THEY WHO STEP ON A TIGER’S TAIL (Akira Kurosawa, 1945)

Based on a kabuki play, Tora no ō o fumu otokotachi is one of Akira Kurosawa’s most beautiful works. Its theme: legend loses facts but preserves humanity.
     The action unfolds in the late twelfth century. Protected by samurai, General Yoshitsune is fleeing his brother, Yoritomo, through a forest. A barrier has been set up to obstruct their safe passage beyond the range of Yoritomo’s authority. Will those guarding it detect that Yoshitsune is among the group? The suspenseful story takes the form of an anecdote.
     The samurai are disguised as monks charged with building the “Eastern Temple”; Yoshitsune is disguised as a porter. A broadly comical anonymous character, the actual porter, has been invented by Kurosawa to serve as an Everyman whose circumstance is changed by the ambiguous adventure.
     At the barrier a battle of wits ensues as Benkei (Denjiro Okochi, powerful) tries to persuade Yoritomo’s commander, Togashi (Susumu Fujita, brilliant), they are who they purport to be. But Yoshitsune and his entourage anxiously feel like those who step on a tiger’s tail. Togashi nonetheless lets the group pass after Benkei beats the correctly suspected Yoshitsune. Could he ever do such a thing if the “porter” underneath the huge hat were in fact his master?
     Togashi may not be as convinced as he appears. He sends wine, making the group, especially Benkei, drunk. Later, the porter wakes up all alone and finds some of the group’s riches in his lap. Have they made their escape and left these tokens of gratitude? Or have Togashi’s men slaughtered Yoshitsune and cohorts, sparing the porter and rewarding him for having been the butt of the latter’s jokes?
     In long-shot the porter dances jubilantly, stumbles, gets up, dances out of frame into the future.

MY BROTHER’S WEDDING (Charles Burnett, 1983; 2007)

I haven’t seen the original version of Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding, but I have seen his new rich, irresistible “director’s cut” of it. This occasionally hilarious tragicomedy portrays life in South Central Los Angeles.
     Pierce works in his parents’ dry cleaners. His mother has persuaded him to be best man at his brother’s wedding. His best friend, Soldier, dies violently soon after his prison release. The funeral is the same day as the wedding; which should Pierce attend? Family pressure delays him, making him late for the funeral service. By his absence the wedding has also been ruined; an out-of-focus extreme closeup shows the rings in Pierce’s hand. The film freezes this image.
     Perhaps Soldier helped Pierce to feel competent, wholesome, possessed of some sort of future, not like his friend a victim of their depressed environment. That illusion has been blurred, perhaps erased.
     At a dinner shared by the two families that the marriage will merge, someone asks Pierce why he didn’t become a lawyer like his brother. Pierce responds that he likes to work with his hands. His tone is aggressive; he feels he is being looked down upon. The camera perspective “enlarges” his hands as he pushes them out to punctuate his point. This distortion of his image suggests three things: the outcast that his brother’s level of professional accomplishment makes him out to be; the aggression he flaunts to hide his vulnerability; his anger at the world’s failure to acknowledge his vulnerability—a non-negotiable irony, since Pierce exerts such effort to hide and suppress this vulnerability. Pierce reminds us of Œdipus, with the exchange of swollen hands for “swollen foot.”
     A key to navigating Burnett’s film is this: It shows each major character, including Pierce, from Pierce’s perspective.

STRANGER INSIDE (Cheryl Dunye, 2001)

Motherless children have a hard time/ When their mother is gone. . . . — traditional gospel spiritual

Cheryl Dunye, the African-American writer-director whose hilarious Watermelon Woman (1996) dazzles with its originality, is on more familiar turf with Stranger Inside—turf that her fine film utterly transforms. The protagonist is twenty-year-old Treasure, who succeeds in getting herself transferred to a maximum security prison where, she has been told, her mother is serving a life sentence. Treasure was separated from her mother at birth. After initially denying that Treasure could be her daughter, Brownie relents and embraces her, and the two form a bond that enrages another inmate, Brownie’s surrogate daughter. It turns out that Brownie, who is psychotic, powerful within the prison conclave, and violent, is not Treasure’s biological mother. Brownie killed Treasure’s real mother in a prison fight. After Brownie herself is killed in such an assault, Treasure announces her new identity to a new prison-mate: “Brownie.”
     Dunye, who wrote the script with Catherine Crouch, fleshes out this anecdote with a genuine feel for prison life. Her lesbianism provides another fresh and enriching perspective. We come to appreciate that Treasure’s whole life, most of which found her cast adrift in the foster family system and on the streets, has been sustained, vulnerably, by her hopes of being reunited with her incarcerated mother. The particularity of Treasure’s heartbreaking situation yields to a generalization: feelings of loss and abandonment among too many young African Americans.
     Stranger Inside plays off its ambiguous title, which refers to the mother who is not the mother, but also to Treasure’s private feelings of strangeness from the loss of biological family roots and connection. And something else: the perspective from those outside who dismiss the incarcerated as aliens, not themselves or their own, but “strangers.”