Tag: 4:3

Mr. Thank You (有りがとうさん, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936)

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Mr. Thank YouBus trips might be much less painful if only the drivers were all as kind as Mr. Thank You and the passengers as generous of spirit as the put upon rural folk travelling to the big city in Hiroshi Shimizu’s 1936 road trip (有りがとうさん, Arigatou-san). Set in depression era Japan and inspired by a story by Yasunari Kawabata, Mr. Thank You has its share of sorrows but like its cast of down to earth country folk, smiles broadly even through the bleakest of circumstances.

Mr. Thank You is everyone’s favourite bus driver. In fact, some of his passengers have even deliberately decided to “miss” the previous bus because they heard he was driving the next one. It’s not hard to see why, he’s a good a driver and a very polite, nice young man who’s been given the affectionate “Mr. Thank You” nickname because of his habit of shouting a loud thank you to everyone who moves out of the way for his bus to pass in the narrow mountain roads (the aforementioned pedestrians are also to be seen waving wildly and shouting his nickname back at him as he grins at them in the rear view mirror). He’s also prepared to stop and pick up passengers along the way as well as carrying messages between villages and filling requests for the latest records to hit Tokyo stores.

Mr. Thank You was apparently shot without a firm shooting script other than the inspiration of Kawabata’s story so the dialogue has a very immediate, contemporary feeling. There isn’t so much of a story as a journey taken with this disparate group of people all travelling from one place to another for various different reasons with the small interjections of other passersby on the roadside. The main drama occurs between a woman and her daughter who have such ashen faces they might as well be ascending the gallows, a very modern whiskey swilling travelling woman, and a grumpy guy with a handlebar moustache who seems very anxious about the bus being delayed by all these pleasantries. Along the way, Mr. Thank You offers commentary on some of the people he knows from his regular trips which amounts to a collection of sad stories decrying the state of the nation in which fathers are selling their daughters and mad men wander the streets searching for lost love.

“Young women used to laugh, but you never hear that now.” Says one passenger glancing at the sad face of a girl on a bus to the city. The mother and daughter seem reluctant to talk about their journey but it’s obvious to all that the girl is to be sold to a geisha house, never to see her home again. Mr. Thank You is sympathetic to her plight whilst silently listening to the lamentations of his customers like a sober barman. At one point he wonders out loud if he might be better off driving a hearse – acknowledging his own complicity in taking money for escorting this poor girl off to a life of rack and ruin. The flirtatious modern woman sitting behind him (most likely a prostitute herself) reminds him that women who pass these mountains rarely make a return journey, perhaps there is another way he could help her even if he can’t do the same for everyone.

Shimizu also stops a minute to consider the human costs of all this rapid progress. Taking a brief break from driving, Mr. Thank You chats to an acquaintance who has been working on the road building programme. A Korean migrant, she is among the most put upon of workers. She hoped she might have enough money to ride on Mr. Thank You’s bus just the once, but no sooner has one road been completed than she’s despatched off to build another one on another mountain so she’ll have to bid him goodbye. Mr. Thank You (seemingly quite taken with her and sorry to hear they may not meet again) offers to let her ride for free but she looks back at the masses of other people who are walking the mountain passes because they can’t afford the bus either and says it’s OK, she will stay with them, walking onward with everyone else caught in the same predicament as herself.

Filmed in 1936 Mr. Thank You has an extremely modern sensibility with a lot of naturalistic location shooting outside of the cramped environment of the bus which forms the main setting for the drama. The bus drives onward without stopping as obstacles fade from view only to reappear in the rear view mirror like ghosts, phantom images reflected on the landscape here one minute and gone the next. Time and history are marching on though one gets the impression Shimizu at least does not approve of the way his country is heading. The passengers on Mr. Thank You’s bus all have their troubles, but they’re trying to do the best they can by putting a brave face on it. They laugh, they drink, they sing but eventually they will all have to get off the bus, away from the careful protection of Mr. Thank You, and return to land of badgers and foxes where it’s every man for himself and those who cannot pay the fare will have to walk the rest of the way on their own two feet alone.

Mr. Thank You is the second of four films in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 15: Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu box set.

Scene featuring the Korean migrant worker (with English subtitles)

The Deserted City (廃市, Haishi, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1984)

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haishiNobuhiko Obayashi might be most closely associated with his debut, Hausu, which takes the form of a surreal, totally psychedelic haunted house movie, but in many ways his first feature is not particularly indicative of the rest of Obayashi’s output. 1984’s The Deserted City (AKA Haishi, 廃市), is a much better reflection of the director’s most prominent preoccupations as it once again sees the protagonist taking a journey of memory back to a distant youth which is both forgotten in name yet ever present like an anonymous ghost haunting the narrator with long held regrets and recriminations.

Based on a novel by Takehiko Fukunaga, The Deserted City is a European influenced, nostalgic, coming of age tale in which university student Eguchi travels to a small Japanese backwater famous for its canals. Though not as sophisticated as Venice itself, the town shares something of the atmosphere of that city as it has often been evoked in literature in its slightly claustrophobic, decaying grandeur. Eguchi has come to the town on an invitation from his uncle and with the intention of spending the summer there to finish his undergraduate dissertation which concerns the work of Edgar Allen Poe.

However, Tokyoite Eguchi immediately finds the town strange, if mostly charming, with its old fashioned rhythms and almost silent soundscape in which only the lapping of the village’s many rivers is audible. Staying in a guest house run by 19 year old Yasuko and her grandmother, Eguchi begins to hear gentle sobbing at night and jumps to the conclusion it must belong to Yasuko’s married older sister, Ikuyo, whom he has yet to meet. Younger brother Saburo also lurks silently in the background with the brother-in-law, Naoyuki, making infrequent appearances. Eguchi had apparently almost forgotten about this single summer in his youth, but was reminded of it after reading a newspaper report that the town had been destroyed in a fire. His memories are coloured by the tragedy which occurred towards the end of his stay and which his youthful soul was not fully able to understand.

The Deserted City revisits many of the themes which came to define Obayashi’s career from the nostalgia for youth and the power of memory to a vaguely supernatural tone which prefigures the final traumatic event that will continue to haunt the protagonist, even if unconsciously, for the rest of his life. Fukunaga was himself very much influenced by European literature and The Deserted City has a distinctly Western feeling with its death ridden canal town and once grand family in decline. Eguchi’s thesis is on the work of Edgar Allen Poe and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he is reading his studies into the story of his own life with the mysterious crying and hidden sister not to mention family secrets and the frequent allusions to the sorry state of the moribund city.

Eguchi describes Yasuko as “cheerful” yet she herself offers the most melancholic commentary of her life. She says she hates the town and can’t stand the constant sound of the waters which she likens the death wail of her city – a slothful sound without energy or purpose. She can see all the other young people leaving with only the elderly remaining behind to decay along with the town, but when Eguchi asks why she doesn’t leave too she replies that she can’t, she’s bound to this place in life and death. Similarly when making a visit to her mother’s grave at a nearby temple she remarks that in this place of stillness, she can no longer discern a difference between the living and the dead. Finally, after all the tragedies that have befallen her, Yasuko declares herself to be “nothing at all” and in bidding Eguchi goodbye as he leaves, corrects him when he promises to visit – she knows she’ll never see him again, he will return to the world of the living. He’ll forget all of this, as if it happened in a dream.

Like many of these stories, The Deserted City is filled with the detached melancholy of the older man looking back at the young one. Eguchi says this incident taught him to expect tragedy from the very beginning of things though he also claimed to have forgotten all about the town and its sad stories of longing and misunderstandings, romantic and otherwise. Working with ATG here Obayashi opts for a nostalgic 4:3 frame and a moderately warm colour palate which echoes both the slightly idealised atmosphere of the idyllic waterside village and its nature as a place which exists solely in memory, shaded in tones of nostalgia but also of regret. Much more conventional than some of Obayashi’s other work, The Deserted City is a perfect blend of European romanticism, melodrama and slight gothic undertones which, though a little low on impact, is a perfect synthesis of his themes up to this point.

Unsubbed trailer:

Temptation (誘惑, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1948)

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TemptationFeelings can creep up just like that, to quote another movie. Like Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, Temptation (誘惑, Yuwaku) also echoes Lean’s Brief Encounter with its strains of accidental romance between unavailable people even if only one of the pair is already married. However, this time there’s much less deliberate moralising though the environment itself is a fertile breeding ground for the judgemental.

The film begins with Takako (Setsuko Hara) paying her respects at the grave of her recently deceased father only to run into an old pupil of  his arriving for the same reason. Takako and Ryukichi (Shin Saburi) are both making the arduous trip back to the city and decide to travel together. Stopping over in Gifu, they find difficulty in getting a hotel room because of a big horse race due to take place the next day and rather awkwardly end up sharing a bed. After Takako becomes upset and ponders what she’s going to do now her father is gone, Ryukichi offers to let her move in with him and the children. Discussing this with his wife who is an invalid living away from the family, he talks paternally of Takako and of a wish to look after her as a way of honouring the memory of his former teacher. However, it isn’t long before the inevitable happens and the pair begin to fall in love.

Ryukichi first met Takako as a little girl when he was her father’s student but she’s 21 years old now – a grown woman by any standard, and plenty old enough to know what she’s doing. He describes her as still “silly”, like a child, and indeed Setsuko Hara breaks out some of her most radiant (if occasionally pained) smiles and almost mocking laughter to play a complex mix of putting a brave face on grief and genuine happiness at being back in a family home. Though feeling the crippling loss of her only family member has left her feeling devoid of a purpose in life, Takako is an essentially good and kind person who sees the best in people and is only too happy to help Ryukichi with the children while his wife is ill as well as continuing with her medical studies.

After leaving academia, Ryukichi has become left leaning politician committed to creating a better, fairer nation. Like Takako he is also an honest and decent person with a high sense of personal integrity. His motives for bringing Takako into the house were innocent, yet gradually his feelings for her begin to shift from the paternal to the romantic causing him a considerable amount of stress as he battles the need to remain faithful to his wife even in her absence while his attraction to Takako continues to grow.

The impending threat of illicit action stalks the screen almost like the stealthy figure of the killer in a slasher movie. At one point where the feelings threaten to overwhelm the couple despite their best efforts to suppress them, Tokie (Haruko Sugimura) – the sickly wife, unexpectedly turns up in true melodrama fashion as if summoned by the lovers’ guilty consciences and accompanied a chorus of stinging strings.

Tokie herself played by veteran actress Hariko Sugimura, is every inch the wounded wife though her plight is played with a little less vindictiveness than in a similarly themed gothic novel where the bedridden spouse suddenly rises as if from the grave itself to haunt the new lovers while still alive. Originally approving of Ryukichi’s desire to help Takako, Tokie’s fears are awaked when seeing her playing with the children on the beach – all long legs and youthful skin, moving in a way she fears she never will again. “Everything inside my chest is ruined” she tells Ryukichi before returning sadly inside, alone, prematurely exiling herself from her own family.

That said, Temptation refuses to follow the established pattern in that it suddenly reverts to a standard romance with no feeling of judgement inflicted on the couple whose love story has occurred in an illicit fashion. Tokie has a late in the game change of heart and the guilty spectre that haunts the couples of European melodrama fails to arise meaning that neither party is left feeling a need to reject their true feelings out of a desire to atone in some way for their inappropriate emotions and putative (if not actualised) betrayal.

This is surprising in some ways as the films also wants to offer a mildly left wing narrative represented by the poor boy fellow student of Takako who is arrested near the beginning of the film for selling flour masquerading as sweetener. He is of peasant stock and ultimately opts to return to simple and honest country life. Offering to take Takako with him, he gives her an opportunity to escape the temptation which is plaguing her and live quietly and naturally in an honest and humble way. In another film, this would be the solution – an abandonment of bourgeois emotion by giving up on her married, middle class politician who, for all his fine talk of open plan houses and rejection of “feudal” ideas, is still a reactionary and part of the system. However, strangely, emotion wins out and the audience gets a “happy ending” (of sorts) which feels a little bit out of place.

Temptation plays with many forms during its running time most notably romantic melodrama but often feels more like a thriller with its various twists and turns which always threaten to disrupt the narrative in unexpected ways. Consequently the film has something of an uneven tone and begins to drag a little even given its fairly short running time. This becomes a particular problem approaching the finale which lacks weight despite its obvious potential for melodrama. Still, even if Temptation is often more interesting than it is engaging it does offer a series of striking visual motifs as well at the superb performances of its leading players.

No trailer for this one, but here’s a picture of Setsuko Hara on the cover of Shin Eiga magazine in 1949 (which is a publication I can’t seem to find out much about). Btw, this is another one with a Kaneto Shindo script!

setsuko hara

Invisible Man Appears (透明人間現る, Nobuo Adachi, 1949)

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Invisible man appearsReleased in 1949, The Invisible Man Appears (透明人間現る, Toumei Ningen Arawaru) is the oldest extant Japanese science fiction film. Loosely based on the classic HG Wells story The Invisible Man but taking its cues from the various Hollywood adaptations most prominently the Claude Rains version from 1933, The Invisible Man Appears also adds a hearty dose of moral guidance when it comes to scientific research.

Once again the action centres around an esteemed chemist, Professor Nakazato, who has been working on a serum to render living things invisible. So far he has a sample which works on animals but is reluctant to move on to human testing as A) he hasn’t found a way to reverse the procedure, and B) there are some unpleasant side effects in which the subject becomes increasingly violent and irrational. The professor currently has two top students who are helping him towards his goal and, inconveniently, both have taken a shine to his daughter, Machiko. Half joking, the professor remarks that whoever can solve the problem first will win his daughter’s hand.

A business associate of the professor, Kawabe, is also interested in Machiko and also in the rights to the professor’s important new discovery. The professor, however, is a responsible man and refuses to sell it in case it falls into the wrong hands. Shortly after the professor is kidnapped by a gang of armed thugs who plan to use the serum to steal a set of diamonds known as The Tears of Amour.

There’s plenty of intrigue with various twists and turns to the original story which keep the viewer on their toes as they try to figure out who exactly is the invisible man and what he’s really after. Actually, the solution is sort of obvious and heavily signposted but that doesn’t make it any less fun. Kawabe is a moustache twirling villain from the get go and it’s obvious he has various things going on in the background but there’s more to the story than a greedy business man trying to manipulate everyone around him for his own gains. There’s also an interesting subplot in which the younger sister of one of the scientists is a top actress at the Takarazuka Review and turns out to have a connection to the Tears of Amour.

All of the classic B-movie hallmarks are here from the slightly ridiculous sci-fi jargon to the classic women in peril shenanigans as the serum starts to take hold and the Invisible Man becomes increasingly paranoid. There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so – so it would be for science as far as the film is concerned. According to the message at the film’s beginning and end, there is no scientific discovery which is innately “evil” but each is apt to be misused. It’s not difficult to see why this would be a popular, even essential, message in the Japan of 1949 and indeed it recurs in many films of this type including, of course, the original Godzilla. The professor takes responsibility for having invented something which, although not created with evil intent, has wrought such destruction on society but finds himself with nothing left to do other than apologise.

Director Nobuo Adachi uses a lot of classic silent cinema techniques such as dissolves and montages with a fair amount of handheld camera and some location shooting (though the majority of the film is studio bound). The special effects were supervised by Eiji Tsuburaya who would later become the founding father of tokusatsu and co-creator of the Godzilla franchise and are top notch for the time period. An enjoyably silly B-movie, The Invisible Man appears is a well crafted addition to the Invisible Man corpus and a fantastic example of Daiei’s post-war genre output.

Original trailer (English subtitles) – I wish all trailers were this much fun!

A Japanese Tragedy (日本の悲劇, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953)

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A Japanese Tragedy 1A Japanese tragedy, or the tragedy of Japan? In Kinoshita’s mind, there was no greater tragedy than the war itself though perhaps what came after was little better. Made only eight years after Japan’s defeat, Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1953 film A Japanese Tragedy (日本の悲劇, Nihon no Higeki) is the story of a woman who sacrificed everything it was possible to sacrifice to keep her children safe, well fed and to invest some kind of hope in a better future for them. However, when you’ve had to go to such lengths to merely to stay alive, you may find that afterwards there’s only shame and recrimination from those who ought to be most grateful.

After opening with a series of genuine newsreel segments overlaid with newspaper clippings which tell of nothing other than crime, corruption and suicides, Kinoshita shifts focus to our ordinary mother, Haruko, currently working in an inn. Her son, Seiichi, has something he wants to tell her and will be staying with his sister, Utako, if she’d care to call. Neither of the children seems very excited about seeing their mother and, in fact, Seiichi’s news is that he wants to be adopted into a wealthy medical family so he can eventually take over their hospital. Utako is studying dressmaking and learning English but has also developed an attraction to her married English teacher which is threatening to develop into quite a difficult situation.

Kinoshita makes it plain that everybody suffered during the war which generally brought out the worst in people and even afterwards it was every man for himself as each tried desperately to climb out of the deepening hole that was Japan’s wartime defeat. Haruko lost her husband in the conflict, leaving her alone with two young children to feed and no one to help her. She did what she had to do whether that was a spot of black-marketeering, hoarding, or even casual prostitution but she put her children first every time. Unfortunately, she also falls for some bad self serving advice from her brother-in-law who offers to take over her husband’s land and look after the children while she earns more money out of town. Of course, he didn’t exactly keep his promises and both of the children suffered as a result.

Far from feeling grateful for their mother’s sacrifice, what the children feel is a mixture of shame and resentment. They’re embarrassed by their mother’s hardline personality and rural earthiness which no longer match their postwar upwardly mobile aspirations and force them to remember the unpleasantness of their upbringing. Seiichi is particularly disgusted by his mother’s having prostituted herself, branding her a “loose woman” and calling into question her character even before the disruptive effects of the war. Utako suffered a far greater betrayal at the hands of her relatives which has coloured her entire world view and left her with nothing but lingering resentment towards the mother who placed her in this situation.

Kinoshita intercuts the present day action with completely silent scenes of the family escaping from the military police, or memories of the various traumas each of the family members encountered in the chaotic period immediately after the end of the war. We see them travel from the warm letters sent by the children to their mother which lament the way their aunt and uncle are treating them to the outright hostility of the contemporary era. Haruko may not be the easiest of women, she’s certainly had a difficult life by any standards and it’s understandable why the relationship with her children might be strained, but in this case blood is not enough to overcome all the years of hardship and neither Seiichi nor Utako is willing to fulfil their filial obligations towards their mother.

Haruko substitutes the relationship she’s missing with her own children by offering maternal advice to the chef who works in her inn and a sad wandering guitarist who often comes by to serenade the guests. Not much older than her own son, the guitarist also has a mother in the country whom he rarely sees – Haruko gives him some money that he tearfully promises to use to send his mother a present, though he confesses at the end of the film that he drank it himself in the end. He feels guilty about it and he’s moved by Haruko’s kindness towards him but in the end he’s forgotten his own mother too and even if he isn’t treating her with the same level of disdain that Seiichi and Utako display for Haruko, he isn’t doing much better in the filial piety stakes.

An extended metaphor with a series of tightly packed layers, A Japanese Tragedy is a lament for a homeland that’s lost its way. Haruko, like the idealised mother, has given her own life in sacrifice for those of her children only to find that her children disown her for it. Everything she has ever done, good and bad, has been in their name yet they refuse even to acknowledge her suffering but rather apportion blame for their own hardships. Kinoshita litters Haruko’s story with news reports bearing out the depths to which the country has fallen – corrupt politicians, rioting, violence on the streets and mothers who commit suicide taking their children with them. At a moment near the end of the film, Haruko remains motionless on the train station steps as a crowd of passengers surges past her. Left alone, uncertain, and believing herself to have lost the only thing that has ever mattered to her, Haruko becomes a casualty of a society that is so intent on marching forward that it’s lost sight of where it’s going. An enraged state of the nation address, this bleak and tragic tale is nevertheless filled with genuine human feeling and naturalistic detail which only deepen the impact of the desperately sad ending.

Opening sequence of the film:

Reviewed at the 2016 Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme, ICA 7th February 2016.

 

Hazy Life (どんてん生活, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 1999)

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51GlvZf-iiLStarting as he meant to go on, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s debut feature film is the story of two slackers, each aimlessly drifting through life without a sense of purpose or trajectory in sight. His humour here is even drier than in his later films and though the tone is predominantly sardonic, one can’t help feeling a little sorry for his hapless, lonely “heroes” trapped in their vacuous, empty lives.

Kee (Hiroshi Yamamoto), a rocker with a giant quiff, meets Tsutomu (Teppei Uda) outside a pachinko parlour and the two strike up an unlikely friendship. Tsumtomu, a little gormless looking and near silent, ends up moving into Kee’s apartment where his main “job” appears to be copying videotapes of the amateur porn (sorry, “erotic cinema” movies) made by his friend Todokoro and his girlfriend(?) Akiko. In fact, Kee sometimes “stars” in the films too, which is something he might have wanted to tell Tsutomu before showing him the video. Kee also has a four year old child he doesn’t really get to see who lives with his ex-partner and only knows him as “uncle”.

As in many of Yamashita’s other films, nothing much happens as Kee and Tsutomu kill time whilst worrying and not worrying about the future. Neither of the guys has a proper job or any concrete ambitions, they mostly just eat time playing pachinko, drinking and hanging out with Tadokoro and Akiko. Kee is still mooning over his ex-girlfriend and, though it’s not clear why they split up, his own fecklessness may be the reason he’s not more involved in his child’s life even if he clearly would like to be. Tsutomu has developed a bit of a crush on Akiko but he never really tries to do very much about it (though he does have the good grace to turn down Kee’s invitation to become a star in one of the videos).

In constrast to his later work, Yamashita injects a number of fantasy sequences which seem to take place entirely within Tsutomu’s mind. Mostly they’re quite gentle – making a bunch of money at Pachinko and taking Akiko out for a slap-up meal or the poignant final scene of all the characters together as they enjoy a picnic under the cherry blossoms like one big happy family. However, there is one very unexpected scene which occurs after Tsutomu is caught shoplifting (which he does very badly) offering only the excuse that he’s forgotten his wallet and was too lazy to go back and get it. This fairly shocking scene of violence is one that does not typically re-occur in Yamashita’s later work and is notable for its extreme bloodiness and direct contrast to the overall tone. Perhaps intended to show Tsutomu’s inner frustrations (he spends much of the rest of the film asleep), this scene becomes one of the most intriguing in the film.

Hazy Life is a “zero budget” affair and makes no attempt to hide that. Shot on low quality equipment and committed to a “natural” look, it makes no claim to aesthetic prettiness though it does display Yamashita’s gift for interesting compositions this time working within a 4:3 frame. The fantasy sequences themselves are presented as reality bar one use of double exposure which is in general out of keeping with Yamashita’s naturalistic style as is the brief use of time-lapse photography.

Not uninteresting, but perhaps more interesting as a taste of things to come rather than as a feature in its own right. Hazy Life is just that, hazy and somewhat meandering as Kee and Tsutomu muddle through life with an air of mild depression and no particular hope in sight. “what day is it?”, “I don’t know”, “Well never mind – at least we’re alive”. This late conversation more or less sums the entire film and it’s poignantly sweet, fantasy sequence ending adds another layer of pathos to this subtly humorous look at laid-back modern life at the bottom of the heap.

 

Coup d’Etat (AKA Martial Law, 戒厳令 Kaigenrei, Kiju Yoshida 1973)

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Snapshot-2015-11-18 at 01_34_49 PM-1660087891Having taken avant-garde story telling to its zenith in Heroic Purgatory, Yoshida returns to the realm of politics with a far more accessible effort in Coup d’Etat (AKA Martial Law, 戒厳令 Kaigenrei). Inbetween the two films, Yoshida had made another more mainstream offering, Confessions Among Actresses, which had been moderately successful with both audiences and critics but with Coup d’Etat he came back to the artistic fare he’d been pursuing since leaving Shochiku. Unlike the other two films in Arrow’s Love + Anarchy boxset, Coup ‘Etat deals with a right wing rebellion rather than the communists and anarchists which are more familiar to the post-war world.

The film begins with a nervous young man brutally stabbing an elderly businessman in the street before taking his own life. On claiming his remains, the man’s sister finds a letter addressed to Ikki Kita – a well known right wing intellectual in favour of the institution of martial law. Kita, or more particularly his work, becomes a figurehead for a putative revolution organised by young army officers who have become disillusioned with the elected government, its plans for increasing Westernisation and treatment of the poor. They seek to overthrow parliament and put the Emperor back in charge for a kind of paternalistic socialist state. Kita remains on the fringes of this movement, coming into contact with a young soldier who wants to join the revolution and advising him but repeatedly making it clear that he is not involved with the coup itself. Nevertheless, even if not directly involved, Kita will still pay the price for his radical ideas.

Less an examination of the historical events of the time or the coup itself, Coup d’Etat is a psychological portrait of Kita’s last days. Marking the only time Yoshida was not involved in the screenplay (this time leaving things entirely to playwright Minoru Betsuyaku) the film follows a much more linear structure rather than playing with time in the same way as Eros + Massacre or Heroic Purgatory. Kita had written a hugely influential book which advocated moving to a system of martial law under the paternalistic care of the emperor alongside nationalisation of industries, minimisation of private property and a better welfare state. However, Kita is a public intellectual not an activist. He takes no personal part in the armed struggle (though he is aware of each of the actions and close to the people who facilitated them), yet still he pays the price. Whether this is an indictment of his lack of physical commitment to the ideals that he spoke of, or an indictment of a system which seeks to shoot the messenger is up for debate but in any case Kita is “betrayed” by the very same emperor that he worshipped as a god.

Having said that, it’s Emperor Meiji who hangs on Kita’s wall. What Kita and the officer class wanted was a “Showa Restoration” in line with the “Meiji Restoration” but almost the reverse as they returned to a form of paternalistic government where personal freedoms were restricted but everyone was well cared for. We actually don’t learn a lot about Kita during the film (a strange thing to say about a “biopic” which is often how the film is described) but it seems that he had a strict childhood in which he was prohibited from feeling fear – each time a boy was a afraid, he was supposed to cut himself as a punishment. Yet Kita is afraid and this tension between intellectual thought and irrepressible emotion is one that restricts his physical actions to the point that he remains a solitary figure entrapped by his own ideology. That he is then betrayed by the very figures that he sought to exult is the very highest form of tragedy and it’s difficult not to believe that the real coup d’etat is being perpetrated against Kita himself.

Perhaps because of its relative narrative simplicity, Coup d’Etat is a visual masterpiece taking Yoshida’s especial gifts for composition to new heights of beauty. Once again shot in black and white 4:3 Academy ratio, the film is an unsettling maze of shadows and light coupled with uncomfortable angles and a musical score that’s almost like a science fiction film. Yoshida’s prognosis is indeed bleak – the young soldier for example who’s unable to carry out his part of the mission and eventually falsely confesses to having been a spy simply because he felt insignificant and wanted to be a part of something is symptomatic of the self-centred ineffectuality of the younger generation. Once again, youth has been evaluated and found wanting though age doesn’t fare much better in the end. The filming of Coup d’Etat was delayed for sometime as Yoshida underwent an operation to remove a tumour from his stomach. His ultimate satisfaction with the film and the feeling of having come to the end of a cycle coupled with the need to recuperate more fully kept Yoshida away from the director’s chair until 1986 though he’d never return to it with the same intensity as in his political trilogy.

Available now on blu-ray in the UK as part of Arrow Films’ Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism box set.

Scene from near the end of the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4A0rZwpOqc

Reviews of the other movies in the set:

Heroic Purgatory (煉獄エロイカ, Kiju Yoshida, 1970)

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Heroic Purgatory PosterThe second film contained within Arrow’s Kiju Yoshida boxset is perhaps his least accessible. Ostensibly, Heroic Purgatory (煉獄エロイカ, Rengoku Eroika) is an examination of leftist politics in the years surrounding the renewal of the hugely controversial mutual security pact between Japan and America. However, it quickly disregards any kind of narrative sense as time periods blur so finely as to leave us with no objective “now” to belong to and characters switch identities with no warning or discernible reason. Yoshida is not really after objective truth here – there is no truth in cinema, film lies repeatedly until it finally exposes the truth.

What there is of a plot begins with the scientist Rikiya Shoda who, it seems, may have been a part of a left wing activist group in the ‘50s who were intent on assassinating an ambassador but may or may not have had a mole in their midst. Now, in the contemporary ‘60s era his quiet life is disturbed when his wife, Nanako returns home with a distressed teenage girl who begins insisting Rikiya and Nanako are her parents. Sometime later another man arrives claiming to be Ayu’s father – he’s even installed a spy cam on her because this is apparently something she does quite often. The “father” eventually leaves without Ayu but then we jump back to the ‘50s where Rikiya and the “father” seem to be part of the same left wing cell but for some reason did not recognise each other in the modern part of the film. There are repeated interrogations regarding a spy, confessions, reversals, executions and betrayals but where does it get us in the end?

There’s no making sense of Heroic Purgatory, that’s not really what it’s about. It’s the very essence of avant-garde, gently eschewing literal narrative in favour of a deeper meaning. At the end what we’re left with is a scientist who professes love to be the highest calling and a wife who answers the question “what do you do when your husband’s working?” with “Think about my husband”. This isn’t some kind of anti-feminist statement in so much as a defence of a thirty year marriage which has, apparently, survived all this chaos. What has clearly perished is the left wing student movement which has ultimately failed to instigate any real kind of social change. The film wraps itself around the dates at which Japan’s defence treaty with America was or would be renewed – something to which the leftwing movement was completely opposed to and failed to prevent. Not only did they not succeed in breaking the American security pact in the ‘50s but interest in the protests themselves slowly dwindled. The film ends with a sign reading “Dead End” which you can only read as being in reference to the eventual demise of armed leftwing rebellion in Japan.

Though Heroic Purgatory is in no way Yoshida’s most easily digestible effort, it may be one of the most beautiful. Shot in 4:3 academy ratio and in glorious black and white with Yoshida’s preference for over exposure, every scene of Heroic Purgatory drips with elegance in its exquisite framing. Yoshida pushes focus to the bottom of the frame, rarely having anything other than empty space above the halfway line. Further adding to the sense of pressured claustrophobia and confusion, Yoshida’s gift for strange compositions is the perfect match for his dreamlike, incoherent, floating tale. Pushed to the edges of the frame, the actors are literally left with nowhere to run in Yoshida’s largely industrial wasteland of a stage set.

The film begins with what looks like a suicide, but turns out not to be. Accompanied by violent, stinging music, we’re trained to expect something terrible to have happened though once again Yoshida has fooled us with clever camera trickery. The music throughout is more like something from a horror film, low level thrumming strings and brief breaks of choral singing set us on edge and make us even more uncomfortable than we already were.

Heroic Purgatory is a poem of beautiful incomprehensibility. Strange and elliptical, the film is visual experience which demands emotional over intellectual engagement. Beautiful, fascinating and ultimately inscrutable Heroic Purgatory is a film that haunts with its refusal to explain itself and is likely to reverberate in the mind long after the final credits have rolled.

Available on blu-ray and DVD as part of Arrow Films’ Kiju Yoshida: Love + Anarchism box set.

Original unsubbed Japanese trailer (slightly NSFW – contains nudity)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=544O9Nj4-ks

Reviews of the other movies in the set: