Old Yorker

  • Patriotism

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Yūkoku

    Yukio Mishima (1966)

    Yukio Mishima’s short story ‘Patriotism’ was first published in 1961 and its author ‘turned filmmaker for two days in April 1965 to shoot an adaptation of his … story’.  That quote is from Tony Rayns’s notes for the Criterion Collection edition of Mishima’s film – ditto this summary of its first screenings and reception:

    ‘[Mishima] shot and postproduced the film in secret and premiered it at a private screening at the Cinémathèque française in Paris in September 1965.  Its first public screening was at the Tours Film Festival (at the time, the world’s most prestigious showcase for short films) in January 1966. … When news of Mishima’s film broke in Japan, the response was surprise and intense curiosity. … The film was released theatrically in 1966; it’s still the only high-grossing short film ever distributed in Japan. …’

    Following Mishima’s suicide in November 1970, his widow ‘requested that all existing copies of the film be destroyed … in 2005 the original negatives were discovered in perfect condition, in a tea box at a warehouse at [the Mishimas’] home in Tokyo …The film was released on DVD in Japan in 2006 and then in the US by the Criterion Collection in 2008’ (Wikipedia).  On a friend’s recommendation, I watched Patriotism (or The Rite of Love and Death) on YouTube[1] and found it amazing.

    The twenty-eight-minute, black-and-white film comprises five scenes and features just two characters – Lieutenant Takeyama (played by Mishima) and his wife Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka).  A textual prologue explains that Takeyama was a member of a secret society of young military officers whose attempted but eventually unsuccessful coup d’état in February 1936 resulted in Tokyo being placed under martial law.  His comrades in the group, which claimed loyalty to the emperor but tried to oust his government, had decided that newlywed Takeyama should not take part in the coup.  The mutineers face capital punishment while Takeyama remains a member of the imperial palace guard.  Morally compelled to choose between loyalty to the emperor and loyalty to his condemned-to-death friends, Takeyama decides to kill himself by seppuku.  Reiko agrees to witness his suicide then to follow suit.

    The five scenes describe, in turn, Reiko preparing for her husband’s homecoming, Takeyama’s return and announcement of his decision to die, the couple’s final love-making, the lieutenant’s suicide, and finally Reiko’s.  Except for the film’s final shot, in a Zen Buddhist garden, each scene takes place on a Noh theatre stage with a kanji painting backdrop but the stylisation doesn’t stop the action being dynamic and involving.  The fourth scene, which shows Takeyama’s self-disembowelment, is both the most technically remarkable and the most notorious.  According to Tony Rayns, ‘the aestheticized but realistically detailed presentation of a traditional bushi suicide caused a sensation. Some in the audience fainted …’   Yet Mishima, in honouring what he considers a noble, purifying act, achieves a fine balance between gruesome detail (blood and guts) and suggestive elision (the lather of saliva around Takeyama’s mouth), and not every detail is gruesome.  The camera is often on the face of Reiko, who watches with concern, tears and resignation.

    Such poignancy is no more than you expect after the very impressive third scene, introduced by text explaining that the lovers ‘are able for the first time in their lives to reveal unabashedly their most secret desires and passions.  First the Lieutenant and then Reiko, who has lost all her shyness in the face of death, bids loving farewell to every smallest detail of the other’s flesh’.  In sequences that stand comparison with the love scenes in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Mishima and Yoshiko Tsuruoka, with the help of Kimio Watanabe’s camerawork, truly embody the written words.  And the episode, because of what is to follow and though beautiful, is persistently underscored by one’s awareness of a central theme in Mishima’s work – the connection between erotic love and violent death.

    The version of Patriotism that I watched is accompanied by a new score by the American songwriter and record producer Aaron Embry.  My first reaction was to feel Embry’s score, although dramatically effective, served to distract – because it’s Western music – from the experience of watching a specifically Japanese ritual.   In fact, this is essentially faithful to Mishima’s original choice of music, the ‘Liebestod’ from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde – a choice that also reflects his broader intentions in filming Patriotism.  Tony Rayns notes that Mishima ‘wanted to create a splash of international notoriety to match the reputation he had already built in Japan’.  He went about this conscientiously, handwriting the scrolling captions quoted in the previous paragraph in English, French and German, as well as Japanese.

    Patriotism is based on an actual coup attempt, the Ni Ni-Roku Jiken of 26th February 1936.  Despite this historical setting, Mishima is dramatising what he saw as the terminal decline of militarism in post-World War II Japan.  When you watch his film on YouTube, the accompanying menu offers a Japanese television interview with him, also from 1966, in which Mishima recalls his reactions to his country’s surrender in August 1945, deplores the ascendancy of Western materialism in Japan in the twenty years since, and reflects on the prospect and meaning of death.  Although he’s cogently articulate, it’s easier to take exception to his ideology when this is put into words.  His film’s potent images are harder to resist, not least because the circumstances in which Mishima’s own life ended give Patriotism, in retrospect, the added intensity of personal testament.

    6 June 2022

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO-w-cn-pJM

     

  • L’argent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Bresson (1983)

    A few years ago I read a collection of Tolstoy’s shorter fiction, including The Forged Coupon.  I found the book unrewarding hard work and remember little about this particular story but the information in the opening titles that it inspired L’argent confirmed expectations of a Christian morality tale to follow.  This is Robert Bresson after all (and in both senses of that phrase:  L’argent was his final work).  Bresson’s screenplay omits the second part of the source novella, in which Tolstoy describes a domino effect of redeeming deeds to complement the first part’s chain of wrongdoings that lead to murder.  The result is a tough watch but never the slog that late Tolstoy tends to be.  L’argent is bleakly and succinctly impressive.

    Teenager Norbert receives pocket money from his wealthy father and asks for more to pay a debt to a schoolmate.  The father refuses, as does Norbert’s mother.  His friend gives him a forged five-hundred-franc note, which they take to a photograph shop and use to buy a photo frame.  It’s the third time counterfeit money has been accepted there in the space of a few days and the narked shop owner decides to get rid of all three forgeries at the first opportunity – provided by Yvon, a young delivery driver.  Yvon, who receives the notes in payment for heating oil he delivers to the shop, is the protagonist of L’argent.

    He tries to pay for a meal with the money but the restaurant manager realises it’s forged and calls the police.  Yvon is arrested, charged and, in the dock, hears staff of the photo shop lie to the court that they’ve never seen him before.  Although he’s not sent to jail, Yvon loses his job.  In desperate need of funds, he agrees to drive a getaway car for a gang of bank robbers.  Police foil the robbery and Yvon is arrested again.  This time, he gets a jail sentence, of three years.  While in prison, he learns of the death of his only child and that his wife has decided to leave him.  Yvon tries but fails to take his own life.

    In the same jail is Lucien, the shop assistant who perjured himself at Yvon’s first trial.  Lucien had been cheating his employers by marking up prices while they were out of the shop and pocketing the difference.  He was found out and fired but had made copies of the shop keys and robbed the shop’s safe before embarking on a larger-scale criminal enterprise – a cash card-skimming operation.  He’s eventually arrested and jailed.  His invitation to Yvon to join him in a prison break triggers a key exchange.  Yvon replies, ‘I’d kill you rather than go with you’.  Absurdly proud that his crimes didn’t involve violence, Lucien reminds Yvon that ‘Neither of us are killers – we have no one on our conscience’.  ‘You have me on your conscience,’ says Yvon.

    After his eventual release from prison, Yvon kills and robs a couple who run a hotel.  He sees an elderly woman outside a bank and follows her back home.  Despite her alcoholic husband’s objections, she lets Yvon stay in their house.  The woman is kindly, Christian and a drudge exploited and exhausted by her husband and other resident family members.  ‘What are you waiting for, a miracle?’ Yvon asks her.  He uses an axe to murder the woman’s exploiters and then kills her.  In a bar, he confesses to a police officer his violent crimes, and is escorted away.  Other people in the place watch him go.

    According to Tom Milne, whose (July 1983) review in Monthly Film Bulletin was the handout for this BFI screening, Bresson described the film’s climax as ‘a routing of the forces of evil’.  In an attempt to explain this ‘startling interpretation’, Milne goes on to note that ‘the meaning of Yvon’s final murders is inescapable: deliverance for the woman, retribution for society, expiation for his own membership of that society’.  I struggle to understand Bresson’s Catholic theology in this context and Milne’s favoured preposition (‘retribution for society’?) but there’s no denying the dramatic impact of L’argent.

    As usual, Bresson worked with a cast who hadn’t acted professionally before.  Some are convincing and expressive – notably Christian Patey in the lead and Sylvie van den Elsen as Yvon’s benefactress and final victim – but all perform with a lack of histrionics that, although their lack of detailed characterisation limits the film at one level, has the effect of making its moral seriousness more salient.  Bresson’s almost complete eschewal of music has impact, too.  There is none, except for the Bach piano piece played by the alcoholic husband just before his death.  One query I’ve not been able to settle through a quick online search.  Norbert’s father is played by André Cler, whom I thought I spotted again, later on.  Is the father, who could be considered the cause of all that happens subsequently, also the prison warden  that tells Yvon, ‘A man who never killed may be more dangerous than a murderer’?

    5 June 2022

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