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The acclaimed American indie filmmaker Kelly Reichardt was invited by the Tokyo International Film Festival to come to Japan and join a symposium to talk about the work of the late Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Ozu’s birth. Following a screening of Ozu’s 1959 comedy, Ohayo (Good Morning), on Oct. 27 at the Mitsukoshi Theater, Reichardt discussed the film and other Ozu works with fellow directors Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Jia Zhangke. Each was to choose a film to discuss in detail. Reichardt chose Ozu’s most famous film, Tokyo Story, which often shows up on lists of the greatest movies ever made. Kurosawa chose the lesser known The Munekata Sisters, and Jia talked about Late Spring. Several days later, I interviewed Reichardt in the offices of the festival for The Japan Times, and the conversation was so lively I have decided to post the whole transcript, digressions and all. Enjoy.

This is the first time you’ve been in Japan, right?

Yes.

You must be a big fan of Ozu if they expressly asked you to come for this symposium.

I was shocked. And then I came here and I literally only spoke for ten minutes.

How did it come about?

I’d been waiting to be invited to Japan for a long time, but my films haven’t really played here much. So this was my first chance, and it was great. But I only scratched the surface.

But why did they specifically ask you?

I don’t know. I think my films and Ozu films were mentioned together in some books. 

Well, you teach, right? Do you teach Ozu?

Well, next semester, just because I’ve been studying so much. I’ve just seen 16 films. I teach production. The students in one of my classes–I teach one semester a year–we do a feature film and each student does one scene and then we suture it together. I give them scenes where they sort of…I’ve shown Ozu and talked about Ozu before, but never made an Ozu film. It’s tricky, because you don’t want to see a bunch of Americans doing Japanese. There’s a lot of Chinese students in the class, so we could do a Chinese film. They do everything, but they’ll do a lot of scenes of Sirk and stuff in Mandarin. 

But if you use Ozu in class, do you use him to teach composition?

Yes. Composition. It’s all about trying to keep a formal language alive against the onslaught of YouTube. It’s a losing battle, but nevertheless. 

At the symposium you said that in the past you had always imagined Japan through Ozu’s lens. What have you discovered since being here?

I mean, also Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, but I suppose it’s the attention to detail for everything. I’ve seen some little scenes play out that seemed very Ozu to me, between parents and kids. It’s just that I’m suddenly very steeped in it right now. Also, this constant corridor effect of looking at things. I went to Kyoto for two days. It was nice to get that kind of change, even if it was only scratching the surface.

You also said that you had discovered Ozu backwards, meaning you saw the later films first. 

Those were the ones I knew.

The title of this movie, based on a best-selling memoir of the same name, probably feels less awkward in French. Having not read the book, I can’t say how much of the movie is faithful to the real life story of its author, Antoine Leiris, but the director, Killian Riedhof, ends up with something that seems to veer from the implication of the title. Leiris lost his wife in the 2015 attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris by Muslim terrorists, and in trying to address his sudden, intense grief he posted an open letter to the terrorists on Facebook saying, in effect, that they wouldn’t win; that though they “stole the life of an exceptional being, the love of my life, the mother of my son…you will not have my hate.” In essence, he would not give them the “satisfaction” of hating or even fearing them. “I will not change,” he wrote. The post went viral and Leiris became a minor celebrity, with media from all over the world treating him as the open face of defiant victimhood, a role he accepted reluctantly but accepted nonetheless. 

The film never leaves Leiris’s side. As portrayed by Pierre Deladonchamps, he’s a slightly off-putting example of male privilege, a would-be writer who can’t seem to get past the third chapter of his novel. His wife, Helene (Camelia Jordana), works full-time, and in the opening scene, which takes place the morning of the attack, they have a minor row over her job schedule. It becomes apparent that Antoine is the stay-at-home dad for their 3-year-old son, Melvil, and he seems to resent the fact that Helene has a life outside their roomy Paris apartment. She is going to a concert that night with a male friend, while Antoine babysits. Riedhof chronicles the unfolding of the attack in almost real time as it impacts Antoine, who desperately tries to find out Helene’s situation once the bulletins start crowding the airwaves. Riedhof ratchets up the suspense, even though the viewer knows what is happening and what the end will be. Most of the film charts Antoine’s emotional state in the aftermath, in particular his relationship to his son, who can barely understand that his mother is not coming home again. But the essay that occasions his fame feels almost like an afterthought. Though reporters play up Antoine’s refusal to play the terrorists’ game, the movie never has much interest in the game or even the background of the attacks. It is purely a study in grief, and once the essay is posted it doesn’t have much purchase on the continuing plot, which is simply a day-by-day reckoning with sadness. 

In that regard, the movie is effective, though the viewer may find it difficult to sympathize completely with Antoine, who remains a sticky personality, so caught up in his grief that he can’t be present for other loved ones, especially those in his immediate family who are also mourning Helene. And while I think this is the point of the movie and a valid one, as a viewing experience the story moves along without much in the way of dynamic variation. Even the highs and lows have a rhythmic consistency that feels predictable. That’s the thing with memoirs: they tend to follow real life, which is often at odds with the aims of cinematic storytelling.

In French and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5068), and from Nov. 16 at Kino Cinema Shinjuku.

You Will Not Have My Hate home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Komplizen Film Haut et Court Frakas Productions TOBIS/Erfttal Film und Fersehproduktion

Recipient of the Grand Prix at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, as well as the prizes for Best Actor and Best Director, this Spain-France co-production is one of the few TIFF winners that seems like it could have been a contender at Cannes or Berlin. (It also won Spain’s Goya Award for Best Picture.) The Competition films at TIFF tend to be movies that aren’t submitted for competition at more famous festivals because of rules imposed by an international film festival authority that limits such films to only one competition, and so as a group they often come across as second-tier. Reviews of The Beasts at other film festivals hinted that it was very good but lacked something crucial that would make it great, maybe because it was pegged as a thriller. Watching it a second time, I picked up on nuances that eluded me initially, and I found the tension actually doubled, despite the fact that I knew what was going to happen. 

When the movie begins, the problems that will eventually boil over are already simmering. Antoine (Denis Menochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs), are a middle aged French couple who have moved to the mountains of northern Spain to start an organic vegetable farm. They are outsiders to this provincial village, and while they have made friends, their nearest neighbors, a pair of brothers named Xan (Luis Zahere) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido) who raise livestock, hate Antoine’s guts, and not just because he’s French. A Norwegian company wants to buy a large parcel of land for wind turbines, and Antoine is one of the landowners who has voted against the deal. The permanently aggrieved Xan figures the money from the sale could set him up for life and relieve him of having to “smell like shit” all the time. The director, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, keeps Antoine’s reasons for spiking the deal under wraps, but it slowly comes out that he understands how this Norwegian company works, and at one point tries to reason with Xan, saying that the company is simply looking for the cheapest land in the EU, and that the money they will pay him will not set him up for life. The gambit fails, because Antoine, a former teacher, is to Xan a “tree-hugging intellectual” who looks down on people like him. The die is cast, and it becomes clear as the two men spar and feint at each other, that the title refers not just to Xan, but also to Antoine, whose resentment for being denied a comfortable, fulfilling life makes him mean and desperate. And while I was expecting some kind of Straw Dogs confrontation, what happens is different but no less terrifying, and as the focus of the movie shifts from Antoine to Olga and their frustrated adult daughter, Marie (Marie Colomb), everything you thought about the movie’s theme and expected from the plot development turn out to be wrong. 

The movie’s haunting atmosphere is deepened by the rugged landscape, the broken down stone houses that Antoine endeavors to fix up for his fellow villagers (Xan thinks he is doing it to attract more like him), and weather that can change on a dime. This is a tale about not taking people you don’t really know at face value. Xan is what he is, and the other inhabitants of these hills and forests, even when they pretend to welcome you, will just as soon wrestle you to the ground and take everything you have. It’s not a thriller. It’s a chiller, because its view of human nature will freeze your soul. 

In Spanish, French and Galician. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Beasts home page in Japanese

photo (c) Arcadia Motion Pictures, S.L., Caballo Films, S.L., Cronos Entertainment, A.I.E., Lepacte S.A.S.