“It can’t be true,” Ángel, a professor and playwright, mutters as his eyes catch a photograph of his wife and daughters, all of whom have just died. Neighbor Terese, a schoolteacher young enough to be his daughter, thwarts Ángel’s suicide attempt and invites him to dinner with herself, her lover, Alberto, and their young daughter. Alberto extends their communal connection by having Ángel write a play, The Melancholic Gentleman it turns out, for Alberto’s stilt-walking street theatrical troupe. Meanwhile, Ángel falls for Terese and obsessively pursues her, even succeeding in getting her into bed. Discord threatens to undo Ángel’s second chance at life.
Written by the director, Carlos Saura, and his superlative star, Fernando Fernán Gómez, from Saura’s story, Los zancos is haunted by Ángel’s recent losses. At one point Ángel must splash his face with water because his vision of his wife at her vanity table is so achingly vivid. Alberto remarks at dinner that he wants to make a film and hopes to search out what lies between sound and gesture. Saura has made that film. This is it.
Saura keeps our gaze on a wrenched life. Ángel cannot imagine his infatuation with anyone as young as Terese; but he could not have imagined, either, the blows that life has recently dealt him. For a spell he is denied the one resolution that makes sense to him: suicide, which Terese regards as an “inconsiderate” act. But how can one go on as if nothing has happened? We watch Ángel hopelessly try to do this by correcting student exams. We fully appreciate this ridiculous effort of his. His attachment to Terese is equally ridiculous, but Terese has encouraged this result. By aborting Ángel’s suicide attempt, she has inadvertently made herself his alternative to death.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
GRASS LABYRINTH (Shuji Terayama, 1979, 1983)
September 18, 2008Originally part of a producer’s package consisting of three short films by different filmmakers, Shuji Terayama’s Kusa-meikyu is a slight, teasing thing that has some affinity to Strindberg’s expressionistic plays, such as “The Ghost Sonata” and A Dream Play, and Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947), with its dreamlike, shifting appearances of the woman Rita Hayworth plays. Akira, in his late teens or early twenties, is haunted by a tune that his mother may have sung to him as a child, or he may be imagining she used to sing to him before or after his birth, and he searches out the lyrics, which, lost to him, have turned the unshakable melody into a kind of torment. “Why not ask your mother?” someone suggests. The boy’s reply: “I have no mother.” Perhaps he never did.
Erotic, surreal, lovely, horrific, the rural territory through which Akira moves, marking his inquiry, may be a child’s dreamscape down some dark rabbit hole; a ball—bouncing here, floating there, transformed elsewhere into a stone that barren women touch and thereupon instantly become pregnant—punctuates his consciousness. He walks in and out of the past, but not necessarily his own past, but his mother’s, or somebody else’s, or nobody’s because he is only imagining it. Here is one of those films where nothing that we see is certain; anything may be a dream-image, mirage, chimera. But we never doubt what we hear: the lullaby—the boy’s ache for communion with the lyrics of that song and the mother somehow attached to them.
At last he encounters someone who is familiar with the melody, but she also has forgotten the words. This whore in a whorehouse counsels Akira to forget about the song right before she jumps his bones.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
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