Film review

  • Equinox Flower

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Higanbana

    Yasujiro Ozu (1958)

    Just a couple of hours after finishing the note on Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951), I watched his Equinox Flower – similar to Early Summer in terms of subject matter, different in tone and emphasis.  (It was also the first film that Ozu made in colour.)  In an early scene, a group of middle-aged men are drinking together.  The talk turns to a Japanese old wives’ (or husbands’) tale:  if the wife is the stronger partner in a marriage she’ll bear sons; if the husband rules the roost the children will be daughters.  Equinox Flower, which is all about fathers and daughters, has already featured a wedding breakfast, where Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) makes a speech, toasting the happy couple.  Hirayama is a successful Tokyo businessman and longstanding friend of the bride’s father, Toshihiko Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura):  they will be two of the drinking buddies in the sequence that follows.  Hirayama tells the newlyweds they’ve been fortunate to be able to choose each other; he recalls, in contrast, his own courtship and arranged marriage, which he describes as prosaic and unromantic.  The adjectives seem insulting to his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka), who, seated beside her husband, listens in silence:  Hirayama claims to speak on her behalf too.  Most of what follows in Equinox Flower, adapted by Ozu and Kogo Noda from a novel by Ton Satomi, concerns Hirayama’s failure – as the father of a daughter who wants to marry the man she loves – to practise what he preaches at the wedding breakfast.

    The theme soon occupies centre stage thanks to two unexpected visits to Hirayama’s office that occur in quick succession.  First, Shukichi Mikami (Chishu Ryu), another of his old friends, comes to seek his help:  Mikami’s daughter Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga) has left home in light of a dispute between them about whom she should marry; Mikami asks Hirayama to try and get her to see sense.  Hirayama goes to the bar where Fumiko now works, to hear her side of the story.  She laments her father’s stubborn insistence on deciding her husband and leaves Hirayama in no doubt of her determination to make a life with the young pianist (Fumio Watanabe) with whom she’s fallen in love.  Hirayama next opens his office door to a young man called Mashiko Taniguchi (Keiji Sada); the purpose of his visit is to ask for the hand in marriage of Setsuko (Ineko Arima), Hirayama’s elder daughter.  Setsuko’s father, who already had a suitable husband in mind for her, is furious that she has tried to make her own arrangements.  He not only refuses to give his blessing but forbids Setsuko, even though she’s no longer a minor, to continue going out to work until she bends to his will.  Hirayama’s hardline policy gets off to a poor start.  Immediately after her dressing-down, Setsuko heads for Taniguchi’s apartment.

    Although Equinox Flower clearly illustrates generational differences in attitude in post-war Japanese society, it also consistently highlights gender differences.  Setsuko is shocked to learn what her boyfriend has done.  She didn’t mean to go behind her parents’ back:  her idea was to tell Kiyoko about her intended, in the hope that her mother would then soften up her father.  Without telling Setsuko, Taniguchi decided to cut out the go-between.  Taking the bull by the horns is a bull-in-a-china-shop tactic (and a red rag to the other bull) but Taniguchi still insists to Setsuko, when she turns up at his apartment in distress, that a direct approach to her father was the sensible option.  As Setsuko anticipated, Kiyoko is less agitated than Hirayama by their daughter’s plans.  When Taniguchi escorts Setsuko back to her parents’ house, Kiyoko meets him briefly and finds him charming.  She gently suggests to her husband that this may be the right husband for Setsuko – to little avail, although Hirayama does make some little attempt to find out more about Taniguchi’s character.  He picks the brains of one of his employees, Shotaro Kondo (Teiji Takahashi), who was at school with the young man.  All Kondo can tell the boss is that Taniguchi was really good at basketball.

    No one accuses Hirayama of double standards until Setsuko’s friend, Yukiko Sasaki (Fujiko Yamamoto), tricks him into indulging them.  She tells him her mother Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa), a widowed innkeeper, is trying to force her into a marriage that Yukiko doesn’t want.  When she asks Hirayama’s advice he doesn’t hesitate to tell her to ignore Hatsu:  the subtext of his reply is that a mother is only a woman after all.  Yukiko triumphantly telephones Setsuko to give her the good news of her father’s views on arranged marriage vs free marital choice;  Hirayama finds himself all the more poorly placed to lay down the law to his own daughter.  His wife reproaches him as hypocritical; their younger daughter Hisako (Miyuki Kuwano) calls him old-fashioned; Setsuko and Taniguchi (although the latter isn’t seen again in the film) insist on getting married.  At the eleventh hour, Hirayama climbs down by agreeing to attend their wedding.

    The tonal trajectory is almost the reverse of Early Summer‘s.  The latter turns more serious as its protagonist, a marriageable daughter who may soon be on the shelf, develops into a more substantial character.  In Equinox Flower, Hirayama, as he tries and fails to assert his authority, becomes increasingly ridiculous.  He and his wife have no sons.  At first, their situation might seem to vindicate the folklore mentioned early on; as the story progresses, hectoring Hirayama appears weak beside his quiet, more effective wife.  Fooled by Yukiko, Hirayama returns home to find Kiyoko listening to music on the radio:  her happy attitude makes clear she has learned from Setsuko that Hirayama has changed his mind.  He promptly turns off the music.  Kiyoko tries to find out what’s wrong; he’s grumpily silent; she turns the radio back on; he shouts at her to turn it off.  Kiyoko does as she’s told but looks levelly at her husband.  Getting his own way over the radio is just about the only argument that Hirayama wins.

    Red might seem to be the film’s signature colour.  Its original title refers to a red flower which blooms in Japan at around the time of the autumn equinox and Ozu makes striking use of red objects in several scenes.  More muted colours register too, though – not least the dull brown robe that Kinuyo Tanaka’s Kiyoko habitually wears, making her a deceptively mousy figure.  (Even the sacking that, as ever, is the background to Ozu’s opening titles is more striking because – for the first time – it’s gingery!)   The fine use of music includes, as well as the traditional Japanese music on the radio in the scene just mentioned, the tinkling arrangement of ‘Home! Sweet Home!’ that also featured in Early Summer.  Although the melody is heard less often this time, the song’s lyrics feature more explicitly in Equinox Flower.  Once she’s married, Setsuko will move to Hiroshima, where Taniguchi is now working.  When she tells her mother and sister the accommodation there will be very basic, Hisako cheerfully replies, ‘Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home’.

    In the lead role, Shin Saburi shows less variety than he did as the childless husband in Ozu’s The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952).  A heavy-set, saturnine figure, he’s neither as appealing a presence nor as nuanced an actor as Chishu Ryu – as Ryu’s appearance in a minor role in Equinox Flower serves to emphasise.  Since Ryu played father of the troubled bride-to-be in several Ozu films (or, in Early Summer, her elder brother) it might seem surprising that he doesn’t on this occasion but the decision to cast Saburi instead was probably right.  Ryu’s charm and the sympathetic associations of, especially, his character in Late Spring (1949) would have disturbed the balance that Ozu seems to have wanted in Equinox Flower.  After Setsuko’s wedding (which takes place off screen), Hirayama learns from Mikami that he too has agreed to let his daughter choose her husband and from Yukiko that she herself hasn’t got time for marriage.  He’s then bounced by Yukiko’s well-meaning chatterbox mother into visiting Setsuko and Taniguchi in Hiroshima.  The film seems on the point of ending several times before it actually does but the closing scene, with Hirayama on the train to Hiroshima, makes sense.  We don’t need to see him visit the happy couple:  we can be pretty sure, thanks to Shin Saburi’s interpretation, that it won’t bring a smile to Hirayama’s face.  It might have been different (and ended the film on a more sentimental note) with Chishu Ryu in the part.

    Ryu is impressive, though, in the old schoolfellows’ reunion that supplies one of the apparently conclusive scenes – and crystallises the picture of a generation of men that Ozu has built by implication in the course of Equinox Flower.  Mikami’s friends at the gathering – Hirayama, Kawai and the others from the early sequence in the Tokyo bar – urge him to sing a traditional song.  He refuses at first; relents to sing a couple of verses; then tells his friends, although they call for more, that enough is enough.  Mikami is reluctant to perform the song because, he says, its sentiments are now old hat.  Once his solo ends, though, the whole group sings another song with similar lyrics.  These recognise the passage of time but affirm abiding comradeship, the loyalty of sons to fathers, the glory of being ready to give one’s life in war to one’s country (and father-Emperor).  Plenty of British and North American films of the period dramatise the struggles of men who’ve had a ‘good’ war but feel diminished in the civilian life to which they return.  In a Japanese film, of course, the disappointment of such men has the extra dimension of defeat in World War II and, in its immediate aftermath, living in an occupied country.  The theme features in other Ozu films (a scene in An Autumn Afternoon (1962) comes to mind) but the reunion singsong in Equinox Flower has a particular resonance.  In contemporary Japan, middle-aged men like Hirayama and Mikami, are doubly defeated:  they’re no longer able to impose their will even on their wives and daughters.  On the train journey to Hiroshima, Hirayama quietly sings to himself the same nostalgic song.

    21 September 2023

  • Au revoir les enfants

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Goodbye, Children

    Louis Malle (1987)

    The climax to Au revoir les enfants takes place on a January morning in 1944.  In German-occupied France, Gestapo officers descend on a Carmelite boarding school whose pupils include three Jewish boys, kept in hiding through the good offices of the school’s head, Père Jean, and his colleagues.  The three boys, along with Père Jean, are eventually led away.  Text on the screen explains that all four died, the boys in Auschwitz and Père Jean in Mauthausen.  The film’s last words are spoken in voiceover by the man that the film’s protagonist – eleven-year-old Julien Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) – became.  The voice tells us that, although forty years have passed since that January morning, he will remember every second of it until the day he dies.  In the winter of 1943-44, Louis Malle, born in 1932, was a pupil in a Catholic boarding school near Fontainebleau and witnessed virtually the same events that Au revoir les enfants dramatises.  Whether or not it’s Malle’s actual voice speaking the closing lines, it seems fair to assume this picture meant a great deal to him.  It was certainly one of his most successful movies in terms of prizes won and box-office receipts.  It’s also far below Malle’s best.

    To be fair, he attempts something doubly difficult in Au revoir les enfants.  First, the film’s central relationship is between two children – Julien and Jean Bonnet, one of the Jewish boys (Jean’s real surname is Kippelstein); Malle therefore relies heavily on young and inexperienced players.  He’d done so before, of course – in Zazie in the Métro (1960), Murmur of the Heart (1971), Lacombe, Lucien (1974) and Pretty Baby (1978).  In all four of those cases, though, child or novice performers co-starred with experienced actors; in Au revoir les enfants the adults are in strictly supporting roles.  Second, the episode that culminates in the Gestapo’s arrest of Père Jean[1] and the three boys, accounts for less than fifteen minutes of the total (104-minute) running time.  These final scenes are, understandably, the film’s raison d’être:  the real events they reconstruct made an indelible impression on Malle.  But you also feel their overwhelming importance in the story he tells in more negative ways.  For the most part, he recreates life in the school competently yet perfunctorily.  Good supplementary details – like Julien’s elder brother, François (Stanislas Carré de Malberg), amiably misdirecting ‘Kraut’ soldiers whenever they need help navigating the school grounds – are few and far between.  Almost anything not directly connected to the often uneasy friendship of Julien and Jean (Raphaël Fejtő) – and to the latter’s true identity and perilous situation – has a makeweight quality.

    It’s a matter of opinion how much of the friendship is invention on Malle’s part.  According to his Wikipedia entry, one of the Jewish boys arrested at his Fontainebleau school was ‘his close friend’.  According to Pauline Kael, reviewing the film on its original release, ‘One of the Jewish boys was in Malle’s class, but Malle didn’t get to know him well and didn’t realize that he was Jewish’.  Whichever of these is correct (if either), Au revoir les enfants gives a melodramatic, unconvincing account of how Julien first gets wind of Jean’s religion.  Late one night, Julien wakes to see Jean, whose bed is next to his in the dormitory, standing in prayer, having lit candles and donned a skull cap – an improbably risky strategy in a crowded dorm.  Gaspard Manesse and Raphaël Fejtő acquit themselves well enough during incidents like the school treasure hunt that turns into a scary twilight adventure and helps create a bond between the boys.  (It’s ironically effective that Julien and Jean, lost on the treasure hunt, are returned safely to school by German soldiers.)  It works too – as a means of giving the pair something in common – that they’re made fun of by their classmates because both are bookish.  Elsewhere, though, Malle doesn’t give the young leads sufficient means of bringing their characters’ relationship to life.

    The film’s opening scene takes place on the platform of a Paris railway station, where Mme Quentin (Francine Racette) is seeing her two sons off to boarding school.  She barely speaks to François, except to scold him for smoking a cigarette:  it’s all about her and Julien, so unhappy at parting from his mother that he petulantly announces that he hates her.  She then assures him that ‘I’ll miss you every moment – I’d like to dress up as a boy and join you:  I’d see you at school every day – it would be our secret’.  These words and the long embrace between mother and younger son during which they’re spoken naturally bring to mind Murmur of the Heart, another semi-autobiographical Malle film, but Francine Racette has none of Lea Massari’s warmth or charm:  Julien’s mother is portrayed here and later in the film as chilly, snobbish and implicitly anti-Semitic.  And Malle pushes too hard to show Julien as pampered and privileged.  His hair, compared with that of the other boys (including his brother), is conspicuously styled.

    During a parents’ day at the school, Mme Quentin takes her two sons to a restaurant.  At Julien’s request, Jean sits at the Quentins’ table.  It’s no surprise that his own parents are conspicuous by their absence but so too is M Quentin.  When François asks if his factory owner father is still a Pétain supporter, his mother retorts that ‘No one is any more’.  Right on cue, Milice officers arrive to harass an elderly Jewish diner, a customer at the restaurant of many years’ standing, and order him out – until a Wehrmacht officer at a table near the Quentins’ tells the ‘Collabos’, as François calls them, to leave, which they reluctantly do.  While this is going on, Malle cuts repeatedly to Jean’s and Julien’s faces, frightened and uncomprehending respectively.  Once the Milice have left, Julien asks his mother, ‘Aren’t we Jewish?’, mentioning some branch of the family in particular.  Mme Quentin is appalled by the suggestion and insists the relatives in question are devout Catholics, adding she has nothing against Jews though she’d be happy to see Léon Blum hanged (presumably for his socialism rather than his Judaism).  After the Wehrmacht officer has ordered the Milice out, she gives him a respectful-verging-on-flirtatious look; when she then tells her sons the officer’s action proves that some Germans are decent, François says the intervention was designed only to impress her.  His mother lightly pooh-poohs the suggestion yet seems almost flattered by it.  The sustained emphasis on Mme Quentin in this scene means that she emerges as its unlikely chief villain.  Was that really Malle’s intention?

    Among the younger actors, Stanislas Carré de Malberg outshines the main boys, not least (though not only) because François is a relatively well-conceived character.  Louis Malle may be able to see his younger self in his alter ego Julien but Gaspard Manesse is rarely expressive.  Raphaël Fejtő’s Jean is a clichéd and queasy conception of what it means to be Jewish – exotic looking, brainy, a gifted musician.  (Malle’s admiring treatment of Jean reminded me of news reports about murdered children which inform us that friends and family remember them as thoroughly delightful – as if we wouldn’t deplore their death without being told that.)  François, who’s meant to be sixteen or seventeen, is at least given some coherent human detail.  He’s robustly anti-German and anti-collaborationist.  He’s interested in the opposite sex and prone to sweeping chauvinist statements about women.  Carré de Malberg plays him with refreshing wit.  François is particularly interested in the young female pianist at a school concert – a cameo role that marked the screen debut of Irène Jacob, who went on to bigger screen roles than any other cast member.  According to Wikipedia and IMDb, Gaspard Manesse moved into music and Raphaël Fejtő behind the camera; Stanislas Carré de Malberg, although he has quite a few more acting credits than either, is probably best known now as a co-writer of The Bélier Family (2014), the French film that inspired Sian Heder’s CODA (2021).

    The film’s busiest actor in subsequent years, though not in lead roles, appears to have been François Négret, as Joseph, the lame boy who helps out in the school kitchens and eventually shops Père Jean to the Gestapo, in revenge for being sacked for minor black marketeering.  I don’t know if this character and plot element derive from Malle’s own experience but they feel more like a re-working of Lacombe, Lucien, in which the young rustic Lucien, rejected for membership of the French Resistance, gets its own back by turning quisling.  Joseph’s treachery is revealed in the course of the climactic Gestapo raid for which Au revoir les enfants has been marking time.  This is the highlight that it needs to be, despite Peter Fitz’s rather overdoing the suave brutality of Müller, the Gestapo leader.  Julien’s inadvertent betrayal of his friend – Müller catches Julien’s anxious glance at Jean across the classroom – is a fine moment.  Another is the formal handshakes Jean gives Julien and others just before he and his Jewish schoolfellows – Dupré (Damien Salot) and Négus (Arnaud Henriet) – are rounded up.  The parting words of the headmaster, as he too is escorted from the school grounds, provide the film’s title.  (It’s usually referred to by its original French name even in the Anglophone world.)  Philippe Morier-Genoud’s bony gravitas as Père Jean is impressive but Au revoir les enfants as a whole is not.  Until the closing stages, Louis Malle’s strong personal investment in the material thwarts his film-making imagination.

    20 September 2023

    [1] The headmaster’s real-life inspiration, Père Jacques de Jésus, according to Wikipedia, ‘died shortly after [Mauthausen] was liberated by the US Army, having refused to leave until the last French prisoner was repatriated. Forty years later, Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, granted Père Jacques the title of Righteous Among the Nations’.

     

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