GOYOKIN (Hideo Gosha, 1969)

Tatsuya Nakadai is spare and intense as Magobei Wakizaka, a ronin—a masterless samurai—attempting to redeem his past and revive his soul by thwarting a repeat of the mass slaughter of villagers three years earlier to conceal the confiscation of mined gold and silver ordered by Rokugo Tatewaki, chief retainer of the Sanabai clan, the honor of which demanded that its coffers be filled, however temporarily. Having carried out the order back then, Magobei exiled himself so as not to expose what he considers Tatewaki’s villainy; Tatewaki was his childhood friend and is the brother of Magobei’s wife, Shino. Now that he has gotten wind of his brother-in-law’s plan to commit another atrocity with the same motive behind it, Magobei returns from exile to do what he feels he ought to have done three years ago: confront and kill Rokugo Tatewaki.
     Alas, the plot is overly complicated, and the thunderous finishing action is exceedingly hard to follow. But much of the story of Hideo Gosha’s Treasure, silly as it is, engrosses, and the first Japanese film in Panavision provides Gosha with a wide canvas on which to create visual magic.
     Although all the symbolical stuff with cawing black crows is visual nonsense, Gosha’s employment of both deep focus and negative space is remarkable. Consider the interior scene following Shino and Magobei’s reunion outside; each is in a different corner of the screen, and the angle stresses the distance between them. Remaining seated, Shino, the camera now at her back, approaches Magobei. A cut shows them together in the lower right corner of the screen, with a vertical line on the farther-most wall in effect dividing the screen and emphasizing the couple’s closeness—the collapsed space between them. Gosha’s film is full of such visual coups.

CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (Eric Rohmer, 1972)

“Since I have been married, I find all women beautiful.”

What does that mean? It is part of lead character Frédéric’s voiceover narration in L’amour, l’après-midi, the last of writer-director Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” whose title refers to time taken off from work at his own law office to have an affair with Chloé. Frédéric (Bernard Verley, excellent) is married to Hélène, and the couple have a baby. Marriage, Frédéric feels, has “closed in on [him],” priming him for some sort of escape.
     Again, what does Frédéric’s remark at the heading here mean? Not that marital contentment has widened his sympathy for the opposite gender. Rather, having a woman of his own, with a wedding band to prove it, has allowed Frédéric to feel attracted to many more women besides, because he no longer has to put himself out in an attempt to attract and seduce them. Like the future Jimmy Carter, though, he lusts in his heart—now more widely than ever.
     In his recurrent dream, Frédéric wears around his neck a device (a displaced wedding band?) that divests women of their free will; it has already divested him of his. Hence Chloé.
     The cumulative effect of his voiceover, as though just watching him and listening to his dialogue weren’t enough, is to assign two signature traits to Frédéric, which he shares, one suspects, with nearly all (at least male) lawyers: complacency; self-absorption. Bursting through these attributes, although perhaps only beginning the spanking that Frédéric has coming, is Hélène’s breakdown. As Rohmer’s both delightful and painful comedy ends, Hélène is sobbing in her repentent spouse’s arms.
     Zouzou as Chloé was a bit of bliss; but Hélène is real—and a down payment on free will, marital happiness, God’s approval and eternity.

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HUNTER IN THE DARK (Hideo Gosha, 1979)

Eighteenth-century Japan, in which a prime political player is the tenth Tokugawa Shogun’s, Iyeharu’s, minister, Tanuma. These are the forces behind the scene. The protagonist here is Gomyo (Tatsuya Nakadai, terrific), a yakuza boss doing his best to survive while navigating a nocturnal world of loyalties which may be feigned and betrayals that are inevitable amidst all the ploys and plays for power. Except for the killings (which, after all, do sometimes reappear), Hideo Gosha’s Yami no karyudo, from Shotaro Ikenami’s novel, describes the world of the present. For us Americans, it is recognizably the world of Ronald Wilson Reagan’s luxuriant and sick reign.
     What is more violent than a yakuza film? Generally, I deplore violence in films; it is almost always gratuitous. Unlike war films, which benefit from not indulging in the violence of wars, yakuza films—well, what would a yakuza film be without violence? It is a dead-ended genre part of whose purpose is to suggest the limitations imposed on reality by our unquenchable thirst for violence. This remains especially salient for U.S. Americans, who may claim the only warmongering nation that exists—this, because we Americans have teased such violence out of all recognizable relation to our daily lives.
     The violence comes. A sword completely penetrates a man’s neck. An arm, including the hand still clutching a sword, defies gravity while remaining intact after the arm has been severed from its body. According to rule, we are told, someone who has betrayed Gomyo must suffer, as he does, death by a plethora of punitive stabs. The man begs to die, but the prescribed punishment continues.
     The outstanding aspect of this film is the dark, voluminously foggy color cinematography of Tadashi Sakai. It evokes the world as we know it.

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THE CLOCKMAKER (Bertrand Tavernier, 1973)

Dedicated to scenarist Jacques Prévert, and written by the director and the pre-nouvelle vague team of Aurenche and Bost, Bertrand Tavernier’s first feature, L’horloger de Saint-Paul, transplants a Georges Simenon novel from small-town America to Tavernier’s own Lyons. It is about a clockmaker’s stance of solidarity with his teenaged son, who has confessed to the crime for which he and his girlfriend stand trial: the murder of a factory owner, for being (as the boy describes him) “filth.” This verbose, conservatively made film suffers from one of those witty, civilized police inspectors that exist only in movies, but it comes to heartrending life in the last few minutes as Michel Descombes visits son Bernard in prison. Bernard has flawlessly anticipated when would be the best time for him and his father to come together emotionally. Sylvain Rougerie gives an endearing performance as Bernard Descombes.
     One passage I especially enjoyed involves Michel’s solitary visit to a church. A portentous rising camera movement suggests significant religious import that Tavernier beautifully undercuts. It turns out that Michel is simply checking out the church clock that he has repaired! Alas, this is one of the film’s rare instances of wit.
     Reviewers at the time couldn’t resist calling the film “precise” (get it? like a clock or a watch); but, really, the film is likeably sloppy. The same can be said for Philippe Noiret’s lead performance, especially when Michel is at such loose ends trying to fathom what his son has done and concluding he does not really know his son.
     Kids can be a lot of bother; but Bernard is worth any bother. The steepness of his sentence, though, distresses. It makes one think that justice is not possible in France—or, for that matter, in the United States.

HOUSE OF SAND (Andrucha Waddington, 2005)

Spanning sixty years in a woman’s life amidst the sands in Maranhão in coastal northern Brazil, Andrucha Waddington’s long, slow Casa de Areia achieves something of an emotional payoff at the end—but with a sentimental gesture made by an elderly woman towards her mother that in reality would have happened either much sooner or not at all. The saga begins in 1910, with the arrival from the city of Vasco de Sá, who has bought a piece of land in the middle of nowhere, his younger wife, Áurea, who is soon pregnant, and Maria, Áurea’s mother. Áurea for the longest time misses the urban life, but after the deaths of spouse and mother settles in with new partner Massu, the son of a former slave. Something always seems to intervene, thwarting Áurea’s various attempts to “get away.”
     Visually, shifting sands, which prove capable of killing people by burying them, distract a pliant viewer from the cornball soap opera that is unfolding. The tenor of the film is depressed, and Waddington is attracted to wide-angle shots of endless sand where one human figure, looming large in the foreground, moves toward a figure in the distant background for an embrace—mother and daughter here, life-partners there. Waddington thus tries hard to punctuate her arid film with sure-fire bursts of emotionalism; but the formalism of her visual method becomes a strain on the viewer’s nerves.
     With one exception the acting is rudimentary and mediocre. But what an exception! The great Fernanda Montenegro plays Áurea’s mother, the older Áurea, and the older Maria, Áurea’s daughter. Stressing the illusion, though, is the fact that Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, who plays the younger Áurea and the younger Maria, Áurea’s daughter, look nothing alike. Torres looks more like Jerry Seinfeld.