A final iimage from Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon

Adding one note to yesterday's post on Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon: HOw could Ihave forgot to mention the final scenes in which the father and daughter prepare for her wedding ceremony and we see the father (Rya) buttoning himself into a "morning coat" - further evidence of the adoption of Western fashions especially for business and for formal occasions - and then the daughter makes her entry, in a traditional Japanese wedding dress, like someone stepping forward from the 18th century: a striking visual presentation of the clash of two cultures in postwar Japan, an attempt to hold onto traditional values and ideals against the tidal wave of Western ideas and commerce. The irony is that she is giving up the traditional role of daughter tending to aging father in order to pursue her own life as wife and mother - though of course she is doing so at the urging of her father. Her bridal attire is a way to say: See what you've sacrificed, see what you're giving up.

The power of Ozu's last movie

Ozu's final movie (1962), the enigmatically titled An Autumn Afternoon (many Ozu films are named for a season or part of a season, but this moniker seems particularly odd as the film is shot almost entirely as interiors - it hardly matters what the season might be - and takes place over several weeks or even months, although maybe the title refers to the autumnal years of the elderly central character and to the afternoon of the final scene?) touches on many of Ozu's key themes, especially father-daughter relationships and the obligations and expectations of families, especially the expectation that daughters forego or at least delay marriage in order to run the house for their father and brothers. In this movie the father - a successful business executive in some sort of vast factory in 1960s Japan, in an era when biz execs don't appear to work at a very fast pace and in which offices are run as strict hierarchies with the women in completely servile roles - wrestles with the idea that his daughter at 24 may be ready for marriage and over time comes to accept that she must begin her own life no matter what the cost to him (a similar theme in Ozu's Late Spring, with same lead actor, and a reverse on Ozu's masterpiece, Tokyo Story, in which the father, again same lead actor, and mother recognize that they are no longer central to their married daughter's life). Over the course of the movie we see a few scenes from several marriages, each exploring different aspects of or degrees of female independence: for ex., in one segment a young businessman tries to buy some expensive golf clubs and his wife forbids him to do so, an almost unheard of breech of protocol, at least of the older generation. We also see the business exec/father meet with some of his high-school buddies for evenings of serious drinking; they invite one of their former teachers - one whom they apparently did not care for - to one of their outings and get him severely intoxicated; they are a little surprised and dismayed, on helping him to get home, to see that his lives in poverty. A sub-theme is the changes in Japanese life and the self-image of the Japanese in postwar years: Not only such details as neon signs advertising "coffee" bars and the fascination w/ golf and w/ baseball but also a scene in which the business executive (Chishu Ryu, looked it up - a terrific actor) drinks with a man who served under him in the Japanese navy - a time of their lives when they were proud and hopeful; the defeat and partial destruction of Japan are never mentioned - history lives between the lines - but we sense that the younger men and women are changing to more Western, "modern" ways and the older men are ashamed of their past and drinking to blot out the bad memories and to blind themselves to the change on-going all around them.

The excellence of Babylon Berlin and some concerns about the end of season 1 (no spoilers)

A few quibbles aside, the German miniseries Babylon Berlin is a powerful and provocative story throughout its 16 episodes, with many plot lines, betrayals, and reversals of fortune that keep you thinking and engaged throughout. The writing and acting are smart; the lead characters - Gereon Rath (Berlin homicide detective who finds himself investigating a plot against the state and a potential military coup) and Charlotte Ricker (a young woman in an impoverished and derelick Berlin family, working nights as a prostitute in a decadent nightclub frequented by vice-squad members among others and who aspires to become a police detective - are intelligent, complex, flawed, and appealing; and the whole company does a great job re-creating the louche atmosphere of Berlin in the 20s, complete with political instability, extremes of wealth and poverty, frenetic entertainment, cross-dressing and overt sexuality, hyperinflation, political battles, clashes between right- and left-wing forces. The season brings a few surprising twists (don't worry, no spoilers here) in the final episode and wraps successfully - while still managing to look forward to an anticipated season 2. That said, the final episode, while dramatic and exciting, seemed, unlike the preceding 15, more 007ish, with a shootout on a moving train, a dramatic underwater rescue, and other theatrics involving near superhuman skills and effort. Similarly - and I wonder if here it went off script from the source novel? - the final episode introduced some startling though hardly credible final plot twists and revelations that seem out of place in this series but admittedly leave the door open for further development and complications in future episodes.

The weirdness of Samual Fuller's vision of mental illness and its treatment in Shock Corridor

Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor (1963), which he wrote/produced/directed is a deliberately sensational and over-the-top drama with an absolutely ludicrous plot, some truly weird scenes, and a haunting vision about life in a mental-health institution that, for all its campy exaggeration, is both scary and sad, rising over the obvious flaws in this film. The plot involves a newspaper reporter who thinks he'll win the Pulitzer Prize (which everyone in the movie mispronounces btw) by getting himself admitted to a mental institutions as a patient and while there he will interrogate other patients to find info to solve a murder. His investigation such as it is consists of asking patients "Who killed Sloan," until he gets an answer, and eventually the Pulitzer - so ridiculous a plot line it's not even worth ripping it apart. That said, Fuller's real interest is in showing the life in the halls of the institution, and his vision is quite harrowing: We see the reporter attacked by a group of "oversexed" women (a hilarious scene), get in a tussle with a black man who is a virulent white supremacist, engage in weird conversations with a man who thinks he's a Civil War general, a famous scientist who behaves like a 6-ear-old boy (they play hide-and-seek), and a man who goes by Pagliacci who thinks he's an opera singer. While these eccentric behaviors dominate the foreground, the real interest, visually and viscerally, comes from the deep focus, where we see many men standing in the hallway, in zombie-like states or stuck in loops of repetitive motion (one man, for example, rows like a member of crew throughout much of the film). The twist of the plot, obvious from the outset, is that the reporter, who enters the asylum healthy, becomes increasingly like the patients until at the end he's seriously ill. This concept - the hospital as infectious - was reversed not long after in the adaptation of Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest, in which we sense that the hospitalized men are healthier and more sane than their so-called caretakers. That was a '60s concept, and Fuller is definitely in working in the spirit of the '50s (one man against the system), even filming in the nearly antiquated b/w though using color for some bizarre dream/hallucination sequences.

A good Netflix documentary about the rise and fall of a cult; did it really need to be 6 episodes, though?

The Netflix 6-part documentary Wild, Wild Country (by McClain and Chapman Way) recounts the history and brings us up to date on a weird event that apparently was a huge part of the news cycle in the early 1980s although, oddly, none of the 3 of us watching nor any of a few people I've discussed this series with has any memory of these events in the news at all (admittedly, these events got much bigger play on the NW, but the were part of the national news, as we see from many interpolated news clips). The story involves and devout group of followers of an Indian guru, Rajneesh, who, forced from their base in Poona, India, resettle in a remote part of Oregon. They went there to build a new community and to live life their own way - evidently, with a lot of frenetic dancing, open sexuality, and communal sharing of property - and one would think all could have been well for them. But instead of quietly going about their lives, they made a nuisance of themselves in the tiny nearby town of Antelope - having sex in plain view, taking over a park, crowding the streets, just generally being provocative and obnoxious, which led to community opposition, The central figure is a woman named Sheela who was the public face and voice for the group - the Rajneesh was spending 3 years in silence (at least publicly) - and Sheela relished the opportunity to be combative and belligerent, eventually to a criminal degree: poisoning people and event taking steps to kill a rival w/in the cult. The cult members were armed and dangerous and they had a huge amount of money - perhaps from sales and memberships world wide, though that's the documentary doesn't examine the source of the $. Sheela was either the iron fist in the velvet glove, carrying out Rajneesh's wishes and orders, or else she went off on her own ego trip, ruining the life the commune through her paranoia and aggression, for which she ultimately paid a price. In many ways it's fascinating to watch this story unfold - aided by a trove of contemporary film footage, supplemented by interviews with Sheela and others who lived through both sides of this struggle, and to wonder how we could have missed this story (which came about in the wake of Jonestown, which everyone remembers); however, most points were well made early on and at least by episode three I became annoyed at how slowly the filmmakers were revealing key information; they didn't need 6 hours to tell this story.

A mediocre work by a great Japanese director

Did someone say that I like any movie as long as it's by a famous Japanese director and completed before 1970? Well that person is wrong. Sadly, I did not like Ozu's 1959 film Floating Weeds (apparently a remake of his own 1930s silent movie). Yes, it was promising at first, a simple plot about troubled a generational clash and troubled family relationships, and yes it has many long takes from Ozu's signature camera position, the "tatami point of view" (i.e., shot as if seen from a tatami floor mat). But this is by no means a Tokyo Story or a Late Spring - it's a melodrama in which the characters are wooden and unchanging and in which Ozu seems to have no feelings for his characters, as if he was just pushing to get the actors through their paces. The story in brief: an itinerant kabuki theater troupe comes to a small seaside city (time is undetermined, but it seems to predate the automobile), where as it turns out the head of the troupe years back had a relationship with a local prostitute that led to the birth of a son. The man has continue to support the son, who thinks the man is his uncle (he's now a young adult - and obviously a gullible one). When the man's current partner, a lead actress in the troupe, figures out what's going on, she induces the beautiful young star of the troupe to seduce the son, leading to a # of conflicts and arguments - in many of which the man is brutal and bullying (enough today to get arrested for spousal abuse). There's potential here, but undeveloped beyond the simple melodramatic plot line (though the final scenes, after the troupe breaks up and leaves town are moving and understated) and the whole approach is wooden and eclectic: This never looks or feels in any way like a real city (no street life, crowds, etc.), the music is sometimes absurdly inappropriate to the action, there's little differentiation among the settings, and we don't know enough about the troupers to care about their individual fates, such as they are. At times this movie even feels like a stage play, which perhaps is part of its provenance? Either way, to get a sense of Ozu at his best, start w/ Tokyo Story and pass Weeds by.

Terrific and complex start to Season 1 of Babylon Berlin

Weighing in on the first half (8 episodes out of a massive 16-episode season) of the Netflex/German series Babylon Berlin, based on a set of crime novels that begin in the mid-90s and are set in the highly atmospheric time era of late 1920s Germany - which we've seen in numerous books (Berlin Alexanderplaz, e.g.), plays/movies (Cabaret), memoirs, even TV series (the aforementioned BA, by Fassbinder, which I'm waiting for Criterion to make available via streaming) -but maybe none as powerful and effective as this series, which will grip you from the first episode and never let go. It's smart, well acted, beautifully produced (astonishing re-creation of the era that rivals anything the BBC has done in its numerous historical dramas, except maybe the superior The Crown), and well written throughout. There's no doubt that it gets off to a violent start, but I encourage viewers to say w/ the series; there is some violence and grotesqueness, but it's always in service of the plot, never gratuitous or sensational. Also, the series introduces many plot lines at the start, and not all will be clear over the course of the first few episodes, which is by design, but as you stay w/ it these plot elements will clarify and cohere in smart and surprising ways. The central characters is a police detective, Gereon Rath, sent by his father - the chief of police in Cologne - to work on the vice squad in the Berlin police force on a particularly sensitive case - which we learn about over the course of # of episodes. He's in a dark and scary world, in which just about everyone is double-dealing and double-crossing, and Rath has a # of issues of his own, including a drug addiction and posttraumatic stress from his war experiences. Possibly the best character in the series is the young Charlotte who lives with her mother and siblings in Dickensian squalor and who gets by via temp work as a clerk/secretary in the Berlin PD and, at night, prostitution as an underground dance club. Working in the PD she develops a taste for detective work and shows herself to be really good at discerning info from clues - but her possibility of advancement is limited by a # of factors, blackmail, sexism, and the mores of her time and place. She's a strong, witty, and appealing character and it's obvious that the season (and more to come perhaps) needs her - even though her position is in jeopardy at the end of episode 8. There's a whole world of politics (both German and Russian), crime and vice, smuggling and arms dealing, addiction, PTSD, plus some family dramas, all played out within a world of fast living, high inflation, terrible unemployment, strikes and street demonstrations, police brutality, and of course, over the horizon, the imminent rise of fascism.