Yasuko, Songs of Days Past

Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be profitable in the late ‘70s: the Roman porno genre. His young compatriots at the company saw artistic opportunity in the freedom this studio gave them for their erotic thrillers and comedies, but Negishi’s successes at the studio (such as 1979’s Wet Weekend and 1981’s Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon) led to even mainstream appeal. Similar-minded (and similarly successful) directors banded together with an experimental venture called the Director’s Company which, like the Art Theatre Guild before it, promised avant-garde Japanese filmmaking in a period of severe economic downturn in the nation’s film industry. While Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Somai’s films enjoy plenty of distribution in the West, most of the other Director’s Company members linger in relative obscurity. Negishi is no exception — his Detective Story (1983) and Eien no 1/2 (1987) were lauded at festivals in Japan, but saw no hope being appreciated in a Western market that was beginning to grow weary of even Akira Kurosawa. These were also light humanistic dramas, the kind that couldn’t fit with Western conceptions of Japan’s media output: samurai, sex films, and anime.

Negishi has made no concessions to these Western preconceptions in Yasuko, Songs of Days Past, but perhaps the world is finally ready to look at the legacy of one of the more important Japanese directors of the past few decades. The film reverberates between the ripples of a soft romantic drama and small explosions of melodrama that have also appeared in Negishi’s late works, but this is also a reflective film for Negishi as he looks back at the magnetic work of one of Japan’s premiere poets of the twentieth century.

The Yasuko of the title refers to Yasuko Hasegawa (Suzu Hirose), a budding actress at Shochiku Studios in 1920s Japan and the muse of the film’s protagonist, the poet Chuya Nakahara (Taisei Kido). The 17-year-old Nakahara roller-skates around a Kyoto that still resists much of the Westernization trend, but Yasuko finds his foreign fashion (more Parisian painter than the standard business suit that signaled Western assimilation) and intense love of poetry charming. They live together — much to the consternation of the women at Shochiku — and host Nakahara’s friends, though Yasuko believes that Nakahara’s passion may never be fully directed toward her. Now in Tokyo, their relationship strains further thanks to the appearance of Hideo Kobayashi (Masaki Okada), a literary critic who supports Nakahara but shows more serious feelings for Yasuko than the immature poet could muster. The love triangle forms and reforms, years pass, and the three artists meet again and again, until they can meet no more.

Though Negishi fills the film with energy at choice moments, this is neither the erotic competition of Lubitsch’s Design for Living nor the romp of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962). Most of the film is comprised of interior medium shots that purposefully exclude a character in order to create a subtle rift in the relationship; any rejection is sullenly but gracefully accepted, and the three continue on. Yasuko’s fear of hereditary madness and some cynical acts of psychological warfare lead to a few screaming matches, but the film sticks with a mostly quiet examination of art and love in a slowly changing Japan. Just as Nakahara may have confused his love of Yasuko for his love of the poetic spark she inspired, Kobayashi admits to Yasuko that it was through loving her that he could truly “talk” with Nakahara and his work. Artist and critic have revitalized each other through their muse-intermediary, who also has confused passion for love.

Every once in a while, the camera will pull back to give a glimpse of this miniature world that these Westernized Japanese artists inhabit. Outdoor studio sets for Shochiku’s silent films, a Western-style fair complete with roller rink and shooting gallery, and a theater with benshi narration keep the characters moving through this quickly developing time and thankfully add some variety to the otherwise claustrophobic interior shots of their small rooms.

However, hardly any tension arises from this emphasis on Westernization. Though Nakahara is known for his identification with Arthur Rimbaud (in age, talent, and style), the film never presses further on what made Nakahara’s poetry feel new or dangerous. The three seem completely isolated from the changing world around them such that Nakahara’s poetic outbursts are treated like moments of temporary madness. The film’s production design keeps hinting at a world that these three are responding to and will continue to help form, but Negishi keeps the trio away from it, lest their pressure cooker of a relationship suddenly run cold. While Yasuko, Song of Days Past wonderfully showcases Negishi’s sense of subtle drama, it also circumvents nearly everything that made these historical characters interesting. — ZACH LEWIS

Ariel

Lois Patiño begins his new film Ariel by spatially positioning Shakespeare’s The Tempest within the frame, as the image of an island opens as if a curtain onto the film. Ariel is the director’s second film drawing from The Tempest, following 2022’s short Sycorax, co-directed and co-written by Matías Piñeiro. Piñeiro, who has a story credit on this film but eventually left the project to direct last year’s You Burn Me, has far more experience working with Shakespeare, dating back to his 2011 mid-length feature Rosalinda — also the first of many collaborations with Agustina Muñoz, who stars in both Sycorax and Ariel as a version of herself, credited here as Agus.

In Ariel, Agus is an Argentinian actress traveling to Patiño’s Spain to take over the eponymous role in a traveling production of The Tempest. After checking in with her colleagues and visiting with family, she finds herself traveling by boat to the Azores, an autonomous region in Portugal where she will commence her performing tour. Though no spell brings forth a storm to maroon the ship, the passengers and crew alike quickly fall asleep. After wandering and observing, Agus eventually submits to the collective dormancy. When she arrives at her destination, she is greeted not by the rest of the theater company or a local welcoming party, but by an island full of people reciting Shakespeare. As bemusement turns to frustration, Agus meets someone at a grocery store — first seen helping shoppers with their lines — who claims to be Ariel, as in literally the (fictional) character Agus is to play. “I know you,” Agus exclaims in disbelief to a blank stare, “you’re not Ariel. You’re the Spanish actress Irene Escolar. I saw you recently in a film by Jonás Trueba.”

Escolar is indeed the performer, and it stands out that Patiño would cast two women to play his film’s titular character. Ariel, a spirit serving Prospero (the wizard often read as an authorial insert), was written with male pronouns, and though for centuries between the Elizabethan era and the present the role was generally played by women, recent productions and film adaptations have more often returned to casting men in the role. Perhaps this is in keeping with Piñeiro’s focus on the women in Shakespeare’s play; the only woman with lines in The Tempest is Miranda, Prospero’s daughter. Sycorax, Ariel’s previous captor, is dead before the action of the play begins. In any case, Escolar’s Ariel explains that the island is inhabited by Shakespeare’s characters (and a few interlopers, including Beckett’s Malone).

When Agus finally finds the actors (Hugo Torres and José Diaz) whom she previously saw play Prospero and Caliban, they here identify only as Trinculo and Stephano, similarly unaware of any alternative identities. Curiously, despite this intensely meta premise, Patiño only breaks the fourth wall for a moment, which his characters quickly think better of. Instead, Muñoz and Escolar exist in a space between themselves and their characters, with the former assisting the latter both in embodying Ariel and in keeping the island functioning. Breaking from a fairly easygoing pace, the film’s ending is diegetically rushed, as both Ariels help the island’s inhabitants to finish their plays before sundown, but the liminal space the actors come to occupy becomes far more compelling than the specifics of the dialogue or plot. In these movements, Patiño’s film may be more accessible than most of Piñeiro’s Shakespearean adaptations, and it boasts broader comedic references to the Bard’s own plays that afford a welcome amiability to the strange proceedings. But even amidst such strengths across the board, Ariel is perhaps most valuable as a showcase for two exceptional actresses, operating here at the peak of their powers. — JESSE CATHERINE WEBBER

Blind Love

The first shot of Julian Chou’s film Blind Love is both jarring and literal: a closeup of a doctor draining a cyst under a twitching eye. The next scene reveals the eye to be that of Han (Jimmy Liu), a teenager intent on studying social sciences despite his father’s wishes, and Chou focuses on his eyepatch falling off when he dives into a swimming pool. The director follows this visual metaphor through for the film’s duration: Han and his family, who struggle to focus on their own desires and each other’s emotional needs, are beset with eye maladies, while two more perceptive characters are, respectively, an eye doctor who takes photographs as a hobby and a prominent collector of photography. While a bit obvious, it is a clear statement of Chou’s thematic intent: in Blind Love, the single-minded focus on how one is perceived by others progressively degrades the ability to see oneself clearly.

This clearly communicated social critique is of a piece with the film’s melodrama-inflected narrative, as crafted by screenwriter River Wu. Han meets and falls in love with an older woman, the doctor and hobbyist photographer Xue-jin (Wu Ke-xi), who is his mother Shu-yi’s ex-girlfriend from college — Han is unaware of Xue-jin’s connection to his mother, and Xue-jin is unaware that Han is Shu-yi’s son. Shu-yi (Ariel Lin), who is in a chilly marriage to a preoccupied doctor, reconnects with Xue-jin at the same time as her son is getting to know her, and slowly rediscovers her long-dormant sexuality through this rekindled relationship.

Chou sets up this triad with the potential for maximum drama and fallout. Early in the film, she stages a profoundly uncomfortable sex scene between Han and Xue-jin, facilitated by Han’s lie that he is a university student and by Xue-jin’s state of drunkenness. Though Xue-jin sets a clear boundary that their relationship is only a friendship once she’s in a sober state, the encounter casts a pall over the film, making Shu-yi’s conflicted but earnest pursuit of Xue-jin tense — whenever she visits her apartment, it is an open question whether Han will show up, thus derailing all three of their lives. It is to Chou’s credit that, when the three of them do eventually encounter each other in the same room — as, narratively, they must — she portrays this encounter with restraint, awkwardness and repressed feelings converging as the three of them realize the dynamic they’ve unwittingly been participating in.

By this point in the film, Chou has trained her focus on Shu-yi, whose burgeoning realization that she is deeply unsatisfied with her life, yet too afraid to walk away from it, becomes the film’s emotional locus, even taking precedence over the triad that forms the narrative spine. The film is set sometime in the 2010s, in the lead-up to the 2019 legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan, and uneasiness over LGBTQ rights affects Shu-yi’s own life — her husband is openly homophobic, and she avoids the topic completely, reflecting her own discomfort with her sexuality. Lin’s performance is emotionally resonant and finely modulated: initially cool and reserved, she reaches ever-intensifying emotional peaks as she loses her grip on her carefully composed life. (A particular highlight is her wild overreaction when her younger son, a kindergartener, is accused of stealing a classmate’s cell phone, which he denies; Shu-yi exclaims that “It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself, it’s how others see you that matters most!”, a rare moment when her mask has fully slipped off.) In this regard, Chou, Wu, and Lin take full advantage of melodrama as genre. In direction, screenwriting, and performance, they reveal the untenability of a social structure — in this instance, the steep expectations of heterosexual marriage and family life — through one character’s flailing inability to navigate it.

The film, unfortunately, tends to falter when Chou moves her focus away from Shu-yi. The other characters are comparatively underdeveloped, which makes the subplots involving Han and Xue-jin feel vague in comparison to Shu-yi’s. Han reads as a disaffected, lightly rebellious teenager without a clear identity beyond this archetype, and Xue-jin is a model of sexual and artistic freedom who exists mainly to provoke and inspire her paramours. Narrative logic and tone also pose occasional issues: there are a series of poorly integrated flashbacks, which provide context for the relationship between Shu-yi and Xue-jin but are included so abruptly as to cause confusion, and Chou moves on too quickly from a scene of sudden violence toward the end of the film, leaving the viewer unequipped to fully process the more ambiguous epilogue. If the film is inconsistent, though, it still clears the bar for an effective social melodrama by centering Lin’s compelling performance and taking an earnest and direct approach to its subject matter’s political import. — ROBERT STINNER

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office

As loglines go, a Chloë Sevigny-narrated, archive-heavy documentary about an infamous, largely discredited dolphin scientist has a kind of whimsical ring to it. And indeed, in Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda’s new film, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, there is a sense of play to be found between Sevigny’s cool, assured narration and the filmmakers’ deft weaving of largely as-yet-unseen archival footage. However, the seemingly light touch behind this unconventional profile of John Lilly, simultaneously a mainstream pioneer in dolphin communication research and an elusive cult figure, belies serious inquiry into the unknowables we face every day.

Stephens and Almereyda might not seem the most obvious pairing. The former’s films are derived from the archive and often experimental in nature, or at least interested in muddying our understanding of the divide between fiction and nonfiction; the latter’s have, in recent years, dressed a fascination with experimentation, speculation, and singular male figures in the garb of conventional narrative filmmaking. The two’s convergence on John Lilly is a happy one, resulting in a documentary that, without demolishing the conventions of nonfiction storytelling, injects much-needed life into public figure profiling.

By chronicling Lilly’s achievements and failures in equal measure, John Lilly is less concerned with discrediting the man than it is in elucidating the nature of his speculative imagination — his capacity for envisioning consciousness outside of his own — which belies a deep insecurity over a rapidly changing world and a desire to tamp down and rationalize those changes. As we watch footage of Lilly’s early experiments on dolphin speech, whatever minute variations in tone and “pronunciation” a viewer’s untrained ear might comprehend feel like the product of a hopeful mind rather than of any measurable reality. But the point is to raise awareness of the gaps between understanding and speculation, between assurance and disbelief. In many ways, Lilly’s life’s work, including his forays into hallucinogenic drugs to reach altered states of consciousness and find answers to the unknowns of our universe, is found in these gaps.

Stephens and Almereyda’s examination sometimes feels overextended. In taking a chronological approach, they appear eager, and rightfully so, to place John Lilly’s life into the broader context of a rapidly changing mid-century America. Though these efforts, like Lilly’s wandering quest for higher truths, can take interesting, if unilluminating, detours, such as when we follow the attempts to relocate the last dolphins under Lilly’s care off the coast of Georgia, the filmmakers are driven by a deeper question, one that partly explains the nature of their and Lilly’s scattered trajectories: in what directions can our quest to understand the seemingly unknowable lead us?

It’s hard to deny the satisfaction, even comfort, derived from finding the historical source for our contemporary conditions, the moment that explains everything that has happened since. This conspiratorial framework of thinking has positive and negative applications, all of which Stephens and Almereyda are keenly aware. In John Lilly’s case, the application is paranoid, as shown in his increasingly improbable explanations for life’s mysteries. Minor experiments with LSD in the early 1960s, seen as practical enhancements to his existing dolphin work and new forays into isolation and sensory deprivation, led him to name the Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO), an extraterrestrial network of biological agents engineering coincidences in the universe and controlling all biological life on our planet. In a way, the film conducts its own speculation, crediting, for example, Lilly’s early experiments on dolphins as part of the reason our culture at large attributes to them such high levels of consciousness. Never ones to rest on an absolute, however, Stephens and Almereyda point out the paradoxical nature of widespread awareness of cetacean activism alongside their continued slaughter.

While John Lilly acknowledges critiques of the man’s experiments on dolphins as quasi-scientific and cherry-picked in nature, its own outlook isn’t entirely critical. Stephens and Almereyda maintain a delicate balance between critique, sympathy, and praise, generally without explicitly verbalizing any one of them. There is the freedom in their assessment for Lilly to be a philosopher, a pioneering scientist backed by an equally ambitious mid-century American government engaging in its own global power struggles; and an insecure quack, prone to flights of fancy, self-mythologization, cruelty, and unchecked paranoia. But their gentle approach to John Lilly’s life feels somehow necessary, because the answers they seek are just about as unknowable as the ones Lilly himself sought. At the risk of being overly permissive, it’s hard to fault a film for grappling with a man who was never satisfied with the day’s answers for life’s mysteries, and failing to find answers of its own. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

Orenda

Last year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Estonian art film 8 Views of Lake Biwa translated a Japanese storytelling tradition of “eight views” to a completely foreign Baltic context. Even the title came from Japan’s Lake Biwa in the  Shiga Prefecture. This year’s Orenda, a Finnish-Estonian co-production with additional support from Sweden, is also in debt to another culture. This time the place of inspiration (or fetishization) is the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people indigenous to North America. The word “orenda” comes from their culture — though the film doesn’t verbalize that — and refers to a panentheistic invisible power present in all things and all people. Orenda opens the door to a new trend in Baltic and Nordic cinema, which hovers somewhere between inspiration and exoticization in a strenuous effort to tell incredibly patient and artistically labyrinthine stories.

Fresh off her incredible performance in Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Alma Pöysti plays Nora, a successful opera singer and grieving widow (in that order). She has come to a remote island occasionally reminiscent of the depressive coasts’ Ireland is often depicted with to honor her belated spouse’s final request for a specific pastor to preside over his final moment (on the island). The priest is Natalia (Pirkko Saisio, also the film’s writer), and she is in the middle of her own Dark Night of the Soul. These two characters’ antagonism, unspoken respect, and shared processing bring the best out of the two actors. Pöysti is remarkable and will surely be the film’s only relevant commercial asset, but it’s actually Saisio who gives the best performance — though not one likely to garner much discourse due to its resistance against any flare for the dramatic. Her tired eyes and snappy attitude hide a vulnerability that the actress only vents in moderation. 

Saisio also undertakes the novel challenge of embodying a woman clergy member, a vocational path denied to women on screen perhaps even more than in real life — recalling another female Christian (or perhaps post-Christian, as one may argue that Orenda falls into) pastor in cinema is a nearly impossible task. A rabbi, perhaps. A priest with a collar? Never. The Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo, thankfully, never lets that fact weigh too heavily though. The significance is exceedingly made insignificant and no shackles of representation are ever put on Saisio; she is simply a spiritual shepherd burnt too much on both ends, in the vein of virtually any other cinematic pastor. 

Elsewhere, the film’s remote and somber setting and landscapes, poetic and moving classical music, and spiritual subject matter will inevitably draw comparisons to Terrence Malick. And for good reason, too. Orenda is best served when it’s at its most Malickian. The remote coast’s waves erode the viewer like they do a rocky shoreline, and Honkasalo has the patience to sit in the images long enough to let them actually weather upon the spectator. And then there’s the film’s finest scene, a powerful sermon that Natalia delivers, wherein it becomes easy to imagine one of Malick’s, or even Bergman’s, many clerics giving a similar speech, albeit slightly less liberal than the one given here.

Also borrowing from the book of Malick is the film’s cinematography, which at times ventures into awkward compositions, for both better and worse alternately. Large sections here depend on closeups of the two women leads and their shared intimacy, but it comes at the expense of the grandeur the film angles toward, the effect somewhat unraveling any transcendence the film’s mise en scène elsewhere establishes. The irony, then, is that though Orenda is by no means a bad film and in fact mightily impresses in moments, its inconsistency undermines testimony of any genuine orenda. — JOSHUA POLANSKI