Film review

  • Past Lives

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Celine Song (2023)

    Writer-director Celine Song’s debut feature starts with three people – a woman and two men – sitting at a bar in New York City.  They’re facing not only the camera but unseen observers whose voices speculate on the trio’s relationships to each other:  one voice suggests the Asian man and woman are tourists and ‘the white guy’ is their guide?  What’s most conspicuous about the threesome is that the Asians are giving each other rapt attention with the other man on the sidelines of their mutual absorption.  Then the woman stares directly, and mournfully, into the camera lens.  The next hour or so of Past Lives tells the story of how she comes to look so sad.

    The main narrative begins with an extended flashback to Seoul, twenty-four years earlier; a girl and boy walk home from school.  She is Na Young (Seung Ah Moon); he is Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim).  They’re twelve years old, friends but also rivals at school:  Na Young is tearful because Hae Sung has come top and she second in their class’s latest maths test – we gather from their conversation it’s usually the other way round.  The two always walk to and from school together and have even been on a date (in a playground), arranged by their mothers, but Na Young is soon to emigrate to Canada with her parents and sister.  Although the children are sorry to part, their leave-taking isn’t overtly emotional.  They say a polite goodbye and literally go their separate ways.  She climbs a flight of steps to her home.  He walks at street level into the distance.

    That the two kids grew up to be the Asian woman and man in the New York bar is quickly confirmed as Celine Song moves the action forward by twelve years.  Na Young is now Nora Moon (Greta Lee), an aspiring writer living in NYC.  Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) is just completing his military service in South Korea and about to resume engineering degree studies.  Nora discovers on Facebook that Hae Sung has been trying to track her down under her former name.  She makes contact with him; they start to Skype and enjoy talking together.  But Hae Sung isn’t in a position to travel to New York for at least eighteen months and Nora isn’t keen to return to Korea – to (as she sees it) backtrack to a past she’s moved on from.  At her suggestion, they stop Skyping.  Hae Sung is hurt by this but gets himself a girlfriend, though little is shown of their relationship.  At a writers’ retreat, Nora meets novelist Arthur (John Magaro) and it’s love at first sight.  Another ’12 years passes’, as the text on screen has it.  Nora is married to Arthur.  And Hae Sung is finally coming to New York to visit her.

    Celine Song was born in South Korea in 1988, emigrated with her parents to Canada when she was twelve, obtained her MFA in play writing from Colombia University in New York fourteen years later.  It’s no surprise to read that Past Lives is at least somewhat autobiographical but that doesn’t guarantee convincing plotting and Song doesn’t supply this as far as the twelve-year interruptions are concerned.  They may be crucial to Song’s heartstring-pulling purposes – the protagonists are not just Seoul mates but soulmates, meant to be, yet not, together – but the gaps in contact don’t otherwise make much sense.  The first separation is relatively plausible because it occurs in a pre-Facebook (though not a pre-email) era – never mind that Na Young and Hae Sung strike you as the kind of likeably diligent children who would ensure they had at least each other’s postal address before they parted company.  As for the hiatus between c 2010 and the present day, I just didn’t get why the pair stopped communicating in any way – or how dialogue had recently resumed.

    The thirty-something Nora looked to me quite a bit older than Hae Sung.  Appearances can be deceptive – Greta Lee is actually two years younger than Teo Yoo – but this particular deception is dramatically effective (even if unintended).  It strengthens the implication that Hae Sung is more attached than Nora to what happened between them in childhood.  Other elements reinforce that idea.  Before she discovers Hae Sung on Facebook, Nora needs her mother to remind her of the name of the boy she was so friendly with in Seoul.  Discussing him with her husband, she wonders if Hae Sung means a lot to her not because of his individual qualities but because, as a link to her childhood, he’s invested with nostalgic power.  These details ring true – as does the unresolved tension between Nora and Hae Sung when they’re first reunited in the flesh and spend an afternoon together in New York.  The conversation is tentative and stop-start.  Most of us probably have had an experience like this:  a long looked forward to opportunity to spend time with someone important finally arrives, and you’re determined not to waste it.  The determination – combined with the realisation that what you’ve often imagined is now actually happening – ties the tongue.

    And most of us internet users will recognise the impulse to try finding out what happened to childhood friends with whom we’ve lost touch.  Celine Song, though, has something higher-toned in mind:  the concept in Korean Buddhism of in-yeon – the idea that fate brings people together, and relationships between them develop, over the course of several lifetimes.  Nora first mentions this to Arthur at the writers’ retreat but we hear more and more about it during Hae Sung’s climactic visit to New York:  as a result, the impression we’ve gained that Hae Sung is keener on Nora than she is on him – which is one of the stronger aspects of Past Lives – is increasingly diluted.  Song relies on what she seems to believe is the emotive power of in-yeon, and on her lead actors, to pump up a rather undernourished script.  Nora is a writer in the vaguest terms.  When other kids at school ask why her family is emigrating, Na Young replies that ‘Koreans don’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature’; in answers to questions from Hae Sung in later years, she jokes that she has adjusted her ambitions to winning a Pulitzer, later a Tony.  She drops the names of major awards more often than she talks about her writing.  It’s essentially the same with Arthur – Song proves he’s a novelist by showing him at a book-signing.  Writers these days are unlikely to pound the keys of manual typewriters or chain-smoke as they do so; film-makers are evidently struggling to come up with replacement clichés anything like as good.

    On the same evening that he leaves New York, Hae Sung goes to Nora’s apartment and meets Arthur for the first time.  The three of them go out to eat and eventually we get back to the bar scene that opened Past Lives.  Up to this point, halting conversations have been the order of the day – between Nora and Arthur (to signal that their marriage is uneasy), as well as between her and Hae Sung.  Suddenly, at the bar, the Koreans are in full flow:  Nora and Hae Sung don’t even wait for Arthur to disappear to the loo before starting their heart to heart – which is conducted, in order that ‘the white guy’ is thoroughly excluded, in Korean (even though we’ve also just heard that Arthur knows a bit of the language).  Back at the apartment afterwards, Hae Sung invites the couple to visit him in South Korea some time and phones for an Uber.  Nora goes out to wait with him on the street.  They stare longingly at each other before speculating whether they may be experiencing a past life or what their future lives together may hold.  I was relieved when the car arrived.

    Greta Lee’s beauty and presence certainly impose themselves on the film but that deliberate gaze which concludes Song’s prologue isn’t the only time that Lee is very aware of the camera; I preferred Teo Yoo’s more subtly expressive work.  As in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019), John Magaro comes over as a capable naturalistic actor but a dull one.  In the screen version of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2015), the heroine, Eilis, who has returned temporarily to her native Ireland, must choose between resuming married life in New York and staying put, between forsaking her devoted Italian-American husband and disappointing her sensitive, better-off Irish suitor, who also loves her.  Eilis is fond of both men and the actors concerned, under John Crowley’s skilful direction, make you care about all three characters:  whatever Eilis decides, it’s bound to make for a poignant ending.  So it does, yet you leave the cinema exhilarated because of how well and engagingly the story has been told.  Past Lives is being widely praised but for this viewer it had almost exactly the reverse effect of Brooklyn.  I didn’t get much out of spending time with Celine Song’s principals.  I emerged from the film in rather low spirits – indifferent to what happened to Nora, Hae Sung or Arthur, in this life or the next.

    3 October 2023

  • There Was a Father

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Chichi ariki

    Yasujiro Ozu (1942)

    The timeframe of There Was a Father is much more extended than that of any post-war Ozu film that I know.  The action begins in what must be the late 1920s and ends with the Pacific War underway.  At the start, widower Shuhei Horikawa (Chishu Ryu) is a maths teacher at the boys’ school where his only child, ten-year-old Ryohei (Haruhiko Tsuda), is a pupil.  On a day trip for an older group of students, supervised by Horikawa, a few of the boys take a surreptitious boat trip across a lake.  One of the boats capsizes and a boy drowns.  Despite being assured by colleagues that the accident was not his fault, Horikawa is consumed with remorse and gives up teaching.  He moves with Ryohei to the town of Ueda, near Nagano, but finds he can’t earn enough there to finance his son’s education.  So Horikawa gets a better paid, though modest, white-collar job in Tokyo.  He lives alone there while Ryohei becomes a boarder at a junior high school in Ueda.  Some fifteen years later, the son is himself a teacher – of chemistry, in Akita.  Horikawa is still an office worker and meets his son only occasionally.  On one such meeting, Ryohei broaches the idea of moving to Tokyo to join his father.  Horikawa sharply dismisses this but Ryohei does come to stay at his home for ten days, immediately after passing his army medical.  During his visit, Horikawa attends a reunion organised by two old boys (Shin Saburi and Shinichi Himori) of the school at which he once taught.  The event, in honour of him and of Makoto Hirata (Takeshi Sakamoto), a former colleague and now a friend, goes off splendidly.  Horikawa is doubly pleased when Ryohei, the same evening and on his father’s recommendation, agrees to marry Hirata’s daughter, Fumiko (Mitsuko Miko).  The following morning, Horikawa, about to leave for work, suffers what appears to be a heart attack and dies in hospital.  Ryohei marries Fumiko; the film’s last scene sees the newlyweds on a train bound for Akita.

    This is both the earliest Ozu work that I’ve so far seen and my first experience of a picture shot and released in Japan during World War II, when ‘The [Japanese film] industry was all but openly government-controlled, and “national policy subjects” were insisted upon’ (Donald Richie in Ozu: His Life and Films (1974)).  Duty and self-denying acceptance of one’s lot are paramount in There Was a Father; the theme is illustrated repeatedly and at different levels of importance.  In the opening scene, when the boy Ryohei laments the state of the shoes he wears for walking to and from school, his father replies that his own shoes will last a bit longer yet.  Horikawa gives up teaching because ‘I didn’t do my best’ on the ill-fated school trip.  His perception of his failure as a teacher – acting in loco parentis – intensifies his determination to be an irreproachably good father to his own son.  Horikawa, who already believes strongly that ‘a man has to serve his country’, is also well aware that the principles of self-sacrifice intrinsic to Japanese life have assumed more urgent meaning with the advent of war.  Pleased and proud when Ryohei passes his medical, Horikawa shows no apprehension at the prospect of his son’s being called up to fight.  Akita, where Ryohei teaches, would be described by a Tokyo dweller in Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) as ‘the back of beyond’ but Horikawa insists his son shouldn’t be ashamed of working there or move to Tokyo for what (his father thinks) are sentimental reasons:  he rebukes Ryohei as ‘soft’ and negligent of his responsibilities in suggesting such a move.  Though it’s hardly the best use of his talents, Horikawa accepts his own routine job as a valid contribution to society.  He has never missed a day’s work.  He insists on keeping up that record until he collapses unconscious on the day that he dies.

    The political conditions in which the film was made add to its fascination and complexity.  To what extent is it propaganda?  Certainly enough for the Japanese government, like the country’s film critics, to give There Was a Father their seal of approval in 1942.  Does this mean that Ozu was a willing propagandist?  Tony Rayns, in a fine essay on the film at the Criterion Collection, supplies a persuasive, balanced answer to that question.  While acknowledging that there is ‘nothing to suggest that Ozu was a closet pacifist or that he covertly opposed the war effort’, Rayns believes that the director ‘cared more about his own procedural and aesthetic choices than he did about the demands of wartime propaganda’.  Ozu wrote the first draft of the screenplay, for which he eventually shared the credit with Tadao Ikeda and Takao Yanai, in early 1937, soon after he had made The Only Son (1936).  According to Tony Rayns:

    ‘We have no way of knowing if Ozu consciously intended the film as a counterpart to The Only Son, and the film he finally made in 1942 was anyway based on a thoroughly revised version of the script, but there are still several striking correspondences between the two films, from the parent-child separations to the classroom scenes of geometry lessons.  Where The Only Son deals with the struggle to maintain an optimistic outlook in worse than trying circumstances, though, There Was a Father brushes aside material hardships and spiritual setbacks to focus single-mindedly on patriarchal strengths: the transfer of dutiful feelings and resolve from father to son.’

    Although it’s effective as wartime propaganda, There Was a Father is much richer than that label implies, for two chief and connected reasons.  First, Shuhei Horikawa’s words and actions are, from the start, firmly anchored in character.  Second, Chishu Ryu’s portrayal of that character is wonderful.  Ryu’s ability to convince playing men of widely differing ages is striking in later films he made with Ozu (see note on Early Summer); in There Was a Father this protean quality is even more impressive.  When the film was released, in April 1942, Ryu was thirty-seven, around the age one assumes the protagonist to be at the story’s outset.  His development into the fifty-something Horikawa is remarkably natural and complete, achieved through subtle adjustments to his facial muscles and his gait, as well as through the cosmetic greying of his hair.  At the funeral of the drowned schoolboy, Ryu doesn’t emote yet his face and bearing fully convey Horikawa’s appalled distress.  In a conversation soon afterwards with Hirata, who tries vainly to dissuade him from resigning his post, Horikawa is unusually willing to give voice to how he feels.  If the dead boy had been his own son, he knows what he’d think of the teacher on whose watch Ryohei died.  Horikawa admits he’s now scared of his responsibilities as a teacher.  (Just as his failure – or what he sees as failure – as a surrogate parent stiffens Horikawa’s resolve to be an exemplary father to his son, so his inability to continue teaching seems to compel him never again to shirk his work responsibilities.)  Ryu’s sympathetic presence makes this conversation with Hirata a particular highlight; it also leavens Horikawa’s usual intransigence throughout – and gives him a persisting good humour.  With a less appealing actor in the role, Horikawa might come across as harshly moralistic and the film as more of a sermon.  As it is (and without softening the character), Ryu’s Horikawa is representative but satisfyingly individual.  Chishu Ryu makes alarmingly credible the physical spasm that precedes Horikawa’s collapse; his seemingly effortless ageing is sustained right through to the deathbed scene.

    Given Horikawa’s decisive abandonment and painful memories of his teaching career, it’s surprising that he readily accepts the invitation of his former students to the school reunion.  It’s not implausible, though – Ozu subtly suggests that time is some kind of healer.  The fatal accident on the school outing happens while the teacher and his students, who undertake much of their journey on foot, are taking a break.  A couple of boys are examining their blistered feet and Horikawa is playing the venerable oriental board game go when they learn of the boating escapade and accident.  Years later, Horikawa bumps into Hirata in a public venue in Tokyo where men meet to play go; the different context is a starting point for Horikawa to seem to make peace with the past.  By the time the school reunion is arranged, he’s not only good friends with Hirata – and, for his sake, wouldn’t want to miss the occasion – but also rightly optimistic that the son whom he has raised successfully will marry Hirata’s daughter.

    A short sequence that shows Ryohei as he’s about to start his higher education introduces Shuji Sano into the narrative.  You miss the engaging, slightly eccentric presence of Haruhiko Tsuda as the pre-adolescent Ryohei; as the twenty-five-year-old version, Sano is competent but relatively bland.  (He would go on to give a livelier performance in Early Summer.)   But this makes sense in the film’s overall scheme:  Horikawa’s example and instruction direct his son towards subduing emotionality – especially after being reproved for proposing the move to Tokyo to be closer to his father.  Shuji Sano’s apparent lack of expressiveness comes to express what must be concealed in adulthood – what it means to be a man.  Horikawa’s anger bursts out in what might seem an unlikely moment, while father and son bathe together on their visit to a spa.  An extract from David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), which formed the bulk of the BFI handout for this screening of There Was a Father, notes that the spa imagery ‘evoke[s] the Shinto purification rite of … ablution’ and that ‘purity becomes a thematic issue in the film’.  This is just one strand of the film’s wider-ranging ‘Japaneseness’, which Bordwell also cites and exemplifies[1], and is not its only religious strand.  Buddhist references also register strongly.  To contemporary Japanese audiences at least, these wouldn’t at all have contradicted the political ideology that the film effectively promotes.  ‘In March of 1941,’ writes Bordwell, ‘… the Great Japan Buddhist Association was formed, with the purpose of supporting the government and the war effort …’

    Among the many potent images created by Ozu and his cinematographer, Yushun Atsuta, some would become (perhaps already were) Ozu tropes – clothes blowing on a washing line, a train disappearing into a tunnel.  The former seems to symbolise both the reassuringly familiar and the fragile aspects of domestic life.  The latter supplies the closing shot (and a train journey the last scene) as it did in Equinox Flower (1958), the Ozu film I saw immediately before this one.  In There Was a Father, however, the dark railway tunnel completes a continuing texture of mortality – at some points foreboding, at others almost cheerfully matter of fact.  A shot of Horikawa and his young son, soon after their move to Ueda, shows them almost pinned into a top corner of the frame, which is dominated by the large black mass of the castle parapet on which they stand.  When the adult Ryohei arrives at his father’s home after passing the army medical, Horikawa urges him to ‘tell your mother all about it’; his son moves a few feet away to kneel at her household shrine.  Horikawa’s ashes, in an urn placed in the luggage rack above their seats, accompany Ryohei and his new wife on the concluding train journey.

    Yet duty and self-sacrifice – since these may extend to sacrificing one’s life – eclipse even death in There Was a Father.  We never know exactly when or how Horikawa’s wife died but, as Tony Rayns notes, her absence intensifies Ozu’s focus on male stoicism.  The female characters, compared with their counterparts in post-war Ozu, are remarkably few and minor in this film:  other than Horikawa’s maid (Chiyoko Fumitani), Fumiko is just about the only woman on screen and, as Rayns also points out, she is ‘the most uncomplicatedly polite, docile, and obedient woman in any Ozu movie, a simple and simplistic image of dutiful Japanese womanhood subserviently meeting all of the male’s needs’.  Although Ryohei is grief-stricken at the moment of his father’s death, he has, by the time of the train journey to Akita, mastered his emotions.  As talk turns to Horikawa senior’s passing, and Fumiko weeps, Ryohei appears to despise her tears.  He behaves in a manner of which his father would be proud.

    28 September 2023

    [1] ‘The school outing is a veritable itinerary of traditionally revered spots:  the Imperial Palace, Imperial and Buddhist shrines, and Lake Ashinoko, across which one can see majestic Mount Fuji.  The road down which the boys hike is the famous Tokkaido highway, immortalised in poetry and woodblock prints … .  The film’s very first image, two women passing on a bridge and framed by tree branches, introduces a picturesque, self-conscious ‘Japaneseness’ …’

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