THE STRANGER WITHIN A WOMAN (MIKIO NARUSE, 1966)

The best of my 'poorly chosen introductions to Japanese masters' series. Ozu's Tokyo Twilight was almost frighteningly bleak and I don't even remember Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy. I anticipate that The Stranger Within a Woman is similarly atypical of Naruse, but it stands as good film nonetheless.

Fort those interested in something insightful, I will refer you to Dan Sallitt's excellent comments on the film, which can be found on page 45 (51 of the document itself). He points out that it's derived from the same source material as Claude Chabrol's Just Before Nightfall. Without seeing his take on it, it's pretty easy to see why Chabrol would be interested in the story.

Tashiro, a respectable family man from the suburbs, has killed his best friend's wife, Sayuri, with whom he was having an affair. This is somewhat of a spoiler, since it's not confirmed until a bit of time has passed, but it's virtually obvious from the moment we learn of the murder.

The film is mainly about how the three central characters- Tashiro, his wife Masako, and aforementioned best friend Sugimoto- deal with the situation. Wracked with guilt from the beginning, Tashiro slowly realizes the need to come clean to Sugimoto and Masako. Their responses only intensify his guilt however. Sugimoto figures out quite early on that Tashiro was responsible for his wife's death. But he puts that knowledge aside and in fact seems more caring toward Tashiro and his family. His kindness doesn't even relent when Tashiro admits his guilt to him. Masako seems conspicuously happy, first thinking that Tashiro just ended the affair, and later learning the truth about what happened. She wants their lives to return to normalcy at all costs and hopes for the murder to fade away as a distant dream.

The never-arriving punishment for Tashiro proves overwhelming. He can't seem to escape the sight of death and justice, yet is never touched by them himself. Sayuri, the victim, meanwhile fades from everyone's memory. Tashiro's determination to see himself punished, perhaps even by his own hands, ultimately tests Masako's ability to face the truth.

SHE WAS LIKE A WILD CHRYSANTHEMUM (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

A tale of young love, like The Girl I Loved from nine years earlier, but even more pure and heartrending. The film is comprised mostly of the flashbacks of an elderly Masao (played by Chishu Ryu) as he visits the village of his youth, but by the end there are some ambiguous shifts in point of view. In either case, the flashbacks scenes are framed by a fixed white iris shot (it doesn't move in or out). Five years later, Truffaut would use irises in Shoot the Piano Player as a playful homage to silent film. Here though, the effect is more of the viewer piercing Masao's soul through memory-flooded eyes.

Per normal, Kinoshita is working with a simple narrative. Masao's flashbacks tell the story of the shared love between his 15-year-old self and Tamiko, his 17-year-old cousin who lives with his family. Everyone seems to know about and disapprove of their love; Masao and Tamiko even try to deny it, but silently they gesture toward a different truth.

Masao's mother has always been conflicted about the relationship between the young cousins and eventually decides to speed up Masao's departure for school, so as to break up any romance. While he's gone, Tamiko is forced home by a relentlessly unpleasant sister-in-law. There, she finds herself in an arranged marriage and becomes depressed. Masao's mother seals Tamiko's dark fate by telling her that there is absolutely no chance she would ever allow a relationship between the cousins.

But all that comes after the beautiful centerpiece of the film. Masao's mother allows the two a rare day working in the fields together. The cousins come closest to articulating their love here when they pick flowers that represent one another. Tamiko is like wild chrysanthemum (She asks "why?" to which Masao replies that he does now know) and Masao like a bellflower.

So often Kinoshita seems to just film nature and by chance capture the human lives and drama that pass through it. He seems to find the perfect amount of wind to gently rustle the flowers and wheat so that we're left with the resonant feeling of souls stirring beneath the empty words that society forces out of us.

ANTONIO DAS MORTES (Glauber Rocha, 1969)

Antonio das Mortes, legendary killer of cangaceiros, is hired to kill what is apparently the only cangaceiro he hasn't yet slain. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who loses duels, especially in films where he's the titular character, so he does in fact kill the alleged bandit in front of the singing crowd of peasants that rally around the cangaceiro.

However, the killing throws him into existential despair. He is particularly affected by the presence of the female Santa (spiritual leader) who arrives with the peasant crowd and seems to make Antonio conscious of the exploitative nature of his employers. Meanwhile, the wealthy landowners who hired him are preoccupied with trying to murder one another. Development and land reform are on the horizon, so that probably informs Rocha's (a radical leftist) absurd representation of them.

The crowd of peasants, in contrast, are depicted as a mass that is less human and more spirit. Their songs (and dance) are quite incredible in fact; I immediately went back to listen after I finished the film. There is no doubt where Rocha's sympathies lie.

Everything in the film feels staged and the political dialogue has an essayistic quality. If that sounds like a Godard film, that is indeed the comparison my unsophisticated mind would make, though if I cared to watch an Oshima film, maybe I would say him. The political complexity of those two directors led to them only flirting with "organized" leftism before disilluisonment. The ending here perhaps signifies something similar for Rocha, as the landowners and their hired men are killed in a political and spiritual victory. But Antonio is last seen dazed, wandering by the side of the road as trucks drive by, and we aren't left with any sense that development in Brazil will bring hope.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

Like Out of the Past, this was simply not a film I could enjoy. Here I pose two theories...first, Tourneur's films that stick closer to genre are not as good as those that defy them. Second, and relatedly, I am bad at watching great films. In particular, great horror films? I had a similarly disappointing experience watching Eyes Without A Face. But in that I could see the good film that wasn't reaching me. In Night of the Demon, I saw a visually striking film that, in the end, probably could have been good camp if it had tried. My mind shouldered that responsibility as, for whatever reason, I found myself replacing Peggy Cummins' face with a face-masked Edith Scob. An amazing seance scene (the highlight of the movie maybe) helped too.

Three aspects of this film that are fun to think about yet nonetheless made it bad:

1. In somewhat of an inversion of Cat People, Holden/Dana Andrews seems surrounded by people who are quick to believe in the demonic powers of Karswell. It's almost laughable but it makes Holden's skepticism grating somehow.

2. In case we did not grasp that Andrews is a rational guy, he gives a moving speech (at least in form and placement) where he reveals that he's been that way since he was a young boy. He tells Cummins that while his friends walked around the ladder, he defiantly walked right under it. Well.

3. Karswell's supposed satanic cult exists? Maybe- we only meet Hobart who dies almost immediately. Does Mrs. Karswell play both sides because she doesn't want to crush the fanciful imagination of her strange son who has never quite grown up?

I also came up with a dream-related theory after watching Hong Sang-soo's Woman Is the Future of Man, so maybe I'm just into that right now. But Night of the Demon, unlike the great Tourneur films, offers no such space for mystification, in spite of a seemingly perfect opportunity.

NENETTE ET BONI (Claire Denis, 1996)

UNDER CAPRICORN (Alfred Hitchcock, 1949)

"A person’s reconquering of their own self is carried out under the double sign of deliverance and redemption providing the film its internal, dramatic progression, a victory over self-contempt and fear of the contempt of others."

So says Jacques Rivette in his piece on Hitchock's Under Capricorn. It's easy to project certain elements of this film onto those subsequently made by Rivette. I'm thinking of Duelle, Gang of Four, The Duchess of Langeais. There is the unsettling artifice of the setting for one. A "queer" Gothic mansion, as it is described, in which the strangeness seems to be less about the architecture or design and more about the people who reside in it. The house isn't dark in the grim sense, but it certainly has a deathly quality to it. And is Charles Adare not a Celine and Julie type figure? Not really, I know. But he is a good-hearted meddler who treats the Flusky home as a stage where he seems to come and go as he pleases.

In fact, what are we supposed to make of the main trio? Wilding in his screwball comedy, Cotten seeming so noirish, and Bergman in her melodrama. The film has elements of all these styles, so it works, but it's important to remember how disconnected these characters are, and how much the film is the project of their reconstruction- in spite of the essential phoniness of their environment. There needs to be some constitution of the self in order for it to be transcended and for human bonds to then be built.

Rivette so beautifully captures the nature of this trio that I'm not inclined to say much more:

"The transfer of responsibility for the sin had previously split the couple, the one assuming the punishment, the other the bad conscience. This first sacrifice, wrongly consented to, obliges them to abandon themselves to the euphoria of other incessantly renewed mutual sacrifices. In the end, it is not possible for them to abandon the sacrifice and accept happiness without the third person in turn taking it on before departing—the carrier of evil, bringing in her wake the drama’s Erinyes, far from Australian land."

Milly as the villain stands outside the triangle because her self-hatred manifests as the urge to destroy another. But to love like the Flusky's, one needs to suffocate under the weight of love. Charles realizes the impossibility of this and moves on, while Milly stumbles blindly until the end.

Imperfect, but a masterpiece.

*Watched at Film Forum so I have no screenshots.

THE GIRL I LOVED (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)

Jingo is home from the war and expects the girl he loves to be waiting for him and his proposal. The girl is Yoshiko, who was abandoned as a baby before her mother's suicide and adopted by Jingo's family. She, in fact, did not wait for him, having apparently fallen in love with Mr. Noda. Noda is a veteran of the war who somewhat embarrassingly walks with a limp, but plays the violin and reads, while the townspeople play the harmonica and appear to be illiterate.

The film teases us with the possibility of romance between the quasi-siblings, reveals Yoshiko's plans to marry Mr. Noda, and, at the end, leaves us wondering if she truly has no feelings for Jingo and if he truly accepts the role of brother (-in-law). In my reading, no and no. Her preference for Noda over Jingo is not because the latter is too much of a brother, but because the former is an outsider in the village like herself. This connection was fostered through circumstance, but with Jingo's return, Yoshiko's feelings are ambiguous, like her identification with two mothers- one living and one dead.

The theme of outsiders in an insular village reappeared years later in A Legend or Was It? and it's interesting to compare the two. For the most part, the later film isn't sympathetic towards its villagers who come across as stereotypically provincial and irrational. Here, Kinoshita shows more of a humanist touch and one senses that he loves or at least respects his characters. He emphasizes the differences between the educated Mr. Noda and farmers like Jingo, but also their shared qualities. Mr. Noda points out how war gives their lives urgency, underscoring the fact that he simply got to begin living his before Jingo. But then we're shown Noda, in a distinct low-angle shot, playing violin for a seated circle of confused and bored boys used to the harmonica and folk songs. Tellingly, Yoshiko is seated among them with Jingo, and the two walk out on the performance to discuss his secret. But Jingo is too embarrassed to reveal his love now, and too good a person to ruin the happiness of others, so he returns home, where, without any conviction, he tells his mother that they need to embrace Yoshiko's marriage.

Once again, Kinoshita demonstrates his ability to capture the poetic beauty of wherever he films. The pastures of The Girl I Loved lend an innocence to the film that makes the war something of a distant memory. There is a transcendent shot of Yoshiko blissfully running through the pasture that is later echoed when Jingo chases his quasi-brother through the fields in tears. Also memorable is a rapid succession of cuts between Yoshiko applying lipstick and her mother's dress flowing in the wind, which now seems quite Kinoshita-esque. Overall, the film is simplistic in its story, but memorable for its poetic style and ambiguity.

A LEGEND OR WAS IT? and WOMAN (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1963 and 1948)

My introduction to the world of Keisuke Kinoshita and two films I won't soon forget. A Legend or Was It? and Woman reveal a director relatively unconcerned with original or complex stories. Instead, Kinoshita takes two simple premises and shows his incredible ability to ratchet up the melodrama and insanity. Marked by a frenetic camera with intense close-ups and quick cuts, these films never really let up once the action is set in motion.

And that takes no time at all. In my limited repository of film knowledge, A Legend or Was It?, the superior of the two discussed here, might be comparable to something by Samuel Fuller, like 40 Guns. In 1945, a family (the eldest brother and sister shown above) escapes from Tokyo during the war to a secluded, insular village in the mountains. The village is safe geographically, but has felt the effects of war, relinquishing both men and food to the Japanese army. There is a mutual dislike between the new family, who find the townspeople hostile, and the townspeople, who seem to distrust outsiders from the city. The family does receive support from the mayor, whose son is set to marry their daughter Kieko. But when her brother, Hideyuki, who is returning from the war, meets the mayor's son, he recognizes him as a soldier he witnessed raping and killing innocents in China. Hideyuki tells Kieko, the wedding is off, and all hell breaks loose.

The two young woman at the center of the story- Kieko (Shima Iwashita) and Yuri (Mariko Kaga)-  dominate the film every time they appear on screen. They deliver amazing performances that propel their characters' vilification at the hands of the simple and pathetic men who surround them. Another  highlight is Kinoshita as an image-maker. The dynamic camerawork makes this melodrama quite a thriller. Kinoshita mixes intense close-ups with long shots that incorporate the beautiful landscape of the mountains the way great Westerns do. And lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the music, which I can only describe as if a drone artist appropriated carnival-type music (maybe like The Savage Young Taterbug?). It's bizarre and sometimes in tonal opposition to what's going on narratively, but it adds a distinct nightmarish quality to the film. This is really one of the best I've seen in some time.

Woman, though an inferior film, only added to my opinion of Kinoshita. The premise here is actually more bare-bones and the running time shorter (67 minutes). Toshiko, a dancer, gets asked by Tadashi, with whom she has a conflicted romantic history, to run away with him. Tadashi has just committed a highly publicized burglary and is already on the run. Toshiko at turns goes along with him and tries to ditch him.

Until an explosive conclusion, much of the film is just a back-and-forth psychological interrogation between the two, largely centered around whether Tadashi can really change his criminal ways (he can't). We're somewhat sympathetic because he says his problems all began when he returned from the war. Their interplay is engaging on a performance-level, but Kinoshita's formal inventiveness makes it extra noteworthy. The close-ups are even closer than those in A Legend or Was It?, as Kinoshita zeroes in on characters' mouths and teeth (alongside a peculiar interest in their feet). In the middle of dialogue, he will suddenly cut to shots of the sea (both of these films make good use of their location). And he uses some low-angle shots, especially during a musical performance, that are reminiscent of Orson Welles. Woman doesn't leave the same impression as A Legend or Was It?, but Kinoshita already strikes me as a filmmaker who struggles to make films that aren't worthwhile.