MERRY CHRISTMAS[,] MR. LAWRENCE (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)

Nagisa Oshima, surpassed in Japanese cinema only by Yasujiro Ozu, tends to make movies that are exceptionally harsh and violent; even so, one is not prepared for the cruelty on display in Merry Christmas[,] Mr. Lawrence, Oshima’s adaptation of Afrikaner novelist Laurens Van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower, about cultural and other collisions between Japanese and captured British soldiers in a prison camp during World War II. Entirely fitting, given this, is that Maj. Jack Celliers—he shares initials with Stephen Crane’s Jim Conklin and the Apostles’ Jesus Christ—ends up capitally punished in a way that recalls Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1928). The film, almost entirely in English, won Oshima three prizes at the Mainichi Film Concours: best film, direction, screenplay.
     It is indeed sufficiently stringent to undo the impression left by Steven Spielberg’s moronic Empire of the Sun (1987), from J.G. Ballard’s 1984 autobiographical novel, that life in such a camp wasn’t a dastardly experience. On the other hand, Oshima succeeds in keeping the film from becoming sadistic, a catalog of horrors, like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which too easily rationalizes its own sadistic streak by taking strident aim at Nazi torture techniques. On the other other hand, Oshima’s film comes close, for instance, when a soldier suffocates, after biting his tongue, because forced to watch the execution of his gay lover. The former is Dutch, the latter, Korean; but this division is as irrelevant as whether either man is (outside the crucible of war and internment) homosexual. The point is this: whatever they are or aren’t, they are equally human in either case. Oshima would deal with the relationship between homosexuality and military environment with greater clarity and wit in Taboo (1999).
     Apart from the theme of betrayal and the fact that Jack’s (whipped) back also figures prominently, I don’t know what to make of haunted Jack’s memories of having betrayed his humpbacked younger brother in childhood. Did any such brother exist? Are both brothers the same character, interacting imaginatively across different (st)ages of life? If the latter is the case, then the other’s stopping singing provides an index of Jack’s torment from the inside out.
     This uneven film by Oshima is certainly not one of his masterpieces. But it is bold, fascinating, hard to let go.

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SHIRIN (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008)

Powerful, mesmerizing, intermittently electrifying, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin shows us, another audience, an audience watching another film, one that we only hear—like a radio drama, with dialogue, human and animal sounds, sound effects, music—from start to finish. We see more than a hundred audience members reacting to it—reactions that projectively become our own.
     We watch one woman after another, all but one played by Iranian actresses, sound and image combining so that eventually, unless we resist, we imaginatively experience both films as one, the film we are watching and the film that we hear. It seeps in and takes over. Men, also in the audience, remain in the background, their faces invisible. We see only the faces of heavily head-covered women, each enrobed in the theater’s darkness, her face spotlit, with waves of light rhythmically crossing that face.
     Kiarostami creates this illusion. In actuality, he filmed each actress alone in his living room as she faced a blank sheet of white paper, next to his camera, that she filled with personal memories, stirred feelings. Kiarostami told none of his actresses what the nonexistent movie they were supposed to be watching was about.
     The film-within-the-film, about the “manly game” of violence, oppression, cruelty, is based on an ancient, pre-Islamic tale, historically rooted, by way of a 12th-century epic poem, The Story of Khosrow and Shirin, by Hakim Nezami Ganjavi. Khosrow is the King of Persia; Shirin, the Armenian princess he desires; Farhad, the sculptor who also loves her. Khosrow banishes Farhad, ordering him to hammer out steps in distant mountains: a practical reduction of an artist’s gifts suited to his breaking heart. We hear this.
     Kiarostami thus anticipates what is at stake in Iran’s upcoming presidential election.
     He and Arash Sadhegi edited brilliantly.

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ANNA KARENINA (Clarence Brown, 1935)

Greta Garbo, cinema’s greatest actress and most intoxicating beauty, played Anna Karenina twice, both times for Clarence Brown, her favorite director: in 1927, in the silent Love; in 1935, in the talkie, which reclaimed two things: the title of Lev Tolstoi’s novel; Anna’s suicidal end, which a happy ending had replaced for the sake of love. The newly formed New York Film Critics Circle named Garbo its first “best actress.” Hers is both a precise and a fluent performance, one so brilliantly judged that the characterization never submits to soap opera. This was producer David O. Selznick’s penultimate film at M-G-M before Selznick “went independent”; in New York City, his A Tale of Two Cities (directed by Jack Conway and Robert Z. Leonard) was released just two days later, on December 27.
     At 96 minutes, Brown’s film ruthlessly condenses the 900-page novel; playwrights Clemence Dane and S.N. Behrman nonetheless achieved a smooth, polished script, while Salka Viertel deepened the result by providing at least one woman’s viewpoint. Moreover, all hands, but especially Garbo, Brown, cinematographer William H. Daniels and scorer Herbert Stothart, give the film (despite little philosophy) a philosophical air, a melancholy beneath the upper-crust tsarist opulence, a sense of foreboding and fate—the idea that we are puppets of our feelings, which our intelligence or wit helps us to either deny or exaggerate.
     I am presuming that every reader of this blog already knows the story contained in what many (including I) consider the single greatest novel ever written. In any case, married to an ambitious bureaucrat, Anna resists Count Vronsky’s professions of love until she falls in love with him. Karenin, throwing Anna out and forbidding her to see their young son, will not allow social murmurings about her affair to sabotage his career. I was plain wrong, in my review of Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina (1948), when I described Basil Rathbone’s Karenin, for Brown, as villainous, unnuanced. It is sympathetic acting, making plain (at least to me now) the range of Karenin’s feelings, including the self-righteous, self-rationalizing ones. Garbo absolutely convinces when she confesses to her husband that he terrifies her and then, shortly after, just as convincingly, shows her bravery by lambasting him for his selfishness and hypocrisy. Unlike Vivien Leigh’s, Garbo’s Anna remains sane; her suicide is the result of her feeling she has lost all other options, including Vronsky’s love and access to her son.
     For me, the most captivating scene comes early on, at a ball, before Anna and Vronsky have become lovers. The mazurka is one of those light group dances where women flit from one partner to the next. (Chester Hale choreographed.) Anna begins the dance with Vronsky; when they are reunited on the dance floor, he tells her: “Our meetings are so brief. The dance, also.” Once she reciprocates Vronsky’s love, almost from the start Anna feels her life slipping away.
     As a lover, Vronsky remains a military man, and one wonders, had he and Anna remained a couple, whether Vronsky might have become Karenin’s mirror-image; already he is self-absorbed. Both characters, note, bear the same name: Aleksei. Fredric March, who plays Vronsky, is never at his best at romance; he is superb, however, in the last scene following Anna’s death, where Vronsky is past icy pride and full of regret. Vronsky is assured that Anna forgave him. “Who knows?” Vronsky replies. “Who knows?”
     The camera has already moved to a framed picture of Anna. Count Vronsky will remain haunted by his memory of her for the rest of his life.

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LETTERS IN THE WIND (Ali Reza-Amini, 2002)

Those who have seen Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Basic Training (1971) or Stanley Kubrick’s fictional Full Metal Jacket (1987), or both, can add Nameha-ye baad, from Iran, to their list of films showing the training of raw military conscripts. In this case, the secluded setting of the army camp is mountainous and snowy, correlative, perhaps, to the freezing of the teens’ souls. Regardless, the 21-month procedure responds to memories of the Iran-Iraq War—the director, Ali Reza-Amini, is himself a veteran of that war—and, short of new war’s breaking out, the camp experience fulfills the boys’ military obligation.
     A tape-recorded female voice, which Taghi, one of only two conscripts given names, has smuggled in becomes a fantastic connection to the real world as the boys listen to it in turn. When he is furloughed to Tehran, Taghi relays recorded messages to the families of fellow conscripts and records street sounds.
     The brief black-and-white opening stuns: handheld camera, simulating cinéma-vérité, capturing each crack in the comfort-level of teenagers who are being plunged into a new, highly restrictive environment. (One recruit won’t stand for it.) Color enters in lovely long-shots of the group’s bus-transport to the remote camp. I’m afraid I found nothing that follows the opening the least bit interesting or moving; indeed, I found the two-shots of verbally quarreling kids excrutiatingly artificial. The “surprise ending,” which charms others, I found unconvincing and evasive. Throughout, the absence of an added musical score is an asset, while an episodic structure, helpful elsewhere, generates flimsiness here. This may have something to do with the film’s short duration: 1¼ hours.
     The patchwork script is by first-time director Reza-Amini and Keivan Nakhaei; Bayram Fazli’s dark cinematography, which does especially beautifully with negative space inside the barracks, is first-rate.

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THE EXPLODING GIRL (Bradley Rust Gray, 2009)

Following in the steps of Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999) and wife So Yong Kim’s In Between Days (2006), which he co-wrote with her, Bradley Rust Gray has taken the title of The Exploding Girl from another song by the British rock group The Cure, whose bleeding lyric for the 1985 “The Exploding Boy” includes the following:

I couldn’t hear a word you said
I couldn’t hear at all
you talked until your tongue fell out . . .
tell yourself we’ll start again
tell yourself it’s not the end . . .

The film’s protagonist is teenaged Ivy (luminous Zoe Kazan, Elia’s granddaughter—best actress, Tribeca), who is back with her mother in New York City, on summer break from Ithaca College. Joining them is longtime platonic friend Al, whose parents, professing confusion as to his arrival date, but probably hiding financial duress, rented out his room in his absence without telling him. (Not this or anything else in Gray’s brilliant script seems contrived; everything, here, weighs, breathes.) Meanwhile, Ivy’s cell-phone conversations with college boyfriend Greg, in his unidentified hometown, indicate their relationship is slipping away from her.
     What a beauteous film this is, fresh, detailed, unsentimental, unmelodramatic—devastating. Ivy has epilepsy—but its control is part of her (and, necessarily sometimes, her mother’s) routine; it isn’t an exploitable convenience. The seizure we do see is in long-shot, with Al’s assistance partially obstructing our view. Being epileptic is just one more thing with which Ivy must cope; she is also afflicted with loneliness and timidity—things that some of us learn eventually, better than others, to cover up. Al also has these problems; fearful he might lose their cherished friendship, he therefore quickly withdraws a romantic overture that has the potential to heal them both, at least for a bit.
     Girls and boys have always had these problems; but no other film shows more convincingly how technology—here, cell-phones—deepens them, generating more intense loneliness and timidity by pressing the illusion of broadening and compounding communication.
     Gray and Kim superbly edited.

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