Film review

  • Eighth Grade

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Bo Burnham (2018)

    By the time of this year’s Directors Guild of America (DGA) ceremony, Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born had imploded as a major awards contender (except in the original song category).   In a particularly striking illustration of this, Cooper, with nominations for the DGA’s top prize and their first-time feature award, lost out on both.  Although he hadn’t been nominated for the former, it was Bo Burnham who won in the debut feature category for Eighth Grade.  The DGA decision felt like a snub to Cooper as much as a commendation of Burnham but turns out not to be unfair.  Eighth Grade, which he wrote as well as directed, is a good film.

    Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) is a fourteen-year-old only child who lives with her single father Mark (Josh Hamilton) in suburban New York.  She’s not  exactly overweight but she’s dumpy; her pleasant rather than pretty face is studded with acne.  About to complete her middle-school education and start high school, Kayla has no friends.  In her room at home, she records motivational videos which she posts on YouTube.  Their purpose, she tells her tiny number of followers, is to ‘help you guys’.  In fact, these are self-help pieces in a very literal sense – Kayla’s way of trying to convince Kayla that, with application, she can fit in.  Some hope:  for this shy, self-doubting teenager, the videos’ objectives – how to be yourself, how to put yourself out there, how to be confident – are decidedly incompatible.

    The videos are an effective narrative device:  Burnham interposes them between episodes that dramatise Kayla’s worsening predicament.  In a poll of the eighth graders to decide superlative students in various categories, she’s voted ‘Most Quiet’.  She’s invited to a pool party, not by the birthday girl Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), one of Kayla’s most derisive classmates, but by Kennedy’s mother.  The protagonist is a reluctant and desperately self-conscious guest; the party, sure enough, is a traumatic occasion.  She then learns that Aiden (Luke Prael), a boy in her class whom she fancies, split up with his previous girlfriend when she refused to send him nude photos of herself.  Kayla lies to Aiden that she has a ‘dirty photos’ folder on her phone, which gets him interested enough to ask if she does blowjobs.  She says yes, researches oral-sex instructions online and is horrified:  things go no further.

    Her class spends a day shadowing twelfth-graders in preparation for their own progression to high school.  Kayla’s twelfth-grade partner is Olivia (Emily Robinson), so encouraging and friendly that she invites Kayla to join her and her friends for the evening.  One of the boys, Riley (Daniel Zolghadri), gives Kayla a lift home.  He stops en route to start a game of truth or dare.  This soon progresses to his taking off his top and instructing Kayla to do the same but she refuses.  The exchange ends in tears and her deciding to give up making videos.

    Eighth Grade has plenty of funny moments but a serious subject both timeless and contemporary:  the urgent pressure to belong to a peer group, which social media culture has intensified.  The requirements of conformity are manifold:  you have to look the same, like the same things, speak exactly the same, limited language.  Burnham’s description of a presumably typical present-day American secondary school is shocking not just in showing Kayla’s isolation and the pack (or safety-in-numbers) mentality that makes her life a misery.  The heroine’s main conversation with Aiden takes place furtively, during a school safety training course – not a fire drill but an exercise in what to do if an armed gunman invades the classroom.

    The truth-or-dare scene with Riley is troubling:  you believe he means what he says when he insists he’s offering Kayla sexual experience for her own good, and that he may well be right when he warns she’s at risk of much rougher treatment elsewhere.  Burnham does well also to make clear how Kayla herself can take out her frustrations on others, even if her options are relatively limited.  Her very nice, slightly irritating, cluelessly accommodating father is his daughter’s whipping boy for much of the film.  Gabe (Jake Ryan), Kennedy’s cousin whom Kayla meets at the pool party, makes follow-up contact with her online and her immediate reaction is to ignore him.  Amiable, dorky, anal Gabe is the last thing Kayla needs if she means to be cool.

    You wonder for some time (though this isn’t a long film:  ninety-four minutes) how the story will be resolved.  You know it will be false to the main character and the main theme to give Kayla a decisive breakthrough.  Burnham manages the closing stages with integrity and skill.   Kayla comes to appreciate her father.  She accepts an invitation chez Gabe for a meal that he prepares; it goes quite well but without any suggestion that these are two misfits made for each other.   After the middle-school graduation ceremony, during which she summons up the nerve to tell the gruesome Kennedy what she thinks of her, Kayla opens a time capsule that she put together in sixth grade.  This includes a video in which her younger self asks Kayla questions about her current friendships and love life.

    With her father’s help, she burns the time capsule before creating another to be interred in the back garden.  For this, Kayla records a new message, urging her high-school self to keep going through hard times.  A brief flash forward suggests that’s what Kayla does, acquiring, on the way, a little self-confidence in her demeanour – though without any remarkable transformation in her looks.  This isn’t a dramatically exciting conclusion but it’s a psychologically persuasive one.  It’s stylistically satisfying too, in sustaining video clips as integral to the story.   A user review of the film that has stuck in my mind (though I don’t recall if it was on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes) complained that Kayla’s awkwardness was overdone to incredible effect.  While it’s right that her looks and speech patterns are exaggerated to heighten the difference between her and the clones in her class, the emotional consequences of that difference feel truthful.  The film struck me as more honest than another recent and interesting internet-generation drama-comedy, Matt Spicer‘s Ingrid Goes West (2017).

    Bo Burnham, a comedian who started his performing career on YouTube and who is himself only twenty-eight, directs his predominantly young actors, all well cast, with a sure and sympathetic touch.   Eighth Grade stands or falls on Elsie Fisher, who was only fourteen when the film was shot (in twenty-seven days) in the summer of 2017.  Fisher was already a reasonably experienced screen actress at the time, although best known in cinema for her voice work (in the Despicable Me movies).  She’s very likeable and remarkably honest as Kayla.   For such a young teenager, this is a physically courageous, as well as an accomplished, performance.  Josh Hamilton’s portrait of Mark is perfectly judged.  Burnham pushes things a bit far in the sequence where, in order to keep an anxious eye on Kayla, Mark skulks in the mall where she’s meeting Olivia et al:  this makes the father an actual embarrassment to Kayla rather than an anxiously imagined one.  Later on, Mark, whose wife walked out when Kayla was a baby, tells his daughter what joy she’s always given him.  The monologue is a shade overlong but that’s hardly a cause for complaint:  Josh Hamilton delivers it beautifully.

    1 May 2019

  • Maborosi

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Maboroshi no Hikari

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (1995)

    Between Nobody Knows and Maborosi in the BFI’s Hirokazu Kore-eda season, I saw a swiftly arranged extra screening of Still Walking, followed by a Q&A with Kore-eda.  Senior programmer Julie Pearce, introducing the evening, explained how it had come about.  She’d been trying for some time to persuade Kore-eda to talk at the BFI.  Currently in Paris editing his next film, he’d made contact to confirm that he felt he needed a break and would come over to London but it would have be ‘next Tuesday’.  Pearce and her colleagues, in partnership with the Japan Foundation, moved commendably quickly to make things happen.  It was a very enjoyable evening in several ways.

    NFT1 was close to packed out (according to Julie Pearce, they could have filled it three or four times over).   Just about the only empty seats in view were immediately in front of me and the young boy sitting with his mother immediately to my right.  He can only have been about nine years old.  I guess he just dropped very lucky not to be behind an obscuring grown-up.  The boy’s presence reminded me that Still Walking was released with a U certificate but it is chiefly concerned with family strife and bereavement – and subtitled.  There were plenty of Japanese at the screening but this kid wasn’t one of them.   It was amazing to me that he watched the film so quietly and attentively.

    It was a treat to see Still Walking again – a bonus that the Q&A was as well organised as it was informative and entertaining.  I’m sorry not to have got the name of the chair, who asked a good combination of questions – some prepared, others spontaneously following up things that Kore-eda said in conversation.  The latter spoke in Japanese with Bethan Jones his interpreter.  She supplied consecutive rather than simultaneous translation, which made for a satisfyingly fluent session even if did also eat up the time.  None of the four questions from the audience was up to much yet Kore-eda’s answers somehow managed to make them all seem worth asking.

    His charm and humour in the Q&A reinforced my feelings of gratitude towards him.  If it hadn’t been for Still Walking, which remains my favourite of Kore-eda’s films, I might never have started trying to get a handle on East Asian cinema.  He’s still the only Japanese director whose body of work I know well but he’s helped me to get more from the Yasujiro Ozu films I’ve seen in recent years.  Kore-eda no doubt sees Korean cinema as an entirely different tradition but the fact is that his work is responsible too for getting me to excellent films from South Korea like Park Chan-wook‘s The Handmaiden and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning.

    The full Japanese title of Maborosi – Kore-eda’s first dramatic feature, following three documentaries – translates as ‘phantasmic light’ or ‘a trick of the light’.  That’s very close to the name of Louis Malle’s Le feu follet (1963):  although the latter was released in America as The Fire Within, the French means ‘will o’ the wisp’.  The two films are thematically connected too:  an impending suicide is central to Malle’s and an apparent suicide pivotal in Kore-eda’s.  After watching Still Walking again, I reread my note on it from 2010.  Seeing Maborosi a couple of weeks later called to mind how the note ended:  ‘It shows how much there is to be gained by surviving and moving forward, how much you can be held in the past even as you do’.

    The heroine of Maborosi is Yumiko (Makiko Esumi).  She marries Ikuo (Tadanobu Asano) and they set up home in Osaka.  Shortly after the birth of their first baby, Ikuo dies – hit by a train while he walks along railway tracks one evening.  As far as his widow knows, he had no motive for ending it all; but there’s no other obvious explanation for putting his life in peril in the way that he did.  Several years later, Yumiko agrees to an arranged marriage with Tamio (Takashi Naito), a widower who lives in a coastal village on the Sea of Japan’s Noto peninsula.  Yumiko and her now five-year-old son Yuichi (Gohki Kashiyama) become part of a household that also includes Tomoko (Naomi Watanabe), Tamio’s daughter from his first marriage, and his elderly father Yoshihiro (Akira Emoto), a former sailor.

    Relations within her new family are apparently harmonious and Yumiko seems to have ‘moved on’ from Ikuo’s death – until she returns briefly to Osaka for her brother’s wedding.  There’s no crucial incident that changes everything suddenly but in places that strongly evoke Ikuo’s presence – and therefore his absence – Yumiko can’t suppress her continuing grief.  Kore-eda and his lead actress convey this very persuasively:  Makiko Esumi consistently implies that Yumiko, while able to construct a new life, is still preoccupied with a death she can’t make sense of.  Back at Tamio’s, an alcohol-fuelled row between the couple reveals that he too is still mourning his former, greater love.  Yumiko is drawn to a funeral procession which she follows along the beach and on to a crematorium.  Tamio arrives there in his car to take her back home.  She tells him she needs to know why Ikuo killed himself.  Tamio suggests, by way of a story told to him by Yoshihiro, a possible explanation:

    ‘He said the sea calls you … He says when he was out alone, he used to see a beautiful light shimmering in the distance, calling him … I think it can happen to anyone …’

    Vanishing and loss are an essential and a recurring theme of Maborosi.   In the early scenes, Kore-eda shows the child Yumiko (Sayaka Yoshino), whose grandmother (Kikuko Hashimoto) sets off walking (aruitemo … aruitemo) towards Shikoku where, she tells Yumiko, she wants to die.   She is never seen again and her granddaughter continues to be haunted by not doing enough to prevent the departure.  While Yumiko’s remorse can obviously be seen as anticipating her feelings about what Ikuo lets happen decades later, his disappearance has more than one aspect.  On a brutal physical level, the police officer who informs her of Ikuo’s death tells Yumiko that she’ll ‘never recognise him’.   She’s also lost Ikuo – he’s gone away from her – in the sense of not understanding his reasons for deciding to die.  Tamio’s own loss, although it isn’t dramatised to the same extent, registers strongly too.  When Tomeno (Mutsuko Sakura), an intrepid old seafaring woman from the village, goes missing overnight, we fear the worst – in spite of Yoshihiro’s confidence that Tomeno will ‘swim back if she has to – nobody knows the sea better than she does’.  When he’s proved right, Tomeno’s reappearance feels like a gift.

    Sympathy for virtually everyone in the story, quietly incisive revelation of character, naturalistic dialogue with occasional poetic touches – these elements of Maborosi are ones with which viewers of more recent Kore-eda will be familiar.  In other respects, this early film, made when the director was in his early thirties, is remarkably different from what has followed.  The visuals have a primacy unusual in his work.  For much of the time, the camera is at some distance from the characters.  Even when it’s nearer, their faces, in natural light, are often partly shadowed.  Kore-eda and his cinematographer Masao Nakabori (who haven’t worked again together since) create some extraordinary images, especially the long shot of the seashore funeral procession under huge louring clouds.  This great sequence is the culmination of the film’s prevailing slowness and silence, qualities that never become self-conscious.  Also unlike all his subsequent dramas, Kore-eda doesn’t have a screenplay credit:  Maborosi was adapted by Yoshihisa Ogita from a short story by Teru Miyamoto.  The dialogue is spare.  What isn’t said is eloquent.

    30 April 2019

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