Michael Snow's "Presents" (reprint, Cinema Canada)

 Presents

Michael Snow's new film is his most generous exuberant and buoyant offer- ing yet As usual, if s a meditation upon the processes of perception. As usual, too, it's a rich, spirited film that should tease viewers into new thouglits how- ever often it is viewed.

The film is structured in three precise pai-fs. The first two dramatize the dis- loitions which result when a willful artist imposes liimself upon the mate- rials of his craft. The third demonstrates the greater riches when the artist subor- dinates himself to the splendors of the world.

In the 10-minute first section, Snow presents the classical odalisque - a nude reclining in an artificial room. Snow opens with a thin vertical sliver of light, which he slowly stretches out into the full image. When his stretch reaches the Cinemascope proportion the woman has been rubberized, dehuman- ized, rendered grotesque. Here Snow exposes the filmmakei's intervention by prop, framing and manipulation of the formal elements of bis shot. Halfway through, the image is squashed into a horizontal slit, then stretched out again. Contrary movements are required to

make the whole. As in the film's overall structure, thesis and antithesis give way to the climactic synthesis.

The second part is a hilarious 20- minute narrative in which the nude rises and joins a visitor to search for a trivial object. For the most part. Snow's camera is stationary, but the entire set moves back and forth. Both actors are hilarious in the stiff movements and in their heroic effort to handle their mov- ing set A phonograph plays classical music, its needle leaping crazily with the movement We hear Snow call out numbers to direct his actors. We see his crew reflected against the set. The man freezes in mid-air whenever the set moves him out of camera range. This is a slapstick exposure of traditional narra- tive cinema, in which a trivial drama is performed against an artificial setting and its entire world is manoeuvered by the director. The comedy lies in Snow making explicit the manipulation that is usually hidden.

As in the whodunit involving the body on the floor in Wavelength, and the classroom incidents in « » (informally called "Back and Fprth"), Snow raises the spectre of narrative cinema only to drop it in favour of analyzing the perception of experience. So in the latter stages of his narrative sequence in Presents, the romantic drama becomes a disaster movie. The furniture wobbles, crumbles, and is crushed. Finally Snow's camera breaks through the setting and we escape into the splendor of the real world. Our first image is the oppressive skyscraper, but we're free.

The third section is a 70-minute al- bum of intriguing rhyming beautiful, unsettling, and extremely personal shots of life, in all its fullness and chaos. Here Snow shows the world instead of a fiction. Here he allows the objects their own free movement unframed, un- ordered. There are passages of breath- taking beauty - the arc of a bird in flight the sinuous routes of machines on earth. There are passages of chuckling irony - a pan of a tlresser ends on a Genie ; next a worker unloads a barrow of trash.

Limited as stereotypes, these people interact v\ ith each other within the con- fines of an inept plot Not only do the episodes fail to contribute to anV un- . folding of Kelly's character, but they also seem gratuitous. The scenes at the monastery for instance, appear to have been written simply to feature the bear. Moi-eover, the plot-lines are so separate from each other that the movie ends three times. The major resolution, Kelly's facing of herself- that should reveal the

extent of her transformation - occurs first and far too early. The second, a nuisance that ought to have bfeen edited out, involves a renewed attraction between her father, and her remarried mother, who is soon removed from the story. Eventually, almost as an afte]> thought, the villain is set up to get what he, if not Russia, desei^'es. But because Kelly cannot take part in the revenge, the joke falls flat. This ending, however, reveals why the movie is not just bad but objectionable.

Kelly is not really the heroine's story, and hemmed in as she is by cliches and stereotypes she has -no chance to act. Always rescued by a father who knows best a spunky kid dwindles into a passive girl. Kelly insults children.
Anna Carlsdottir •

K E L L Y d. Christopher Chapman p. Samuel V. Freeman asst p. George Anthony exec in cliarge of prod. Robert Meneray sc Robert Logan mus. Micky Erbe, Maribeth Solomon song «ril Keep It With Me,» comp. by Maribeth Solomon, Micky Erbe, sung by Donna Ramsay r e c by Andrew Hermant art. d. Charles Dunlop superv. ed. David Nicholson, cfe. d.o.p. Paul Van Der Linden, esc. L prod. Fran Rosati casting Canadian Casting Asso- ciates sc. consult Francis Chapman cont Mai^ garet Hanly cam. op. Cyrus Block cam. op. (2nd unit) Rod Parkhurst f o e puller Brent Spencer foe. pullers (2nd unit) Then Eglseder, Peter Smith clapper/loader Harvey La Rocque ed. Byron white, Peter Dale loc. sd. mix Larry S'jtton boom op. Lars Ekstrom sd. ed. Fred Brennan Yanina Jezek (asst.) key grip John Dillard Brinson dolly grip Richard Allen, John Brown asst. grip Tom Hansen, Brian Kuchera prop, master Tracey Budd, Craig Ponton lassL) hair Salli Bailey make-up Sandy Cooper a-lL David MacLeod (1st), Kim Win- therl2nd), Val StefofllSrd) p. s e c Karen Hamasaki p. acct. Lacia Kornylo p. bookkeeper Joanne Jackson p; sec. Angela Gruenthal p. assL Vikki Haimila l o c man. Michael MacDonald assL art d. SLuzanna Smith, Daniel Bradette p a i n t e r Susan High gaf. David Anderson electr. Rob Brown best boy electric Rod Merrells gen. op. Glen Sherman set d. Steve Shewchuk asst set dresser Chris Merrells wardrobe Deborah Weldon, Jackie Mei' rells (assL) craft serv. Mike Brown driver c a p t Cy Bariy, drivers Mark Barry, Don Brown, Betty Elliot, Martin Gutkind, Hoy Hart, Ken McClennon stills Bruno Engler spec efx. John Thomas Rex Cooley (asst) Whitewater consult Robin Sims safety rafts Vivian Fehr pilots Tony Hugman, Scott Swan- son stunt doubles Betty Thomas, Graham Elliott, Erwin Oertli animals Hubert Wells trainers Che- ryl Shwaver, Karin Dew bear trainers Lloyd Beebe, Marinho t:orreira vet Terry Quesnel l.p. Robert Logan, Tv\'yla-Dawn Vokins, George Clutesi, Elaine Nalee, Doug Lennox, Alec Willows, Dan Granirer, Jack Leat Mona Cozart, Paddy While r e - r e c Nolan Roberts, Film House dist Paramount Pictures coL

35 mm running lime 95 min. p.c Famous Players Film Corp. 1980

There are shots of unaccountable detail and white flowers, as if tearing away.a

68/Cinema Canada - May 1981

J

REVI

and appreciation, like the lengthy views
of a steamroller, later a snowplow, as
Snow's lingering camera seems capti- a grisly surgery.
vated by physical details. There are Presents is based upon the paradl sequences that rhyme textures - a of authorial personality. The first tvw/ blanket, then a field of snow. There are parts demonstrate the falsity and foHV^ moments of drama - from a hunter an art in which the creator obtrudes nis proudly displaying his moose head. voice and craft The third is a celeWfF Snow pans blurrily across fields of red tion of the woBWifwhich the dire^r

revulsion. No rose-lensed optimisK^

Snow cuts in an Arctic caribou hunt anO^

modestly studies and preserves in eter- nal "presents," and presents to us as delightful gifts (the third sense of "presents"). The paradox is that the film
is most personal in the section in which the artist does not intrude. He shows himself most profoundly when he shares whathesees.Sothis,thethirdsection,is . so much weightier and more moving than the illusionist cinema which he

' satirizes in the earlier comic episodes. The first tWo episodes are enclosing and false. The tfiird is an exhilarating exer- cise in opening out

The third part is a collage of apparent objectivity. Neither heard nor seen. Snow is present only by his iiripltcit functions of choice of material, filming and editing. But the world we see there is very much Snow's world. The section abounds with characteristic Snow shots - dizzying pans back and forth, and waves, and birds, and walking women. And a beaming Joyce Wieland hard upon (well; really soft) a shot of a happy family celebration. Not just the world opens out in that third section, but the private Snow as well.

The first part is accompanied by a modulating electronic drone, that seems to harmonize as the image comes into focus. In contrast the sound in the second part is rooted in the setting both in the character's room and in the direc- tor's operation. In the third part the sound works ambiguously between the synchronous and the imposed. Each cut is accompanied by a drumtap, like a pulse. We can't determine whether this tap causes, announces, or reacts to the change in image. That is the very am- biguity of the filmmaker's relationship to his image here. He is a present recorder. He is at once passive before the spectacle and active in its preserva- tion.

For all its Import, though, one must not lose sight of the sheer pleasure that thisfilm presents. If s not often that one feels regret when a Michael Snow film comes to its end. But here one is disap- pointed when that brilliantly executed slapstick sequence is over. And even more when his collage of splendid reality draws to a close. But then the quickening drum-pulse heralds our return to the worldbeyond thescreen. There we can exercise the sharper, appreciative eye for color and movement that Snow has primed. There his Presents will en- hance our own present.
Maurice Yacowar •

PRESENTS d/p/cant/^/sets Michael show sd. John Kamenaar, Bill Buxton, Brian Day cam. Keith.Lock p.man. Robin Collyer Lp. Jane Fellowes, Peter Melnick colour 16 mm year 1980 (with the "•iJlanceoftheCanadaCouncil)running time90 "lin; dist Canadian Filmmaker's Distri

On Cronenberg's Shivers (reprint, Cinema Canada)

 YOU SHIVER BECAUSE IT'S GOOD

Why David Cronenberg's The Parasite Murders was retitled Shivers I can't imagine. But even under its new title it continues to suffer the insensitive abuse that was reported (and well rebutted) in Cinema Canada No. 22. What has not been established is exactly what the film is saying through its shocking effects.

Shocking it certainly is. The film is a relentless flood of. murder, rape and upchuck. But complaining about a horror film's nauseating effect is like complain- ing about dancing in the streets in a musical, or horses and jeans in a Western. That's what we go to see one for. Nausea, fear and shock are the conventional effects of the horror genre. The critic's task is not to com- plain they are there (they come with the territory) but to work out how they are used.

The film opens and closes with a media-sell voice- over, detached from the action, oozing the complacency of modern urban man. The opening is a sales pitch for the Starliner apartment building on a Montreal island, where the drama will take place. The closing is a news bulletin by a go-go disc-jockey type, assuring the listener that nothing dangerous has happened. We've seen the danger, though, and been shocked out of the complacency of the frame voices. We must be further shocked at the complacency of the closing media man,

as the Beautiful People drive out in their performance cars to infest the world.

The film is a jeremiad about man's abandonment to the pleasures of the failing flesh. Mad Doctor Emil Hobbes has been experimenting with parasite implants to assume the function of flawed human organs. His pride is, of course, the sexual application: a parasite with aphrodisiac effects. He plants the red little phallic critters in his mistress, then waits for them to spread, turning the world into a great sexual orgy (the global village with a Playboy vengeance), thus saving man, as

Hobbes sees it, from the tragic fate of having lost contact with his body.

The film dramatizes the horror of what we often take to be one of the happiest triumphs of our time, the new sexual permissiveness. The key spreaders of the para- site are figures representative of the modern liberation of sexuality: the precocious Lolita-type, the adulterer, the old man with his megavitamin vitality, the Swedish couple, the bachelor swingers, hetero and gay.

Cronenberg's Emil Hobbes is a direct descendant of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century philosopher whose Leviathan argued the primacy of the physical nature of man and his universe. Hobbes provided the philosophical rationale for Restoration libertinism, so Cronenberg goes back to his name for his horrific vision of the libertinism of our time. Indeed the shape of the little critters is a cross between your standard red phallus and your swimming whale.

The apartment setting, a self-contained tower on an island, is an image of the isolation of the sensually obsessed. The apartment facilities cater to the appetites

and to the image of the beautiful life, nothing else. The apartment residents are characterized as lonely, insular people, condemned to a sad privacy until the monsters free them for a horrible parody of community, love, encounter session, primal therapy, virtually every mind-blowing, self-exalting fad on the psychological market today.

Cronenberg often seems like an Old Testament prophet in his horrifying vision of what happens when man sells his soul for his appetite, values "guts" more than reason, and labors under the delusion that fulfilment can be had by ingesting something (a kiss, a pickle, a pill, a little critter, or what have you). It should bemuse the reader to find such a traditionally moral work attacked by such traditional critics as Messrs. Robin Wood, Gilmour, Fulford, and Knelman. Are they all secret swingers chafing under Cronenberg's lash?

True to the traditions of the genre, Cronenberg spe- cializes in the slow accumulation of danger, then fills familiar objects with threat. The parasites are passed on by sexual contact at first, but then they take on indi- vidual life and travel independently. They attack from washing machines, mail slots, bath drains, to the point that we're terrified at the opening of a fridge or a contact-lens vial. Such is their independence that one man even converses with his little critters as they throb tumescent in his tummy.

Cronenberg inflects the conventions of his genre. For one thing, his vision is heightened by the fact that these are not monsters from outer space but from within ourselves. The parasites are images of our own sexual compulsions. Thus they pop up in the horny.

One scene is a conscious variation on the famous shower scene in Psycho. Hitchcock had the lonely girl attacked from the outside world when she was most vulnerable. Cronenberg's attack comes from within, as the critter creeps up through the bathtub drain to sexually enter — and this is the crucial point - the girl (Barbara Steele) who has been moping around in pre-masturbatory loneliness and has been lying open in her tub as if in subconscious hope of such a visit.

The final overcoming of our central hero, the doctor (Paul Hampton), occurs in the apartment swimming pooL which is a public extension of that private tub. The doctor's nurse and her initiator (Steele) are in the

pool. That climactic scene has several shades of mean- ing. The wet blanket is finally getting into the swim of things, one might say. The girl's lonely tub has grown. It's also a parody of a baptism, as the community surrounds the pool to celebrate the immersion of their new member. Finally, his nurse's oral insertion of the parasite is a reversal of male penetration. In the last two respects, the scene is a witty play on the missionary position.

The film is most dependent upon its horror genre in its inflection of the traditional threat to human person- ality. In its forebears, the humans are endangered by depersonalizing, de-energizing forces. The film belongs to the tradition of zombie movies, like Night of the Liv-

ing Dead and the pod variant in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But Cronenberg dramatizes depersonalizing in sexual activity, the thing we have come to take as our most personalizing activity. That's what makes the film both so shocking and such a strong moral statement. Where we expect to find zombies we find people who are fulfilling our fondest fantasies, of sex unlimited by law or by physical capacity. The film is shocking because Cronenberg's zombies are what we want to be.

He draws us into this position in the scene where his hero doctor continues to chat coolly on the phone, impervious to his nurse stripping in front of him. He seems to bear out Emil Hobbes' contention that modern man has been cut off from his blood and his impulses. We expect, indeed require, him to make love to her, then and there. But of course he is a man of reason and responsibility. He is not the zombie but the rational man. The real zombies are the orgiasts, whose physical hyperactivity belies their void in will, soul and sense.

Cronenberg's film has suffered the same critical disdain that was accorded Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Perhaps serious art in the horror genre must expect to be reviled before it is understood. Shivers (by whatever name) will join those classics. If Cronenberg continues to grow this film will rank with Psycho as a personal stata»nent. At the very least it will rank with those other two films, as a powerful expression of an anxiety of its day, so deep it hurt.

Maurice Yacowar

54/ Cinema Canada

Genies--1981 (reprint, Cinema Canada)

 

/ dream of Genie with a gilty pate.
] don't know why: something I ate ?

(Traditional songi

The best one can say about this year's Genie Awards is that they could have been worse. Francis Mankiewicz's Les bans dibarras would be a distin- guished winner in any country in any year. So, for that matter, would be Micheline Lanctofs L'homme a tout faire. We can be grateful that there was

no unseemly rush to reward the lugu- brious Tribute, or the muddle-headed Lucky Star (wherein it is implied that a Jew can achieve heroism by adopting the mythology of the American gun- slinger, much as the supposedly "Cana- dian" film plunges into American genres, images, tones and values for self-fuliillment). Similarly, the indefen- sible Terror Train won nothing though its four technical nominations left it with excessive shreds of respect- ability. Such justice is rare in any awards competition, so we'can be grate- ful for small mercies.

But this relief should not divert us fiiom the essential wrong-headedness of the whole Genie operation. Simply, it is silly to celebrate Canadian film in such a transparently American ritual It recalls that Fernwood Tonite gag where Frank Sinatra Jr. establishes his own fame by singing "My Way" in exact- ly his father's tone and cadence.

This self-disrespectful imitation per- vades the whole show. It is implicit in the organization's name. The Academy of Canadian Cinema. The prize itself is a gold statuette that looks like an eviscer- ated Oscar, standing cross-legged to avoid further violation. So, too, the ironic aptness of its name : the Genie recalls a foreign giant that springs out of a magic lantern to bolster some 97- pound weakling(Aladdin Canuck, boy cineaste.').

The build-up to tfiis year's show reeked of this disrespect for Canadian film. The poster was a vulgar, sexist affront that pretended to be a Muybridge primer for artistic success through the casting couch. The ad run in the cinemas showed more Canadian than last year's but still relied on the lure of Jack Lemmon, Bruce Dem, Ann-Margret, as if they were Canadian stalwarts. Of course, none of the named showed. Hardest to swallow was the ad's closing salute to the audience for being such great supporters of Canadian film. It was enough to make you retch. Or at least, to kvetch.

The Genie show lived down to its promise. Brian Linehan was smooth and engaging enough, and he even braved the danger of wandering from his spot into comic and lyrical routines, but the show as a whole felt like the Oscar-nomination that it was. So we had the tiresome routine of envelopes and

"And the winner is..." The opening

gracious candor ("This is the first thing I Phoney ever won and I appreciate it"), followed by a well-intentioned portrayal of the arrogance and imperiaUsm of Her People. The Canadian crew on Atlantic City, USA was "professional in every way." she allowed, as if this were a matter of surprise or note. Then the poor girl was stuck on camera to announce the two design winners. As both categories were won by the absent Anne Pritchard, Ms. Sarandon accepted the awards she presented. Then she made the best editing presentation. Her prolonged stand poinffed to the paucity of stars on the Genie roster. Moreover, Ms. Seirandon showed all the poise and control of an epileptic ferret At the opposite extreme, Burt Lancaster's patriarchal appearance had dignity and style, but his Leopard and 1900 associations made him embody the American industry's rigid

sibilify of grit was killed in glitz.
As if the imitativeness was not depressing enough, the whole affair evoked a sense of waste, of lost oppor^ tunity. It is ironic that the theatre life of Canadian films is seemingly dependent upon the Awards' showcase, when, in fact, the Americanization of the celebra- tion discourages confidence In that

same product ~^^
Will The Handyman [L'homme a

tout faire) play across English Canada even though it didn't win any of the biggies ? Win Tom Peacocke's best actor award resurrect The Hounds of Notre Dame (before its American title-change

to 'Puppies of the Prairie Priest) ? Does anyone out there care ?

While the stars and asterisks gathered onstage for their (Oscarstyle) cham- pagne party, the Canadian film-fan had to feel a little flat. For like Canada itself, why should its film industry be sustained if it Is only a pale copy, of the American ? What should have been a celebration that promoted the Canadian in film became a squeaky pretense at being American. As far as Canadian content was concerned, the only subject dis- cussed with ardor was the background (and fore) of Trudeau's date (Kim Cattrall the lusty lack-lustre vaculfy from Tribute). Otherwise there was no challenge to the show's assumption that Canada's maturity and vyorth lie in how American It acts. •

Maurice Yacowar teachesfilm at Brock University, St Catherines, Onfah'c^ where he is also Dean of Humanities. He reviewsfilm on CBC-FXTS "Stereo Morning', and his new booK Method in Madness: The Comic An ofMel Brooks, m'/fbepufafisfiedt/ite

Benediction

  In this brilliant biopic of British poet Siegfried Sassoon several Sassoon poems are read over landscapes and war scenes. 

But the key poem is Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled.” It appears twice. At his first reading Sassoon finds it a brilliant advance from Owen’s earlier derivativeness. Here for the first time the poet finds his voice, his independence, his self-assertion and emotional freedom. But we hear it only near film’s end, amid the aged Sassoon’s looking back in remorse at a life marked by loss and his emotional paralysis. 

The title points to the film’s two central wars and their respective costs in humanity. The literal war is WW I. There Sassoon fought valiantly, then courageously campaigned against its unscrupulous and disastrous continuation. We see a range of the war’s consequent disability, physical, emotional and psychological.

The second war is the homosexual’s campaign to survive in a bigoted cruel world. Owen and Sassoon were both “disabled” by the war, Owen killed and Sassoon robbed of emotional fulfilment. Owen was Sassoon’s one great love. Because their’s was “the love that dare not speak its name” the two ardent poets’ sole physical exchange is the stiff handshake when Owen marches off to death. Sassoon never recovers from Owen’s loss.

With his usual eye — and heart — for the oppressed sensitive, director Terence Davies conveys the gay characters’ sentence to emotional crippling. That’s the second form of disability in these wars. When Sassoon is interviewed by the army counselor — who himself admits to being gay; “I trust you will be discreet” — they are shown primarily in alternating one-shots, defining the isolation imposed upon the forbiddenly compatible.     

Unable to fulfill his romantic nature Sassoon drifts into trivial affairs, with shallow rewards while they work and profound loss when they don’t. The successful poet is condemned to a failed emotional life.

Sassoon’s retreat into conventional marriage only spreads his damage, the corollary  costs of that war. We see the consequences of Sassoon’s frustration in his wife, when the ebullient Kate Phillips turns into the haggard Gemma Jones. The son is his own frustrated loner, of uncertain sexuality and stunted emotional connection. Sassoon’s desperate retreat into “normalcy” destroys his nearest as well as himself. That’s the point of the song cited from Stop the World I want to Get Off — a piquant satire of the “typically English.”

The doubled shadow of Owen’s “Disabilities” hangs over the film and Sassoon’s sad, sad life until the poem is finally heard. The film is truly a Benediction because it bestows upon the dead — and the living who remain with us — the blessing of acceptance and understanding that they were denied in life.

Les Olympiades, Paris 13e

  As the title suggests, Les Olympiades, Paris 13e is a cultural barometer. To represent contemporary France director Jacques Audiard focuses on a little-known arrondisement known for its spectacular modern architecture — hence the opening sweep — and its young, ascendant middle class population that includes a high concentration of Chinese. Here is melting pot France, for better or worse. Nary an Eiffel, beret or baguette shot here. 

In accord with this fresh take on Paris, both central relationships begin with mistaken identity. Emilie is surprised to find that the Camille responding to her roommate ad is a man. Nora is driven out of her confidence — and law studies — by the spreading lie that she’s video porn star Amber Sweet. 

All three central figures work through different conceptions of their selves, moving through their own mistaken identities. Camille leaves his teaching career, then his doctoral studies, to sustain his real estate career. (On the margin, his obese, stuttering sister aspires to an implausible career as standup comedian.) Nora leaves an affair and real estate career with an uncle for the same double duty with Camille. Ultimately she abandons both for an affair with the woman who plays Amber Sweet, i.e., the persona Nora had been mistakenly assigned. Emilie enjoys a free flat but drifts through jobs and affairs before settling back into her opening relationship.

The film’s elegant black-and-white composition is briefly interrupted by Amber Sweet’s colour video. That is, the more realistic palette is given to the unreal supercharge of eroticism. In all three relationships a genuine emotional connection is impeded by the sexual liberty of the times. Camille and Emilie, Camille and his teaching replacement, Camille and Nora, all slip into a sexual relationship that fails to connect them. The sex precludes mutual understanding.

Hence the double happy ending, which is dependent upon the traditional subordination of sex. The Camille-Emilie relationship starts to work when they are living separately but have reconnected and freely discuss each other’s lives (and sex lives). Nora and “Amber” start by Nora buying the video porn star’s time to chat online. It advances to unpaid personal facetime conversation, where “Amber” joins Nora in the real-name world. This relationship culminates in the traditional Paris park personal meeting. So the film that originally feels libertine concludes in (relatively) conventional romances.

The film is as reactionary in its politics as in its sexual morality. The dominant black and white makes the Camille-Emilie and Camille-Nora sex scenes seem rebelliously frank. But the black-and-white mix does not hold up. Emilie is not white but Asian. Her ultimate union with Camille unites two outsiders, not a mix with the mainstream. So too the other couple’s lesbian union. The happy ending reasserts the conventional racial border. For all the architectural advance of this particular area France here remains a black vs white order.  

 

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

  Like his later Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy ripples with emotional insights centered on a feminine sensibility. The film presents three Hamaguchi short stories about lost love and the yearning to recapture a past. The boyish women at the center of the two framing stories anticipate the Drive film’s mute and driver.

Again an intimacy develops in a close car. “Magic or Something Less Assuring” grows out of two women’s increasingly intimate conversation in a taxi. The beautiful Tsugami confides in the boyish Meiko her new ardor for a stranger, Kazuaki. Realizing Kazuaki is her own ex-lover, Meiko confronts him in his office at night, whether to win him back or to torment him. The episode has two endings, providing alternative responses by Meiko. The “Magic” refers to Tsugami’s experience with the man; the “something less assuring” to Meiko’s ambiguous intervention.    

Initially Meiko is a model performing in a fashion shoot. At the end she shoots a photo of an urban construction scene, machines reaching above the foliage. That movement suggests the character’s tension over her own agency.     

In “Door Wide Open” a woebegone elderly writer/professor Segawa is visited by a beautiful ex-student, the married mother, Nao. Her young lover coerces her into luring Sagawa into “a honey trap” to avenge the professor’s thwarting of the young man’s career. 

The title echoes the professor’s care to avoid a compromising situation. In the event, however, the professor is seduced by his own words when the woman reads to him an erotic passage from his Akatagawa Prize fiction. (The allusion is to the celebrated Ryunusuke Akatagawa, two of whose short stories Kurosawa turned into the classic Rashomon.)

The seduction attempt backfires when the woman is herself deeply moved by the professor’s succumbing to her voice. They restrict their romance to agreeing to share the recording of the passage, with a mutual promise of a remote erotic connection through it.

But a misdirected email ends the professor’s career and the woman’s marriage. A chance meeting at the end suggests her avenging reunion with the young lover who initiated her visit. However carefully we leave our doors open, our impulses may still rule. 

In “Once Again” two women passing on an escalator mistake each other for intriguing characters from their high school past. Despite their errors they find a spark in each other. Each assumes the role the other hoped to meet, enabling their respective reconciliations and forming a close emotional bond in the process. 

All three stories show women negotiating their compelling drives through conventional strictures. They confirm Hamaguchi’s mastery of nuance in character revelation.       

 

Let It Be Morning

As in his The Band’s Visit, Israeli director Eran Kolirin uses a small incident to dramatize the Jewish-Arab tension in Israel. The present focus is entirely upon the Palestine community, as a small Christian Arab Israeli village suffers a brief military enclosure. No reasons are given for the Israelis’ defensive/offensive restrictive posture.

Hero Sami has returned to his family for his young brother’s wedding. The army’s restriction costs him his important job at a Jerusalem computer company — and keeps him from his enchanting Jewish mistress there. His brother’s unease in his own new marriage echoes Sami’s wife’s sensitivity to Sami’s detachment.  

Sami’s father has an Old School conviction that the Palestinians should massively rebel against the Israeli outpost. They would incur a few deaths but would prevail. He also tries to protect the illegal workers -- the daffawi, illegals from the West Bank -- he has building a house for Sami there. 

When one citizen tries to drive through their blockade the Israelis shoot down his car. The driver returns, bandaged, at the end for the funeral of the Palestinian cabbie who was killed by the panicking young Israeli guard.

The local council is a corrupt gang that bullies the citizens and seems to be serving the Israelis by trying to weed out the undocumented workers. The thug leader torments the cabbie about his betraying wife and has the cabbie’s cab burned when he fails to repay the loan he bought it with. Following the threat just to seize the cab this arson casts a pall of irrational self-destruction upon the community.

In dramatizing the Palestinians’ plight the film presents only one Jew, that young guard who is a sad case of soldier. In the early crossing scene the other Israeli soldiers are polite, efficient. But the young man -- an example of the sentimental Left --  twice absently  leaves his gun loose for seizing and is prone to sleep while on watch. Yet his sympathy for Sami, his older brother’s schoolmate, allows him some privilege — which only frustrates Sami more.   

The gang leader also shows a soft spot for Sami, which may — or may not — be due to their sexual experimentation as kids. After his wife reveals her knowledge of his infidelity Sami revives his marriage, perhaps resigning himself to staying with his father and wife and abandoning his Jerusalem liberty.

After this dark night of the community soul the film ends ambiguously on the eponymous -- and Genesis -- morning. The newspaper delivery man connotes the reopening of the road. After the cabbie’s funeral the whole community marches to the border to find the Israeli guards gone.  

And here is the ambiguity. Does the community’s march mean they are finally moved to collectively resist the Israeli restrictions or are they acceding to their control?

The answer may lie in the frame provided by the opening and closing scenes, with their antithetical bird’s eye views. The film opens with a tracking shot through the wedding reception from behind white vertical bars. This turns out to be the perspective of the white pigeons who are supposed to fly off at the end of the ceremony. 

But they don’t. They don’t want to leave their cage. Even when shaken out they refuse to fly. In a later scene Sami’s wife and son try to teach the pigeons to fly but they refuse. The boy and one by one his parents throw stones at the cat attacking one and at the birds who refuse to escape. 

In the high angle (aka bird’s eye view) closing shot we see the townspeople staring at the newly opened gate, but not moving. If they had decided to move en masse it's too late. Like the cabbie's wife showing her feelings at his funeral, too late. Like the birds, the villagers prefer the discomfort and frustration of being caged over the opportunity — and danger — of escape.  

The open end allows space for the viewer’s political choice. What would these Palestinians' flying free be? Resuming the century-long attack against the Jews or abandoning the "resistance" to enjoy the opportunities of collaborating with the Jews, as represented by Sami's lost job and his "amazing" Jewish mistress?