Old Yorker

  • Tokyo Twilight

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tokyo boshoku

    Yasujiro Ozu  (1957)

    The season is winter and the hour, as the title predicts, often late – the outdoor scenes mostly take place at night.  The outwardly dark weather is unusual for Yasujiro Ozu, so are the abortion and suicides strands of this family melodrama, and that may explain the lukewarm reception of Tokyo Twilight on its original release.  The usual visual formalities are still in evidence, though, along with examples of the Japanese domestic and social routines that typically feature in Ozu’s cinema.  For much of the film, these conventions serve to increase the accumulating tension of the narrative.  It’s only in the climax that the melodrama occasionally seems, to western eyes at least, melodrama of a more familiar kind – but even then there are dissonant notes.  As Akiko (Ineko Arima) lies in hospital following a suicide attempt, her elder sister Takako (Setsuko Hara) and their father Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) are at her bedside but neither is tearful and Takako seems hardly sympathetic:  ‘Pull yourself together!’ she scolds Akiko (that’s what the English subtitle says anyway).  The injunction is fruitless:  Akiko dies – though not on screen.  Her death is reported by Takako to the sisters’ mother Kisako (Isuzu Yamada) and comes as a shock not only to her but to the film’s audience too.  Kisako, who walked out on the family years ago and whose unexpected return to Tokyo is an important plot trigger, subsequently sees Takako again, calling at the family home to bring flowers for Akiko’s funeral.  Kisako then prepares to leave the city with Sakai (Nobuo Nakamura), her second husband.  As their train waits in the station, Kisako watches through the window in the hope that her surviving daughter will reappear at the last minute.  Although Sakai assures Kisako this won’t happen, viewers raised on Hollywood product of the 1940s and 1950s will realise that, like Kisako, they’re hoping against hope for a happy ending.  Sakai is correct:  Takako doesn’t turn up.

    The long-past estrangement of Kisako and Shukichi  is the seminal event in the story (written by Ozu and Kogo Noda), the start of a pattern of loss and separation that has developed in the years that followed and that continues in the film’s present tense.  Kisako’s and Shukichi’s three children were raised by and experienced the love of only one parent.  Takako’s and Akiko’s brother subsequently died.  Near the start of the film, Takako, who is married with an infant daughter, leaves her husband Yasuo (Kinzo Shin) and, with her child, moves back into Shukichi’s house, where Akiko, who is at secretarial college, also still lives.  Shukichi’s sister Shigeko (Haruko Sugimura) is an enthusiastic but ineffectual matchmaker:  Akiko already has a boyfriend, Kenji (Masami Taura), a student who hangs out with his friends at a local mahjong parlour.  Akiko discovers that she is pregnant.  When she goes to the mahjong parlour to look for Kenji, she gets into conversation with the proprietress, who shows a surprising knowledge of Akiko’s family.  The proprietress is Kisako.  Takako guesses as much when Akiko tells her about the encounter, before going to the mahjong parlour herself to confirm her suspicions.  Akiko realises that Kenji doesn’t love her and decides to have an abortion.  Although Kisako has begged Takako not to reveal her identity to Akiko, this happens, resulting in a confrontation between the mother and her younger daughter in which Akiko berates Kisako for walking out on the family when she was a toddler.  An argument between Akiko and Kenji in a noodle bar swiftly follows.  Akiko rushes out of the bar and, at a nearby intersection, into the path of a train, sustaining what prove to be fatal injuries.  (Ozu characteristically makes clear that this was a suicide attempt by means less direct than actually showing it.)  Akiko’s death in effect halts the succession of break-ups within or involving the members of her family.  Takako, anxious to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself, decides that she and her child will return to Yasuo.  She will try again to make the marriage work.

    It’s simply but strongly eloquent that Sukichi and Kisako are never on screen together – nor are Takako and Masuo.  A good deal of sake is downed in the course of the film:  from the opening scene, when Shukichi calls in at a bar on his way home from the bank where he works; through the sequences in at the mahjong parlour and the noodle bar where Akiko and Kenji have their final argument; to the hip flask that Sakai drinks from and offers to his wife as they await the start of their long train journey from Tokyo to Hokkaido.  There are fine, persuasive details throughout – perhaps especially in the hospital episode that follows Akiko’s attempted suicide:  the persistent sound of a dripping tap; the yawning receptionist; the noodle bar owner (Kamatari Fujiwara), who did the decent thing by coming to the hospital but who takes the opportunity, while he’s there, of talking up his noodles.  After seeing Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoon, it’s hard to watch Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara without thinking of their father-daughter partnerships in those other films.  Ryu’s emotionally supple acting means that once again he’s the outstanding member of the cast.  Hara, as before, supplies a remarkable, melancholy image in individual shots although her movement from one emotion to another is relatively laborious.  According to Joan Mellen’s 1976 book The Waves at Genji’s Door – Japan Through Its Cinema, ‘Abortion, for Ozu, is symbolic of a social disease afflicting all of Japan after the war’.  The other kinds of family fracture dramatised in Tokyo Twilight may also express his regret at developing modern trends.  Yet the film artist in Yasujiro Ozu still trumps the social commentator, even in this melodramatic context.  He doesn’t treat any one of his characters dismissively.  My resistance to his supposed masterwork Tokyo Story got me off to a very slow start with Ozu but the more films of his that I see, the more I now want to see.

    10 November 2017

  • The Florida Project

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Baker (2017)

    It’s a good title.  The ‘Florida project’ was the working name for what became the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida – aka Disney World.  The setting of Sean Baker’s story is an extended-stay motel in nearby Kissimmee.  Even though this isn’t a publicly-funded development, its badly off residents introduce a hint of ‘housing project’ into the film’s title. The motel’s name – the Magic Castle – has a Disney ring to it.  One of the strongest elements of The Florida Project, which Baker wrote with Chris Bergoch, is the Magic Castle’s proximity to, and distance from, Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  As a birthday treat for the six-year-old heroine Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), she and her friend Jancey (Valeria Cotto) are taken by Moonee’s mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) to watch the Disney World fireworks – from outside the Magic Kingdom.  Its realms are geographically close but financially inaccessible.  The finale of The Florida Project (a two-stage nod to the climax of Les quatre cents coups) makes complete emotional sense.  Halley’s variously erratic behaviour leads the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) to separate Moonee from her mother and take the child into care.  At the last minute, Moonee breaks free from a DCF officer and dashes to Futureland, the neighbouring motel where Jancey lives with her family.  Jancey grabs Moonee’s hand and the pair keep running – all the way to, and into, Disney World.

    The visuals are also a strength of The Florida Project, as they were of Baker’s previous feature, Tangerine (2015).  He and his DoP Alexis Zabe don’t convey the so-near-and-yet-so-far relationship between Disney World and motel world simply by giving the latter a grim appearance.  Bobby (Willem Dafoe), the motel manager, gets the whole exterior of the place painted mauve – a shade surprisingly easy on the eye (it’s closer to the violet than the reddish-purple end of the mauve spectrum), even though you wouldn’t want to live close to it in reality.  The motel’s name isn’t merely ironic either – Moonee and her friends have plenty of low-budget fun and pleasure around the Magic Castle.  It’s a disenchanted place too, though.  A series of short scenes shows Moonee playing with her toys in the bath, and seemingly in a world of her own.  In the last of these scenes Sean Baker reveals exactly when the child’s bath time takes place.  It’s synchronised with Halley’s use of the adjoining bedroom to receive male visitors who help pay the rent.

    As I watched the film, I was struck by Baker’s non-judgmental description of his characters but I struggled to match him.   I was sorry Halley’s lack of funds forced her into desperate measures but two hours in her company is a long time, even from the safety of a cinema seat.  The Florida Project is full of lively incident but a little of kids behaving badly always goes a long way with me (and there’s plenty here).  On reflection, I’m not sure that Baker is as impartial as I first thought.  In presenting Halley as a loving but irresponsible mother, he tends to imply that both qualities are positive:  that Moonee can run wild – be more of a true child, the film seems to say – thanks to Halley’s fecklessness.  Perhaps Baker doesn’t mean to make this connection.  There are other struggling-to-make-ends-meet, caring but less undisciplined mothers in evidence – Ashley (Mela Murder), whom Halley falls out with and physically assaults, Jancey’s mother (Sonya McCarter).  Compared with Halley, however, these two women are at the margins of the story.  It’s striking too that Baker doesn’t follow up the shocking moment when one of Halley’s clients needs to use the bathroom and, on opening its door, is upset to discover Moonee inside.  Elsewhere, Moonee is lively and inquiring but she never asks her mother who the strange man was.

    Sean Baker gets remarkable performances from the children in the cast, especially Brooklynn Prince.  Moonee is anything but a crybaby so it’s affecting when she finally bursts into tears, as she makes her desperate escape to Jancey’s motel.  Except for Willem Dafoe, the adult actors with larger roles are virtual unknowns – or were unknown to me, at any rate.  (Caleb Landry Jones makes a very brief appearance as Bobby’s son Jack and Macon Blair has a cameo as a tourist.)   Dafoe’s presence in the cast creates something of an imbalance.  His acting is the opposite of scenery chewing but his familiarity means you’re aware of it as acting even so.  In comparison, the other grown-ups are less like actors than like actual people whose behaviour the camera is recording.  Dafoe interacts well with everyone he shares the screen with, including, in one amusing little scene, three cranes (birds rather than machinery).  There’s a less delightful but nonetheless compelling exchange with a creepy elderly man (Carl Bradfield) hanging round the motel – a paedophile on the prowl, Bobby reckons.  We learn that his marriage to Jack’s mother has broken up but Bobby, in conversation, doesn’t give a lot away.   The regret etched in his face and the doggedness of his bearing, however, say more than is in the script.   Willem Dafoe, in other words, conjures up a sense of Bobby’s past life and makes him magnetic in a way that no one else on screen is.  Thanks to his acting skills, the increasingly exasperated but unfailingly conscientious Bobby becomes the heart of The Florida Project though I’m not sure this is what Sean Baker intended.

    10 November 2017

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