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Weird and Wonderful [KIKUJIRO]

From the Chicago Reader (June 30, 2000). — J.R.

Kikujiro

Rating *** A must see

Directed and written by Takeshi Kitano

With Beat Takeshi (Kitano), Yusuke Sekiguchi, Kayoko Kishimoto, Yuko Daike, and Kazuko Yoshiyuiki.

I’m finally starting to understand Takeshi Kitano’s movies, though given that his specialty seems to be a mixture of violence, slapstick, and sentimentality, I’m not sure I’ll ever be a convert. Still, I found Kikujiro (1999) — his eighth feature, showing this week at the Music Box — much more affecting than the other three features I’ve seen.

One of the fascinating things about Kikujiro, which has virtually no violence, is that it seems both more mainstream and more experimental in form than the other Kitano movies I’ve seen. It changes style so often that it all but eliminates narrative. It’s divided into sections like a photo album, with photos and captions doubling as chapter headings. It has intricately choreographed expressionist dream sequences, extended gags in extreme long shot that all but convert the main characters into balls ricocheting through pinball machines, and absurd physical gags in medium shot (e.g., the hero tries to swim) that take the form of frozen tableaux and provoke blank stares from other characters. It’s full of strange flights of fancy that come out of nowhere and go nowhere. And along with the laughs, it creates a sense of loss so strong and grievous that this feeling may stick with you for days. Yes, it’s sentimental, but it’s also highly atypical and downright weird. And it’s been haunting me ever since I saw it a year ago at the Locarno film festival.

A statement by the writer-director-editor-star suggests that it’s supposed to be and do all of the above: “After Fireworks, I couldn’t help feeling that my films were being stereotyped: ‘gangster, violence, life and death.’ It became difficult for me to identify with them. So I decided to try and make a film no one would expect from me. To tell the truth, the story of this film belongs to a genre which is outside my specialty. But I decided to make this film because it would be a challenge for me to cope with this ordinary story and try to make it my very own through my direction, and I tried a lot of experiments with imagery. I think it ended up being a very strange film with my trademark all over it. I hope to continue upsetting people’s expectations in a positive way.”

Generic expectations aside, Kitano’s reputation in Japan is based on far more than what he’s done as a film director. As a comic performer, he’s been around for a quarter of a century, having started out as half of a comic duo known as the Two Beats (playing Beat Takeshi — a stage name he still uses as an actor — alongside Beat Kiyoshi). He evolved into a TV personality in the early 80s and in recent years has been appearing weekly on no less than eight or nine programs, which range from sitcoms to game shows. He didn’t begin directing until 1989. (When I was in Tokyo last December, it took only a bit of channel surfing to find him.) Somewhat abrasive and even abusive in manner, he probably shares as many traits with Groucho Marx as he does with Buster Keaton, and poker-faced impassivity has also long been part of his style and persona — something that’s only emphasized by the paralysis in portions of his face, a consequence of a traffic accident several years ago.

I rarely find Kitano as funny as I think I’m supposed to, which makes me wonder if this is because of cultural differences in how we relate to tragedy and comedy. At Locarno last summer, I saw two recent documentary features about him. One of them, Makoto Shinozaki’s Jam Session — a standard “making of” promo about Kikujiro, created by Kitano’s production company — was little more than advertising. The other, Jean-Pierre Limosin’s Takeshi Kitano the Unforeseeable (made for French TV), was helped immeasurably by a sensitive interview conducted by film critic (and now president of Tokyo University) Shigehiko Hasumi, who implicitly treats Kitano as a tragic figure.

French filmmaker Chris Marker recently observed that it rains equally often in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Akira Kurosawa. Are Eastern cultures and Russia more comfortable with gloom and tragedy? After all, in Japan suicide is still sometimes seen as a noble and satisfying way of concluding things — a kind of credible Dostoyevskian solution. Hasumi’s approach to Kitano implies that viewing him as some sort of over-the-hill wreck may be a prerequisite for finding him funny. A sense of human wreckage is certainly apparent in Kikujiro, whether or not one laughs at the gags, nearly all of which are suffused with melancholy; I found myself laughing at only about half of them.

Kitano has accumulated all sorts of associations from being on Japanese TV, which obviously makes his films harder for Western viewers to read. The films are also full of personal references. For instance, his former partner Beat Kiyoshi makes a guest appearance in Kikujiro as a security guard at a rural bus shelter whom Kitano gratuitously berates and harasses, but I have no idea whether this scene alludes to some of their old routines. It also can’t be coincidence that this movie opens and closes in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, home to the two leading characters — a nine-year-old boy named Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) who lives with his grandmother and Kikujiro (Kitano), the husband of a friend and neighbor of the grandmother — and the place where Kitano spent his own childhood. He has even said that his father — a housepainter and maker of lacquered objects who had many financial ups and downs because he gambled — was the inspiration for the film’s title character.

As suggested earlier, the plot of Kikujiro is so minimal and ambiguous it verges on nonexistent. Masao, a lonely kid, has no father and has never met his mother, who works far away to support him. After he stumbles upon her picture and address, the grandmother’s friend gets Kikujiro to take the boy to see his mother. Instead Kikujiro takes him to the bicycle races and gambles away all the boy’s travel money, but saves him just before he’s molested by a pervert. Then they hitch rides to where Masao’s mother lives, meeting various people en route. Kikujiro spots the mother with another boy and reports back to Masao that she isn’t there; later he hitches a ride to a nearby town and glimpses his own mother in a nursing home without approaching her. Eventually he and Masao return to Asakusa and part company.

Kikujiro is the only developed character, though his background is a bit cloudy. We know nothing about his current or past profession, though some viewers may assume he used to be a yakuza. Masao is more a figure than a character, and we find out even less about his mother. Moreover, the various friends Masao and Kikujiro make on their trip — a writer, a woman juggler, and two bikers — seem to exist only for the purpose of amusing Masao.

The Japanese title of this movie is Kikujiro no natsu, which means “The Summer of Kikujiro,” and central to its singular handling of time is that it has a sort of aimless summerlike drift. Part of what I find so strange and affecting about it is that it goes beyond feeling like “a summer movie” and seems suspended in time, so that the picaresque events could be taking place over three or four days or just as many weeks or months — maybe even years. Kikujiro and Masao have virtually no luggage with them, but that doesn’t prevent them from periodically appearing in different clothes. Furthermore, though most or all of their destinations can be found on maps of Japan and aren’t that far from one another, their cross-country journey feels so mythical that they could be crossing a vast continent.

Indeed, the film feels like an epic, roughly akin to Don Quixote or The Searchers — one that’s infused with a sense of futility and delusion combined with wistful yearning and persistence. The sensation of being caught in an endless loop is reinforced by the main musical theme, by Kitano regular Joe Hisaishi, a piece of treacle featuring piano and orchestra that’s repeated so many times it drills its way into your skull, like one of the elevator-music themes of a comedy by Jacques Tati (or, perhaps closer to the mark, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s main theme for Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which featured Kitano’s first film performance).

As for the sense of tragedy, I’m hesitant to rely too much on national typecasting. But there are passages about mothers and sons, “passive dependence,” and arrested male development in Ian Buruma’s provocative 1984 book about contemporary Japan, Behind the Mask, that have more to say about the emotions of mother loss in Kikujiro than anything I could add. One fairly sarcastic and brutal paragraph catches Buruma’s overall drift: “The treatment of young children is in a way similar to that of drunks and foreigners. They are not held socially responsible for anything they do or say, for they know no shame. They must be pampered not punished. This wonderful state of grace is one good reason for foreigners to live in Japan and Japanese males to spend much of their non-working hours in a state of inebriation or even, if necessary, to fake it.”

That the movie periodically grinds to a halt so that the juggler, writer, bikers, and title hero can devote their time exclusively to amusing Masao may seem like self-indulgence, but ultimately it points to a traumatic sense of mother loss that no amount of amusement can placate. An experimental feature that keeps shooting off its ideas like an endless row of skyrockets, Kikujiro ultimately conveys this grief with such sustained intensity that it can only leave a scorched path of devastation in its aftermath.

RED PSALM (1971)

This was written in the summer of 2000 for a coffee-table book edited by Geoff Andrew that was published the following year, Film: The Critics’ Choice (New York: Billboard Books). — J.R.

A recent documentary about communist musicals called East Side Story (Dana Ranga, 1997) assumes that communist-bloc directors were just itching to make Hollywood extravaganzas and invariably wound up looking strained, square, and ill-equipped. But Red Psalm (1971), Miklós Jancsó’s dazzling, open-air revolutionary pageant, is a highly sensual communist musical that employs occasional nudity as lyrically as the singing, dancing, and nature. That is to say, within its own specially and exuberantly defined idioms, it swings as well as wails.

Set near the end of the 19th century, when a group of peasants have demanded basic rights from a landowner and soldiers arrive on horseback to quell the uprising, Red Psalm is composed of only 26 shots. (With a running time of 84 minutes, this adds up to an average of three minutes per shot. Jancsó’s earlier feature from 1969, Winter Sirocco, is said to consist of only 13 shots.) Each long take is an intricate choreography of panning camera, landscape, and clustered bodies that constantly traverse, join, and/or divide the separate groups. The music, ranging from revolutionary folk songs to “Charlie Is My Darling,” will keep playing in your head for days, and the colors are ravishing. The picture won Jancsó a best director prize at Cannes, and it may well be the greatest Hungarian film of the 60s and 70s, summing up an entire strain in his work that lamentably has been forgotten in more recent years.

The film’s original Hungarian title, Még Kér a Nép, is said to translate into English as “And the People Still Ask”. This suggests that that charge of formalism frequently leveled against  Jancsó may stem in part from an inability to fully comprehend his historical and political meanings — combined with an understandable temptation to become intoxicated by the stylistic virtuosity of the externded takes and intricately plotted camera movements, thereby overlooking what the film’s images actually mean. According to Hungarian film  theorist Yvette Biró, who used to write scripts for Jancsó, “bleeding white doves, a white shirt pierced through by a dagger, a long lingering shot of a gun tied with a red ribbon,” are all “taken from the folklore of our collective memory….Symbols here are elements of a folk community’s language. Through a dance, Jancsó brings back to life this community, whose fate, in the fairy tale we are presented, is determined by ancient, biblical, and folkloristic ritual; hence, the recurring presence of these rites is an organic and justified part of the story.”

Jancsó’s awesome fusion of form with content and politics with poetry seems fully contemporary with the innovations of the French New Wave during the same period. And as the Hungarian title suggests, one of Jancsó’s characteristic achievements is to create a striking continuum between past and present — a sense of immediacy about history that can be found in few other period films.

LES BONNES FEMMES (1960)

This was written in the summer of 2000 for a coffee-table book edited by Geoff Andrew that was published the following year, Film: The Critics’ Choice (New York: Billboard Books). — J.R.

There’s something approaching a consensus, shared by the filmmaker himself, that the best of Claude Chabrol’s early features is Les bonnes femmes (1960), his fourth. Yet the film was a box office flop when it first appeared, widely attacked in France and elsewhere for being ugly, misanthropic, and cynical. And it might be fair to say that this response wasn’t so much superseded as reinterpreted in the years to come. For Les bonnes femmes is probably Chabrol’s most pessimistic work, harping relentlessly on vulgarity, boorishness, and cruelty. Focusing on four young woman who work from nine to seven at an electrical appliance store in Paris, the film offers a definitive look at what they want from life and how poorly they fare in their aspirations — culminating in a remarkable, ambiguous final sequence set in a dancehall, leaving everything up to the audience’s troubled imagination, about another young woman who isn’t identified at all dancing with an equally unidentified stranger.

Jane (Bernadette Lafont), the shopgirl who visibly expects the least from life, goes out carousing with a couple of men in an early sequence and virtually gets raped. Rita (Lucille Saint-Simon) looks forward to marrying her doltish fiancé who mercilessly coaches her to speak about Michelangelo when she meets his parents for lunch. Ginette (Stéphane Audran) sneaks off nightly to sing sappy songs in a black wig at a music hall, until her coworkers turn up one night and recognize her, thereby shattering her private identity. And Jacqueline (Clotilde Joano), the most self-contained and idealistic of them all, secretly in love with a stranger named André (Mario David) who silently follows her, finally meets him and goes off with him to the country on his motorbike, where he promptly strangles her to death.

If all that interested Chabrol and his screenwriter, the late Paul Gégauff was harrowing the viewer with grimness about the human condition, then this movie might have been the horror show its detractors claimed. Admittedly, Jacqueline’s fate is only the last of a string of deflating narrative stripteases that rhyme with a literal early striptease in a nightclub. An earlier one reveals that the personal fetish of an older woman in the shop is a handkerchief soaked with the blood of a guillotined sex murderer, treasured since her girlhood. Yet it’s significant that Jacqueline meets André only after he saves her from the “prank” of being pushed underwater repeatedly at an indoor swimming pool by the same two men who date-raped Jane at the beginning — a sequence showing that the difference between joking and killing, or between banal horror and ultimate horror, is sometimes only one of degree.

It’s worth adding that the creepy-lyrical sequence of Jacqueline’s murder in the woods was in effect reprised as the grand climax of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 13-part miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) — not as a facile piece of Hitchcockian irony but as a piece of tragic fatalism, more relevant to the detached viewpoint of a Fritz Lang.

DAISIES (1966)

This was written in the summer of 2000 for a coffee-table book edited by Geoff Andrew that was published the following year, Film: The Critics’ Choice (New York: Billboard Books). — J.R.

My favorite Czech film, one of the most exhilarating stylistic and psychedelic explosions of the 1960s, is Vera Chytilová’s  highly aggressive feminist farce Daisies, which erupts in all directions. At any given moment, shots can switch from luscious color to black-and-white to sepia to a rainbow succession of color filters, shatter into shards like broken glass, rattle through rapid-fire montages like machine-gun volleys, and leap freely between time frames and locations. While many American and Western European filmmakers during this period prided themselves on their subversiveness, it is quite possible that the most radical film of the decade, ideologically as well as formally, came from the East — from the liberating ferment building towards the short-lived political reforms of 1968’s Prague Spring.

Featuring two giggling, nihilistic 17-year-olds, both named Marie — a brunette (Ivana Karbanova) and a redhead (Jitká Cerhova) — Daisies does not have a narrative or even characters in the ordinary sense: Just a good deal of provocation that typically garners more laughter from the women in the audience than the men. (As a gender statement, it is many years in advance of the French New Wave, and only Celine and Julie Go Boating would learn from its example.) Chytilová, working collaboratively with cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera (her husband) and cowriter and art director Ester Krumbachová, underlines her feminist impulse by having her heroines indulge in several antiphallic gags, such as slicing up pickled cucumbers and bananas. (Food and/or drink appear in almost every scene.)

The film mainly intercuts between segments showing the girls in bikinis near a swimming pool, in their bedroom, in restaurants (usually wolfing down food with dirty old men in exchange for promised sexual favors that are never delivered — with the men in each case summarily and hurriedly sent home on trains), and in the county. The escalating sense of outrage culminates in a protracted free-for-all of the girls set loose in an enormous banquet hall containing the fanciest food imaginable. Constructed musically, the sequence develops from tentaive samplings of dishes to sinking hands into salads and sauces to wielding chickens, guzzling whisky, pigging out on pastries, and then slinging them at one another like Laurel and Hardy — the girls finally dancing on the table, smashing plates and glasses, and swinging gaily from a chandelier. (Some of this is suggestively played out to the Austrian national anthem.)  Even more transgressive is a speculative epilogue with the girls dressed in costumes made of newspaper tied with string returning to the scene of the crime and pretending to clean up all the carnage. Scraping food off the floor and heaping it back onto trays, they partially reassemble plates like jigsaw puzzles. Then the film ends, over newsreel shots of aerial bombardment, with a stinging title to suggest its moral: “This film is dedicated to all those who are horrified only by the sight of stomped-on lettuce.”

Overrated Solutions [L’HUMANITÉ]

From the Chicago Reader (June 23, 2000); also reprinted in my book Essential Cinema. — J.R.

L’humanité

Rating *** A must see

Directed and written by Bruno Dumont

With Emmanuel Schotté, Séverine Caneele, Philippe Tullier, Ghislain Ghesquière, and Ginette Allegre.

One of my favorite Italian novels, long out of print in English, is Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, a sort of Roman police procedural from 1946 in which the central crime never gets solved. The book is so beloved in Italy that it’s known simply as Il pasticciaccio (”the awful mess”), and when Gadda died in 1973 at the age of 79, it had gone through several editions.

William Weaver, who did the 1965 English translation, wrote in the preface that “Il pasticciaccio occupies in contemporary Italian literature the position that Ulysses, Remembrance of Things Past, and The Man Without Qualities occupy in the literature of their respective countries.” He also noted that many of Gadda’s other fictional works are “unfinished, but not incomplete. Even the briefest of Gadda’s fragments has its own curious wholeness; and if the ‘murder story’ aspect of Il pasticciaccio remains unresolved, one feels — at the end of this long, apparently ambling work — that it is better not to know who is responsible for the death of Signora Liliana. The reader feels that he has probed deeply enough already into the evil and horror of the world and that yet another, worse revelation of it would be more than the reader, the author, and the protagonist [Detective] Ingravallo could bear. Though students of Gadda’s work might not agree, one also suspects that his novels were born to be fragments, like certain imaginary ruins in Venetian painting, perfect parts of impossible wholes.”

On a busman’s holiday last month, I saw Pietro Germi’s 1959 adaptation of Il pasticciaccio, The Facts of Murder, at the Film Center and was disappointed but not surprised to find the plot “resolved,” the murderer uncovered. The feeling of infinitely expanding material in the novel had become not only finite in the film, but ultimately forgettable. On its own terms, the movie had many virtues, but it and the novel offer profoundly dissimilar experiences.

That led me to reflect on a few of the fundamental differences in how novels and movies are perceived. Kafka is allowed to leave all his novels unfinished — and, indeed, might not even be valued as much today if he’d forced conclusions on Amerika, The Trial, or The Castle. But Welles is castigated by most of his biographers for leaving a few of his films unfinished, and Eyes Wide Shut is automatically diminished in some people’s eyes for not having been fully mixed by Kubrick before he died. Similarly, we tolerate some paintings and symphonies having been left unfinished but not movies, the assumption being that their “formal” demands require some closure.

It’s an artistic double standard, and I believe certain films would be more honest and artistically and philosophically better if they’d been left unfinished. Unfortunately, the business of film distribution dictates that we generally don’t get to see unfinished films (Welles’s works are a prime example), and seeing only finished ones affects our expectations. It’s probably also true that some films only pretend to be finished, and that their real virtues are inextricably bound up with their unfinished qualities.

Foremost among the latter is Bruno Dumont’s powerful second feature, L’humanité, another police procedural, playing this week at Facets Multimedia. I hasten to add that the mystery in this case is solved at the end, and maybe it shouldn’t have been. Dumont himself seems open to this possibility when he writes in notes about the film distributed to the press:

“[Jean-Pierre] Melville used to say that the cop genre was a good vehicle.

“A police investigation is a sound movement…a dialectic: the quest for truth in a concrete and common expression, where it is innocently at work.

“The discovery doesn’t really matter. What counts is the movement: looking.”

I think Dumont’s film is unfinished in the sense that some paintings are; that is, some parts of the “canvas” are only sketched in while other parts are fully realized. As a mannerist portrait of a few individuals, it’s often amazing; as a spiritual statement about suffering in the contemporary world, it almost lives up to its title; for its blunt depictions of sex, it’s about as carnal in an unvarnished way as filmmaking can get; and as a visual rendering of an area of northern France (Dumont’s hometown, also the setting of his first feature, The Life of Jesus), it’s pretty impressive. But as a police procedural, it’s unsatisfying, far from being worked out in all its details.

Some of the details are even in direct conflict with some of the virtues I listed. For one thing, as Dumont pointed out in an interview with Toronto critic Mark Peranson, the film doesn’t qualify in any way as “realist,” though the nonprofessional actors and the locations may occasionally foster that impression — and lead one to expect a verisimilitude in the plot and the psychology of the characters that the film doesn’t furnish.

There’s nothing wrong about any of this. Given Dumont’s Dostoyevsky-like ambitions, it’s the most honorable sort of failing imaginable. Yet because it’s a movie and not a painting or a symphony, this failing has made some people angry. Last year a Cannes jury headed by David Cronenberg awarded L’humanité the grand jury prize and awards for best actor (Emmanuel Schotté) and actress (Séverine Caneele, in a tie with Rosetta’s Emilie Duquenne), and the international press was scandalized. That both Schotté and Caneele were nonprofessionals contributed to the outrage, but other issues relating to “professionalism” were also at play — above all, conformity to genre expectations. The dramatic payoff in Dostoyevsky is hardly the same thing as the dramatic payoff in a serial-killer mystery, and anyone looking for the latter clearly felt cheated.

The crime in L’humanité is the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl on her way home from school, and practically the first thing we see in the film is the anguished response of the hero, detective’s assistant Pharaon De Winter (Schotté), to seeing her naked body in a field. Not long afterward, Dumont tries to get us to share Pharaon’s trauma by focusing in close-up on her bloody crotch. Some of the remainder of this 148-minute film dutifully follows the investigation of the crime until an arrest is made, but the details of what happened and why never become a central concern.

The major focus is Pharaon, who lives with his mother and is silently though transparently smitten with his neighbor Domino (Caneele) — a factory worker who’s sexually involved with a loutish bus driver named Joseph (Philippe Tullier) and who frequently invites Pharaon along on excursions with her boyfriend. (She and Joseph are shown having sex three times in the film, something Pharaon accidentally witnesses once; but when she crudely offers to have sex with him he refuses.) We learn in passing that Pharaon had a girlfriend and a baby and “lost” both two years earlier, but no further details about them or what happened are forthcoming. This is perhaps the sketchiest detail of the film, and we may not even be able to accept it.

Some commentators maintain that Pharaon is unbelievable as a cop. My own small-town experience suggests that all kinds of people wind up in all kinds of jobs, but I’ll concede that he’s not entirely believable in some ways. I can at least buy that he’s sensitive, wide-eyed, and fairly ineffectual in most social situations. (An ironic and telling exception is when he breaks up a group of striking factory workers, Domino among them, who are trying to speak to the mayor.) Iconographically and poetically, he’s one of those tenderhearted “simple souls” we associate with D.W. Griffith — Richard Barthelmess’s nameless Chinese figure in Broken Blossoms (1919) is a key example — who are destined to be brutalized by the world at large, though Dumont doesn’t always idealize him. He’s a veritable stand-in for suffering humanity itself — critic Robin Wood maintains, with some justice, that this is a film “about Somalia, Kosovo, East Timor” and “school massacres,” among other things — and his practice of offering hugs to arrested criminals and to a doctor at a mental hospital is a good example of this movie’s periodic departures from realism. A more obvious example would be a brief shot that shows Pharaon levitating in his garden — a moment that places Dumont in the territory of Pier Paolo Pasolini (who created a comparable moment with Laura Betti in his Teorema) more than that of Robert Bresson.

Like Pasolini, Dumont seems to regard Christianity as a kind of continuing scandal. This implicit notion was also apparent in The Life of Jesus, which depicted a similar milieu of louts and sensitive souls in the same town in northern France, showed nudity and sex with the same carnal bluntness, and was similarly both broad and austere in its uses of sound (sparse and selective country noises) and image (’Scope framing with lots of empty spaces).

A fearless filmmaker, Dumont seems willing to risk using characters as metaphors for metaphysical states of being even when this plays havoc with the usual expectations of storytelling. As a stylist, he likes to linger over his characters and landscapes with the firm patience of a portrait artist, and to allow a kind of calm wisdom to emerge from his contemplative moments. (This film is hysterical only in its subject matter.)

L’humanité is above all a film of physiognomies: the hero’s ruddy-cheeked, overweight boss is a kind of earthy physical type we’ve hardly ever seen before in movies — at least not since the 30s, when, as Manny Farber once pointed out, people hadn’t yet got into the habit of jogging and “every shape was legitimate.” Big-boned, desultory Domino, hanging out in front of her house like a refugee from Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher, is an even more painterly subject who seems to luxuriate in her own Amazonian diffidence. Like Pharaon, both of these characters seem to suggest that if you ponder some parts of the world long enough and hard enough, solving a mystery becomes a pretty trivial business, because it doesn’t prove a thing.