Guru Dutt

Films of Guru Dutt:

• Mr. & Mrs. ‘55 - Guru Dutt (1955)
• Pyaasa - Guru Dutt (1957)
• Kaagaz Ke Phool - Guru Dutt (1959)
• Chaudhvin Ka Chand - Mohhamed Sadiq (1960) 
• Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam - Abrar Alvi (1962)

“Still Life” - Jia Zhangke (2006)

Jia Zhangke, a leading member of China’s “Sixth Generation” of filmmakers, started off in the 1990s making “underground” films, without government support or authorization. He finally got state approval with The World (Shìjiè, 2004) and then worldwide recognition with Still Life (Sanxiá Haorén, 2006), which won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. 

The physical setting for Still Life is the Three Gorges region along the Yangtze River, one of the most spectacular scenic areas in China.  But the focus of the film is not on that beautiful natural setting, but on manmade squalor produced by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam that the ordinary people of that region had to cope with.  In particular, the action is focused on the city of Fengjie, a 2,300-year-old city that was located upstream of the newly constructed dam and was in the process of being demolished in preparation for its being flooded by the dam’s reservoir waters [1].

Some people may think of Still Life as almost an ethnographic coverage of working class people in that area of China, but I would say that the film is much more than that [2].  It is an atmospheric mood piece that reflects not so much a natural environment but more like a dystopian nightmare that the people in this film are living through.  And the principal characters in the film are essentially just animated (barely) signposts to that relentless nightmare.

Thematically there are several undercurrents suggested in the story:

• lack of communication
• exchange tokens and gestures.  The exchange tokens are iconized in the story as
• cigarettes
• liquor
• tea
• toffee
• dislocation
• alienation. 

I will allude to some of these below. A critical factor to how all this is presented is Jia’s deceptively low-key cinematography.  Frequently using long and medium-long shots with slow pans, he embeds his characters in a heavy environment of industrial desolation and human-made decay.  This is enhanced by ambient noises that tend to engulf and dominate the human participants. One might be tempted to think that Jia is merely passively documenting the reality of Fengjie’s disintegration, but there are many carefully composed and choreographed shots, some lasting more than four minutes in duration.   The whole effect reminded me somewhat of Antonioni’s Red Desert” (1964).

The story is told using “slow disclosure”, and the viewer only gradually gleans information concerning the background to various scenes.  It passes through three separate acts that cover events surrounding two principal characters:

• Han Sanming (played by Han Sanming) a coal-miner who has come to Fengjie from his home in Shanxi province (Jia Zhangke’s native province) to look for his wife and daughter whom he has not seen for sixteen years.  His wife’s brother lives in Fengjie and may know their whereabouts.
• Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) a young woman, also from Shanxi, searching for her husband who had come on his own to Fengjie two years earlier.

1.  Han arrives in Fengjie

Han Sanming, a laconic working-class visitor to Fengjie in search of his long-missing wife Missy Ma, upon arrival hires a motorcycle to take him to the last address he has for her, only to find that the entire street is now submerged by the newly constructed dam’s backwaters.  He then manages to find her brother, “Brother Ma”, who is laboring on a river boat in town.  The two men are so taciturn that there is almost no information exchanged during a shot lasting 3:40 – even Han’s awkward offer of liquor is barely acknowledged by the sullen Brother Ma.  But Han does learn that Missy Ma is working in a nearby town and might show up in a couple weeks or months.  So he decides to stick around a bit and gets a job as an unskilled demolition worker. 

Staying at a cheap hotel for itinerant workers where the primary gesture for social interaction is lighting a colleague’s cigarette, Han meets “Brother Mark”, a more talkative sort who dreams of being a gangster, after the fashion of Hong Kong triad gangster film star Chow Yun Fat, in the demolition racket . The thoughtful and discerning Brother Mark, aware that bride-selling had long been a lucrative business for Fengjie, extracts from Han the fact that he had purchased his bride from Fengjie many years ago for the sum of 3,000 yuan.

While walking outside, Han is only mildly interested in seeing a UFO or spaceship pass by in the sky.  The otherworldly nature of Fengjie’s self-destruction is so bizarre and unnatural that even the sight of a UFO doesn’t seem very surprising.  But this event is the transition to Act 2.

2.  Shen Hong looks for her husband

The camera now pans down to Shen Hong who has also just arrived in town and has just seen the UFO.  Also in this act there is another bizarre shot of expressionistic unreality like the UFO – this time a large building in the background is seen to takeoff like a rocket ship. Again the surreal depiction is merely atmospheric and has no significance with respect to the main events of the story. Anyway, Shen Hong finds her runaway husband’s former work place and takes some tea from his still-preserved desk that evidently reminds her of him and happier former times together. She then locates their mutual friend, Wang Dongming, who after some effort helps her find her husband, Guo Bin.  When Shen Hong and Guo Bin finally meet, their encounter is cold and emblematic of the pervasive lack of communication throughout this disintegrating environment. Guo Bin tentatively offers to embrace Shen Hong, but his weak gesture is almost offensively rude. Seeing this, Shen Hong tells him that she has found another man and wants a divorce. You can decide for yourself whether you think she really has a new love or is just fed up with Guo Bin.  This entire encounter is encompassed in a single moving camera shot lasting 4:15.  She walks disconsosately away from him, and so ends the Shen Hong story.

3.  Han meets Missy Ma

Returning to the first narrative thread, Han discovers the dead body of Brother Mark buried under a pile of construction bricks.  One gets the impression that Mark was murdered in connection with his nascent gangster activities.  Later Han finally meets his wife.  She is now working on a boat as an indentured slave to pay off her brother’s debts to the boat owner. Again, there is not much verbal communication here, but perhaps just enough.  He asks her, “are you OK these days?”, and she responds, “not so good.”  She finally says,

“You never came. Why has it taken you ten years to look for me?”

When Han tells the boat owner that he wants to take Missy Ma away with him, he is informed that he will first have to pay off the 30,000 yuan debt.  Han calmly calculates that it will take him a year working in the Shanxi coal mines to save up the money and says he will return for her in a year’s time.

In the concluding scenes, Han is talking with his fellow itinerant unskilled workers.  There is an extended session of drinking and lighting each other’s cigarettes as they display some degree of  camaraderie in a single moving-camera shot of 4:14 duration.  Hearing that the dangerous job of coal mining offers a better salary, they all say they want to go to join him in Sanxi province and work there.  As they all move to a new hotel (their previous hotel having been condemned to demolition because it is to be flooded by the rising reservoir waters) Han idly watches an unlikely image of a man walking on a high tightrope strung between two buildings. This symbolizes the kind of fate that he and his comrades have been subjected to by the inhuman dislocations and disruptions of modern industrial China.

I originally saw Still Life back when it was first released and thought it was just OK.  When I recently saw it again, I appreciated it much more.  Its mood catches up with you and eventually takes over.
★★★½

Notes:

1. “Fengjie Vaporized for Three Gorges Project”, Xinhua News Agency, November 4, 2002.
2. For a discussion of this film’s message in the context of Jia Zhangke’s other work, see
• Acquarello (with “Alsolikelife”), “Still Life, 2006", Strictly Film School, February 4, 2007.

Jia Zhangke

Films of Jia Zhangke:

• Still Life - Jia Zhangke (2006)

“Late Autumn” - Yasujiro Ozu (1960)

Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960), like his two preceding films, Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959) and Good Morning (Ohayo, 1960), was a rehash of one of his earlier black-and-white films. In this case the earlier film, Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), was one of Ozu’s personal favorites. But Late Autumn was also a critical success and won the Golden Lion award at the 1960 Venice Film Festival. Interestingly, long-time Ozu favorite Setsuko Hara starred in both Late Spring and in Late Autumn but in different roles.

As was customary with Ozu films, the story of Late Autumn concerns cross-generational cultural issues – in this case about a widowed parent’s efforts to marry off an only-daughter.  But there is a light-hearted air to the entire proceedings, and we could justifiably call this film a comedy, even though there are some moments of melancholy.

The key to understanding the meaning behind the film is that the marriageable daughter, Ayako Miwa, is subject to the opinions and maneuverings of three distinct cultural spheres or attitudes.  The resulting interactions and misunderstandings across these three spheres constitute the heart of the film.  Before describing these spheres, let me list the principal characters:

• Three Ladies
• Akiko Miwa (played by Setsuko Hara) is the widow with an only child, Ayako
• Ayako Miwa (Yoko Tsukasa) is Akiko’s daughter
• Yuriko Sasaki (Mariko Okada) is Ayako’s office colleague and friend
• Three Middle-aged men who are of similar age, temperaments, and opinions and who were longtime friends of Miwa, Akiko’s deceased husband.
• Shuzo Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura) is a business manager. Of the three middle-aged men, he is the energetic source of new ideas, which he often fails to bring to successful closure.
• Soichi Mamiya (Shin Saburi) is also business manager. Of the three men, he is the decisive, get-things-done person who seeks closure, but his crude acts are also often ineffective in this story.
• Seiichiro Hirayama (Ryuji Kita) is a mild-mannered college professor who tends to go along with the more highly opinionated Taguchi and Mamiya

These characters constitute the three cultural spheres:

• Traditional values – embodied by Akiko
• Modernism – represented by Yuriko
• Opportunism – this invokes traditional values and modernism as suits the occasion (in the minds of the three middle-aged businessmen)

How these cultural spheres interact and affect Ayako is told through a series of conversations which on the surface seem to be mostly just courteous small talk.  There is almost no real action in the film, and even some of the key personal interactions are not shown but merely talked about after the fact (this omission of key moments is a characteristic of Ozu’s mise-en-scene).  A further beclouding aspect of the storytelling is the cultural practice among the Japanese middle class to suppress overt emotional reactions and to merely display a smiling countenance.

Offsetting these obfuscating aspects of the narrative, however, is Ozu’s characteristic cinematography, which features low-angle closeups and medium shots, with many of the conversation participants looking straight into the camera when they speak. This makes the viewer seemingly directly involved in the conversation and more sensitive to the nuances that are being conveyed. Over the course of this sequence of conversations, the viewer watches the story pass through four stages.

1.  Ayako is Available
After attending the temple ceremony commemorating the seventh anniversary of the death of their friend, Mr. Miwa, the three men (Taguchi, Mamiya, and Hirayama) talk together about the two surviving members of the Miwa family – Akiko and her 24-year-old daughter Ayako.  It is clear that all three men lustfully regard Akiko as a great beauty, even though she is in her forties, and they feel that they missed out by not marrying her.  They also feel that it is their comradely/familial duty now to find a suitable husband for Akiko's daughter, Ayako.  Taguchi suggests a candidate, but that person is already taken, so Mamiya suggests a person from his office, Mr. Goto.

But Ayako is a modern girl and uncomfortable with these kinds of arranged marriages. She also feels guilty about leaving her mother all alone if she gets married. So she tells Akiko to decline the offer. But Akiko tells her that it would be a sacrifice that she would be willing to make.

“I’d miss you, but it can’t be helped.  I’d have to make do.”

There are no scenes showing Akiko being presented with the Goto offer, nor of her ultimate response that the offer is declined.  We only learn about these events from subsequent conversations.

2.  A New Candidate is Found
On a hiking trip with some coworkers, one of her colleagues offers to introduce Ayako to Mr. Goto, anyway.  Ayako agrees and begins seeing the man, but she is still not interested in getting married.  Accidentally running into Mamiya at a restaurant, she informs him

“For me, love and marriage don’t necessarily go hand in hand.”

Meanwhile Taguchi, Mamiya, and Hirayama try to come up with a “plan B” to get Ayako a husband.  Since Ayako is evidently worried about Akiko being left alone, Taguchi asserts that they must find a husband for Akiko, too.  And the one they come up with is Hirayama, who has been widowed for four years.  Hirayama at first feels that marrying Akiko would be disrespectful of his old friend, but after talking it over with his son, he gives in to his personal desires.  He tells his other two friends that they can inform Akiko that he would like to marry her.

3. Resistance to the Proposal
Again, a key interaction with Akiko is omitted – in this case it is the one where Taguchi goes to ask her about the possibility of her remarrying. We only hear Taguchi later telling Mamiya that Akiko told him she wouldn’t remarry.

But Ayako has learned of the proposed union anyway and mistakenly thinks that her mother has accepted. Before Akiko can correct her misunderstanding, Ayako quarrels vehemently with her mother for being unfaithful to her deceased father and runs off to visit her coworker friend Yuriko.  At this point Yuriko becomes a major figure in the story. 

Yuriko is a modern girl and scolds Ayako for not letting her mother live her own life.  After visiting Akiko to comfort her, Yuriko tries to fix things.  She goes to meet Mamiya, Taguchi, and Hirayama and forcibly lambasts the men for being meddlesome and clumsy in the way they have handled things.  After getting Hirayama’s assurances that he truly loves Akiko, Yuriko is sure that all the problems and misunderstandings can be resolved.

4. A Wedding
But Yuriko’s modernism cannot budge Akiko’s traditionalism. Akiko tells Ayako that she will remain a widow, but urges her daughter to go ahead and marry Goto.  The traditional wedding ceremony is duly held, after which Akiko is left alone in contemplation.

Although the general tenor of Late Autumn is that of a comedy, with the three middle-aged men continually joking their way through their marriage-making antics, the ending, for me, is not a happy one.  There isn’t much love depicted in this story.  And the one person who believes in love, the modernist Yuriko, appears to have been stymied in her efforts to encourage its flowering.

• Ayako’s marriage to Goto appears to be merely a practical decision. Goto seems to have been chosen from a utilitarian perspective. At the wedding, Ayako looks trapped and almost smothered in a traditional bridal gown.
• Akiko’s dedication to traditional values forces her to part permanently from Ayako and deny the possibility of a new life with Hirayama. She is abandoned by everyone, and ultimately by the story, itself.
• Taguchi and Mamiya appear to be living in cold marriages.  They almost openly admit to their wives that they would have preferred to marry Akiko.  In fact Taguchi at one point tells his wife, “marriage is really tedious when you think about it.”  When Hirayama complains at the end that he was just used by his other two friends and got nothing out of all their shenanigans, Taguchi tells him that he did get something precious – dreams.  Taguchi’s own dreams are evidently dead.

In fact many of the misunderstandings in the film were caused by the crude, “businesslike” manner in which Mamiya informed people about his plans for Ayako.  The three middle-aged men are opportunists, because they support traditional values where and when convenient. But if the opportunity would come up to be with Akiko, they would jump at the chance. In the end, they seem moderately happy that they have arranged what appears to me to be like a “business” deal – the marriage of Ayako. They toast themselves in celebration. But the real person who was capable of authentically expressing herself and of seizing the moment was Yuriko. She seems to be the only one in the film who could spontaneously express genuine anger, loving compassion, and joy.
★★★

“Summer Interlude” - Ingmar Bergman (1951)

Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude (Sommarlek, 1951) displays a continuation of the turn he had taken with his previous film, To Joy (1950), towards a more personal and existentialist perspective. As in To Joy, the concerns expressed in Summer Interlude are not just about romantic love, but about who we are and what we ultimately find fulfilling. And once again a horrible, unexpected, and unexplainable tragedy must be dealt with without eternal bitterness. But this time the focalization is not on a man, but on a woman and her perspective, something that would be increasingly characteristic of Bergman’s film over the ensuing years. 

In both To Joy and Summer Interlude, Bergman was expressing something difficult to put in towards – something about the pure exquisiteness of life, itself – which provides a manifestation of what cinema can offer beyond the written word. And crucial to this cinematic presentation is the emotive expressiveness of his leading actress in both films, Maj-Britt Nilsson.  Ms. Nilsson’s performances in these films are remarkable for their sensitivity, depth, and range of feeling, and watching her performances makes me suspect that she was Bergman’s greatest actress.

Another relatively “new” aspect of Bergman’s work that appears in Summer Interlude is the turn towards outdoor settings.  Earlier Bergman films were very much studio productions, with carefully crafted and theatrical moving-camera shots of long duration that needed to be blocked out in the studio. In Summer Interlude, though, Bergman’s cosmos seems to have been liberated and opened up to the natural world. The camera shots are shorter in length here, but still the compositions and visual pacing are masterful.  In fact Bergman, himself, has said that it was only with Summer Interlude that he first began to feel confident about his capabilities of cinematic expression [1].

The story of Summer Interlude concerns a woman’s recollections of her first love that happened many years earlier when she was a teenager.  (It is apparently based loosely on Bergman’s own personal experiences, although with a shift in gender.)
The narrative structure has five parts, or acts.

1.  The Ballerina at the Dress Rehearsal
Marie (played by Maj-Britt Nilsson) is a successful ballerina and preoccupied with rehearsals for a performance of “Swan Lake”, which is to open shortly.  Just before a last dress rehearsal, she is presented with an anonymously posted diary written by her first boyfriend, Henrik, whom she had met thirteen years earlier on her summer holiday when she was fifteen years old.  This prompts her to remember those old days.  A theater lighting fault causes the dress-rehearsal to be postponed until that evening, so Marie has the afternoon off. On the street she sees David Nyström (Alf Kjellin), her boyfriend and a newspaper writer, and the two of them quarrel about each being too busy and selfish to attend to what the other wants. 

On an impulse, Marie then takes a ferry to an offshore island, which we will learn was the scene of her summer romance thirteen years earlier.  Upon arrival she finds the cottage where she sometimes slept and begins reminiscing about those old days.

2.  Flashback 1: Meeting Henrik
In flashback, Marie is a teenage ballet student who has attracted the worshipful admiration of a shy and sensitive young college boy, Henrik (Birger Malmsten).  During summer vacation, when many people in Sweden seek to get away from it all during the relatively short warm period, they meet on the holiday island and begin seeing each other, going boating, swimming, and walking around the island.  They are usually accompanied by what Henrik says is his only friend, his shaggy dog, “Gruffman”.  Aware that Henrik is shy and insecure and that he is attracted to her, Marie takes the lead in advancing their relationship.  In fact with her effervescent enthusiasm taking over, she basically seduces him. 

Marie is staying on the island with her aunt and uncle, the latter of whom, Uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist), cannot hide his roguish attraction to his young niece.  Marie, in turn, flirtaciously encourages him. This, of course, makes Henrik jealous, and he finally declares his love for Marie.  Soon they consummate their affair in an upstairs bedroom.  Marie reminisces in voice-over:

“Days like pearls: round and lustrous, threaded on a golden string. Days filled with fun and caresses.  Nights of waking dreams.  When did we sleep?  We had no time for sleeping.”

3.  Marie Visits the Old House

Back to the present, Marie pays a visit to her aunt’s old house on the island, which is now shuttered.  By chance, she runs into Uncle Erland, who has been bird-hunting.  They haven’t seen each other for over ten years, and their interaction is cold, in fact almost venomous.  Erland is still the rogue and reveals his cynicism about life.  He reveals that he is the one who sent Henrik’s old diary to Marie, and she is resentful about this and other aspects of her uncle.  In a revealing statement she says she regrets ever having let him touch her.  She then takes the ferry back to the mainland. 

4.  Flashback 2: The End of Summer
While on the ferry, Marie reminisces more about that fateful summer.  She remembers more of their carefree frolics, and their quarrels, too.  She also remembers some ominous moments when she suddenly became scared about the unknown – sometimes when things became too quiet or when an owl mysteriously screeched in the woods.  The world was full of magic then, but there was a vague menace, too.

Three days before the end of their glorious summer holiday, Marie and Henrik are thinking about their tasks back on the mainland.  Henrik wants to go for one last swim.  They kiss, and then he takes his dive off a cliff, but it was misguided and Henrik crashes to his death on the rocks.

Marie is utterly shattered by Henrik’s death and cannot understand why the world goes on as before.  She tells Erland,

“Everyone is alive. They run around in the streets. And here I am, eating and drinking. At the theater, we dance about and frolic. Henrik lies out there starting to rot.  A moment before we were laughing about everything.  He lay in my arms. I kissed his lips.”

The idea that she must go on living seems unbearable, and her withdrawal from life is reflected in her expression of hatred for God and her cruel pronouncement to Erland:

“Promise me one thing.   You have to shoot Gruffman.  The poor thing shouldn’t have to live.”  

Erland tells her that he will help her build a wall around herself in order to protect her from such tragedies. She says in recollection while still on the ferry that after Henrik’s death she went back to working hard on her dancing. In the spring Erland took her away on a long trip to help her forget. She regretfully reflects to herself that 

 “In this way I forgot Henrik”

5.  Re-engagement with the World
Up to this point, Marie has taken her journey into the past, but she has made little progress with her inner demons.  She still hates Erland, and she still hates herself for forgetting Henrik.  The reviewing of Henrik’s diary has brought back happy memories, but also horrible traumas.  Back at the rehearsal theater with the lighting fixed, they rehearse for the performance of “Swan Lake”.

Afterwards in her dressing room, she talks to the ballet master (Stig Olson), who taunts her about the emptiness of people’s goals in life.  He compels her to admit that her life is ultimately empty, other than when she is on the dance floor and immersed in her art.  To some extent this is almost a reference to the theme of To Joy, which partly conveyed this idea of artistic engagement as the ultimate end. Note that in this dressing-room scene, we return to some theatrically staged moving-camera shots characteristic of Berman’s earlier films. There are several shots featuring complex moving-camera compositions that last over one minute, and one shot takes almost three minutes.

After the ballet master departs, Nyström shows up in the dressing room, and again they quarrel.  Marie is fed up with his self-centeredness, and she says she wants to break up with him.  He leaves in a huff, and Marie continues to wash away her makeup.  As she stares at herself in the mirror, though, the accumulated days’ experiences seem to have an effect on her.  She seems to have an epiphany, and smiles impishly at her reflection.  Engagement with life has its own immediate rewards.

During the ballet performance the next evening, Nyström shows up and watches her from the stage wings.  Between sets Marie comes up to him and sincerely and unreservedly kisses him.  She is refocused on the sweetness that can be found in life as she lives it – not only with her art, but with Nyström and others, too.

As mentioned, Bergman’s cinematography is very expressive and assured in Summer Interlude. There are arresting moments in the outdoor shots on the island.  Particularly memorable are some shots of Marie, in the present, when she first visits the island and sees an old woman walking by who looks like a wraith or a symbolic figure from a masque.  On this occasion Marie follows the woman for awhile through the woods, which evokes her penetration into a half-forgotten past.  The scenes of Marie and Henrik having their fun on the island are also effective.  They are often composed in closeups, but the visual flow is inevitably fluid.

But perhaps the key to the overall presentation is the performance of Maj-Britt Nilsson as Marie.  She has to play an accomplished dancer in her late twenties as well as a bubbly teenager of fifteen, and convey not only that difference in age, but a difference in outlook. And she does so convincingly. 

In the end, we are left with a feeling that is not just resignation to the ups and downs of life, but is an affirmation of the opportunities for ecstasy that can unexpectedly appear all around us in the present. We must not miss out on these opportunities. Perhaps this note of affirmation is even more emphatic here than in the conclusion of To Joy.

★★★½

Notes:

1. For further commentary on how this film fits into the context of Bergman’s other work, see
• Peter Cowie, “Summer Interlude: Love and Death in the Swedish Summer”, The Criterion Collection, May 29, 2012.