August 30: Seven Samurai/Shichinin no samurai (1954 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★★★

Thought it was about time I checked this movie out, so I settled in for half of it….and couldn’t leave.  I think this film plugged into many of the themes I like: its warm humanity, its elder-teaching-youth theme, its plot of building a team to accomplish an ethical goals.  These are things I always enjoy in a film, and I thoroughly enjoyed them here. 

I like the breadth of Seven Samurai, too.  We follow not only the seven samurai but also some of the villagers.  And like Altman would later, Kurosawa develops a character arc for many of the characters instead of just one or two.  We follow the leader, Kambei; the youth, Katsushiro; the samurai wanna be, Kikuchiyo; Kambei’s friend, Shichiroji; kendo master, Kyuzo;   the villager, Rikichi; Katsushiro’s love interest, Shino; and many others.  It takes a 3.5-hour film to do that, and the movie doesn't waste a second.  Although it doesn’t develop any of these characters in real depth, they’re all more than mere ciphers for an idea or stereotypes as the movie follows their growing together to accomplish a goal.  And there are touching moments as we learn about them: Katsushiro’s tossing money to ensure the villagers can get rice of the samurai and Kikuchio’s unintended revelation that he has a farming background, for example.  These two characters in particular also tread along social class boundaries, putting them at the center of one of the themes of the film. 

I was also relieved that I wasn’t put off by cultural elements of the film.  The over-the-top theatricality that I sometimes find in Japanese film generally takes me out of the movie, but that didn’t happen in Seven Samurai.  Toshino Mifune’s Kikuchiyo is big here, and I sometimes found him too big; his actions go beyond what seems the norm for the movie.  But Mifune never takes him so far out that I can’t continue to see him in the film.  The ensemble models how to respond to Kikuchiyo, and I found that easy to follow.

If Altman had done an action movie, it would have looked like Seven Samurai.  Warm, human, engaging, deep, poignant, epic and ethical. And photographed beautifully.  I know this film is seen as the predecessor for many team-action films, but it has more affective complexity than any other I’m aware of.  Seven Samurai is a wonderful cinematic achievement and testimony to what cinema can do.  And worth many hours of rewatching.

August 30: Sanjuro/Tsubaki Sanjûrô (1962 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★
It seems this film gets short shrift when people talk about it with Yojimbo, but I like this sequel better than the first.  There’s a more action in this one, and there’s humanity in its gentle comedy.  Many of the smiles and laughs come from the contrast of earnest, impetuous youth contrasted and skilled, weary experience of maturity.  And this set-up even propells the story on several occasions.  There’s a similar deft humor in the courtly ladies, who emphasize conventional correctness over expediency at nearly every turn.  But their comic relief, too, has its warm and knowing truth, recognized by Sanjuro both when he has cascades of white camellias tossed in the stream and when he quotes the older lady about the sheathed sword.  In fact, despite all its violence, Sanjuro affirms the wisdom of maturity over the earnest strength of youth throughout.  Or maybe I’m just getting old.

I find Sanjuro himself interesting here as in Yojimbo.  Unlike today’s action heroes, Sanjuro keeps his strength in check until he judges he needs it, and he is a paragon of judgment.  Of course, he could take on Schwarzenegger if he needed to, but Sanjuro prefers to work in the realm of the trickster rather than the elephant, accomplishing his goals with his wit rather than his martial prowess.  In addition to his controlled strength, this samurai is another 60s antihero, rejecting the status quo and following his own high moral code.  He has more depth here than in Yojimbo, and that adds to the appeal of the film, too.

So Sanjuro is a fun action movie with a compelling hero and a moral focus.  I was a little surprised at how much I enjoyed it.  

August 29: Fistful of Dollars/Per un pugno di dollari (1964 -- Sergio Leone)

★★

I think I read somewhere that Kurosawa had sued Sergio Leone’s company for stealing from Yojimbo to make Fistful of Dollars and Kurosawa had won the lawsuit.  Kurosawa said he’d made more from Fistful of Dollars than he’d made from Yojimbo.  No surprise that that he won the lawsuit, but a pity that the copy did so much better at the box office than the original.    

Once again, I find myself no fan of the pop culture knock-off.  The things I like most in FoD come from Yojimbo or the Westerns that precede it, things like the cinematography and the grittiness.  You hear that FoD introduced this roughness into the Western genre, but I’m thinking Kurosawa deserves that accolade more than Leone.  Kurosawa made the conceptual leap of creating the gritty, action anti-hero; all I see in Leone is following Kurosawa’s direction.

And he really does follow it.  FoD lifts whole scenes out of Yojimbo.  A man stops at a fountain for a drink in the beginning of both, and the heroes in both pal up with the inn keeper in both to find out about the bands of bad guys in both.  Citation is rife, at least in some of the more surface elements.

But when I consider the depth and involvement I felt in the two movies, I really see the difference.  FoD is more a stylistic exercise than anything else.  In the many parallel scenes and actions in the two films, scenes like the rescue of the damsel in distress have genuine resonance in Kurosawa while, in Leone, Joe just goes through the motions. There’s a deep moral motive in Yojimbo, but Joe just does the rescue;  Joe’s hair is hardly messed up in his rescue, but Yojimbo can hardly walk or even breath after he is caught.  One character clearly reaches deeper and sacrifices more for a human value that does the other.  The depth of humanity that you find in Kurosawa is lacking in FoD.

So for me, Fistful of Dollars is more a historical curiosity than a work of art that moves me, that I recognize humanity in.  Good for what it is.

August 28: Yojimbo/Yôjinbô (1961 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★
This is my second time around with this Kurosawa film, too, and I still don’t see what everyone else does in it.  I get that Kurosawa adapts the conventions of the western into a Japanese context here, and I get that the movie is technically great. 

But I still don’t respond to it the way that so many critics do.  I find it clever – shots like the low-angle ones with architecture or the bell in the background are citations from so many westerns.  And the dusty street scenes shot from behind one group looking out the other, a classic shoot-out composition albeit using guys with swords and wearing Japanese clothes.  But I find this kind of cinematic borrowing more clever than insightful or creative.  Films like Yojimbo remind me of Quentin Tarantino’s approach to film; appropriate some distinctive film flourishes from an external source (Asian B-movies on Tarantino’s part; the Western on Kurosawa’s) and then put the borrowings together skillfully so the cinematic elements make some sense to the target audience.  This citation/appropriation, to me, never rises much above “clever.”

Of course there are Kurosawa touches here that are unique to him: there’s Lady Macbeth in the character of Seibei’s wife, and there’s the humanity at the center of so much of what I like about Kurosawa.  Yojimbo offers Sanjuro’s pity for the plight of the kidnapped mother as well as the endearing figures of the restaurant owner and coffin maker.  And Toshiro Mifune puts in another amazing performance here, too.

But these touches don’t make Yojimbo for me.  Maybe I have a limited sense of humor, but the horns and 60s flourishes of the soundtrack are unnecessarily heavy-handed intrusions to me, the drum roll behind a comedy routine, and the comedy often seems based in traditions or cultural values that are too distant for me to sense and respond to. 

So although Yojimbo was a hugely influential film in popular culture, I think I’d put my money on films like Throne of Blood and High and Low.

August 27: The Tree (2010 -- Julie Bertuccelli)

★★★

The French have a knack for truth in their psychological dramas that escapes our Hollywood.  We can usually manage cinema clichés and less-than-full characters when we do dramas here, and those dramas touch us, but whenever I head into a French drama, I know I’m going to be in the presence of truth.  And that I'm going to squirm.

I squirmed in The Tree.  There is a group of middling-aged French actresses who seem to fear nothing, and this film adds Charlotte Gainsbourg to that list.  Her Dawn O’Neil suffers through her grief so intensely that I feared for her children as she failed to cope; scenes like the one in the kitchen were almost suffocating.  The children, too, cope with their grief in ways that only show their pain to those of us watching.  The Tree doesn’t explain to us what’s happening in the children’s minds, but we watch their actions and understand that they’re coming from intense pain and loss.  Here, too, the French excel at showing the emotions of children.  This film has the best evocation I’ve seen of grief in a child since 1996’s moving Ponette.

Julie Bertuccelli also does a fine job of using Australia as a perfect environment for her characters’ grief, too.  Australia hasn’t looked this oppressive, unforgiving and harsh since Animal Kingdom.  It’s the perfect location for unmitigated emotional pain.

Unfortunately, other elements of The Tree don’t support the heavy lifting that the cast and setting do.  There are heavy-handed plot moments, like when Daddy-tree drops a bough on mommy’s bed after she’s been out on a date.  Or when the new boyfriend drips over Daddy-tree’s root.  Or when we get a one-dimensional secondary character like the arch villainess who lives next door.  Lapses like these undermine the other great efforts here.

Still, The Tree has truth in it, and it’s always a great experience to recognize that in a dark cinema.

August 25: High and Low/Tengoku to jigoku (1963 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★★★
This is the second time I’ve watched this movie but the first time I’ve really gotten it.  What mastery.  Kurosawa manages a wide range of characters here, all the while maintaining big stakes for everyone.  High and Low is theatrical, cinematic and even novelistic.  It’s among my favorites of his.

More than previously, I was impressed by the way Kurosawa uses the tools of the cinema here.  You have to watch the whole frame to get what’s happening in most scenes.  For example, when Gondo is talking with his evil assistant, the camera isn’t on the two faces in the conversation but on the scene, so you can see how the police, the wife and the chauffeur are reacting to the conversation.  That’s theatrical, but also very cinematic since the frame is communicating a lot of information about several characters at the same time.  I think of this in Altman or PT Anderson.  Or Renoir. I didn’t realize this technique was part of Kurosawa’s style.   One of the phone conversations is another great example of cinema economy.  The scene starts with Gondo talking on the phone, and the soundtrack continues with the conversation while the visuals cut from an image of Gondo on the phone to an image of everyone listening to a recording of the conversation.  Again, we can see how the conversation is affecting everyone in the movie with the screen full of characters.

High and Low also builds and builds the stakes until they are so high that you can’t imagine things could ever work out.  Not only is the kidnap victim at risk, but so is Gondo’s career.  And Kurosawa uses the Japanese culture of honor to raise the stakes even more, and to use this single kidnapping situation to question the entire economic development that Japan has undergone since the end of the war.  Early, the question is whether the corporate types will throw away quality and integrity in order to do business.  We learn that they will do so through the actions of Gondo’s assistant and through Gondo’s refusal to compromise on quality.  But the story then shifts to the question of whether Gondo will sacrifice his own material well-being for the life of the chauffeur’s son.  And when that’s decided, a large social question emerges; Will society respect and reward honor?  Throughout High and Low, we feel that nothing less than the culture of Japan itself is under stress, whether traditional values will bend to the demands of capital or not.  There’s a Shakespearean quality to the questions here as well as to the scope of the inquiry.

I like the range here, too, another Shakespearean element that makes even episode-based movies like High and Low feel epic in scope.  As the title implies, there is intrigue and conflict among those high on the hill, and there is grunt work, both among the police and the criminals, among those in the lower parts of the city.  In one compelling sequence, the police tail a suspect through honky-tonk bars and drug dens.  In this film, Kurosawa takes his camera through a big range of environments.

I also always respond to the humanity in Kurosawa, too, which can border on cute but which doesn’t  lapse into maudlin.  In the sequence on the train, the little aside when the policeman nods off captures both Kurosawa’s humanity as well as his use of comic touches to lighten the action.

I really liked this movie on the second viewing, and I’m sure it will hold up under subsequent.

August 21: Pale Flower/Kawaita hana (1964 -- Masahiro Shinoda)

★★★★★


Another great cinema experience here.  Pale Flower ranks with the beautiful films of bored existentialism from early 60s Antonioni, who deals with Europeans facing the same malaise as Muraki and Saeko here.  This Japanese pair see life as bland and uninteresting and seek thrill experiences to authenticate their existence. 

The thrills they seek include ever-higher gambling stakes as Saeko becomes used to risk and must wager more for excitement.  In fact, we learn that her intensity of living is so strong that even the other card players feel more alive when she’s there and look forward to her being in their game.  She also does a wild highway race with another sports car down Tokyo interstates in the middle of the night; the race ends when the driver of the other car stops and comes over to the couple, laughing hysterically.  He, too, had needed a thrill to feel authentic, and Saeko had shared that with him.  She even tries drugs as a way to feel, too, though we don’t see that scene.  I guess that if Masahiro Shinoda’s studio thought the card games were too graphic, they’d have definitely frowned on drug use. 

 Muraki is as bored as Saeko, as he says in voiceover at the film’s opening, but he’s experienced the intensity of truly living in killing another man; he explains to her that the feeling at the moment of killing is deeper and more authentic than any other thrill experience.  He feels some draw towards Saeko’s quest, but having felt intensely alive as he murdered the man, Muraki often doesn’t participate in Saeko’s seeking with the relish she does.  Having lived so intensely in doing his first killing, he finds that other thrills lack intensity, so he ultimately volunteers to do a hit for his gang even though he’ll return to jail because of it.  But before he kills his target, he seeks out Saeko so he can invite her share in the intensity of his moment.  It’s the climax of the film.

I like the ending of Pale Flower, too, sad and ironic as it is.  Muraki is in jail by then and unlikely to again feel authenticating thrill, while Saeko is dead, murdered in a scene which we hear involved sex and drugs; she was evidently continuing to seek intense thrill with the junkie Muraki had feared would lure her to her death.  We also see Muraki’s protégé show up at a card game in the suit that Muraki had given him, but the kid’s open face and body language tell the viewer that he has none of the depth of the man who'd previously worn the suit.  The young guy doesn’t understand what had been going on around him.

And layered on the philosophy, Pale Flower has gorgeous cinematography.  Shinoda uses intense blacks and whites and frequent strong composition in the frame, both two-dimensionally and leading into deep background.  The scenes of the (obscure-to-me) card games are tense and riveting even though a western viewer probably doesn’t understand the rules.  The films interiors are full and lit theatrically; its exteriors tight, creating the feel of characters trapped in a maze.  Even the clothes are remarkable with their elegance.  

Without the compelling characters and theme, I’d want to watch this movie just for its visuals.  With all of these elements together, Pale Flower if a great experience for the brain, the eye and the heart.