America. Those that sell them can’t afford what they’re selling or perhaps, more importantly, simply don’t believe in it anymore.

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“Swiss Army Man” Accepting Magic, Reluctantly.

(spoilers below)

The sad caucasian male aged 25-40 is the exhausted figurehead to so many critics’ darlings these days that it’s hard to convince myself to pay admission to any of them anymore. From Spike Jonze’s wistful “Her (2013)” to Kaufman’s meditation on narcissism “Anamolisa” (2015), it seems like white guys just can’t catch a break. So when Daniels’ “Swiss Army Man” opened up with Hank (played by Paul Dano, previously the Nietzechean “bummed teenager” in “Little Miss Sunshine”) hanging himself from a tree on a remote island, a part of me cringed. Yes, it’s a throwback to Hal Ashby’s OG “suicidal teen” in “Harold and Maude” (1971) (which was made before the suicidal teen was a trope and before you could poke fun at them), but really? Are we going down this road yet again?

Well, no. And that’s a big no for “Swiss Army Man,” which treats its first act like a Knox Cube test for the audience. It seemingly goes nowhere, it’s demonstratively wordless, and tests your endurance with a repetitive flatulence gag. For all intents and purposes, this is not how you should start your film, let alone your film career, as directing duo Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert do. But if you’re patient enough to hear Daniel Radcliffe (three Dans now, keep up) utter his first words, you can rest assured the remaining acts are quite rewarding.

“Swiss Army Man” is a kind of epistle to imagination in a rather unimaginative time in cinema. Stripped down to practically one location and a handful of actors, Daniels set out to challenge the viewers, their characters, and their audience into reconsidering the boundaries of our own playful existence. It reduces to a fine boil just how much can be done with very little. Despite the well crafted effects and gags, it’s steeped in a no-frills style of showmanship. It breaks down the narrative to the essentials almost like a…umm…swiss army knife.

Despite its reductive approach, the characters and their world are deceivingly deep and complex. Our hero Hank wants to live to see another day for Sarah (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a woman he’s made into his phone wallpaper and whom he thinks he loves. The key word here being “thinks.” And it’s that drive which brings his counterpart Manny back to life to help him. I say “thinks” because upon the second act, we discover Sarah is a mere sketch, mostly sinewed by Hank’s own imagination of her. In the third act, we not only discover Sarah doesn’t know Hank, but that she has a family of her own.

Speaking of Hank, “Swiss Army Man” reminded me of Tom Hanks’ brilliant one-man show in “Cast Away” (2000), where a forlorn ex-delivery man resigns to imagining his best friend is a volleyball manifest. Except in “Swiss Army Man” it’s a dead guy and there is no love in his life waiting safely on the shore, simply the love of his own life. Yes, “Swiss Army Man” borrows openly from some of the best “stuck on a desert island” parables: the first act is akin to Shindo’s “Naked Island” (1960) in its quiet meditation, the tribalism of a “Lord of the Flies” adaption creeps its head out when they discover their magic, and even the duplicitous unreliable markings of this decade’s “Shutter Island” (2010) when the two return to reality.

For Daniels, reality isn’t hard or unpleasant, it’s just more sober, more sane. Daniels’ characters survival is predicated on the opposite, on the willingness to disavow the normalcy. That’s the spine to this film and I think the reason this debut is infused with so much energy and love. Here are two young artists who seem to be working within an industry of corpses disguised as big-budget sequels, prequels and franchises - as cleverly personified by the all-encompassing ex-Harry Potter masthead - and yet they want to bring the medium back to life, despite just how insane that may appear.

How these characters survive (a sparse diet of Cheetos and game meat), how Hank’s phone still maintains battery life, or how a corpse can double up as a slingshot are all besides the point. Leave reality at the door. But that isn’t to say don’t confront reality because if I were to dissect this story into three acts, it’d be:

1. A reluctant acceptance of reality (corpses do in fact pass gas long after their dead)

2. A departure from reality and entrance into imagination and magic

3. The return to reality with said magic.

And the third act is one of the funniest confrontations between reality and fantasy I’ve seen in quite sometime, along with one of the more daring. It’d have been easy for them to adopt a pathos with an approval of reality just as it would have been easy to surrender to absolute whimsy. They do neither. The ending comfortably disappoints those who can’t jump aboard the magical train and those who stayed at the station after the first fart.

What audacity for a pair who’ve been working chiefly in the commercial world. It feels like they’ve been wanting to make this movie for a long time and it certainly shows in every scene. I fear this film won’t get enough word of mouth because if you really try to sell the concept, it sounds absurd: a suicidal man stranded on an island discovers a magical corpse he brings to life to return him home.

When I asked a close friend of mine whether I should see it, I was stifled by his response. Is it a low-brow film? A fantasy? A buddy comedy?

“It’s a lot of farts and bonkers. But it’s really beautifully done.”

Those two descriptions don’t usually fall in suit.

“It may bring up thoughts of intimacy.”

Are we talking about the same film?

“Yes, it’s absurd.”

Very absurd. But instead of quietly skirting the line of absurdity and earnestness (Richard Ayoade’s “The Double” (2013) and Lanthimos’ “The Lobster” (2015) come to mind), it wears its silliness in bold primary colours. What joy that they can explore the ideas of love, survival and companionship on the big screen.

There’s an importance to making a kids film for adults. Bear in mind this is an R-rated film. I’m almost positive in thinking that the studios probably wanted to cut this down to receive a PG rating. It has the makings of one: the Harry Potter lead, the fantastical effects, and the buddy comedy form. But its dark subject matter and sexuality most definitely denied such acceptance. Why is it that when a director makes a comedy for adults, it’s usually stripped away from any of the imagination, the magic? With the exception of Edgar Wright, there’s no one playing in that arena. More stories need to awaken the children in the adults without catering completely to the infantilized market (i.e every wonderful Pixar film).

The island which Hank and Manny reside upon is an unfortunate analogy for the island these types of films get bound to. Little chance for survival and yet ripe with possibility.

Manny and Hank develop a relationship over the sparse 93 minutes that rival most romantic comedies in film. Their bond made stronger by the fact that they both want to live in a world that might accept them. Acceptance is a major theme throughout. Not just accepting each other, but accepting their fears, desires and yes…their flatulence. It’s an idea that strikes me as very personal for the Daniels, who markedly forged their way in their careers as weirdos, misfits. They had to accept their own shared insanity in order to thrive in an otherwise safe, placid industry which seems to have forgotten how to believe in a bit of magic.

[markcira]

HAIL, CAESAR! : Moving Pictures, Polytheism, and Propaganda

Morality, Business, and the Anti-Hero

Many filmmakers have their film on filmmaking. Fellini made “8 1/2”, Altman made “The Player,” Truffaut made “Day for Night” and now the Coen Brothers have “Hail, Caesar!,” a story which revolves around Eddie Mannix, the Hollywood fixer. If one isn’t familiar with Eddie Mannix, I recommend Scott Eyman’s ���Lion of Hollywood,” which follows the rise of MGM during the conception of Hollywood. In the book, Eyman paints Mannix as cruel villain, albeit useful villain.

So it’s interesting to me that the Coen brothers decided to make a film, not around the auteur (A.K.A. the filmmaker), like the aforementioned do, but around the brutish anti-hero to cinema: The muscle. The man who, arguably, lacks more artistry than the people he surrounds himself with. Tim Robbins’ character Griffin Mill in the “The Player” looks like a regular Pablo Picasso compared to Mannix. This proposes a certain challenge for the writers. How to espouse artistry through this “money man”? It also suggests the Coen brothers belief that this industry is built on this type of character, one who seemingly lacks morality and artistry all together.

But despite Mannix’s embodiment of the anti-hero, the Coens somehow find a way to suggest a moral passage for Eddie throughout the film. His decision to concede to the arms industry by working for Lockheed-Martin rather than making movies is his moral dilemma. In real life Mannix had no such offer on the table. So why did the Coen brothers choose Lockheed? They could’ve chosen any company for Mannix. Which leads me to my theory about…

Film as Propaganda

Mannix’s conflict is indicative of the depthless morality that rightfully divides art from propaganda. His arc is not just a philosophical question, but majorly an economic one. Mannix is offered a high-paying job to help produce instruments of mass destruction. During the height of World War II, the United States military industrial complex produced a good share of movies in the Hollywood system, notably “One Minute to Zero” (1952) and “From Here to Eternity” (1953). Lockheed’s offer mirrors the plethora of similar offers the military made to top Producers who had the capability of garnering political support through the movie business. Whereas Whitlock (played wonderfully by George Clooney) has his morality on trial by a room full of writers, all echoing the looks and sentiments of popular philosophers throughout history.

It’s my belief that “Hail Caesar!” provides a rare insight into the lucrative business that is governmental funding in Cinema. The film acts as scrutable critic of its own influence in the political, philosophical and religious sphere. Hence, its rather amoral and paradoxical ending. Mannix does not take the job at Lockheed, however he does successfully shake Whitlock out of his communist stupor to deliver a borderline farcical monologue about the son of God. The Coens seem cognizant that their stories are unavoidably sermonizing through Cinema, but their political agenda feels mostly out of place. Their political ethos sometimes surfaces in dangerous waters; the same kind of water which the writers find themselves paddling through to deliver the ransom money to the head of the Communist party.

Are the Coen brothers confessing to their own involvement with political propaganda? Forget not that they released another film this year, “Bridge of Spies,” which shares a similar “Red Scare” tone but in a much more earnest and Hollywoodized form. Whatever the connection might be, “Hail, Caesar” boldly repudiates its political and religious agenda. Despite Whitlock delivering his monologue, he happens to choke on the word “Faith,” a gaffe that suggests Whitlock’s own forgetfulness of the meaning behind the word. In the end, who is the actor serving? The story the writers gave him, the money Hollywood blankets him with, or the power of his own ego manifest - a certain Eddie Mannix?

Polytheism in Cinema

Capitol Pictures is making a religious epic throughout the movie, as was the trend MGM was known for in the 1930s-1950s. “Hail, Caesar!” is essentially religious propaganda for the monotheistic religious sects. Mannix even rounds up the respective ambassadors of Judaism, Greek Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism to ensure its accurate depiction. Film as direct message from God is an ongoing theme in “Hail, Caesar!”

For all intents and purposes Mannix is a very monotheistic personification of God, within the economic hierarchy that is the film industry. While Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) plays a role as the Roman general who kills Christ (the emblematic leader of most monotheistic religions) in the film within a film, his role explores a more polytheistic point of view after being kidnapped by his captors. It isn’t until he awakens in a room full of intellectuals, that he adopts the socialist, anti-hierarchal perspective of morality. Suddenly there isn’t just one God (or the divine trinity of Christ, Mannix and Money), but rather countless Gods of different origins and beliefs. And in this case, the Coen brothers perfectly depict this kind of Ancient Greek polytheism as a room full of writers. The same, of which, write Whitlock’s words and decide just what kind of “hero” he will be. 

While Cinema is a very hierarchical system that delivers masterworks on the shoulders of the one true Auteur, it would be silly to deny the fact that it is one of the most collaborate artforms to have ever existed. Eddie Mannix, an alpha-type leader and Baird Whitlock, the “leading man,” both venture on a rather unconscious and conscious exploration of polytheism. In Mannix’s case, he is surrounded by the many people who make his universe work - from the lowly extras who poison Whitlock to the top actors who carry the pictures on their shoulders. It isn’t until this Greek tragedy comes to the final battle of the two gods - a kind of Titanomachy between the Producer Mannix vs. the Actor Whitlock that the Coens contextualize just how silly these clashing of egos are. After Whitlock sermonizes about the injustices and superficiality of the industry he benefits from, Mannix, the cold-hearted capitalist slaps him and marches him back to set. As the opening of the film is a confessional, is this too the Coens confessing their guilt of making films about the importance of the immaterial despite their own financial gain from said ethos?Whitlock’s odyssey reminds me of John L. Sullivan in Preston Sturges’ “Sullivans Travels”.

In the film, John L. Sullivan is a director in Hollywood who feels the escapism of his work isn’t confronting the tragic blight that faces America. So he decides to embark on a journey into the fringes of the impoverished, invisible classes. The primary difference is that Sullivan’s odyssey into introspection is conscious, while Whitlock’s is unconscious and without consent. It isn’t until he’s drugged, kidnapped and fed tiny sandwiches that he can face such introspection. In the end, they both confront similar truths. Sullivan realizes his escapism isn’t a frivolous byproduct of his wealth, but a necessity for the enchantment of those who can’t afford the luxuries to truly escape. Whitlock’s catharsis is definitively less deep, but important nonetheless. Despite Whitlock’s quick dismissal of the philosophies he absorbed at his hostage retreat, he has a new understanding of the monologue he performs in the face of Christ…or rather the actor playing Christ. The words now seem flush with meaning. They have the desired weight the writer’s intended and thus they reach a kind of artificial transcendence.

Film as Love

Despite the artist’s vain attempts at capturing spirituality or political rhetoric in their works, the Coens definitely have a vested belief in cinema. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have the careers that they do. In the end, the film

is a self-celebratory reflection upon the most transformative and groundbreaking era in Hollywood. It admires not only the big players in the pictures, but the lesser seen personalities. The ones that, without them, cinema would cease to exist.The most interesting tenet of Mannix’s odyssey, and arguably his most intimate, is the scene of him checking the dailies with the Editor (played by Frances McDormand). In it, we find the two sharing a moment above the warm glow of the moviola (a time before we edited films on bright blue LCD screens). C.C Calhoun (the name an echo of Billy Wilder’s own C.C. Baxter in “The Apartment” nearly kills herself while prepping the machine. Here Joel Coen, husband to McDormand, is literally “killing his darling” in this film. The gag acts as both metaphor to editing and personal memoir for Joel as filmmaking was responsible for bringing the two together during their meeting on “Blood Simple.”

Cinema as magic. Cinema as Cupid. Cinema, perhaps, has no place as a political medium or as religious testament. But it can, through its own superficiality, depict the tenderest moments between love and death with brilliant realism like in “Blood Simple” or as comedic catharsis, a staple in the Coen Bros.’ body of work. For all of the seriousness of moviemaking, the Coens successfully scrutinize the inherent silliness of people en masse scrambling to make a fantasy into a reality. No matter what, even if their hero gets drugged, kidnapped, and held hostage. 

And perhaps that is the fabric of filmmaking: a true labour of love which must prevail against the forces of sabotage, economic ruin, and even a few disgruntled extras.

[markcira]

The Martian - A Hopeful Exploration of Space and Survival

Ridley Scott just turned 78 at the end of this year and yet, “The Martian” feels like the work of a young, virile filmmaker. The kind who hasn’t been jaded by the world’s shortcomings and doesn’t take himself so seriously that he feels compelled to enshroud all humanity in a Science Fiction epic.  It’s hard to write about films that take place majorly in space without mentioning the big two in the past three years - Interstellar and Gravity. Both of which got Space right, but got humanity utterly wrong. And that’s not to say their protagonist’s intentions weren’t real. They all want the same thing: to survive. It is, and always will be, humanity’s best trait. In this Space-trifecta, we follow the course - usually of one individual - as they attempt to escape their destiny as space dust. In Gravity, it’s with the help of Ryan Stone’s daughter. In Interstellar, it’s with the help of Cooper’s daughter, Murph (played by Jessica Chastain, where she emboldens the revisited role with Scott). But in The Martian, Mark survives with equal parts himself and the rest of humanity. What a concept.

Within the murky existentialist drama of Interstellar and Gravity, the hope barely breaks through the surface to reveal itself amongst the plight of the story. It beckons the cry of the underdog and re-affirms its ethos of hopelessness to no end. Ridley Scott’s approach is different. And I think it’s the markings of a fantastic script and brilliant direction.

Mark Watney, despite the odds, never feels like he’s out of depth for survival. It’s his innate intelligence and happy disposition that actually counters the idea of the underdog. You aren’t thinking to yourself, through the course of his journey, will he ever survive? But rather, how could he not? 

A novice plot requires constant reminders of the hero’s conflict and thus accenting their hopeless effort. But here, it’s the conflict and possibility. So many possibilities, in fact, that in the third act they have to choose one. And yet it never detracts from the tension.

Ridley Scott dodges three major pitfalls of most science fiction films with The Martian. 1. He refuses to fall into the dystopian milieu of his predecessors, including his own Blade Runner. 2. The film doesn’t rely on score as its narrative compass (due in part to 2001′s brilliant, yet irreproducible music). And finally 3. It uses humour. Science fiction can’t use comedy.  This is what defines Ridley Scott for me, not as a good filmmaker, but a great one. There are sci-fi comedies, no doubt. Galaxy Quest, Paul, and the latest Box-Office smash, The Guardians of the Galaxy. But there are no sci-fi comedies that are weighted so perfectly in both genres. When I list of those preceding examples, they’re more or less comedies. But The Martian is not. It is an astute exploration of scientific fiction and politics within the scientific community and it’s really quite hilarious. And it’s the necessary jolt to the otherwise drab genre. While Nolan explores the metaphysical and philosophical implications of space and Cuaron puts you in space, Scott outlines human’s need for outer space and more importantly, why we’re a species worth saving. But this could all be chalked up to Goddard’s wonderful script. Let’s just take in account the technical prowess of The Martian. For one, there isn’t a film that felt so short to me this entire year. Due in part to Pietro Scalia’s (the longtime Sicilian editor to Ridley Scott and Gus Van Sant) truly remarkable grasp on pacing. This isn’t a topic I like to tread lightly. The overlooked artistry of pacing is a definitive measure in my mind. The Martian could be one of the best edited films of the decade.  The use of titles, monologue as transition, time-lapse, and most importantly who to cut to when someone else is talking. This is pairing of two maestro’s at the height of their careers. There’s no fat on this film. It’s lean and its pace is astonishing. Where other sci-fi films rely on music to tell their stories, The Martian is music. It’s rhythm is close to perfection. I’d rewatch this film simply for the cuts.

Also - the cast. Ridley Scott casts the perfect ensemble and gives each character just enough time so we feel their importance, but no one overshadows each other, and yet they all stand out for me. Kristen Wiig and Chiwetel Ejiofor offer up knockout performances.  And they aren’t easy performances. When you consider the urgency of a timeline-based story, it’s very easy to bypass beats for comedic relief. And yet they all managed the script effortlessly. This is one of the anomalies of The Martian. It feels so urgent, so rushed, and yet never so much as to give time for those comedic beats.  Perhaps that’s where Ridley Scott’s genius lies in the twilight of his longstanding career: rushing to get the important stuff on screen, but never so hurried as to miss the funny stuff.

[markcira]

Gaspar Noé’s “Love” as Childish Meta-Student Film

Open admission: I'm not a Noé fan. Never have been and after watching "Love," the position still stands.

It’s a story through the eyes of a young, immature film student. So it's permitted to be deeply shallow, meandering and excessive. I'll give it that. If it were from the perspective of an older couple (like Haneke's masterful "Amour"), it'd be a different story altogether. But it's not. It's young love, dumb love, and boring love. So if you don't mind the "metafilm-from-film-student" theory, you'll love "Love."

Yes, Noé constantly reminds us we're watching a film student's perspective of film love. Whether it's the whispery voiceovers lifted from Terrence Malick, the plastered film posters all over the characters' walls ("Taxi Driver," "M", "Birth of a Nation" and even a sly "The Vanishing" poster in the police office) or the overuse of the overused Erik Satie score, Noé needs to re-affirm - as he always does - that we're watching a Noé student film.

So what's wrong with that? When Coppola made "Tetro," he proclaimed it to be a return to his student film days when he first fell in love with cinema. And I'd argue, there's a puerile and even exciting veracity to "Tetro." With "Love," that puerility is cute for the first thirty minutes and then graduates to nauseam and numbness.

Numbness for all the wrong reasons is what particularly put me off the film. There's a sense that Noé doesn't love any of this characters and doesn't want them to find happiness or anything for that matter. They shuffle around miserably, finding only some joy in exchanging their fluids. I don't mind not liking characters, but it's beyond hating or loving any of them. It's sheer indifference.

For a movie that relishes in its explosiveness of colours, sexuality and mistreatment of characters, I was shocked at how much I didn't care. 

But ultimately the pace and art of editing grabs me first when watching a film. "Love" seemed to have lacked either. It felt like it was about four hours long. I'm not sure if it was the technique of the "fading to black breathing" dissolves he employs, but it felt ceaseless. There was absolutely no pace. Gaspar Noé insists on editing all of his own films. And someone should really not let him do this. The construction is so faulty. He attempts to break structure and give us the common Sonata-structure, where it returns to where it started. But it fails. Again, this could be lent to the "film student" theory, but I'd argue the rest of his oeuvre suffers from this too.

So what's good about "Love"? The visuals. Goddamn it. The cinematography is enlightened. It's one of the best looking films of the year (maybe only next to "The Lobster") . There's a love for the image in his works and therefore, it feels even more tragic when he wastes about twenty minutes of the film with characters talking on the phone.

Remember how Hitchcock said "You should be able to understand a movie with no sound"? Yeah, this film would be indecipherable without sound. It's a lot of Murphy, our lead, laying on a bed with narration or walking with his head turned to us, etc. But it all looks gorgeous. So kudos to Noé and his cinematographer.

The music and sound design are also top notch. The film's soundscape is wonderful, captivating and disturbing. Great use of score. He reaffirms the meta-theory with the use of John Carpenter music (a filmmaker unabashedly using a filmmaker's written composition).

There's a scene where two Parisian authorities take the American Murphy for a pint and discuss the difference between French love and Western love. It's the kind of stated thesis you might expect in a facebook status. It pokes holes in the American's ideology surrounding fear in love. It's a wonderful conversation, albeit contrived and painfully direct. And perhaps that's the point? Or is it that the American's obsession with violence is as blasé as the French's obsession with love?

I don't know. I was so numb to the poor writing at this point that I kinda turned off. Wait... maybe that's the point? That with all the graphic sex and cum in the face, love is a turn off? Again, I have no idea.

There’s also a scene where the two leads have sex after torturing each other verbally at a club. In the background is the poster for “Salo.” Is this Noé trying to suggest that the emptiness of the bourgeoise torture pales in comparison of a truly sexually charged political climate like in Pasolini’s work? If he is, he nails that one on the head! At least he’s self-aware about the fact that this is a middle-class, white man’s perspective on love and therefore, lacks any real conflict or passion.

But despite it’s knowing of its depthless insight (he made it in 3D. Get it? So it’s one dimensional but has dimension? Nudge, nudge), there’s little artistic redemption. Because in the end, "Love" is a sloppily written, meandering, repetitive, nauseatingly meta, and terribly acted work. I feel with such a film so enamoured with its own take on clichés, I should end this review with: "Love" stinks.

[markcira]

The Treatment of Women in Postwar Cinema of the West and of the East

In 1948, Max Ophüls came to America from Germany to explore his penchant for female narratives in a large studio setting at MGM. Ten years later Mikio Naruse's long-spanning oeuvre (he completed over 90 films in his lifetime) crystallized in "When a Woman Ascends the Stairs." Despite bearing striking similarities in both plot and characters, it's astounding to consider what ten years can accomplish in the way the cinema of the West and the East treated women.

In "Caught," Leonora Eames (played by Barbara Bel Geddes) is a lower-class woman seeking the attention of a rich suitor who will pave the way for her career as a happy housewife. When she finds the millionaire tycoon Smith Ohlrig (a play-on the word "oil-rig"), she swoons him and they get hitched. However, Smith is a brazen patriarch who locks her into his world, by contract, as another faceless employee. "As my wife, you are to stay in my company and that means being hostess in this house," he instructs. She manages to escape his grasp and lands into the arms of Larry Quinada (James Mason), a pediatrician on the Lower East Side.

"When a Woman Ascends the Stairs" is the story of Keiko Takamine working as a bar hostess, entering thirty-hood. Torn between buying and starting her own bar or marrying a wealthy Japanese businessman and living comfortably, she finds herself in constant limbo. In a small pocket of Tokyo, she is referred to as Mama, a name alluding to her dignified and approachable disposition. Many bar patrons love her but, like in "Caught," men are generally deceptive, callous.

When Keiko gets charmed by one of the many gentlemen who frequent her bar (he gifts her with a bottle of her favourite fragrance: Black Narcissus), she decides to accept his proposal for marriage. Except he's already married. And he already has a family.

Both Ophüls and Naruse paint men as stern, unwavering bodies of charm and wealth on the outside, but they're all morally indecisive, messy and internally bankrupt (with the exception of the all-too-perfect Dr. Quinada in "Caught"). On the other hand, their female counterparts appear to be demure and indecisive, seemingly not knowing what they want and yet, inherently solid on the inside.

Where Leonora's character is almost immune to criticism (she abandons her life of materialism to work as a receptionist for the Doctor), Keiko's character isn't quite as infallible. She has moments where you simply can't side with her. When her mother asks for money to keep her brother out of jail, she refuses. When her nephew has polio and her brother beckons for financial help, she coldly declines. Pairing this with the sparse nature of Keiko's distant voiceover narration, Naruse masterfully dodges the popular melodrama so common in 1950s cinema.

Structurally, Ryuzo Kikushima's (the longtime collaborator with Akira Kurosawa, responsible arguably for his best films) script is leaps and bounds ahead of Arthur Laurents, who primarily worked as a musical playwright in his career. He was responsible for wonderful stories like Gypsy, which succeeded in acutely capturing an overbearing stage mother. But when adapted for the screen, his sense of structure and rhythm feels stagey where Kikushima's is sculpted effortlessly. And where Naruse's narrative proves to be more evolved than Ophüls' reveals itself in their third acts.

"Caught" trips into a formulaic and rather unbelievable ending when the powerful Ohlrig is crushed by a pinball machine (a silly analogy for his own games being the root cause of his demise), while Leonara sits by and watches. Eventually espousing some guilt in the last scene (god forbid she'd remorselessly kill a man!), she inevitably ends up with the handsome doctor. It's a rather parochial Postwar sermon on the virtue of abandoning any form of materialist ethos.

In Naruse's story, Keiko doesn't get what she wants because she doesn't know what she wants. 

This is a creative freedom lent to very few characters, albeit strong ones (Bob Rafaelson wrote a similar character ten years later with the lauded Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces). The sophistication of his storytelling is the confidence in painting fully fleshed out and realized females, yet still allowing them to have doubt and fear. This doesn’t detract from their strength, quite the contrary. It reminds us there’s a falseness behind the certainties of moral characters. That to persevere with doubt may be more resolute a character trait than concluding with absolute moral vindication.

There is a scene in Naruse's film where Keiko, after being lied to by yet another businessman, is comforted by her bar manager Kenichi (played wonderfully by Tatsua Nakadai). He swoops in expectedly as the man who saves the day (much like the character Mason embodies in “Caught”). He hugs her, consoles her, and offers his hand in marriage and a partnership to start a bar together. It’s a solution that seemingly reconciles both material and moral woes. But she says no. Why?

It's a question I still ask myself after multiple viewings. Is it her stubbornness? Is he not rich enough? Or is it simply that she doesn't love him? This is where the dichotomy of the two women is so poignant. Keiko doesn't have to choose between the love of a man and their money. Because in Naruse's world, there's neither. Her solitude and strength isn't found in the contrived morality or a male suitor or in the emptiness of commerce. It's found in the obstacles she can choose to place herself in - it's the Sisyphean staircase.

Very few films approach the female narrative earnestly. “Caught” was a far cry from our current characterization, for the most part. But not really. Nearly seventy years later and many films portray women choosing between real love or the rich guy. They ultimately choose real love, giving them a sense of moral purpose. That love conquers all kind of stuff.  

The very same year Naruse released this film, John Cassavetes gave way to the same kind of female narrative in “Shadows” (1960) in the U.S. His reflection on the subject of women in film is rather prophetic:

“I’m very worried about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s gotten worse than ever and it’s related to their being either high- or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed, with whom, and how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.” 

In considering the dreams of women, Naruse’s work is challenging because it defiantly resolves in saying, from a male perspective, “I don’t know.” He relishes in the mystery and in his refusal to distill Keiko into the dull framework of some Manichean duality, he radically redshifts the priorities of a man telling a woman’s story. A woman choosing herself over any man? Over money? Over, even, love?

It is a triumph of not only Japanese cinema, but international cinema. Where “Caught” is Ophüls clearly trying to paint within the lines drawn by the studio heads at MGM, “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” is Naruse reshaping the page he’s drawing on. Ophüls returned to Germany a year later, completing some of his strongest works of his career - all of which featuring female leads.