this week in film and television

THE IDIOTS

A group of nonconformers battle the status quo in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots

THE IDIOTS (IDIOTERNE) (Lars von Trier, 1998)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, June 16
metrograph.com
mubi.com

I remember being fairly disgusted the first time I saw Lars von Trier’s 1998 film, The Idiots, about a group of men and women who pretend to be mentally ill in order to subvert bourgeois society. They “spass about,” going to restaurants, bars, a factory, a pool, and people’s homes and act like “retards” (their word, not mine), dribbling from their mouths, talking with speech impediments, and moving as if they have cerebral palsy. They pull off pranks that range from just plain silly to downright offensive, with no regret or apology. The film was booed at Cannes, then nominated for the Palme d’Or, while reviews praised and reviled it. However, over time, its reputation has grown, with more and more critics raving about its ingenuity and inventiveness.

The Idiots is the second Dogme 95 film, and von Trier’s only such movie, following a set of ten principles involving sound, light, acting, camera use, genre, location, and other elements, aiming for naturalism and immediacy without technical virtuosity. In the “Vow of chastity,” each filmmaker “swears as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a ‘work,’ as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations.”

The film is now back in a twenty-fifth anniversary 4K remaster that on the surface would appear to violate at least the spirit of those rules. Opening at Metrograph on June 16 before streaming on MUBI, The Idiots still challenges good taste, but it’s more difficult to merely dismiss it as some kind of goof gone wrong as the political correctness of the 1990s evolves into the wokeism of the 2020s. However, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not profoundly offensive to the disabled community. Are we allowed to think that some of the inanity is funny in this blackest of black comedies? I let out one belly laugh that shook my body, but I grimaced a lot more than I smiled.

Stoffer (Jens Albinus) is the ersatz leader of this group of misfits, which includes Susanne (Anne Louise Hassing), Henrik (Troels Lyby), Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), Josephine (Louise Mieritz), Ped (Henrik Prip), Miguel (Luis Mesonero), Axel (Knud Romer Jørgensen), Nana (Trine Michelsen), and Katrine (Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis), who have left their boring, materialistic, conventional lives as doctors, advertising executives, and parents in order to challenge the status quo. After pulling a stunt at a fancy restaurant in part to skip out on the bill, they are joined by Karen (Bodil Jørgensen), a quiet woman who seems lost in the world; she is essentially the cinematic representative of the audience, wondering if what they’re doing is disgraceful, exciting, or important.

A key exchange takes place in the woods, about twenty minutes into the film:

Karen: Why do they do it?
Nana: That’s a bloody good question.
Stoffer: They’re searching for their inner idiot, Karen. What’s the idea of a society that gets richer and richer when it doesn’t make anyone happier? In the stone age, all the idiots died. It doesn’t have to be like that nowadays. Being an idiot is a luxury, but it is also a step forward. Idiots are the people of the future. If one can find the one idiot that happens to be one’s own idiot. . . .
Karen: But there are people who really are ill. It’s sad for the people who are not able like us. How can you justify acting the idiot?
Stoffer: You can’t.
Karen: I would just like to . . . understand.
Stoffer: Understand what?
Karen: Why I’m here. Why I am here.
Stoffer: Perhaps because there is a little idiot in there — that wants to come out and have some company. Don’t you think?

The Idiots have taken up residence in a large house owned by Stoffer’s uncle, Svend (Erik Wedersøe), who is trying to sell it and is thus pretty unenthusiastic about how his home is being ransacked. Even a local councilman (Michael Moritzen) stops by to see just what the hell is going on. But that doesn’t stop them from continuing their exploits, although the plot heats up when Stoffer insists that some of them go back to their actual lives and still “spass” out. “Either you’re an idiot or you aren’t,” Stoffer proclaims. Editor Molly Malene Stensgaard occasionally cuts to several of the Idiots on a couch as if they are on a reality show, discussing something that went wrong but skirting around the details.

Perhaps the most important statement is made by Axel, who announces with disdain at a turning point, “Here comes reality.”

The 110-minute film features plenty of nudity (including an orgy scene with close-ups of penetration by unidentified porn actors), multiple scenes where the boom mic is visible, and even a shot in which we can see von Trier in a window reflection, holding the camera. There’s also incidental music, which Dogme 95 generally disallows, but von Trier has Kim Kristensen play Camille Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” on the melodica live, just out of visible range, so it was deemed acceptable.

Twenty-five years later, I’ve come to terms with the film. While I can endorse such other controversial von Trier projects as Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Zentropa, Dogville, The Element of Crime, Nymphomaniac, Melancholia, and Antichrist — many of which are now available on MUBI — I can’t unequivocally recommend The Idiots, but there is much more to it than I initially wanted to realize. It is still offensive; the disabled and young people brought up to be aware of the rights of the disabled especially might not appreciate the use of some of the language, highlighted by a word that recently popped up in songs by Beyoncé and Lizzo that they both had to apologize for and replace with an alternate lyric.

But in a world of vast income inequality, critical issues with mental health, viciousness on social media, and cancel culture, The Idiots now feels more radical than ever, with a deeply emotional, unforgettable finale.

“Idiocy is like hypnosis or ejaculation: If you want it, you can’t have it — and if you don’t want it, you can,” von Trier, whose parents both worked for the social ministry, told journalist Peter Øvig Knudsen about the film, which is meant to provoke. And provoke it still does, a quarter century after its debut.

KAGAMI

Ryuichi Sakamoto extends his legacy with jaw-dropping Kagami at the Shed (photo courtesy Tin Drum)

KAGAMI
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 9, $33-$38
646-455-3494
theshed.org

“I honestly don’t know how many years I have left,” composer, musician, producer, and environmental activist Ryuichi Sakamoto says in the 2017 documentary Coda. “But I know that I want to make more music. Music that I won’t be ashamed to leave behind. Meaningful work.”

The Tokyo-born Oscar and Grammy winner died this past March 28 at the age of seventy-one, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to see him perform live — sort of — ever again. Over the last nine years of his life, Sakamoto battled various types of cancer. Knowing his time on Earth was limited, he continued working, releasing the album async in 2017 and 12 just before his death, composing the scores for such films as The Revenant, Rage, The Fortress, and Love After Love, and preparing the cutting-edge project Kagami, which opens today at the Shed in Hudson Yards.

On the wall outside the theater, Sakamoto writes:

There is, in reality, a virtual me.
This virtual me will not age, and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries.
Will there be humans then?
Will the squids that will conquer the earth after humanity listen to me?
What will pianos be to them?
What about music?
Will there be empathy there?

Empathy that spans hundreds of thousands of years.
Ah, but the batteries won’t last that long.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, director Todd Eckert, and Rhizomatiks work behind the scenes on Kagami (photo courtesy Tin Drum)

Kagami is a spectacular, breathtaking mixed-reality concert experienced with specially designed optically transparent devices, making it appear that Sakamoto is playing live piano, enveloped in augmented reality art. Visitors are first led into a room in the repurposed Griffin Theater with large-scale posters of Sakamoto and a screening of clips from Coda, in which he wanders through a lush forest and the Arctic, searching for the harmonies and melodies of nature. Sitting by a hole in the ice, he dips a microphone into the water and says, “I’m fishing with sound.”

The group of no more than eighty next enter another space, where chairs are set up in one row around a central area with cubic markings on the floor. Each person receives tight-fitting goggle-like glasses and, suddenly, a hologram of Sakamoto appears in the middle of the room, seated at his Yamaha grand piano; he was volumetrically captured in December 2020, during the height of Covid, by director Todd Eckert and his Tin Drum collective, which previously made the mixed-reality installation The Life with Marina Abramović.

The audience is warned before the show starts that the technology is not perfect — it turns out that the hologram is not very sharp, and it’s difficult to understand what Sakamoto says in brief introductions to two of the songs — but it’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous nonetheless. The fifty-minute concert begins with the jazzy “Before Long” from the 1987 album New Geo; as the white-haired Sakamoto tickles the ivories, smoky clouds rise from the floor and float in the air. Near the end of the number, one audience member got up and walked over to the image of Sakamoto at the piano. A few others, including me, soon joined him, and more followed. As Sakamoto played the ethereal, New Agey “Aoneko no Torso” from 1995’s Smoochy, I approached Sakamoto and slowly sauntered around the piano, seeing the maestro from all different angles, close enough to determine the length of his fingernails and follow his eye movement. Even though he’s slightly out of focus, it’s hard to believe he’s not really right there, questioning reality itself as a construct. Although you could walk through him, no one did, as if out of respect.

Over the next several songs, ranging from “The Seed and the Sower” and the title track from the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, “Andata” from async, “Energy Flow” and “Aqua” from 1999’s BTTB, and “MUJI2020” from the “Pleasant, somehow” campaign about humanity’s responsibility to the environment, raindrops created ripples in a pond at our feet; diagonal neon lights hovered ominously over our heads; snowflakes fluttered by; multiple screens projected archival black-and-white footage of old cities and a snowstorm; and a tree grew out of the piano, its roots then digging far into the ground, mimicking the circulatory system. The highlight was when the Griffin became like the Hayden Planetarium, with stars and constellations everywhere and the spinning earth underneath, making me feel like I was floating in the air, a wee bit dizzy until I let the music bring me back.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the technology is its ability to essentially allow you to see right through anyone standing in front of you. At a concert with a real pianist, if a tall person gets in your way, you can’t see the performer. But here, they are like ghosts; you can make out their outlines but still have a clear path to Sakamoto. Of course, the other people are actually there, so you have to avoid bumping into them by using your peripheral vision.

Kagami means “mirror” in Japanese, and the show certainly makes you look at who you are both as an individual and as part of the greater environment. The special effects cause sensations reminiscent of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s thrilling Infinity Rooms, which use lights and mirrors to extend visions of our universe. The presentation is no mere money grab by an estate trying to resurrect their dead cash cow with posthumous holographic tours. Kagami is an intricately designed multimedia installation that the artist was deeply involved in; Sakamoto fashioned his own unique legacy, pushing the boundaries yet again, playing one last concert that can last forever, or at least as long as the planet he so loved and protected is still here and the batteries last.

PRIDE REVISED — LINES AND CURVES, DRAWN AND MOVING: THE WATERMELON WOMAN

THE WATERMELON WOMAN

Cheryl Dunye wrote, directed, edited, and stars in The Watermelon Woman

THE WATERMELON WOMAN (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, June 14, 5:30 & 7:30
Series continues through
212-255-224
quadcinema.com

“The idea came from the real lack of information about the lesbian and film history of African American women. Since it wasn’t happening, I invented it,” Cheryl Dunye says about her 1996 debut, The Watermelon Woman, which underwent a twentieth-anniversary 2K HD restoration in 2016. In the film, the first feature by a black lesbian, Dunye plays herself, a twenty-five-year-old black lesbian working at a video store with her goofy best friend, Tamara (Valerie Walker). Searching for a topic to make a movie on, Cheryl becomes obsessed with an actress who played a mammy in Plantation Memories and other 1930s films. The actress was listed in the credits as the Watermelon Woman; Cheryl decides to find out more about her, going on a journey in and around her hometown of Philadelphia, discovering more and more about the actress, also known as Fae Richards, and the battle black lesbians had to fight in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. In the meantime, Cheryl begins a relationship with Diana (Guinevere Turner), a privileged white woman who has just moved into the area, mimicking what Cheryl has found out about Richards, who had an affair with white director Martha Page.

THE WATERMELON WOMAN

Diana (Guinevere Turner) and Cheryl Dunye (as herself) stars a relationship in The Watermelon Woman

The Watermelon Woman suffers from amateurish filmmaking techniques (Michelle Crenshaw was the cinematographer, while Dunye served as editor as well as writer, director, and star), but its central issue is a compelling one, and Dunye is engaging as her onscreen alter ego. Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson) and Page (producer Alexandra Juhasz) are seen only in photographs and archival footage shot by white lesbian artist Zoe Leonard (her photography assistant was Kimberly Peirce, who went on to make Boys Don’t Cry), while Doug McKeown (The Deadly Spawn) directed the scenes from fake movies Plantation Memories and Soul of Deceit. (The photographs became an art project of its own, touring museums around the world.) The film features numerous cameos by writers, musicians, and activists, including Camille Paglia as herself, V. S. Brodie as a karaoke singer, Sarah Schulman as the CLIT archivist, David Rakoff as a librarian, and Toshi Reagon as a street singer. The Watermelon Woman is a heartfelt tribute to black lesbians by a black lesbian who is restoring one woman’s true identity as a microcosm for all black women who have had theirs taken away. In addition, the film became part of an attempt by certain congressmen to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, which supplied a $31,500 grant to Dunye; Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra, head of the House Education and Workforce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, singled the film out as offensive. The Watermelon Woman is also a reminder of what research was like pre-Google, less than thirty years ago. Dunye has gone on to make such films as Stranger Inside, Black Is Blue, Mommy Is Coming, and My Baby’s Daddy, continuing her exploration of multiracial, gay, and trans culture. The Watermelon Woman is screening June 14 at the Quad as part of the series “Pride Revived: Lines and Curves, Drawn and Moving”; the 7:30 show will be introduced by film critic, comedian, and podcaster Jourdain Searles. Also on the schedule are Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason on June 12, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema on June 13, and Jack Sholder’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge on June 14.

THE RETURN OF THE RISE AND FALL, THEN BRIEF AND MODEST RISE FOLLOWED BY A RELATIVE FALL OF . . . JEAN CLAUDE VAN DAMME

Joe Cordaro and John Harlacher star in Timothy Haskell’s semibiographical play about Jean Claude Van Damme (photo by Nathaniel Nowak)

THE RISE AND FALL, THEN BRIEF AND MODEST RISE FOLLOWED BY A RELATIVE FALL OF . . . JEAN CLAUDE VAN DAMME AS GLEANED BY A SINGLE READING OF HIS WIKIPEDIA PAGE MONTHS EARLIER
Brooklyn Art Haus
24 Marcy Ave., Brooklyn
Sundays, June 11 – July 16, $25 (opening night $20 with code FACEKICK23), 7:00
www.bkarthaus.com

Last June, I saw — well, experienced might be a better word — Timothy Haskell’s spectacularly titled The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of . . . Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of His Wikipedia Page Months Earlier at the Pit Loft. It’s now back for an encore run on Sunday nights at the Brooklyn Art Haus, from June 11 through July 16. Below is my original review, but you don’t need to read it if the name of the show already has you hooked. Just go, especially with tickets only twenty-five bucks (plus, you can save a fin on opening night with code FACEKICK23). But do tell Mr. Haskell that twi-ny sent you.

———————————————————————————————————————————————

I’ve seen so many meticulously researched plays about real-life figures and situations, wondering what is actually true and what has been tweaked — or just plain made up — for dramatic effect, that Timothy Haskell’s new work is a breath of fresh air. The title explains exactly what you’re in for: The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of . . . Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of His Wikipedia Page Months Earlier. Haskell checked out Jean Claude Van Damme’s relatively lengthy Wikipedia entry, then, a few months later, wrote a play based only on what he could remember, without doing any further reading or fact checking. “Absolutely no research was put into learning anything about the subject at hand,” we are told early on. “It was all gleaned from one cursory glance at his Wikipedia page, and just general knowledge of the man based on tabloid headlines.”

The result is a breezy, extremely funny look at fame, ambition, gossip, and celebrity, gleefully codirected by Haskell, set designer Paul Smithyman, and puppet master Aaron Haskell (Timothy’s brother). For about an hour, John Harlacher and Joe Cordaro, standing behind makeshift podiums, share the not-necessarily-true story of the Muscles from Brussels. Between them is an angled table with slots where they place cardboard cutouts on Popsicle sticks of Van Damme and people who have been part of his personal life and professional career — or have nothing to do with him. Behind them is a small “screen” on which they project photos and a few choice film clips, including a fantastic moment from 1984’s Breakin’ with Van Damme as an uncredited background extra.

Both actors play multiple roles, but the hirsute Harlacher (Bum Phillips, Dog Day Afternoon) is mainly the narrator, meandering through his overstuffed, disorganized notebook, while Cordaro (The Foreigner, The Tiny Mustache) is mostly the former Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg, reacting to what the narrator says and occasionally taking center stage to act out various scenes, including JCVD’s infamous barfight with Chuck Zito.

Timothy Haskell and the narrator make no bones about what went into the scattershot though chronological show, which has a proudly middle school DIY aesthetic. Introducing the Breakin’ clip, the narrator explains, “There’s a pretty fun YouTube remix our author was lucky enough to stumble upon while limply researching another play about the movie Breakin’ that some guy did that looks like this.” The two actors dance along with JCVD, after which the narrator rhetorically asks, “Isn’t that fun?” Yes it is!

Repurposed action figures play a pivotal role in JCVD show at Brooklyn Art Haus (photo courtesy Aaron Haskell)

Commenting on JCVD’s battle with drugs, the narrator admits, “As for Jean Claude, he did that stupid thing in Breakin’ and then toiled away some more and did a ton of bullshit and got all kinds of high. Not on life either, brother. The man was a straight up smack head if smack head means you did lots of cocaine which the author is now not sure it does. Fed up and high as a Romanian glue-huffer he decided to make some bold moves. He decided to case Joel Silver’s office. Joel Silver was the producer of Road House starring Patrick Swayze that was later turned into a hit play by Timothy Haskell who thought after that he could do serious work but was wrong.”

As JCVD’s career rises and falls and rises and falls and so on, we (sort of) learn about his siblings, his wives, his martial arts mentors and heroes, his perhaps partially fabricated tournament record, and his hotly anticipated confrontation with Steven Seagal. We go behind the scenes of such films as Bloodsport, Kickboxer, Universal Soldier, and Timecop. Oh, and there is plenty of fighting, carried out by Cordaro and Harlacher with repurposed action figures, designed by Aaron Haskell, battling it out on a long, narrow fencing piste at the front of the stage. It’s like watching two young friends playing in the basement with their GI Joe dolls — the ones with kung fu grip, of course.

As a founding member of Psycho Clan, Haskell has presented such immersive horror experiences as This Is Real, Santastical, and I Can’t See. He has also directed James and the Giant Peach, Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy, Road House: The Stage Play, and the upcoming graffiti drama Hit the Wall.

In an April 2014 twi-ny talk about his interactive Easter-themed eggstravaganza, Full Bunny Contact, I asked him, “What happened to you as a child? Based on the kinds of shows and events you write, produce, direct, and create, there had to be some kind of major trauma involved.” He replied, “Nothing unusual. My mother says she dropped a toy Ferris wheel on my head, and anytime I do something unusual she blames herself for dropping a heavy toy on my noggin.” That could explain this new work as well.

The show concludes with an extended monologue by JCVD, who begins by warning, “I know what happened. I am me. I don’t need to read a Wikipedia page to know who I am. I did, however. Thoroughly. Ya know, for safety.”

There’s nothing safe about The Rise and Fall, Then Brief and Modest Rise Followed by a Relative Fall of . . . Jean Claude Van Damme as Gleaned by a Single Reading of His Wikipedia Page Months Earlier. But there is a whole lot that is hilariously entertaining. And that person sitting behind you, laughing even harder than you, just might be Timothy Haskell himself.

OZU 120 — A COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE

Film Forum is hosting a complete retrospective of the work of Yasujirō Ozu in honor of the 120th anniversary of his birth and 60th anniversary of his death

OZU 120: A COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
June 9-29
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

While it is never a bad time to celebrate the genius of Japanese auteur Yasujirō Ozu, now seems a particularly potent moment, with partisan politics and social media tearing friends and families apart, corporations gaining more and more power and wealth, and education under attack across America. From June 9 to 29, Film Forum is hosting “Ozu 120: A Complete Retrospective,” consisting of all three dozen of his extant works, in honor of the 120th anniversary of his birth, on December 12, 1903, and the 60th anniversary of his death on his birthday in 1963. It is no coincidence that six of the films have references to family members in their titles and another dozen involve youth and the passing of time over the course of a day and the seasons of the year.

The Tokyo-born writer, cameraman, and director made poignant “common people’s dramas,” known as shomin-geki, that penetrated deeply into the relationships among husbands and wives, children and parents, and bosses and employees, presenting honest portraits with care and intelligence. Interestingly, Ozu never married and never had kids of his own. His magnificent, meditative films feature long interior takes, little action, and few camera movements, letting the story unfold at its own pace, often photographed from low camera angles that came to be called tatami shots, from the point of view of someone kneeling on a tatami mat.

On June 19, the screenings of I Was Born, But . . . and a fragment of the short film A Straightforward Boy will be accompanied by live music by pianist and composer Makia Matsumura and a performance by master benshi Ichiro Kataoka. The June 20 showing of Tokyo Twilight will be introduced by Asian-American International Film Festival programming manager Kris Montello. Keep watching this space for more reviews of films from this must-see retrospective.

LATE SPRING

Father (Chishu Ryu) and daughter (Setsuko Hara) contemplate their future in Yasujirō Ozu masterpiece

LATE SPRING (BANSHUN) (Yasujirō Ozu, 1949)
Film Forum
June 9, 10, 11, 13, 28
filmforum.org

A masterpiece from start to finish, Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring marked a late spring of sorts in the Japanese auteur’s career as he moved into a new, post-WWII phase of his long exploration of Japanese family life and the middle class. Based on Kazuo Hirotsu’s novel Father and Daughter, the black-and-white film, written by Ozu with longtime collaborator Kogo Noda, tells the story of twenty-seven-year-old Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who lives at home with her widower father, Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a university professor who has carved out a very simple existence for himself. Her aunt, Masa (Haruko Sugimura), thinks Noriko should get married, but she prefers caring for her father, who she believes would be lost without her. But when Somiya starts dropping hints that he might remarry, like his friend and colleague Jo Onodera (Masao Mishima) did — a deed that Noriko finds unbecoming and “filthy” — Noriko has to take another look at her future.

Late Spring is a monument of simplicity and economy while also being a complex, multilayered tale whose every moment offers unlimited rewards. From the placement and minimal movement of the camera to the design of the set to the carefully choreographed acting, Ozu infuses the work with meaning, examining not only the on-screen relationship between father and daughter but the intimate relationship between the film and the viewer. Ozu has a firm grasp on the state of the Japanese family as some of the characters try to hold on to old-fashioned culture and tradition while recovering from the war’s devastation and facing the modernism that is taking over.

LATE SPRING

Late Spring is part of month-long festival at Film Forum celebrating the work of director Yasujirō Ozu

Hara, who also starred as a character named Noriko in Ozu’s Early Summer and Tokyo Story, is magnificent as a young woman averse to change, forced to reconsider her supposed happy existence. And Ryu, who appeared in more than fifty Ozu films, is once again a model of restraint as the father, who only wants what is best for his daughter. Working within the censorship code of the Allied occupation and playing with narrative cinematic conventions of time and space, Ozu examines such dichotomies as marriage and divorce, the town and the city, parents and children, the changing roles of men and women in Japanese society, and the old and the young as postwar capitalism enters the picture, themes that are evident through much of his remarkable and unique oeuvre.

PASSING FANCY

Takeshi Sakamato makes the first of many appearances as Kihachi in Yasujirō Ozu’s Passing Fancy

PASSING FANCY (DEKIGOKORO) (出来ごころ) (Yasujirō Ozu, 1933)
Film Forum
Sunday, June 11, 4:40
filmforum.org

Yasujirō Ozu might not have been keen on the latest technology — he made silent films until 1936, and his first color film was in 1958, near the end of his career — but there’s nothing old-fashioned about his mastery of camera and storytelling, as evidenced by one of his lesser-known comedy-dramas, Passing Fancy. Takeshi Sakamato stars as Kihachi, a character that would go on to appear in such other Ozu works as A Story of Floating Weeds, An Inn in Tokyo, and Record of a Tenement Gentleman. The film opens at a rōkyoku performance, where the audience is sitting on the floor on a hot day, mopping their brows and fanning themselves; Kihachi has an ever-present cloth on his head, looking clownish, a small boy with an injured eye who turns out to be his son, Tomio (Tokkankozo), sleeping by him. Foreshadowing Bresson-ian precision, Ozu and cinematographers Hideo Shigehara and Shojiro Sugimoto follow a small, lost change purse as several men inspect it, hoping to find money in it, then toss it away when it comes up empty. The scene establishes the pace and tone of the film, identifies Kihachi as the protagonist, and shows that there will be limited translated text and dialogue; in fact, Ozu never reveals what happened to Tomio’s eye. After the performance, Kihachi and his friend and coworker at the local brewery, Jiro (Den Obinata), meet a destitute young woman named Harue (Nobuko Fushimi). An intertitle explains, “Everyone years for love. Love sets our thoughts in flight.” Kihachi, a poor, single father, helps Harue get a place to stay and a job with restaurant owner Otome (Chouko Iida), hoping that Harue will become interested in him, but she instead takes a liking to the younger Jiro, who wants nothing to do with the whole situation, believing that Harue is using them.

PASSING FANCY

The relationship between father (Takeshi Sakamato) and son (Tokkankozo) is at the heart of Passing Fancy

Ozu follows them all through their daily trials and tribulations — with hysterical comic bits, including how Tomio wakes up Kihachi and Jiro to make sure they’re not late for work — but things take a serious turn when the boy becomes seriously ill and Kihachi cannot afford to pay for the care he requires. Winner of the 1934 Japanese Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film — Ozu also won in 1933 for I Was Born, But . . . and 1935 for A Story of Floating Weeds — Passing Fancy is filled with gorgeous touches, as Ozu reveals the stark poverty in prewar Japan, focuses on class difference and illiteracy, and displays tender family relationships, all built around Kihachi’s impossible, very funny courtship of Harue and his bonding with Tomio, since love trumps all. And yes, that man on the boat is Chishū Ryū, who appeared in all but two of Ozu’s fifty-four films.

Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) is a conflicted father-matchmaker in Yasujirō Ozu’s first color film, EQUINOX FLOWER

Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) is a conflicted father-matchmaker in Yasujirō Ozu’s first color film, Equinox Flower

EQUINOX FLOWER (HIGANBANA) (Yasujirō Ozu, 1958)
Film Forum
June 14, 17, 18
filmforum.org

Yasujirō Ozu’s first film in color, at the studio’s request, is another engagingly told exploration of the changing relationship between parents and children, the traditional and the modern, in postwar Japan. Both funny and elegiac, Equinox Flower opens with businessman Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) giving a surprisingly personal speech at a friend’s daughter’s wedding, explaining that he is envious that the newlyweds are truly in love, as opposed to his marriage, which was arranged for him and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka). Hirayama is later approached by an old middle school friend, Mikami (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu), who wants him to speak with his daughter, Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga), who has left home to be with a man against her father’s will. Meanwhile, Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto), a friend of Hirayama’s elder daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), is constantly being set up by her gossipy mother, Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa). Hirayama does not seem to be instantly against what Fumiko and Yukiko want for themselves, but when a young salaryman named Taniguchi (Keiji Sada) asks Hirayama for permission to marry his older daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), Hirayama stands firmly against their wedding, claiming that he will decide Setsuko’s future. “Can’t I find my own happiness?” Setsuko cries out.

The widening gap between father and daughter represents the modernization Japan is experiencing, but the past is always close at hand; Ozu and longtime cowriter Kōgo Noda even have Taniguchi being transferred to Hiroshima, the scene of such tragedy and devastation. Yet there is still a lighthearted aspect to Equinox Flower, and Ozu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta embrace the use of color, including beautiful outdoor scenes of Hirayama and Kiyoko looking out across a river and mountain, a train station sign warning of dangerous winds, the flashing neon RCA Victor building, and laundry floating against a cloudy blue sky. The interiors are carefully designed as well, with objects of various colors arranged like still-life paintings, particularly a red teapot that shows up in numerous shots. And Kiyoko’s seemingly offhanded adjustment of a broom hanging on the wall is unforgettable. But at the center of it all is Saburi’s marvelously gentle performance as a proud man caught between the past, the present, and the future.

THE END OF SUMMER

Ganjirō Nakamura is a sheer delight as the unpredictable patriarch of the Kohayagawa family in The End of Summer

THE END OF SUMMER (KOHAYAGAWA-KE NO AKI) (Yasujirō Ozu, 1961)
Film Forum
June 23, 24, 27
www.filmforum.org

Yasujirō Ozu’s next-to-last film, 1961’s The End of Summer, is a poignant examination of growing old in a changing Japan; Ozu would make only one more film, 1962’s An Autumn Afternoon, before passing away on his sixtieth birthday in December 1963. Ganjirō Nakamura is absolutely endearing as Manbei Kohayagawa, the family patriarch who heads a small sake brewery. The aging grandfather has been mysteriously disappearing for periods of time, secretly visiting his old girlfriend, Sasaki (Chieko Naniwa), and her daughter, Yuriko (Reiko Dan), who might or might not be his. In the meantime, Manbei’s brother-in-law, Kitagawa (Daisuke Katō), is trying to set up Manbei’s widowed daughter-in-law, Akiko (Setsuko Hara), with businessman Isomura Eiichirou (Hisaya Morishige), while also attempting to find a proper suitor for Manbei’s youngest daughter, Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), a typist with strong feelings for a coworker who has moved to Sapporo. Manbei’s other daughter, Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama), is married to Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi), who works at the brewery and is concerned about Manbei’s suddenly unpredictable behavior. When Manbei suffers a heart attack, everyone is forced to look at their own lives, both personal and professional, as the single women consider their suitors and the men contemplate the future of the business, which might involve selling out to a larger company. “The Kohayagawa family is complicated indeed,” Hisao’s colleague tells him when trying to figure out who’s who, an inside joke about the complex relationships developed by Ozu and longtime cowriter Kôgo Noda in the film as well as in the casting.

Akiko (Setsuko Hara) and Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa) represent old and new Japan in Ozu’s penultimate film

Akiko (Setsuko Hara) and Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa) represent old and new Japan in Ozu’s penultimate film

The End of Summer tells a far more serious story than Late Spring and many other Ozu films that deal with matchmaking and middle-class Japanese life, both pre- and postwar. The perpetually smiling Hara, who played unrelated women named Noriko in three previous Ozu films, once again plays a young widow named Akiko here, as she did in Late Autumn, while Tsukasa, who played Hara’s daughter in Late Autumn, now takes over the name of Noriko as Akiko’s sister. Late Autumn also featured a character named Yuriko Sasaki, played by Mariko Okada, who went on to play a woman named Akiko in Ozu’s final film, An Autumn Afternoon. Got that? Ozu’s fifth film in color, The End of Summer uses several beautiful establishing shots that incorporate flashing light and bold hues — including a neon sign that declares “New Japan” — photographed by Asakazu Nakai (Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Ran), as well as numerous carefully designed set pieces that place the old and the new in direct contrast, primarily when Akiko and Noriko are alone, the former in a kimono, the latter in more modern dress. But at the center of it all is Nakamura, who plays Manbei with a childlike glee, as if Ozu is equating birth and death, the beginning and the end.

A trio of yentas in LATE AUTUMN

Nobuo Nakamura, Ryuji Kita, and Shin Saburi play a trio of matchmaking yentas in Ozu’s Late Autumn

LATE AUTUMN (AKIBIYORI) (Yasujirō Ozu, 1960)
Film Forum
June 23, 24, 28
filmforum.org

Yasujirō Ozu revisits one of his greatest triumphs, 1949’s Late Spring, in the 1960 drama Late Autumn, the Japanese auteur’s fourth color film and his third-to-last work. Whereas the black-and-white Late Spring is about a widowed father (Chishu Ryu) and his unmarried adult daughter (Setsuko Hara) contemplating their futures, Late Autumn deals with young widow Akiko Miwa (Hara again) and her daughter, Ayako (Yoku Tsukasa). At a ceremony honoring the seventh anniversary of Mr. Miwa’s death, several of his old friends gather together and are soon plotting to marry off both the younger Akiko, whom they all had crushes on, and twenty-four-year-old Ayako. The three businessmen — Soichi Mamiya (Shin Saburi), Shuzo Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura), and Seiichiro Hirayama (Ryuji Kita) — serve as a kind of comedic Greek chorus, matchmaking and arguing like a trio of yentas, while Akiko and Ayako maintain creepy smiles as the men lay out their misguided, unwelcome plans.

Mamiya makes numerous attempts to fix Ayako up with one of his employees, Shotaru Goto (Keiji Sada), but Ayako wants none of it, preferring the freedom and independence displayed by her best friend, Yoko (Yuriko Tashiro), who represents the new generation in Japan. At the same time, their matchmaking for Akiko borders on the slapstick. Based on a story by Ton Satomi, Late Autumn, written by Ozu with longtime collaborator Kôgo Noda, is a relatively lighthearted film from the master, with sly jokes and playful references while examining a Japan that is in the midst of significant societal change in the postwar era. Kojun Saitô’s Hollywood-esque score is often bombastically melodramatic, but Yuuharu Atsuta’s cinematography keeps things well grounded with Ozu’s trademark low-angle, unmoving shots amid carefully designed interior sets.

TRIBECA FESTIVAL: RULE OF TWO WALLS

David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls celebrates the resilience of brave Ukrainian artists during a brutal war

RULE OF TWO WALLS (David Gutnik, 2023)
Thursday, June 8, SVA 2, 6:30
Saturday, June 10, Village East, Cinema 3, 2:45
Friday, June 16, AMC 19th St. East 6, Cinema 1, 5:15
Sunday, June 18, Village East by Angelika, 8:30
tribecafilm.com

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2023, the ProEnglish Theatre of Ukraine converted its black box space into a shelter for members of the theatrical profession and neighbors, began collecting food and medicine for the elderly, and continued to make art. On March 27, 2023, the Kyiv-based company teamed with Boston’s Arlekin Players Theatre to livestream a production of Harold Pinter’s The New World Order, a ten-minute play that deals with imperialism, totalitarianism, and hegemony, as a fundraiser as well as a bold statement about the resilience of the Ukrainian people and the power of art.

In April, Ukrainian American filmmaker David Gutnik went to Warsaw with his camera to interview Ukrainians who had been displaced by the war. Instead, he spent the next seven months in Ukraine, following artists who had chosen to stay. The result is the terrifying but life-affirming Rule of Two Walls, making its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, where Gutnik screened his feature film debut, Materna, in 2020.

The film, which mixes narrative with documentary, begins with the sounds of war — guns, bombs, sirens — and a couple in bed in Lviv, just waking up, seen in shadows and silhouettes. “My gallbladder hurts,” the man, Stepan Burban, says, as if oblivious to what is happening in his country. They both laugh, and the woman, Lyana Mytsko, says, “Why would it do that? Little Stepanko, ninety-five years old.” As an air raid alarm wails outside, Lyana gets up and opens the shades, revealing windows taped with large Xs, centered by Jewish stars, to protect it from explosions. “Set some tea,” Stepan suggests. On the window, they have written in black marker, “Sad Stupid World or No?” with a drawing of the sun peeking out from behind clouds. As news reports detail attacks and deaths, Stepan walks out onto his balcony and watches men playing soccer below.

Lyana is the director of the Lviv Municipal Art Center, where artists depict the war through painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, photography, video, and installation; the exhibition they are working on is called “Shelter,” which includes the work of Diana Berg, who explains that she made her pictures of a destroyed theater “to regain some control over all this crazy shit.”

Writer, director, editor, and cinematographer (with Volodymyr Ivanov) Gutnik takes viewers through a dangerous, still-burning recently bombed area with downed electrical wires and charred bodies; a recording session where Stepan is making a new song in which he defiantly declares, “Didn’t get to love enough, to live long enough, and I’m not sorry”; a basement where men and women prepare Molotov cocktails; the studios of radical artist and “convinced materialist” Bob Basset, who poses in postapocalyptic hardcore masks, and Kinder Album, whose stylistic watercolor visions of the fighting have such titles as Russian attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine could be a war crime and Dozens of civilians were killed by metal darts from Russian artillery; a group of locals working to safeguard a tall historical monument; and artist Bohdana Davydiuk pasting political posters out on the street and explaining, “There is a war, and there is a war for truth.”

Along the way, several members of the crew share their painful personal experiences of how the war has directly impacted their families.

Named after the advice that Ukrainians should seek shelter between two walls during attacks — one to stop projectiles, the other to block shell splinters — Rule of Two Walls is a harrowing look at the bravery of Ukrainians who refuse to give up to the Russians, instead defending their home and their culture against seemingly impossible odds. With death all around them — Gutnik includes several frightening scenes of mutilated, bloody, burning bodies — a group of brave creators forges ahead, fighting the only way they know how, through their art. It’s a devastating film with a gorgeously symbolic ending.

Rule of Two Walls is screening June 8, 10, 16, and 18 in the Tribeca Festival’s Documentary Competition; the first three shows will be followed by a Q&A with Gutnik, joined on June 8 and 10 by film participants and, on June 8, by executive producer Liev Schreiber, who cofounded BlueCheck Ukraine, a nonprofit that “identifies, vets, and fast-tracks urgent financial support to Ukrainian NGOs and aid initiatives providing life-saving and other critical humanitarian work on the front lines of Russia’s war on Ukraine.” In a statement, Tony winner and Emmy nominee Schreiber said, “In David’s film, I saw the embodiment of the resilience I observed during my time in Ukraine: the profound spirit, sense of nation and history emboldened by an existential war. As an artist in my own right trying to do all that I can to help Ukraine, I responded to the film’s focus on Ukrainian artists processing the brutality of the war while using their art to fight back. This honest and intimate portrait of the first months of the war resonates deeply with me.”

Meanwhile, Arlekin Players Theatre is livestreaming The Gaaga from a converted Boston restaurant June 8-18, a site-specific phantasmagoria written and directed by Ukrainian playwright Sasha Denisova, who has been living in Poland as a refugee. “In the first days of the war, I fled from Moscow, where the police came for me. Russia bombed Kyiv and my mother, Olga Denisova, who was born under the bombing of Kyiv on July 7, 1941. She refuses to leave and awaits victory in her home. During these months, I thought about what would give hope to me and those who fled the war. A trial of Putin and his government was the biggest expectation,” Denisova said in a statement.

As Album proclaims in the film, “No war can deprive us of our cultural heritage and traditions.”

THE STRANGE CASE OF UDO KIER: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

Udo Kier plays multiple roles in Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s unpredictably strange and wonderful homage to lost early cinema, The Forbidden Room

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson, 2015)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, June 3, 4:15
Series continues through June 4
anthologyfilmarchives.org
theforbiddenroom-film.com

Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room is a deliriously mesmerizing epic tone poem, a crafty, complex avant-garde ode to cinema as memory, and memory as cinema. An homage to the lost films of the silent era, it is the illegitimate child of Bill Morrison and David Lynch, of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, of D. W. Griffith and Josef von Sternberg. The impossible-to-describe narrative jumps from genre to genre, from submarine thriller to Western adventure to murder yarn, from romantic melodrama and crime story to war movie and horror tale, complete with cannibals, vampires, poisoned leotards, “valcano” eruptions, caged lunatics, butt obsession, squid theft, explosive jelly, a fantastical mustache, and skeletal insurance defrauders. Intertitles that often fade away too soon to decipher help propel the plot, contain lines from John Ashbery and the Bible, and blast out such words as “Deliverer of Doom,” “Diablesa!” and “Trapped!” Text in intricate fonts announces each new character and actor, including Maddin regular Louis Negin as the Sacrifice Organizer, Slimane Dazi as shed-sleeper and pillow-hugger Baron Pappenheim, Lewis Furey as the Skull-Faced Man, and Roy Dupuis as a “mysterious woodsman” determined to rescue captured amnesiac Margot (Clara Furey) from the evil clutches of the Red Wolves. Also involved in the bizarre festivities are Geraldine Chaplin, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Rampling, Maria de Medeiros, and the great Udo Kier in multiple roles.

Although shot digitally, the film explores photographic emulsion and time-ravaged nitrate while treating celluloid as an art object unto itself, looking like Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) and Johnson stomped on, burned, tore up, and put back together the nonexistent physical filmstrip. Thus, major kudos are also due Maddin’s longtime editor, John Gurdebeke, and music composers Galen Johnson, Jason Staczek, and Maddin himself for keeping it all moving forward so beautifully. The film was photographed by Benjamin Kasulke and Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron in alternating scenes of black-and-white, lurid, muted color, and sepia tones that offer constant surprises. The Forbidden Room might be about the magic of the movies, but it is also about myth and ritual, dreams and fantasy as it explores storytelling as psychodrama. Oh, and it’s also about taking baths, as Marv (Negin) so eagerly explains throughout the film. But most of all, The Forbidden Room is great fun, a truly unpredictable and original work of art that is a treat for cinephiles and moviegoers everywhere.

The Forbidden Room is screening on June 3 at 4:15 in the Anthology Film Archives series “The Strange Case of Udo Kier,” which continues through June 4 with such other Kier gems as Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, and Monika Treut and Elfi Mikesch’s Seduction: The Cruel Woman.