The Auteurs Cinema

As relayed by David Hudson at GreenCine Daily, a significantly longer cut of Fritz Lang’s oft-restored, oft-reconstructed 1927 sci-fi allegorical masterpiece Metropolis has been found.  Images of the new footage courtesy of Die Zeit.

Above: Horikita Maki plays the terminally ill teenager in Love on Sunday 2: Last Words.

I can’t think of too many current directors of Hiroki Ryuichi’s stature and skill who work almost exclusively from scripts written by others. Is he a modern-day Jacques Tourneur, submitting to random collaboration in order to explore the dimensions of his personality? Or does he have the clout to work with writers to develop material that is meaningful to him? He was unknown on the international scene before his excellent 2003 Vibrator - but the IMDb gives him 44 directing credits, and 33 of them are before Vibrator. Many of these are allegedly “pink films,” soft-core pornography. At what point did he turn into an important filmmaker?

The two best Hiroki films I’ve seen, Vibrator and 2005’s Yawarakai seikatsu (It’s Only Talk), were written by Arai Haruhiko, another filmmaker with a long list of prior credits that aren’t familiar to me. Both these movies are adaptations of novels written by women (Akasaka Mari and Itoyama Akiko, respectively), and are strongly centered on their female protagonists.

The New York Asian Film Festival just screened two more Hiroki movies, Koi suru nichiyobi (Love on Sunday) (2006) and Koi suru nichiyobi watashi, Koi shita (Love on Sunday 2: Last Words) (2007). Despite the titular connection, the films do not share characters or have similar plots. But they are both shot on video, and deal with the emotional lives of teenagers. Both have soundtracks peppered with sentimental pop songs, presumably part of the series’ mandate. And, as with the other Hiroki films I’ve seen, both stories are told from a female perspective. The writers (Izumi Yoshihiro and Watanabe Chiho, respectively) seem to be relative newcomers, with only a few credits each.

The Love on Sunday films seem to me to have serious weaknesses on the scenario level, but they are beautifully directed. My guess is that Hiroki has enough prestige to exercise some control over his scripts, in which case I’d opine that his dramaturgical instincts aren’t impeccable.

But Hiroki is second to none in his ability to create a bemused, drifting ambiance to amplify his characters’ philosophical melancholy. Koi suru nichiyobi meanders around a small town at the end of the school year, bathed in golden-hour light and mysteriously underpopulated: an idyllic dream of last days and life changes. In their wanderings, Hiroki’s characters move between the foreground and background of calm long shots, mapping out the space of receding alleys or approaching the entry points to looming buildings. Koi shita is likewise keyed to the misty atmosphere of a beach town, and likewise fuses the portentous brooding of its main character to the camera’s lucid exploration of locations. The films’ most stunning moments generally have only a loose connection to plot – like the scene in Koi shita where the heroine wakes up alone in her friend’s house and walks around its windowed perimeter, absorbing the muted morning sunlight and the ocean-adjacent sounds of outdoors. For all their differences, Hiroki’s projects always seem to revolve around characters who withhold information about their emotional crises, and the exploration of space in his movies is invested with the romanticism of their unexpressed longing and pain.

Hiroki’s style suggests greatness: any few minutes of any of his movies gets me in the mood for a masterpiece. If the Love on Sunday films are a bit disappointing, it’s because the films’ inchoate emotionality is ultimately defined by unsatisfactory plot structures. Koi suru nichiyobi is built around an improbable love quadrangle that generates farcical plot twists at the expense of character, and finally arrives at romantic union by ignoring rather than resolving obstacles. Koi shita, after a pathos-laden setup, sends its tearjerking protagonist out on a mysterious mission – only to arrive at the sob-fest that it might as well have staged in the first five minutes. If Koi suru nichiyobi has an edge over the later film, it’s because it resolves its plot early and returns to the ambient rhythms of concealed sadness for a long, visually expressive coda. Both films are required viewing for their dazzling display of directorial skill – but they leave unresolved the question of whether Hiroki is a major or minor talent.

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Above: Shawn Yue, giving the best Kubrick Stare since Eyes Wide Shut.

The Kubrick Stare: that look, ranging from Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove all the way to Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, forehead tilted down, eyes turned up into the skull, a piercing gaze of the insane, those quashed by a system and unhinged to such a degree to turn their furious rebellion outwards. Believe it or not, Chinese genre director Cheang Pou-soi has miraculously dedicated an entire movie to the Kubrick Stare, with an unbridled, truly brilliant lead performance of desperation by Shawn Yue. Imprisoned as a youth for the murder of his parents, trained in karate in the hoosegow, turned loose on a disdainful society to be first a gigolo and then a contemptible blood fighter; beaten and raped in jail, scorned in society, finding his now parentless sister turned prostitute, hated by even the official crypto-pit fighting league, it is no wonder Yue saves his Kubrick Stare not for a final denouement or moment of insanity, but rather screws up his face from minute one, hating all and seeing threats and insults everywhere.

What is left, then, but to lash out? Cheang crafts another brutal winner based entirely on survival, desperate, humanity-forsaking survival. What seems at first a fight movie—with Yue being trained by a disgruntled karate master played by Francis Ng—and a fight narrative—Yue wants to beat the reigning fighting champion to achieve some measure of dignity after his criminal past—is nothing of the kind. Never has a fighter been trained so poorly, listened with such a deaf ear to an instructor, been beaten so thoroughly again and again inside the ring and out. No—Yue is not fighting to win, he is fighting back to stay alive. Unlike the institutional and even social oppression that plague Cheang characters in Dog Bite Dog and Love Battlefield, Yue has next to no psychology. Ominous shots of cicadas and ravens overlooking the fate of the poor boy are not for nothing: this is a film that is animistic above all else, with man as the most animal of all.  Yue truly is a beast lashing out at all perceived threats.Knocked down again and again, tread on and treated as nothing but the animal is probably is (or is turned into, as the film’s finale hints at), Yue becomes hate-filled and irrepressibly violent. Shamo is stripped almost entirely of the thing that make goal-oriented cinema so driving: psychological desires. Cheang takes us back a step, to a primal level of desire, instinctual, bodily desire, a place few truly desire to take the cinema.

But enabled by the adventurous, hard-edged stylization by photographer Fung Yuen Man and the film’s remarkable, empathetic score, Shamo wins our allegiance by its dedication. If a man’s spiritual wherewithal is signaled in his bodily endurance, the film’s spirit is likewise expressed in its foremost determination to stick by the side of such a terrible person in such a terrible position, and stick by him until, through the insanity of sheer beast-like perseverance, he wins our respect and admiration.

Although Wall-E ends with a very apt and moving nod to City Lights, it is in fact Pixar’s answer to Modern Times—both a bravura summation of everything the studio is great at and a “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” statement of purpose. Not to mention that it’s both a techno- and eco-fable, of  course.

The early teaser trailer for Wall-E emphasized its roots as a labor of love; in one, co-writer/director Andrew Stanton, the second animator to join Pixar, waxes nostalgic about a 1994 lunch wherein the idea for Wall-E, the industrious garbage-disposal robot trying to tidy up an impossibly waste-clotted world devoid of humans, was dreamed up. Pixar is of course one of the most accomplished anthropomorphizing concerns in all of show business—it has made you feel for insects (A Bug’s Life), fish (Finding Nemo), automobiles (Cars, perhaps the most pro forma Pixar product thus far, and only slightly less enjoyable than its other output for all that), and most recently, a rat, for heaven’s sake, in Ratatouille. Compared to that last, concocting a pair of empathetic robots would seem a cinch—and it’s not as if there is no cinematic precedent for that sort of thing. Cinematic precedent becomes one of the film’s problems in the home stretch. But that’s not on account of the two robots: the shambling, nostalgic pack-rat title character Wall-E, still collecting and boxing garbage almost a millennium after the humans have abandoned a trash-clotted Earth; and Eve (ha, ha), a sleek, white, blue-eyed powerhouse sent to Earth to find evidence of its reinhabitabilty. Yes, Wall-E does look a slight bit like Number Five from the dreaded 1986 cheesefest Short Circuit (a resemblance Stanton insists is inadvertent, which I buy—the Pixar guys have better taste than to reference that film on purpose). But as a character he’s both totally familiar and sui generis, and I am with the several other critics who have implied that they would be willing to watch a Satantango-length depiction of his daily routine: charging his battery in the never less than harsh sun, scooting around on his durable treads, companion cockroach trailing behind, compressing trash into cubes, building skyscrapers out of said cubes, and then, when the sun goes down, retiring to his trailer with whatever collectibles he’s spotted and watching a spot of Hello, Dolly—yes, Hello, Dolly—while yearning for a more meaningful companion than the roach.

When Eve shows up, Wall-E’s (understandable) fascination with her results in his dogged attempt to get her to a) acknowledge his existence and b) not pulverize him into dust once she does. Though blessed with as much personality as, and similar communication skill to, Wall-E, she is driven by her “directive.” Once that directive’s achieved, she shuts down, and Wall-E watches over her for what seems to be forty days and forty nights.

At which point the spaceship that dropped her off comes to reclaim her, and humans are introduced into the picture. Fat, lazy humans, bloated by centuries of complacency and “micro-gravity.” And here’s where Wall-E’s problems begin. The film’s set-pieces—largely chases between the “rogue robots” Wall-E and Eve eventually become, and the scores of other ‘bots who’ve come to run the massive ship—grow ever more elaborate. In terms of design and action they’re among the most ambitious Pixar have ever attempted. But they also verge on the alienatingly frenetic. (The short that precedes Wall-E, the marvelous Presto, is by contrast a fiercely funny clockwork mechanism of slapstick.) But the main problem, besides the increasingly cutesy overt movie references (“Also Sprach Zarathrustra” makes an appearance, sigh) is in the story emphasis. After falling in love with these two kids Wall-E and Eve, the audience is suddenly asked to care about whether a lost humanity will be able to find itself again. A question that is, as it turns out, infinitely less interesting then “Will Eve finally accept Wall-E’s love?” So it’s with a palpable sense of relief that we come to the final scene, where the focus is again on our hero and heroine. Back to what’s important, finally—two hands, not necessarily engineered to fit together, but trying to.

For a minute and a half, Razzle Dazzle is about the most beautiful movie of the year: little flickers of light, looking like flakes of crumpled paper, flash about, moving outward, appearing like traces of a carousel, in night, swirling around the camera. Which is what they are; Razzle Dazzle is Ken Jacobs’ remix of Thomas Edison’s one-minute short of the same name (actually made by A.C. Abadie), in which a carousel spins. Not quite so in Jacobs’ feature, in which the carousel is quickly flattened into digital wallpaper. Laid against a garish red matte—and I don’t think there is a name for this completely unnatural “red,” to be found only in pixilated form—the figures, in usual Jacobs form-alism, are sped up, slowed down, blown up, blown away, and even, at one point, blown apart. But this is not quite like his film work; it’s not even like his recent digital work with stereographic cards (some of which is included in interludes). With the cards, Jacobs flashes from one to the other, accentuating their slightly altered perspectives, as if jiggling the foreground apart from the background. The effect is of three dimensions in what is of course, actually two. But in Razzle Dazzle, Jacobs takes the ostensible three dimensions of the original short, and pitching them against a digital (pixilated) landscape, shows them as the two they really are. It looks like a screensaver from hell.

I think Jacobs thinks somewhat like I do, that very early silent film was a point of innocence—in content and form alike—to which we can never properly return. Tom Tom the Piper’s Son, a masterpiece, can only demonstrate the plethora of details on display in Billy Blitzer’s own little masterpiece (of the same name) by examining the individual details and forsaking the plethora that comes from Blitzer’s supposed stylistic naiveté (though a naiveté belied by any number of Blitzer’s other shorts). Here, Abadie’s Razzle Dazzle, swamped in digital gimmickry, is never allowed to play out fully as itself: by decontextualizing the short entirely, so that the carousal seems to twirl infinitely on some corrupted hard drive rather than finding place in any particular time, Jacobs’ adaptation becomes a simulation of a simulation of a simulation, with imitation carnival music finishing off the simulacra. The white blobs represent people in a faded film; the people in a faded film, stripped of their surroundings like a line of cut-out paper men, represent the entirety of the Abadie film Razzle Dazzle; and the Abadie film Razzle Dazzle represents people in a carnival around 1903.

The carousel riders, endlessly riding the same circle and thus riding nowhere, are well lost to the past; the past, as usual, is simply lost. Jacobs is perhaps the only artist who’s used digital to eulogize the (supposed) end of film; in his Two Wrenching Departures (which I’ve only been able to see part of, and still seems like one of the great movies of the decade), moving precisely because it moves, Jacobs not only delivers the ultimate elegy to two old, dead friends, but demonstrates how even the flicker of film can be a sort of eulogy: emphasizing that we see is a trace of something dead and gone, even as the flicker effect brings it to life. Like any proper eulogy, Two Wrenching Departures is a celebration and a lament—that things live on in memory, that that’s not a proper life. They’re gone and, for better and for worse, they refuse to go. Jacobs replays footage of his friends endlessly, as if trying to perform an exorcism as much as he is a resurrection.

Razzle Dazzle, however, is bitter lament without a bit of celebration. And for a guy who found a perfect match of form and content in his sharp and brilliant Capitalism shorts, made around the same time, it’s blunt. Whereas the stereographic play in the Capitalism series attempt to expose some dark truth about its subject—while blinking and shaking rapidly, as if to rattle the subjects awake and put the audience into a sleepy trance—the card tricks here are simply facetious, exposing the cards’ staged, Hogarthian narratives as false, militaristic platitudes and propaganda. The shaking just makes the subjects look sillier in jiggling around, when they’re clearly stuck in place, playing their programmed role. Likewise, the movie nearly ends with an Edison speech in praise of imperialism, followed by rapidly flickering slides of a green light, a red light, and a pile of skeletons. It’s like, we’re all cogs in the system, The Man’s unwitting henchmen! Jacobs possibly only could have surpassed such symbolism with shots of a mirror flickering between images of average Joes handcuffed by President Bush and taking it from behind. Why not replace all of Lee Marvin’s great death scenes with clip-art of skeletons, to get the point across a bit quicker? Hell, why didn’t Sam Fuller just release 30 films of skeleton drawings?

Of course, 90 minutes of Ken Jacobs’ flashing skeleton piles—barely glimpsed, and so, not quite so over-stated—would still be preferable to a bunch of Iraq war docs I’ve seen. And as J. Hoberman points out, that’s about what the dazzling, razzing 90 minutes Razzle Dazzle comprises (skeleton pile and Iraq war doc both). At its happy ending, even as a laughing, bobble-headed girl is enlarged over the scattered remains of Abadie’s short, the girl is so blown up (in a somewhat different sense than her companions) that her undistinguished features, negligible when she was small, leave her dangling as a skeleton and ghost—though coming forth as if the first to attempt to escape the flat, digital morass. And even within the first ten minutes, Jacobs’ ultra-abstract expressionism and décollage nearly turns the merry-go-round into a children’s Triumph of Death: the almost identical kids charging after one another, grasping the maypole as though it were a javelin or spear.

Jacobs has written:

“They look out - from their place at the start of the 20th century - with a remarkable variety of expressions, giddy to pensive. We observe them but of course they see nothing of this, our America, hopelessly gone to rot, its mountaintops leveled for extraction of coal, rivers and air polluted, crisscrossed everywhere with property-lines; they don’t see its prisons or the corporations leaning in from their off-shore tax-bases to see what more they can take.”

I’d like to take the movie also as an attack on all things digital; things which Jacobs has openly embraced. Perhaps because I’m less than a third as old as Jacobs, his Powerpoint editing tricks (actually, the cut-outs were cut on FinalCut) carry a different connotation for me: spinning frames, bulging images, and cuts that shatter the screen into a few flying blocks seem like the none-too-razzle-dazzling devices of an 8^th grade video slideshow, its makers eager to show off their bargain-basement special effects (Jacobs was not only assisted by his wife Flo, as usual, but Erik Nelson). Or perhaps not. The tackiness grates, but Jacobs is at least one of the few artists left in the movies who believe that art should grate (De Palma, with his digital tackiness, is another), at least if it’s to provide any reflection on so-called “modern times.” (Though why isn’t there a modern Chaplin to attack the more pressing issue of “Modern Places”? Adam Sandler?) Razzle Dazzle may be a film from 1903 embalmed in plasma, but really (I’m wondering), it’s a movie about a country that has refused to grow up—a society of spectacles, oblivious to the climate changes (quite literally—Jacobs puts the ignorant kids through a rain storm at one point), riding around and around, sacrificing progress for instant satisfaction even as it spins out of control and into the Inferno. Which is, if correct, a pretty reductive critique, and why Razzle Dazzle is pretty minor Jacobs. Which means it’s totally essential.

***

Jacobs’ liner notes transcribed below:

“Not that many people stop me now to ask directions to the 9.11 site. It’s close enough so that John Koos, seeing the burning buildings from Brooklyn, phoned to tell us to clear out before they fell on us. I used to enjoy looking at them out our bathroom window while pissing. Low-flying planes would approach, pass behind one building and then appear for a moment between the giant structures. It was a spectacle I intended to film and then edit out approaches and departures to create an illusion of a single nervous plane caught between them.

The buildings were monstrous but did reflect the late afternoon sun into our loft. Now the threat is that Freedom Tower will be built on the site. To fill the World Trade Center, N.Y. Governor Nelson Rockfeller [sic]—whose vanity project the WTC had been—had to relocate state and city offices scattered throughout the city. But no one seems so crazy as to sign up for Freedom Tower and we’re hoping the idea is finally shelved.

A newspaper story describes arrangements to protect George W. Bush once he leaves office. He will lurk among us, with caravans of steel-plated government limousines protecting him from machete-wielding citizens. He and Cheney—oilmen who saw their jobs as promoting oil-profits come hell or high water—will sometimes get together in a well-appointed bunker for a laugh at the idea the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions were a bust. With the shifting of attention from their Wahhabi-promoting business partners in Saudi Arabia, no bid contracts for Haliburton and Carlyle, and final and irreversible—less a revolution—concentration of public wealth into select private hands, they will drink to a catastrophe made in heaven. “And they called me dumb!”, Bush will say.

I stick to abstract cinema, shutting out news of gangsters big-time and small. I see that rhythmic connection is possible with what I think of as modules of action, a few frames and then another few frames circling quickly. Flo moves through the place like a melody. “Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them”, I quietly intone and attend to the screen.”

Above: Kang Dong-wo dreams he may be smoking in Lee Myung-se’s M.

Lee Myung-se (Nowhere to Hide, Duelist) is, for better or for worst, building a reputation as being one of contemporary cinema’s preeminent stylists. The successes and failures of the director’s approach can be seen in his newest film, M. Its strange splendor and unusual appeal is great, but fleeting. It is never quite as beguiling as it is in its first half, where dreams of one character bleed into that of another, and the story purposefully does not provide enough grounding for the audience to know what part of what they are watching is real or not.

Whereas someone like Alain Resnais used a highly psychological form derived mostly from Hitchcock to express the dreamlike chronology possible in movies, Lee is exploring the two-dimensional imagistic possibilities. His technique is graphic, not psychological, and he fluidly splices together time and spaces and degrees of reality like a comic book. Similar in its use of space to Speed Racer but far more self-aware of the way film can digitally blend planes of the image to confuse impressions and points of view, M succeeds for a surprisingly long amount of time by charting a mostly context-less series of liquid-like dissolves between dreams and memories of a troubled writer, his wife, and a quirky young girl who seems to be either the writer’s stalker or his ghost.

Eventually though, without a story hook to hang his oneiric montage on, Lee risks pursuing a simple series of clever audio-visual transitions. But at its best M’s hushed, viscous images are so resoundingly sleepwalking that there is never a sense of any scene “outside” of potential dreams and fantasies. And, before one senses a commitment by Lee to the banal mystery which these dreams envelop, Lee substitutes true content for a deliriously unclear and ungainly soap opera, romantic comedy, and a creative personal crisis, capped off by the deliciously insipid acting by Kang Dong-wo (who plays the troubled, dreaming writer, whispering his muffled lines with that dreamy loquaciousness of Marcello Mastroianni’s dubbed dialog in Fellini). Whether Lee ever reveals his true colors in the film—what he, or it, truly believes in—is a matter as shrouded by artifice as the true character, desires, emotions, or humanity of M’s haunted protagonist. And for a while, there is a profound pleasure in the film in our inability to see what is true.

Above: The “mad detective,” played by Lau Chin-wa, and in the typically warped side of the frame, rookie cop Andy On.

After so many stoical, staunchly confident films from Johnnie To, it’s always refreshing to see one of his collaborations with fellow Milkyway Image director/producer Wai Ka-fai, who brings a welcome wackiness to a film like their latest co-directed work, Mad Detective. A splintering look, a gunsmoke drab palette, and an off-kilter mise-en-scène using wide-wide angles from long lens, harsh lens flare, and nihilist attitude—the film has a beautiful, grimly amusing, honed purity to its world so that we may accept the insanity to follow. Insanity, literally, in fact; Lau Chin-wan plays an ex-detective who has a strange psychic talent that involves empathetically reenacting crimes (including being buried alive and kicked down a staircase stuffed in a suitcase) and whose principal side-effect is a schizophrenia that “allows” him to see the inner personality(ies) of those around him.

Our “mad detective” is contacted to solve a crime by a baffled rookie played by Andy On, and in a Tourneur film (or most others, for that point), the story would cast its gaze at the rational youth’s flirtation with the beguiling, unsettling success of the disheveled, wildly irrational veteran (who is also sockless and missing an ear). But To and Wai have no such pretensions. Mad Detective is genre exercise through and through, humor and pathos enabled with supreme precision due to the psychic-tint on a traditional internal affairs plotline, which distracts from the conventions with the feats, pathetic and fantastic, of Lau’s weary, optimistic/depressive schizo.

In turn, Wai and To give the film an unfriendly, mysterious look devoid of safety and desiring comfort; even Lau’s kind-hearted wife is a figment of his imagination, and a respected, but personality-less captain deserves Lau’s ear as a departing gift. Only the score by Xavier Jamaux (genius composer behind To’s other recent film, the near-musical Sparrow) and Lau’s fantastic performance lend a knowing humor to the vaguely ghastly emptiness in the film world. All in all, it weaves a tonally erratic but always inventive path.

Strange but understated, Lau’s schizophrenia, On’s uncertainty, and the sublimely restrained panic of cop-suspect Lam Ka-tung (who has seven inner personalities, all fighting for control) are all treated as par for the course as if this were a regular policier. There are To’s stoical tidings, allowing us to treat normally a film whose eerie insanity Wai helps displace to the film’s form. Jokes with the true personalities only Lau can see, and grimmer tidings of a film beset by slanting shadows, askant, warped lines, and playful spatial disorientation between character’s points of view are put in a general atmosphere of a world without goodness and belief, wrapped in a kind of professional, ethical nullity. Mad Detective’s wacky distraction is playing a darker kind of game than one may think.

Above: Asano Tadanobu and Odagiri Jô scan a Japanese landscape made from Hawaiian coral—one of Sad Vacation’s many examples of drifting elements coming together to form a disparate and unstable whole.

More often than not, a film’s makers struggle mightily to make sure that the movement of a film from one shot to another is a natural chain of action, thought, purpose, and coherency. What Aoyama Shinji’s film Sad Vacation does is readily admit to the disruption and deviance of cinema’s editing, and show us that with each new scene, and sometimes even with each new shot, a new film can be born.

Picking up threads of parent-less, wayward characters from past movies (1996’s Helpless and 2000’s Eureka), Aoyama’s drifters define the form of the film through the form of their lives: unsure, varied, disparate, resolute, calmed, hysteric—and so on. Gradually the main characters, centered around Asano Tadanobu’s ex-criminal, ex-illegal human transporter, descend onto a Tokyo trucking company run by a family including the Asano’s runaway mother, and form a kind of ragtag band of miscreants of ambiguous origin, uncertain purpose, and vague character.

By this point a strange, existential hybrid of Hawks and Imamura, the film is not nearly as exciting as its unstable first third, wherein Asano picks up illegal Chinese workers, adopts a Chinese orphan, gets threatened and beat by the yakuza, takes care of a childhood friend (involved in the unfortunate events of Helpless) now psych-case, travels to Tokyo and starts dating a prostitute. Aoyama here is pure cinema, a mad mixture of handheld camera and jum-pcuts, gorgeous helicopter coverage of a seaport city, long uncut dialog scenes, momentary fast-forward edits, and several other kinds of visual and aural experimentation (with a score by Nagashima Hiroyuki, who worked on the director’s experimental sound film, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?). Each change in style is as much a change in narrative, and possibly in character, and Aoyama seems to birth a new film at every moment—and it is a thrilling sensation.

That the film settles is somewhat is a disappointment (though to be fair, the director is adapting his own novel, and it seems unlikely Sad Vacation could keep up such unbridled freedom). Yet as the story turns towards clarifying its focus on the conflicting feelings of magnetism and repulsion towards parenthood and adoption, the values of Asano’s character—the center of the drama—are as unclear as ever. Aoyama prefers to leave almost all characters undeveloped to degrees that range from amusing—such as the bantering male duo from Eureka—to undeveloped—the young girl from Eureka, now a young woman and working at the trucking company—to maddeningly fascinating, as in the case of the unfazed calm clearly bordering psychosis of Asano’s mother.

Asano Tadanobu’s character is essentially the nexus of these misfits, sketched thick (a very few) and thin (the majority of the crew), perhaps a prism into which their ails and situations are channeled, violence and threats and dismay and confusion and desire all existing simultaneously in the same body. Which is why Sad Vacation, at its start, is so fresh—it takes this later narrative development, which is a kind of aggregation of all that is in the film’s people into its central character, and expresses it through a manic, but contemplative variety of film form. To make some of the film’s radicalness understandable, Aoyama must eventually turn away from experimentation so as to explain it—or perhaps expand it (perhaps even to curtail its free excess)–and while considerably less exciting, Sad Vacation’s evolution into a kind of classical family melodrama is no less expressive, nor unusual.  It admits to nothing except the uncertain difficulty of living in groups, be they made up of parents and children, couples, siblings, friendships, or co-workers, and to the certain truth that these people—all people—and the film itself, are not only far from flawless wholes but most definitely the unstable result of the unexpected combinations of life.