LOLO (Francisco Athié, 1992)

A fine first feature, Lolo is a trenchant film about impoverished life in an urban slum. In its circling dance of shifting official responsibility for a neighborhood murder, played to the grind of a sardonic hurdy-gurdy, filmmaker Francisco Athié startlingly captures crisscrossing variations on hopeless human existence. Rarely has a film shown how dire poverty, terrible enough in itself, informs every aspect of the lives of its victims, dealing blow after daily blow after daily blow. It’s a round of circumstance enmeshed in two others: street crime, and the brutality and corruption of law enforcement. Moreover, Athié has created an atmosphere so dark and dank that one almost feels as if one is suffocating while watching the film. There’s no sugar coating here, as there is, for example, in Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945) or, (much) worse, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961).

The film is contemporary; it is set on the outskirts of Mexico City. Athié wrote and directed the film, which is in fact a transmutation of Dostoievski’s novel Crime and Punishment.

The lead character is Dolores Chimal, nicknamed Lolo, an 18-year-old boy who works in a foundry. When Lolo asks for a raise, his supervisor decides to teach him—and other workers—a lesson. On pay day, after he has received his meager earnings, Lolo is stalked, robbed at gunpoint, and beaten nearly to death by thugs and the police. “Why didn’t you put up a fight?” his mother asks when Lolo returns from the hospital, where his five-day stay, absenting him from work, cost him his job and his family the lion’s share of their marginal income. (Señora Chimal has two daughters younger than Lolo also living at home, one way too young to work, the other whose stealing leads to her incarceration.) Señora Chimal pawns the gold watch she recently received from her children on her birthday; the elderly pawnbroker gives her little for it and, usurious, charges 50% interest. When Lolo is stealing back the gold watch, the pawnbroker’s daughter comes upon him and he kills her. The pawnbroker identifies the assailant’s red sneakers, which Lolo trades to his friend, Bobo. Lolo’s mother’s boyfriend, and perhaps his own best friend, Alambrista, is arrested for the crime, but Marcelino, a police officer who is Lolo’s cousin, suspects the truth and tries through a series of conversations with the boy to bring Lolo to the point of confession. Lolo eventually confesses to Marcelino, who takes the money that Lolo stole from the pawnbroker and gives his young cousin one day to leave town. The fall guy, both agree, will be Bobo. The neighborhood gang, though, knows the truth and beats Lolo, stopping short of setting him ablaze. Lolo beseeches his devout girlfriend, Sonia, for money so that they can both leave town together. Sonia prostitutes herself to raise the money, telling Lolo that she borrowed the money from her mother. After Lolo deposits the gold watch on a table by his sleeping mother, they leave town by bus, heading for as grim a future as the flypaper past that will dog them. There is a faint echo here of Tom Joad’s leavetaking at the end of John Ford’s great The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

The narrative is framed by shots of Bobo hanging in his cell, in both instances surveyed by Marcelino. In the last shot we see the red sneakers on his feet. We are never shown the corpse’s face. We recognize Bobo from the sneakers and from the polo shirt we earlier saw him wear. This instance of presentation is typical of the film’s elliptical nature. Superficially at least Bressonian in style, the film is a series of lightning flashes—and flashes of sound also—in profound and disturbing darkness and silence. The moment of murder, lucid and horrific, finds Lolo smashing his victim over and over with a handy, heavy crystal vase; the camera doesn’t leave his almost translucent young face as this outburst of sheer violence transports Lolo to a calm, gracious mental place—a place to which nothing in his miserable life has probably given him previous access. The moment is heartrending.

Lolo is a loving, decent boy doing his best for his family, trying with all his might to shoulder his responsibilities—an impulse made poignantly visible as he literally supports his little sister on his shoulders at their mother’s birthday celebration: an instance of rare happiness, with cousin Marcelino, perpetually sunglassed, even (as here) indoors, in ominous attendance. After Lolo, severely beaten, has returned from hospital, his mother berates him in a silent quarrel we see in the background of the shot. The camera is fixed instead on Lolo’s little sister’s distressed face as the living room, the scene of the family quarrel, spins around and around—a joyless merry-go-round: the corruption of childhood by poverty and its consequences. We watch Lolo slide into self-preservation, selfishness and cruelty. We later learn the reason for Marcelino’s dark glasses. When he was a boy he, too, committed murder and let a friend—Alambrista, by coincidence—take the fall and be brutally beaten. The police academy was the option he was given when “the law” realized its mistake. Corrupt, Marcelino now perpetually hides from the world and from himself—another index of poverty and its consequences.

The film, taut and etched, is resplendent with memorable imagery, such as the closeup of the pawnbroker’s aged, greedily agile hands as she turns the gold watch around and around in them. There is much circular imagery in the film, and indeed the opening and closing narrative frame—Bobo hanging in his cell as Marcelino, smiling, looks on—traps the whole film in a grinding circle. It is this circularity that renders Lolo and Sonia’s “flight” by bus sorely ironic; it is the form of escape, but the abiding content is entrapment.

Roberto Sosa’s acting as Dolores Chimal obliterates the difference between fiction and documentary realism. It’s an incredibly haunting performance. Why didn’t we pay more attention to Lolo’s friend, Bobo, when we had the chance? This aspect of the film also haunts. So many children are lost right in front of our eyes—or somewhere in the corners of our sight.

Count Lolo among the great films from Mexico.

THRONE OF BLOOD (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)

Retitled Throne of Blood in the U.S., Akira Kurosawa’s Kumonosu jo—Cobweb Castle—transcribes Macbeth to medieval Japan. Kurosawa, as with what remains of his (hypnotic) film of Dostoievski’s The Idiot (1951), dispenses with the original’s language and takes aim at the soul of the text. At the same time, his vision attests to specifically Japanese concerns. Finally, Kurosawa demonstrates his appreciation of the (remarkable) visual aspect of Orson Welles’s film of Macbeth (1948) as well as his own philosophic inclination towards Western existentialism. The result is, with Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966), one of the three greatest Shakespeare films.

The film’s opening is majestic, projecting a sense of long-ago, by extension, of timelessness. With formal rigor the camera’s eye surveys mist-shrouded landscapes composing a wasteland and scans, downward, an ancient obelisk as a solemn, disembodied chorus, chanting the inscribed text, tells of a ‘proud warrior murdered by ambition,’ whose ‘once mighty fortress’ leaves no trace; ‘Vain pride, then as now,’ intones humanity’s cautionary voice, ‘will lead ambition to the kill.’ It is the voice of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”; it is Wordsworth’s “still, sad voice.” The wasteland filling the screen, then, is the result of such ambition; and, in this ceremonial opening, the level shots or depressive camera movements from cut to cut, along with the “reading” of the obelisk, suggest we are hearing the voice of the earth, of the dead, a distillation of human wisdom. The probing camera, coupled with the human absence save for the invisible chorus, helps identify us with the camera’s point of view. Our eye thus extended from our corporeal rootedness, we feel we have entered, not merely a remote time and place, but the conclave of fundamental law. We are thus implicated in the tale, about to unfold, of a mortal whose presumption led him to violate this law, setting him squarely against the natural order he sought to redefine to his personal advantage—one who grasped power in hopes of solidifying his ontological status in a shifting, labyrinthine cosmos.

As in Rashomon (1950), Kurosawa’s symbol of this ambiguous universe is the forest. In its fog-drenched, convoluted maze, what can be clear or certain? (Ironically, brilliant sunlight dappling the woods projects the same uncertainty in Rashomon.) In the forest’s grip, having overpowered an insurgent and forced his army into retreat, two generals chance upon an otherworldly creature, an ancient, wraithlike spirit slowly, ceaselessly spinning silk—cobweb—at her wheel. She expresses the idea of fate; but, too, she seems an objectified piece of the opening chorus. In a voice so low it seems to emanate from earth, she announces that one of the generals, Washizu, will command, first, the insurgent’s fort and, afterwards, Lord Tsuzuki’s castle. The other general’s— Miki’s—son will in time succeed Washizu. Do the two men dare believe all this? Trying to penetrate the forest to reach Tsuzuki’s castle, repeatedly they gallop into and out of the deep, blank fog—the overriding impression, auditory, is of alternately emergent and receding hoofbeats—but arriving each time nowhere, at the point, perhaps, from which they started, until they end up, as if by chance, where they were headed. Made more dense by incessant rain and wind, the forest shows the two lost men as a combinate Everyman challenged by an unchartable, inhospitable cosmos.

The words of the wood-spirit turn out to be sooth. At the castle Tsuzuki rewards Washizu’s loyal victory by enacting unawares the first prophecy. Ironically, this sets Washizu on a path that undoes his loyalty and therefore the honor paid him. For Washizu’s wife, Asaji, on no real evidence, convinces him that Tsuzuki favors Miki over him. This, in effect, sets Everyman against himself—a metaphor for war. But it is Asaji who prods her husband into, first, murdering Tsuzuki and usurping power and then, the second prophecy thus fulfilled, murdering Miki and his family in order to thwart enactment of the third prophecy. The latter effort fails, though, when Miki’s son escapes and joins Lord Washizu’s military opposition. The spiderweb of fate tightens.

Clearly, much of the story derives from the play. (The script is by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni and Ryuzo Kikushima.) But Kurosawa lacks Shakespeare’s interest in the reciprocative and cyclical nature of violence. Rather, as Shakespeare also would, in King Lear (which Kurosawa, given Kumonosu jo, superfluously filmed as Ran—Chaos—1985), he focuses on humanity’s confrontation with an awesome, likely unfathomable universe. In doing so, however, Kurosawa is able to address Macbeth’s most perplexing paradox: that such a bold, commanding leader as Macbeth should also be such a weak, subservient mate. Kurosawa shows that Washizu is both for one and the same reason. Washizu’s battle prowess, and his assertions of military authority and political rule, enable him to hide, from himself and others, his fear and trembling; and, at home, he submits to his wife’s dominance only because she continually points up those deceptive appearances of reality that imply the cosmic ambiguity which terrifies him. Asaji’s low voice—it resembles the spinner’s—insists that, however they seem, things aren’t unfolding to Washizu’s advantage and, therefore, to correct this, Washizu must act by doing this, and then this, and so forth. Asaji, then, gives voice to her husband’s own worst fears and proposes only such courses of action as might hold his fear in abeyance.

All this leads to another revelation about the Washizus’ marriage that may or may not be applicable to Shakespeare’s play. Whenever Washizu submits to Asaji’s cynicism and murderous promptings, he is really submitting to an inner voice of his own—a voice he has projected onto his wife. Supporting this imposition is the patriarchal culture that Washizu represents. In effect, Asaji’s whole being has been sacrificed to the dutiful fulfillment of her marital role. In this light, her eventual insanity may be viewed as consequential to her grasp of her own nothingness vis-à-vis her husband. From the start, Kurosawa undercuts Asaji’s seeming dominance by showing her, often, stooped and very nearly whited out—her makeup and stylized movements derive from Noh theater—alongside Washizu’s looming presence and raw, turbulent humanity. Puppet on a string, then, Asaji is the monster that her husband requires her to be; and if, for a while, she at least seems to relish this vicious, instigatory role, it is because the role compensates for her lack of any real power or even identity, her image and self-image being wholly dependent on her meeting Washizu’s needs, where even her compensatory show of force, ironically, remains at his behest. To be sure, commentators generally find Asaji’s lack of dominance in the mise-en-scène as another instance of Kurosawa’s fine (or blunt) irony; but I even find contributing to my understanding of the role the casting of Isuzu Yamada, who two decades earlier had been the favorite actress of Kenji Mizoguchi, a filmmaker with the feminist credentials Kurosawa lacks. And, for me at least, Washizu’s actual dominance of his wife explains so much and deepens the film’s overall theme; for Asaji’s monstrous role—something fierce in his favor he can rely on in an otherwise unreliable cosmos—provides him with a needed grounding and anchor.

With this ‘anchor’ of his slipping into the bottomless waters of madness, though, increasingly Washizu cannot unloosen the grip of his fear. When Noriyasu’s opposing army approaches, he seeks out the woods-creature, who predicts his safety so long as the forest doesn’t move in on the castle. (Kurosawa deletes the ‘No man of woman born …’ tease; his ‘witch’ is no trickster.) However, Washizu doesn’t take this to mean that nothing can go wrong. Worried, he rallies his troops, reassuring them in order to reassure himself that they remain invulnerable. This speech the high point of Toshiro Mifune’s brilliant performance, Washizu thus manipulates the crowd below to fortify their allegiance and to stabilize his own wobbling psyche—a Kurosawan insight into political demagoguery; but for all his bravado, Washizu remains awash with fear.

No wonder. In a world where a woods-creature has flashed into nothingness before his eyes, where a tame horse, as if demon-possessed, has gone riotous, where he himself has committed crimes beyond his worst imaginings—in such a world, might not a forest move? What fitting retribution for one whose ambition sought to thwart Nature. When a flock of wild birds becomes trapped indoors, the omen of doom is complete.

Kurosawa has in mind here something other than ambition as we in the West normally define it. Specifically, he is cautioning against any repeat of the aggressive acts that brought upon his nation the “judgment” of atom bombs and the resultant deaths, deformities, cancers. It is this immense concern of his that generates the film’s austere moral passion. It therefore shouldn’t surprise us that, whereas Shakespeare warns against excessive ambition, Kurosawa’s film warns against all ambition—any presumption by rulers—as reckless, dangerous. This more inclusive warning also strikes a Buddhist chord befitting Japan’s national tradition, although Kurosawa himself is a humanist, not a religionist.

The closing scenes astonish. Feverishly ‘washing’ her hands of the shed ‘blood’ blotting her mind’s eye, Asaji dissolves into madness, leaving Washizu alone to face his fate: the forest now approaching the castle. The image of trees implacably moving forward completes the idea of fate introduced by the spinner at her wheel, her fourth prophecy thus proven as true as the others. Onward towards the camera/Washizu/us the viewer, the trees appear to move on their own, their dark, billowing branches creating a magnificent sense of impending doom. The vision inciting them, Washizu’s men turn on him, savaging him with arrows, volley after volley. Thus the dread consuming Washizu is objectified by the spectacle of his awesomely protracted death, his eyes at the last bulging in animal horror at—who knows?—the ‘nothing that is,’ or whatever else lies behind life’s veils of mist. Now for the first time taking a lateral rather than a frontal view, the camera reveals guiding human hands behind the camouflaging trees. Those opposing Washizu have executed his fate, restoring a semblance of order but leaving untouched the terror at life’s core. The film concludes with the recitation off the scanned obelisk with which it began, recalling the bookending structure (and the guarded, trespassed-on domain) from Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).

Grave, powerful and eerily beautiful, Kumonosu jo owes a larger debt, however, to Welles’s Macbeth, whose tonal scale for visually evoking ambiguity it adopts—although, whereas Welles stresses moral ambiguity, Kurosawa stresses cosmic ambiguity. Too, the film achieves nothing to which the stormy, fatalistic black-and-white—though mostly variously gray—cinematography of Asakazu Nakai doesn’t directly contribute. With Nakai’s assistance Kurosawa has given us here a tremendous film—one depicting a world where, unable to chart its spiritual place, humanity acts aggressively and violently in the hope that doing so will still fear and distract its eyes from impenetrable mists. It is a familiar world, and also a strange one. Haunted by interminable echoes of slaughter, it is a world whose meaning is impossible to locate. It’s an ancient world—and the modern one of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

TOKYO TWILIGHT (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

Yet another one of Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpieces, Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo boshoku) demonstrates the disintegration of family as a structuring and supportive social unit in postwar Japan. It turns Ozu’s exceptionally poignant Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) on its head, suggesting the embittered aftermath of the kind of hopeful marriage with which the earlier film ends, and even further suggesting that the father’s sacrifice in Late Spring, his letting go of the daughter who anchored his life into a life of her own, has turned up empty for them both. (The father in both films is played by Chishu Ryu. In both films the character’s first name is Shukichi—the same name as the characters Ryu plays in Ozu’s Tokyo Story, 1953, and Equinox Flower, 1958.) Rather than drifting apart like floating weeds, the family in Tokyo Twilight is riddled with lies, secrets and spousal abuse behind closed doors. Watching it unfold is an unshakable experience.

Shukichi Sugiyama is a hardworking, middle-aged man whose two daughters, college-age Akiko and her older sister, Takako, are currently living with him in Tokyo. Takako has left her brutal alcoholic husband, whom Shukichi had persuaded her to marry. This is not the only source of regret in Shukichi’s life. When Akiko was an infant, his wife, Kisako, left with another man, a friend of his, abandoning him and their three children. Their son died six years ago. Now Kisako is back in Tokyo with another partner (the man she had run off with died in a prison camp during the war), and Shukichi learns that Akiko is pregnant with her irresponsible boyfriend’s child. Akiko has an abortion. Tragedy follows, further battering the cold, already embittered man’s heart. Takako’s decision to return to her spouse—she will not abandon him as her mother abandoned her father—leaves Shukichi very much alone.

Ozu’s plot—the original script is by him and writing partner Kôgo Noda—is the stuff of melodrama, but the precise dialogue, Ozu’s humanism, and the muted treatment Ozu imparts to the material generate a very different, profoundly affecting result. Father and daughters, although living together, each lead a painfully lonely life. Not even her delightful two-year-old daughter remedies Takako’s conflicted soul, and the discovery of her mother in the neighborhood provokes more bitterness and anguish in Takako, who is more or less the one making the greatest effort to hold together what remains of the family. This effort, doubtless, is unconscious on her part. It is partly motivated by her having (temporarily) broken up her own family by leaving her husband—an action for which she is likely compensating vis-à-vis parent and sibling. It seems that family is no longer something that can be counted on to bring stability to its members; rather, an effort must be made to stabilize it.

This effort—as much as anything else, Akiko’s unmarried pregnancy and abortion signify its futility—is needed to restore a semblance of traditional continuity to lives disrupted and up-heaved by war. To whatever extent the institution of the Japanese family took its orderly patriarchic character from the nation’s dictatorial rule by an emperor, that world has vanished and taken much of the idea of family (in its modern form) with it. Kisako’s abandonment of spouse and children—one wonders: was Shukichi as harsh a husband as Takako’s?—indeed implies that family, even when intact, is little more than a ceremonial façade that carries within its domain the seeds of its own undoing. But above all, because they invited such a close, anguished reconsideration of all familiar institutions, the war, Japan’s defeat and the difficult aftermath of occupation contributed to a more general unraveling of the institution of family. In effect, Tokyo Twilight examines scraps and shards of family, while its title implies a momentous transition—the end of something (including the family as a reliable institution) and, hopefully, the beginning of something else. The film ends not only with Takako’s departure from Tokyo but, also, Kisako’s.

Twilight refers to two lights in the sky, the faded sun after it has set and the moon that is coming into focus. There isn’t a single shot in the film that shows either light, let alone both simultaneously. Rather, the streets, the wharf and the characters’ lives are all permeated by that particular time of day: dusk. Tokyo Twilight is a film of cold, wintry evenings—it is shot in black and white—whose grays and darker grays, untouched by chiaroscuro, are all correlative to souls whose lives are at loose ends and are difficult for them to take hold of. (It is also a film of lonely, dingy meeting-places—bars, mahjong parlors.) Here is one of Ozu’s bleakest films that quite reverses our sensitive expectations based on our familiarity with Japan’s greatest film artist. How many times have we marveled at the intimations of human closeness and connection conveyed by Ozu’s shots of a couple, their backs to the camera, sitting side by side? (These are among Ozu’s signature shots.) In Tokyo Twilight the shot recurs—and Ozu blows it apart. The couple aren’t a pair of old married folk, as in Tokyo Story (1953). Here, they are Akiko and Kenji, her boyfriend, sitting together on the pier, bound together by Akiko’s news that she is pregnant, as the foggy dusk and the sound of moaning foghorns envelop them. Ozu cuts to a frontal view of the couple and cuts back and forth between them as they quarrel, with Kenji (cruelly) even questioning whether he is the father. Kenji abandons Akiko, leaving her seated alone, promising to meet her later at an appointed place to which he never shows up. All this quite undoes what we are used to taking and feeling from the classic Ozu shot of a couple sitting together, where the sweet sadness distilled derives from the transience of even the closest human connection as mortal life is measured against eternity. Here, in Tokyo Twilight, the couple instead falls apart, disintegrates, before our very eyes.

Similarly, shots of people together may end in this film with one lonely figure, after another or others have departed, left alone in the frame. A related poignancy is achieved when Kisako and her partner are seated together on a train which is about to depart Tokyo and, her head out the window, she is hoping against hope that Takako will turn up to say goodbye. We know, and Kisako’s partner tells her, this is not to be.

Tokyo Twilight is brilliantly acted. As Takako, Setsuko Hara gives one of her most complex and richly detailed performances; Ineko Arima is heartbreaking as Akiko; Chishu Ryu, eloquent as the father; Isuzu Yamada, Kenji Mizoguchi’s star of the ’30s, phenomenal—it’s the performance of her career—as Kisako.

Tokyo Twilight is full of thoughts that lie too deep for tears.

A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED (Vyacheslav Krishtofovich, 1998)

There is much to lament in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise, part of which is playing out in the Balkans; but the principal victims are the former nation’s citizens, whose lives have enormously worsened, not improved, from the intrusion into cities of commercialism and capitalism, and their twin cousins independent street crime and organized crime. In addition, outer areas have sunk even further into indigence and neglect.

Predictably, for a while many anti-Soviet films issued from the region, replete with massive, bitter memories of Soviet totalitarianism, including of a brutal police force. Just as predictably, nearly all of these films were shrill, venomous, artistically worthless. Among them were any number of items from the Prince of Bile, Semeon Aranovich, including People’s Gala Concert, and Alexander Rogozhin’s The Chekist (both 1992). In its pathological eagerness to find terrorism at the foundation of the Soviet state, The Chekist ends up with a pseudopsychological jumble that evidences no more feeling for the bourgeois victims, naked, endlessly shown being lined up and shot down, than the merciless officers executing them evidence; an inhuman film cannot be persuasive on the subject of inhumanity. These films are intolerable for their cruelty, but they are also, perhaps, necessary as a means of contesting Soviet mythology and disclosing stinging truths about domestic Soviet tyranny.

However, as the region’s misery index has risen, films of this abusive kind more and more have had to contend with those of another, more urgent kind—one that casts an eye around rather than at the past. Outstanding recent examples include Alexei Balabanov’s trenchant Brother (1997) and, in black and white, Petr Lutsik’s mordant Outskirts (1998). A Friend of the Deceased, by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich, is a gentler work belonging to this group. Wry, ironical, touching, it comes from the (now) sovereign nation of Ukraine, whose national studio, I am happy to report, is Dovzhenko—named for Alexander Dovzhenko, cinema’s poet of the Ukraine, and perhaps the greatest Soviet filmmaker.

Krishtofovich’s lovely film certainly doesn’t aspire to the rigor of Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1929), Earth (1930), Ivan (1932) or Aerograd (Frontier, 1935). It is, after all, a comedy. Its warm, easy-going main character is Anatoli, who lives in Kiev with his wife, Katia. A former scholar in foreign languages, Anatoli—Tolia—has been cast adrift into unemployment by the collapse of the Soviet Union; in his thirties, he barely scrapes together pocket money by taking whatever odd translating assignments he can uncover—work whose token pay can discount his education and expertise because of the vast army, readily exploitable, competing for such work. (Example: He nets $10 for work that’s essential to the closing of a translingual business deal.) A former philologist, Katia, because prettier, has been luckier. She works in an advertising agency along with her lover, a nouveau capitalist for whom she leaves her spouse. Krishtofovich is careful to draw her sympathetically; she isn’t to blame. Katia probably still loves her Tolia more than she does her capitalist—if in fact she loves the latter at all, which isn’t clear because it isn’t clear to her, either. But she and Tolia no longer have much in common, and in any case she believes she is following her future. Tolia’s friend Dima later remarks: “Friendship here disappeared with the Soviet Union. . . . Today there are only business relations.” Friendship has disappeared, and, it appears, marriage. Now in their place is what in the nineteenth century British writer Thomas Carlyle termed the “cash nexus.”

Dima works as a salesperson for an above-ground black marketing concern. He helps his impoverished friend in three ways. One, he provides alcoholic comradery. Two, he arranges for Tolia a well-paying gig. Dima’s seedy boss, Boris, needs a court witness in his divorce suit—someone to say that he is Boris’s wife’s lover. Initially Tolia protests, “That’s giving false testimony”—to which Dima compellingly replies, “What isn’t false nowadays?” Tolia, it turns out, doesn’t have to testify; Boris’s wife caves in when this “witness” merely appears. For once, Tolia is handsomely paid, but for “work” of the new order—work alien to his interests, training and humanity. Still, now he can pay Dima for the third thing his friend will do for him: assist in Tolia’s contractual murder under the misconception that the intended target is Katia’s lover.

Dima puts Tolia in contact with the right man for the job. Over the telephone and through a postal box, a despairing Tolia thus arranges for his own execution—an anonymous suicide by unwitting proxy. But Tolia’s disposition changes once a prostitute gives him a new lease on life. It’s too late; there’s no canceling the hit. To do so would jeopardize Dima’s life, since Dima is the one who vouched for the arrangement. Tolia has no way of knowing that his hired assassin is no more a monster than he himself is. Kostia, in fact, is a nice boy trying to earn enough money to take university classes—another soul forced by the new reality to support his wife, Marina, and their new son any way he can. Choosing to live, Tolia hires another hit man, Ivan, to kill Kostia before Kostia kills him (Tolia). Before this film is complete, Tolia’s crafty intervention will have thwarted another hit, and two other hits will have been successfully executed or will be lying in wait. Too, Boris’s store will have been burned to a carcass, and Dima nearly along with it. (The mob did it! No, the wife! No, the mob!) Omnipresent, the new order will have been shown to be greedily breathing down everyone’s neck and potentially bullet-riddled torso; and Tolia, a rattled fish out of water, will have ended up either dead (in a socialist heaven) or emotionally and morally dead as a living part of a capitalistic society.

Brilliantly scripted by Andrei Kourkov and beautifully directed by Krishtofovich, A Friend of the Deceased is a near perfect comedy, full of suspense, surprises and tantalizing ambiguities. (How much in the dark about Kostia’s “business” is Marina really?) Above all, it is informed by a definite point of view, compassion, and shrewd insights into the former Soviet Union’s new (dis)order. With his lightness of touch, Krishtofovich thus deClairs himself a rare and winning artist.

Vilen Kaluta’s color lensing, absent all affectation, is gracious and evocative; Vladimir Gronski’s score contributes a sense of human frailty—a fine, sad undertow.

Finally, and centrally, Alexander Lezerev’s Tolia is one of cinema’s most engaging Everymen. When Tolia, realizing he is penniless, apologetically leaves an elderly woman who is discreetly begging on the street, you recognize his bashful humanity as your imperiled own.

JAPÓN (Carlos Reygadas, 2002)

Among the most extraordinary feature film debuts, Japón (Japan) announces the arrival of a major talent: Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas, who has written and directed this enormously powerful and heartbreaking film. Reygadas, who is very young (31, when he made Japón), can be forgiven the occasional artiness and cruelty to animals (no special effects here), and, given his youth, also the shafts of influence from three clear and distinct sources: Abbas Kiarostami, for the sense of an odyssey and a penchant for extreme long shots of a moving vehicle amidst mountainous terrain; Werner Herzog, for the delirious sense of a foreign, hallucinatory environment and the extreme nature of human behavior; and Andrei Tarkovsky, one of whose shots from Solaris (1972) Reygadas, at the opening of his film, lovingly all but recreates. But Reygadas is highly original, too, having translated Tarkovsky’s anthropological and deeply religious sense, of layers of cultural artifacts rising to a bleak surface of consciousness, into a natural and secular mode. Only here and there, regrettably, a strain of influence separates out from the pattern Reygadas otherwise seamlessly weaves.

Although the film utterly lacks all affect of mystery (and, so, differs from Tarkovsky in that regard; even Christ statuary seems incapable of igniting a religious or redemptive spark), its protagonist is an unnamed stranger (some Sergio Leone here?), on a dire mission, who is destined to affect the destinies of several other people. A painter in his 50s and lame (a sign of his mortality and perhaps of sexual impotence), “El Hombre”—The Man—has forsaken his home in civilization, Mexico City to be exact, to venture into the remote, rural interior of Mexico. (The film was shot in the Hidalgo wilderness.) He has come to die, and he brings death with him, which is to say, a fever-pitched consciousness of death. Disillusioned with life, all but dead already to life, he has come to an isolated part of Mexico to commit suicide. However, he fails in his attempt to end his life.

Reygadas establishes the painter’s close connection to death almost immediately in a scene as shocking as it’s disgusting. A boy is unable to kill the bird he has shot and begs the stranger’s help. The stranger complies, lopping off the quarry’s head; the bird twitches to death on the ground—a shot that perhaps can’t be dismissed, finally, on the grounds of artiness precisely because its mannered quality is on thematic point. Not only is Reygadas identifying the stranger with death; the stranger identifies himself with death. However hard these moments are to take, their selfconsciousness formally embodies the selfconsciousness of a being who has become for himself as much of an abstraction as is the daunting terrain now surrounding and supporting him to his practiced artist’s eye. It isn’t too great a leap to surmise that the stranger is in fact dying precisely of this selfconsciousness, the slow, agonizing death (like that of the unselfconscious bird’s, ironically) that his planned suicide will come to formally embody as though tantamount to the completion of a painting. He has no name, but we know his name; this being is modern civilized humanity: us.

The abstract nature of the environment that the stranger has entered, at least as he perceives it, is defined by the canyon and its mountainous walls, and also by various techniques that Reygadas applies to this environment. One is his use of sound, or, to be precise, the sound Reygadas will erase to create a silence that underscores the dreamlike nature of this ground in relation to the painter’s figure and emphasizing this protagonist’s inwardness, his silent, interior romance with thoughts of death. Another is the pace of the film, at times agonizingly slow, and at other times—during at least one critical patch—nonexistent. This film, near the end, achieves a perfect stasis, a long scene, one of huddled humanity, that is bereft of any trace of onward movement—a maddeningly “dead” spot that ironically signals the stranger’s rebirth, his reawakened appetite for life.

What, then, has been the agency of this rebirth of his? The stranger may have fallen in love; he has had sex with a very old woman, the woman of the mountains, if you will, Ascención, who, true to her name, has proven his ascension—to earth, that is, not to paradise. Ascen has been chosen by the villagers to tend to the stranger. Hers is the film’s most humane character. (Among the nonprofessional cast, Magdalena Flores especially shines as Ascen.) The scene of awkward lovemaking, where we see fully naked two bodies long past the firmness and suppleness of youth, rivets. It’s not a stunt, like Kathy Bates appearing naked, briefly, in About Schmidt; instead, it’s one of cinema’s most generous embraces of humanity—on Reygadas’s part, an appreciative act of youthful reverence. Moreover, it brings to a deeply moving point the larger cause of the painter’s renewal that his sexual intercourse with Ascen represents: the sheer humanity of the villagers, including—by way of Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece, Viridiana (1961), perhaps—those (including her nephew) whose scheme to cheat Ascen out of property the stranger addresses in his first (lame, unhelpful) step to rebirth. Grubby human nature; transcendent human nature: Reygadas embraces it all, and his film unsentimentally insinuates the resurrecting force of this humanity contesting the abstractness into which the stranger’s perceptions had fallen. The painter, mired in abstraction, had forgotten to take into account the antidote to his pessimism and despair, humanity, which therefore catches him unawares.

But at a terrible price. Japón, early on, discloses traveling shots of stony terrain: visual metaphors for the stranger’s journey and its suicidal motive—a preparation, it turns out, for the completion of the film: one of the most stunning, terribly moving shots in all of cinema. Part of the brilliance of this shot is that it seems both inevitable and to come out of the blue. Down from the mountains a cart carries a slew of the villagers, the stranger remaining above, reborn, as it were. The villagers have combinately saved his life; but the death he brought with him, which had been his own, now is projected onto the others. There is a catastrophe below, in the canyon, on the railroad tracks. To the musical accompaniment of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus for Benjamin Britten (this, the same year that Gus Van Sant drew upon Pärt’s music for his own existential fable of death played out in otherworldly landscapes, Gerry), Reygadas achieves a sense of gravity—humanity’s burden of mortality and of mortal consciousness—by bearing down on the pebbled railroad tracks at dynamic speed: formally, an explosion of the slow pace and the stasis he had established, now fully rendering these expressive and legitimately preparative. Again and again the 16mm camera swoops around 360º, in time picking up here and there, on the tracks, off to the right, off to the left, another body, the corpse of another one of the villagers, or a corpse we have already spotted there. In some sense, these are the casualties of the “civilized” self-involvement, the suicidal self-indulgence, the stranger has brought with him from the city. In another sense, we witness the connectedness of humanity; rural Mexico, however remote, cannot remain immune to the currents of discontent that the stranger represented. What an appalling and shattering vision Reygadas has achieved.

Why the title? What does this Mexican film—the lab processing was done in Spain—have to do with Japan? Reygadas himself has explained: “Go out into the street and ask people the first five words they relate to Japan. I am sure that 80% of them will choose words like ‘Harakiri,’ ‘respect,’ ‘samurai’ . . . . And Japan is also the land where the sun comes up first every day. It’s a place of renewal. And the film is about all those things.” However, this explanation scarcely takes into account the film’s grim, tragic conclusion. The friend with whom I saw Japón opined that the title also indicates the Japan of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in a larger sense, the horrors of the twentieth century to which even the most remote people in a land very far from Japan cannot remain immune.

Who is this kid Regadas who has come up with such a staggering piece of work? (Prior to Japón he made four shorts.) The son of an accountant and an anthropologist, he trained for the law and worked for the United Nations before setting out on his dream. A genuine artist, he scorns Hollywood, which he calls a virus from which “we are all under attack.” One shouldn’t go to a movie house to be “entertained,” he has said, but, rather, with the same object as one goes to an art museum. “You don’t go to a museum to kill two hours of your time,” he explains. “You go there to live.”

Japón and Reygadas have won a number of festival prizes: at Bratislava, the Grand Prix and the Ecumenical Jury prize; at Edinburgh, the New Director’s prize; at Havana, the prize for the best first work; at Stockholm, the audience prize; at São Paulo, the Critics’ award; and at Thessaloniki, the Best Director prize. At Cannes, the film was runner-up for the Caméra d’Or. Diego Martínez Vignatti indeed contributes lustrous color cinematography.