THE VANQUISHED (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)

Accompanied by the front pages of newspapers, voiceover sets the theme of Michelangelo Antonioni’s uneven I vinti: a lost generation that grew up during the war, for whom “the one law is lawlessness.” The film, then, is about postwar collateral damage.
     These aren’t Buñuel’s “forgotten ones”; they are working-class or bourgeois, not direly impoverished, but driven to escape what they perceive to be one form or another of social imprisonment. In each of the three segments (France, Italy, England), someone commits murder and himself dies or will be executed by the state. Each killer is older than his predecessor, and each episode, I’m afraid, is progressively weaker; but the first, at least, is splendid. On a day’s holiday in the country, amidst one of cinema’s loveliest renderings of adolescent ache, one envious working-class schoolboy, as planned, shoots a bourgeois classmate dead, robbing him. The money, which wasn’t the point in any case, turns out to be fake. The college student in the second episode stays out all night; while his father thinks his son is painting the town with a girl, the boy is really engaged in a smuggling operation. Even less interesting, except as it vaguely anticipates Antonioni’s later Blowup (1966), is the concluding episode, where a man collects money from a newspaper for reporting the discovery of a woman’s body in a park. It turns out that his wasn’t a chance discovery; he murdered the woman precisely to collect the money. There’s a message there somewhere; this is strictly Alfred Hitchcock Presents-level irony, with smug TV-level comic relief around the edges.
     It is understandable that this schematic film is always regarded among Antonioni’s poorer efforts. Taken alone, though, the French episode—actually, all three episodes are in Italian—is a small naturalistic gem.

A SNAKE OF JUNE (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2002)

Tokyo’s wet season finds incessant rain falling from heaven and, through drains, down into hell. Rinko, a suicide phone counselor, is being blackmailed by a client, who has somehow managed to take photographs of her in atypical erotic solitude. These arrive in the mail. “You made me want to live,” Iguchi tells Rinko; we hear his disembodied cell-phoned voice throughout Rokugatsu no hebi. Rinko’s marriage to businessman Shigehiko is cordial, even affectionate, but hardly burning up the bedroom; Shigehiko works late and is anally compulsively given to scrubbing sink and tub. Meanwhile, blackmailer Iguchi (played by producer-writer-director-cinematographer-editor-production designer Shinya Tsukamoto) sends Rinko on a humiliating excursion to secure the negatives. (A vibrator and a cucumber are involved.) “I’m not asking for sex,” Iguchi explains to Rinko. “I’m telling you to do what you want to do.” A closeup of a vulnerable snail emerging from its shell represents Rinko.
     Iguchi, who is dying of cancer, realizes from one of the photos that Rinko also might have cancer; but Shigehiko’s ambivalence about her having a mastectomy, even if it means saving her life, causes Rinko to tell Shigehiko that the doctor canceled the operation as unnecessary. Now Iguchi takes aim at Shigehiko, including with the strangling coils of his hydraulic penis. The increasingly surreal imagery underscores how hard it is nowadays to separate fantasy from reality.
     Influenced by Tsai Ming-liang’s Ai qing wan sui (Viva l’amour, 1994) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Tsukamoto’s brilliant black-and-white film suggests that life and its technology have shattered our integrity by invading our privacy and readying us for further invasions. The final searing movement shows how little husband and wife know what the other wants and what they themselves desire: marriage as another casualty of the modern age.

MARRIAGE ITALIAN STYLE (Vittorio De Sica, 1964)

Oversized, opulent, Matrimonio all’italiana is one of Vittorio De Sica’s baubles, an artificially colored marshmallow. Dazzlingly entertaining, it is unworthy of the artist De Sica once was.
     From the play Filumena Marturano by Eduardo De Filippo, adapted by Renato Castellani, Tonino Guerra, Leonardo Benvenuti and Piero De Bernardi, the film encompasses two decades of comedic soap opera, some of which is presented in flashback. The two principal characters are Domenico Soriano, a sexually hyperactive rich businessman, and Filumena, whom he seduces when she is 17 during a World War II bombing raid. In due course Filumena becomes a prostitute and tricks Domenico into marriage; she is in love with him and, however much it seems to the contrary, he may be in love with her. The plot has little connection to reality; its presentation, even less.
     By turns, one or the other character takes center-stage; the two never seem to inhabit the plot coequally at any point. Filumena refuses to disclose to Domenico which of her three sons is his because she loves all three equally. “I would know if one of them is mine,” Domenico at one point insists, but Filumena counters he would have had her “kill” the fetus had he known she was pregnant. This potential plot-hole is covered by the instability of their relationship; Domenico would disappear from Filumena’s life for patches of time. The couple divorce, and the film ends happily—that is, in its own contrived universe—with their remarriage and Domenico’s adoption of all three boys.
     Marcello Mastroianni, brilliantly funny, creates and inhabits the irascible character of Domenico. Sophia Loren, always at her best under De Sica’s guidance, still is not an actress. Rather, she emotes, projects, radiates. We see Domenico; we see Loren playing Filumena.

TOKYO CHORUS (Yasujiro Ozu, 1931)

Yasujiro Ozu’s silent Tokyo no kôrasu begins hilariously. Like his classmates, student Shinji Okajima (Tokihiko Okada, endearing) seems incapable of keeping in line—literally, I mean, quasi-militarily, on the college grounds. Ozu’s film leaps forward “several years,” where rhe comedy deepens. At the insurance company for which he works, Shinji confronts his boss over the baseless termination of a fellow employee, Mr. Yamada, an older gentleman, one year shy of his pension. This confrontation includes a riotously funny exchange of pokes, jabs and fan taps. With lovely tact Shinji explains to Yamada the upshot of all this: “It turns out this is my last day of work also.”
     This is the Depression; Tokyo is the “City of the Unemployed.” Shinji and his wife, Tsuma Sugako (Emiko Yagumo, miraculously sensitive and restrained), have a baby girl and two very young children. (Hideko Takamine, age 7, plays the elder daughter.) Shinji desperately looks for work.
     Much of the film’s later part is conventional, even sentimental; Shinji ransacks drawers of Tsuma’s cherished kimonos in order to pay the hospital bill when one of their offspring falls ill. One stunning image remains: a street curb tracking shot surveying the backs of the seated jobless.
     Shinji’s former teacher, who runs a restaurant (“Our Portions Really Fill You Up”), solicits his help in advertising the place—tactfully: “If you’re out of work, how about helping me for a while?” At a dinner reuniting Shinji’s former class, the former teacher makes a toast: “May all of you continue to prosper through hard work and self-reliance.” But we’ve seen that hard work is insufficient and one must rely on others.
     Shinji’s new teaching job means that the family must move. Mrs. Okajima’s wistful remark grazes: “I’m sure we can return to Tokyo someday.”

BULLET BALLET (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Dazzling, gorgeous, pulsating, visionary, Shinya Tsukamoto’s black-and-white Bullet Ballet brilliantly fuses social criticism, ultra-violence, West Side Story’s street gangery, Tarkovskian science fiction, and film noir to wrestle a stunning life-affirmation from a compelling description of the nihilism of young Tokyoans who see violence, including murder and suicide, as the logical extension of what they perceive to be dead-ended lives. Wrongly, some commentators have said that the film itself is nihilistic. Tsukamoto, the cult favorite who directed Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989) and A Snake of June (2002), wrote, directed, cinematographed and edited this fantastic film.
     Goda, beautifully played by Tsukamoto, seems to scurry through a dark, occasionally deadly dream. The point of departure is girlfriend Kiriko’s unexpected suicide with a gun the calibre of which only the police use. How did she get this gun? Was her death really a suicide? Goda himself investigates, descending into a gang underworld not only to discover the truth, which proves elusive, but to secure his own gun of the type that killed Kiriko so he can strike out at some portion of a dizzyingly immoral world. The mystery police gun suggests that Tsukamoto had in mind Akira Kurosawa’s swooning postwar noir Stray Dog (1949), thus laying Japan’s current moral chaos at the doorstep of the U.S. occupation that stressed capitalism at the expense of Japan’s religious foundation and family orientation.
     This is a dank film (another touch of Tarkovsky), with a leaky faucet and dripping corridors, and a rush, with flights across streets and bridges in pursuit of confrontation’s clarity. Handheld camera rules. The production design, as in a dream, makes inside Goda’s never-locked apartment one step away from some bizarre, leaky subterranean world that accesses the outdoors. People run while urgently using their cell phones.
     Futuristic; contemporary.