Cold War (2018)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Cold War (2018) – P. Pawlikowski

Pawel Pawlikowski’s doomed romantic drama looks gorgeous in black and white, with its perfect period recreation (1950s Poland and Paris) and melancholy jazz score.  Tomasz Kot plays Wiktor, the musical leader of a Polish folk music troupe, presenting peasant songs and dances (astonishingly performed) in a theatre setting across Eastern Europe.  Joanna Kulig plays Zula, a young girl with a somewhat dire past who pushes herself into the troupe and becomes one of its stars.  Soon, they have fallen in love (despite his other relationship) and their (moderate) age difference.  When the Stalinist regime begins to impose itself on the troupe’s repertoire, Wiktor plans an escape to the West (when on tour in Berlin) and Zula commits to join him...but does not.  Years go by but their love does not diminish and eventually they are reunited in Paris.  But happiness is not to be.  The film really captures a certain mood, a haunting feeling arising from obsessive love between two damaged people.  Pawlikowski keeps us on the outside, letting us view the characters’ actions but not always revealing their thoughts or motivations (although often we can infer them easily enough).  The plot moves forward rather elliptically, spanning from 1949 to 1964, and we are often surprised by the changes that time renders.  The dazzling cinematography (by Lukasz Zal) also contains a number of beautiful and surprising shots (e.g., we don’t realise that a couple is standing in front of a mirror rather than in the middle of a crowd until someone walks up to them). Indeed, the word “arthouse” fits the film like a glove, as it feels like a wonderful, sad, nostalgic, work of art.  It’s dedicated to the director’s parents whose own relationship apparently bears some similarities to the onscreen romance.  Highly recommended!

Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015) – K. Jones

Film critic Kent Jones wrote and directed this documentary about the making of (and reaction to) the famous book of conversations between director Alfred Hitchcock (then 63) and acolyte and French new wave director Francois Truffaut (then 30).  The book runs through Hitch’s entire oeuvre with his frank and seemingly unguarded and unpretentious thoughts about each film (originally up until The Birds, 1963, but later updated to include the later films, including Family Plot, 1976, based on further correspondence between the directors). Although this documentary does involve an array of talking heads (David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Olivier Assayas, James Gray, Paul Schrader, Richard Linkater, Peter Bogdanovich, and of course Martin Scorsese), it is really the clips from Hitch’s work and the discussion of them that is the highlight.  Extended treatment is given to Vertigo and Psycho (and there is an interesting nugget about The Birds) although most films get only a light touch and many none at all.  Occasionally we hear recorded excerpts of the actual tapes (including some rather risqué comments that I don’t remember in the book!). The take home point is that Truffaut’s book helped people to see Hitchcock as an artist who knew how to manipulate audiences with (and even changed) the language of cinema (stemming from his training in the silent days) and also invested many of his personal concerns (and perhaps pathologies) into his films as a true auteur.  Although not in the film, a trivia item on imdB.com argues that Truffaut’s book (released in 1967) resulted in Hitchcock becoming too self-conscious and therefore never making another good film!  (It’s an interesting hypothesis but I reckon Frenzy and Family Plot are not too bad). Although I myself would have enjoyed a deeper analysis of each film (with clips), I guess I always have the book to turn to, sitting proudly on my cinema shelf.  Still a fun watch if you are a Hitchcock fan!

Sisters of the Gion (1936)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Sisters of the Gion (1936) – K. Mizoguchi

Watching this 1936 film in 2019 offers some lessons.  First, that women’s mistreatment by men was fully recognised and challenged this early.  Second, that Mizoguchi was able to express this clearly in pre-war Japan.  Oh, have we moved backwards or forwards since then? (Of course, I know that the suffragette movement was already in full flourish a century ago but worldwide progress seems slow). Two sisters living and working as geisha in the Gion district of Kyoto take opposite approaches to men.  Umekichi feels an obligation to support the man who has been kind to her (as a “patron”) even after his business has collapsed and his wife has left him a pauper.  But Omocha feels that men are forever taking advantage of women, treating them as “playthings” and she vows to do everything she can to get back at them.  The plot then involves Omocha scheming and lying and taking advantage of drunken and gullible men (who are obviously suckers to their sexual desires).  Perhaps in 1936, Omocha was the villain and sympathies were aligned with Umekichi?  I don’t really think so, despite the fact that Omocha is (physically) punished for her actions (by a less powerful man she “cheated”).  After all, Umekichi is also spurned by the man in whom she invested her care and concern.  Therefore, the much more logical conclusion is that Mizoguchi is instead showing us that “women can’t win” no matter whether they choose to side with men and support them or to confront men and challenge their dominance.  Until power differences really do change, that is the likely reality.  Of course, in 1936, the safe course was for Mizoguchi to end the film by saying the life of the geisha is hard … but no doubt he knew that this extended to women as a group (as witnessed by all of the women suffering in his other films).  Let’s hope that equal rights, equal pay, etc. for women (and all gender categories) will be here soon (we will need to continue to vote wisely and to fight).

The Naked Island (1960)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Naked Island (1960) – K. Shindô

Wordless but not silent, Kaneto Shindô’s The Naked Island (Hadaka no shima) feels almost like ethnography as it details the (hard) lives of a family of four who live on a small rocky island in the Seto Inland Sea of Southern Japan.  They carry fresh water in large wooden buckets from another island (paddling across the sea in a wooden boat) just to irrigate their crops, which seem to be dying of heatstroke on the exposed cliff face.  No one speaks, they just work; the husband tends to the field while the wife carries the water and the children help to prepare meals (when they are not being ferried to school by the mother).  They take turns having a bath in an old oil drum. There is an almost tactile sensuality to the widescreen images – and the Foley artists seem to be working overtime!  Indeed, it slowly becomes apparent that the sounds have been consciously selected, along with the jaunty (almost Tati-like) musical theme which changes its pace and mood along with the events portrayed.  When the two sons manage to catch a fish, the family heads to the nearest town (jarringly this is a modern film, taking place in 1960 or thereabouts) for an evening out (restaurant, cable car up a mountain). A late tragedy darkens the film’s tone dramatically, almost turning it to horror (a nod toward this director’s later masterworks in that genre: Onibaba, 1964, and Kuroneko, 1968).  Stoically (except for a brief release of tension and pain), the family continues their daily routine (wordlessly).  The result is hypnotic and beautiful, but perplexing in its intentions. Why the constraint of wordlessness? Is this hard, almost Sisyphean life, a metaphor for another fruitless challenge?  Regardless, it works as a pseudo-documentary of a place and lifestyle you’ve never seen before.