Film review

  • The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ochazuke no aji

    Yasujiro Ozu (1952)

    Tokyo housewife Taeko Satake (Michiyo Kogure) calls on her friend Aya (Chikage Awashima), who runs a shop in the city centre.  Aya proposes they take a short break at Shuzenji, an out-of-town health spa.  Taeko is keen to go but needs a pretext for absence from home to give her husband, Mokichi.  At Aya’s suggestion, she tells him her niece Setsuko has been taken ill with stomach pains while staying at the spa.  No sooner has Mokichi (Shin Saburi) agreed to the trip than Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima) turns up at the Satakes’ home, a picture of health.  Taeko then substitutes a different invalid, her friend Takako, and heads for Shuzenji – along with Aya, Setsuko and Takako (Yoko Osakura).  As the sake flows, Taeko jokes to the others that Mokichi – ‘Mr Bonehead’ – didn’t get wise to her deception.  When she takes a call from him at the spa, she’s keen to end the conversation as quickly as possible.  Having put the phone down, she instantly picks it up again to order more sake, only to find that the previous call hasn’t disconnected and Mokichi is still on the line.

    These opening scenes of The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice are puzzling or dismaying, depending on what you take from them.  Yasujiro Ozu cuts straight from Taeko deciding on the substitute appendicitis victim to the train carrying her and the others to the spa:  we don’t, in other words, witness Mokichi’s swallowing his wife’s second lie.  Swallow is and isn’t the operative word here.  The morning after the sake party, the women throw food to koi in a pool by their room.  Amused by a fish slower on the uptake than the others, Taeko derisively compares it to Mr Bonehead though the dimwit carp doesn’t even get to ingest.  Ozu and his co-writer Kogo Noda strongly imply that Taeko’s husband believes the Takako story but that’s hard for the viewer to swallow when Mokichi has only just been fed the Setsuko fib.  More credible is that the mild-mannered husband realises his wife’s lying but doesn’t let on.  In which case, is it also possible that Taeko knows he knows – that her derision is a response not to her husband’s gullibility but to his apathy or cravenness?

    The Satakes are from different backgrounds.  Taeko, a Tokyo native, is more sophisticated than her husband, who comes from Nagano and a humbler background.  He’s progressed to a management job in an engineering firm but his wife finds him boring.  Shin Saburi, the standout in a strong cast, is the perfect embodiment of reliable solidity and its shadow side of implacable dullness.  (The several shots of Mokichi poring over his work are especially expressive.)  The couple came together through arranged marriage:  Ozu uses Setsuko’s determined opposition to the arranged marriage she‘s now under family pressure to enter into both to highlight generational difference and to expose the extent of Taeko’s regret and disaffection.

    Setsuko’s intended is glimpsed only briefly, seated beside Taeko at a kabuki performance from which Setsuko absents herself.  This prim, drippy suitor is a comedy character in a film that’s often (and often more subtly) amusing but the principals’ feelings and exchanges are no laughing matter.  Setsuko’s resistance to a ‘feudalistic’ system that prevents a woman’s choosing the man she’s to spend her life with, is stiffened by the impact of hearing Taeko make fun of her husband in the presence of others.  When Taeko insists that Mokichi reprimand Setsuko for skiving off the kabuki date, he does so reluctantly and half-heartedly.  Any schadenfreude Taeko might have got from seeing her niece on the receiving end of conventional expectations around arranged marriage quickly evaporates.  Urged by his wife to scold Setsuko more vigorously, Mochiki replies – in the niece’s presence – that it’s pointless to push her into a union she doesn’t want.   He says this would ‘only create another couple like us’.  His habitual placidity makes Mochiki’s remark all the more devastating.

    In order for Setsuko to serve as a means of reinforcing the divide between her stern aunt and stolid uncle, it’s clearly necessary for them to take the lead in laying down the law to the young woman (who’s in her early twenties).  This is slightly awkward since both Setsuko’s parents are around, albeit her mother is a minor character and her father, Taeko’s brother, is never seen.  (Taeko claims Setsuko is wilful because her parents spoil her although there’s not much evidence of that.)   For the most part, though, the narrative is cleverly constructed.  During the first hour, Taeko and Mokichi share the screen in only one scene yet we always sense, through their moods and words in other sequences, that these are the main characters, and that their unhappy, childless marriage is the film’s chief concern.  At the same time, the scenes they don’t share develop the supporting characters and help to build another of Ozu’s illuminating portraits of Japanese domestic and social life in the early post-war years.

    Green Tea over Rice was released in Japan just a few months after the end of the American occupation, whose influence is regularly in evidence.  The commercial aircraft in the film carry the Pan American Airways logo.  Mokichi’s younger acquaintance Noboru Okada (Koji Tsuruta), known as Non-chan, when he applies for entry to Mokichi’s company, takes an exam in which it’s ‘no surprise’ that the ‘Dulles theory of public finance’ is a main component.  In the Satakes’ kitchen, there’s a drum of Wesson’s cooking oil.  Setsuko’s determined modernity includes a different occidental outlook.  In the opening scene, she and Taeko are in a taxi heading into town, where Setsuko will see a film starring Jean Marais.  Her mother (Kuniko Miyake) expresses concern that her daughter is reading books in translation.

    Setsuko is also the only female playing in the pachinko parlour where she insists on accompanying Mochiki and Non-chan when she should have been watching kabuki with her suitor.  Gambling and sports are a leitmotif, so too various kinds of song.  While pachinko, a baseball game and cycle races appear as enjoyable diversions, Ozu shows them as distractions in more ways than one.  As illustrations of escapist needs, marital snags, or a combination of the two, they strike harsh or melancholy notes.  This is clearly announced in the name of the pachinko parlour – ‘The Bittersweet School of Life’ (which might serve as an alternative title to the film – a good job Ozu went for a less explicit one).  From their seats in the baseball stadium, Taeko, Aya and Takako spot Aya’s husband (Hisao Toake) sitting down nearby with a much younger female companion (Matsuko Shige), whom Aya has never seen before.  An announcement over the public address system then asks Taeko to return home immediately.  The request has been placed by Setsuko, who has learned about her parents’ intentions for an arranged marriage, urgently needs Taeko to bend an ear and is startled by her lack of sympathy.

    People bet on the outcome of the cycle races, just as they hope to win money at pachinko.  Non-chan introduces Mikichi to both and they make two visits to the pachinko parlour.   The older man’s second visit is thoroughly uncomfortable, thanks to his anxiety about Setsuko’s presence there.  The first visit is jollier:  Michiki, who fought in World War II, is surprised to discover that the man who runs the place is Sadao Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), a member of the army unit Michiki headed.  The delighted Sadao insists that Michiki and Non-chan have a drink with him but he’s less cheerful about his present line of work.  When Michiki says he must be doing well financially, Sadao voices doubts that the current pachinko craze will last.  For all his genuine, genial pleasure at seeing his old squad leader again, he sees his peacetime circumstances as sadly reduced.  (Chishu Ryu, in this relatively small part, brings the character vividly to life.)

    Nostalgic for their army days, Sadao sings a song that commemorates corps d’esprit while acknowledging the pain of losing a fellow soldier in action.  Taeko and her companions, on their visit to the Shuzenji spa, sing a more broadly nostalgic love song (‘When the violets were blooming’) together but the legacy of war, in combination with the passage of time, also percolates the first conversation between Michiki and Non-chan in a Tokyo bar:  Michiki recalls his high-school friendship with Non-chan’s elder brother, who was killed in action.  Here too, there’s singing although the song choice isn’t so easy to understand.  Non-chan launches into ‘La donna è mobile’ from Rigoletto – or, at least, into the Verdi tune:  he sings in Japanese and the lyrics aren’t subtitled.

    The drama is consistently gripping but the early deceit(s) shaped my reactions to much of what followed.  If you don’t believe Mokichi believes the Takako lie, you’re liable to see the Satakes’ marriage, from an early stage, as steeped in cynical dissimulation.  That means things can get hardly worse – although they do in terms of conspicuous fractures in the relationship.  After falling out over Setsuko’s behaviour, Taeko – according to what she tells Aya – refuses to speak to Mokichi for days on end.  She breaks her silence to deplore his table manners, as he pours soup over rice before ‘wolfing it down’.  She asks if he’s in the habit of doing this in her absence – a question she directs to the couple’s diligent, likeable housemaid Fumi (Yoko Kosono), who’s deeply embarrassed to witness her master’s dressing-down.  Later, in private, Mokichi tells Taeko he won’t eat this way again but also reminds her that it’s how he was brought up, and that he likes things ‘cosy and down-to-earth’, with ‘no ceremony or affectation’.  He mentions other preferences that he knows his wife detests:  third-class rail travel, which Mochiki finds more relaxing; a brand of cigarettes that aren’t only cheaper but taste better.  Taeko says she’s heard enough and leaves the room.  The following morning, shortly after Mokichi has left for work, she takes herself off to Kobe for a few days, leaving her husband a note that she needs to ‘clear my head’.

    Taeko’s attitude towards her marital problems also causes a rift between her and Aya.  At the start of the film, it’s Aya who first complains about husbands, though she does so good-humouredly, even before she proposes that Taeko invent a reason to go to Shuzenji.  At the spa, Taeko mocks her dull husband; at the baseball match, Aya is made a fool of in public, albeit unwittingly, by her philandering husband.  Aya loses patience when Taeko complains that Mokichi deceived her by concealing that Setsuko had gone to him after abandoning her kabuki date.  Aya reminds Taeko that she’s been selfish and used to getting her own way since they were schoolgirls together; she tells her friend she should be grateful to be married to someone as dependable as Mokichi.  In the same conversation, Aya voices what may be the most disillusioned point of view expressed at any point of the film.  She tells Taeko it’s a sign of a healthy marriage that she and Mokichi still take the trouble to lie to each other.  When a relationship has really broken down, says Aya, the people in it don’t bother to do that.

    On the same morning that Taeko departs for Kobe, where she’ll stay with a friend, Mokichi’s boss asks him to go on a business trip to Uruguay the next day.   As soon as he gets back from the office, Mokichi sends a telegram to his wife, asking her to return home urgently.  He receives no reply and flies to Montevideo the following morning.  Mokichi is seen off at the airport by a crowd of people, including nearly every significant character in the film.  Taeko is highly conspicuous by her absence.  Aya and Takako, who are present, take a very dim view of it.  As the plane takes off, Sadao says, ‘That’s my squad leader gone now’, as if he’ll never see Mokichi again.  This departure scene baffled me:  I could only suppose the mass turnout at the airport was a joke a Japanese viewer would understand.

    Later that day, Taeko comes home and finds out about her husband’s foreign trip.  Aya and Setsuko are waiting there to tell her off for ignoring Mokichi’s telegram and one that Setsuko sent subsequently.  Taeko spends the rest of the day alone in her room, deep in thought.  A technical problem forces Mokichi’s plane to head back to Tokyo; his flight is rescheduled for the following morning and he returns home late in the evening.  With Fumi and their other maid having gone to bed, the Satakes, most unusually, prepare food themselves.  No less unusually, Taeko’s manner towards her husband is now gentle and friendly – once or twice, she even touches him affectionately, as he does her.  Mokichi is hungry but wants just rice and green tea.  As he and Taeko enjoy their food, he reiterates the simple tastes that, in their previous scene together, so infuriated his wife.  She now accepts them, and apologises for the way she’s been behaving.  A smiling Mokichi compares marriage to the pleasures of the well-matched ingredients of the meal they’re eating.

    On the surface, all seems to end well.  Taeko reconciles with Aya, Takako and Setsuko – who now seems free to choose her life partner.  (Ozu’s lack of explanation of how this cultural shift has been achieved calls to mind lines in Philip Larkin’s ‘Annus mirabilis’ – ‘Then all at once the quarrel sank:/Everyone felt the same’.)  It’s been clear for some time that Setsuko and the cheerful, self-confident Non-chan enjoy each other’s company.  The closing scene of The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice shows them going out together – and squabbling, as if to confirm they’re becoming an authentic couple.  In early scenes, each of Setsuko and Non-chan is told, by Aya and Mokichi respectively, that they’re at the best age, in the springtime of their lives.  The last sequence works as a witty, light-hearted affirmation of this but its lack of weight also amounts to an ironic postscript to what’s gone before.

    The film’s penultimate scene is as open to interpretation as its beginning.  It consists largely of Taeko’s account to Aya of the revival of her marriage.  Taeko’s falsehoods get the story underway:  how truthful is she in what she finally tells Aya?  We know that she and Mokichi reconciled over the green tea and rice supper.  We have to decide whether to believe Taeko’s claim that Mokichi described that night as the happiest of his life.  Without acknowledging it’s something Aya has already told her, Taeko informs her friend that what counts most in a marriage is having a reliable husband.  It’s hard to credit that this bitterly disappointed, often dislikeable woman has had an epiphany that will sustain her in the longer term.  Mokichi is now in Montevideo (it’s not clear for how long):  is their new honeymoon period helped by his absence making Taeko’s heart grow fonder?  Is she genuinely contrite, as she told Mokichi she was, or has she decided to make the best of a bad job?  (Not that those two things are mutually exclusive …)   She also tells Aya that Mokichi says he knew, when Taeko went to the spa, she was making up the sick friend story.  He’s advised her to lie more convincingly in future.

    The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice, which comes immediately before Tokyo Story in Ozu’s filmography, is not among his best-known works but I found it more complex and compelling than any other film of his that I’ve so far seen.  (That includes Tokyo Story, though I’m keen now to give that supposed masterpiece another go now.)   As I was writing this note, I kept going back to individual sequences to check things.  After a while, I decided to watch the whole film again before trying to write more.  Ozu must have one of the most distinctive visual styles in cinema history.  This film, photographed in black and white by Yuuharu Atsuta, has an abundance of the director’s trademark static shots of unpeopled rooms to end scenes; but there are also powerful kinetic images, most remarkably when Taeko is making her supposed escape to Kobe but her train is moving through a landscape that seems like an unending metal cage.  The Japanese characters in the opening credits (which, as usual in Ozu, appear against a burlap-like background) are, to these western eyes anyway, remarkably orderly; they might seem to herald a drama whose themes will be similarly cut and dried.  Any such impression foreshadows, rather, the importance of deceptiveness in what’s to come in this richly ambiguous film.

    21 July 2020

  • The Vast of Night

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrew Patterson (2019)

    This science-fiction mystery was made quickly and relatively cheaply, which could explain why its several unusual features include not including a director’s name in the credits.  Andrew Patterson appears there only pseudonymously – as James Montague, who shares the screenplay credit with Craig W Sanger (not a pseudonym!).  Patterson, whose first feature this is, uses a television screen-within-the-screen:  he presents his story as an episode of a TV show called ‘Paradox Theater’, which has its own credits.  Maybe that complication proved distracting and caused the omission.  If this rookie director’s self-effacement is intentional, though, it’s unnecessary.  The Vast of Night is irritating at the start and, in one way, anti-climactic at the end but it delivers a fine middle and plenty of other good things (including a splendid title).

    Paradox Theater is clearly inspired by The Twilight Zone.  Rod Serling’s introduction to the latter situated his creations in ‘the middle ground between light and shadow, science and superstition’.  The corresponding voiceover for Paradox Theater describes its territory as ‘caught between logic and myth’.  The Twilight Zone started life on CBS in 1959, which looks to be around the time The Vast of Night is set (it’s certainly post-October 1957 – there’s a reference to Sputnik).  The story is introduced, as a Paradox Theater piece, in flickering black-and-white.  The screen then expands, the images turn to colour and the film’s narrative gets underway.

    Perhaps Paradox Theater nods secondarily to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, responsible for the notorious 1938 radio dramatisation of H G Wells’s The War of the Worlds.  For the first fifteen minutes or so, The Vast of Night is a bit like a radio play.  The talk comes thick and fast, its hectic quality reinforced by a difficulty in matching voices to characters on screen.  The action takes place in nearly real time one dark evening in the (fictional) small town of Cayuga, New Mexico.  Miguel Ioann Littin Menz’s lighting is aptly crepuscular but it’s hard at first to tell who’s who.  Even when the two main characters emerge to dominate proceedings, you’re initially conscious of them as a pair of voices – or, at least, a pair of voices and two pairs of dark-framed spectacles that overcome the gloom.  These belong to sixteen-year-old telephone switchboard operator Fay Crocker (Sienna McCormick) and local radio DJ Everett ‘The Maverick’ Sloan (Jake Horowitz).  His near namesake, Everett Sloane, was a member of Mercury Theatre and starred in a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone.

    Fay has just become the proud owner of a tape-recorder; Everett shows her how to use it.  As they move around the environs of a gymnasium before a basketball game there, Everett records a pretend interview with Fay and vox pops in the car park, where folks are arriving to watch the game.  Andrew Patterson (according to Wikipedia) self-financed hispicture with earnings from work producing promotional films for an Oklahoma City basketball team.  They may or may not have supplied the players used in The Vast of Night (which was shot in Whitney, Texas) but the basketball game plays a doubly important role, even though we see little of what happens in it.  This major local event means the town outside the gymnasium is largely empty.  That suits Patterson’s low-budget purposes and links to a theme of the drama that develops.

    Although it’s wearing and disorienting, the opening talk has a dual payoff.  Tape-recordings, and other disembodied voices, will matter in what follows.  The incessant chat will contrast with more extraordinary noises, and with passages of virtual silence.  (The ingenious sound designers are Johnny Marshall and David Rosenblad.)  When she starts her stint at the telephone exchange, Fay gets calls which, when she answers them, consist of a spooky unnerving buzz on the line.  One call that does have a human voice on the other end comes from a terrified woman who’s seen something scary arrive on her land.  This conversation, and others that Fay starts with members of her family, are interrupted by the buzz.  Fay contacts the local police station but the officers are at the basketball.  She then phones Everett and plays him the extraordinary sound.  When he records and broadcasts it on his radio show, calls come in from two people who claim they’ve heard it before.

    A man introducing himself as Billy tells Everett of how, on military detail some years ago, he was involved in helping build a bunker to house a large, unidentified craft.  Travelling back from the isolated facility where the work took place, Billy heard on a plane radio the same mysterious noise that Everett has played over the air.  Billy later developed a lung condition, as did a colleague with whom he worked on the project.  Another of his friends recorded the signal and sent a copy to, among others, a now-deceased air force officer resident in Cayuga.  The well-informed Fay happens to know this man’s collection of tapes was bequeathed to the local library.  Even though her work shift isn’t over, she dashes to the library and steals them.

    When Everett tries to broadcast this further recording, the radio station’s power is knocked out.  Back at the telephone exchange, the switchboard is now flooded with calls reporting ‘something in the sky’.  A woman called Mabel Blanche, as well as recognising the sound, says she has plenty more to tell Everett but insists on meeting him to do so.  When he and Fay go to see her, Mabel (Gail Cronauer) doesn’t disappoint although her monologue isn’t as compelling as the sound-only contribution of Billy (Bruce Davis).  Mabel’s account is almost comically lengthy, especially given that Everett has prefaced their meeting with a warning that he and Fay don’t have a lot of time.

    Still, Mabel does impart plenty of relevant information.  Her visitors arrive to hear her chanting words in an incomprehensible language – it’s the same chant, she goes on to explain, she’s heard certain other people utter.  They include her only son, shortly before his unexplained disappearance, never to be seen again – on a night, Mabel says, like the present one.  She has a theory that aliens, from whose spacecraft the weird chant seems to be some kind of communication, abduct humans from especially isolated places.  Cayuga on the night of a big game for the local basketball team evidently fits the bill (even if it’s not sufficiently isolated to prevent numerous alarmed calls to Fay’s switchboard) …

    UFO sightings go back a long way but their frequency and popular appeal seem to have peaked in the years following World War II.  The premise of C G Jung’s late essay Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky is characteristically complex, both high flown and down to earth.  Jung describes UFOs as a ‘projection-creating fantasy [that] soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets’.  He nevertheless roots the emergence of such fantasy in ‘the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake’.  In retrospect, the UFO craze of the time looks like a strand of Cold War paranoia.  Everett, a young man who doesn’t strike you as a natural Red-alert type, is convinced the unnerving goings-on are the Soviets at work.

    During the first half-hour, Andrew Patterson punctuates the narrative two or three times with cuts back to the crackly black-and-white television screen, which tend to break your involvement with the main story.  At least for as long as these continue, The Vast of Night looks set to be no more than a stylish pastiche of various examples of 1950s screen product (with echoes of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers sub-genre of sci-fi horror as well as The Twilight Zone).  Yet Patterson has surprises in store.  The camera movement – often at high speed and ground level – is persistently confounding and there are striking, unstressed resonances with present-day preoccupations.  These go beyond Fay’s enthusiastic chatter in the early stages about technological advances on the way (according to a magazine she reads, by the year 2000 you’ll have ‘a miniature television screen and you’ll keep it in your pocket’).  After telling Everett he’s black, Billy goes on to reveal that all his fellow workers on the military detail were African-American or Mexican – were people, in other words, whose voices, should they decide to speak up about their experiences, were relatively unlikely to be heard.  Even as Everett’s diagnosis illustrates American anxieties of six decades back, a present-day audience can relate to his suspecting the nefarious hand of Russia in the high-tech incursions that destabilise Cayuga.

    Patterson doesn’t take the easy way out of the film by leaving things an atmospheric unsolved mystery – it’s a commendable decision albeit the effect is almost inevitably reductive.  The alien craft, when they appear on screen, aren’t fully visible.  Even in the near-darkness, though, they suggest low-budget relatives of the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The protagonists (along with Fay’s baby sister, who enters the picture late in the day) are at last nowhere to be seen.  All that remains in the field where they were stood confronting the craft are their footprints – which (like the footprints of Mabel Blanche’s son years ago) suddenly stop – and Fay’s tape-recorder.  The Vast of Night’s conventionalising direction sets in a while before that.  You don’t expect a piece like this to be primarily a relationships drama but the two leads are good enough, and the interactions of Fay and Everett engaging enough, to make you feel something’s been lost once they’re engaged almost exclusively in detective work.

    Yet the finale has ambiguous facets too, which the effective score (by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer) seems to have been predicting.  Although the principals’ disappearance is sinister, the extra-terrestrials aren’t confirmed as malevolent (or benevolent) – and the vanishing strikes a different note in chiming with another element of the story.  Again without overstressing, Patterson, in his creation of local texture, hints at the claustrophobic side of small-town life.  Fay would love to go to college but can’t afford to do so.  Everett has ambitions of a bigger-time broadcasting career than local radio.  The pair’s encounter with out-of-this-world visitors distances them further from their fellow residents who are merely enjoying basketball.  It’s somehow fitting that Fay and Everett get out of Cayuga.  The only way is up.

    16 July 2020

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