Tokyo Story (1953)

Family relationships have been a part of the movies from the beginning. No surprise there; being a part of a family is a universal reality that transcends time, place, and culture.

Filmmakers frequently approach the family from the perspective of trauma, and its effect on the bonds of blood and memory. But the simple truth is that for most people, the years spent with family members—whether of the original family, or the family created with a spouse (or any of the many other ways people form families)—are often filled with smaller moments, where babies begin to walk and talk, children grow, parents age, and grandparents find their place to live out their last years and leave a legacy to the young.

This is the quiet cinema of the great Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. The prolific master began working in the 1920s and made many (now lost) silent films before making the transition to talkies, and he developed his “home” movie style as he went along. He was a notorious perfectionist, requiring take after take just to get the simplest motions exactly as he wanted them. It paid off.

Picking only one Ozu film to showcase is no easy feat, but it’s hard to ignore one renowned masterpiece: Tokyo Story (1953). The plot of this simple film is simple enough: Grandparents leave their tiny town to visit their children and grandchildren in bustling postwar Tokyo, but the busy lives these families lead swirl around the grandparents. As Shukishi, the grandfather, and his wife Tomi visit one child (and family) after another, it becomes clear to them that they welcome, but in the way. They decide to visit a resort, and on the way back to Tokyo, Tomi falls ill and dies. The family gathers for a funeral … and that’s it.

But plot isn’t the point in an Ozu movie. As the grandparents visit each child, we are given subtle insights into the dynamics and emotions that shaped these people over time, room by room, child by child, family by family. No huge arguments take place; no great calamities transpire. Ozu’s camera rarely moves, allowing facial expressions, dialogue, and the movement of people in and of rooms to reveal the real story of joy and disappointment, longing and satisfaction, that belongs to time and memory. Poignant moments abound, but they are never telegraphed; they sneak up and settle in beside you.

It’s fairly clear, early on, that Ozu wants us to get a sense of where we are in these homes. His camera follows one daughter through her home as she takes care of household chores, completing a circle as she winds up in the room she began in. He does this not with a hand-held camera, but with a series of jump cuts from room to room, tracking her progress as a series of moving snapshots. In these rooms we will get to know this family and experience their interactions as they share meals, tea, conversation, and a past that frequently finds a way to make itself known.

In one scene, grandpa Shukishi tosses a few back at a local pub with old friends as they share memories and news of family and friends. The conversation seems small and familiar, but it is laced with emotion, unpunctuated with musical flourishes or close-ups. No actor dominates (an Ozu trademark); each is an important part of the scene, and people we haven’t met until now reveal in small bits of conversation their frustrations at time’s passing by, and everything that goes with it. As Shukishi drunkenly shuffles home, we gain a new insight: Shige, one of his daughters, notes with sympathy toward her mother that her father’s current state is painfully familiar. Just one line, mind you; yet it says so much by what isn’t said, by what Ozu shows us in the brief expression that passes over Shige’s face.

To be sure, these adult children are selfish to a great extent. The multigenerational family dwellings that were so much a part of Japan’s heritage as a nation of families and clans is beginning to dwindle in the face of the nation’s rapid modernization; Tokyo’s demanding pace as a global metropolis is stretching the bonds of family thinner and thinner, albeit subtly, such that only visitors—such as the grandparents—can perceive it accurately. Yet Ozu doesn’t parse blame here; this isn’t a case of the young abandoning the old, but of a family battling a tendency toward abandoning each other that stretches back through their past together.

Part of Ozu’s magic is to show us the shades of difference in how these adult children, and in turn their children, understand that past, the present it informs, and the future that all glimpse only in shadows of suggestion, noting the passage of time each step of the way.

Even the film’s title hints at the commonality of these experiences to families everywhere. Interestingly, Ozu’s films did not catch on internationally until years later, as distributors feared they were “too Japanese”—unlike the films of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, among other Japanese directors who found international success. Once his films began gathering critical plaudits, though, they built momentum quickly. To this day, Ozu has some of the most devoted and passionate fans of any director (much as Bresson and Tarkovsky do, among others).

To be sure, Tokyo Story (and Ozu’s other films from this postwar period) are not for everyone. Patience is required; these aren’t plot-drive films, but living portraits of very real people with very real flaws, who nonetheless find ways to carry on as they build their legacies against time’s passage. Throughout this film, though, the emotional impact is undeniable; Ozu lures us in to this family and their homes by blending us into the flow of each scene. Some may well find this boring, and that’s understandable. For the rest of us, Tokyo Story is both a landscape and portrait of the heart, and its power to stir emotions is absolutely magical, something no explanation could possibly convey. And that’s why you need to see for yourself.

Fight scene Friday!

Another fine bout of fisticuffs, this from John Carpenter's fun-yet-pointed 1988 gem, They Live:

The pointlessness of the Oscars

Given some of the absolute howlers that have won Best Picture Oscars over the years (to say nothing of a long-overdue Best Actor Oscar for Al Pacino, for one of the worst performances of his career), it's a wonder anyone cares what happens when the envelopes are ripped open. But hey, it's celebrities, it's long suck-up speeches, it's two-bit political posing ... it's showbiz.

The real reason, of course, is that it's publicity for all concerned, and publicity means money.

There's a great piece in The Times of London today on the typical backbiting, shameless self-promotion, and nonsensical rules governing the whole Academy Award process. This gem stands out:

It would appear that the makers of The Hurt Locker, which features real actors on location in Jordan, consider themselves more worthy than the “blue screen” computer technicians who made Avatar possible. “Let’s be honest: this is Hollywood,” one well-known Hollywood writer told The Times yesterday. “Everyone hates each other. People here can nurse grudges better than high school girls. The emotional immaturity is stunning, and then you throw in something like the chance to talk on a live international telecast, and it’s really quite a combustible combination.”

Fame is a drug, indeed. Just one more.

Of course, the stink this year is over one of the producers of The Hurt Locker, an excellent low-budget (by Hollywood standards) film about an explosive ordinance detonation (EOD) crew in Baghdad circa 2004. Producer Nicholas Chartier apparently crossed one of the lines when he sent out a blast e-mail urging support for his film over its Best Picture rival, the technological behemoth Avatar. (Of course, the directors of both films, Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron, respectively, are exes who purport to be friends now.) He took a very mild swipe at the rival film, too, which apparently got the attention of the Academy itself. They took an unprecedented action of banning Chartier from the ceremony itself. Will this judgment affect the voting? Who knows? Who cares?

As journalist Chris Ayres continues putting the fracas in context, we encounter this worthy point:

While it might be argued that the academy’s ruling is more about generating publicity for an event whose television ratings have collapsed by a third over the past decade, the organisation has previously disclosed its fears that if the awards become viewed with cynicism — as they did a decade ago, when claims emerged that studios were “buying” Oscars — the world’s most famous showbusiness brand could be ruined.

Nevertheless, by historical standards of Oscars campaigning, Chartier’s offence looks relatively tame — especially when compared with the tactics of the veteran Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who become both feared and admired in the 1990s for his ability to win statues for what many critics thought were mediocre films, such as Shakespeare in Love.

Weinstein's antics reached this low point, which is so over-the-top one wonders why Chartier's minor gaffe even warranted the Academy's attention. Ayres continues:

Mr Weinstein’s most infamous ruse involved using a column by the former academy president and twice Best Director winner Robert Wise to praise Martin Scorsese’s 2003 Best Picture contender Gangs of New York. Miramax then began to reprint the column in its own advertisements and publicity material, even though it was revealed that the article had in fact been ghost-written by the studio’s publicist — who was also advising the academy on matters of public relations. All this came only a year after Miramax had been suspected of encouraging rumours that the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr, was an anti-Semite.

The studio denied any such whispering campaign.

So, we can safely write off the Academy Awards as nothing more than a tool of the Hollywood ATM. The awards mean nothing, not even in their limited context of "Hollywood-driven American movies of sufficient budget to merit inclusion," except more cash to the winners.

The return of Fight Scene Friday!

Yes, it's been a while, so we couldn't actually wait until Friday, you see.

"I'm alive, I live, I breathe ... I feel." Wow, somebody's channeling Shatner!

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

"It is the world in an hour and a half."—Jean-Luc Godard, on Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar
Some films leave such a personal mark on the heart and soul that discussing them can trigger the emotions that the experience of viewing the film stirs. If you love movies, you surely have one or more such personal films that you cherish.

For its devotees, Au Hasard Balthazar is just such a film. Written and directed by the French master Robert Bresson, Balthazar follows a donkey through his life of wandering from owner to owner as he bears up under circumstances that range from abundance to abuse, truly a beast of burden bearing the weight of human iniquity and the weight of experience on his back.

The film's story is simple enough: The daughter of a rural French family claims as her own a donkey she names Balthazar. Marie loves her donkey, and delights in showering him with affection. But her attentions are drawn away as she grows up and turns from her childhood sweetheart to the village bad boy, and she neglects Balthazar. Circumstances and her father's stubbornness force Marie's family into bankruptcy, and they lose custody of Balthazar. From there, the creature is alternately abused and coddled, finds sympathy and cruelty as he passes from one owner to the next, always doing what he was made to do: bear the burden as best he can. Balthazar's life comes to an end much as it began, in a pasture surrounded by farm animals (here, sheep).

It is very tempting to make of Balthazar an allegory for the Lord Jesus Christ. But it's wise not to read it so closely into Balthazar's life, from his play-baptism to his suffering death, carrying contraband as though they were the sins of all who mistreated him during his days. Certainly, Bresson resisted any allegorical underpinnings, preferring instead to point to the simplicity of the story and the central fact of Balthazar's reality within the scope of the film. He is a donkey, a fact made abundantly clear from the opening credits, when his braying interrupts Schubert's lovely Piano Sonata No. 20. The sacred gets elbowed by the profane; the worldly and the holy are always getting entangled. Balthazar is both; the humans who cross his path become who they are through their shared experiences of sin's cruelty, and they do not spare him the brunt of the pain. He was born to suffer, to bear the burden.

Bresson's human actors are restricted to the most austere of performances, and that by intent. Mostly amateurs, Bresson deliberately chose actors of limited experience, then shot take after take to wring every ounce of dramatic artifice out of each actor's performance before getting the flat delivery he wanted. In this way, Bresson's films demand much of a viewer. There is no easy emotion, no passive response; but there is room for the investment, and reward that lingers long after the final reel comes to a close---even if Bresson doesn't hand it to you, it's there to be taken, and all the more rewarding for those willing to make the effort.

Au Hasard Balthazar (an idiom that means something akin to "That's How It Goes, Balthazar") is a cinematic masterpiece whose meaning(s) no two of its loving fans agree on. Like the best of any art form, it resonates in private, personal places where one goes when the heart's keen needs are taken to the altar, to speak quietly to God. Life is painful. Suffering is real. Grace isn't always obvious. But it is there, ever there. Such are the lessons a donkey can teach in an hour and a half.