Nobody knows

Koreeda, Japan, 2004

The film is based on a much publicised event in the eighties which came to be known as " the affair of the four abandoned children of Sugamo". The news story has been transformed into a heart wrenching film (arguably the director's best) about childhood and the descent into horrifically primordial conditions when people without money are cut off from the sustaining grid of society. It reminds one of the fragility of what we term normal life, the shifting sands on which the fabric of our existence is based.

The four children, from different fathers and the same mother, are abandoned on a second floor flat. The mother's visits become less frequent till her final disappearance. All but the eldest are forbidden to leave the flat. At first there is money but the pennies run out fast. One by one the gas, electricity and water supply are cut off and at one stage we find one of the children eating paper. The children's longing to have a normal life and going to school recedes as a distant dream. Only on one occasion does the eldest Akira manage to smuggle the other three into the open world. Conditions within the flat deteriorate and more and more it starts resembling a garbage dump as the amenities on which urban life depends vanish. They must go out to the park to relieve themselves, but this part of the horror is only hinted by the director.Water must be filled from the public tap. And finally death takes it's toll on Yuki, one of the sisters, slumps from her chair.  Akira, responsible and caring to start with, starts to crumble under the stress of  the problems which pile up like waves, and seems to be about to give way as time passes. (The real life confinement lasted six months.)

And as the end credits roll, the children are seen on a lane with buckets of water, and hope nowhere in sight.

The director has captured every nuance of the harrowing tragedy with the utmost sensitivity and delicacy. His view is unsentimental and compassionate. Yagira as the eldest sibling touches the sublime in his restrained and mature perdormance, which earned him the Palme d'Or.

Alley and Bread

Kiarostami, 1970, 10m, Iran

This short film, one of the first by the director, is a delightful human vignette about a child in whom you might see yourself. Returning home through the mud-caked street carrying a loaf, he is interrupted by a growling dog. He is alone, the sun baked street is empty. He looks here and there and is almost going to cry. Three mules with one rider clatter noisily by. A bicycle. He follows a bald man for some time, before the man disappears into a house. The dog has a change of heart and the pair proceed homeward together. The boy goes in. The dog squats outside the door. Another boy comes along. Dog growls.

It was a one-growl dog.

Battleship Potemkin

1925, Eisenstein, USSR, 73m

Another miracle of the silent film, demonstrating it's possibilities beyond the cinema of words. There may be things which can be expressed in words alone, but silent cinema seems particularly suited for exalted themes, where script is likely to prove inadequate. The Passion of Joan of Arc was one such theme, and the present film, portraying a society in the grip of rapid violent social change, usually termed revolution, is another such. If talking cinema is comparable to drama, silent film may be like painting or dance.

A mutiny broke out on the Potemkin in June 1905. The immediate provocation is the serving of maggot infested meat, which is refused by a part of the crew. The disobedient ones are ordered to be shot, but at the last moment, the firing squad refuses to fire, and soon the ship is taken over and the officers cast into the sea. As the ship sails into Odessa, the populace joins the rebellious sailors in a mounting crest of mass emotion, followed by a bloody massacre by the Czarist forces. The Potemkin sails away, and is allowed to proceed unchallenged by a squadron of ships sailing in the opposite direction, betokening the rebellious currents which are to gather momentum.

Visceral passion, a mounting anger and the thirst for the opressor's blood are what the movie is all about. The film has a heavy sledge hammer masculine quality, a brutal realism which starts from the most elemental human need of food. The insult implicit in the serving of rotten meat sparks of anger spreading like a fire. The condemned rebels are covered with a tarpaulin before being shot. The entire drama of the mutiny is captured in a breath stopping sequence. The film has the quality of a natural cataclysm, moving with the fierce energy of a tidal wave.

Ofcourse, there is the long, celebrated sequence of the firing down the steps, the bayoneted militia advancing implacably like a roadroller, as the populace scatters in silent screams, to be confronted with the sword slashing cavalry from the opposite side.

One may miss on the artistry in being swept by it's sheer power. The rippling waves shimmering in shafts of light, sail boats in joyous procession, and the naval squadron in pitch darkness--the camera delights continually.

To call it a propaganda film is to miss the epic sweep and grandeur. It's a movie that comes straight from the red heart.

Metropolis 1927

Fritz Lang (1890-76), 118minutes

The movie is made in 1927 Germany, in a lull between WW1 and the emergence of the scourge. The film itself has survived in various degrees of mutilation and the one I got to see is not it's most complete incarnation.  It is noted as the first SF, the most expensive silent movie, and for employing platoons of extras (25,000). 

The plot has little coherence and is a mish-mash of science, labor vs capital issues (which must have been burning hot in those tumultuous times with Lenin active up the street) and biblical overtones all culminating in the momentous conclusion that the heart (a savior) must be a mediator between head (intelligentsia) and hands (working classes). In proposing a messianic figure as the absurdly naive solution to the class struggle, Lang tries to assuage all shades of opinion and belief. Social issues must have been pre-eminent in those heady times of dramatic change, and Metropolis is a grand parable articulating with energy and passion, if not commitment, the concerns of the augenblick.

The theatrics are piled without inhibition and are a mixture of the grotesque, comical absurdity, at the same time riveting as pantomime, silent opera or dance. Most impressive are the sets, dark and hellish, vast spaces through which the anguished hordes pour.

Metropolis is a city created by an unscrupulous business visionary and an evil scientist. Humanity is divided into the managers who lead lives of luxury in an Eden like environment and the laborers who toil in the sub-terrains to create wealth for the master classes. Opposition to the schema emerges from none else than the top guys only son. Throw in a Madonna like prophetess who talks of the coming Mediator to remedy the state of affairs, her mechanical replica who follows the will of the mad scientist to mess up our plans, and take a zig-zag path to reach the winning post.

The film is a compulsory viewing for it's historical importance and the grand scale and cost of it's production, reminding us of the brighter Avatar. The impression that remains is one of megalomaniacal grandeur, of spaces vast yet suffocating, of leers, grimaces and bodies unnaturally contorted. But after all it is a silent movie and it's the body and face that has to do the speaking, and Lang doesn't do it by halves. It has more of the medieval than SF. Even the over sized wheels and dials (small was not beautiful yet), the boiling retorts and the lightening flashing in the laboratory are more of a witch's paraphernalia. If it is science fiction, it's science is closer to the Industrial Revolution than the information age. After all, this is the period of H.G.Wells, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne, with Dickens not far behind.

As Ebert brilliantly summarizes,"``Metropolis'' does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world."

Roger Ebert's review
J Hoberman

Maboroshi 1995

Kore-eda (director, b.1962), 110minutes

The film is set in the quietitude and rhythms of a remote Japanese fishing village on the sea. Maborosi is about the sudden unexplicable suicide of a young husband, leaving behind the stunned widow, Yumiko, played by a prominent fashion model, and the three-ish year old son. Five years later she remarries, relocating to the aforesaid village. There is little progression of plot and the viewer has to piece together the inner journey of the woman across two marriages.

The film is a visual treat and there is a profusion of broad, horizontal, static shots in which the camera gives us time to linger over the interiors, or examine figures in muted communication. There is a prolonged funeral march in which the mourners proceed in single file towards the left of the screen. The shanties of the fishing hamlet, the trams and buses winding through the mountainside, the narrow allies where the children play, out of the way railway stations--everything is meticulously etched.

The cinematography has been compared to Ozu, but the underacting and sparseness of dialogue is also reminiscent of Bresson. An example is when Yumiko and her son for the first time meet her new husband and his daughter at a railway station in this planned marriage of convenience--like the complete strangers that they are. It is as formal and unemotional as a meeting of two executives, as the man apologises he has to rush to work immediately. The same delicacy, balance and restraint flow through the film.

The reason why the first husband killed himself or why Yumiko's grandmother even furthur back walks into the night never to return are left unanswered. The point of the story is not why the suicide occurs--it is enough to know that it happened-- but how the woman responds to and copes with the event. A big question mark hangs over most suicides, and the suggestion offered by the husband that he was following some mysterious light seems to be begging the question, ignoring the deepest human instinct for survival. As is written, even horses and cattle fear death, how much more a man in his prime. The film is a sensitive study of the "hollow" of  bereavement and guilt. The scars of the mind take long to heal. A suicide, more than a natural death, leaves behind a permanent pall of gloom, feelings of worthlessness and failure to love, making a mockery and superfluity of existence itself. There is never a tear or a sob in the movie and it's only the camera and composition that narrates the festering process. "Your silence spooks me," says the husband at one point.

And the mystery is not why the particular event occurred but why life is the way it is. Or rather to realise that it is.
Ebert's review