Review: Hannah

Posted on February 4, 2019 by philipbrasor

Thematically and structurally similar to 45 Years, which also starred Charlotte Rampling as the wife of a man who undergoes a startling change in situation, Andrea Pallaoro’s heavily circumscribed character study is less emotionally involving but more evocative. Set in France, the movie keeps its focus on the title character, an unassuming and undemonstrative housewife whose husband (Andre Wilms), we gradually learn, is about to embark on a lengthy prison stay. The opening sequence, which finds Hannah dutifully packing a back for her spouse, is so devoid of dramatic signifiers that as the truth reveals itself the viewer may find himself questioning his eyes…though not his ears. There is virtually no dialogue for the first ten minutes or so.

The unnamed husband’s crimes are never explained, though in Hannah’s subsequent encounters with friends and family it’s easy to get an idea of the nature of his trasngressions. These encounters are situated in daily routines that include acting classes whose purport is purely expository. Indeed, Hannah seems as incapable of empathizing with fictional characters as she is with her husband’s alleged victims, though her son (Simon Bisschop) is explicit in his determination to have no more contact with his parents. Whatever sins the father committeed, the son sees the mother as complicit. To us she seems oblivious.

The difficulty of the movie is in Pallaoro’s decision to divorce these brief spurts of melodrama from the overall tone of the film, which is so evenhanded as to be almost hypnotic. At one point, while visiting her husband in prison, her stone face fads, but only for a second, when the husband hints that, of course, he isn’t guilty of the crimes he’s been accused of. If anything, Hannah’s steely demeanor may not just be a front to avoid thinking of her responsibility in the matter, but also a means of denying the obvious; and as the movie wears on her self-contained quietude takes on a desperate cast, a form of acting in and of itself, even if the only audience is herself. Her suffering is indirect; not a function of pain but rather one of avoiding pain. Pallaoro keeps the tension taut through intractable closeups and a sound design that reminds us that Hannah exists in the real world, even if she seems trapped in her own self-created hell. You wait for her to unravel. And wait some more…

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Hannah home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2017 Parner Media Investment-Left Field Ventures-Good Fortune Films

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Review: Burning

Posted on February 2, 2019 by philipbrasor

Before he became the most vital director of the Korean film renaissance, Lee Chang-dong was a successful novelist, and the most penetrating aspect of his movies is their unpredictable but nevertheless natural plot developments. In his two best films, Oasis (2002) and Poetry (2010), he sets up simple storylines that stress character interactions and then tests those interactions by setting off catastrophes that are both shocking and seemingly inevitable. Consequently, the melodrama that is so intrinsic to the Korean cinema sensibility feels neither sentimental nor contrived, making for the purest catharsis.

Burning is Lee’s first film as a director in 8 years, and this time he adapts someone else’s work, a short story by Haruki Murakami, which I haven’t read. Reportedly, Lee took the basic idea of the story, written in the early 90s, and made it relevant to South Korea right now. If the movie differs appreciably from his earlier work, it’s in the way he plays with thriller elements that may have been inherent in Murakami’s story. The most common complaint about Burning the film is the way the “mystery” propelling the plot is or isn’t resolved, and thus the motivations of the protagonist, a young, ineffectual would-be novelist named Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), remain unknown, though it doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to guess what those motivations are.

As with most Lee protagonists, Jong-su’s inner life is initially characterized as being inert. His annoying countenance usually presents an open mouth and eyes that rove as if trying desperately to make sense of his surroundings. He rarely responds to stimuli, spoken or otherwise, giving the impression he’s slow on the uptake. And yet, as he explains to Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seo), an old classmate he runs into while delivering merchandise to a department store where Hae-mi is doing promotional work in leather miniskirt and boots, he attended college where he studied creative writing. If no one seems surprised at this calling, it’s probably because no one seems to believe it. How could this guy, so incurious, make fictional worlds?

Jong-su could simply be an empty vessel, and one night of sex with Hae-mi gives him at least some sort of goal, which is to make her fall in love with him. She goes to Africa in an ambitious bid to learn about a certain tribe she’s read about, and while she’s gone he takes care of her cat, an animal he never sees, and masturbates in her empty apartment while thinking about her. However, when she returns, she’s with Ben (Steven Yeun), a rich, handsome, internationally savvy dude who befriended her overseas. Jong-su can’t quite get a handle on their relationship—are they lovers, just friends, or something in between? Jong-su obviously sees Ben as a rival, and not just for Hae-mi’s affections.

Plotwise, there isn’t much beyond this threeway dance of meaning, but when Hae-mi disappears without a trace, Jong-su falls into an obsessive pattern of stalking Ben and sinking deeper into his own fancies, which are opaque to the viewer even if Lee attempts to visualize them to a certain extent. The director’s game is to widen the socioeconomic gap between Jong-su and Ben without ever having either character comment on it, unless you consider Jong-su’s description of his rival as a “Gatsby” to be criticism. Actually, what he says is that there are a lot of Gatsbys in Korea these days, a situation that seems to perplex him, a lower middle class, marginally employed individual living for free on his family’s farm while his volatile father is tried for assault. Like his stalled literary career (we never see Jong-su write anything except a petition for leniency for his father), the social milieu of Burning feels stuck in neutral. No one and nothing seems to be going anywhere, including Ben, who doesn’t work and spends most of his days lounging around his high-rent Seoul pad, tooling aimlessly in his Porsche, and entertaining friends, many of whom are similar in demeanor to Hae-mi—or maybe that’s just us looking at them through Jong-su’s eyes.

This, to me, is Lee’s comfort zone, an ambiguous moral environment where one’s sense of right and wrong is a matter of improvisation, but if the characters in Lee’s past films eventually reached a state of grace without necessarily achieving happiness, Jong-su falls on the other side of the divide, and this would seem to be the Murakami effect. Certainly, the seminal scene where Ben, after smoking some weed, confesses to Jong-su that his hobby is burning down derelict greenhouses, feels straight out of Murakami, and Lee seems to accept that non sequitur as a challenge; not just in terms of fitting it into the plot, but in making it the central motif in a movie that smolders rather than burns—until the end, that is, when all bets are off.

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter (050-6868-5001).

Burning home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Pinehouse Film Co., Ltd.

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Review: The Front Runner

Posted on February 1, 2019 by philipbrasor

Pardon me if I initially confused Gary Hart with John Edwards. Though the two presidential candidates’ respective career-destroying sex scandals happened almost two decades apart, they tend to blur together in my mind. All those WASPy Democrats look alike, I guess.

However, the distinction is importnat, or, at least it is from director Jason Reitman’s point of view. Reitman and his co-scenarists, Matt Bai and Jay Carson, clearly believe Hart was railroaded by an overzealous press for an indiscretion that didn’t amount to much even in terms of the sex. The promotional campaign for The Front Runner wants you to see the “timeliness” of the film in the age of Trump, when sex scandals count for nothing any more. Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman), as the film’s trailer puts it, “changed American politics forever” by essentially martyring himself on the altar of principled adulthood. After that, Bill Clinton could get away with a lot, and though John Edwards didn’t, it’s mainly because he knocked someone up and didn’t have the moxie to hire a team that could play it down effectively enough. And forget about Trump.

Too cynical? The scenario is only convincing up to a point, and given how determinedly Reitman tries to ram it home, it feels forced and a bit tired. Much footage and production values are expended to prove the titular label: Hart barely lost to Walter Mondale for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and definitely, according to the film, had a more progressive and rational platform. He was thus perfectly positioned to win the nomination in 1988 after eight years of Reaganomics and right wing shrillness. The Colorado senator has it all, the smart stand on issues, the charisma, and, most importantly, the looks.

How this freight train of political inevitability gets derailed is told in a sketchy and not altogether convincing manner, but it is told with passion, which should count for something. As it happens, Hart separated from his wife, Lee (Vera Farmiga), for part of the campaign due mainly to her exhaustion. After all, she’d essentially been doing it for more than four years. Then two reporters for the Miami Herald, portrayed as dogs on the trail of a raccoon, reveal that a campaign worker, Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), had spent an evening and maybe the night at his single-guy apartment on the road. From there, the rest of the press, including the Washington Post, whose respected editor, Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina), at one point fondly remembers the days when reporters respected Jack Kennedy’s indiscretions, piles on with lots of innuendo that snowballs in the face of Hart’s intransigence. The problem for the viewer is that, despite Reitman’s demonization of the Fourth Estate, it’s difficult to get a bead on Hart. He’s definitely irresponsible for getting himself in this mess, but is he actually guilty? The fact that Reitman confuses the matter by insisting it’s nobody’s business doesn’t get to the heart of the movie’s point—Was Hart actually unfaithful and were he and his wife on the outs anyway? Of course, life is messy, but the movie is so adamant about taking Hart’s side that it gives the impression it’s playing fast and loose with history. It’s exciting and utterly frustrating at the same time.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Front Runner home page in Japanese.

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Review: The Wife

Posted on January 28, 2019 by philipbrasor

Glenn Close’s surprise Golden Globe win for Best Actress in a Drama already pegs Bjorn Runge’s film as a must-see mediocre movie, and, in truth, Close makes it worth your money. As the wife of blowhard writer Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), who is being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Close conveys her character’s mixture of horror and self-satisfaction with unusual delicacy. Why the wife of a man who is being feted for such an achievement has such polarized feelings is the question at the heart of the story’s conflict, and as high concept it’s a doozy, which is why the movie doesn’t live up to its star’s portrayal of the title character—Runge won’t leave well enough alone.

The first assumption the viewer makes about Joan Castleman’s ambiguous response to the announcement is that she’s finally forced to confront the fact that she has never loved her husband, despite the deceptively tender opening scene. As the directness of the title would seem to indicate, Joan’s position in this marriage is decidedly secondary, but the truth turns out to be even worse. Joan has not so much wasted her love on this man, but wasted her life and her native talents. The plot occasionally shifts into the past, when Joan was Joe’s student. He acknowledged her gifts as a fiction writer and eventually left his wife for her. But that act of adultery is not the source of Joan’s towering resentment, and as the scenes in Stockholm, where the couple repair to wait out Joe’s ascension into the Valhalla of world letters, play out in bars and hotel rooms, Joan’s feelings can no longer be denied, and Joe’s own guilt comes to the fore in very ugly ways. Based on a novel, the story didn’t really need to go any further than these sequences where husband and wife go at each other as if in an Edward Albee play, stabbing each other in the psyche with their pointed accusations of exploitation and self-serving monomania. The thing is, Joan’s hurt is real and justifiable. What Joe has done to her in his own passive-aggressive way is monstrous.

So why does Runge add a son (Max Irons) who tags along to present his own resentments about his stalled literary career? To further make the point that Joe is too full of himself to care about even his own flesh and blood? And why the unauthorized biographer (Christian Slater) who corners Joan in a restaurant to torment her with his theory of Joe’s fraudulent front and knowledge of his sexual indiscretions, both of which she is very familiar with and hardly needs to be reminded of? Is it a device to reveal Joe’s execrable personality, which is hardly necessary since we can see from the start that he’s a priggish asshole? It’s obvious that the core issue of the film is why Joan has put up with him all these years, and the movie gets to the solution mainly through Close’s performance. You can see her panic at the realization she’s wasted it all, and when a reckoning does come it’s appropriately apocalyptic, if not necessarily convincing when scrutinized thoroughly. (It helps that the movie is set in 1992, meaning that Joan is the product of an earlier era when women weren’t taken as seriously as they were later as writers, but it doesn’t help that much.) The Wife needs to be seen if only for proof that Glenn Close is one of the most accomplished actresses of her generation. But like Joe in relation to Joan, it’s not a fitting monument to her talents.

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

The Wife home page in Japanese.

photo (c) Meta Film London Ltd. 2017

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Media Mix, Jan. 27, 2019

Posted on January 27, 2019 by philipbrasor

Futenma air base

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the protocol relationship between Japan-Russia negotiations over the Northern Territories and the U.S. base issue in Okinawa. According to writer Koji Yabe, Japan is totally in thrall to the U.S. military and thus cannot make any assurances to third parties with regard to its own strategic interests if the U.S. doesn’t sign off on those assurances. The media, for the most part, buys into the government’s narrative of “hope”—that there is still a possibility that the Northern Territories will someday revert to Japanese sovereignty, and that the contested Henoko air base will mean the shutdown of the even more contentious Futenma air base—but that there is little chance that what they suggest is happening will actually come to pass.

What’s particularly galling about Yabe’s point is that his findings are not exactly secret. They are there for any journalist to see. During his Golden Radio conversation cited in the column, he talks at length about the so-called secret agreement behind the revised Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed in 1960, the one that essentially allowed the U.S. to carry nuclear weapons on its vessels when they came to Japan. Though at one time this agreement was classified, it has been common knowledge for a few decades now, and available for anyone to read and study. To Yabe, the dynamic outlined by the agreement informs the relationship between Japan and the U.S. military to this day. Nobusuke Kishi, Shinzo Abe’s grandfather, was prime minister when the secret agreement was signed two weeks before SOFA was concluded, but his successor, Hayato Ikeda, apparently was not informed about the agreement, so several years later when opposition lawmakers heard that nukes were being brought into Japanese harbors, they questioned the ruling party in the Diet, because it wasn’t allowed, and Ikeda firmly denied the rumors, thinking they weren’t true. The Americans became nervous, and then-ambassador Edwin Reischauer sat Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ohira down and explained the secret agreement to him and the use of the vague term “introduce”—as in “the U.S. will not introduce nuclear weapons on Japanese territory”—which was used in the public documents. The thing is, the U.S. thought the current Japanese administration knew about this, but apparently Kishi and his people didn’t tell anyone. From then on, the Liberal Democratic Party stuck to the secret agreement and pretended that nukes were not being carried by American submarines into Japanese harbors (as well as other nukes that didn’t become known until later). As a result, Japan was able to maintain its image as a nuke-free country and Eisaku Sato could win the Nobel Peace Prize for something—the storied three non-nuclear principles—that was basically a lie.

Yabe tells this story to reinforce his theory that Japan’s foreign ministry has absolutely no authority when it comes to negotiating with the U.S. on almost anything. Moreover, this idea is so deeply ingrained in the bureaucratic and political sensibility that the government has used it for its own ends. When Yukio Hatoyama became in 2009 the first non-LDP prime minister in more than a decade, he proceeded to realize his campaign promise to move the Futenma air base out of Okinawa, something the U.S. didn’t want. He was then visited by bureaucrats from the foreign and defense ministries who showed him something they called the U.S. military operations manual, which said that helicopter bases could not be situated more than 120 kilometers from a land forces base. Hatoyama was planning on shifting Futenma to Tokunoshima, which is more than 120 kilometers away. That’s why Hatoyama eventually dropped the idea for the move. As a result, his government collapsed and he resigned.

But, according to Yabe, there is no such manual. It was a story made up by bureaucrats who knew the U.S. would never go for Hatoyama’s plan to move the Futenma base off Okinawa. Yabe says the mass media knows about the bureaucrats’ lies, but never discuss it. Even Hatoyama seems to have accepted his fate. It’s no use trying to resist the Americans.

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Review: Suspiria

Posted on January 25, 2019 by philipbrasor

Few genres have become as formulaic as horror movies, and one of the better things you can say about Luca Guadagnino’s reimagining of Dario Argento’s 1977 slasher classic is that it avoids the cliches you expect. Unfortunately, it replaces them with other cliches, mostly from opera and political thrillers. In fact, it’s probably best not to categorize this new version of Suspiria as a horror film, since it will mislead fans of the genre—there’s not a whole lot of suspense, and rather than gore the film charges its shocks with unsettlingly bizarre visuals—and repel those who usually eschew horror movies, though even this latter group might find it difficult to swallow.

Having never seen the original, I approached it with an open mind and, since I don’t really like conventional horror, the movie exerted a certain peculiar fascination, though, to tell the truth, I really had no idea what was going on from scene to scene and would have a very hard time trying to explain the plot in detail. The story takes place in Berlin in the autumn of 1977, when West Germany was going through political upheaval due to antics by the likes of the Red Army Faction. A member of a local avant garde dance troupe, Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), consults with an elderly psychiatrist (Tilda Swinton with tons of makeup) about a coven of witches who use the dance company as a kind of front. When Patricia disappears, the doctor tries to investigate the dance troupe to find out what happened to her, and in the process we learn that he lost his wife in the Holocaust, though it’s not clear if she was killed or just disappeared, like Patricia. Eventually, this through-story becomes annoyingly complex and muddied as Guadagnino intercuts it with scenes from inside the dance troupe that suggest the leader, Madame Blanc (also Swinton), is, in fact, a witch who recruits young women as dancers to fulfill some sort of Satanic inevitability that I could never really figure out. The film shifts its focus on a new American recruit, Susie (Dakota Johnson), who has escaped a rigidly religious upbringing in the Midwest to feed her art jones in Europe’s most celebrated divided city.

To say the dance sequences, which are set to Thom Yorke’s hyperventilating score, are ridiculous is to question the film’s priorities. Good horror revels in ludicrous brainstorms, but one thing that Suspiria truly lacks is a relatable sense of humor. The scary scenes are usually built around body horror meant to mimic the unnatural choreography that Madame Blanc favors, and which Susie seems to understand preternaturally. There is a kind of genius to these scenes, though they aren’t really scary, just discomfiting, and, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, they sit in the movie like a battleship in a bathtub, overcompensating for the meandering plot and the confused themes. And it just goes on forever. One thing you have to say about Suspiria is that its original, but I’m not sure if that’s what horror fans are really into.

In English, German and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Suspiria home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Amazon Content Services LLC

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Review: Girls of the Sun

Posted on January 22, 2019 by philipbrasor

Though horrific in intent, this French film about a battalion of Kurdish women fighting against the Islamic State in Iraqi Kurdistan avoids scenes of overt violence and goes rather light on the gore. It’s both a relief and a cop-out, since what’s left of Eva Husson’s movie is mostly suffering for the sake of suffering.

The commander of the battalion is Bahar (Golshifteh Farahani), a former lawyer from a fairly well-to-do Yazidi family with a husband and a young son. Their village is invaded by IS troops, who summarily execute all the men, including Bahar’s husband, commandeer the children for military mobilization, and imprison the women as sex slaves. Husson structures Girls of the Sun as a chronicle of a specific mission to take back a Kurdish town from IS insterpersed with flashbacks showing how Bahar was militarized. As a kind of Greek chorus, we have the French journalist Mathilde (Emmanuelle Bercot), who, with her borderline PTSD and eyepatch is obviously meant to remind us of Marie Colvin, who was killed covering Homs, which Mathilde has just left when she is embedded in Bahar’s battalion. The two women bond over their equivalent losses (Mathilde’s journalist husband was killed in Libya) but mostly they stew in their own fear and uncertainty. It’s an oddly inert film. Even the battle scenes feel like interruptions rather than means of showing these women’s determination to avenge their loved ones and affirm their faith. It’s not really a problem that the IS soldiers are portrayed as soulless monsters—they barely register as human beings—but the women who serve under Bahar are difficult to distinguish from one another; that is, until one shockingly runs to her death on purpose in order to take out a bunker.

Obviously, Husson does not want to exploit these women’s experiences for shocks and visceral thrills, but she doesn’t have a lot to work with except Bahar’s determination to find her son, who is presumably fighting for the IS now. That should be compelling enough a reason to stay involved with the film, but even that aspect seems outside Husson’s concern. In trying to let these women tell their own tale, she loses the story.

In Kurdish, French and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Cine Swich Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Girls of the Sun home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Maneki Films-Wild Bunch-ARches Films-Gapbusters-20 Steps Productions-RTBF (Television belge)

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Media Mix, Jan. 20, 2019

Posted on January 20, 2019 by philipbrasor

Rendering of the proposed nuclear power plant on Anglesey Island, Wales

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about remarks made by Hitachi’s chairman, Hiroaki Nakanishi, about the future of nuclear energy in Japan, and the world, for that matter. As pointed out at the beginning of the column, Nakanishi made the remarks mainly as the chairman of Keidanren, Japan’s main business lobby, though it was obvious that he was answering a specific question as the head of one of Japan’s biggest nuclear plant providers, or “vendors,” as he put it. The gist of his remarks was that the government needs to do more to make nuclear energy commercially viable, since it’s national policy, despite the fact that Hitachi itself was about to pull out of a big nuclear project in the UK due to the insurmountable costs involved. In a sense, the difficulty in getting assistance guarantees from the UK government for the project aligns with Hitachi’s annoyance with the Japanese government for not being able to convince the public that nuclear is the way to go. The central government has done little work to persuade the citizenry that nuclear is fine. Its safety plans since the Fukushima meltdown have been rather half-hearted, and accepted as such by people who currently live near nuclear plants, most of which remain offline. Obviously, the government doesn’t need the people’s “permission,” but it nevertheless seems sensitive to criticism, which it would prefer to ignore. Nakanishi may simply be giving lip service to the presumed will of the people with his remark that public opinion needs to be swayed, but he has that luxury as someone whose direct stake in the matter is not dependent on public opinion.

Hitachi’s concerns are completely of the financial sort. It is leaving the Anglesey Island nuclear reactor project in Wales because costs are too high, but despite the promise of some 9,000 jobs that would have been generated by the plant construction, local support wasn’t necessarily forthcoming and might have added more obstacles in terms of lawsuits and court costs. For one thing, the island is a bird sanctuary, and plant construction would have necessitated extensive landfill work. Much of the industry in the area is in agriculture, and reportedly farmers were united in their opposition to the plant. But even in terms of economics, the rationale for the plant has changed since Hitachi first became involved around 15 years ago. Originally, the UK’s energy policy was to increase its nuclear output from 9 gigawatts to 16 gigawatts by 2030, but since 2005 electricity consumption has decreased significantly and will continue to do so. At the same time, the cost of buying electricity from renewable sources has also decreased significantly, to about 57 pounds per megawatt/hour. In order for Hitachi to make money from the plant it’s building, the price of the electricity it sells would have to be at least 92 pounds per megawatt/hour. In addition, the UK’s committee on climate change says that the country can reach its CO2 reduction goals with the nuke plants it already has. It should be pointed out that Hitachi never really wanted to operate the plant it’s building, but was forced to do so since it couldn’t find a third party operator. Now that operations have become irrational, Hitachi has decided it’s not worth building. So, yes, without government support, the nuke business isn’t a business. The question remains: are the climate change advantages of nuclear beneficial enough for a government to completely subsidize it? In that regard, only socialist arrangements make nuclear power viable.

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Review: Rebel in the Rye

Posted on January 19, 2019 by philipbrasor

Whether couched in prose or celluloid, literary biographies are a dodgy enterprise, but prose at least has the luxury of length for people who are probably pre-disposed to sitting for long periods of time reading a book. Danny Strong’s rather precise film about the development of J.D. Salinger (Nicholas Hoult) into one of the most iconic American novelists of the 20th century isn’t really that long, but it feels over-stuffed with details that could have been conveyed in different, more economical ways. It’s likely that most people with any interest in Salinger know that he was a difficult artist, that editors had their hands full with a writer who knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish even if that vision didn’t jibe with conventional publishing wisdom at the time. However, they may not have known about his PTSD as a result of his service in WWII, his crush on Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona (Zoey Deutch), or his brief but seminal interest in Buddhism, and while Strong was right to explain these matters, he treats them as milestones on Salinger’s road to success and self-exile without distinguishing them in terms of relative impact.

If the movie works in any valuable way it’s in the way Strong weaves Salinger’s difficult writing regimen into the fabric of the story. We see how Holden Caulfield developed not so much as a character in Salinger’s most famous work, but rather as a means for Salinger to process his disappointments with a life less ordinary. Though there’s a certain mechanical efficiency to Strong’s methodology—raging at arbitrary acts of authority or sexual frustration leads to feverish sessions at his writing desk—it does show how such a unique creation emerges from a need to make sense out of random experiences. Also instructive is the central inclusion of Whit Burnett (pre-scandal Keven Spacey, marvelously self-effacing), the writing teacher who had more to do with Salinger developing his voice simply because he made him suffer due to his own envy.

The problem is that Strong gets too close to Salinger: the inner monologues adapted from writings, the rather hackneyed psychological treatment of his relationship with his well-to-do parents, and, most especially, Hoult’s eternally brooding portrait, which doesn’t change meaningfully as he grows older and becomes a literary star. It’s easy to understand how a writer of such a peculiar sensibility would never be satisfied with success, but maturity has to count for something. In Rebel in the Rye it seems to have no effect on Salinger, either spiritually or physically. He’s still incredibly beautiful, and grouchy.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).

Rebel in the Rye home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2016 Rebel Movie, LLC

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Review: His Lost Name

Posted on January 18, 2019 by philipbrasor

The cautious tone and austere aesthetic of Nanako Hirose’s debut feature was what most likely got it placed in the New Currents section of the most recent Busan International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere. New Currents is the only section of the festival with a dedicated competition, and it’s limited to films that are the first or second feature of their respective directors. They are also limited to Asian films, and over the years a certain type of film has ended up in the section, and they tend to look and sound a lot like His Lost Name. They also tend to be more interesting or, at least, more exciting. The fact that this was the lone Japanese entrant in the category says more about Japanese indie films than it does about new Asian directors.

As everyone loves to point out, Hirose has apprenticed with Hirokazu Koreeda, and you can see Koreeda’s fondness for the offbeat family dynamic in Hirose’s script. Yuya Yagira plays a young man, Shinichi, who jumps into a river in rural Chiba. An older woodworker, Tetsuro (Kaoru Kobayashi), sees his body in the water while driving by and fishes him out. But the audience’s immediate concerns—why did Shinichi jump, mainly—are continually pushed to the side until they seem to have no bearing on either anything that goes on in the story or, for that matter, the movie itself. Tetsuro is not particularly interested, in fact, especially after he learns the young man’s name is Shinichi, which just happens to be the name of his son, who is no longer around. This coincidence is the movie’s lynchpin, and while Hirose doesn’t belabor the matter she also places too much faith in the notion that it will be enough for the viewer.

It becomes clear that Tetsuro sees Shinichi as the replacement of his blood heir, and all plot devices are set toward realization of a family in name only, and while there are suspicions among locals, in particular Tetsuro’s employees and creditors and the younger woman (Keiko Horiuchi) he plans to marry, all tend to feel that Tetsuro’s happiness is paramount and go along with the fairy tale—except, of course, Shinichi, whose dark past can’t be banished the way the original Shinichi’s guitar was locked away in its case. Eventually, the effort to be a son to a man who, despite his generosity and decency, can’t see past his own self-pity and guilt, becomes too much to bear.

The ambiguities at work might have made this a fine addition to the New Currents tradition, but Yagira’s performance is anything but ambiguous, or subtle. His painful reticence act becomes tiring and then just plain unbearable. It’s difficult to believe any of these characters would want to be in a room with him for more than a few minutes. People just don’t act this way, even those with terrible secrets.

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Uplink Shibuya (03-6825-5503).

His Lost Name home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2019 Yoake Seisaku Iinkai

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