The Wasteful Things

We've just watched a Japanese movie called I Wish. That's the English title, of course (in Japanese the film is called Miracle).  The cover quotes the New York Daily News, who says it's Extraordinary.  The Guardian calls it A Gem of World Cinema.  And there are more lines from other sources telling us how brilliant and revelatory and delicate and observant it is....and so on.

Well, it's quite a delight, but extraordinary it isn't. Its script is very loose, and the long-awaited 'miracles' at the end of the movie turn out to be something of a fizzer. Sure, there's a more settled feeling in the air amongst those participating as the credits roll, but to all intents and purposes, life goes on pretty much as before.

The film is about two young brothers (perhaps eight and ten, and played by real life brothers) who live in separate cities, one with his mother and grandparents, the other with his muso father. The father is the 'problem' according to the mother, and there's a brief flashback about halfway through showing what life was like for all members of the family before the split. The two boys have telephone contact with each other, and after it's announced that the new bullet train will be starting up in a couple of months' time, the boys decide on asking for a miracle at the moment when the northbound train passes the southbound train. Quite why this is significant isn't clear, but then a lot of things in the movie aren't clear: you just accept them because you don't have a choice. The director, Kore-Eda Hirokazu, isn't into explaining things. Certainly you can pick up most points in some measure - and no doubt there's a bit of a cultural gap to cross - but Hirokazu just drops stuff before us and shows us something and leaves us to deal with it.  Because the movie has an immense amount of natural charm, and because the younger boy in particular is an absolute delight, with a face that lights up at the drop of a hat, and because there's no real villain in the picture, or any sense of an evil world out there (even the smoking volcano is fairly benign) you enjoy the movie as it wends its quiet way along (it's 128 minutes).  There's enough of a story to keep us interested, and the performances from the kids - the two young leads, their assorted companions, and various other children who get a few seconds of screen time - are so natural and enjoyable that the fact that there's little else going on barely matters.

There are a number of adults in the picture, but their lives are almost secondary to the children's, and for the most part they're a pretty amiable lot (the squabble flashback between the parents is the only grim note in the piece). The two grandparents (a taciturn grandfather and a grandmother with lots of hand-me-down information) and the elderly couple who suddenly find themselves landed with seven children late in the movie, are genial and pleasant people. Even the grandfather's drinking companions are played more for comedy than anything else. Compare the elderly people in some older Japanese movies, such as Ozu's Tokyo Story, for a quite different picture of the older generation.

The film doesn't disappoint, in spite of the hype on the cover. If you're prepared to take the movie as it comes, you'll enjoy it. Much of what happens skims across the surface like a breeze. And perhaps that's the director's intention. At one point, the father says to his younger son: "There's room in this world for wasteful things. Imagine if everything had meaning. You'd choke."  A lot of the detail in this film is trivial, seemingly unimportant; even the events are small-scale. But the father's point is that not everything has to be significant - children, for instance, are often seen as unimportant - and Hirokazu has managed to make something of considerable value out of 'wasteful' things.

Extras disks

Two of the three DVDs I borrowed from the Library last week had an extra disk with them, with 'additional features.'   I wonder how many people actually ever watch all these extras?   When we bought the DVD packs for the Lord of the Rings series I remember watching the additional material, though in fact a lot of it was excess to requirements: it added little to the movies, except for extreme film buffs (and I do enjoy background information about movies).  Some of these 'extras' are about as much good to me as Gurkha cigars.  Not that I've got anything against cigars, per se, but I've never smoked, and don't plan on doing it now, and cigars, Gurkha or otherwise, have no real appeal.  I actually quite like the smell of cigars (which for some reason my fingers insist on typing as cigards (?)) and I flatted for a while with a young man who smoked Gauloises, which have a distinctive smell of their own too, but I never fancied actually getting on and smoking them, just because I liked the smell.

Chishû Ryû on left 

Well, that was an interesting digression.  The extras disk that came with Tokyo Story included a documentary called Tokyo Ga by Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker.  It was interesting, but I got interrupted about half way through, and didn't go back to it, because while Wenders came at his visit to Tokyo in his inimitable fashion, he took his time about doing so, and there were long sections in the doco where very little actually happened.   Yes, it allowed us to just 'live' in the moment and observe, but it didn't really impact on Ozu's movie to any great extent, and sometimes seemed indulgent.  It did help in letting me know in advance what patinko is (it's a pinball game that's played obsessively in Japan) so that when it was mentioned in Still Walking,

I knew what they were talking about. And there was a scene where Chishû Ryû, who played the father in Tokyo Story (and also appeared in 52 out of the 54 films Ozu made!) went to Ozu's (anonymous) grave and poured water over the gravestone. I'm not sure what this signifies in Japanese culture, but the doing of it turned up again in Still Walking, twice.

Incidentally Ryû was only 49 when he played the old man in his late sixties in Tokyo Story. Apparently it wasn't uncommon for Ozu to use him to play men of a variety of ages. The interview with Ryû in Wenders' documentary is perhaps the most interesting thing in it; at least, it was the most interesting thing in the section I actually saw. Ryû came across as a surprisingly humble actor, a man who'd understood Ozu to be his mentor throughout his career (even though there was only a year difference in their ages), and whom he trusted implicitly. If Ozu said he wanted a scene played this way, Ryû would play it that way. He didn't ask questions about motivation or backstory, he just got on and did as he was told, and the result was always effective. Ozu seldom did many takes on a scene; he knew exactly what he wanted (he would even attend to the details of the set and the actors' clothing until they were to his satisfaction), and, somewhat like Hitchcock, he had the movie planned in his head long before filming actually began. What he 'saw' is what appeared on the screen. Nevertheless, for one scene in which Ryû appeared, he remembered that they had around twenty rehearsals, and some twenty takes. Ozu commented at the end that Ryû didn't seem to be quite on form that day, but it was said as a matter of fact rather than as a criticism. Ryû remarked in the interview that he wasn't that great an actor; he had none of Ozu's intellectual capacity.

So, yes, occasionally an 'extras' disk does have something of real value in it!  All right, I eat my words.

Tokyo Story

I watched Yasujiro Ozu's movie, Tokyo Story, on DVD a couple of days ago.  It dates from 1953, and I kept having the strangest feeling that I'd seen it before, though I certainly don't remember doing so.  But at the beginning, in particular, and occasionally throughout, there would be a shot that clicked as being one I'd seen in the past.  Some of them seemed strikingly familiar, yet the film as a whole doesn't ring any particular bells.

Be that as it may, this film comes with a considerable reputation: Sight and Sound is quoted as saying (on the DVD cover) 'One of the three greatest films of all time...' (unfortunately we don't know what the other two are, though critics 'worldwide' voted it amongst the top five best films ever made); BBC Films says, 'A simple story simply told...widely considered one of the great classics of world cinema.'   And Halliwell, that doyen of movie-listing, puts it as Number One in his Top 1000 movies.  With all that, like it or not, you're coming to a masterpiece, when you sit down to view this movie.   And it's certainly a striking movie.  Shot after shot is visually satisfying; there are many shots where there's hardly a human in sight, but they add to the overall atmosphere.  The cast is uniformly good, right down to the bit players, and the story, for all its simplicity, is moving and detailed.

I saw it in several bits, which didn't help its reputation, and, as a result, found it longer than it actually is -it runs to 136 minutes.  Nevertheless, even interruptions couldn't stem its strength, and it's a movie worth watching, and one I'd probably watch again.

The story is straightforward: an elderly couple take the long journey from their small coastal village to Tokyo, in order to see their older son and daughter.  The younger daughter lives with them at home, still, and we only see her at the beginning and the end.  There is another younger son (living in a town closer to his parents) who doesn't appear at all in the movie until more than three-quarters of the way through - and comes as a surprise.  We thought we knew who all the family members were.  Then there is the daughter-in-law - her husband was killed in the war, some eight years before the story takes place.   There are sundry other in-laws and grandchildren (one of them the most obnoxious you'll find in a movie).   The older daughter's husband has no opinions of his own, and all his ideas are put aside by his wife: there is no doubt she considers herself the future matriarch of the family.  What's more, she can never open her mouth without grumbling about something, or without causing offence, however hard she tries.  The older son is a doctor whose wife does as she's told, and struggles to control the obnoxious grandchild mentioned above.

Both the older daughter and son work from home, so their lives are often interrupted with work.  Worse, the elderly parents are seen as just another interruption, and neither the son or daughter can wait to move them on to someone else, or to a hotel by the sea.

The only one of the family who is different is the widowed daughter-in-law; try as she might, she can't help showing love to her mother and father-in-law, and takes time off from work to show them the city, and cares for them quietly.  She is the one most affected at the end of the story by the elderly mother's sudden death.  

So it's mostly a study of people - and not just the family; there are a few other minor characters who appear for short periods, notably the elderly father's old friends who live in Tokyo and with whom he goes on a drinking binge (for the first time in many years).  Of course his older daughter is appalled, especially when he arrives home drunk - with one of the other drinkers - and assumes that she'll put them both up for the night.

Much of the movie proceeds at a quiet pace - there's no 'action' a la Hollywood, no surprising denouement.  Everything we learn about these people we learn early in their first scenes, and there are only occasional further revelations.  So what makes it so watchable?  It's hard to know, except that people-watching is something we all do if we're willing to give the time over to it, and the people here, for all their ordinariness, are immensely watchable.  The mother and father are a lovely couple, well-past the quarrels and difficulties of their earlier lives; the children are a mixed bunch and their selfishness is a bit surprising, but perhaps not as much as we think.  The one shining star, the daughter-in-law, may be a bit too good to be true, and yet she doesn't come across that way.  We believe in her, and her modesty, humility, generosity, and warmth, which are consistent in every appearance until the very end, when she breaks down because of her mother-in-law's death.  The fact that her husband had been somewhat brutal to her should have put her against this family, yet she has somehow surpassed all that, and is even resigned to loneliness, if necessary.  (Her parents-in-law are both insistent that she should forget her former husband and make herself available to a new man.)  It's interesting that Ozu uses one of his particular techniques with this character, that of showing her almost full-on when she's speaking to another character (especially the older couple).  This has the effect of making her seem to be speaking to us, the audience.

But beyond the people there is the detail in the movie: each house is a little box full of all manner of household items carefully placed not only for the residents, but to delight the eye of the viewer.  Each garden with its rustic tables and particular flowers and urns and decoration is part of an overall vision. The photography is the best of black and white, although it lacks that sharpness of definition that seems superior.  Interestingly enough, the music has a distinct Western feel to it; though there's a element of the Japanese style, the score could easily be used in a film made in the USA or Europe.

I've got the movie out for a week....I may try and watch it all in one go, if I get the chance!