PASSING FANCY (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933)

In the opening scene of Yasujiro Ozu’s first silent about the working poor, Dekigokoro, the camera moves backward across rows of people seated on the floor. The pervasive use of hand fans conveys oppressive airlessness and heat, thus fragmenting with shared discomfort a unifying shot. Someone’s wallet, accidentally misplaced, makes its way through the audience, one shot showing someone’s hand picking up the thing, followed by a shot of the person as he guiltily peruses the contents before tossing the wallet away, whereupon someone else’s hand reaches for it. One man disrupts the continuity of this repetitive event: the film’s protagonist, brewery worker Kihachi, who picks up, checks and tosses away the wallet, like everyone else, but then reconsiders, picks the wallet back up, empties the wallet’s meager contents into his own, smaller purse, and tosses the other, so it makes its way back to the owner in this reduced state, before which we see again the hand-pickup routine until a foot rather than a hand enters the frame, a visual “difference” recalling Kihachi’s. Suddenly it isn’t a wallet that’s passing from person to person but unseen mosquitoes or fleas. In a single shot audience members stand up and start scratching—visually, a scene of harmony (within a single static shot, people behaving identically) undone by the fragmenting nature of perople’s identical discomfort. We never find out what has occurred: wide insect attack or an outburst of contagious behavior. Either way, it’s hilarious.
     Two harmonious relationships of single father Kihachi’s are tested by the appearance of a woman in the poor Tokyo suburb: with his young son, Tomio, and with co-worker Jiro. All works out affectionately for the best, with a touch of life’s inevitable rue and disappointment, in the context of family and community.

THE SCARLET LETTER (Wim Wenders, 1973)

As I explain in my essay “Allegory Versus Allegory in Hawthorne” (American Transcendental Quarterly, fall 1976), Nathaniel Hawthorne employs allegory ironically, as a means of contesting reductive U.S. allegorical thinking, one result of the puritanical/biblical confusion of life and art. Wim Wenders’ Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe takes no such tack, nor any other I can discern; it changes the story and gives no hint of a theme, nor does it suggest the novel’s dense, complex style. In the DVD commentary track, Wenders pleads he was only 25 years old at the time. Spank him!
     Wenders has made a mess of the material, beginning with the choice of color for this project. Moreover, nothing symbolically reverberates in this version, even ironically. There is no need for Wenders to poke the association with redemption that her name confers on Hester’s bastard child; here, Pearl fails to fulfill even the semblance of such a role in the scheme of her mother’s ostrasized life.
     Seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, isn’t unrealistic here because the film was shot in Spain, as Wenders seems to think. Rather, Wenders fails to evoke the period as well as the place. His Hester is ridiculously 1970s-ish; Senta Berger is incompetent in the role of the woman who has been condemned to wear a scarlet “A” for her adultery. Yella Rottländer is adorable as Pearl, but she would be much more convincing in her next film, which is set in the present: Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1974).
     However, Lou Castel transcends his German dubbing to give a piercing performance as Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s former lover who, too weak to stand alongside Hester in public shame, has burned an “A” into his own flesh, unless God has done this.
     Misguidedly, a film more elemental than social.

ISLAND IN THE SUN (Robert Rossen, 1957)

Wobbling, Robert Rossen’s vaguely liberal adaptation of Alec Waugh’s popular novel is a mix of adultery, murder, miscegenation and local politics on a fictitious West Indies island, a former French, now British colony. It gets into all kinds of lives except those of any of the impoverished, teeming black lives of slave descendants. Two light-skinned blacks are among the major characters, one of them a union organizer and political aspirant. Lots of veddy British whites are veddy decent, you know.
     For such dubious material (including clichéd shots of natives at work in the cane fields), this is a moderately interesting and surprisingly entertaining film, richly launched by Harry Belafonte’s heavenly singing of the title tune. Belafonte also plays David Boyeur, the one attempting to lead the island’s blacks and pursue their interests. Far better and in fact vivid performances come from James Mason, Joan Fontaine and especially Diana Wynward. The film deftly zigzags amongst different characters and plotlines, although the whole thing eventually peters out.
     The most interesting aspect involves Maxwell Fleury’s certainty of his wife’s adultery, which leads to his killing the wrongly suspected rival. A verbal slip alerts the investigating officer of Fleury’s guilt, but now Colonel Whittingham has to manipulate Fleury to confess to overturn a lack of evidence. Fleury’s guiltiness, especially after discovering his victim’s innocence, has him resorting to cliché by smashing the bathroom mirror. Whittingham has not only played Porfiri to Fleury’s Raskolnikov but has talked about the book with him and given him a copy; but Fleury won’t read it because Raskolnikov wasn’t married, so what could be the parallel? Crime and Punishment proves irrelevant as Fleury confesses after traveling a private psychological road. Whittingham ends up looking perfectly foolish with his calculated, condescending literary approach.

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (Xu Jinglei, 2004)

Yi ge mo sheng nu ren de lai xin transposes Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella from turn-of-the-century Vienna to Beijing in the years of the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the years just after. Xu Jinglei, who took the filmmaking prize at San Sebastián, convincingly weaves in strands of Chinese history. The film ends in 1948, with the man receiving the deathbed letter from the former lover whom he always failed to recognize but who repeatedly re-entered his life. This is a nod to Max Ophüls’s celebrated Hollywood version,* but it also ends the action, as it must, prior to 1949 and Mao’s communist rule.
     Here again we “see” events as conjured by the unknown woman’s letter, which we hear as voiceover as the man reads the letter silently on a wintry night. Gradually he connects images, from her childhood on, of the one person who truly loved him—“slavishly,” as she puts it.
     This time, all the characters go unnamed, as though fragments of a single anonymous personality suspended in a dream. Xu is minutely, tenderly sympathetic to the protagonist as she runs the course of her life: child, university student, prostitute. Her love for the man sustains her through a series of tumultuous events unfolding in the unromantic world outside; but this sumptuously romantic film creates an air of memory, of deconstructing the present for a journey into one’s past, for both the writer of the letter and its recipient. Slow pans, unrushed pace, slow dissolves; the oblivious hedonistic man moves through his life with sadly open eyes for the first time.
     Giving short shrift to everyone but the main character, Xu’s film, at best, is an exquisite mood piece; but her final haunting shot proves she knows her Resnais.

* Please see my essay on Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, under “Hollywood Film Reviews,” elsewhere on this site.