Only a Blockhead

August 22

Crape myrtle in bloom

In Still Walking, the flowers

The children reach for

Blooming everywhere

Crape myrtle: signature flower

of the long summer

A classic haiku:

The morning glories

mending chinks

in the old fence

朝顔や昼は鎖おろす門の垣

(あさがおやひるはじょうおろすもんのかき)

(asagao ya hiru wa jō orosu mon no kaki)

--Matsuo Basho (1693), Translation: Michael R. Burch

September 15

Watching the trailer

of Christopher Robin

my eyes well up with tears

 

Perhaps because the Bear of Very Little Brain was a part of childhood, and the trailer/preview is a miniature movie in itself.

 

August 3

Red crape myrtle everywhere

The flowers the kids reach for

in Still Walking

Time

Watching the DVD of Days of Heaven reminded me how beautiful the light is at dawn and dusk. And how farmers--then as now--have only the daylight hours to work with, bookended with the pinks and oranges of daybreak and sundown.

Here in Japan, farmers used to divide the day in just this way: sunrise to sunset; sunset to sunrise. And these two were further divided into six parts – "hours" if you will – that expanded and contracted as the year turned. In winter, the six daylight periods were each shorter, the night ones longer.

We lost that connection with the cycle of the day and year when we left the land, measured our lives with rigid hours and minutes, turned on the night with artificial light. We fill our hours of rest with bright pastimes, go to bed late and wake groggy. I've seen many more sunsets than sunrises.

 

        Midnight

        Convenience store lit up like Christmas

        Full moon high above

 

--Julian

Still walking

The crape myrtles are in bloom: the signature flower of the movie Aruite mo, aruite mo (English title: Still Walking), which is about a family reunion over the August Obon holidays. This brilliant film is specifically Japanese, but resonates with our common humanity. This is some of what the film illustrates:

• the awkwardness of family reunions: The young don’t want them but they reel you in
• to stay over with one’s parents is an effort on both sides; an inconvenience for the young; a matter of pride--and work and expense--for the elders
• the difficulty of communicating across generations
• the need for politeness, care, and the smoothing of ruffled feathers, and how tiring that is
• how deeply our family can hurt us with a careless word
• the wonder of childhood and the children’s own world
• the food
• the idiosyncrasies of age: stuffing a refrigerator full of food to “feel safe”; saving enormous numbers of empty bags
• the self-absorption of the young, who are reluctant to put themselves out for their parents
• the later regret of the young for their self-absorption
• the family in-jokes and shared memories
• the passing on of heirlooms by parents sensing their impending demise
• the closing of smaller, local businesses… or their survival with a new generation
• the awareness of, and the indignities of ageing
• sibling rivalry
• the stubborn pride of the old and the young alike

We can’t celebrate a decade of Only A Blockhead without mentioning this movie, which has caught our notice multiple times over the years. David found it early; it’s common to be swept away by an experience (he called it “one of the best films I’ve ever seen”) only for it lose its luster later on, but he had called it accurately, still finding it “my favorite movie of the last decade or three” when years had past. NC Tate wrote about the food. We even had a long, considered guest review (by, I can now reveal, prize-winning author P.D. Walter), which drew thoughtful comments.

Aruite mo, aruite mo, with the children visiting their parents, is a contemporary take and mirror image and artistic equal of Ozu’s Tokyo Story in which the parents visit their children. As the crape myrtles bloom on roadsides and in gardens, I spend another Obon with the Yokoyama family.

--Julian

Two communities

I split some cedar before remembering that it’s best not to burn it in a stove. I was told there were neighbors with less worry about a coated chimney and I said I’d be glad if they took the logs off my hands. And so I met the Okamotos who farm in the adjacent valley. They have what’s best described as a community that attracts both free spirits and the marginalized. They still cook and heat the bath with wood, and people at a nearby facility for the mentally challenged help with the farm work there.

Suzuki-san is a new staff member at that facility, and he had the vision of holding an outdoor movie showing at the Okamotos this spring. I met him when he came to collect the logs, and I suggested a documentary called アラヤシキの住人たち(Arayashiki no Junintachi/The people who live at Arayashiki). It was filmed at a community farm in rural Nagano Prefecture where I once stayed and taught English. Suzuki-san said that was exactly the movie he was thinking of showing because he saw the similarity to the Okamotos’ farm.

Last night the event was realized. The Okamoto residents served curry to about 50 of us, after which we retired up into the woods where we sprayed ourselves liberally with mosquito repellent and sat on mats on the ground for Okinawan music, followed by the movie as darkness fell. It was eerie and even surreal to be watching the scenes of the Nagano countryside with the sounds of bush warblers, insects and frogs while, at the same time, the sound of local frogs drifted up from the valley, and the occasional night insect flew across the screen.

It’s an amazing coincidence that I once stayed in one community, and now discover that I live next to another. I hope I can be of help to them in future.

--Julian

The DVD of アラヤシキの住人たち has English subtitles, and is available at Amazon.co.jp and elsewhere.

"Sequences of Tokyo life drag out rather aimlessly"

My sister-in-law Liz watched Lost in Translation again, knowing it’s a favorite of mine, and having been underwhelmed the first time. She was underwhelmed the second time, and asked me why I liked it. (The following comments include spoilers.)

Apart from the comedy set-pieces (lip my stocking; “Suntory time” photo shoot), the depiction of the perfect storm of isolation/alienation is probably the reason I like it so much: the sheer strangeness of Japan; the language barrier; the jet lag; being outside your daily routine and so feeling aimless and… lost.

(perfect storm of alienation [copyright image used to critique or promote a film, which is hopefully fair use])

I also enjoy how Japan seems weird to the main characters: the bowing, the efficiency, the shrine and the wedding the Scarlett Johansson character witnesses; the pachinko parlor she and Bill Murray race through; the unsexy “sexy” dance club; trying to order food from pictures on a menu that all look the same; the almost undersea world of the dim high-rise hotel jazz bar, out of place, out of time.

Liz noted how the characters keep their integrity (he wants sex, but respects her lack of passion), which adds to the feeling of nothing happening: it’s an alienation from conventional film plotting. And there’s the ending (which frustrated me) when we the audience is alienated by not being able to hear the contents of the whisper.

I saw a later Sofia Coppola film that begins with an endless sequence of a car being driven round in circles. I thought it was boring and self indulgent, but my movie-literate partner says it brilliantly captures the aimlessness and emptiness of Hollywood life. Which helps me understand how what worked for me didn’t get beyond “sequences of Tokyo life drag out rather aimlessly,” as my sister-in-law put it.

--Julian

Rohmer in summer

Over at Movie Morlocks, R. Emmet Sweeney is taking a virtual vacation by watching director Éric Rohmer’s movies that are set in summer. And blogging about one of them every Tuesday. Yesterday it was The Green Ray. Scroll back for Pauline at the Beach, Claire’s Knee and La Collectionneuse.

Apart from Sweeney’s astute analysis, the posts are enriched by background revelations taken from the massive new Éric Rohmer, A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe, recently translated into English. The Green Ray, we learn, was filmed by an all-female crew, from a tight script based on long conversations with lead actress Marie Rivière. She recalls Rohmer saying, “I’m reproached for writing sentences that are too long. But in life, people talk a long time without stopping. And I’m going to demonstrate that. No one will see the difference between a text I’ve written and an improvised text.”

There is much more in this and Sweeney’s previous posts to enrich our experience of watching Rohmer’s characters discuss love and life under the bright sun of summer.

--Julian

Like life itself: The films of Eric Rohmer

With great pleasure, I am rewatching my DVD collection.

I’m into the Rohmers now, and have finished the Six Moral Tales, in the handsome Criterion box set with extras. I’d forgotten that it contains an illuminating rarity: a Canadian interview with Rohmer himself (who shunned TV appearances in his own country so his mother wouldn’t know he was a famous film director) from the time he was completing the Moral Tales.

I’m watching the contemporary stories, having never gotten into Rohmer’s period works. To come are the Comedies and Proverbs and the Tales of the Four Seasons, plus a movie I’ve not seen before, 4 Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. I await all with anticipation. As Neil LaBute said in another Moral Tales extra about the world that Rohmer creates,

“This is a pleasant place to be because if feels very real to me; it feels very much like life itself.”

--Julian

Pico Iyer on Ikiru

On the Criterion blog, “Ikiru Many Autumns Later,” an interesting new essay on that movie by Pico Iyer.

--Julian