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).
Work, as the Nazis used to say, will make you free, though it depends on which end of the whip you’re on. A lot of it has to do with milieu. Louise Courvoisier’s continually surprising coming-of-age tale, Holy Cow, is set in the present-day agricultural region of eastern France, specifically among dairy farmers. Work isn’t so much punishing as it is merely less rewarding than the effort would seem to promise. Consequently, the characters are unsophisticated in a stereotypically rural way but hardly hicks or pushovers. They live even harder than your typical urban blue collar drone, drinking to excess nightly, brawling with gusto, and rutting, literally, til the cows come home. Eighteen-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau) is almost a steel-hardened example of the species. We first view him at a fair playing a drinking game that he loses, thus forcing him to strip naked in front of a crowd, which he does gleefully. The gambit works in the sense that he goes home with a girl but is too drunk to get it up and ends up sleeping on the street. It isn’t clear at this point whether Totone is in school or working, but it doesn’t matter because in short order his father dies in a car crash—not a shock, since the father was drunk himself—and he is forced to find work to support himself and his 7-year-old sister, Claire (Luna Garret). He gets offered a job at a cheese factory, which, unfortunately, is managed by the father of two boys who recently had a violent run-in with Totone and who make his work life miserable.
It’s difficult to assess whether Totone’s occupational screwups are intentional or come down to willful incompetence, but given his combination of native intelligence and short temper it’s likely both, and he’s soon out of a job, after which he cooks up a plan to make his own Comte cheese in a bid to win a local contest and a mess of euros that will keep him and Claire solvent for an indefinite period. From the beginning, it’s a naive expectation and turns into a desperate one when he runs up against a fundamental problem: He doesn’t have the cows to produce the milk and no money to buy it. So, of course, he steals it from his former employer with the help of his two partners-in-crime, Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Frances (Dimitri Baudry), while using sex to distract his old boss’s daughter, Marie-Lise (Maïwéne Barthélemy), who performs the dairy’s grunt work. Though there’s a farcical quality to the storytelling, Courvoisier dispenses with the predictable virtue arcs in terms of Totone’s attitude toward hard work and even sexual love. There’s something admirably real world about his trajectory, and you grow to respect him not because of what he learns, but because of what he endures. In a corny sense, he takes it like the man he has finally become.
Work of a less taxing nature sets the theme for the Japanese film Brand New Landscape. Ren (Kodai Kurosaki) works for a Tokyo florist delivering arrangements to businesses throughout the city. During one delivery to an awards function, he discovers that his estranged father is back in the capital and about to open a landscape design office. In the opening sequence, we witness the event—a family getaway to the mountains—that caused the rupture between Ren’s parents which led to the estrangement: Ren’s father put work above family, and moved to Singapore to make his name. In the meantime, his mother has died and his sister is moving toward marriage while Ren remains stuck in a state of inertia that is shaken by his father’s reappearance.
The first-time director, Yuiga Danzuka, mining reportedly autobiographical material, does a neat job of incorporating every character’s approach to work into what is essentially a family potboiler. We soon learn that the father (Kenichi Endo) has moved to Tokyo to supervise the controversial razing of a park in Shibuya that is being replaced by a commercial redevelopment project, thus displacing a number of homeless people, and that he is receiving pushback not only from the community but from one conscientious employee; a dynamic that emphasizes the self-aggrandizing attitude that destroyed his family. Ren and his sister contentiously discuss reconciling with their father and can’t quite come to terms with their lingering resentments, but more out of a lack of commitment—Ren has already been fired for what can be described as a terrible attitude—than any kind of trauma-based angst as a result of what they went through as abandoned children. There’s a lot going on in Brand New Landscape that’s interesting, especially its depiction of Tokyo’s ever-changing environment, but the story never fulfills its potentials. It’s as indecisive as its central character.
Holy Cow, in French, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6359-8608), Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
Brand New Landscape, in Japanese, now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
Portuguese critic-turned-director Miguel Gomes is comfortable with anachronism. It was the most obvious narrative device in his era-splitting breakthrough Tabu, and in his latest movie it’s essentially a theme. The title refers to a famous travel itinerary available to Europeans who wanted to see Asia in the early part of the 20th century, when much of the continent was still under colonial control. The tour covered all the major capitals, from Singapore and Manila to Osaka and Shanghai. Gomes uses the tour structurally in telling a story about a British colonial factotum who flees the arrival of his fiancee and does the tour, albeit informally and on the cheap, with the fiancee following close behind. Gomes alternates black-and-white recreations of the drama with 21st century documentary footage of the locations covered, thus offering a kind of comment on what the colonials never got about the places they ruled.
It’s never entirely clear why Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) decides he can’t face his betrothed, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), from whom he’s been separated for some time. The easy answer is that he’s simply a coward who can’t face up to commitment, but with each step of his journey he goes further into a kind of black pit of no return. Traveling from Singapore to Bangkok, his train derails and instead of waiting for help he hires a native to take him through the jungle. In Manila, where we are treated to real modern cock fights, he remains in a constant state of inebriation, and after arriving in Osaka escapes the Japanese authorities by hiding out in a rural temple with a bunch of monks, one of whom happens to speak his language (though the white characters are all supposed to be British, they converse in Portuguese). This mood of fatality is enhanced by the voiceover narration, which is all presented in the language of the place being depicted, and in a kind of heightened literary tone, as if written by an overarching novelist. The second half of the film traces Molly’s pursuit of Edward along the exact same route, but her journey is not desperate. It’s more sympathetic, as she encounters souls who try and usually fail to make her understand the places she visits.
Because Gomes treats the basic melodrama as farce, the colonial comments don’t always hit with as much force as they could, and a lot of Grand Tour comes off as a kind of paste-up travelogue. He doesn’t attempt to mediate the sensibilities of natives and colonists—the latter complain of the smells and inscrutability of the locals, and none think that any of the latter are there to be anything other than disposable servants. It is this aspect that the documentary elements are meant to contrast, by showing the people who live in these cities at home in an environment the colonialists abandoned out of frustration rather than conscience. In its own odd way Grand Tour is a lushly beautiful production about European stupidity, because in the end both Edward and Molly are lost to their hubris. They venture too far into a universe they don’t understand and which doesn’t want them.
In Portuguese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, French, Spanish, Japanese and English. Opens Oct. 10 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).
Though I’ve little use for wholesale creative comparisons, the critical observation that Paul Thomas Anderson is this century’s Stanley Kubrick makes a certain kind of sense, if only because no other contemporary director comes close to Kubrick’s playful eclecticism, especially in terms of story material. Though one could make a case for a commmon theme or mood that dominates Anderson’s oeuvre, he never repeats himself when it comes to subject matter, until now. One Battle After Another is Anderson’s second Thomas Pynchon adaptation, a feat in itself since Pynchon’s wild and woolly fiction seems all but impervious to adaptation. Moreover, Inherent Vice and Battle (based “loosely” on Vineland) are both what you would call genre exercises—the former a detective mystery, the latter a large-scale action movie complete with big explosions, gunplay, and car chases. In the end they are totally different in style and effect, but they retain Pynchon’s penchant for the absurd in ways that show how much work Anderson put into them.
And as a genre exercise, Battle may well be Anderson’s most conventional film in that its plot, while not entirely predictable, follows the formulaic development of an action flick. The prologue, as it were, is the best and most exciting part. Opening in the middle of a raid on an immigrant holding facility in what looks like the southwest U.S. by a radical left wing group called the French 75, the story injects us directly into what looks like an extreme partisan struggle for the soul of America, and you’ll have to decide for yourself if it looks at all like the struggle America is going through now. The two members of this group Anderson is most interested in are Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a no-holds-barred Black antifascist warrior with a thing for humiliating her enemies, and the white explosives operative called Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). These two are in what at first feels like an unlikely romantic relationship. However, during the raid, Perfidia comes across the super-macho Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), whom she mocks sexually for fun and, inadvertently or not, turns him on. Before the title credit is even shown, there’s a rapid-fire montage showing Perfidia and Lockjaw in an occasional wild affair unbeknownst to Pat, Perfidia giving birth to a daughter, and Perfidia getting caught and ratting on her associates before disappearing into Mexico.
The movie proper takes place 16 years later, when the child has grown into a teenage firecracker taking care of Pat, now passing as Bob Ferguson, who has turned into a stoned slacker. Lockjaw has in the meantime endeavored to join a super secret white supremacist cabal, and has been doggedly looking for the fugitive remnants of the French 75 for years, though not for the ostensible reason of wiping out antifa elements (though he very much wants to) but rather because he suspects Bob’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), may actually be his. For the most part, Anderson presents this premise without a lot of stylistic elaboration, and his action set pieces are brilliantly rendered with a cockeyed verve that plays off the various invented Pynchonisms (the white supremacist group is called the Christmas Adventurers; a convent that shelters undocumented immigrants and leftist fugitives goes by the name of Sisters of the Brave Beaver) and distinctive characters, like Benicio Del Toro’s coolly resourceful karate instructor, who keep the action moving at a rapid but coherent pace. As an action movie, One Battle After Another is extremely satisfying.
And as countless media profiles have already pointed out, it’s also thematically rich, though that would seem to go without saying given the times we live in and Anderson’s choice of updating Pynchon’s story from the 80s to a kind of hyperventilating now. There’s no way a director as thoughtful and imaginative as Anderson would not take advantage of this material to comment on our current predicament, no matter how much he downplays the notion in interviews. So for me, at least, the immediate appeal of the movie is as a genre exercise, and as such it doesn’t quite stick the landing. There’s a two-pronged post-climax coda that feels superfluous and long-winded, as if Anderson felt beholden to certain genre requirements he couldn’t in good conscience subvert. As a director who always identified closely with the people who sit in a movie theater, he seems to have gone a step further by attempting to please everyone, which is, of course, impossible.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
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