Old Yorker

  • Nothing But A Man

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Roemer (1964)

    Now being released for the first time in this country, Nothing But a Man is an impressive combination of documentary and drama.  It has, at least in long retrospect, a mythical quality.  That might seem to imply self-conscious and perhaps self-important film-making but neither ‘self-‘ is in evidence here.  The movie is very well written, by the director Michael Roemer and Robert M Young.  The relationship of the protagonist Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon) and Josie Dawson (Abbey Lincoln), the girl he marries, is exceptionally convincing at every stage.  The title may sound too resonantly humanistic but it’s fitting.  Roemer, who has made only one other feature film (The Plot Against Harry in 1969), describes the typical experience of a black working man in Alabama in the early 1960s, and the powerful and various forces of racism that he’s up against.  Duff, a rail worker at the start of the story, is both principled and bloody-minded enough to resist these forces and to make life more difficult for himself, and others, as a result.  His energy curdles into anger with Josie and physically violent treatment of her.  You understand why Josie’s patience and quiet understanding makes matters worse when Duff is boiling with fury and frustration.  Abbey Lincoln, best known as a jazz singer, has a calm which is very expressive – and which she makes you believe is something that Josie, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a preacher who’s ‘black on the outside, white on the inside’, has willed.  The different ways in which Duff and Josie express their excitement with each other during their courtship is beautiful.  So is the powerful but unstressed intimacy between them – both physical and emotional – at the start of their marriage.   When Duff loses a subsequent job as a building worker, he takes it out by teasing the couple’s cat in a nasty, scary way, and Josie tells him off.  Perhaps because (needless to say) I found the cat’s treatment upsetting, this seemed by the end of the film to be a strong foreshadowing of how Duff mistreats Josie later on.

    Duff has a horror of turning into one of the black men he says he’s seen all his life – doing nothing or drinking themselves to death, as Duff’s own father Will (Julius Harris) does in the course of Nothing But a Man.  Duff is estranged both from Will and from his own son, from an earlier failed marriage.  It could be argued that this set-up gives Duff too conveniently ready-made an opportunity to learn the error of his, and his father’s, ways but the fragile hopefulness of the film’s ending is earned and genuinely moving.  There is a superb sequence in a bar in Birmingham, when Duff first goes to see his father and meets Lee (Gloria Foster), the woman who lives with and looks after Will.  The three of them stand side by side drinking at the bar and Will, through a very few scornfully aggressive words, shows how hopeless his life – and life with him – is.  He gets angry and goes off.  Duff and Lee are left defeated – she in shame, he in embarrassment – but, while Will is out of the picture, they dance.  Roemer then shows the trio back at the bar – in exactly the same positions as before but with something having changed.  During that dance, you feel Lee’s sense of the more hopeful life that might be shared with Duff.   You feel it again near the end of the film, after Will’s funeral, as Lee walks along the cemetery path with Duff until he heads off and Lee retraces her steps along the path.

    In the first part of the Birmingham bar sequence, Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Heat Wave’ is playing on the jukebox.   This is the second time it’s been heard and the contrast with the emotional atmosphere of the first time, on Duff and Josie’s first date, is effective.   Nothing But a Man features a Motown soundtrack which is sometimes odd in the explicit aptness of the numbers:  Josie asks Duff to teach her how to box and their playful sparring is accompanied by ‘You Beat Me To the Punch’ by Mary Wells.  This is another marvellous scene:  the sparring is both a kind of foreplay and an anticipation of the violence that will scar the marriage later on.  Mary Wells’s voice is interrupted by a row from the porch of a middle-aged couple in the house opposite – the woman complaining how useless and idle the man is and putting the wind up Duff in the process.

    The playing of Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln is incredibly truthful and most of the actors in supporting roles are good too – especially Gloria Foster and Yaphet Kotto (in a small part but he registers strongly).  Stanley Green as Josie’s father is too deliberate, though:  his acting belongs in a different, inferior kind of melodrama.  A sequence at the Reverend Dawson’s church is breathtaking, however:  it has compelling documentary interest yet the members of the congregation, although they appear only briefly, are intensely individual.  The vileness of the racist whites is insistent but not, I think, overdone.   Nothing But a Man depicts a society which has gone in terms of racist structures.  To that extent, it feels like an important historical record – but you’re always aware, watching the film, that not enough has changed in terms of the socio-economic realities of life for many African-Americans and the potential and actual consequences of those realities.  There are great details like the art work on the walls of Duff and Josie’s home – a print of a Van Gogh self-portrait beside paintings by kids in Josie’s class.  It’s amazing to think this film was made – by a white man – at the same time as clumsily worthy Hollywood movies about racial issues.

    3 October 2013

  • Norwegian Wood

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Noruwei no Mori

    Tran Anh Hung (2010)

    In Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood, the young protagonist Toru Watanabe is caught up in relationships with two girls, Naoko and Midori.  He knew Naoko from adolescence; when their mutual friend Kizuki committed suicide, Naoko had a breakdown from which she’s never recovered.  Watanabe has to get away; he starts university in Tokyo but without achieving any emotional distance from Naoko.  Midori is also a student at the university.  Her mother is already dead and it transpires that her father is terminally ill but Midori is determinedly undaunted and eccentrically vivacious.  Watanabe’s choice is, in essence, between death and life and Murakami perhaps uses the story to reflect his own snagged feelings about the Japanese psyche – his anger and impatience with its tradition of thanatos getting the better of eros (reflected in the art and the life of a writer like Mishima).   You wouldn’t guess from this description how richly entertaining the book is – and the entertainment is fundamental to Murakami’s thesis:  it’s a realisation of his life-affirming point of view.  The story takes place in the late 1960s and early 1970s and this too is crucial.  Watanabe (Murakami’s contemporary) is a student in Tokyo in the years shortly after the city hosted the 1964 Olympics, when Western pop music and clothes and fast food were increasingly influential, and anti-establishment protests were in vogue too.  I’m not sure how highly Murakami rates any of these but they add to the texture of the lives of Watanabe’s generation.  The novel is full of references to what people are eating and wearing and what they’re hearing on radios and turntables.  (This aspect of the book reminded me of the abundance of cultural detail in The Group.)

    Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation is remarkably lacking in these things (and the student protests are perfunctory background).  Because I love the vibrancy and variety of Murakami’s narrative, I found the film, from a screenplay by the director, infuriatingly monotonous and gloomy – the antithesis of what the novel was about.  (I wasn’t hopeful once I’d seen the trailer.)  Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) is no longer the central consciousness; the events seem to be taking place in the bereft, penumbral, death-bound mind of Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi).  There are some very compelling landscapes in the hills outside Kyoto but their beauty – regardless of the season – is bleakly intimidating.  The hills loom above the asylum where Naoko lives and is befriended and cared for by another patient, an older woman called Reiko (Reika Kirishima).   When Naoko eventually commits suicide and Watanabe is grieving and haunted by dreams of her, he’s lying among and dwarfed by rocks above a crashing sea.  Tran Anh Hung doesn’t juxtapose, let alone balance, this crushing expressionism with existential images of life and movement in Tokyo.  There are hardly any outdoor scenes in the city and the interiors are often as dark-toned as the rooms of Naoko’s morbid habitat.   There are British and American rock and pop songs but this part of the soundtrack feels merely imposed on the material; it has no connection with what we see on the screen.   The real theme music is the elaborately mournful score by Jonny Greenwood.  The only sequences with any tonal variety are the sex scenes, which are composed thoughtfully but are at the same time sensually strong and expressive.

    A week after the Japan earthquake and tsunami, when you catch the front pages of newspapers with features inside about how the Japanese have learned to live with disaster and pessimism is an integral part of the national character, it’s difficult at one level to see the thoroughgoing grimness of the film of Norwegian Wood as false – but it definitely falsifies the source material.  The fact that Watanabe, even when he’s temporarily immersed in metropolitan life and relationships, can’t get Naoko out of his head gives the novel a sustained and intrinsic tension.   In the film this obsession is no longer underlying – it’s never obscured.  In the book, you’ve no doubt that Watanabe enjoys Midori (Kiko Mizuhara)’s company infinitely more than his gruelling visits to Naoko in the asylum, even though she gets in the way of the relationship with Midori going deeper.  Here Naoko is such a dominant influence that her shadow hangs over nearly every moment that Watanabe spends with Midori.  In both book and film, she has to wait for Watanabe to start loving her – wait until Naoko, who can almost never go through with sex with Watanabe (or Kizuki before him), has consummated her relationship with death.  Yet I had the sense reading Norwegian Wood that part of Watanabe was resistant to Naoko’s importance to him – that it was more a case that his world revolved around her than that she was his first and only love.  Tran Anh Hung doesn’t get anything of this complexity.  For what it is, the film is well acted by the four principals but three of these roles have been considerably reduced from the book.  It’s Naoko’s show.

    19 March 2011

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