Review: Close

Posted on July 13, 2023 by philipbrasor

I can’t remember where, but I once read an article that said our first realization of our place in the world comes when we experience loss. The two protagonists of Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s Oscar-nominated feature are old enough that they have surely already lost something important to them, and yet loss comes in many shapes and sizes. Thirteen-year-olds Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) look as if they’ve been best friends since they were born. The opening scenes form a montage of all the different varieties of closeness this pair manifest, from sharing an imaginary world of martial derring-do to napping together in the same bed while holding on to each other. Even Remi’s mother (Emilie Dequenne) comments lovingly how she feels so lucky to have “two sons” when Leo is around, which seems like all the time. When Remi, clearly the more sensitive of the two, performs an oboe concerto, Leo looks on with pride and awe, and schemes with his friend about their future: I will be your manager, he says, and we’ll be rich and travel the world together.

Their friendship is a utopia, and as literature has always taught us, all utopias are doomed. Though the ostensible cause of Leo and Remi’s breech is the pressure of social engagement, Dhont makes it clear as the story progresses that it was going to happen anyway due to the nature of love. After the new school year starts, the boys are teased by classmates who ask if they’re “a couple,” and a few male bullies toss homophobic slurs their way. The chiding gets to Leo more than Remi—at least on the surface—and Leo feels compelled to put a certain measure of space between himself and Remi by joining the ice hockey team and avoiding touching Remi in public. Remi resents these acts of betrayal and becomes sullen and, eventually, antagonistic. The two end up in a schoolyard fight that has to be broken up by teachers, one of whom tells a struggling Remi, “It’s over!” She’s talking about the fight, but to Remi it means something more.

Loss pervades the second half of the movie, but Dhont tries to avoid the inevitable as long as possible by focusing on everyday details, like Leo working hard on the family flower farm, or his sudden passion for hockey, an aggressive form of activity that is obviously a substitute for something else. Separation, Dhont seems to say, is felt physically as much as it is emotionally for children and adolescents, maybe even more so, manifesting as loss of appetite and bed-wetting. This description sounds clinical, but the viewer absorbs the movie’s sense of loss in a visceral way, mainly through Dhont’s insistent use of tight closeups, which give much of the story a melodramatic cast. I could have used a bit more distance myself. It’s unbearably painful to watch children go through such misery while standing so damn close. 

In French and Dutch. Opens July 14 at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

Close home page in Japanese

photo (c) Menuet/Diaphana Films/Topkapi Films/Versus Production 2022

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Review: The Pope’s Exorcist

Posted on July 12, 2023 by philipbrasor

Though The Pope’s Exorcist is not a particularly good movie, it’s a fitting vehicle for Russell Crowe’s return to top billing, albeit one in which he appears grey-bearded and paunchy. As the titular priest, Crowe brings a welcome measure of cynicism to the movie’s jaundiced take on post-millennial Catholicism, and while it might have been even more fitting had the movie done more than mention the most pressing scandal to confront the Church in the last 50 years only in passing, the filmmakers were obviously not going to push their luck by trying to be topical. The main scandal they dig up is the Spanish Inquisition, which was handled more effectively many years ago by Monty Python. 

Still, there are comic elements on display that distinguish The Pope’s Exorcist from the usual head-spinning, pea soup-vomiting extravaganzas, and most are delivered by Crowe, whether purposely or not. His Father Gabriele Amorth is a polymath and something of a black sheep in the Vatican (his Vespa-riding skills are portrayed as that of an iconoclast), who obviously has the ear of a pontiff (Franco Nero) who keeps his own counsel to the best of his meager ability. Amorth’s main heresy, as far as his colleagues are concerned, is approaching his specialty without the necessary gravity. In an opening scene, Amorth is called upon to exorcise a young Italian man who can suddenly spout English profanity as fluently as Ozzie Osbourne, and while Amorth fulfills his task in a novel way, he also reveals that he thinks most possessions are either faked or the result of deep psychological trauma. But that somewhat compelling insight, like the nod to pedophilia, is pushed aside for the main story, which takes place at a castle in Spain that has been inherited by a widowed American woman (Alex Essoe) and her two children, the younger of whom, Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), becomes possessed. Amorth, accompanied by a younger local priest, Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), quickly realizes that the possession has something to do with the castle’s use as a site for torture during the Inquisition centuries before, an explanation that basically relieves the Vatican of any responsibility for the terror it inflicted since it was apparently the work of a servant of Satan. But, in any case, Amorth and Esquibel are put through their conventionally hellish paces, complete with finding the name of the demon and undergoing quasi-possession themselves.

It may not be saying much that Crowe makes the whole mess entertaining. His dodgy Italian accent and jaunty fashion sense congeal for an image of a “have holy water will travel” kind of free agent whose attachment to his higher calling seems nominal at best, and he pulls it off with more than a wink and a nod. He clearly seems to be enjoying himself. In fact, the ending is primed to make it seem as if Father Amorth might be worthy of a franchise (the character is based on a real person). If Crowe has decided, like Liam Neeson, that his serious acting days are behind him, playing the pope’s exorcist isn’t a bad gig to see out his twilight years. 

Opens July 14 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 Pope’s Exorcist home page in Japanese

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Media watch: Hiroshima sister park agreement angers atomic bomb survivors

Posted on July 10, 2023 by philipbrasor
Pearl Harbor memorial

Sister city relations between municipalities of different countries are familiar to most people, though sometimes these arrangements have a specific purpose. Apparently, in 2016 there was a sister-type relationship forged between the Sekigahara battlefield in Gifu Prefecture, where General Toyotomi Hidetoshi, fighting for the Oda Nobunaga clan, lost to the forces of the Tokugawa Shogunate in October 1600, thus ushering in three hundred years of Tokugawa rule; and the Gettysburg battlefield in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, the site of the bloodiest and perhaps most consequential battle of the American Civil War. There are enough thematic similarities between the two battles to make the sister relationship apparent, but, obviously, the deal was made mainly for tourism purposes.

A more recent sister partnership is less easy to explain. On June 29, the city of Hiroshima announced it had concluded a “sister park” agreement between the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Pearl Harbor National Memorial in Hawaii. The agreement was signed by U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emmanuel and Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui. According to a report in Tokyo Shimbun, the sister park agreement was proposed by the U.S. State Department last April as a gesture before this year’s G7 Summit, which took place in Hiroshima in May. Ostensibly, the state department said the purpose is to promote peace education and help set up an exchange program to share experiences and resources that would help foster historical facilities and, yes, tourism. As to the thematic relationship between the two memorial parks, the state department said that they represent the two temporal poles of the Pacific War, meaning Pearl Harbor was where the war started and Hiroshima was where it ended. Given that Hiroshima was attacked with an atomic weapon on June 6, 1945, and another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, and the emperor of Japan did not announce Japan’s capitulation until August 15, by which date many other cities in Japan had be “conventionally” bombed by U.S. forces since Hiroshima (including some that were bombed even after the emperor’s broadcast), it would seem that the historians at the state department should reread their John Dower. 

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Review: Great Freedom

Posted on July 7, 2023 by philipbrasor

Sebastian Meise’s prison movie jumps around between 1945, 1958, and 1968, but starts near the end with a trial in which prosecutors use clandestinely shot film of male-on-male couplings in a public toilet to convict Hans Hoffman (Franz Rogowski) of violating Germany’s Criminal Code Paragraph 175, which prohibits “homosexual acts,” and sentences him to 24 months in prison. Hans’s unperturbed reaction to the court’s decision indicates he’s been through this before, and when Meise subsequently flashes back to 1945, we learn that Hans was a concentration camp inmate, and went directly from Nazi hell to an Allied detention center, solely due to his sexual orientation. Meise provides very little background for Hans—no job history, no family—focusing completely on Hans’s life as a recidivist sodomite, a description that would seem to reduce him to someone whose entire existence is dictated by appetites, but in fact the movie makes a broader, much more moving case for Hans’s character.

During his first prison stint, his cellmate is Viktor (Georg Friedrich), a junkie initially disgusted by Hans when he hears of his crime, but once he discovers Hans was in a camp, Viktor’s attitude changes and he offers to cover up Hans’s number tattoo with a larger design. Inking is forbidden in the prison, and so the work is done secretly at night, but eventually it is found out and both are punished with beatings and solitary confinement. Nevertheless, a bond has been formed. Hans encounters Viktor again during his subsequent stints, and while both are depicted as “addicts,” Meise is insistent that there is a big difference between Viktor’s chemical cravings and Hans’s need for love, because that’s how it’s portrayed. During his imprisonment, Hans has relationships with two other prisoners, one a young school teacher named Leo (Anton von Lucke) who was caught with Hans in the aforementioned toilet. Through carefully coded messages that Viktor helps deliver, the two actually carry on a physical affair and in the end Hans deepens his own criminal record to help win Leo a pardon. But Hans’s motives aren’t always easy to understand. He almost seems to take pleasure in the cruelty of the state, since it reinforces his self-image as a man outside of society who can only deal with other human beings in a direct, honest way; otherwise they are simply unknowable. His relationship to Viktor is practical, until it isn’t. When Viktor demands a blowjob in return for passing Hans’s message to Leo, Hans at first refuses, saying, “I don’t do it for just anybody.” He has to feel something.

Throughout Great Freedom the state hovers above like a dark, permanent cloud, depriving Hans—and Viktor, too—of hope for any kind of life free from its disapproving shadow, and in the end, when Paragraph 175 is suddenly rescinded and Hans visits a gay bar (also called Great Freedom), he seems not so much liberated as confused by the irony of it all. “Can they just abolish a law?” says Viktor, utterly at a loss to comprehend such an act, even though it doesn’t affect him. Given Hans’s measured reaction, maybe he believes it doesn’t affect him either. After all, the law never prevented him from loving whom he wanted to love before, it just made it more difficult. 

In German. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (050-6875-5280).

Great Freedom home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 FreibeuterFilm-Rohfilm Productions

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Review: Pearl

Posted on July 6, 2023 by philipbrasor

As an origin story, Ti West’s prequel to his hit horror comedy X seems under-conceived, and, according to reports, West and his star, Mia Goth, mostly came up with the idea on the fly not long after X finished shooting, fully confident that they could make it quickly. In X, Goth played two roles, that of a crew member of a porn shoot on a Texas farm in the 70s, and that of Pearl, the sex-crazed old lady who terrorizes the production. X didn’t explain how Pearl had turned into an axe murderer. Pearl the movie attempts to.

And just as X successfully achieved a 70s-era production design look, Pearl achieves an even more retro feel, mimicking mid-century Hollywood Technicolor movies replete with big musical cues and an eye-popping credit sequence. Set in 1918 when World War I and the flu pandemic were happening simultaneously, the movie takes place on the same Texas farm where X took place, with Pearl a teenage bride whose husband is fighting in Europe and who dreams of becoming a professional dancer and maybe even a film star. Her strict mother (Tandi Wright) forbids her to even think about it and orders her to take care of her catatonic, wheelchair-bound father (Matthew Sunderland). But the headstrong Pearl is determined to be on the silver screen, and secretly sneaks away one day to participate in a regional audition for a film studio, encouraged by the local movie house projectionist (David Corenswet), the town’s self-styled “Bohemian,” who also has the hots for Pearl and, at one point, shows her a contraband stag film from France, where he promises to take her someday.

It’s not revealing much to say that all of Pearl’s dreams are dashed and that it’s this disappointment that brings out her  cruelty, which, so far, she’s only visited upon barnyard critters. Though the tone up to this point has been that of a playful pastiche of all the old film cliches you’d expect, the murder scenes lack anything distinctive, either as comedy or horror. And because this is a prequel, the movie also feels truncated, unfinished, even if you’ve seen X. There’s not a whole lot of obvious continuity between teenage Pearl and the crazy old lady, unless you assume, after seeing Pearl, that she’s driven to murder not so much because of the sex she witnesses, but rather because she’s reminded of her stalled show biz career. Still, I’m not curious enough to want to sit through X again just to find out.

Opens July 7 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Pearl home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Origin Picture Show LLC

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Media watch: Newspaper reveals that fertility rate isn’t what it’s cracked up to be

Posted on July 4, 2023 by philipbrasor

While attending a recent symposium sponsored by the Cabinet on Japan’s low birthrate, which the government has pledged to raise by any means possible, a reporter for Tokyo Shimbun discovered that the so-called fertility rate statistic published by the government doesn’t properly represent what people might think it represents. 

During the symposium, a representative made a presentation in which he explained that the projection for Japan’s fertility rate in the year 2070 would be 1.29, which is only fractionally higher than last year’s rate, which was 1.26. These projections were made based on current trends in the birthrate. However, when the staff member explained how the number was calculated, he said that only Japanese women were included and not foreign resident women, while babies born to both Japanese and foreign women were included. According to the reporter, the attendees expressed shock, saying they weren’t aware that foreign resident women were not counted in the statistic. One professor told the reporter he found this revelation “unbelievable,” especially given the fact that the foreign population of Japan is on the rise. 

The fertility rate is supposed to represent the number of children the average woman will give birth to in her lifetime, and a number of around 2.0 is believed to be necessary in order to maintain the population of a given country. However, the calculation is made on a yearly basis to chart trends. To reach the index, the total number of live births in the population within a given time frame—in this case, a year—is divided by the number of females in the population aged 15 to 49, and the resulting quotient is multiplied by 1,000. Obviously, not counting foreign women in this formula while counting the children they produce is going to alter the index, though it isn’t really clear by how much. Mathematically, it would seem that the more women you add to the divisor in the equation, the smaller the quotient and thus the smaller the fertility rate, but the article doesn’t really explain the different numbers offered at the symposium in a comprehensible manner.

A representative of the health ministry told Tokyo Shimbun that population statistics, including those used to chart the fertility rate, only take into consideration Japanese people, and that this has always been the case, so to change it now would throw the whole system out of whack. Children of foreign mothers are included in these calculations if the mother is married to a Japanese national, since a child is considered Japanese if either parent is Japanese. (Though that has only been the case since 1985. Before then a child’s nationality was determined solely through the nationality of the father.)

Another person from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research told the reporter that the current methods for compiling population statistics go back to the Meiji Era and are based on the Family Register (koseki) Law, which only applies to Japanese people. When the fertility rate statistic was adopted right after World War II, there were few foreigners living in Japan, so they weren’t counted. One wonders about all the resident Koreans who, before the end of the war, were considered Japanese and after the war suddenly weren’t; not to mention all the Chinese who had never been Japanese but had lived in Japan for many years. 

Nevertheless, as more than a few people at the symposium pointed out, the number of foreign women giving birth in Japan is increasing, and it seems misleading, if not downright discriminatory, not to count them when determining the fertility rate, regardless how useful the fertility rate is in the first place. The data researcher put it quite plainly: in other countries of the world, they count all the women who give birth in their statistics and not just citizens.

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Review: The Novelist’s Film

Posted on June 30, 2023 by philipbrasor

As a formalist, Hong Sangsoo rarely sticks to the same set structure, though, given his stylistic distinctions, many may assume he does. He often plays with time, linearity, and alternate outcomes in order to demonstrate how stories can be told, but his latest film is—at least within his own large filmography—structurally conventional in that it follows a kind of plot. As is always the case with Hong, the story is almost pure whimsy, even if the dialogue and situations come across as quotidian to a fault. For instance, everyone the titular protagonist meets during the course of the movie has read her latest book, which is one of the best jokes Hong—whose sense of humor is underappreciated—has ever hung a storyline on, suggesting either a universe where everyone indulges in fine literature or, more likely, one where everyone deploys a kind of strategic tactfulness.

Jun-hee (Lee Hye-young) has come to a regional city to visit her old friend (Seo Young-hwa), a lapsed writer who now runs a small bookstore. During one of Hong’s patented veiled-but-pointed conversations, it’s revealed that the two parted on less-than-ideal terms, and that Jun-hee is thinking of giving up writing. Though she doesn’t use the term “writer’s block,” as the movie progresses she justifies her decision to others by saying that she doesn’t have the patience to be imaginative any more. This journey to see an old friend, unannounced, comes across as desperate, even though she acts anything but. While in town she takes in a local tourist attraction and runs into a film director (Kwon Hae-hyo) who once tried, unsuccessfully, to adapt one of her novels. Their conversation is as tense as that between Jun-hee and the bookseller, but funnier since the director insists on smoothing out matters that Jun-hee is past forgiving. Nevertheless, the meeting does lead to yet another coincidental encounter in a nearby park with the actress Kil-soo (Kim Min-hee), whom the director berates for having decided to retire at a young age “with such potential.” Jun-hee, recognizing a kindred spirit, not only defends Kil-soo, though they’ve never met before (Kil-soo, of course, has also read Jun-hee’s latest book), but asks her out to lunch, where she proposes they make a short film together with Kil-soo’s film student nephew (Ha Seong-guk), an idea that Jun-hee has apparently came up with on this trip and was probably provoked by the director’s fatuousness. 

From there, the film devolves into Hong’s usual alcohol-fueled free-for-all, as it turns out that Kil-soo knows the bookseller and they all collect at her store for multiple bottles of makgeolli, along with a gregarious male poet (Gi Ju-bong) whom Jun-hee slept with once back in the day. At this point, whatever sparked Jun-hee’s decision to become a filmmaker, it’s too late to turn back, and while I think Hong had already made his point about the self-regard of this circumscribed group of arty types and didn’t need to go any further, he follows up with a screening of the proposed short film, which Jun-hee has successfully completed. A short clip is shown demonstrating only that her visual aesthetic aligns somewhat with Hong’s, which may be the ultimate joke, but one that I needed a second viewing to get. As a matter of fact, I laughed quite a few times the second time I saw it, and that’s saying something. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645).

The Novelist’s Film home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Jeonwonsa Film Co.

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Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Posted on June 29, 2023 by philipbrasor

The obvious outlier among last year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations, Dean Fleisher-Camp and Jenny Slate’s story about a talking seashell never had a chance, which is probably why film cognoscenti tripped all over themselves in a rush to claim it was some kind of work of genius. It isn’t, but its charms are unique. Having started as a series of shorts that quickly developed a following on YouTube about ten years ago, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On has been carefully reformulated as a 90-minute feature by jiggering the titular mollusc’s origin story and using his internet fame as part of the plot-line. But the basic frame of the shorts remains in tact: Fleisher-Camp interviewing Marcel, who is voiced by Slate, after he discovers him living with his slightly senile grandmother, Connie (Isabella Rossellini), in the Airbnb house he’s renting. Apparently, there was a larger shell brood that belonged to the previous tenants, a couple who broke up and moved out taking all the shells except Marcel and Connie, who ever since have been making do as best they can.

Most of the humor is derived from Slate’s purposely cute vocal mannerisms and portrayal of Marcel as a wisecracking, genuinely curious adolescent savant who is constantly dreaming up ways to overcome his very small size by repurposing common items he finds around the house, including detritus (nail clippings as skis—yech!). But there’s also poignancy on display, as Marcel enlists Fleisher-Camp in his hunt for his extended family and addresses Connie’s encroaching dementia in a protective and often defensive way. As Fleisher-Camp’s videos of his interviews with Marcel catch fire on YouTube, Marcel’s fame grows, and while at first he can’t quite process the attention, he tries to exploit it for his family-seeking purposes, agreeing to appear as the subject of a 60 Minutes (his and Connie’s favorite TV show) profile hosted by Leslie Stahl. The scene where the CBS crew takes over the house for the shoot is certainly one of the most trenchant comments on media overkill ever set to film. 

Having not seen the shorts, I can’t say whether the feature is better, but the appeal is obviously centered on the interactions between Marcel and Fleisher-Camp, which have a tension that complicates the childish tone of the whole premise. Tying it all to a plot-like structure doesn’t necessarily spoil this appeal, but it sometimes gets in the way. Visually and conceptually, Marcel has a wondrous simplicity that could have only been achieved through a great deal of effort and thought. It’s endearingly entertaining. 

Opens June 30 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Marcel the Movie LLC

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Media watch: Transphobia fueled by hatred, spread by ignorance

Posted on June 26, 2023 by philipbrasor
June is LGBTQ+ Pride month

On June 3, an anonymous person or persons posted 15 defamatory messages, including death threats, on the home page of Osaka attorney Shun Nakaoka. The poster accused Nakaoka of being a “man pretending to be a woman” and for that reason she should die. During a press conference on June 5, Nakaoka said the posts constituted a hate crime that targeted transgender people and that she had reported the posts to the police.

In a June 23 opinion piece published by the Asahi Shimbun, Nakaoka characterized the kind of transphobia exhibited in the posts as a “monster” that has run amok. Though she doesn’t specifically mention the recent bill passed by the Diet to promote “understanding” of LGBTQ+ persons, which sexual minority activists have labeled dangerous to their cause, she says that the “trend to provoke discrimination and bias toward transgender individuals has spread at an alarming rate” recently, and that some of this provocation has been carried out through political means. 

The aim of hardcore transphobes is to make people who otherwise “have no idea” about transgender people uneasy at the prospect that transgenders will be at large in society. The typical way to do this is to claim that greater rights for transgenders will mean that “men claiming to be women” will be able to access women-only spaces, such as public restrooms, the implication being that men would only do this to molest or take advantage of women in these spaces. Nakaoka says this idea is “preposterous.”

She goes on to explain the definition of the English word transgender. The morpheme “trans-” means to “cross over,” and that the process of someone assigned as being, say, male at birth transitioning to female is ongoing and involves changing one’s appearance and possibly physiology through medical treatment, not to mention changing their relationships with others and their lifestyles. It does not mean simply “saying that one is a woman.” It takes time. A transgender person is in a constant state of becoming. Consequently, each transgender person decides for themself how they interface with society, which means their use of public facilities, such as restrooms, will be measured accordingly. It is wrong to assume every transgender person will act in the same way, but it is safe to assume that, in addressing their own circumstances, they will develop an attitude that causes as little friction as possible with society. The point is to be oneself in the real world, to live with others. There is no reason to be afraid of transgender people.

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Review: Calendar Girls

Posted on June 24, 2023 by philipbrasor

Not to be confused with the 2003 Helen Mirren comedy with the same title, Maria Loohufvud and Love Martinsen’s documentary nevertheless covers similar ground; namely, women of a “certain age” flaunting what they’ve still got to make a point about female vitality. In the former, this theme was played for both laughs and poignancy, while in the latter it’s presented as an aspect of aging that most people would prefer to ignore. The titular dance troupe, whose members are over 60 and some over 70, performs in various public and private facilities to raise money for charity (usually, helper dogs for veterans). They wear colorful, often purposely ridiculous costumes and come in all shapes and sizes, but for the most part they exude a relaxed sexual confidence in their appearance and limited athletic capabilities. Since they’re based in Florida, most of the facilities where they perform cater to people who are even older than they are, but the film claims they put on more than 130 shows a year, and have been doing this for 14 years, meaning they’ve become something of an institution, though, obviously, one with high turnover.

And while the filmmakers do emphasize the troupe’s aspiration to professionalism with extensive scenes of sweaty rehearsals and interviews that highlight their dedication, what distinguishes the documentary is how they convey what this kind of activity means to these women. The variety of backgrounds and attitudes is impressively diverse. Though most seem to have been homemakers, quite a few are retirees who used to have careers (one used to be a Baltimore cop), and a few still have to work to make a living. Almost all suffer to some degree from health problems, and openly share horror stories about medication and bad insurance. Significantly, almost all are married and look upon their dance activities as a respite from connubial responsibilities that they only take seriously insofar as their husbands insist they do—the few men who appear onscreen at best tolerate their wives’ participation in Calendar Girls. And while the members interviewed look as if they lead nice, middle class lives, the movie gives the impression that their activities fulfill a need that they always knew needed to be fulfilled but couldn’t until now. This realization is poignant in and of itself because they crave some sort of meaning at the end of their lives. One woman who has chronic health problems even talks about assisted suicide in a positive way, as if dancing had been the main item on her bucket list. 

It’s difficult to take in these women’s longings and ambitions and not think about the state (in all the word’s meanings) of Florida, which the current governor has turned into a bastion of intolerance and white male grievance. Here, only the personal is political, and since the directors are Swedish I don’t think they tried to avoid anything that smacked of cultural anxiety. The abandon with which their subjects throw themselves into their art, no matter how corny some people may find it, goes to show that women of any age just wanna have fun and, as a corollary of that desire, hope everyone else can live their lives as they please in the moment. There’s no reason to wait until you’re old. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Uplink Kichijoji (0422-66-5042).

Calendar Girls home page in Japanese

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