Early Spring

EARLY SPRING   ***1/2

Yasujiro Ozu

1956

IDEA:  A sullen salaryman begins an affair with a coworker, much to the chagrin of family and friends. 


BLURB:  Early Spring is so pervaded by loss, disillusionment, and the lingering effects of WWII that, despite not featuring scenes of combat, it feels like nothing so much as a war film. Specifically, a coming-home domestic drama in a quasi-Hollywood vein, with Ryō Ikebe’s Rock Hudson-resembling salaryman a returned soldier disaffected by the modern trappings of postwar Japanese culture. Capitalist work, and its promise of prosperity, is only an interruption of life in Early Spring, and Ozu emphasizes its oppressive presence in constant references to burdensome commutes and regimented schedules, as well as visually in the rigid, uniform geometry of office buildings. He also, in his many group scenes, suggests how the losses suffered in war become repurposed into sources of commiseration and solidarity, underpinned by a Japanese ethos of endurance. Early Spring provides a surfeit of poignant moments that dialogically voice the concerns of this booming but spiritually uncertain nation, giving space to a multiplicity of perspectives united in their bittersweet regard for a world out of their control. Like the results of the war, capitalism, familial conflict, and aging are things to be accepted, if not resigned to, and Ozu’s characters, as ever, respond to their challenges with placid determination.

Climax

CLIMAX   **1/2

Gaspar Noé

2018

IDEA:  A troupe of dancers descend into animalistic chaos after they drink sangria that was secretly spiked with LSD.


BLURB:  Gaspar Noé’s fascination with bodies under the influence – mostly of psychotropic drugs, but also of primal urges and various visceral states of ecstasy and suffering – reaches its zenith in Climax. It is a film of writhing, ululating corporeal intensity, a Theatre of Cruelty-invocation of somatic experience at its vertiginous limits. As always, Noé locates in these limit-experiences a constantly oscillating exhilaration and terror, where the surrender of the self to sensations that rupture and overwhelm it becomes an act of extreme liberation – jouissance – that also always threatens the complete disintegration of the ego. And just as characteristically, he emphasizes the fetid, the abject, offering a grotesque view of human bodily capacity that underlines his thesis on the horror of existence. This nihilistic attitude is compounded, even more odiously, by Climax’s politics. If the film is concerned with the volatility and violability of the carnal body, it is also, by extension, concerned with the instability of a contemporary, multicultural body-politic. The fissures that emerge from the interactions of its ethnically and sexually diverse dancers are figured as inevitable effects of social heterogeneity; their collapse into anarchy can easily be interpreted as a xenophobic wariness of a globalized Europe, a reading reinforced by Noé’s assigning to the black characters the film’s most violent behavior. But is this inveterate provocateur merely agitating us, or sending an insidious message? Either way, Climax’s virtuosic formal inventions can’t help but feel at odds with ideas that come across as so reactionary.

Top 10 - 2018

The year 2018 on the Gregorian calendar may have ended three whole months ago, but I will let neither this fact nor a plethora of extenuating circumstances (plus possible procrastination) prevent me from putting together a Top 10 list! This annual feature and mainstay of critics everywhere is also a tradition I hold dear – it both helps put a movie year into perspective and embodies one’s (hopefully?) idiosyncratic tastes and sensibilities. And for the future, it reminds us of what we were watching and taking pleasure in. Ideally, that pleasure extends far beyond the 365 days that delimit the scope of the list.

So treat this as a testament to that transcendent pleasure, to the ways in which the following films continue to affect me and make me think, their images and sounds and gestalt effects reemerging to remind me that they are now embedded in my existential being for the better.

One note on something different this year: because it has taken so damn long for me to publish this list, and because my time has been so diffused across various personal and vocational obligations, the blurbs here will mostly, regrettably, be ones I have previously posted to the blog, with some adjustments for space. To riff on one of the titles included below, turning a beseeching question into a desperate command: please forgive me!


Sorry, I STILL have not seen:  Blindspotting, Private Life, Bisbee '17, Capernaum, Wildlife, At Eternity's Gate, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Wild Boys (if 2018).

Special mention to: Abbas Kiarostami's hypnotic neo-structuralist swan song 24 Frames, certainly one of the best films of any year but I'm counting it as a 2017 work.


On to the Top 10, after the break!

24 Frames

24 FRAMES   ****

Abbas Kiarostami

2017

IDEA:  A series of 24 "frames" that combine photography with digitally-manipulated movement.


BLURB:  It’s no surprise a movie called 24 Frames would be an interrogation of film form, but Kiarostami’s swan song doesn’t settle with being merely a structuralist exercise. The film is as concerned with the medium’s essential characteristics – movement and temporality – as it is with its increasingly nebulous form in the digital era, encapsulating and distilling cinema as it always has been and is continually becoming. But rather than posit some facile evolution by dichotomizing the photographic and the synthetic, the natural and the artificial, Kiarostami sets them in dialectical relation, enmeshing their properties in “frames” that transcend traditional indexical and digital image capture classifications. As we watch these meticulous frames, mostly composed to emphasize their graphic flatness, we are incited to wonder about their ontology. Which parts of them were composited, and which were originally there? What has been manipulated on a computer? Kiarostami doesn’t let us experience them passively or unquestioningly, leaving the crude seams of his digital stitching to rupture their illusion, as well as our naturalized expectations of vision. That wildlife features so prominently in them compounds this thrilling askewness, the aleatory behavior of birds, horses, cows, and dogs coming into pronounced tension with their seemingly algorithmic interpolation into the tableaux, an intermingling of the contingent and the structured that is at the heart of Kiarostami’s fascination with the medium. 24 Frames is constantly negotiating this and other dualisms, dissolving and reworking distinctions between machine and human production, representation and reality, presence and absence, to proffer a vision of cinema that resists our anthropocentric (pre)conceptions. The film re-sensitizes us to the world, yes, but also to the new, radical exorbitance of ways it can be sensationally figured; its sublimity, in the end, is as much due to its gorgeous scenery and meditative rhythms as to its suggestion that this endlessly mutable art form will forever exceed our ability to contain it.

Seconds

SECONDS   ***1/2

John Frankenheimer

1966

IDEA:  A man dissatisfied with his life undergoes an arcane procedure that grants him a new identity.


BLURB:  Rock Hudson isn’t comfortable as Rock Hudson. In Seconds, the closeted actor plays a man alienated from the identity that has literally been constructed for him by a company that specializes in giving people new lives. The perils of conformity, the folly of reinvention, and the debasing, predatory logics of consumer culture are all accounted for here, but what is most inescapable throughout the film is this extra-textual layer, fraying outward into a nightmare of dissociation. Rock Hudson is not Rock Hudson. James Wong Howe’s ingeniously warped frames, alternately deliquescent and stubbornly solid in their claustrophobic close-ups, capture the visceral unease of a man circumscribed by social and institutional structures in which he can never belong. The juxtaposition of Hudson’s matinee idol image with the film’s off-balanced mise-en-scène tacitly draws out the actor/character’s queerness, pinning him like a specimen under wide-angle lenses, his clean-cut Hollywood persona generating a tension with the destabilizing force of the imagery that denies the assimilation of his difference. We come to read his sulky, discontented character not just as a misguided customer exploited by the market, but as an outsider to the very systems that are meant to situate and sustain him, a body whose iconicity has replaced its identity. Certainly this subtext, this star-text, is only amenable to the film in hindsight, but what it does is merely reinforce the uncanny horror of Seconds, embossing what is already so subversive about this exhilarating, disturbing vision of a culture – the very one that produced it – that makes its business serving up bodies as signs and commodities, useful only as long as they play the part.