Hong Sang-soo’s antiromantic comedies differ little in terms of narrative themes, and tend to distinguish themselves through formal construction. The Day After is almost unique among his films in that its form is conventional—no “what if” digressions or POV mischief—and for once the comedy is clear-eyed and unfussy. Bong-wan (Kwon Hae-hyo) is a typical Hong stand-in protagonist, a noted critic-cum-small press publisher who is having an extramarital affair with his only employee, Chang-sook (Kim Sae-byuk). In the brilliantly staged opening scene, Bong-wan is having breakfast with his wife, Hae-joo (Jo Yoon-hee), who has somehow gotten wise to the affair and plies him with questions as he plays with his food and laughs at her. The scene is both hilariously on point and witheringly precise about the marriage dynamic, but the viewer has no way of knowing whether Hae-joo’s suspicions are correct. Still, if the viewer has seen a Hong film before they can probably assume them to be.
Hong subverts this expectation by showing it’s both true and false. Bong-wan has already broken up with Chang-sook, and in an intensely uncomfortable flashback shows how, during one of those drunken meals Hong is so fond of (this one during the day), Chang-sook goes swiftly from trusting acolyte to resentful victim, accusing Bong-wan of cowardice. She quits him and her job in a nasty huff. When the narrative returns to what has been set up as “the present,” Bong-wan is interviewing a replacement named Areum (Kim Min-hee, who, for what it’s worth, Hong had left his wife for). It’s obvious from the outset that Bong-wan means Areum to not only replace Chang-sook as assistant, but also lover, and the brilliance of the sequence of scenes that develops this seduction is how it reveals Bong-wan’s eternally narcissistic temperament without showing him to be underhanded. Areum, a student of good literature, is enamored of the older man and while she doesn’t seem interested in sleeping with him doesn’t lay down the law–at least not at first.
The ringer, the incident that tips her hand, is when Hae-joo, still steaming from that morning’s breakfast tiff, shows up at the office while her husband is out running an errand and mistakes Areum for the mistress who has already quit and supposedly moved on. There’s a deliciously old-fashioned comic vibe to the scene that recalls the best of Preston Sturges, as Areum, totally unprepared for the fusillade of abuse this woman directs at her, tries desperately to get a handle on what is actually going on.
Hong doesn’t stop there. Chang-sook eventually returns and there are several more dual dialogue sequences that sample every possible configuration of characters. Being the only man in the picture, Bong-wan is asked to represent his gender, and, as is Hong’s wont, he fails miserably as a sexual being and a professional. But if the women come off better in contrast, it’s not because they stand up to Bong-wan’s interminable self-regard. If anything, all three still seem mysteriously invested in his approval. Some will call this element sexist in nature, but Hong’s jokes have always been at his own expense. Any woman who is fool enough to fall in love with him deserves what she gets.
In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
The Day After home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2017 Jeonwonsa Film Co.
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It would be difficult to make a better military-themed movie than The Last Detail, the 1973 Hal Ashby adaptation of Darryl Ponicsan’s debut novel about two fun-loving sailors escorting a third to the brig for the ignominiuos crime of pilfering a charity box. With a script by Robert Towne and one of Jack Nicholson’s most indelible performances, it’s a unique feature, better than M.A.S.H. at plumbing the contradictions sane men put up with when following the killing chain of command, and the seminal road movie in an era when the road movie came into its own as a sub-genre. Ponicsan wrote a sequel in 2004 with the same three characters, older, obviously, and going on another road trip, but director Rickard Linklater, for reasons that can only be surmised, decided to change the names of the characters, their branch of service to the Marines (which is odd, since in the original movie the Marines are sworn enemies of the Navy), and the most salient trait of the character who went to jail, namely his innocence. In fact, this character, called Doc (Steve Carrell), seems to have been dishonorably discharged for a more serious offense than stealing.
It will be interesting to see the reaction in Japan to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last month. Though Kore-eda has tackled socially relevant topics in the past, most notably in his 2004 shocker Nobody Knows, Shoplifters seems to have hit a sore spot with certain fellow countrymen who probably have no intention of ever seeing it, thinking it reflects badly on Japan while winning a prestigious award overseas and being sold to 149 countries. These public personalities, including bestselling novelist Naoki Hyakuta and celebrity plastic surgeon Katsuya Takasu, claim to speak for Japan when they say the movie, which is about impoverished people who resort to petty crimes to get by, sends the wrong message about Japan and Japanese people. During a post-screening press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, the director didn’t address these claims directly, but suggested instead that he had no particular reason for choosing this theme except that he found it dramatically interesting. If the movie comes off as being “political,” meaning that it appears to criticize social policies that have resulted in abject poverty, that is more like a function of the viewer’s take on the subject. If anything, Shoplifters is a work of empathy rather than one of outrage or polemics—more Mike Leigh than Ken Loach. In fact, if the naysayers swallowed their bile and sat down and watched it, they’d probably realize that, in its own way, it paints the Japanese family in the kind of colors they would normally approve of. Their problem is that they aren’t going to accept the social unit on display as a “family” in the first place.
Authenticity is fleeting in American teen comedies, even when they shade over into coming-of-age tales. In her autobiographical directing debut, Greta Gerwig is obviously after authenticity above everything else—it’s mainly there in the subversive dialogue—but she’s too experienced as an actor and indie film fixture not to want to get as many laughs as she can, and the purposely commonplace quality of her setting—early 00s Sacramento, which one person calls the “Midwest of California”—works to emphasize the extraordinary self-possession of the titular character, high school senior Christine (Saoirse Ronan), who prefers to be called Lady Bird. Extraordinary protagonists are, of course, the standard of teen comedies, but mainly in constrast to their peers. Here, what makes Lady Bird special is her relationship with her parents, in particular her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), a hard-working nurse who recognizes what’s extraordinary about her daughter but still has to throw her authoritative weight around because she panics at the idea that Lady Bird is unequipped for the world, despite her intelligence and sensitivity. While driving back from a tour of colleges, the pair listen to an audio book of The Grapes of Wrath and get into a bizarre argument about how to appreciate the novel, which has brought them both to tears. In protest to her mother’s haughtiness, Lady Bird flings herself out of the moving car.
It’s difficult to grasp what director Lynne Ramsay is trying to accomplish with her new movie. Ostensibly a genre exercise, You Were Never Really Here sketchily outlines the daily grind of a hit man, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), who specializes in rescuing young girls from the clutches of kidnappers and other bottom feeders. Joe suffers from some form of PTSD that seems to be a combination of battle fatigue and his own early childhood trauma, and Phoenix plays him as a sullen misanthrope who occasionally bursts into uncontrollable tears, but not necessarily because of his bloody work. Ramsay’s style here is similar to that which made her 2001 feature, Morvern Caller, an indie sensation: Smudgy cinematography and random edits that recreate a druggy sensibility. This made sense in Morvern because the protagonist was living a lie that she couldn’t credibly keep up with. With Joe the charged atmospherics are a literal representation of his mindset, and in the end they only work against the trite hit-man arc of the plot.
Recently, Christopher Nolan hailed Stanley Kubrick as the greatest director of all time, mainly for his ability to make nitrate film stock mimic the most sublime visual attributes of great paintings. Though he was thinking of 2001, Barry Lyndon is a better example of this attribute, and Barry Lyndon is the most obvious analog when discussing Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV. This is about as close as we’ll ever get to the richness of Rembrandt on film, and there are whole passages where all we have are closeups of faces that are doing nothing in particular but look like people from the 18th century.
As a long-time resident of Japan whose interaction with the local culture is circumstantial, I don’t believe I have much to add to the conversation that has surrounded Wes Anderson’s latest entertainment and which mostly has to do with whether the director has exploited that culture without really understanding it. At first glance, I was more offended by the anti-cat bias of the storyline, but that, as they say, is just me. Narrative films rarely take the trouble to make whatever milieu they depict accurate in every sense since dramatic considerations usually come first. Generally speaking, if the dramatic elements work for me, I will appreciate, if not necessarily enjoy, the work on hand, and while I’ve had problems with Anderson in the past, I have come to like his movies the more I see them, which means he’s either getting better or I’ve just become used to his purposely quirky presentation.
In the rarefied setting that informs Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest luxury, the title “fashion designer” seems imprecise when describing the vocation of the protagonist, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis). He’s a dressmaker. All he makes is fine dresses for fine ladies. He is not, in fact, interested in fashion as an art form, though he obviously sees himself as something of an artist. More to the point, he’s an aesthete, a trait that Anderson emphasizes in the broadly conceived opening sequence, which shows Woodcock carrying out his morning ritual of dressing himself and then eating breakfast, preparations that are as vital to his vision of life as a series of beautiful choices as are his selection of fabric and filigree for his apparel.
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philipbrasor.com 