Recently Viewed: Ida

Logged on to Kanopy to watch Ida, a beautiful Polish movie about a young orphan who, at the behest of the Catholic nuns that raised her, ventures out into the world to meet her Aunt Wanda—partially to make peace with her last surviving relative, and partially to learn more about what she’ll be giving up before she takes her own vows and commits her life to serving God. She quickly discovers that her parents were Jews slain during the Nazi occupation, leading the unlikely duo on a journey to track down their corpses and properly lay them to rest; unbeknownst to Ida, however, her aunt has ulterior motives for embarking on their little road trip…

In terms of its visuals, the film reminds me of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; the elegant simplicity of its style enriches the complexity of its themes. For the most part, the camera remains static (I counted only four moving shots: half of them represent the protagonist’s point-of-view as she gazes out the window of a vehicle, and the other half… well, I don’t want to spoil anything), either trapping our characters in tight, claustrophobic closeups that push them into the lower corners of the frame, or losing them in vast, sprawling compositions in which they’re absolutely dwarfed by their surroundings. The implication is clear: these women feel confined and smothered by their respective social roles.

The sound design is equally exquisite. Once again evoking Akerman, much of the conflict occurs in the ellipses, and director Pawel Pawlikowski fills the tense, uncomfortable gaps in the dialogue with the clink of cutlery, the echoes of footfalls in an empty stairwell, and the splash of alcohol in a glass bottle.

I’m obviously a great fan of big, explosive blockbusters, but there’s always something refreshing about a filmmaker that understands the emotional power of subtler cinematic techniques. Akerman, Yasujiro Ozu, and Robert Bresson saw the value in occasionally stepping back and allowing the story to tell itself, trusting the viewer to make do without exaggerated performances or a swelling orchestral score—and so does Pawlikowski.

Recently Viewed: An Inn in Tokyo

With my free trial period of FilmStruck quickly coming to an end, I finally got around to watching An Inn in Tokyo, one of Yasujiro Ozu’s last silent features.

Like A Story of Floating Weeds—my favorite of the filmmaker’s works, far superior to his better known remake for Daiei—this 1935 drama is told with the economy and precision of a true virtuoso. The composition (which constantly emphasizes the seemingly boundless depth of the frame) and subtle camera movements (which became increasingly rare as Ozu transitioned into talkies) evoke profound emotion, mood, and atmosphere. And while the story of an unemployed former alcoholic struggling to support his two children sounds like the stuff of pure melodrama, the director and his screenwriters manage to find surprisingly creative ways to depict the protagonist’s plight without resorting to shallow manipulation. In the movie’s best scene, for example, the older son attempts to cheer up his crestfallen father by pouring him cups of imaginary sake; soon, the whole family is laughing as they pretend to gorge themselves on rice and tea, letting “invisible” bills of paper money drift away on the wind, momentarily unburdened and carefree.

It’s a breathtakingly beautiful and devastatingly heartbreaking image that reinforces Ozu’s total mastery of his craft, even before he’d developed his naturalistically circuitous style of dialogue. Hopefully, Criterion will give An Inn in Tokyo a full home video release someday; it deserves to be seen by a wider audience.

Recently Viewed: After the Storm

I was still feeling a little sick this morning, but I'm a glutton for punishment as well as a cinephile, so I willed myself out of bed, made my way over to IFC Center, and purchased a ticket for Hirokazu Kore-eda's After the Storm.

I’d only seen one other Kore-eda film before today: After Life. While that earlier production explores themes of death and memory from the perspective of the recently departed, After the Storm instead examines the lives of those left behind, focusing in particular on an elderly widow, who struggles to cope with the lingering consequences of her late husband’s gambling addiction, and her divorced son, Ryota, who fears that he will follow in his father’s self-destructive footsteps.

As he abuses his position as a private investigator to blackmail clients, blows every paycheck at the local racetrack, and obsessively pries into his ex-wife’s love life, Ryota gradually emerges as one of the most fascinating and nuanced protagonists I’ve yet encountered in Japanese cinema, as beautifully contradictory as Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. Sure, he frequently rummages through his mother’s closets and cabinets, searching for anything that looks valuable enough to pawn… but he spends every cent he earns on child support and expensive gifts for his young son, even as he languishes in relative squalor.

Ryota’s painful efforts to reunite his splintered family and come to terms with his father’s legacy could have easily resulted in a generic, cliched melodrama. Fortunately, like Yasujiro Ozu, Kore-eda understands that truly compelling conflict arises not from tearful confessions, but from rambling small talk whispered over tea while the rice bowls and chopsticks dry in the kitchen sink. The director’s innate ability to transform mundane moments into life-changing epiphanies made me realize that I’ve been ignoring his work for far too long—a mistake I intend to remedy very soon.

Cinemagic: The Artist

“I’ll never talk!” silent film star George Valentin cries (via title card). And right there, in the opening seconds, The Artist tidily introduces its central conflict.

The Artist traverses familiar territory—the classic Singin’ in the Rain dramatized the rise of the talkie way back in 1952—but cuts its own unique path. The dream sequence in which sound quite literally bursts into Valentin’s silent world exemplifies the picture’s stylized approach. In an era that takes sound for granted, it’s refreshing to see some legitimate innovation, a novel (ahem) voice that evokes Hitchcock’s Blackmail, Lang’s M, Chaplin’s Modern Times.

But this creativity only reinforces the movie’s elegant use of silence. The action occurs between 1927 and 1932, when directors as stubborn and proud as Valentin perfected the obsolete art of screen pantomime in films such as City Lights, Sunrise, and A Story of Floating Weeds. Jean Dujardin absolutely earns his Oscar, immersing the viewer in the period by bottling the energy, timing, and mannerisms of masters like Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Keaton—making Valentin's frustration with his gradual irrelevance all the more palpable. Michel Hazanavicius, too, deserves his statue. He takes his place alongside Chaplin, Murnau, and Ozu by not only capturing the flavor of Hollywood’s most artistically fruitful years, but also by demonstrating once again that you don’t need words to tell a good story. The proof: Valentin and dancing extra Peppy Miller slowly fall for each other across successive takes on the set of A German Affair.

Their body language and expressive eyes say it all. No dialogue required.

Previous Cinemagic Posts

1. Hugo

2. Fish Story

3. Adventure Time: "What Was Missing"

4. Inglorious Basterds