EXTREME PRIVATE EROS: LOVE SONG 1974 (Kazuo Hara, 1974)

Documentarian Kazuo Hara and Miyuki Takeda, his child’s mother, broke up in 1972. Takeda moved from Tokyo to Okinawa, leaving Hara with unresolved feelings that he hoped making a film about her would resolve. With her permission, therefore, he stayed with her and her new lover, Sugako.
     Miyuki proves a fascinating subject. A feminist and her own person, she opposes the male bias of Japanese culture and society. Her iconoclasm shows a pioneer proceeding on her own, without the support of like-minded souls, much less an organized group.
     Okinawans are looked down upon by mainlanders; they’re among the “untouchables” of Japanese society. Miyuki exults: “I am pregnant. I’m having it. I’m having an Okinawan baby.” Miyuki exemplifies the very prejudice she opposes; in her stance we see both the premise of the prejudice and her opposition. Hara is thus able to present a countercultural figure—an unmarried, promiscuous bisexual Japanese woman—that nonetheless reveals the mainstream culture. Moreover, the father of the fetus is a black U.S. soldier—this, in a nation that is obsessed with notions of racial purity and ethnic superiority.
     Miyuki leaves Sugako, returning to Tokyo. Before settling in a woman’s commune, she delivers her own baby, with Hara, at her suggestion, filming it in its entirety, his 16mm camera pointed at her vagina. Blurred focus (for which he apologizes) provides an index of Hara’s anxiety and concern. Afterwards, on the phone with her mother, Miyuki notes that her son, at her side during the birth, did not cry. We know he did. Is Miyuki lying, misremembering? Perhaps, for her, the child’s cries were displaced to the daughter being born, testifying to the holistic nature of her, their mother’s, existence.
     Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974 warmly embraces all children.

THE CRIMSON RIVERS (Mathieu Kassovitz, 2000)

Grisly murder mystery in the French Alps that finds two separate investigations crossing one another for a more complicated solution than anyone could possibly guess. Thoroughly suspenseful, irresistible entertainment, with great visual flair; but, ultimately, a silly film that takes too long for the mystery to unravel. When it does, inbreeding at a university, switched babies in the maternity ward of university hospital, eugenics and Nazis are all involved—as well as a case of twins we didn’t know existed. The acting, for the most part, is bad, including that of the two leads, Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel; but very good, and a sight for sore eyes, is Dominique Sanda as a mad nun who has taken a “vow of shadows.” (I have no idea whether there is such a thing.)
     Be forewarned: the killer tortures his or her victims, mutilating them slowly while they are still alive; and the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, keeps showing us the result.
     This movie, from France, is slick, commercial and overproduced—and narrative: a reminder that cinema is no place for stories, which should be told and listened to, as befits their oral tradition. Moreover, once the dots are all connected, one still has a hard time figuring out what happened. Nick Charles wrapped things up a whole lot better.
     Les rivières pourpres is from the novel by Jean-Christophe Grangé, who co-authored the script with Kassovitz.

ROMANCE SENTIMENTALE (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1930)

Romance sentimentale, from France, is one of the most beautifully photographed films ever made—by Eduard Tissé. Essential viewing, it is nonetheless the one Sergei Eisenstein film I find dubious.
     Its theme is the relation of mortal awareness to the suspension of this consciousness wrought by art, whose impetus, ironically, can be an overwhelming feeling of loss, with its presentiment of the end. The principal action consists of a glamorous woman sitting at her piano in a luxuriant room, singing. An opening title card explains: “Autumn, sadness, dead love: such are the themes of this old Russian song.”
     The first thing we hear, against a darkened screen, though, is discordant sounds. Images appear in speed-motion: traveling shots through trees; crashing waves; falling trees. When the added speed is withdrawn, thin trees are bent by the wind. Storm subsides; trees appear reflected in rippling, then settled water. The woman, in stark silhouette, is introduced indoors; she is postured, pensive. The first of many inserts of a mantlepiece clock at work sets the woman in time; now fully visible, at her piano the woman starts singing, and we realize that what we have seen of Nature subsumes the sadness of the song. Outdoors again, the camera shows melancholy, fog-drenched Nature; bare branches in the background are phantoms, while thin ones in the foreground are black, echoing the woman’s initial silhouette. The film cuts back and forth between Nature and the woman at the piano before brandishing superimpositions of both and a montage of Rodin sculpture. Downpour; the sound of the song dissipates as image is lost to dark and fog. Then sunlight; dawn. Trees are in blossom, and the woman, still singing, for the first time is smiling.
     It could be spring. It could be death.

MENILMONTANT (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)

Estonian-born, Russian emigré Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant, from France, opens explosively. A grinning lunatic hacks to death a man and a woman with an ax, orphaning the couple’s two daughters, whom we watch playing outdoors with a cat, lamenting their loss at their parents’ graves, and walking together from the cemetery down a desolate path lined with a small number of bare trees. A dissolve shows the pair farther down the path all of a sudden; and, while it is likely he stopped filming in between the two points, Kirsanoff thus established the idea, the possibility, of a jump-cut. Mark Donskoi, moved and impressed, used Kirsanoff’s lyrical method of transposing a human figure farther along in a significant foot-journey to conclude his Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938). Indeed, shards of Ménilmontant’s expressiveness would make their way into many other famous films. Alas, the two main characters, unlike Gorky, would remain anonymous—except to us. At some level, one cannot help but think, their orphaned fate is correlative to Kirsanoff’s own separation from homeland, also instigated by violence, the 1917 revolution and the subsequent Soviet state.
     Kirsanoff follows the sisters from the country to Paris, which electrifies amidst speedy tracking shots and use of hand-held camera, correlative to the world of possibilities now seemingly before the girls. The world, though, shrinks; they begin and end working in a sweatshop. In between, a man comes between them, undercutting their one source of emotional support: each other. One becomes pregnant, while the other becomes a prostitute. Also, their parents’ killer re-enters the picture.
     As in Dickens, melodrama is a vehicle for social and psychological inquiry into the plight of the downtrodden. Kirsanoff’s dazzling technical versatility—different camera angles and distances, superimpositions, dissolves—never overwhelms the sad, delicately spiritual human story.