Issey Ogata in “The Sun”
Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the “emperor taboo.” In the piece I refer to an article from 2018 that surveyed movies depicting or otherwise including the emperor in some capacity. Most of the titles mentioned in the article dwelled on World War II, meaning that the emperor under discussion was Hirohito, or Emperor Showa, as he is now called. One of the core reasons for the taboo as it applied to Hirohito is that, despite his renunciation of his divinity, older Japanese still felt him to be something of a god, and, in any case, postwar political thought at least entertained the idea that he was responsible for the war. So while most postwar films that addressed wartime subjects tread lightly around the emperor’s involvement, a few presented that involvement in clever ways that may have flown over the heads of studios and other self-censoring entities. A 1963 comedy called Haike, Tenno Heika-sama, starring Kiyoshi Atsumi of the Tora-san series, included one scene where the bumbling protagonist, newly arrived at a drill area where Hirohito was to appear, comically tries to sneak a peak at the emperor’s face, thus making fun of the whole divine aspect of the monarchy. Of course, the film itself does not show the emperor’s face. In the 1972 movie, Gunki Hata Meku Shita ni, which takes place in the South Pacific near the end of the war, a non-commissioned officer is executed for insubordination, and right before he dies he screams, “Tenno Heika!”, or “His majesty the emperor.” However, the doomed soldier does not add the customary “Banzai!”, an exhortation that expresses the speaker’s hope that the emperor’s reign will last 10,000 years. By leaving out the “banzai” part, the filmmakers signal to the audience that the soldier is not praising the emperor, but rather protesting him or making an appeal, either of which were forbidden before the end of the war.
The most famous non-appearance of Hirohito in a dramatic movie was in Japan’s Longest Day, a 1967 feature about the decision to surrender. In this film, the emperor was only shown from the back, and the situation was so sensitive that the identity of the actor who supplied that back was kept secret by the studio so as not to endanger his life. Notably, in the 2015 remake of the movie, the emperor was played by former idol singer Masahiro Motoki, who, of course, looks nothing like Hirohito, which may have been the point. It’s certainly the most open depiction of Emperor Showa ever attempted in a Japanese movie, but because Motoki is so well-known, there was no risk of people somehow identifying the image on the screen with the actual person being represented. In any case, certain traditionalists were still taken aback and protested accordingly.
Foreign filmmakers have no such taboo, but interestingly enough, Japanese emperors in Hollywood movies tend to be played by kabuki actors, as in The Last Samurai and Emperor. Perhaps it’s coincidental, but the pedigree of both kabuki stars and the imperial family are based solely on male lineage. The great exception is the comic actor Issey Ogata who played Hirohito as a mumbling, distracted little man in Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Sun, a decidedly non-Hollywood movie that found distribution in Japan despite itself. The casting, in fact, was more noteworthy than the film itself, which was so insular as to be almost meaningless in terms of shedding light on the emperor as an individual. He was definitely a man in the script, but his relationship to the war and, more significantly, his subjects was almost perversely vague.
This third exploration of the semi-fictional competition-friendship between the two British comedic actors, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, tries to get by on the pure momentum generated by the last installment, The Trip to Italy, which was and will probably remain the high point in the series about two insufferable entertainers tooling around the countryside on some publication’s dime sampling amazing food, accommodations, and scenery while bemoaning their respective personal and professional setbacks. Though Coogan and Brydon got much more mileage out of their considerable celebrity impersonation skills in Italy than they did in the original The Trip, where they simply traveled the English countryside and which was edited down from a TV mini-series, here the surrounding plot is so weak and gratuitous that you almost get the feeling the whole movie was built around these seemingly spontaneous attempts at one-upmanship in the mimicry arts, which peaks during a sequence in which Coogan, attempting to explain to two female acquaintances the importance of moor culture in Spain, is confounded by Brydon’s incessant impersonation of Roger Moore. The scene outdoes Ricky Gervais (also referenced at least twice in the movie, which is nothing if not incestuous about British comedy) in terms of wince-inducing faux hilarity, and you really just want it to stop as soon as possible.
It could be argued that we don’t need another biopic of Vincent Van Gogh, certainly the most cinematized painter of all time. And on the surface, Julian Schnabel’s treatment of the tormented Dutchman covers much of the same ground that previous movies have, at least temporally. He limits the film to the last year of Van Gogh’s life, but rather than dwell on his state of mind or what might or might not have happened during those last fateful, disputed months, he looks squarely at the work, which makes sense since Schnabel is a respected painter himself.
Ironically or not, the national film culture that has best represented post-millennial capitalist malaise has been China’s. Many, including me, will credit or blame Jia Zhangke with this development, but it’s really a function of the Peoples’ Republic’s almost schizophrenic approach to economic relativism, the idea that a fully communist regime can adapt market solutions to social policy. The latest piece of evidence proving how pointless this approach has been is Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, a nearly four-hour exercise in raging against walls. The movie is set in a town in northeast China that was once an important mining center and which now seems desperate to find any use for itself. This desperation is mirrored in the lives of four characters looking for a way out their difficulties—and out of the town—and not having any success.
As the poster boy for post-millennial transgressive French cinema, Gaspar Noe has a reputation that precedes him by miles, and while his newest outrage does nothing to confound that estimation, its musical pedigree makes it somewhat less distasteful, at least on the surface. Ugly things happen as they do in all Noe films, but the glaze of manic terpsichorean energy lightens it up substantially, making Climax not only Noe’s most watchable film but perhaps his wittiest as well.
One surprising thing I learned while watching Julian Schnabel’s movie about the last year of Vincent Van Gogh’s life was just how many paintings he produced. Sometimes he would finish a dozen in a week. This sort of superhuman output clashes with our image of a great painter, who we tend to think hesitates over every brush stroke. Van Gogh, who admitted he was an “animated” painter, just couldn’t help himself.
Hirokazu Kore-eda is Japan’s master of the middlebrow, and in that regard Shoplifters, the movie that cemented his international cred, is an outlier. Most of what has sustained his career in Japan is what can be safely called domestic potboilers—tales of family secrets that coast along on unchallenging ideas and solid craft. Kore-eda’s first non-Japanese film fits this pattern. It is a perfectly executed French middlebrow entertainment, though lighter on the sex than your average French middlebrow entertainment.
Leigh Whannell’s seeming homage to David Cronenberg pits an analog holdover named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green), who likes to listen to blues music on vinyl and rebuild classic cars, against the already arrived cyborg technology that rules the rest of his life in this approximation of our immediate future. As it turns out, Grey is married to a woman (Melanie Vallejo) who is totally into tech, and, in fact, works for a company that has a huge stake in this brave new world of AI and total interconnectivity. Eventually, this clash of sensibilities comes to a head, and Grey is left paralyzed after an accident involving a self-driving car.
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