There’s obviously something about Hong Sangsoo’s methodology that appeals to Isabelle Huppert, because this is the third movie of his that she’s starred in. It may be the free-form way Hong constructs his narrative. Like Mike Leigh, Hong doesn’t start with a finished script, but unlike Leigh he doesn’t involve his actors in the scriptwriting process. Instead he shows up to the set every day with notes that are then fleshed out by the actors. This method can sometimes backfire, with actors overcompensating for the lack of clear narrative intent with actorly flourishes that give the game away, so to speak. Huppert is too seasoned to give the game away, but in A Traveler’s Needs she seems more untethered than in the two previous films she did with Hong, In Another Country and Claire’s Camera. As a result, it’s the Korean actors who seem untethered.
Partly it has to do with language. Much of the dialogue is in English, and while Hong is self-assured enough to let his actors stumble around in the language in accordance with their skills levels—meaning they simply sound linguistically challenged rather than stilted—they still sound as if they’re not sure of what they’re supposed to be saying when they’re locked in conversation with the fluent Huppert. The French actress plays Ilise (or Iris, depending on how Anglophone you want to be), a preternaturally carefree Seoul tourist who is bold in striking up conversations with random natives. One encounter has led to an ad hoc French conversation teaching gig with a pianist, Isong (Kim Seung-yun), during which very little French coaching takes place. Mostly the two talk in English about Isong’s feelings, a method that at first smacks of laziness on the part of Ilise, who would rather drink (thus making her a perfect foil for Hong) than do anything else. But eventually you get the notion that Ilise’s insistence that her “students” open up to her is a kind of arrogance: She interprets the Korean reticence with foreigners as a hindrance to real communication, and, in a sense, her method works, though the reaction it sparks is not the one she expects. Eventually, the connection with Isong leads to connections with others who want to learn French, and in the patented Hong style these new encounters become variations on a theme rather than unique interactions in their own right.
Though all of Hong’s films are comedies, some are funnier than others, and A Traveler’s Needs‘ jokes have a biting insistence that sometimes feels forced, again, probably because of the language. When it’s revealed that Ilise is actually staying at the apartment of a younger man (Ha Seong-guk), the first impression is that she’s using her French feminine wiles to take advantage of his hospitality, since he doesn’t ask her for rent even though he himself seems underemployed. The man’s mother (Ha Jin-wha) confronts him about this unseemly arrangement (they don’t seem to be having sex, though you never know with Hong), but the incident isn’t really keyed into the overall flow of the story. It’s simply there to reinforce the theme of Ilise’s disregard for people’s concerns, despite her determination to understand their “feelings.” Maybe that’s a point that would become more pertinent on repeated viewings, but Hong makes so many films so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up with him.
In English, Korean and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).
Baek Seung-bin’s third feature’s literary pretensions go beyond his borrowing the title of William Maxwell’s classic 1979 novel. There’s a gay bar that figures centrally in the plot called Giovanni’s Room, the title of an early James Baldwin novel and one of the characters grows up to pen an award-winning work of fiction that takes place in parallel universes, a situation that mirrors the plot of Baek’s own movie, which reportedly is a response to an “existential crisis” the director experienced. The protagonist’s own existential crisis would seem to be a lifelong one, and starts with the departure of the high school classmate he loves after the suicide of the latter’s beloved mother, who happened to be a professional poet and English lit scholar. Baek doesn’t go much into detail regarding the relationship between the protagonist, Dong-jun (Sim Hee-seop), and the mournful friend, Kang-hyun (Shin Joo-hyup), but simply presents it as a given, with isolated scenes of the two trading philosophical bon mots and getting chastely physical. The difference is that Kang-hyun believes life isn’t worth living without risk-taking—his hero is the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit—while Dong-joon dreads the future, but doesn’t realize why until Kang-hyun goes away.
The bulk of the movie takes place in three what-if scenarios, as if Dong-joon, now 42 years old, were only a figment of Baek’s imagination as a writer. The conceit of having Dong-joon lead three separate lives depending on which life path he chooses at an early juncture would probably work better if Dong-joon were a more sympathetic character, but the one quality that all three of his “me’s” share is moroseness. In one life he’s an English lit professor who drinks too much and mopes around his office, trying to hide his homosexuality though everyone seems to know about it and doesn’t really give a shit, thus making his gloomy attitude not just pointless but annoying. In a second narrative, he’s a modest and hopeful cram school teacher with some literary pretensions of his own who is a good brother to a married sister undergoing a cancer scare, a good brother-in-law to the sister’s good-natured but ineffectual policeman husband, and a terrific uncle to the couple’s mildly rebellious teenage daughter; but still morose. In the third universe he’s again the heavy, though he seems to have mended whatever wayward tendencies ruined his marriage and turned his son into a convict. The proof of his redemption is the friendship of a construction worker widower-father who has his own literary pretensions that Dong-joon encourages is a selfless way—or is his interest more erotic in nature?
The other thing all three narratives have in common is that they all eventually lead back to Kang-hyun, an outcome that feels anticlimactic by definition, since it seems to happen three times. The trouble with movie scripts that want to be novels and movie directors who aspire to be Willam Maxwell is that both tend to create worlds that can only be effectively conveyed through unique literary stylings. Despite its formal ambitions, So Long, See You Tomorrow, the movie, is emotionally incoherent, which is especially disappointing. Right now, Korean cinema could really use a good, honest, straightforward fiction movie about queer longing.
The parallel universe depicted in Singapore director Eric Khoo’s Spirit World is a more conventional literary conceit: the afterlife, which here is inhabited by two recently deceased souls who are stuck watching a living person try to find meaning in a life that has become a chore. The fact that one of these two souls is a famous chanson singer named Claire played by Catherine Deneuve and the afterlife seems limited to Japan, specifically the Pacific coast of the lower Kanto region, says more about Khoo’s peculiar creative obsessions than it does about his beliefs.
The other departed-but-not-yet-enraptured soul is piano tuner Yuzo (Masaaki Sakai), one of Claire’s biggest fans who died only days before the singer was to make her long-awaited concert return to Japan, and thus his son, Hayato (Yutaka Takenouchi), a blocked film director, goes to the concert in his place as a kind of tribute to the old man. Claire dies while drinking a mess of nihonshu after the show and meets Yuzo on the other side. He tells her one of the rules of the afterlife is that newly embarked souls can’t cross over oceans (who makes these rules?), and so the pair spends the rest of the movie watching over Hayato as he slips into his own existential crisis, one that seems to have been triggered not so much by his father’s death or, for that matter, his reconnecting with his estranged mother (Jun Fubuki, behaving the total opposite of how you would expect a woman who abandoned her son as a young child would), but rather by his disappointment in how his career turned out. Based on what we’re shown it’s likely his cinematic vision tanked because he just drinks too much.
Khoo, along with his scriptwriter, Edward Khoo, has even less to say philosophically about the higher purpose of living one’s life gracefully than Baek does, and for the most part the viewer can do little more than tag along with Spirit World, whose internal logic, even as a fantasy, not only defies common narrative sense but lacks any recognizable emotional contours. The afterlife, it would seem, is pretty boring.
So Long, See You Tomorrow, in Korean, is now playing in Tokyo at Cine Libre Ikebukuro (03-3590-2126).
Spirit World, in French, Japanese, and English, is now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).
The title of this Spanish drama has less to do with the mechanics of the story than with the expectations of the viewer. Director Antonio Méndez Esparza, adapting a novel, concentrates on the everyday concerns of an average citizen named Lucia (Malena Alterio), a woman of unremarkable appearance, passable social skills, and an attitude of what’s in it for me. Which isn’t to say she’s mercenary or cynical; only that her appetites are the only thing that keep her interested in life. When we meet her, she’s the IT specialist at a company that offers dental plans. Her boss is immediately pegged as a creep when Lucia has lunch with a former colleague who left the company because of some questionable actions on the part of the boss, but those concerns pass under the proverbial bridge when the whole company goes under due to disastrous, possibly illegal investment decisions on the part of management. Lucia is out of a job.
Admitting to herself that she can’t work in an office any more, she studies for a taxi license and uses her savings to purchase a used cab. In the meantime, she makes the acquaintance of a handsome neighbor who lives upstairs in her apartment building. She’s drawn to knock on his door after hearing him play Pavarotti’s rendition of the aria “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. Not knowing anything about opera, she isn’t clued in when the handsome stranger (Rodrigo Poisón) introduces himself as Calaf, who is the prince in Turandot. Esparza keeps the Turandot references coming for the rest of the movie as Lucia’s romance with Calaf, who turns out to be a theater actor, ends abruptly with no explanation from him. Though we expect Lucia to be destroyed she takes it in stride since she’s worldly enough to understand that sex doesn’t mean as much as people think it does. However, over the coming weeks she meets fares in her cab who have associations with her former lover, and eventually comes to realize that she is somewhat popular among a certain coterie of creative types, which at first flatters her and later makes her wonder if she’s being used. And then her old boss, drunk and abusive as ever, gets into her cab one night and she acts on her sudden feelings of resentment.
Though Something Is About to Happen doesn’t scan as a thriller, its mounting sense of nervous anticipation gets under your skin. The lynch pin is Lucia. It takes time to fall under her charismatic spell since she is not what you would call conventionally beautiful and has a tendency to make up stories about herself. And yet she wields her sexuality with a confidence that’s disarming. In the end, her self-assurance doesn’t save her and she falls off the deep end emotionally. Esparza doesn’t let us stick around long enough to learn if she hits the ground too hard or picks herself up and dusts herself off, but if it’s the latter, you’ll feel sorry for anyone who gets on her wrong side.
In Spanish. Opens Oct. 31 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645).
Something Is About to Happen home page in Japanese
photo (c) Una Produccion de Que Nadie Duerma AIE-Avanpost
In June the Supreme Court ruled that government cuts to welfare carried out between 2013 and 2015 were unlawful in a decision that undermined much of the welfare ministry’s rationale for how it determines benefits. The court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, meaning welfare recipients who’d had their benefits reduced, in two cases. Another two dozen suits against the government are still being heard and it’s assumed the court’s decision will have a significant impact. The ministry argued that the cuts in question, which totaled about ¥300 billion, reflected a decrease in the cost of living, but the court found that the ministry had “exceeded and abused [its] discretionary power” in arriving at the cuts, which went as high as 10 percent for some welfare recipients. As it happens, 10 percent is the exact portion by which the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in 2012 pledged to reduce government assistance. In essence, the ministry had come up with a calculus that would make the LDP’s wishes come true, and had less to do with deflation. It remains to be seen if any of the plaintiffs are compensated for the cuts.
It also remains to be seen if the Supreme Court ruling will have any effect on the welfare policies of the new administration of Sanae Takaichi, who, according to Reuters, has advocated for a “stricter ability-to-pay principle” that could adversely impact single parents and low-income earners, many of whom are dependent on public assistance to make ends meet. The LDP’s general approach to welfare is that it is something that needs to be reined in as much as possible, as illustrated by an article published by Asahi Shimbun in early October.
A single mother with four children who lives in “northeastern Japan” applied for public assistance in 2024, since she couldn’t raise her kids on the money she earned from her full-time job. The woman had divorced her husband early in January of that year because of his “reckless” attitude toward money, which made it difficult for her to plan for her family’s future. As is often the case with such stories, the reporter neglects to discuss anything related to the ex-husband’s responsibilities in supporting his ex-wife, who appears to be raising their four children, including an infant, alone. She made the best of her situation for as long as she could and found her living expenses exceeded her pay, so “as a last resort” went to city hall and applied for government assistance to make up the difference.
During the application process, she was asked if she had a car, and she said that she did since she needs it to shuttle her kids to daycare and to commute to her job. Her assistance was approved, but in the fall of 2024 she received a phone call from the official who had taken her application. He told her she would have to get rid of her car by the end of the year or forfeit her benefits. The welfare office had determined that her car was an “asset,” so, according to the rules, she was not allowed to own one.
The daycare facility where the woman brings her children is a 15-minute walk from her house. Without the use of a car she has to walk three of her children to the facility while also carrying futons and changes of clothing for them. As for her commute, she returned to her job after maternity leave, and it takes 20 minutes to get to her work place by car. If she uses public transportation, it takes an hour and 20 minutes each way. More significantly, if any of her children fall ill at daycare, she would be unable to get to the facility quickly without a car. She told the official at city hall that she needs her car in order to keep her full-time job. Without it, she would probably have to reduce her hours, meaning she would then have to apply for more benefits. With the car, her benefits can be reduced. The official said there was nothing he could do since he was just following the law.
Eventually, the woman hired a lawyer who argued her case with the pertinent officials, and last March the welfare department relented and allowed her to keep her car and her benefits.
October 24 marked the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Day of Peace in Iceland, when 90 percent of Icelandic women commemorated the United Nations International Women’s Year by going on strike. That means not only did working women not go to work, but homemakers told their husbands they would have to fend for themselves that day, including taking care of the kids. This short, rather plain documentary is mostly a series of talking head interviews with women who participated in the action on the day in question. Naturally, they are all much older, and the decades-long perspective is interesting in the way it reveals how uncertain they were at the time and how much they’ve gained since then. Iceland is famous for enjoying the largest portion in the world of women in government (48 percent of parliament) and as business leaders, and the movie goes to some length to prove that the Women’s Day of Peace had much to do with it, because it shows how everything changed after that.
Prior to the action, Iceland was as sexist as any other country in the world. Girls who dreamed of occupations were derided by their parents and teachers, but at the same time many women who married still worked in factories and on farms while keeping house and raising children. In fact, one woman who grew up on a farm said that she was “equal to any man” she worked beside by default, though, culturally speaking, she could never expect to advance upwards either within the agricultural community or outside it if she decided to pursue an education. Female clerical workers testify that they kept the gears moving at banks, media companies, and government offices while earning much less pay than their male counterparts. Those who were stay-at-home wives complained about the ritualistic aspect of their vocations. “Christmas was a terrible chore,” one says about her domestic responsibilities, not only toward her immediate family but toward her extended one. Of course, all these gripes were universal—it’s one of the reasons the UN made a point of declaring 1975 for women—but the fact that women from all walks of life in Iceland could organize a national strike on such short notice points to something extraordinary, and the film does a good job of explaining how the strike came about and how it operated in real time. The most interesting aspect, and one that seems only apparent in hindsight, is how successful the strike was in spite of the compromises made. “We loved our male chauvinists,” one woman says wryly, and there was unease among a great many participants of spooking the men who had oppressed them. “They assumed we wanted to take over,” said another. So while the action was a general strike, it wasn’t called that. “Day of Peace” was an anodyne concession. Anything that smacked of communism and revolution was tamped down. “We weren’t active in a nasty way,” is how one woman puts it.
The many anecdotes about husbands being forced to cook for themselves and stubborn female managers getting dragged to demonstrations for the sake of feminist enlightenment are amusing but in a sense detract from the most edifying aspect of the story, which is the power of collective action. The overarching emotional tone of the interviews is giddiness: After 50 years these women still can’t believe they pulled it off, and many admit it was the most “fun” day of their lives. In that regard I could have used more input from actual working class women as to how the subsequent changes improved their own lives. Almost all the witnesses are professionals—major movers in the business, legal, and media worlds, including Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who was president of Iceland for 16 years, the first woman in the world to be democratically elected to her country’s highest office. Good for her, but I wanted to hear more about the woman who as a little girl aspired to be a ship captain.
In English and Icelandic. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
One of the many refreshing things about Mike Leigh’s cinema is the way he disregards certain prejudices in terms of plotting and characterization. There are moments during his movies when viewers may ask themselves why a certain character acts a certain way or why something happened out of the ordinary without an explanation, and Leigh won’t provide an answer. He’s got a story to tell and such considerations are beside the point in the larger scheme of things. His latest is about two Black middle aged sisters. The younger one, Chantelle (Michele Austin), has two adult daughters who are shown at work experiencing various work-related problems that aren’t developed and so feel like non sequiturs. They are also shown ineracting intimately with their mother and it seems natural to wonder where their father is. Leigh doesn’t tell you and doesn’t seem to care. Meanwhile the other sister, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), is also shown with her family—a plumber husband, Curtley (David Webber), and an unemployed son in his early 20s, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett)—and the intrafamily dynamics there are essentially what the movie is about, but the contrast with Chantelle’s arrangement is important, and immediately brings to mind Tolstoy’s famous line in Anna Karenina about families. Whatever contributed to Chantelle and her brood’s happiness isn’t Leigh’s concern. It’s what brought Pansy and hers to such a state of abject misery.
As usual in the director’s domestic life movies, the quotidian details are paramount. Pansy lives in middle class comfort in a London suburb, but she is far from comfortable. She is, in fact, mad at everything, all the time. She wakes up in the morning as if from a horrible nightmare and faces the day as if that nightmare has followed her. Her beefs are both unassailable and pointless. She berates Moses for laying around enveloped in headphones, only leaving his room for walks to nowhere. Curtley, who is shown working hard at his job with his voluble assistant, returns home to a constant barrage of needling and fierce bitching. Pansy often naps during the day, a sign of depression, and complains bitterly of aches and pains that may or may not be psychosomatic. Leigh and Jean-Baptiste make it difficult to suss Pansy’s mindset because her behavior is so taxing to watch. In a pharmacy she aims her venomous attention at anyone who looks at her the wrong way, which seems to be everyone. She antagonizes medical personnel and insults sales staff. Her rants might be hilarious if they weren’t so relentless. In the movie’s funniest scene she trades barbs with another rager in a parking lot over a space, a cliche that Leigh handles as a kind of joke on itself, but the punch line is exhausting. Chantelle, on the other hand, lives a life of quiet accommodation, working as a hair dresser in a salon she runs. She listens patiently to her customers gossip about their love lives (“Give him ideas? I’ve got 6 kids!”) and offers sane advice when solicited for it. More significantly, she’s the only person who puts up with Pansy’s insufferable anger, and while some of the source of that anger is explained when the sisters visit their mother’s grave together, it’s obvious Pansy’s inner demons are provoked by another, more contemporary and ongoing tribulation.
Leigh eventually gets to the point, but reveals it in such a plain fashion that the viewer may not get it at first—and not without having to interrogate the central relationship, which is that between Pansy and Curtley, an even more patient being than Chantelle despite the fact that he has to put up with the storm on a daily basis. Pansy’s depression springs from a deep loneliness, but not because Curtley is abusive or neglectful. Far from it. It’s something more fundamentally irreversible and inherently tragic, and it knocks the wind out of you when you understand its provenance. It’s a very hard truth indeed, and not a particularly rare one. What’s rare is Leigh’s insightful approach.
The strife that has visited the marriage of Ivy and Theo Rose (Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch) is played for laughs in a more conventional way in The Roses, even when its physical manifestation turns potentially deadly. Though clearly British, the pair live in a coastal Northern California paradise with two smart, all-American children. He’s an up-and-coming architect and she’s a world-class cook with unrealized ambitions, but Ivy’s latent frustration isn’t the reason for the couple’s mounting frictions. Theo pushes through an adventurous design for a local museum that ends up ruining his reputation, and while serendipity had much to do with the disaster, his towering ego can’t be discounted in the calculus that determines his firing. Ivy has just opened a seafood restaurant that, due to her lack of aggressive self-promotion, isn’t doing so well, but once she realizes she’s the only paycheck in the family, she doubles down and, voila!, the place becomes the toast of the Bay Area. Theo, who has taken on the double mantle of househusband and stay-at-home dad as he plots his comeback as a master builder, is thus sidelined even more as Ivy’s star rises in the hospitality trade, and therein lies the rub.
It’s also the reason why the movie doesn’t work the way its writer, Tony McNamara, and its director, Jay Roach, intend it to. Based on the same novel that Danny Devito’s caustic 1989 comedy, The War of the Roses, came from, McNamara’s script tries to contend with the changes that middle class marriage has undergone in the last 30+ years. In Devito’s movie (and presumably the novel) the wellspring of the spousal disaffection is the wife’s overflowing resentment after she concludes that she will be stuck at home for the rest of her life dependent on her husband’s financial largesse but only if she tolerates his non-negotiable emotional whims. McNamara has transferred the resentment to the husband: Theo hates that his manhood has been diminished by his wife’s success, a trite situation that the writer attempts to upend by allowing Ivy her own resentments, which are based on the notion that Theo’s effective disciplined parenting methods have turned her children into virtual strangers.
These resentments come to a head after Theo returns to his craft by designing a gorgeous seaside mansion with Ivy’s burgeoning riches. Intramarital hatred at the service of comedy can often be liberating, but despite McNamara’s facility with the kind of witty dialogue that school-trained English thesps like Colman and Cumberbatch throw off with aplomb (after all, McNamara wrote The Favourite, the movie that gave Colman an Oscar), the situations are strained and unnatural. It doesn’t help that the supporting players, which include the usually reliable Kate McKinnon and Andy Samberg, are all American actors working in a comic vernacular that makes for painful dissonance when they come in contact with the two non-American leads, as if they couldn’t really figure out what they were supposed to be doing in the same room together. I assume the Roses are meant to be unsympathetic characters, which is why their vitriol is played so monumentally, but I’m not sure if the actors know that.
Hard Truths now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).
The Roses now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), 109 Premium Cinemas Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
One of the two women that Japan’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has appointed to her cabinet is Kimi Onoda, who will be in charge of promoting “orderly coexistence with foreigners.” Onoda, who was born in the U.S. to a Japanese mother and an American father, has adopted as the motto of her ad hoc portfolio “Zero Illegal Foreigners,” which means she will work to deport any non-Japanese person who is in Japan without authorized permission to be here.
As anyone who has read a Japanese newspaper or watched a Japanese newscast since the campaign for the Upper House election last summer knows, foreigners in Japan has been the issue du jour, whether the foreigners are tourists or de facto residents. The reason is the ascendancy of Sanseito, whose campaign slogan was “Japanese first,” implying that they would work to regain the primacy of native people in a country where foreigners have supposedly been granted special privileges. Some of these privileges could more accurately be described as loopholes that a small subset of foreigners have indeed taken advantage of, but for the most part Sanseito’s campaign fed off the latent anxiety across the population, which was caused by the huge influx of foreign tourists over the past few years, a situation that has been exacerbated by uniformly negative media coverage, mainly about rude foreign tourists. This anxiety was seized upon by anti-foreigner elements who wish to curb the introduction of low-paid foreign workers to make up for acute labor shortages and deport people who came to Japan to escape persecution in their own countries. Misleading news stories were reposted ad nauseum through social media, much of it by Russian bots, about problems caused by foreigners and government programs that were believed to be encouraging immigration though they did not, such as the long-standing hometown exchange program devised by the Japan International Cooperation Agency to promote cooperation between Japanese municipalities and places in Africa. But the ruling Liberal Democratic Party did not clear up the misinformation and, in fact, adopted the Sanseito credo as its own after the upstart party performed better than expected in the election, believing that it reflected the sentiments of the people. Newly enlightened members of the public who came out vociferously against Japan’s immigration policy did not realize that, in fact, there is no immigration policy. If anything, immigration became stricter two years ago when the LDP revised the relevant law.
An article in the Oct. 10 Asahi Shimbun discussed the Zero Illegal Foreigners plan, which started in May after Sanseito’s campaign demonstrated real forward momentum. Deportations have indeed increased in the subsequent three months, though not anywhere near the levels achieved by the current Trump campaign in the U.S. to deport undocumented foreigners. From June through August, 119 foreign nationals, accompanied by immigration agents, were deported from Japan, all of it paid for by the state. During the same period in 2024, 58 foreign nationals were deported. By nationality, the June-August 2025 deportations included 34 Turks, 17 Sri Lankans, 14 Filipinos, and 10 Chinese. Thirty percent of these people had applied for refugee status, thus marking a significant change from the past, when deportations could not be carried out while a decision on refugee status was pending. Two years ago the government revised the Immigration Law to allow deportation after 3 unsuccessful bids for asylum even if a new application had been submitted. An applicant can also be deported if they have been found guilty of a crime. During the entire first year after the revision went into effect, a total of 25 people whose applications were still pending were deported, whereas 36 whose applications were still pending were deported between June and August of this year.
I have not followed the Conjuring franchise so far and was taken aback by the conceit that it is based on the adventures of a real life married couple, Lorraine and Ed Warren, who performed exorcisms starting in the 1950s and wrote books about it. Paranormal skeptic that I am, I felt somewhat intimidated by Last Rites‘ attitude that the viewer should take it for granted that the Warrens were the real deal, something that other movies of this ilk never really did, even the original Exorcist, which, while based on a novel, was grounded in Catholic dogma, and so its portrayal of supernatural phenomenon had a certain structural integrity to it. I was expecting something similar from this supposed final installment in the Warren saga (it would appear the franchise itself will continue with other characters), but in the end I failed to locate any kind of rationale that would make sense of what happened in the story.
And the story is comprehensive, starting in 1964 during an exorcism of a possessed mirror that sends the pregnant Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) into labor and nearly kills her and her baby daughter. Of course, the mirror reappears in the couple’s life many years later after that daughter, Judy (Mia Tomlinson), has grown into an adult and Lorraine and Ed (Patrick Wilson) have basically retired from the “ghostbusting business,” a term used derisively by some college students who attend their lecture. One of the reasons for quitting their vocation is that Ed has developed a serious heart condition that could trigger a massive heart attack during, well, contact with evil spirits, and, from the look of things, the spirits are always evil. The mirror comes into play when it’s bought by an extended working class family in the industrial heartland of Pennsylvania in the 80s as a graduation present for one of their daughters, who promptly starts having troubling visions. As the visitations become more intense and affect other family members, a priest is called in to investigate. He subsequently commits suicide under suspicious circumstances, and the Warrens receive a phone call (the priest was an acquaintance, since Ed is the only non-Catholic to whom the Church has granted exorcist credentials) for their assistance in the matter. Though at first they decline, once they are forced to confront the family they realize that the demons in the mirror are causing mischief expressly to get to the Warrens so that they can finish what was started in 1964.
Whatever real life story is behind this plot, the director, Michael Chaves, does a decent job of laying it out in a way in which all the disparate elements converge so that the Warrens and their ectoplastic nemeses reunite, but after that point things become narratively dodgy. The frights, which have so far been few and far between, increase in frequency and intensity once the Warrens produce their bag of tricks and get to work, but the reasoning behind their methods never come across the way the two priests’ methods did in The Exorcist and its cinematic progeny. At least William Peter Blatty conveyed the historical and religious concepts behind the Church’s means of fighting evil forces that manifest as existential threats. It’s hard to know what sort of rule book the Warrens are following as they try to draw out and banish the spirits of the mirror, which are determined, it turns out, to kill Mia. Consequently, I derived no real satisfaction in their somehow figuring it out, and that’s always the problem with supernatural horror: Writers and directors can do anything they want in order to produce disturbing images and sounds because the supernatural, by definition, does not follow plausible laws. But thrillers, also by definition, must in some way follow an internal logic, and Last Rites had none that I could discern. It’s a lot of sound and fury directed toward an outcome where Mia and her new husband are poised to take over the family business and, thus, the franchise.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).
Because of Hollywood, American movies are considered the default cinematic form, meaning any other kind needs to be qualified first; but there are enough American movies that fall outside the perceived Hollywood norm to constitute their own collective genre. This odd indie film about two amateur baseball teams playing the last game on a hallowed community field that’s about to undergo redevelopment sometime in the 1990s is so American in vibe and look that it feels like an outlier. Even I, who was born and raised in a milieu not much different from the movie’s Massachusetts setting, experienced some discomfort in my acknowledgment of the way it accurately depicted a certain by-product of American manhood, an acknowledgment that was mainly felt in the bones.
Eephus, which refers to a pitch that’s so slow as to be almost supernaturally imbued, is a comedy with a lot of jokes but no punch lines, unless you consider the notion that the men on display, most of them middle aged and in bad health, have nothing to look forward to after Soldier’s Field is torn up for the sake of a new middle school is a truth that’s more comical than bitter. The thick atmosphere of small town New England is immediately manifest with the help of a local radio station (whose announcer’s voice is provided by no one less than documentary god Frederick Wiseman) and its surfeit of ads for local restaurants and auto parts stores. The first person we meet is Franny (Cliff Blake), the guy who keeps score for the games seemingly for his own amusement, though eventually he’s called on to umpire when the longhair who’s being paid to officiate walks off because the game has gone on longer than his agreement allows. The two teams, one seemingly unaffiliated, the other sponsored by a paint store, chug beer throughout the day, with one team’s pitcher doing his stuff while becoming increasingly inebriated. There’s one player who is actually nominally qualified to be a pro since he’s on a college team somewhere, but his youth automatically makes him not only an exception but a ringer. The guys use these games less as a means of physical recreation than as an excuse to get out of the house and away from the sublimated pressures of raising families and holding down jobs they hate; and what becomes clear as the very long game proceeds through the afternoon, past twilight, and into the night is that, despite their constant bellyaching, they don’t want it to end because once it does they will have no outlet with which to release their frustrations about what their lives have become. The jokes are all on them, and as darkness descends their situation turns from comically quotidian to comically desperate, and in a very American way.
That’s because director Carson Lund’s script, written with two other men, taps directly into that unique form of American male loneliness. These guys bitch and moan and get on one another’s case for being fat and out-of-shape, but the forced enmity exposes the feeling that they know they likely won’t have any reason to see one another again after this game because they can’t admit that their lives are somehow incomplete. They could always just call and get together for a beer, you think to yourself as they leave the field for the last time in their respective vehicles, but this is the decade before the ubiquity of the cell phone, a technology that kept everyone connected but contrarily encouraged social atomization. Without the premise of an organized excuse, they have no impetus for contact. Eephus shows, albeit indirectly, just how we got to that point spiritually and culturally.
Opens Oct. 17 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
philipbrasor.com 