philipbrasor.com

French novelist and filmmaker Alain Guiraudie has been active since the early 90s but didn’t really make an impression on the wider world until after the turn of the century, and even then his films were mainly categorized as Queer Cinema, a label that certainly applied but didn’t prevent his work from finding a bigger audience and winning Cesars and festival prizes. The fact that it has taken this long for any of his movies to earn theatrical releases in Japan is not necessarily surprising, but if this were the late 90s-early 00s, I’m sure he would have already become an item on the Japanese mini-theater circuit. Distribution of world-class art cinema isn’t as thorough as it used to be here. 

The oldest of the 3 features being released in Japan simultaneously this weekend, Stranger by the Lake, came out originally in 2013 and was the film that made Guiraudie famous internationally after it won the Queer Palm at Cannes and was chosen as the best film of 2013 by Cahiers du Cinema. Though I haven’t seen his previous work, which number a dozen shorts and features, from what I understand Stranger marked a shift in tone away from an aggressive form of confrontational cinema to something more conventional in presentation. Nevertheless, Stranger can still be startling in the way it tries to normalize behavior that many will find gratuitously unwholesome, and it’s not just because it’s set in an exclusively gay milieu, a remote lakeside cruising spot where anonymous, spontaneous sex is the only recreation on offer other than skinny dipping. Guiraudie delineates this aspect by dropping a straight character into the mix, a tubby, middle-aged guy named Henri (Patrick D’Assumçao) who shows up regularly at the beach just to watch what goes on. Our protagonist, a young buck named Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), makes his acquaintance and the two often talk about life in general until Franck spies someone he likes and pursues him into the bushes. Guiraudie stages these trysts in such a way as to heighten their comical quality, but at one point Franck spies on a mustachioed hunk he’d like to shag who swims out to the middle of the lake with a companion and proceeds to drown the guy. Though he’s shocked, Franck’s ardor isn’t cooled a bit, and eventually he and the hunk, Michel (Christophe Paou), hook up as we in the audience wait for the other shoe to drop. The fact that the police finally show up and can’t penetrate the veil of homosexual solidarity—Franck’s too taken with Michel to rat him out, and thus his life seems even more at risk—heightens the suspense to almost unbearable levels. 

There are gay themes in Nobody’s Hero, released in 2021, but the main love story is hetero, even if it’s no less transgressive than the one in Stranger and a lot funnier. A freelance computer programmer of indeterminate age and no discernible charm named Médéric (Jean-Charles Clichet) approaches Isadora (Noémie Lvovsky), a middle-aged prostitute he’s been eyeing for a while, and propositions her for free sex, saying that he is “anti-prostitution.” Isadora initially blows him off but calls back later, intrigued by his gall, and they start to get it on in grand style in a rented hotel room when the TV reports a terrorist bombing in their city and Isadora’s burly, blunt husband barges in and drags his wife away. Guiraudie’s busy script lurches back-and-forth between this awkward and somewhat unappealing affair and Médéric’s parallel relationship with a homeless Arab teen, Selim (Ilies Kadri), who may have been involved in the bombing and is camping out in the hallways of Médéric’s apartment building. The two storylines eventually come together in classical farce style, sending up French attitudes toward minorities and the transience of sexual attraction. Not nearly as provocative as Stranger, Nobody’s Hero is nevertheless weirdly irresistible in its ability to take subjects that most people would consider controversial and treat them with a wry frivolousness.

Guiraudie’s most recent movie, Misericordia, isn’t as funny but still manages to keep you off balance with a story that never takes itself as seriously as it probably should. Jérémie (Felix Kysyl) drives to the rural village he grew up in to attend the funeral of his mentor, the village baker who schooled him in the art of pastries and baguettes. He boards with his mentor’s widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), who seems to be attracted to him, though it soon becomes clear that Jérémie always had a thing for her husband. Her son, the volatile Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), is convinced that Jérémie has designs on his mother and pressures him to leave, thus making Jérémie even more determined to stay and manifest his real attraction toward a doughy old friend, the retired farmer Walter (David Ayala—one thing about Guiraudie’s objects of desire, they aren’t conventionally attractive), who quickly disabuses him of his availability. The real monkey wrench, however, is the elderly local priest (Jacques Develay), whose intentions toward Jérémie are anything but hidden, and when Jérémie becomes the prime suspect in a villager’s disappearance, it is the priest who comes to his rescue, so to speak, with an offer Jérémie can’t likely refuse. 

Some critics have called Giraudie’s films “Hitchcockian” in the way they toy with a viewer’s presumptions and primal feelings, but the most affecting aspect of his work isn’t the subversive humor or the weird way he ramps up tension. It’s how he confounds expectations about where his stories are going. His plots bob and weave tantalizingly, and often end up somewhere you would never predict after they make their own intentions clear. You may not appreciate them as much once you get to where they’re going, but you’ll have to admit they’ve taken you on quite a ride. 

All three movies, in French, now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Home page in Japanese

Stranger by the Lake photo (c) 2013 Les Film du WorsoArte/France Cinema/M141 Productions/Films de Force Majeure

Nobody’s Hero photo (c) 2021 CG Cinema/Arte France Cinema/Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes Cinema/Umedia

Misericordia photo (c) 2024 CG Cinema/Scala Films/Arte France Cinema/Andergraun Films/Rosa Filmes

While watching this self-styled docudrama, one has to take into consideration that it is being directed by a professional filmmaker even if the protagonist-narrator, Jerry Hsu—playing himself, as the title so usefully points out—seems to be making all the decisions. So the home video quality of the production, which is a big part of its appeal, is something of a dodge, even as it sets the scene with a melancholy but believable premise. Jerry, who emigrated from Taiwan to the U.S. as a young man and now resides in a typical exurban town as a retired engineer, lives fairly comfortably on the money he saved. He is divorced from his wife, Kathy, who seems to enjoy a second life taking classes and hanging out with friends, and while in touch with his three grown sons doesn’t appear to be that close to them, even as the youngest is badgering him to loan him money for a down payment on a home. In other words, Jerry, the self-made immigrant, is pretty much an average American septuagenarian, healthy but lonely.

The drama starts when Jerry receives a call from two policemen in Shanghai who tell him that the Chinese authorities have determined criminals are using his bank account in the U.S. to launder money. The director, Law Chen, switches up the framing and the production values to show us the two policemen, played obviously by actors, talking to Jerry in Mandarin and explaining the situation to him, and thus the home movie takes on the cinematic trappings of a crime thriller. As Jerry, who is easily intrigued by the adventure potential of the police request, starts cooperating via cell phone with the officers to trap the criminals by staking out his own bank, which he is told is in on the scam, his sudden change in behavior piques the curiosity of his family, whose members have so far shown little interest in his activities or even well-being. But since Jerry has to keep a low profile, thinking the criminals may be somehow watching him, he can’t tell his sons what he’s doing. At one point, they conclude that maybe he has cancer and is dying, a plot development that gooses the story’s comic possibilities, though not as much as Jerry’s initial suspicion that Kathy might be working with the money launderers. 

Eventually, something’s gotta give, and when it does the movie loses its creakily charming mojo and turns into something more like an elaborate public service announcement. Admittedly, the entire family comes out of the ordeal closer and with a better appreciation of Jerry as a paternal figure, but it’s also obvious that Jerry the producer has contrived matters in such a way so as to convince the audience of all that. It would have been impossible for him to make a straight documentary about what happened to him in hindsight, but the methodology he ended up choosing feels deceptive. Only Jerry’s own natural likability saves the movie from being a total come-on. 

In Mandarin and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

Starring Jerry as Himself home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Forces Unseen, LLC

As a film about four-legged creatures on a perilous long-distance sojourn, the Latvian film Flow, which recently won an Oscar, at first brings to mind the Disney classic The Incredible Journey, which used real trained animals as its protagonists. Flow is animated, and, as a friend suggested after I’d seen it, has more in common with the work of Hayao Miyazaki, whose affinity for nature the makers of Flow obviously share if not outright mimic. Though Miyazaki will occasionally include animals that act like people, for the most part he avoids anthropomorphizing his non-human characters, allowing them to express themselves in accordance with actions we would associate with their relative species. The hero of Flow is a housecat whose instinctive behavior is immediately familiar to anyone who has had one as a companion, a presentation that’s intensified by the fact that this nameless feline lives in an abandoned house in a forest surrounded by wooden and stone sculptures of cats, as if it were the muse of an artist who is now gone. And yet the cat returns to the empty house, as if waiting for its companion to return as well.

There are no people in Flow, which takes place after some kind of apocalypse. The land is suddenly inundated, and as the waters rise through the lush vegetation surrounding the house the cat survives as best it can, eventually encountering other animals—a lazy capybara, a mischievous, hoarding lemur, a goofy golden retriever, and a majestic Secretary bird—who form a kind of confederacy of the displaced, steering a broken sailboat among the ruins of civilization that are now mostly underwater. Though the theme that runs through the adventures these non-speaking comrades experience is one of communal dependence and cooperation, the cat is still the central consciousness, and director Gints Zilbalodis infuses the animal with a vivid personality that conflates a cat’s natural curiosity with a distinctive empathy. If humans, through their own selfishness, have destroyed this world, the surviving animals will keep themselves alive by looking out for one another, which may sound anthropomorphic (there are scenes, especially among the secretary bird’s own kind, that indicate non-humans can be selfish as well) but feels credible given what can only be described as the story’s focus on the longing for so-called creature comforts. 

That the characters are self-aware is perhaps the movie’s most striking assertion, since we tend to think of animals as being only present in the moment. Zilbalodis’s color palette and extraordinary use of light and 3D “camera” movement create a state of magic realism that respects these creatures’ inherent, organic being while giving them the opportunity to create their own stories apart from those we usually deign to impose on them, which is what Disney tends to do. Miyazaki uses animals to highlight and contrast his human characters’ relationship to nature. Zilbalodis attempts something similar, but leaves out the human presence. 

Opens March 14 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiys (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Flow home page in Japanese

photo (c) Dream Well Studio. Sacrebleu Productions & Take Five