Keeping a Toe in

The weather outside is frightful, but blogging is delightful, no particular place to go, let it snow etc. Be glad this is not a vlog, or you would be hearing me croon away... yes, that is a horrible thing to contemplate. But - resolving, once more, to try to post more often, here we are, on a Monday, with nothing in particular to blog about, so we shall blog about everything. The weather is frightful indeed - sleet, snow, cold; the power has been blinking on and off the last couple days. Twice this evening, making using the computer something of a gamble. Overnight last night - though I have programmed by brain and body too well, and woke up at my usual time even without an alarm. Bloody thing.

Anyway: don't forget the Short Film Blogathon at Ed Howard's place and Culture Snob.... I, however, have to settle for some long film blogging - for it was a productive weekend on the moviegoing front: Dylan and Imamura... While I hope to come back to Imamura, especially, let me offer up some quick thoughts...

I'm Not There is getting a lot of praise it seems, and I suppose it deserves some of it - it's intermittently inspired, maybe brilliant, but not so much taken as a whole, I'm afraid. All the hype about Cate Blanchett seems right - the film comes alive when it switches to her, or to the kid (Marcus Carl Franklin) - it goes flat when it switches to Heath Ledger or Christian Bale (despite the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg - hey! when's the Serge Gainsbourgh biopic coming?) - I have no idea what Richard Gere and Ben Whishaw were in the film for. It's one of those films that flips back and forth among a bunch of stories for no particular reason, except, I suppose, to avoid the necessity to work any of them out. I guess it doesn't pay to think too much about it. It's enjoyable enough to watch: and the music is outstanding. It's Dylan, so it's got a leg up - but the performances are worthy of the music (unlike that misbegotten Beatles movie that blighted the world a couple months ago.) But other than the Blanchett parts, there's nothing here really worth seeing again.

That was good and harsh! Whatever virtues the Haynes film had, they were blotted out by the mastery on display later that day.... An Imamura double bill - Vengeance is Mine and A Man Vanishes. The former is one of Imamura's better known and easily available films - it's on DVD, people have seen it. Ken Ogata stars as a petty crook, a con man, I guess, who turns violent - killing a couple ex-co-workers, then going on the run, impersonating randy professors and lawyers for profit, only to end up killing his benefactors, since he can't kill the ones who actually hurt him... This story, told out of sequence for fairly good reasons, is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood - a bullied minority! turned delinquent! a mama's boy! - and very Imamura-esque home life (his wife takes up with his father, under mom's nose - maybe...) pre-crime spree. The centerpiece of the film is the time the villain spends at a seedy inn, seducing the madame, and facing down her mother, an extravagantly tough old bird, just out of the clink herself, where she'd served 15 years for murder - here, Imamura gets into his element, with sex and violence and primitive instincts for survival - and the chance to indulge in some maginifent filmmaking: one shot, where the killer and his mother seem to pass each other on the stairs, and Imamura shifts from one inn to another without cutting, is as glorious as it gets...

Meanwhile... A Man Vanishes is, perhaps, a documentary, about one of Japan's 91,000 (adult) runaways (I think that's the number cited by an expert toward the end,though by that time, things are well out of control; 5,000 a year, if I remember the Takeshi Kaiko story right) - it is a strange documentary, starts strange and gets stranger, and becomes something quite different from a documentary. The "plot" so to speak is this - Imamura and crew start looking for a man named Tadashi Oshima - the point people in this search are an actor and Oshima's fiancee, Yoshie (known as the rat) [no, really - that's what the crew calls her: part of the manipulation is the way we hear the crew talking about the woman they call the rat without naming her - that could be a trick of the translation I suppose, but I don't think so - I don't think they name her until later...] - as they pass through several months (it seems) of unsuccessful investigation, Yoshie starts to fall for the actor... and suspect her sister of murder. Leading to a scene where Yoshie and a fishmonger who saw Oshima and the sister together confront and accuse the sister - who flatly denies it. This eventually brings Imamura himself into the conversation - he lectures them a bit on the nature of truth then has the crew strike the set. Then the gang of them adjourn to the street [or - appear to adjourn to the street: like any movie, this could have been shot at any time - it's only the vestigial traces of documentary rhetoric that even suggests that this is literally just outside the sound stage where the previous scene was shot] where, well - a couple experts come in to talk about the 91,000 Japanese runaways, more witnesses argue and speculate on what happened and what it meant, and eventually Yoshie and her sister and the fishmonger get back into it, yelling at each other and carrying on. All of this, of course, is being filmed by three or four cameras, with sound gear everywhere - a kid keeps running into the shot with a clapper - Imamura mixes the sound and visuals here, as throughout the film, in strange, provocative ways. (There's a post to be written about the sound design of the film: I may, if I ever get any energy.) And then, it ends, with a flourish: a kid laughs - someone askas Yoshie what she will do now and she says she doesn't know - and Imamura freezes on the clapper...

I can't do it justice, not here, not tonight. It's still one of the most disruptive, surprising, strange films I have ever seen. That - I should note - works perfectly well as a documentary about a man who has disappeared without a trace... and as an Imamura film (complete with tough, strange women, possibly fighting over men, maybe killing men, and flatly denying what they may or may not have done - worth noting that the actor is the male lead of Intentions of Murder, which also features a woman murdering a man and flatly denying it in the face of overwhelming evidence - coincidence?)... and, heck - as a parody of L'Avventura... It's very hard to track down, but it's a film that needs to be seen.

Finally - one more Imamura: Profound Desire of the Gods... I can't describe it, so I won't. I have heard people call this his masterpiece - I can't buy it. It is gorgeously shot and made, but it's pretty damned silly, when you get down to it. It's full of mythical stuff - brothers and sisters marrying and founding races and the like - all very sordid, and I suppose that's part of the joke, the depiction of the beginnings of Japan itself as a bunch of inbred hillbillies - but still.... I also fear that this marks a kind of turn for Imamura, where those tough, earthy women he idolizes start to get too symbolic, and too mythological. The earlier ones are tough, independent, and always protagonists - in control or fighting like hell to be in control. But in this film, they become a retarded sex fiend and a plot device: Nekichi's sister/lover, Ryugen's priestess/lover. They are symbols, not characters. This turns sour - this film ends up being misogynist in ways not even Mizoguchi (if you insist on reading him that way) managed: Mizoguchi's women were always agents, one way or other - as were Imamura's earlier women. The women in this film are not, they're just embodiments of Imamura's ideas about what women represent...

That proved to be more substantial a post than I expected coming in, though there is a lot more to be said about any of those films.... There are more Imamura's coming - I hope I can write them up as well, maybe work out a more coherent treatment of some of it. He was one of the great ones, and the run of films he made in the 60s stands with anyone.