Office space

You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep. What’s up with this movie though for real? Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s secret weapon is he hypnotizes you while simultaneously placing you in a world that demands you to wonder what’s happened? Why do his films feel this way? Somewhere between what they mean to our spirit mind emotions and senses sense of humor sense of cinema sense of narrative lies the little candy.

 

Barren Illusion (1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) just might be his slowest film and that’s saying a lot. In fact that’s likely its most distinctive feature it’s an example of slow cinema if you consider that a thing. It’s also so far as I can tell the only Kurosawa movie without a score. 
     Speaking of sound design though it does utilize his characteristic drone mesmerizing technique. The bar with ominous ambient repetitive mechanized duct construct sound aurally supports a general repetition motif to be found throughout Barren Illusion. You know the way in the first few minutes the stranger girl being hit on in the bar tells the stranger guy to disappear then the safe thieves scene they tell the guy to disappear then the guy in his flat scene he disappears. 
     The girl in this thing has definitely got this I don’t know crinkle ASMR leitmotif. Right? When she’s in the music rehearsal space flat the way the sound effect foley of her eating each chip slowly flows into the way the sound of her taking that recycling out similarly crinkles the way she opens the parcel with the dried leaves same.
 
Barren Illusion feels otherworldly because the guy and girl seem like they’re in purgatory and it does everything it can formally to enhance this troubling premonitorily uneasy abstraction cinematically through its form so well because Kurosawa manipulates each element of his toolkit with everything at his disposal he’s mastered so well. When they disappear it’s as though they’re visually physically stuck between this world and the next. When the girl confronts the barrier we don’t see because before the camera flips to reveal her pov and talks about going over to the other side when we are shown it’s the beach and that skeleton corpse shores up says it all. Also when she tries to buy a plane ticket to get out they ignore her because she can’t leave here.
     My favorite sequence that tells me what Barren Illusion is essentially is when the girl plays with that slice of bread in bed then cut to she’s a jumper match cut to toast pop but wait the dust spores outside her window link to the following shot with the guy and the dust becoming this midpoint whole big part of the film. My point is on top of being purgatory Barren Illusion is experimental.
     That’s why I’m so obsessed with Kiyoshi Kurosawa that elusive what every filmgoer filmmaker seeks. Doing something with the cinematic language we haven’t seen yet. Nor heard nor felt for that matter. Maybe I’m wrong but I like calling this one purgatory. Because why else when the girl goes jumper or she gets Rodney Kingged does she seemingly reset? Speaking of purgatory she’s a postal worker what other shorthand in our modern society is there for purgatory? 
     Is that a ten minute scene of them bouncing a ball back and forth or does it just feel that long? Also something I don’t think other slow cinema films do or have done yet that Barren Illusion does is it plays out as a silent film. Oh and yeah this is probably a throw away idea I’ll reconsider useless later but for now could the couple in this be ghosts? Because of the scene where the couple get a dog then later on there’s a quick scene with the dog catchers outside taking it to the pound and the guy standing there can’t do anything about it. Or maybe it’s just another purgatory thing. They feel like ghosts. Or as part of this loose disaffected youth trilogy the question returns to haunt us did I ever exist?

Restore the rules of the world

How can one think about Charisma (1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) without trying to decipher its meaning? Let’s start with some basics. Kôji Yakusho plays YABUIKE. What do we know about Yabuike?

     He’s a cop who’s so over his workload he just sits alone in an empty room avoiding it. Then there’s this standoff between a gunman and his hostage a parliament member. Yabuike arrives on the scene only to walk away from it because of his conflicting morals. Then the guy shoots the hostage and the cops rain down on him with gunfire. Yabuike walking away shows us he didn’t want either to have to die. But specifically why would someone have to shoot and kill the other guy because the hostage holds a post in the government.
     Charisma literally from the Greek means God’s grace. At the end of Charisma the poacher puts a gun to JINBO’s head and Yabuike is so over it he raises his weapon to shoot the guy who even starts to say something like if you do you’re gonna make me kill the hostage but Yabuike doesn’t hesitate for a second. And both the hostage and because it was a nonlethal wound the poacher live. This is the crucial final test of Yabuike’s character after all he’s gone through. And the moral discussion throughout Charisma is despite the reality that nature is made up of forces that want to live and forces that want to kill is it possible through the grace of God to allow both to exist? I’ll let you think about Yabuike’s conclusion.

But really the big question what’s up with the tree? On another level I think the tree could be charisma along the lines of winning hearts and minds charm wisdom someone adept at rhetoric persuasion politics cunning. A leader. Which is why we see two sides battling over it. And the way it’s told through these characterizations is what’s so wonderful.
     First there’s bureaucracy. They work in the forest and I guess rig the tree with speedrail. Then there’s the zealot who they all know violently protects the tree. The zealot or protector KIRIYAMA funny we learn was a patient in a now defunct sanatorium in the forest. And the way Yabuike wanders into the abandoned sanitarium unbeknownst to him to sleep there and in the middle of the night Kiriyama returns his gun and badge he mutters he’s taking Yabuike’s soul. I don’t think there are any throw away lines in this film. Think about that later. 
     The opposing side is the ecology professor Jinbo. She tells Yabuike the guy who used to run the sanitarium brought Charisma the tree from the continent and it’s not what everyone thinks it produces a harmful toxin and is killing all the other trees in the forest. Of course we later find out it’s actually she who’s poisoning the forest as a means to make her claims credible. 
     What happens next I take as none of this matters because a stronger force armed invade and kill the tree. No one can stop them. And what’s the image resulting from the aftermath? Mushroom cloud. Nuclear holocaust. 
 
But despite neither Kiriyama nor Jinbo believing him Yabuike begins nursing a new Charisma. The final act of the narrative. As fate would have it through chance events Kiriyama absconds with stolen cash so he doesn’t care about the tree at all anymore or the forest for that matter. In a scathing portrayal he even tries to buy his way into the poachers.
     When the leader of the poachers takes control of the new Charisma everything is in place to set up the standoff mentioned earlier. I see the ending as Yabuike giving up on thinking he can single handedly end highest levels of political corruption all he can do is be average and do his average job so he gives the sprout to Jinbo while admitting he really doesn’t care what she does with it. 
     So everything’s settled. Tied up in a bow for us. We got our answer. Don’t even try to get involved when it comes to high stakes politically motivated action. Right. That’s what Yabuike did and in the end it was what’s right for him. Now he can go back to being a cop. Oh except for what follows is the end of civilization as we know it into a lake of fire oops. 

When You Hear the Words Foreign Film, Think of France

Okay, so you've all heard the distinction between films and movies, I'm sure. As a filmmaker, I define film as pure cinema. My basis for this definition consists of three broad groupings. The categories are as follows: the Alfred Hitchcock style of pure cinema (Hollywood), the Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claire Denis respective styles of pure cinema (France), and the Terrence Malick style of pure cinema (The New Hollywood). There are subtle variations inherent in these distinctions.

Sometime around the early to mid aughts I had repeatedly skimmed the title Beau travail (1999, Claire Denis) in print articles found in the New York Film Society at Lincoln Center's monthly "Film Comment," often in best of lists. I'd also been hounding David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and come across his monograph of Claire Denis--he specifically refers to her biggest fans being "the 'Film Comment' critics." So, I finally gave Beau travail a chance around 2009.

Claire Denis is probably my most recent discovery that has allowed me to find that elusive scent I hunt down so desperately--that of creative aesthetic brilliance. (Actually, Bruno Dumont is the most recent, to be accurate.) Beau travail won me over firstly with its short running time, splendid Benjamin Britten score, and insurmountably calculated final shot.

I love Beau travail as a foreign film. It's foreign in many senses of the word, especially for me. Denis uses tiny details to establish the Djibouti location in ways that evoke its people, markets, landscapes, transportation systems, and merciless barren deserts along with marvelously azure coastal planes. When I watch this, I always appreciate the quality of being transported to Africa for an hour and a half--and I've never been to Africa, but it strikes me as the most foreign of continents because I have the hardest time imagining what it would actually be like to visit.

The iconic French veteran actor Denis Lavant (he's got a mug like a French Dafoe) stars as Sgt. Galoup, an inwardly-turmoiled French Foreign Legionnaire who struggles with his jealousy over the new thin recruit Sentain. So the foreigner stacking piles up here: Galoup is a Frenchman in Africa, appears to be either a closeted homosexual or conflicted similarly with a dark impulse that arises out of his jealousy over Sentain, and all of this was filmed by a 43 year old French woman who AD'd for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch throughout the 80s (Don't tell me you can't think of Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) or Jarumusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), or Down by Law (1986) as having a similarly foreign protagonist in a foreign place, typically encountering other foreigners).

The Djibouti discotech scenes are easily some of the finest craftsmanship Denis has arranged, infusing the bleak desert locale with lively colors, seductively corporal gyrations, darkness and energy. This counterpoint evokes part of the mysterious inner life of Galoup.

It was Godard who famously said that, "a film needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But, not necessarily in that order." Beau travail's famous final shot has been reported numerous times to have been found at another point in the script initially; only in post did Denis realize where she wanted to put it. But, this holds as a vital example to Godard's original intent.

This is the rhythm of the night.

Galoup's queer demeanor is a locked door. Perhaps we will never really know him. However, it is clear that he lives for the corps--the Foreign Legion, his body, their bodies, Sentain's body, and even Rahel's (Galoup's African mistress) body. But, the final shot nearly guarantees to us that there is something locked up behind that door that is bursting forth to get out--the subjective responsibility of the audience is to spend a moment trying to think about it.

Last night getting to watch this in 35mm (the print was a little scratchy) was a welcome and refreshing oasis in my week of watching big budget effects movies.

--Dregs

Dead But Dreaming

Who newly emerged in the US during the 80s as auspiscious personal filmmakers? It doesn't seem like there were many. Michael Mann, Tim Burton, John Hughes, Jim Jarmusch, (unofficially) Oliver Stone,  James Cameron, Tony Scott, Joel Schumacher, Rob Reiner, James L. Brooks, Lawrence Kasdan, Joel & Ethan Coen, Sam Raimi, Kathryn Bigelow, Susan Seidelman, Penelope Spheeris, Gus Van Sant, Hal Hartley, David Mamet, (barely making it) Steven Soderbergh and Cameron Crowe; and, Spike Lee are the only ones I can think of.

Impressively, it is Spike Lee that proved in the 90s to have the most prolific body of work, with 9 features and 2 documentaries. And they remain fascinating, varied and sometimes bordering on trivial, entertaining time capsules of 90s pop culture in a significant way.

Since it was over 10 years since I'd seen Summer of Sam (1999, Spike Lee), all I had been able to recall were a scene of a large black lab tormenting Berkowitz and the protests of a friend of mine in PDX who was aggravated and intolerant of the movie she continually renounced on the grounds of Mira Sorvino's character squeaking in Brooklyease, "I could taste her pussy juice all over your face," to her Leguizamo-played husband in one scene.

Interestingly, when I saw the film this past weekend those two scenes are still the ones that stand out most, and maybe even work best for me.

The two strongest elements supporting Summer of Sam are the self-destruction of Vinny (John Leguizamo) and Terence Blanchard's, umm, Harlem Renaissance-stately, Aaron Copeland-like, sweeping operatic swells contrasted against 70s punk rock--okay, I'm going to argue that as far as I've known The Who were never punk. Am I wrong?

The visual look is a kinetic frenzy closer to Oliver Stone than the suave rapture style found in Mo' Better Blues (1990, Lee) and Jungle Fever (1991, Lee). It starts with the classic Hollywood studio crane sweep of a cavernous set to evoke 70s disco glamor, but is one of so many similar sequences that even use the same music, like Boogie Nights (1997, Paul Thomas Anderson), The Last Days of Disco (1998, Whit Stillman) and Blow (2001, Ted Demme). Although the context of "Best of My Love" is sly here.

Lee's visual fever isn't as nauseating as Natural Born Killers (1994, Oliver Stone) because he's succeeded with something closer to the 90s MTV music video aesthetic, yet uses it strategically so as not to let it get stale. All of the Berkowitz cutaways are ghastly (the greens especially) in the distorted result of cross processing, and on top of that, he heaps a tilt shift on the lens. These moments are disturbing, and inserts within them like the homicidal messages misspelled with children's building blocks further enhance some of Lee's most ambitious stagings. And the plastic, commercial, store bought production design that's supposed to show Berkowitz's squalor looks like it's all brand new and they bought it at a Toys R Us--which I really enjoy.

The comedy fits well too. Lee again squares off two pressure keg factions in a Brooklyn neighborhood, and this time its an Italian-American civil beef. Ritchie (Adrien Brody) doing a Brit accent and taunting the rough and tumble heavy hitters in their dead end neighborhood is one of the main ingredients in this thriller, but those scenes are also often funny at the same time in the way some of the best scenes in movies can have you laughing one second, then recoiling in tension the next.

Ritchie is supposed to be some kid who would be prime trade at Warhol's factory, but as was the case with much of the 90s punk creations, looks like he bought all of his clothes at the mall brand new recently.

Vinny is not supposed to be Warren Beatty's character in Shampoo (1975, Hal Ashby), but he mostly is.

As most know, this film is about Vinny, Ritchie, their neighborhood, and incidentally the Son of Sam murders. The murders raise the tension, but I for one wondered why the film didn't bother to ever mention the victims' identities, any relevant details about them, or even the number of how many there were. The killings just kind of loom. Most of the film is dancing, sex, dancing in the sex industry, fighting about sex, fighting about where to dance, and people swearing. The first disco scene struck me as romantically special when the rest of the crowd disappear for a moment as Vinny and Dionna dance alone--yeah I eat that sugar up.

I find none of the ensemble grating, although I used to find Leguizamo really obnoxious. I think John Leguizamo is fantastic in Summer of Sam because by the end, he was what held it together--his plight was earned through its dramatic portrayal on the page and with his performance. And the escalating dementia of Vinny and Son of Sam parallel one another purposefully, to effective results.

While this film did a lot for me and I want to come back to it, by the end credits when I saw how the Brooklyn neighborhoods, New York Yankees, and other iconography seemed a perfect fit for Lee, I couldn't help being distracted thinking about what Fincher would do in SF 7 years later.

And one last thing I haven't checked: is that last beatdown scene copying the Rodney King beating? That's what it felt like. I thought if it was, that would be something to recognize the space and arrangement of those bodies and batons.

--Dregs