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The climate of beauty
At the MFA, Sontag again picks the best of Japanese film
BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

In this sequel to the series of Japanese cinema she curated in 2003, author Susan Sontag returns with another group of not-to-be-missed films, some of them rarely screened. Two of the best-known Japanese directors, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, are represented by two films each, as is the astonishing lesser-known director Mikio Naruse. An array of other distinctive directorial styles rounds out the series, which is strong on films about women and about the struggle to resist a pervasive moral decay.

Both Mizoguchi films deal with the theater of the Meiji era (late 19th and early 20th centuries). Asked why so many of his films were set in this period, the director replied, "Let us say that a man like me is always tempted by the climate of beauty in this era." This climate is one of the first things to notice about The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums/Zangiku monogatari (1939; January 2 at 10:45 a.m.). The story concerns the untalented scion of a famous family of kabuki actors. The only person who dares tell him he can’t act is his brother’s wet nurse, who devotes her life to helping him improve his art, ruining her health in the process. Mizoguchi’s scrolling long takes enfold events within ever larger and more complex structures while moving the narrative forward with inexorable logic. With its emphasis on metaphorical journeys (the migrations of the acting troupe, the hero’s path to artistic excellence), the narrative lets Mizoguchi meditate both on the time-bound course of human life and the transcendent role of art.

In Mizoguchi’s undervalued Love of Sumako the Actress/Joyu Sumako no koi (1947; January 15 at 10:30 a.m.), Kinuyo Tanaka, one of Japan’s greatest film stars, appears as Sumako Matsui, who played Nora in the first Japanese production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and became a pivotal figure in the new-theater movement of the early 20th century. Matsui’s debut in the Doll’s House production is an early highlight of this chronicle, which focuses on her relentless dedication to her art, her scandalous affair with her married director, and the hardships they and their company endure on their tours of Japan. The conjunction of theater, love, and physical illness makes the film an important counterpart to The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums; and both films insist on the exclusive relationship between the actor and a person who remains his or her main audience, even after death. Tanaka brings great energy and vitality to her tour de force performance, which includes a ferocious on-stage turn as Carmen, and Mizoguchi lets her rule the frame (and even, in two scenes, drive men out of it).

The two Kurosawa films in Sontag’s series are among the contemporary-set works of a filmmaker more often remembered for his films about the samurai era. In Drunken Angel/Yoidore tenshi (1948; January 27 at 2:15 p.m. and January 30 at 3:45 p.m.), Takashi Shimura stars as an alcoholic physician on a personal mission to battle the physical and moral corruption of his yakuza-ruled slum neighborhood. Toshirô Mifune (in his first role for Kurosawa) roars and coughs his way through the film as a tubercular gangster in whose condition both doctor and director see a clear symbol of the precarious state of postwar Japan. As always, Kurosawa is unashamed to pose his conflicts in the starkest, most obvious forms he can get his hands on. Thanks to his visual flair, the strong performances, and some nice work involving a guitar, Drunken Angel is passionate and urgent rather than just schematic.

Kurosawa’s High and Low/Tengoku to jigoku (1963; January 6 at 1 p.m. and January 8 at 11 a.m.) is, on the other hand, a full-fledged masterpiece. Mifune plays Gondo, a shoe manufacturer who’s on the verge of scoring a big financial coup when he gets a phone call from someone who claims to have kidnapped his son and demands a large ransom. The protracted first section of the film takes place entirely in Gondo’s mansion, as he and the police wait for contact from the kidnapper and plan their response. Kurosawa captures the agonizing tension of the situation with stunning verve, using the TohoScope wide-screen with brilliance, shrinking it and even stretching it with his compositions. The beautiful and memorable design of High and Low includes a short, swift second section aboard a bullet train; then, with the grueling and intense third section, we descend into "hell" (the film’s Japanese title means "Heaven and Hell"), as the police swarm over one of Kurosawa’s typical urban mazes in search of the criminal.

Kurosawa’s bold use of wide-screen has never lacked for vocal admirers, but I feel the need to point out that Sontag’s series also includes a film in which director Mikio Naruse’s use of the "Scope" format is no less stunning, though rather more subtle: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs/Onna ga kaidan o noboru toki (1960; January 9 at 10:30 a.m. and January 13 at 4 p.m.). The film concerns the plight of a smart, chic, and widowed bar hostess (Hideko Takamine) in Tokyo’s Ginza district. Dreading the advance of age and its effect on her market value, the heroine considers raising money to buy her own bar while she can still attract investors, but she really would rather get out of the Ginza life, which she hates. Less obtrusive than Kurosawa’s and less imperious than Mizoguchi’s, Naruse’s style suggests both a complete immersion in the world he’s depicting and a dynamic, intelligent, complex response to that world. He propels scenes by cutting together ever-varying camera angles that feel strong and right and that also, in their deftness and precision, point to competing expectations and unstated motives, and create a rich and vibrant atmosphere. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is an absolute masterpiece, a perfect narrative-filmmaking model that no one has followed.

In the earlier Repast/Meshi (1951; January 20 at 2:45 p.m.), Naruse also deals with the financial and emotional pressures on a woman, this time the disappointed wife (Setsuko Hara) of a low-level stockbroker. A quiet and devastating film, Repast is comparable to contemporary films by Rossellini, Antonioni, and Ida Lupino in its nuanced portrait of feminine alienation. Hara, best known for her work with Yasujiro Ozu (absent from this series, no doubt only because he was the subject of a complete retrospective that came to Boston earlier this year), here shows more of her range: a marvelous late scene in which she unexpectedly laughs constitutes the most startling and understated payoff imaginable to the film’s clear-eyed analysis of limited possibilities.

Kon Ichikawa’s icy antiwar classic Fires on the Plain/Nobi (1959; January 22 at 12:15 p.m.) concerns some starving Japanese soldiers on Leyte Island in the Philippines in early 1945. The film’s hero, suffering from tuberculosis, gets expelled from both his regiment and the military hospital and finds himself wandering through a chaos of destruction and struggling against the temptation of cannibalism, to which his comrades have succumbed. Ichikawa’s harrowing images draw their strength from the tactile qualities of mud, rock, and flesh.

Another film about people confronting nature (including their own), Himatsuri (1984; January 13 at 5:45 p.m.), directed by Mitsuo Yanagimachi, takes place in an isolated Japanese village where a marine park is under construction. Little by little, the film widens its view of the town, gathering up various characters and locating them within the local ecological and economic systems: woodsmen, fishermen, bikers, a venal bar hostess and the old real-estate broker she has her hooks into. The pivotal figure is Tatsuo, a lumberjack and hunter who claims a personal relationship with the region’s tutelary nature goddess. The slowness of the film is full of threat; with impressive calmness and control, the director tracks down a still-present animism in this weird modern world, culminating in the fire festival of the title.

Humans are linked with animals again in Pigs and Battleships/Buta to gunkan (1961; January 19 at 6 p.m.), one of the best films by Shohei Imamura. Telling a convoluted, funny, and creepy story of yakuza taking up pig farming during the postwar American occupation, Imamura gets his hands dirty in a waterfront-sleaze setting that he tackles with much enthusiasm, no moral complacency, a sort of earthy intelligence, and an unsentimental and vivid sense of the grotesque. Imamura is another wide-screen innovator, combining entertaining splash with clarity of ideas in a way that recalls Nicholas Ray’s Hot Blood and Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It. And in his portrait of his heroine, a bar girl struggling to keep her romanticism, Imamura carries on the feminist traditions of Mizoguchi and Naruse in a world more dehumanized than the ones against which their heroines fought.


Issue Date: December 31, 2004 - January 6, 2005
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