DOGORA (Ishirô Honda, 1964)

Jellyfish are not my cup of tea, and if there’s anything worse in the world than slimy jellyfish it is slimy giant space monster jellyfish. But it’s our own fault; that is to say, the radiation that resulted from the A-bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generated disgusting mutations of what were already disgusting jellyfish, and now not even diamonds are safe! The beasts, it seems, crave any kind of carbon, including diamonds and ordinary coal. This is very discouraging for all diamond owners, who cannot maintain their grip on their precious jewels. Can’t we just give the jellyfish our old carbon paper? Might not that kill two birds—or at least two creepy jellyfish—with one stone?
     Written by Shinichi Sekizawa from a story by Jojiro Okami, Uchu daikaijû Dogora is another kaijû from the artist who launched the “big monster” genre, Ishirô Honda. Once again, the center of dismay is Tokyo, where various authorities, including local police, investigate a ring of jewel thieves for missing diamonds. Honda’s marriage of science fiction and crime melodrama is somewhat clunky, but jocular humor—which the English dubbing in the version I saw may have broadened—is thrown in as well in an attempt to smooth the mix. It more or less works.
     It is amazing, given all the slapstick, how heartstoppingly frightening one of the jellyfish is when it ghostily appears in the sky, its tentacles dripping down and demolishing a bridge. Indeed, the infusion of horror gives Dogora an awesome grandeur, as do the long-shots of coal being sucked up into the invisible mouths of these shimmering monsters.
     Not all the conventional stuff on the ground is as sharp, but in the air Dogora becomes magical, its jaw-dropping special effects a delight.

THE VANQUISHED (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)

Accompanied by the front pages of newspapers, voiceover sets the theme of Michelangelo Antonioni’s uneven I vinti: a lost generation that grew up during the war, for whom “the one law is lawlessness.” The film, then, is about postwar collateral damage.
     These aren’t Buñuel’s “forgotten ones”; they are working-class or bourgeois, not direly impoverished, but driven to escape what they perceive to be one form or another of social imprisonment. In each of the three segments (France, Italy, England), someone commits murder and himself dies or will be executed by the state. Each killer is older than his predecessor, and each episode, I’m afraid, is progressively weaker; but the first, at least, is splendid. On a day’s holiday in the country, amidst one of cinema’s loveliest renderings of adolescent ache, one envious working-class schoolboy, as planned, shoots a bourgeois classmate dead, robbing him. The money, which wasn’t the point in any case, turns out to be fake. The college student in the second episode stays out all night; while his father thinks his son is painting the town with a girl, the boy is really engaged in a smuggling operation. Even less interesting, except as it vaguely anticipates Antonioni’s later Blowup (1966), is the concluding episode, where a man collects money from a newspaper for reporting the discovery of a woman’s body in a park. It turns out that his wasn’t a chance discovery; he murdered the woman precisely to collect the money. There’s a message there somewhere; this is strictly Alfred Hitchcock Presents-level irony, with smug TV-level comic relief around the edges.
     It is understandable that this schematic film is always regarded among Antonioni’s poorer efforts. Taken alone, though, the French episode—actually, all three episodes are in Italian—is a small naturalistic gem.

A SNAKE OF JUNE (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002)

Tokyo’s wet season finds incessant rain falling from heaven and, through drains, down into hell. Rinko, a suicide phone counselor, is being blackmailed by a client, who has somehow managed to take photographs of her in atypical erotic solitude. These arrive in the mail. “You made me want to live,” Iguchi tells Rinko; we hear his disembodied cell-phoned voice throughout Rokugatsu no hebi. Rinko’s marriage to businessman Shigehiko is cordial, even affectionate, but hardly burning up the bedroom; Shigehiko works late and is anally compulsively given to scrubbing sink and tub. Meanwhile, blackmailer Iguchi (played by producer-writer-director-cinematographer-editor-production designer Shinya Tsukamoto) sends Rinko on a humiliating excursion to secure the negatives. (A vibrator and a cucumber are involved.) “I’m not asking for sex,” Iguchi explains to Rinko. “I’m telling you to do what you want to do.” A closeup of a vulnerable snail emerging from its shell represents Rinko.
     Iguchi, who is dying of cancer, realizes from one of the photos that Rinko also might have cancer; but Shigehiko’s ambivalence about her having a mastectomy, even if it means saving her life, causes Rinko to tell Shigehiko that the doctor canceled the operation as unnecessary. Now Iguchi takes aim at Shigehiko, including with the strangling coils of his hydraulic penis. The increasingly surreal imagery underscores how hard it is nowadays to separate fantasy from reality.
     Influenced by Tsai Ming-liang’s Ai qing wan sui (Viva l’amour, 1994) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Tsukamoto’s brilliant black-and-white film suggests that life and its technology have shattered our integrity by invading our privacy and readying us for further invasions. The final searing movement shows how little husband and wife know what the other wants and what they themselves desire: marriage as another casualty of the modern age.