5 Japanese Divas

Above, top to bottom,
3 of the 5 Japanese divas in lead roles for Mikio Naruse:
Hideko Takamine in Yearning,
Setsuko Hara in Repast,
Kinuyo Tanaka in Mother

The essential 3-week series titled "5 Japanese Divas" is now playing at Film Forum. As Adrian Curry noted at MUBI, "there are more masterpieces per square foot in this retrospective than in any other theater in town." The eponymous divas are Setsuko Hara, Kinuyo Tanaka, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo and Hideko Takamine, and thus the series is packed with some of the greatest films of Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse and Kurosawa. There are 5 Mizoguchis and 6 Ozus, but I'm especially delighted that no less than 6 films by Mikio Naruse are included, as he is the most neglected and rarely screened of the three major Japanese auteurs.

I saw a double bill of Naruse's Repast (featuring the exquisite Setuko Hara in one of her most nuanced roles as a disillusioned wife) and Yearning (with Hideko Takamine, who appeared in most of Naruse's great films of the 50's and early 60's). I posted about the latter film back in December and was eager to see it again just 4 months later. Yearning deserves to become part of the canon of Japanese cinema for its final movement, which begins with a lyrical depiction of a train ride that brings Takamine's character Reiko progressively closer to the forbidden love she feels for the younger brother of her dead husband, only to end the next morning with a shattering closeup after her rejection of him leads to inevitable tragedy.

Among others, I'm looking forward to as many of the other Naruse films as I can see, as well as Ozu's very dark Tokyo Twilight (with Setsuko Hara and Isuzu Yamada) and the rare Keisuke Kinoshita film Carmen Comes Home (Takamine).

New Directors/New Films

Curling

Winter Vacation

 Attenberg

Octubre 

 

I'm finally getting around to posting on the 2011 New Directors/New Films festival a day after it wrapped up. The two best films I saw, Denis Cote's Curling and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg, are very different looks at a father-daughter relationship which exhibit striking formal qualities while not sacrificing deep emotional resonances. Attenberg intercuts a semblance of a story with delightful improvised shots of the two girls doing Monty Pythonesque "silly walks" or walking slowly arm-in-arm a la Fassbinder's Katzelmacher (a reference the director acknowledged in her Q&A). Curling makes stunning use of its bleak wintry Quebec landscape to tell a mysterious tale of an emotionally shut-down father and his lonely teenage daughter, played by a real-life father and daughter who appeared at the film's MoMA screening.

Li Hongqi's Winter Vacation uses long, still takes beautifully to depict the aimless despair of a group of young Chinese kids in a remote small town with deadpan humor. And Daniel and Diego Vega's Octubre also uses wry humor to show a reluctant relationship between a lonely moneylender and the woman who helps take care of the baby he is suddenly saddled with as the result of one of his many visits to prostitutes. The sense of community in this poor neighborhood of Lima is wonderfully developed.