LATE AUTUMN (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)

The loveliest, most humane comedy of the 1960s, Late Autumn (Akibiyori) is one of Yasujiro Ozu’s late masterpieces. A meditation on family matters, human existence and human acceptance, it’s a gentle film that yet manages to be nearly as funny as Jacques Tati at his best (Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, 1952; Playtime, 1967). Like Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959), it’s in color, but that shouldn’t keep any but the most dire purists away, for the warm colors that Ozu and his cinematographer, Yuuharu Atsuta, have devised help deepen the film’s humor to something bittersweet, poignant, indelible.* The beautiful script, based on a novel by Ton Satomi, is by Ozu and longtime screenwriting partner and drinking buddy Kôgo Noda.

The film most resembles Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), but with a twist. In Late Autumn it isn’t a widowed father who courts greater loneliness by seeing a daughter through to her wedding; it’s a widowed mother. While in Late Spring the widowed professor feigns his own upcoming marriage in order to release his daughter from a sense of obligation to him so that she may freely fulfill her own happiness, in Late Autumn two former friends of the widow’s spouse concoct a rumor of this teacher’s upcoming marriage to smooth the daughter’s path to her own wedding. In both cases, the widower or widow chooses his or her solitariness, rejecting suitors, as a means of keeping faith with the past and embracing the natural course of life. “That’s the way life is”—a summation of the Ozu spirit—is a recurrent line of dialogue in Late Autumn and, in different wordings, in numerous Ozu films.

But Late Spring is a tragicomedy—in the viewing, an almost intolerably moving thing. On the other hand, Late Autumn is closer to being a full-fledged comedy. A trio of characters, businessmen, constitutes its principal source of humor (in addition to the often hilarious repartee back-and-forth among them). The two gentlemen noted earlier, both married, are actually part of a socializing threesome, the other member of which, a widower, becomes the rumored future spouse for Akika Miwa, the film’s protagonist. There are a number of problems to this situation. The widower, sincere in his romantic interest, believes that the other two are actually approaching Akika with his suit, which they are not doing. Nor does Akika herself have any interest in the suit once she learns about it from her enraged daughter, Ayako, who, informed about it and believing it, turns against her mother, thus threatening the friendship between them that has deepened their bond since the death seven years ago of their husband and father. All misunderstandings, though, are dismissed once the three meddlers are brought to account by Ayako’s friend at work, Yukiko. All’s well that ends well, and, like a Shakespearean comedy, this one ends in marriage—between Ayako and the meddlers’ hand-picked groom, Goto, who is as handsome as she is Audrey Hepburnishly beautiful. But the film ends on an exquisite, sad note: Akika, now alone, in the evening, in the apartment that she had shared with her 24-year-old daughter.

That’s not the only sadness dealt us; for, also as in a Shakespearean comedy, the marital match doesn’t resolve itself into an image of bliss. The couple’s dour posing for a wedding photograph implies a mother’s loving sacrifice for what will prove her daughter’s unhappy union. Indeed, marriage doesn’t fare well in this film in any quarters that we see. Soichi Mamiya and Shuzo Taguchi, the two married meddlers, are entrenched in seemingly passionless unions that make their frequent get-togethers, along with their widowed companion, the high point of their day, in addition to their conspiratorial machinations. It is more than hinted, in fact, that they all loved Akika in their youth and recall the departed Miwa as having “snatched” her away from them. One of them has a young married daughter who, intent on teaching her spouse a lesson, routinely returns home alone, suitcase in hand, for a week or so. To be sure, by all accounts, including her own, Akika was happily married; but, of course, a spousal death can cast a backward glow on a marriage the experience of which fell considerably short of its subsequent idealization. People are perpetually pressuring others to marry in Ozu films, but Ozu himself never even had a wife to whom, had he died before she, he might have left his second-best bed.

Ozu is most of all concerned with the comedy of life. “Life is simple,” one of the characters at one point notes; “It’s people that make it complicated.”** And so we do, at times out of loneliness or a sense of aimlessness, and, of course, because of the cloud of mortal awareness driftily shadowing us. Ozu’s cinema is a cinema of transience—of stable life fluctuating, sometimes seemingly evaporating, in mortal breezes. Throughout Late Autumn, as throughout other Ozu films, there are momentary intervals (inserted between scenes) of people walking—for instance, as glimpsed on the street by the camera through alleyways. In no earlier Ozu film, though, has Ozu and his cutter so flawlessly, hauntingly extended the evanescent quality of these moments by match-editing consecutive ambulatory movements of different characters, either from indoors to out (or vice versa) or from one indoor spot to another. Thus, a silent formal device frees thematic import that is wedded to a store of heartache as we, the viewer, brush along the side of our sense of life’s transient nature, our own mortality.

Another technique that Ozu employs throughout this film has the same thematic purpose and carries the same profound emotion. Intimate conversations between two characters are presented as each in turn, back and forth, looks directly into the camera. This makes the character who is being addressed briefly evaporate from view, and the cumulative effect is to conjure the most delicate and aching sense of transience imaginable. (Here, again, the contribution of Ozu’s cutter, Yoshiyasu Hamamura, is extraordinary.) Indeed, Ozu’s typically low-hung camera, in addition to being visually pitched to Japanese seating arrangements, provides a persistent mortal chord from the vantage of the hinted earth below and (though some may find this farfetched) may even in some sense suggest the two departed spouses. Life goes on in an Ozu film, but life there is also constantly going away. If Shelley is the English poet of evanescence, and Dickinson the American one, Ozu is cinema’s poet of evanescence.***

In Late Spring, the daughter was played by Setsuko Hara, who, at forty, plays Akika, the mother, in Late Autumn. This brilliant actress contributes her most mature, complex, and subtly inflected acting here, and only Monica Vitti’s performance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura keeps me from naming her 1960’s best film actress. Let me say, too, Hara looks good enough to justify all the remarks in the film about how beautiful Akika still is. All the acting in the film is fine, although Shin Saburi warrants especial praise for his very funny role as Mamiya. Chishu Ryu, who gave one of cinema’s greatest performances as the father in Late Spring, appears briefly as Akika’s brother-in-law and Ayako’s uncle in Late Autumn.

Akika, Soichi, and so forth: these are middle-aged characters, not old ones; why late autumn in the title then? (Wouldn’t early autumn, or just autumn, be more apt?) Everything human in Ozu’s world is being gently pressed toward life’s end. In Late Spring the bride was, I believe, still in her twenties.

I always feel a tad older myself, and sadder and wiser, when I see a great Ozu film like Late Autumn. That’s the way, after all, life is.

* Atsula was the black-and-white cinematographer of some of Ozu’s greatest works: Late Spring, Early Summer (Bakushû, 1951), The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Ochazuke no aji, 1952) and Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953).

** Is it possible that Ozu had seen Hollywood’s Easter Parade (1948) and recalled the bartender’s remark on the subject of education? Charles Walters’ film, a huge hit, coincided with the postwar U.S. occupation of Japan.

*** We U.S. Americans have our own cinematic poet of evanescence: Jon Jost. See my piece on Oui non elsewhere on this site. Better still: See Oui non (2002).

JE T’AIME, JE T’AIME (Alain Resnais, 1968)

Written by Jean Sternberg (?), I Love You, I Love You is Alain Resnais’s most daring attempt to use images and editing to suggest thought processes. Claude, recuperated following a suicide attempt, is recruited by scientists who are researching time in order to verify their experiment with a mouse, which they believe they succeeded in transporting to a moment in its past before bringing it back to the present. But something goes awry with the human version of the experiment, and Claude is stuck in the past, not only recapturing a lost moment of time, but also reliving seemingly random fragments of the past, many revolving around his conviction that he has murdered a woman, Catrine. Among the events that Claude relives is his attempted suicide.
     An astonishing essay on how the human mind organizes time elements thematically, achronologically, this science-fiction poem gives Claude a companion for his time-travel: his predecessor, the mouse—a perplexed image of himself, it turns out, straining for breaths in the cage, in this instance, the belljar of time that proves its eventual home.
     Wry dialogue includes the delightful possibility that the cat was created in God’s image, and that man was created to be the cat’s slave and caregiver. By extension, time’s relation to humanity is a cat-and-mouse game. A cab driver casually asks Claude, “Have you got time?” Really, time has us.
     Resnais’s film can seem a fiendishly desentimentalized version of Frank Capra’s lugubrious It’s a Wonderful Life (1946); but its ultimate effect recalls the powerful last shot of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958): Everyman, on a ledge, all but falling, fixed in helplessless, guilt, loss, regret.
     Moreover, this haunting film, especially given its themes of time, loss and memory, anticipates another great work of science fiction: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).

TITANIC (James Cameron, 1997)

Titanic, James Cameron’s profligate, hollow “epic,” scantily details the “unsinkable” luxury liner’s 1912 encounter with an iceberg on its maiden voyage, which cost the lives of more than 1500 passengers. Overtaxed by a barrage of cornball clichés, this slick film’s adolescent heart belongs to the doomed romance between bountiful, young-womanly Rose, from first-class, and girlish, breezy Jack, from steerage. These two, played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, are given an improbable point of contact through the agency of a dashingly foiled suicide attempt. In truth, the ship’s tightly regulated social architecture would have prohibited their ever meeting. But since they have met and have taken a fancy to one another, the two Americans homeward-bound from England must keep eluding Rose’s tyrannical fiancé (Billy Zane) and his thuggish manservant (David Warner). The whole thing couldn’t be sillier.

I wish silly were the worst thing that the film is. Regrettably, it is also politically reactionary. This may be inadvertent. Cameron dutifully dotes on every nuance of class division and upper-class insensitivity. But because he applies this social portraiture only to 102-year-old Rose’s flashback to her time on the Titanic, and provides no update in the 1996 framing narrative, Cameron consigns the problem, still virulently alive in America, to a distant past. Despite his attention to the minutiæ of decor and panting puppy romance, then, Cameron scarcely grasps the political implications of his own material.

This hack of two Terminators (1984, 1991), a Rambo (1985) and a frigid True Lies (1994), Cameron, like Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg, has convinced himself he is on the side of the angels. Titanic, his magnum opus, shows humanity, he believes, at its most deleteriously presumptuous and arrogant; he has stated that the ship’s sinking was caused by “human greed, trying to be the biggest and the best.” (To keep the upper deck uncluttered, the film notes, the ship carried half the number of needed lifeboats.) But how can this message be honestly delivered by a production so inflated that its cost overruns led to an eventual price-tag of $200 million? With unintended irony, this indulgent film embodies what its message takes aim at.

Yet, for all the mammoth expense, the film is curiously unconvincing to the eye—like Spielberg’s computer-generated bodiless dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993). For instance, Cameron’s cracking-and-sinking ship is depressingly fake, a blatant miniature (especially absent past conventions) contesting any but the most servile audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief.

Titanic carries no conviction among its cargo and too many computer-generated “persons” among its “passengers.” (Only the blindest eye would be fooled.) The film shows “size” but no breadth; it brandishes a (computer-generated) pseudomystical ocean, but no depth. The net result is (literally) inhuman. Titanic is the 2001 of water in lieu of space, as flat as cardboard and tritely melodramatic.

Except for DiCaprio, who is dreadful beyond measure, the acting isn’t a problem. Indeed, Bill Paxton is good as the earringed present-day adventurer marshaling high technology to salvage riches from the long-sunk ship. And Kate Winslet is magnificent as young, progressive Rose.

The older version of Rose is played by Gloria Stuart, who helped found the Screen Actors Guild in the 1930s.

MILDRED PIERCE (Michael Curtiz, 1945)

Ranald MacDougall and Catherine Turney’s script for Mildred Pierce adds up to a thematic equivalent of James M. Cain’s novel despite a number of drastic changes, most of them dictated by Hollywood’s moral code. In the novel there is no murder, but the murder of one of the lead characters structures the film’s narrative. (A good many other differences proceed from the film’s addition of the murder.) In the novel, the ungrateful daughter is an opera singer; in the film, her lowbrow singing elicits men’s whistles in a seaside dive. These two shifts to seaminess and unwholesomeness are meant to compensate for the novel’s central relationship between mother and daughter, the convoluted (including incestuous) implications of which the film dared not touch. It was enough that the film, following the book, had the daughter have a love affair with her stepfather. Ultimately, the film no less than the novel—and this is why Cain approved of it—casts a persistent and grim eye on the American family, the distorted human relationships it engenders and their social consequences. It is inconceivable that Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s script for The Lost Weekend should have won an Oscar over MacDougall and Turney’s much defter job, especially if one recalls that, again to appease the Hollywood code, the film of Charles Jackson’s novel deleted the motivation of the lead character’s drunkenness, which is homosexual guilt, replacing it ludicrously with a symptom rather than a cause of the man’s problem, namely, writer’s block. (Actually, Turney had no chance at an Oscar for Mildred Pierce anyhow since her contribution to the script—one assumes, the female perspective—went uncredited, hence, unnominated!)

The film, then, has its own tale to tell. Shot repeatedly, Monty Beragon dies with the name Mildred on his lips in his California beach house. Mildred Pierce Beragon, a businesswoman who has lost a restaurant chain due to personal debts, sets up someone else for her husband’s murder: Wally, the spurned longtime admirer who has taken over her business. He is arrested; she, questioned. She recalls the end of her first marriage, the death of a daughter, and the troubles of another daughter on whom she dotes and to satisfy whose taste for the high life she married the shiftless playboy Beragon, with whom this daughter, Veda, had an affair. It is to maintain the pretentious lives of these two ingrates, we learn, that Mildred went into debt. Now the man is dead; who committed this murder? With suspicion directed towards her first husband, Mildred confesses. However, the investigation has some twisted dark miles to go.

One of the most popular American movies of the 1940s, Mildred Pierce focuses on virtue pursued to a fault. Pierce is a woman whose maternal devotion is unreasonable, assuming the form of a martyr complex, and leading to both the destruction of her surviving daughter—it is suggested that her younger daughter’s death from pneumonia is the result of her neglect, her obsession with the older child—and her second husband’s death. Veda is her all-consuming passion and thus the rationale for every wrong thing she does. Theirs is a mirror-image relationship, largely forged by Veda’s shame at her mother’s humble, uncertain origins. A hybrid of two genres, the “woman’s picture” and film noir, the film proceeds along two parallel lines, clearly distinguishing between the “good” self-sacrificing parent and her “bad” selfish daughter while at the same time challenging this distinction by identifying each with the other in the murder that their middle-class striving and lack of moral clarity bring about. Above all, Mildred Pierce is an assault on American class-ism and class-mania.

The filmmaker is Hungarian emigré Michael Curtiz. He compellingly evokes a world of muddle and shadow, the underside of American virtue and family life that had drawn Alfred Hitchcock’s more profound attention in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Curtiz is without satirical inclination. Despite a kind of phosphorescent vicious humor, therefore, the film is glum and unrelenting—like the train symbolizing Mildred’s one-track restless yearning (one of the film’s finest aural/visual touches). The startling intimacy of Curtiz’s Four Daughters (1938), the emotional catharsis of his most famous film, Casablanca (1942): these qualities are not present here. Rather, Mildred Pierce is noteworthy for its absorbing and psychologically sound mystery, contemplative distancing, and deeply engaging insight into the hidden connection between upward mobility and the destruction of the American family. Its relevance, alas, continues unabated.

Stylistically and intellectually, the film resembles a scaled-down Citizen Kane (1941) as Pierce journeys out of a melancholy fog to survey the wreckage of all the “best” American dreams for which she reached and overreached. Moreover, it is a nearly perfect example of Hollywood craftsmanship, with cunning, sensitive editing by David Weisbart, Ernest Haller’s gorgeous, moody black-and-white cinematography recalling French poetic realism, dreamlike semi-abstract designs by art director Anton Grot, and one of Max Steiner’s most memorable scores. Finally, Mildred Pierce is very well acted. If one argues that Joan Crawford adds an irrelevant prepossessing note of glamor to the film, the touching complexity with which she invests the title role overturns the argument. Moreover, her Oscar-winning work is, if anything, surpassed by that of Bruce Bennett as Mildred’s decent first husband and Zachary Scott as Mildred’s second husband, a lazy, nasty, self-indulgent oily snake of a man. Jack Carson, Ann Blyth, Eve Arden, and Lee Patrick are also at their best in other important roles.

One sour note: Mildred’s condescension to Butterfly McQueen’s character, the “colored help,” is excrutiating to listen to and watch. The servant’s aura of “humorous” absent-mindedness and her occasional need for social correction should have been rethought and replaced. Whatever else this material may be, it is most certainly gratuitous and even harder to rationalize, therefore, than the film’s ignorance of basic police procedure.

MONDAYS IN THE SUN (Fernando León de Aranoa, 2002)

Fernando León de Aranoa’s fourth film, Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun), is a mellow, warm, wry, deeply humane comedy-of-character and comedy-of-life, about a group of long unemployed former workers at a coastal shipyard in Vigo, in northwest Spain. It’s a fairly (though certainly not dauntingly) complex film, patient in the extreme and, for the most part, beautifully realized as it portrays the daily toll exacted on these men by their emasculating joblessness and financial predicament. All their days might be Mondays, the beginning of the work week, because each day is like the others, and every day reminds them afresh of their joblessness. In Aranoa’s film, time seems to stand still—or barely, repetitiously move ahead.

I so admire, indeed love, this wonderful film that I wish to post my most serious objections to it at the outset, to be able to set them aside. We know from the sequence that accompanies the opening credits the immediate cause why workers lost their jobs two years earlier: we are shown a violent street confrontation between protesters and police, from which we reasonably infer that the workers were locked out and cut loose. We later learn that some of the older workers, fearful of losing their own jobs, conspired with management one year earlier to effect the severance of younger workers, thus abandoning the worker solidarity that alone might have shored up their political strength. We also learn that it’s unclear just why the shipyard has altogether closed. One possible cause is global capitalism; other labor forces in other countries may have submitted bids too low to enable the Vigo shipyard to compete any longer. Another possibility, rather blithely tossed out, is of a local nature; perhaps the shipyard was bought out by developers keen on transforming the seaside property into high rises and parking lots. All this infuriates; I cannot believe that in all this time none of the 200 cut-loose workers were curious and investigatively savvy enough to determine just what broader machinations behind and beyond the immediate cause separated them from their livelihoods. (I admit: I worry that I’m chauvinstically projecting onto Europeans an American mania for initiative—“rugged individualism”—that shortchanges the broader, and more accurate, perception of what insurmountable forces are arrayed against ordinary people. But 200 people! I can’t accept that, driven by a radical impulse, not one ferreted out the cause of the shipyard’s demise.) It makes all of them, including the handful the film follows, seem unnecessarily passive and threatens to introduce notes of self-pity into their predicament that much else in the film might otherwise succeed in keeping at bay. I have other problems with the film that I’m also about to note, but this is the one that most challenges my placing Mondays in the Sun in the top rank of films. It’s a flaw in the film’s foundation—and it helps make the film politically murky at best, politically indecisive at worst.

Indeed, although the film lights on many pertinent points (for instance, the fact that jobless workers, beyond severance pay, are provided with no safety net to defend them against financial devastation), there’s a curious haziness to the film’s political disposition. It’s Leftist, to be sure, but guardedly Leftist, carefully Leftist. One character, Sergei, a Russian emigré, formerly (he claims) a Soviet cosmonaut, quips that, while everything about the former Soviet Union was a lie, regrettably everything that was said about capitalism is true. That’s clever, but maybe a bit too clever a formulation; its even-handedness grates. Moreover, despite the opening flashback of protest, and the later remark by one of the characters that the workers should have stuck together, I’m made uneasy by the film’s invocation of what might have been a more fully developed theme. The idea of worker solidarity seems to crop up in this film as a matter of convenience; it seems closer to lip service—a point thrown into a litany of points—than to a full and resounding aria, a rock-bottom and all-informing conviction. As a political film, it seems to me, Mondays in the Sun is unfocused at best, hollow at worst.

Another inconsistency, hugely distracting, provides further evidence that Aranoa may have failed to think through a number of aspects. Much of the film’s action, which consists of the men sitting around and talking, drinking, and blowing off steam, unfolds in a bar that one of the laborers, Rico, established with his severance pay. He and his 15-year-old daughter, Nata, are richly indulgent of the others. The bar, we are told, is a successful operation. However, Rico’s former fellow workers only inconsistently pay; some can’t pay at all and get served drinks anyhow. None of this would especially matter were it not for the fact that we never once, at least as far as I can recall, see anyone else patronizing the tiny establishment. (There’s a vast bar scene in the film, but surely that’s occurring somewhere else.) I love the Eugene O’Neill-ishness of the bar scenes at The Shipyard (that’s what Rico has named it, but for some reason Aranoa coyly delays our finding this out), but how the place is solvent is a mystery. Where is Rico’s living coming from? I suppose it’s possible to conclude that Rico is fibbing when he notes the success of his business, that he is keeping the bar open only as a therapeutic refuge for downtrodden former workers, and this provides an index of his guilt for having subverted his identification with other workers when he, along with many others, conspired with management against a segment of co-workers. However, I cannot accept that he would jeopardize his daughter’s economic well-being for the sake of easing former co-workers’ psychic condition; thus the one reconciliation of the matter I can intellectually make wars with one of my convictions about human nature. Now here is a problem that would have been easy to solve, by hiring extras to play other, unscripted customers at the bar. Aranoa, it appears, is less concerned with what is most reasonable than with what creates dramatic intensity and intimacy—for, doubtless, these qualities are sharpened by the elimination from the bar of all customers except the ones we see and, outside the bar, follow. Even in Spain, this shows, I’m afraid, a Hollywood frame of mind.

Yet, despite all these complaints (and others, including a botched last act), I’m not budging from this film’s corner. Here is one of the most emotionally satisfying human(e) comedies in recent memory. Almost all the characters are likeable. It is good to have gained admittance into the lives of all but one, an older worker who, abandoned by his wife and behind in paying bills (his water has been turned off), either drunkenly falls to his death or commits suicide—an ambiguity that makes real-life sense to me, although it repeats the film’s annoying tendency to suggest this possibility and that.

The most militant of the group is Santa, who has been reduced to shattering street lamps to protest the unfairness of the unemployment in which he and the others find themselves. What a marvelous implicit definition we find here: ineffective protest—protest, where the authorities themselves don’t know what you’re protesting or, even, that you are protesting anything. Rueful, insightful, witty: these are the qualities, as here, that elevate this film, and they are, among the group, most completely embodied by Santa, whose periodic outbursts of temper punctuate an otherwise temperate personality. Santa helps unify the film by being our observant and patient guide through it. Javier Bardem, fattened up and given a receding hairline and an additional ten years or so, is utterly convincing here. (I wasn’t the least bit moved or impressed, however, by his portrayal of Cuban poet Reynaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s dreadful Before Night Falls, 2000). Bardem won the Goya Award and was similarly named best actor by Spain’s circle of film critics.

Another member of the group, perhaps the angriest, is José. He has quite given up on everything; he isn’t even looking for work. José is the one of the men most visibly in the grip of despair, especially since Ana, his wife, working on her feet on the night shift at a fish processing plant, is the breadwinner now. (At home, Ana fulsomely sprays herself with perfume to mask the fish stench that sickens her; feeling unsexed, she is indisposed to José’s touching but somewhat misguided attempts to reassure her that he still finds her attractive.) But more: he is heartsick that her legs and feet are in such pain from her labor and that even her beauty, such a source of his pride, as a result is fading. José and Ana plainly love one another very deeply, but profound sadness, even beyond the measure of the current crisis, seems to afflict them. Could it be that the problems that the couple are now enduring in fact compound the childlessness of theirs that has already seemed some sort of judgment against them? Luis Tosar, excellent as José, won the Goya Award as best supporting actor; the Spanish critics likewise honored him. However, Nieve de Medina’s performance as Ana may be the most heartrending one in the film; it provides the film’s most telling index of the way that getting fired and subsequent unemployment affect not only the laborers but also their families and loved ones. Ana’s exquisite tact as she desperately tries to hold her marriage together, while at the same time doing her best to hide the effort so that it doesn’t add to her husband’s already burgeoning burden, is astonishing. De Medina, who recalls both Anna Magnani and Anouk Aimée, won both the critics’ accolade as best supporting actress and the Goya as best new actress. (This is, in fact, her sixth film role.) Guided by Aranda, she has made Ana one of my favorite film characters ever.

Yet another one of the men is Lino, who, unlike José, is dogged in his pursuit of another job, applying here, there and everywhere. He and his wife, unlike José and Ana, have a son—a convenient son. Let me explain. So desperate is Lino for any sort of job that he applies for jobs claiming for himself experience that he does not have and jobs that are aimed at a much younger work force. (Lino, in fact, is older than his confederates at the Shipyard bar.) Lino—this film is so marvelous at sympathetically locating and showing us human rationalization!—says he is computer-savvy when he isn’t, but in the meantime he works hard, tutored by his teenaged son, to learn about computers. Moreover, he invades his son’s wardrobe to find clothes that might shave his years, putting him, hopefully, into fighting form for the jobs that are available. In addition, he blackens his hair—only to find the dye running, à la Death in Venice, just before he enters a job interview. Right before another interview, Lino catches his reflection in a mirror and, more realistically, sees just how “not young” he is. When his name is called, he doesn’t respond and leaves. José Ángel Egido, who plays Lino (I would describe Egido as the Spanish John Cazales), shared with Tosar the best supporting actor accolade of the nation’s film critics.

For those who care (we all know that current U.S. filmgoers prefer violent action to penetrating characterization), Mondays in the Sun is as good as character comedy gets. The problems I have with the film, most of which I have noted here, derive from the script, which was written by the director and Ignacio del Moral. Although they may have shortchanged the through-thinking they ought to have mustered, the two men have composed delicious and moving dialogue. Their original script was honored with both the industry’s Goya and the critics’ accolade. However, there is more to a script than dialogue. A script is not only literature; it’s a blueprint for the film.

But I have no reservations regarding the best film and best director prizes that this film has gathered up. Indeed, Mondays in the Sun won the best film prizes from both the industry and the critics in Spain. It won in the same category at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, where is also won the FIPRESI Award, “[f]or its poetic and precise look at people living on the periphery.” Aranoa was named best director by the critics and at San Sebastián.

There are two other major contributors to the film’s beauty. One is the scorer, Lucio Godoy, whose pensive, elegiac music suggests Nino Rota’s. The other is, for me, the film’s unsung hero, Alfred F. Mayo, whose dusky color cinematography does so much to convey the film’s melancholy while not overwhelming the lives of the characters—the humanity—to which this melancholy is attached. I named Mayo best cinematographer of 1990 for Montxo Armendáriz’s tremendous Letters from Alou (1990), and his work is again marvelous in Mondays in the Sun: two totally different palettes, equally expressive. Perhaps it would have been preferable had the film been shot in black and white, which is infinitely more complex, flexible and expressive than color. In color, though, Mayo certainly has helped young Aranoa to achieve all that he miraculously did.