Reviews

Possibly one of the most ambitious works in the entire Japanese New Wave, and certainly Kiju Yoshida's most experimental film (to date). As Yoshida and lead actress Mariko Okada said when they gave their rather extensive introduction to the film, what they wanted to achieve with it was to not just portray the protagonist's history as an event of the past but rather place both his story and struggle and the audience on a same temporal plain. The results might have been a lot more successful for its time of release, but it's still a fascinating effort all along.

Essentially, the film treats the work and death of anarchist Sakae Osugi as seen through the eyes of two characters in different timelines, being his long-time lover Noe Ito (Mariko Osada) and a teenage couple living out his "free love" revolution, going over his biography, who discuss and propose different scenarios that may have happened during his life, such as a notorious event when he was stabbed by his wife which is replayed and deconstructed in an almost Rashomon-like fashion.

Yoshida mentioned in his introduction that he wanted to structure the film like a dream, in a place where we could flow freely from past to present and back again but in a manner that seemed to make a narrative/structural sense, like how we forget of these lapses while we dream even though they were there. I found it interesting how he made reference to these two timelines as almost separate events joined through a mere montage trick, however, when the actual way he solves this temporal obfuscation is by blending both timelines within the same mise-en-scene, like these characters and stories are merely a panel away from each other. The modern-day characters are surrounded by the locations that Osugi once inhabited, whereas the love triangle developed between Noe, Itsumi (a former lover of Osugi) and the revolutionary occur in locations that are highly artificial and clearly modern, but which also reflect Osugi's ever-growing disdain towards the world he lives in and his conceptions of "free love". It's this quality of juxtaposing temporalities is what gives it a more oneiric feeling to me than the mere disjointed structure with which this story fledges out.

Another point of interest which struck me as odd considering the way Yoshida introduced his film is that, whereas he appeared to act very reverently towards the anarchist and how he seemingly was interested in conserving his ideology and not reducing the man to yet another historical figure of whom to make another biopic from, there seemed to be a pretty critical, even satirical tone held throughout to his ideology. There are some sequences within where he freely speaks of his notions of love and government, but these come as firstly apparently shallow, and secondly as little more than a lot of charlatanry. He speaks and writes a lot about these ideals but later says he's unable to defend them publicly because he's constantly surveilled, while on other sequences he seems to completely alter or even outright reject his ideals just to make an argument to defend his love (or lack thereof) to a woman or another. On the other hand, the students doing the investigation are also living in a time where much of Osugi's conceptions of love are coming to fruition, but they do so from the hands of people who seem to do that as a means to clash against the past and little more, and whose musings sound a lot like the classic college lefty monologues which just repeat vapid speeches and ideals against the "system" while drinking a can of Coca-Cola and wearing Levi's jeans and Nike trainers. In a sense, I feel the film is a deliberate case study on the vanity and frivolity in revolution, all the while not taking away merits from the essence of these movements' essential ideals.

There is, I believe, one problem that defines just why this film was not the masterpiece that so many of Imamura's films were, and that's a problem with the aesthetic. The visuals in this film, the very complex narrative structure, they're all fascinating elements on their own accord, and it's likely that the film would have never been this wonderful without them, but unlike the work of the aforementioned filmmaker, all of this aesthetic innovation appears as a forced, individual element in the film. You never feel like it is something that blossoms naturally from the development of the themes and ideas, or from the position of the characters themselves. Often you're drawn into just how amazing the form is, to the point that you occasionally forget what is going on. It's like both what is being told and how it's being told exist in two very different through equally mesmerizing plains. Also, the way in which the present is depicted in the film is something that refers a lot back tot he time it was made, and nowadays one can't help but feel like the film is a product of its time as opposed to the timeless products of Imamura, Teshigahara, Shinoda, Kobayashi and the likes.

Either way, it's an excellent film all around, certainly the best, the most complex and enlightening work I've seen of Yoshida, a definitive milestone for anyone interested in the 60's Japanese scene.

A grand-scope experimental documentary about illegal immigrants in Europe, about their journey into Europe, their expectations and reality, and their methods to evade the law and fight deportation. Sylvain George captured himself all of these images through a span of five years, and from the sounds of it, we still haven't seen anything.

Some of the images, situations and testimonies are absolutely superb, I have to say. We hear many of these immigrants talking about their experience being stranded in a wayward boat in the Mediterranean Sea for weeks, we see them burn their fingerprints away in an almost ritualistic fashion involving them holding bright-red screws and metal shards, we see some brutal, in-detail confrontation with the French police, and more elements divided into many narratively unrelated sequences, told through this raw, highly-contrasted black and white photography, this strangely grimy editing, with sudden freeze-frames, black gaps and a back-and-forth montage between images that seem to belong of different times and places altogether, paired with a very harsh soundtrack made mostly out of heavily processing the ambient sounds in each location, occasionally bursting into sheer white noise produced by an amalgamation of heavily amplified field recordings, such as trucks, waves on a beach and the likes. Merzbow would be proud. The fact that there is no actual music or narration which tries to empathize with these characters also helps enormously in keeping a distant, observational point of view rather than become engrossed in their journey. In many ways it just lets the characters speak for themselves, and in the end you end up strongly sympathizing with them, but never feel pushed to doing so by the aesthetic devices the film employs.

There is one major fault with the film, though, which is that it is not only too long for something of its nature (155 minutes), but feels interminable as well. I credit this fault to the particular structure the film uses, in which we are offered with several five to ten-minute sequences that fade in and out from a black space, and which are united through little more than a thematic arc. All of these sequences hold value entirely on their own merit, they almost feel like they're independent of a more global structure, be it narrative or thematic, almost like a series of short films. They're not linked by linearity or events or people, they depict stories of people who are in a same situation but probably never once heard of the other, let alone saw each other face-to-face, and the fact that all of these sequences are unified by black spaces makes it impossible for the viewer to get a proper sense of closure or development at any part of the film. By the time you feel you've had enough, you're still never sure if that fade-out will not fade back in to yet another sequence, and so you find yourself with no idea of when the film may stop or for how long you've been watching, and hoping for the last ten-to-twenty fade-outs that that will be the last one. At a time I literally felt that I had misread its running time and that it was in fact somewhere along the four-hour mark instead.

Nevertheless, it is a hugely interesting watch, and I probably would've been even more fascinated had I seen this in chunks and not from start to finish.

Last year I was really surprised with the latest film of Niclas Winding Refn, Valhalla Rising, mainly because of how he was able to generate such a grand-scope epic with as minuscule a budget as he must've had. His production consisted basically of taking a group of actors, props and costumes into some stunning locations and start filming, just trying to capture the magnificence of those landscapes the best way they could. The result was somewhat awe-inspiring, a film that created some visions so epic that it made Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings look tiny and unimportant in comparison, almost like they had reversed budgets. in many ways, Meek's Cutoff does just that, although in turn it delivers a much, much better film as well.

The film is set during the travels through the Oregon Trail in 1845, where three families led by a contractual guide Stephen Meek get lost in the desert. Meek keeps saying they'll be there soon, but the route he promised took no more than two weeks to get through has already lasted for five, and they seemed nowhere close to the mountain pass they were aiming for. As he becomes more and more unreliable, and water starts running out, they come across a native, who they capture and want to force to have him lead them to water.

There are a couple of reasons why this reminds me of not only Valhalla Rising, but also Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath Of God before it. The most obvious connection between these films is that they all treat that notion of a group of people foreign to a particular land begin a journey through it and quickly lose their way, so much of the film we spend seeing them drift aimlessly through these landscapes, becoming more desperate about the growing shortage of food and water. Then, as I mentioned earlier, there's also the matter of the production scheme - Herzog did something similar when he made up these rafts and dressed a troupe of actors as conquistadores and went ahead and started telling his story. In the case of Meek's Cutoff, what we see throughout the entire film are a group of people, oxen and horses carrying a couple of wagons with them across some superbly shot arid landscapes, with the story needing only that to flesh out, but it is all so incredibly captured, so nicely treated from the sound and the atmosphere, that one can't help but be engulfed by what he's watching.

Much like Herzog and Winding Refn, though, what also makes this film work is that there is a constant sense of a metaphysical element working in the background. It is not just merely that these natural terrains hold an ancient charm to them, in a sense that you can almost imagine the world's history just by looking at them, but because all of these locations are heavily tinged by the native culture and beliefs, by their rituals and their own codes and languages. All throughout this journey, within each location one can notice several paintings on the rocks, carvings, and signs such as rocks piled up in an almost totemic fashion. This all becomes more apparent when the native character appears in the scene, and thus the protagonists are also forced to live with the culture and beliefs of this individual without being able to communicate with each other. There's an absolutely magnificent moment late in the film where a man falls down due to dehydration, and the native beings to spray sand on him and sing and everyone around him just looks. It's a sequence that reminded me a lot to that shot in Aguirre: The Wrath Of God where Aguirre is standing beside a man playing a traditional Andean melody on a panflute.

It's an absolutely wonderful film and I urge everyone to see it, a stunning meditation on the idea of the foreigner invading a land and culture he does not truly understand. The ending left me chills running down my spine.