A HUMBLE LIFE (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

Aleksandr Sokurov is without doubt one of the half-dozen or so most brilliant and accomplished filmmakers working today—and, prolific, he gives us a great deal to applaud. I have long since accepted that this man’s politics are not close to my own. What difference does that make, given the wide variety of his concerns and mine? But there are times when Sokurov the Great strikes me as boorish, self-indulgent and, really, inhuman. How could the artist, the man with a soul who made Aleksandra (2007), have also made Smirennaya zhizn? Beats me.
     Sokurov’s camera—not cameras, and a betacam at that—cleaves to his subject, an elderly Japanese woman named Umeno Mathuyoshi, for ten years a widow, whose spare, solitary existence in the mountains attracts his documentary attention. Umeno ekes out a bare-bones livelihood by sewing funeral kimonos, which, like the dirt floors in her house, remind us of her closeness to the earth. Sokurov, who finds Umeno admirably humble and noble, leaves us no room to think otherwise; and it would be churlish of us to do so. But may I suggest that Sokurov’s detailed descriptions of Umeno’s everyday activities and rituals, punctuated by his unpleasant extreme closeups of her wrinkled hands and mouth and lips, are so grandiose that they rob this ordinary woman of the simplicity, humility and anonymity to which she is entitled? Sokurov can find nothing else to do but call attention to himself calling attention to Umeno Mathuyoshi.
     Sokurov so often transports me to another, more spiritual plane. This time, he had me screaming to get out.
     There is one good passage. Four monks won’t leave until Umeno gives them “charity” with which (we know) she cannot afford to part—but does, to rid herself of their company. How superficial of the monks, to assume that Umeno’s home certifies her comfortable existence.
     Against the accuracy of Sokurov’s irony here, however, are countless shots and sequences that are deplorable and even disgusting. In one, the camera surveys Umeno’s house while the voiceover insists that the place is metaphor for the person: “What a delicate, what a solid construction: the house is 130 years old. Walls and doors are glued over with paper, everything is breathing, in everything there is persistence, obstinacy and immutability.” Lordy!
     At the last Umeno, encouraged by Sokurov, reads her poetry—but not in closeup or thereabouts, but in long-shot that conjures visual rhetoric: a lonely soul in a vast, dark, forlorn room. This is a pity, for one haiku better than Sokurov captures the essence of its author:

Bending softly and gracefully,
To a streamlet murmur
Is the white lily.

EASTERN ELEGY (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1996)

Gorgeously photographed by Aleksei Fyodorov, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Vostochnaya elegiya—gray, muted green, eerily slightly out of focus—is a dream of death, perhaps the dream of a dream. Low constant wind suggests the echo of a sound which is vaguely recollected. Faint music; distant bursts of song. Sokurov is the dreamer, a gently inquisitive wanderer who finds himself in an old Japanese town on a remote island that is blanketed by layer and layer of swirling fog and mist. “All is a dream,” we hear the dreamer’s low voice say; “. . . nothing weighs on my heart.” Moonlight palely glimmers on water—a reflection; perhaps, rather, the reflection of a reflection. The dreamer’s hand lights on the sign of an old tobacco shop.
     “Am I in Paradise?” the voice, now sad, asks. Is the garden sculpture a Buddha? The dreamer’s voice is still accompanied by wind: “The houses are as if they have turned to stone. I do not hear my steps at all. In this fog, I am like a fish in water. But I feel a chill, as a human would. . . . There is a light in a window. For me, perhaps?” Enrobed in dark space, the face of an elderly woman dimly appears; she is seated, alone. Then elsewhere, the face of an elderly man, who also is seated alone, also dimly appears. The man reminisces. The voice of the dreamer asks, “Do you know how men change after death?” The reply: “They become more tender.” Dreamer: “Why is there such sadness in poetry?” Silence.
     Revisiting the old woman, the dreamer asks, “What is happiness?” Almost nothing in life, she says, made her happy.
     The dreamer’s voice: “It seems I am welcome here, and this island is enough for all my dreams. I will stay.”

THE 400 MILLION (Joris Ivens, John Ferno, 1938-39)

The 1937 Japanese invasion of Manchuria provides the background for Joris Ivens’s film, begun in 1938, documenting one of the few aspects of resistance where the Chinese, the “four hundred million” of the title, prevailed against their aggressors. Narrated by Fredric March, it was financed by March, Dudley Nichols, who had written the commentary that March read, Ernest Hemingway and Luise Rainer, among others. With bitter irony, it was released a month prior to the disastrous outcome, in April 1939, of the Spanish Civil War, which Ivens had optimistically documented in his previous The Spanish Earth (1937).
     Script refers to China’s 4,000-year-old civilization, the imperialistic Japanese war machine opposing this, and Japan’s alliance with “the Rome-Berlin axis.” For Americans, the aerial strike that immediately follows portends Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. But this is much worse; March runs through a list of bombed cities, citing statistics of Chinese fatalities for each before summarizing: “150,000 deaths, all civilians—not one soldier.” Underscoring this is an image of precarious survival: a woman in grief on the ground, holding her toddler; the camera pans to reveal the dead body of (we presume) her husband and the boy’s father. The film’s silence but for the voiceover and sounds of fire—specifically, the woman’s muteness—intensifies our sense of war as civilian nightmare. Bombers roar; people rush for cover; ghastly smoke and flames—destroyed homes; the quick insert of a horribly mutilated corpse; by another body, this time a man is in tears. Who was the dead man? His son? Grandson? Brother? More shots of mutilated bodies follow. And the living: “They leave the captured city . . . and move toward the interior of China.”
     The Great Stone Lions of China “look in the four directions of the wind.”

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HIP HIP HURRA[H]! (Kjell Grede, 1987)

Painters are a tortured lot—and when they are sculptors, too: hopeless! One of the loveliest, most lyrical films about painters and art, specifically, about Denmark’s Norwegian-born Søren Krøyer (Stellan Skarsgård, magnificent), a Scandinavian icon, Swedish writer-director Kjell Grede’s Hip Hip Hurra! focuses on the community of artists to which Krøyer belonged in the late nineteenth century. In 1882 Krøyer (also known as Peder Severin Krøyer and P S Krøyer) had fled to it—from the family mental illness fear of which dogged him. Grede shot the film on location in Skagen, on Denmark’s northern coast.
     The community has its dark side; the closeness of participants causes envy of Krøyer to bubble up now and then. “How does it feel to fly when we only walk?” Krøyer is asked. Christian Krogh: “I will not talk money with you, because you sell everything you paint.” I wish there were more “artists’ talk” in the film—such as: “Lately, spatial perception has become a mirror-image of society at large. Obscuration in painting is passé.”
     Visually, Grede’s film evokes Krøyer’s paintings, including the 1888 one that gives the film its title. Along the beach, Grede and Sten Holmberg (best cinematographer, Venice) get the colors right, but not the light; in Summer Evening at Skagen, the Artist’s Wife with a Dog on the Beach (1892), and again in Summer Evening by Skagen’s Beach (1899), the pale shimmer of light seems an interior as well as exterior light—a projection of the couple’s melancholy over time’s passing.
     Why does the painterly style work so well here, but not in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952)? Krøyer’s restraint allows the evocations of his work to relax into the film’s breathing fabric, while Toulouse-Lautrec’s much brasher, brilliantly theatrical style brings Huston’s gorgeous film to something of a halt each time Huston and cinematographer Oswald Morris evoke it. It is against this academic, selfconscious sluggishness that Huston’s vivid use of the can-can wages a frenzied assault.
     Grede doesn’t cheapen his material, or insult our intelligence, by “telling a story”; rather, he paints a portrait of the artists’ community and evokes a spirit of suspended time—a measure of Krøyer’s (and others’) mortal anxiety and self-dissatisfaction.
     Krøyer, battling mental illness, was in and out of hospital; at 58, he died of syphilis in 1809. We know his story. Whenever we watch the film, we bring it ourselves.

MESSIDOR (Alain Tanner, 1978)

Referencing the crime spree of two French teenaged girls, writer-director Alain Tanner’s dark, corrosive Messidor begins with an aerial tour whose gaze shifts upwards—to the soprano accompaniment of a Schubert song. Freedom; aspiration. Cut to Earth. Marie Corrençon, an 18-year-old Moudon shop clerk, looks out her window onto the street, the camera behind her; down below, everything is particular, distinct, while she is a blacked-out blob. Similarly, Jeanne Salève, a bespectacled 19-year-old college student, looks out her window in Geneva and sees hectic activity, hears urban noise. Marie lives with her separated mother, with whom she constantly quarrels, and her mother’s lover—“an asshole”; Jeanne lives with her boyfriend. Both bolt, meet while hitchhiking, get tossed out by a middle-aged ride who seems frustrated that girls (including his daughter) are college-educated. Visiting where Marie grew up, the girls camp out—“city girl” Jeanne for the first time—in a dark forest. Ride by ride, they tour Switzerland. Their money runs out; they scrounge, beg, steal a ride’s gun—initially, only to brandish, encounter much help, even after/because of becoming wanted fugitives.
     We watch the friendship forming, the distance between the girls narrowing; they kiss, caress. When the police stop them, Jeanne identifies them as sisters: Thalia and Clio Messidor. But Marie may be more in control of the relationship. When they spend a night in a motel, Jeanne cannot read in bed after Marie announces she can’t sleep with a light on. Tanner charts the pair’s progress from complementarity to symbiosis. Neither, we come to realize, would have committed to her downward spiral without the other. (The first violent act is with a rock, one girl protecting the other against rape.) By extension, violence assuages their alienation, desolation, loneliness.
     Jeanne: “We’re moving through empty space.”

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