Film review

  • The Third Murder

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sandome no satsujin

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2017)

    The victims of the first two murders, back in the 1980s, were loan sharks.  Takashi Misumi, the man who killed them, would have received a death sentence but for the leniency of the trial judge.  Decades later and shortly after his release from prison, Misumi is charged with murder again.  Tomoaki Shigemori, the high-profile lawyer brought in to head his defence team, is also the son of the judge who saved Misumi’s life all those years ago.

    The BBFC notice for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest warns of ‘brief, strong violence’.  This occurs immediately, in a sequence describing the titular crime.   The notice is accurate enough – on a deserted riverside one night, a man beats another man to death with a wrench – although the killing takes place under cover of darkness and with Kore-eda’s camera at a discreet distance, until it closes in on the bloodstained face of Misumi (Kōji Yakusho).  The climax to The Third Murder is the courtroom drama of his trial.   But the intervening film is less of a departure from Kore-eda’s usual domestic territory than the basic plot components might suggest.  Misumi is, for Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama) and his colleagues (Kôtarô Yoshida and Shinnosuke Mitsushima), an exasperating client.  He keeps changing his mind about important details of the killing and why – at one point, whether – he’s responsible for it.  Family ties, ruptures and secrets are essential to the piece, as they have been in much of Kore-eda’s previous work.

    Responses to the film may vary according to whether capital punishment is still a fact of national life.  In Japan, The Third Murder has been received as a powerful abolitionist contribution to an urgent continuing debate about the death penalty.  Western European audiences are likely to see the film differently (if, like this viewer, they know little about the conventions that govern Japanese homicide trials and penalties, they’ll find it instructive).  In After the Storm, Kore-eda seemed ill at ease when the story moved for a time into the world of private detective work and The Third Murder, as a ‘legal thriller’ (Wikipedia), is underwhelming.  As a search for truth – a philosophical why-dunnit – it’s more interesting, even if (intentionally?) frustrating.  The differing accounts of how the crime occurred and the motive behind it naturally call to mind Rashomon, with the several perspectives of Kurosawa’s classic replaced by several versions of events offered by a single character.  Kore-eda uses Shigemori’s dreams not only to suggest how obsessed with the crime the lawyer is becoming but also to reduce gradually the audience’s certainty that we know what really happened.

    A Rashomon echo is heard beyond Misumi’s shifting accounts – in contesting explanations of the physical infirmity of Sakie (Suzu Hirose, the title character in Our Little Sister), the daughter of Yamanaka, the murdered man.  According to her mother (Yuki Saito), Sakie’s bad leg is a congenital condition; according to Sakie, the legacy of her jumping from a window when she was a girl.  The last explanation of the murder in the film is that Yamanaka, a crooked factory owner, had repeatedly raped his daughter and that his employee Misumi, who found out, killed him to save Sakie from further abuse.  Although Misumi is estranged from his daughter and there are growing tensions between the recently divorced Shigemori and his (Aju Makita), these other relationships aren’t significant enough.  They’re designed to complement the crucial father-daughter story – and parts of a design is all they come across as.  (The symbolism of Misumi’s daughter sharing with Sakie a limp is weak.)  Nor does Kore-eda go far in exploring the relationship between Shigemori and his elderly, ailing father (Isao Hashisume) or the moral implications of the latter’s part in Misumi’s history.  Mention is made of Judge Shigemori’s being indirectly responsible for the third murder but the idea isn’t probed.

    The most dramatically absorbing element of The Third Murder is the affable, quietly spoken Misumi’s increasingly unnerving effect on the man defending him.  Misumi, who tells Shigemori he’s spent many years regretting that he was ever born, says finally that he feels his life has acquired value in what he’s done to help Sakie.  His mid-trial change of plea, which effectively destroys Shigemori’s chance of getting a prison sentence for him, further protects the young woman – from having to give evidence to the court about her father’s sexual behaviour.  Kore-eda makes unusually imaginative use of that familiar screen partition – the glass dividing a prisoner from the person visiting or interviewing them.   Misumi places the splayed fingers of one hand against the glass, explaining to Shigemori that doing so helps him get to know better the person he’s talking to.  Later on, the prisoner appears to be able to read the lawyer’s mind.  As Misumi, the gently charismatic Kōji Yakusho gives the outstanding performance.  The eloquent, often wintry landscapes of The Third Murder are photographed by Mikiya Takimoto.  The effective score – spare, melancholy strings and piano – is by Ludovico Einaudi.

    27 March 2018

  • The Devil’s Eye

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Djävulens öga

    Ingmar Bergman (1960)

    The words of an Irish proverb – ‘A young woman’s chastity is a stye in the devil’s eye’ – and a Scarlatti sonata for harpsichord introduce Bergman’s comic ‘rondo capriccioso’.  The source, according to Peter Cowie’s biography of Bergman, was ‘a somewhat elderly Danish radio play, Don Juan Returns, written by Oluf Bang’, which Bergman found in Svensk Filmindustri archives.   Cowie suggests he was drawn to the material out of a ‘desire to place on film some elements of his enjoyable staging of Molière’s Don Juan at Malmö in 1955’.  The film’s basic conceit has Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) dispatched by the Devil (Stig Järrel) from Hell into the world above to deflower Britt-Marie (Bibi Andersson), the daughter of a rural clergyman (Nils Poppe), in order to cure the Satanic eye complaint.   Don Juan, whose infernal punishment is to be forever denied sex just as the woman he’s seducing is ready for it, accepts the assignment enthusiastically but things don’t go according to plan.   Britt-Marie brings out a romantic vulnerability on the part of the great lover; she admits to feeling pity, rather than desire, for him.  They go through the preliminaries but the relationship isn’t consummated.  Only after Don Juan has returned to Hell, mission unaccomplished, does the Devil’s stye disappear – thanks to the lie Britt-Marie tells her fiancé Jonas (Axel Düberg), when she assures him she’s never been kissed by another man.

    This breezily cynical jeu d’esprit is inventive, with some nice theatrical flourishes.  It’s seldom irritating in the self-consciously waggish style of Bergman’s next comedy, All These Women (1964).  His script includes plenty of clever, epigrammatic exchanges about the nature of love, the moral shortcomings of Heaven as well as Hell, the relative superiority of human life to post-mortem existence in either location.  There are nice reversals: while Don Juan reveals a surprising weakness, Britt-Marie’s father proves more cunning than his naïve, holy fool persona leads us to expect.  Yet the film never quite coheres.  At this stage of his career, Bergman was creating heavy (major) dramatic works at an astounding rate – he may well have felt the need for an occasional burst of light relief.  Whatever the reason, The Devil’s Eye (sandwiched between The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly in the canon) has a sketchy feel.   The mismatch between the introductory proverb and the eventual stye cure is typical of this:  since, as she admits to him, Britt-Marie has kissed other men before Don Juan, he seems surplus to requirements for the final whopper to Jonas.   The story amounts to a (qualified) vindication of marriage that makes a change from plenty of other pieces in the Bergman oeuvre.  You wonder, though, if this is genuine optimism – or a matter of convenience in tying up the plot.

    A more persistent trait of the film is its half-hearted modernisation.  The story is narrated by a character listed as ‘the actor’ (an expertly arch Gunnar Björnstrand):  this affable, slightly pedantic figure in a suit and tie starts by explaining the geography of Hell with a map and pointer.  When the action switches to the abode of the damned, Satan too appears in modern office clothes – a hint that he keeps himself up to date.   Don Juan’s changes of outfit in the early stages – from doublet and hose to dressing robe to pullover and trousers for his earthly visit – are pleasing.  It’s a relief that Britt-Marie isn’t an obvious country girl innocent:  dressed in a blouse and slacks, she’s painting and decorating when she first meets Don Juan and gives him a tour of the all-mod-cons home she and Jonas will share when they’re married.  There’s mild amusement in the revelation that the fiancé, when he arrives to join Britt-Marie’s family at dinner, is a petulant nerd.  After their initial impact, though, none of these elements is much developed.  Nils Poppe gives a charming, funny performance as the clergyman (especially when he goes to bed to read and say his prayers:  he takes about ten seconds to do both before falling asleep) but his character could be from a bygone era – Bergman doesn’t get much out of placing him in the mid-twentieth century.  By the end of The Devil’s Eye, Britt-Marie too, in spite of her appearance, might as well be a more traditional figure.

    Bibi Andersson was in her mid-twenties at the time and looks it.  She immediately – and therefore disappointingly – suggests there’s more to Britt-Marie than meets the eye in terms of worldly experience and savoir-faire.  Jarl Kulle is splendid in Hell but wears the same masklike face out of it.  Don Juan’s melancholy awareness of his eternal fate is occasionally poignant but the viewer’s awareness, from his other Bergman roles, of Kulle’s comic resource and vividness makes it frustrating to watch him here.  (If Bergman had given Kulle rather more to do in The Devil’s Eye and rather less to do in All These Women, both performances might have been better.)   There’s not much connection between Kulle and Andersson:  the supposedly central relationship is often upstaged by the persistent but eventually unavailing attempts of Don Juan’s servant Pablo (Sture Lagerwall) to seduce Renata (Gertrud Fridh), the clergyman’s wife and Britt-Marie’s mother.  The excellent Sture Lagerwall has a great face:  it’s surprising he didn’t feature in more Bergman films.  Don Juan’s and Pablo’s excursion is supervised by a demon (Ragnar Arvedson) who repeatedly metamorphoses into a black cat and back again.  Bergman keeps switching because he knows neither incarnation works on its own.  (The Devil’s Eye provided a near-first when this viewer got bored with feline antics.)   Allan Edwall makes a more entertaining appearance as a devil on the party’s return to Hell.

    23 March 2018

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