MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE (Vittorio De Sica, 1964)

Oversized, opulent, Matrimonio all’italiana is one of Vittorio De Sica’s baubles, an artificially colored marshmallow. Dazzlingly entertaining, it is unworthy of the artist De Sica once was.
     From the play Filumena Marturano by Eduardo De Filippo, adapted by Renato Castellani, Tonino Guerra, Leonardo Benvenuti and Piero De Bernardi, the film encompasses two decades of comedic soap opera, some of which is presented in flashback. The two principal characters are Domenico Soriano, a sexually hyperactive rich businessman, and Filumena, whom he seduces when she is 17 during a World War II bombing raid. In due course Filumena becomes a prostitute and tricks Domenico into marriage; she is in love with him and, however much it seems to the contrary, he may be in love with her. The plot has little connection to reality; its presentation, even less.
     By turns, one or the other character takes center-stage; the two never seem to inhabit the plot coequally at any point. Filumena refuses to disclose to Domenico which of her three sons is his because she loves all three equally. “I would know if one of them is mine,” Domenico at one point insists, but Filumena counters he would have had her “kill” the fetus had he known she was pregnant. This potential plot-hole is covered by the instability of their relationship; Domenico would disappear from Filumena’s life for patches of time. The couple divorce, and the film ends happily—that is, in its own contrived universe—with their remarriage and Domenico’s adoption of all three boys.
     Marcello Mastroianni, brilliantly funny, creates and inhabits the irascible character of Domenico. Sophia Loren, always at her best under De Sica’s guidance, still is not an actress. Rather, she emotes, projects, radiates. We see Domenico; we see Loren playing Filumena.

TOKYO CHORUS (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

Yasujiro Ozu’s silent Tokyo no kôrasu begins hilariously. Like his classmates, student Shinji Okajima (Tokihiko Okada, endearing) seems incapable of keeping in line—literally, I mean, quasi-militarily, on the college grounds. Ozu’s film leaps forward “several years,” where rhe comedy deepens. At the insurance company for which he works, Shinji confronts his boss over the baseless termination of a fellow employee, Mr. Yamada, an older gentleman, one year shy of his pension. This confrontation includes a riotously funny exchange of pokes, jabs and fan taps. With lovely tact Shinji explains to Yamada the upshot of all this: “It turns out this is my last day of work also.”
     This is the Depression; Tokyo is the “City of the Unemployed.” Shinji and his wife, Tsuma Sugako (Emiko Yagumo, miraculously sensitive and restrained), have a baby girl and two very young children. (Hideko Takamine, age 7, plays the elder daughter.) Shinji desperately looks for work.
     Much of the film’s later part is conventional, even sentimental; Shinji ransacks drawers of Tsuma’s cherished kimonos in order to pay the hospital bill when one of their offspring falls ill. One stunning image remains: a street curb tracking shot surveying the backs of the seated jobless.
     Shinji’s former teacher, who runs a restaurant (“Our Portions Really Fill You Up”), solicits his help in advertising the place—tactfully: “If you’re out of work, how about helping me for a while?” At a dinner reuniting Shinji’s former class, the former teacher makes a toast: “May all of you continue to prosper through hard work and self-reliance.” But we’ve seen that hard work is insufficient and one must rely on others.
     Shinji’s new teaching job means that the family must move. Mrs. Okajima’s wistful remark grazes: “I’m sure we can return to Tokyo someday.”

BULLET BALLET (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)

Dazzling, gorgeous, pulsating, visionary, Shinya Tsukamoto’s black-and-white Bullet Ballet brilliantly fuses social criticism, ultra-violence, West Side Story’s street gangery, Tarkovskian science fiction, and film noir to wrestle a stunning life-affirmation from a compelling description of the nihilism of young Tokyoans who see violence, including murder and suicide, as the logical extension of what they perceive to be dead-ended lives. Wrongly, some commentators have said that the film itself is nihilistic. Tsukamoto, the cult favorite who directed Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989) and A Snake of June (2002), wrote, directed, cinematographed and edited this fantastic film.
     Goda, beautifully played by Tsukamoto, seems to scurry through a dark, occasionally deadly dream. The point of departure is girlfriend Kiriko’s unexpected suicide with a gun the calibre of which only the police use. How did she get this gun? Was her death really a suicide? Goda himself investigates, descending into a gang underworld not only to discover the truth, which proves elusive, but to secure his own gun of the type that killed Kiriko so he can strike out at some portion of a dizzyingly immoral world. The mystery police gun suggests that Tsukamoto had in mind Akira Kurosawa’s swooning postwar noir Stray Dog (1949), thus laying Japan’s current moral chaos at the doorstep of the U.S. occupation that stressed capitalism at the expense of Japan’s religious foundation and family orientation.
     This is a dank film (another touch of Tarkovsky), with a leaky faucet and dripping corridors, and a rush, with flights across streets and bridges in pursuit of confrontation’s clarity. Handheld camera rules. The production design, as in a dream, makes inside Goda’s never-locked apartment one step away from some bizarre, leaky subterranean world that accesses the outdoors. People run while urgently using their cell phones.
     Futuristic; contemporary.

O.J.’S TRIAL & AFTER

Trouble beats time,
fragile as a wren
draws wind and epithets.
What verdict were we after
no jury can give us?
A certainty of guilt?
Scapegoat?
The chance to inflict pain?
An atonement,
like the million-man march?

It may be too late for time’s
comfortable judgments,
all a-ache and brittle-broke.
Through raw eyes we again see
fish caught in a net,
black and white;
the shadows strain,
the unmothered children
perpetuated by white spite.

Time lets go of even this
and every one of us.
The perished perish afresh,
slapping water against the hips.
Heat sifts, water dips and drowns,
a promise, defaulted,
eager to collect.
Wounds heal and bleed:
the sun about to set
on an empire of hope.

SONG OF CEYLON (Basil Wright, 1934)

Commissioned to make travelogues publicizing the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board, budding British documentarian Basil Wright made instead something else—just what precisely is debatable. Producer John Grierson thus defined the point of The Song of Ceylon: “Buddhism and the art of life it has to offer, set upon by a Western metropolitan civilization which, in spite of all our skills, has no art of life to offer.” Once a routine entry on lists of the all-time ten best films, Wright’s Song is rarely sung anymore for its perceived chauvinism, although Wright may be ironically undercutting chauvinistic notions voiced in the late seventeenth-century text (by Robert Knox) that the film’s narration draws upon. Everyone agrees that the film is lyrical.
     The 40-minute film is divided into four parts: “The Buddha,” “The Virgin Island,” “Voices of commerce,” “The Apparel of the Gods.”
     The opening tests the possibility of Wright’s irony. Ceylon’s “dark forest,” which the narrator (quoting Knox) says existed “since ancient times,” plants the land and its people in the symbolical “darkness” of ignorance, backwardness. But the accompanying tracking shot through forest is most striking for shafts of intense sunlight! The narrator proceeds to describe natives as making themselves “prostrate to the Devil” at night; but the accompanying image of grotesquely masked figures dancing in fire-lit darkness is sufficiently fantastic to suggest a dream, one perhaps lodged in the “civilized” Western mind that, we cannot help but note, presumes a literal belief in the Devil! In any case, the narration explains that Buddhism replaced such devil-worship as the film moves from night to day and from gaudy, pulsating closeups to orderly long-shots. We suddenly realize that the devil-dance is a performance, a reconstruction.
     Wright’s beautiful film is ripe for revisiting.
     Ceylon today is Sri Lanka.