THE KOUMIKO MYSTERY (Chris Marker, 1965)

Chris Marker met twentysomething Koumiko Muraoka by chance at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Marker’s voiceover tells us (Marker never appears in Le mystère Koumiko), “She is not an example of anything.” She is irreducibly herself, hence mysterious. “Japan is all around her”—Japan, which can be categorized, its people statistically analyzed, but to little avail, for Koumiko exemplifies the mystery of everything, everyone, everywhere.
     Hiding behind his pseudonym, one mystery contemplates another. The gaze he casts upon Koumiko’s face recalls Alain Resnais’s upon the woman’s face in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). Koumiko is mysterious even to herself. Born in Manchuria, she was educated in a Franco-Japanese school. “I must be Japanese now,” she says, but she speaks in halting French and finds that Japanese men speak too quickly for comprehension. She confesses to being “not completely Japanese,” “all mixed up”; but somehow Marker suggests that each of us, if we aren’t complacent, has a similarly confused identity.
     Everything belongs to a complex web of associations that multiplies and deepens the meaning of every kaleidoscopic bit of reality. A boxing match sandwiched into a series of shots of buildings at night, for example, becomes mysterious, unfathomable. Everything means more than it appears to.
     Recounting how she stepped on a rabbit, accidentally killing it, Koumiko isn’t exactly guilty, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, but haunted nevertheless. The past, she says, is a “cold and cruel,” unforgiving, eternally “silent” mirror.
     We see neither Marker nor Koumiko as (supposedly) they drive forward in the rain. Marker asks, “What do you think of—?” and a series of images rather than words completes the question. Is it war? Violence? Progress? “It is a wave over the sea,” she answers, adding, “The wave advances bit by bit and finally reaches me.”

THE LAWLESS (Joseph Losey, 1950)

Sleepy Hollow is a shantytown of mostly Mexican field workers outside a small California town. At a “good fellowship dance,” a white boy picks a fight with Paul Rodriguez, and in the ensuing ruckus a police officer is assaulted. Another officer is killed in a police car crash. Although he is innocent of all wrongdoing, the town turns on Rodriguez, who is also wrongly accused of raping a white girl. The owner-editor of the Union paper defends Rodriguez, helps rescue him from a mob lynching and raises money for his legal defense. In retaliation, the rampaging town destroys his equipment and business. Does it matter? Won’t Rodriguez, whatever the evidence, be found guilty anyway?
     From a novel by Daniel Mainwaring, Joseph Losey, soon to be blacklisted out of the U.S., makes a rough though compelling social melodrama—indeed, one of the most important studio films of the decade. The aspect of the plot that follows editor Wilder’s journey from “not taking sides anymore” to committed activist is hokey, and his Hispanic girlfriend, a rival reporter, doesn’t help. But the rest is fascinating and occasionally brilliant, as in the manhunt for the escaped Rodriguez, where the sound of boots on rock and gravel is correlative to the fear-ridden disruption of the 19-year-old boy’s life. Losey admirably tackles media exploitation, as a reporter otherwise shown as sympathetic distorts the truth about the decent Rodriguez—or is she misperceiving him to justify her nailing the best possible “story”? An especially fine image: Paul’s mother, seated, holding up as best she can under a dignified hat.
     Whites do not come off well, as indeed they shouldn’t. This is the book on Wilder: “He sounds like he may be a good guy. You run into one once in a while.”