PATRIOTISM (Yukio Mishima, Domoto Masaki, 1966)

Japanese author Yukio Mishima directed but one film: based on his own short story, Yûkoku. It involves a couple, military officer Shinji Takeyama (played by Mishima) and his wife, Reiko, who prepare for and commit harakiri following a failed 1936 coup d’état—a real event—in which Takeyama participated, and for which he will be expected to execute his comrades. The black-and-white (except for music) silent film utilizes a Nōh stage and the couple, on the floor or in their bed, below a gigantic wall poster whose characters apparently translate as “Wholehearted Sincerity.” The short film predates by four years Mishima’s own ritual suicide, ostensibly provoked by his intense anxiety over Japan’s current social and political state—that is, yûkoku.
     As cinema, Mishima’s film, co-directed by Domoto Masaki, is arty nonsense, appalling drivel. Tenderness flows between the two characters, busting the floodgates of Japanese reserve, all in anticipation of the flood of blood and guts to follow. The closeups of hands on bodies; the tight closeups of faces; the selfconscious lyricism of their intimacy: all this soulfulness, especially as a windup for an obscenely bloody pitch, is sick, slick, depraved.
     Have I forgotten to mention Takeyama’s wearing his officer’s cap at the oddest times, eerily hiding his eyes? But the film is full of hiding. Kimitaké Hiraoka hiding behind his nom-de-plume and reinvented identity, Yukio Mishima. Mishima’s homosexuality closeted behind the show here of heterosexual passion. Mishima’s fierce feudal/reactionary conservatism: who knows to what extent this sought, consciously or otherwise, to divert eyes from his sexual orientation, which Japanese society deemed, at best, a weakness?
     Frankly, because of Mishima’s soon-after suicide, this film gave me a case of the willies. It is sentimental crap that provides little insight into Mishima’s own tormented psyche.

LOVE SONGS (Christophe Honoré, 2007)

“Love me less, but love me a long time.”

With apologies to Billy & Izzy, the best last line ever in a Hollywood comedy was penned by writer-director Preston Sturges for his glorious The Lady Eve (1941): “Positively the same dame!” Full of wise self-awareness, wit, tenderness and vulnerability, the last line of writer-director Christophe Honoré’s Les chansons d’amour, which you will find quoted above, is better yet. It is uttered by Ismaël, who loses girlfriend Julie, brutally, to cardiac arrest. (They are both twentysomethings.) For the previous month, the couple was part of a ménage à trois, along with Alice, Ismaël’s co-worker—this, Julie’s attempt to counteract her own jealousy. After Julie’s death, Ismaël uses casual sex to numb his sense of loss and maintains a warm connection with Julie’s parents and sister, Jeanne (Chiara Mastroianni, more beautiful than ever in the film’s best performance). Erwann, a gay schoolboy and the younger brother of Alice’s boyfriend, Gwendal, romantically pursues Ismaël and finally ropes him in, leading to that simultaneously sensible and aching closing line.
     Julie’s death is a despicable contrivance. Its nastiness isn’t at all helped or explained by the fact that Alex Baupain, the composer of the film’s many dull, dreary songs (which are well sung by the characters), was inspired by the unexpected death of a dear friend. Grotesque is grotesque.
     But there is also Paris in winter: as imagined by Honoré and lensed in rich, soft colors by Rémy Chevrin, the most beautiful place on Earth.
     Louis Garrel plays Ismaël, for the most part diffidently, or by snapping rudely at folk, but occasionally with impudent charm. He scores a Léaudian moment by flashing a smile while whistling; and another, by flinging himself out of bed in an instant.
     An uneven film.

THE PORCELAIN DOLL (Péter Gárdos, 2005)

Based on a trio of stories from Csillagmajor (Star Farm), Ervin Lázár’s collection of related novellas, A Porcelánbaba is a spotty Hungarian film—to my eye at least, it looks videographed—by writer-director Péter Gárdos. Actually, the first segment is powerful; but the second one is lame, and the last is even more diffuse. Each successive rural segment is set at a later point in twentieth-century Hungarian history.
     In the first tale, a shy, innocent teenaged boy, alone and at night, tests his skill at the pole vault, as other boys had done, competing with one another, during the day. The boy’s confidence grows as a result of his performance. When they swarm into the farming community, soldiers engage the boy in various athletic competitions, including pole-vaulting, and ending with a race. The boy has beaten the soldiers in each contest and is about to do the same in the race; however, the commander shoots the boy dead, with shot after shot, before he can reach the finish line. Some unaccountable grace had helped the boy, who symbolizes Hungary’s future (in which capacity, incidentally, he reappears in the final segment), to triumph over the invading soldiers; now this is matched by the loving, superstitious hands that wash and caress him, causing the bullet-wounds to disappear, and restoring him to life. This may be the most moving cinematic moment of resurrection since Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1954).
     The second segment gives the film its title. A Communist official also comes from “outside,” in his case to bring the good news to the farmers that now they own everything around them. But his State promise to resurrect their dead children the next day proves empty. Clichéd, borderline-moronic, Twilight Zone-ish.
     And the longish third part is worse.

AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO (Roberto Rossellini, 1971)

In the time of the Roman Empire’s waning, decadent, self-indulgent days, the Algerian-born Catholic convert Augustine was appointed Bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa. Seeing his own time, with its widespread poverty, greed and materialism, the Vietnam War, reflected in this fifth-century world, Roberto Rossellini turned his series of present-tense histories to the figure of Augustine, the splendid result being Agostino d’Ippona.
     Rossellini portrays Augustine, whom the Church will declare a Saint, as a roly-poly man, but also an austere one without Rabelaisian appetites. His former rambunctious, libertine nature, which we know about from the Confessions, has passed; when he notes, “[Y]outh is worshipping a cult of the senses,” he is applying analysis to the present while also measuring the extent of his own spiritual advancement.
     The conflict between Augustinians and the Donatists takes up much of the film. These punk-heretics constantly inflict violence on the meek, non-violent Augustinians. But then Rome falls, all Christians are deemed responsible, the Donatists themselves are targeted with violence, and Augustine takes them in, providing sanctuary.
     Augustine exhorts his gathered flock to war against materialism, poverty and social iniquity—and power: “All that regards power is like a river after the rain. It is born, it swells, and it is lost in the sea.” The destruction of Rome by the barbarians is a case in point; Rossellini’s Rome, Rossellini worries, may be another.
     To which city does each belong? “If you are a citizen of Babylon,” Augustine says, “tear the greed out of your heart.” Become instead a citizen of Jerusalem, the City of God. But what of Rossellini himself, whose humanism has set him against Babylon but kept him from embracing faith?
     Passionate, intensely personal, Rossellini’s film proceeds, like Augustine, with the analytic calm of reason.