This 16mm presentation is part of the Shōhei Imamura season at the ICA. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: Kikuyo Zendo, the subject of Shohei Imamura’s funny, shocking, and
seemingly effortless 1975 documentary, was one of thousands of
impoverished Japanese women forced into prostitution and shuttled across
southeast Asia in the early 20th century. The director clearly regards
her story as a vehicle for numerous perennial themes: the resilience of
women, sex as a function of capitalism, and the radical idea that the
oppressed economic underclass are the most reliable commentators on
Japanese history. Sort of a nonfiction follow-up to Imamura’s narrative
films The Insect Woman (1963) and Intentions of Murder (1964), this also looks forward to his 1987 period piece Zegen
in its cynical portrait of Japanese imperialism, and Imamura’s warm
onscreen rapport with Zendo (whom he dotes on as if she were his own
mother) anticipates the humanism of his late masterpieces The Eel (1997) and Dr. Akagi (1998). Jonathan Rosenbaum
Time Out review: Deliriously playful yakuza pic, in which Seijun Suzuki lets logic hang.
Basically just another tale of gang warfare, it's kitted out with plot
ellipses, bizarre sets and colour effects, inappropriate songs, absurd
irrelevancies (nice hair-drier gags!), action scenes that verge on the
abstract, and some visual jokes tottering precariously between slapstick
and surrealism. Somehow, it still just about works as a thriller, with
(very, very faint) echoes of Jean-Pierre Melville and Sergio Leone. Inspired lunacy. Geoff Andrew
Reverse Shot review: Raging Sun, Raging Sky is split into three distinct verses,
consisting of a prologue and two separate epic visual love songs, the
first contemporary the second mythic and ancient, featuring the same
principal characters, but for the first time in color. All stanzas are
largely dialogue-free, with images moving in musical ebbs and flows—it’s
unlikely that anyone has made or ever will again make a men’s room
seduction scene as lengthy and sinuous and erotic as the one that opens
the film’s second act. After a brief shot of a projectionist, firmly
situating us both in a movie dream world and literally in a movie
theater frequented by horny young gay men, Hernández orchestrates an
intense roundelay of flirtations, intercourse, masturbation, and
voyeurism between multiple mute characters, from urinal to stall and
back again—graceful camera dexterity transforms this potentially putrid
lavatory space into an erotic labyrinth and unites these hungry young
men in a luscious continuum of desire. The cruising continues in the
shadowy entrance to the theater itself, an overhead chiaroscuro of Kieri
avoiding Tari’s attempted seduction on the steps—as stunningly
patterned with light as anything from early Sternberg. The lingering air of sensuality in this film, as in Broken Sky,
is so strong that it’s almost as though all the characters have
ESP—that they can sense each other’s presence, their skin and bodies,
yes, but also their melancholy and loneliness, their intense passions.
Hernández here almost seems to view this young community of gay men
(more than twenty years his junior) as spiritually connected. In their
isolation one could read a rather old-fashioned take on the homosexual
doomed to loneliness, but there is no discernible sociopolitical angle
to his point of view—this is the stuff of classic romantic legend, of
poetry, of lovesickness and pursuit. When Hernández shows us an overhead
shot of man in bed curled up, the sheet creases fanning out around his
body like rays of light, it’s not a visual aside, it’s an entire stanza
from the love song itself. Yet Hernández is seeking something more sensuous; these men are not
shirking their skins but inhabiting them even more fully, and their
desire is depicted as a primal, ancient force, one that, in this case,
even has power to affect the present. Indeed, the richness of
Hernández’s filmmaking isn’t quite comparable to that of any other of
the formalist darlings of the contemporary art-house scene, from Tsai
Ming-liang to Lisandro Alonso or even to Portuguese director João Pedro
Rodrigues, who may also trade in vivid homoeroticism but whose approach
is less extravagant and more given to tragic grotesquerie. The
romanticism and desperation in Hernández’s films are an aesthetic unto
themselves—Mexican cinema has somehow given birth to the bastard child
of Cocteau and Ophuls. Now the world needs to take notice. Michael Koresky
Chicago Reader review: I can’t vouch for its fidelity to Homer, but this version of the Iliad,
scripted by David Benioff (25th Hour) and directed by Wolfgang Petersen,
is clearly more than a prequel to O Brother, Where Art Thou? It has
plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to
Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O’Toole (as King Priam), a deeper
sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic
(even if Pitt’s character has some of the beefcake accoutrements of
Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Titanic). Far from lost among the zillions of
extras are Eric Bana (Hector), Brian Cox (Agamemnon), Diane Kruger
(Helen), Orlando Bloom (Paris), Sean Bean (Odysseus), Rose Byrne, and
Julie Christie. Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is part of the excellent Mubi Weekend Festival at Hackney Picturehouse. Full details here.
Time Out review: The
truly great ‘LA noir’ movies – ‘Point Blank’, ‘The Driver’, ‘Straight
Time’, ‘To Live and Die in LA’, ‘Heat’ – share common characteristics
beyond the basic clichés of the crime genre. These are movies informed
by the city in which they were made, a city constructed of gleaming
surfaces – six-lane highways, vast industrial wastelands and endless
suburban sprawl – and a place where crime is grubby and small-time,
carried out by empty, hopeless loners in hock to dapper despots with
unpredictable personalities. It’s in this world that we find the
near-silent hero of ‘Drive’,Nicolas Winding Refn’s self-consciously slick, synth-scored throwback.Ryan Goslingplays the unnamed Driver, a mechanic and occasional getaway guy whose life is overturned when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan),
a struggling mum with a husband in the joint. As all the above implies,
this is a film built on familiarity, in terms of narrative and style:
neon lights flash, rubber tyres screech, Gosling broods, Mulligan swoons
and a trio of wisecracking, overdressed character actors –Albert Brooks,Ron Perlmanand
Bryan Cranston – provide both levity and dramatic weight. But ‘Drive’
never drags: this is an entirely welcome riff on old material, a
pulse-pounding, electronically enhanced cover version of a beloved
standard. Sure, it’s shallow, but it’s also slickly compelling,
beautifully crafted and so damn shiny. Tom Huddleston
ICA introduction: Wanda, a dominatrix and businesswoman, presides over a gallery in Hamburg’s seedy port district. She stages sadomasochistic rituals as elaborate spectacles for her eager audiences. As Wanda’s many lovers become entangled in her meticulous web, the shifting dynamics between pleasure and pain, performance and reality, love and obsession, salaciously intertwine. Inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Treut and Mikesch queer the conventions of the S&M classic, placing a woman’s bisexual desire at the centre of its narrative. Pairing the glamorous and commanding presence of Mechthild Großmann with an achingly submissive Udo Kier, Mikesch’s cinematography oozes with New German Cinema cool. Banned for 18 years by the German Federal Board of Censorship, the exquisitely controlled staging and charged psychosexual tension have since established the film as a seminal work of queer cinema.
Time Out review: A reflective drama about a college professor in her fifties. On sabbatical to write a book on German philosophy, Marion (Gena Rowlands) rents an apartment for the necessary solitude. There she starts overhearing sessions in the psychologist's office next door, in particular the disclosures of Hope (Mia Farrow), who has cause to question her marriage, the meaning of life and death, etc. Marion gets to thinking, and is appalled to realise that so many assumptions about her own life and marriage are largely unfounded: in her desire for a controlled existence, she has evaded the emotional truth about relationships with her best friend (Sandy Dennis), brother (Harris Yulin) and husband (Ian Holm). The film shows a refinement and development of recurrent Allen themes, particularly in the characterisation of what is arguably his most complex female character to date. But in choosing a stylised approach, Allen too often obscures points in overstatement and intellectual posturing. Where the film gains considerable momentum and richness is in the marvellous performances: Rowlands' perfectly pitched approach to a demanding role is particularly stunning.
