Under the inane and senseless title “New Beat Japanese Cinema,” the MFA is sampling the work of three contemporary Japanese directors. The term “New Beat” suggests that movies are now to be received and discussed as if they were club-music styles, in which case I guess I missed the “Old-School Illbient” retrospective. I presume “New Beat” is also meant to refer to “Beat” Takeshi Kitano (Fireworks) and to imply that the three filmmakers (Tetsuya Nakashima, Junji Sakamoto, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa) either are his disciples or have somehow unseated him — neither of which is true in any important way.

Nakashima’s two films will both screen in the series. Happy Go Lucky (1995; June 8 at 8:15 p.m., June 10 at 10:30 a.m., and June 17 at 10:30 a.m.) is the lighthearted account of how a boy survives the fourth grade despite being marked in gym class as one of five students who can’t master the forward giant (a 360-degree swing over a horizontal bar). The film offers a revealing characterization of the Japanese elementary-school classroom: its rigidity, its negativity about failure, the way it gives kids complexes about the danger of growing up to be a “loser.” Here Nakashima is in the territory of the great director Yasujiro Ozu, and the film has many Ozu-esque shots (involving inter-scene transitions and frames within the frame) — but also a more sentimental view of childhood and a more facile sense of humor than Ozu demonstrates. The best thing about Happy Go Lucky is its sense of arbitrary or chance relationships (such as the boy’s father’s obsession with a schoolgirl whose classmates repeatedly beat her up). This quality dominates Nakashima’s second film, Beautiful Sunday (1998; June 15 at 8 p.m. and June 17 at 12 p.m.), a survey of how various oddballs who share the same apartment block spend their Sunday. For a while the film is intriguing for the way it juggles dispersed points of view and keeps having people appear from behind barriers in the frame, but this formal innovation proves too limited and the characters are too uninvolving to sustain a limp narrative.

In Sakamoto’s first film, the bold, brightly colored Knockout (1989; May 26 at 1:30 p.m. and June 2 at 1:45 p.m.), a boxing champion badly injured in the ring retires from fighting to open a gym, where he inculcates would-be fighters with his spirit of relentless aggressiveness. The director flings people across the frame with an abandon worthy of his bullying, likable protagonist, and the film is entertaining and not inflated. The director’s latest, Another Battle (2000; May 25 at 8 p.m.), is a plodding remake of Kinji Fukasaku’s 1972 yakuza hit Battles Without Honor and Humanity. Sakamoto trades in Fukasaku’s trademark vigor for a somber, pretentious style that does nothing for the overcomplicated story of two pals from childhood who get caught up in the succession war that follows the death of the leader of a yakuza family. The progression from Knockout to Another Battle and the equally dreary Face (2000) suggests that Sakamoto has come to see himself as a genre revisionist when he would be more compelling as a traditionalist (i.e., he should make direct-to-video crap and not film-festival crap).

By far the best of the three directors, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira Kurosawa) has evolved a distinctive style. He likes to start with an extreme premise and then draw it out in unpredictable ways. He favors leisurely shots with medium-distance staging and lateral camera moves, and he intersperses them with short shots that sometimes convey key information (like a novelist putting plot points in parentheses). In License To Live (1999; June 23 at 1:30 p.m. and July 8 at 3:50 p.m.), Yutaka, a 24-year-old man who has been in a coma for 10 years, the victim of a car accident, suddenly recovers. He finds that his parents have divorced, his sister has become a greedy jerk, and his best friend from junior high is a cellphone-wielding idiot. The only person he can relate to is Fujimori (Koji Yakusho, Kurosawa’s fetish actor), a college friend of his father who now runs a fish farm on Yutaka’s family’s land. Confronted with a bewildering new world, Yutaka tries to restore the one he knew by reopening the family’s dude ranch. The most charming of the Kurosawa films in the series, License To Live is pleasingly understated (though with a surprising emphasis on physical comedy), preserving its hero’s air of mystery and loss.

Two other Kurosawa films in the series — Cure (1998; June 3 at 7 p.m., June 22 at 6 p.m., June 23 at 3:30 p.m., June 24 at 4 p.m., June 28 at 6 p.m., June 29 at 6 p.m., July 1 at 1:50 p.m., and July 7 at 1:20 p.m.) and Charisma (1999; June 24 at 12 p.m. and July 5 at 6 p.m.) — both feature Yakusho as a cop. Cure is a horror movie (somewhat reminiscent of Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To) in which a series of motiveless throat slashings, each done by a different person, prove to have been committed under hypnosis. The hypnotist is a laid-back, apparently amnesic drifter with a habit of replying to questions by asking the other person to talk about himself. Kurosawa deepens the film’s creepy ambiguity even as the plot starts to unravel. At the beginning of Charisma, Yakusho’s detective botches a hostage rescue by failing to kill the gunman when he has the chance. Sent on vacation by his superior, he ends up in an isolated forest where various parties are embroiled in a battle over a tree (called “charisma”) whose roots, according to one character, secrete a poison that is slowly destroying the entire forest. The conflict becomes a chance for the detective to redeem his fatal nonintervention in the hostage case by expanding it into an environmental policy. Kurosawa handles the spiraling perplexities of Charisma with a self-effacing mastery that, as in License To Live, doesn’t preclude emotional involvement or nutty humor.

NONE OF THE THREE “New Beat” directors would even think about having his name in the title of one of his films. Federico Fellini put his name in the titles of three of his — all of which (along with 12 others) will be shown in “The Divine Comedy of Federico Fellini,” at the Harvard Film Archive. After he’d mythologized his own creative process in 8-1/2 (1963), the next step for Fellini was to cut out the alter-ego middleman (played in that film by Marcello Mastroianni) and name himself as the consciousness creating and organizing his images. The audience was invited not to “become” Fellini (writ so large, the author’s name bars identification) but to look over his shoulder as he turned the pages of his very expensive scrapbooks.

Fellini Satyricon (1969; May 25 at 8:30 p.m. and May 26 at 8:30 p.m.), a free adaptation of Petronius, is based on an æsthetic of the fragment: disjointed episodes that flow into one another, all involving eating, sex, and power in first-century Rome. The film is filled with the exhausting sense of bodies, costumes, and sets constantly being gyrated for Fellini’s camera. In Fellini’s Roma (1972; June 21 at 7 p.m. and June 27 at 9 p.m.), the director’s memory summons up visions of Rome during World War II that are freely linked to similarly modern-day scenes, some of them involving Fellini’s own effort to make a film about Rome. Like Satyricon, Roma is a huge spectacle about consumption, but this time Fellini communicates both the feeling of being inside the spectacle (so that we share the bewilderment and delight of an imaginative witness) and a sense of the complexity of social interaction. His visual flair is at its height in Roma: the long sequence of the traffic jam on the road to Rome is a self-contained epic of movement and detail almost worthy of Jacques Tati.

Casanova (1976; June 23 at 8:45 p.m.), known officially in Italy as Il Casanova di Federico Fellini, is again a series of fragments, this time strung together by the recollections of the title hero, who’s played by Donald Sutherland as a dead-eyed fop in a succession of candy-colored outfits. The baroque, theatrical film has a cloying preciousness that’s not relieved by Fellini’s jokes at the expense of Casanova’s sexual gymnastics, but it also has an icy severity rare in Fellini’s work, especially in its last half. The dream solitude in which Casanova ends up — an aging librarian convinced he’ll be remembered for his novel, a performer who turns his back on a low-class audience but can’t hold even the high-class audience he identifies with — is a warning against the implied isolation of the artist traveler who is the hidden protagonist of Satyricon and Roma.

If Casanova’s old age doesn’t fully move me, it’s because time is unreal, weightless, and reversible in Fellini. It’s a vast road without lanes, speed limits, or tollbooths. Fellini’s name on the titles of his films denotes not just the grandeur and the grotesquerie of his fragments but the distinctive imagination of time that unifies them.

Issue Date: May 24-31, 2001