“Rashomon” - Akira Kurosawa (1950)

Akira Kurowawa first came to widespread world attention with Rashomon (1950), which went on to win the Golden Lyon at the Venice Film Festival and a US Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Though Japanese critics seemed to believe that the film’s overseas popularity was due to Western fascination with Eastern exoticism, I think the real reason was quite the reverse. By raising universal issues concerning the narrative nature of truth in a mythic setting, Rashomon was able to appeal to a worldwide audience.

Kurosawa and co-screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto based the story of Rashomon on two short stories, “In a Grove” (1922) and “Rashoumon” (1915), by the renowned early 20th-century modernist author, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa [1,2].  In particular, it was “In a Grove” that contained the famous plot twist, where several characters who witnessed a murder give conflicting accounts of what happened. 

The setting for Rashomon is 11th century Japan, when the land was beset with natural disasters, plague, famine, and lawlessness [3]. It was natural for religious thinkers of the time (in this case Buddhist) to wonder whether the world was heading towards total annihilation.  It seemed to be reduced to a dog-eat-dog struggle for survival, with no trace of grace among the human inhabitants.

Kurosawa’s production of this story is fascinating, because it seems to be a combination of an atmospheric and situationally immersive cinematic environment combined with theatrical staging and histrionics.  There are only eight characters that appear in the film, and there are just three scene locations.

At the outset, we are at one of the locations, Rashomon, the ruined outer city gate of old Kyoto, where there is a heavy downpour (a gloomy atmospheric effect that Kurosawa would later use very effectively in Seven Samurai, 1954). The appearance and aura around this city gate look utterly desolate, as if it signifies the dark recesses of human degeneration.  Two figures, a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) and a Buddhist priest (Minoru Chiaki), have huddled there from the rain and seem to be utterly baffled by something they have witnessed earlier that day.  They are joined by a rough-and-ready commoner (Kichijirô Ueda) who wants to know what so mystifies the other two.  Kurosawa draws out the tension here by taking his time to reveal just what it is that is so mysterious.  Eventually the Woodcutter is induced to tell his story.

1.  The Woodcutter’s Account
In flashback, the setting moves to the thickly foliated forest where the woodcutter had gone earlier that day to cut wood.  To get us into the setting which will be the key scene of the film’s action, Kurosawa spends two minutes of screen time tracking the woodcutter as he walks through the heavy undergrowth.  This evocation of a dense forest symbolizes the occluded nature of our lifeworld (or, similarly, Martin Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world”).  As Heidegger pointed out, we are always engaged in finding “pathways through the woods” of murky existence.  Each trail is unique.  Of course we imagine that it is possible to build from these various pathways a common, objective map of the world that is independent of the individual point of view.  But all that we have in front of us, individually, are our own clouded and indeterminate perspectives in connection with our experiences.  From these we imaginatively construct our own dubitable narratives about the world and who we are.

Eventually, the woodcutter is surprised to come across several odd items at various locations along the way: a woman’s hat, a samurai’s cap, some pieces of rope, and an amulet on the ground.  Finally, he is shocked to see a corpse on the ground, and he runs back to report what he has seen to the authorities.

Still in flashback, we now move to the third setting, the magistrate’s courtyard where testimony is taken from summoned witnesses For this setting, we only see the people facing straight into the camera and giving their testimonies; we never see the authorities.  Thus the viewer is placed in the position of a judge faced with the task of assessing what is true.

The woodcutter gives his testimony, and then the Buddhist priest tells how he encountered the dead man, a samurai (Masayuki Mori) who was escorting his wife (Machiko Kyô), earlier that day on the road.  Additional testimony is taken from a bounty hunter (Daisuke Katô) who has captured the notorious bandit Tajomaru (Toshiro Mifune) in possession of the dead man’s horse and weapons.  Tajomaru (like the others witnesses, facing the camera) then gives his account of what happened when he encountered the dead man and his wife.

2.  The Bandit’s Story
The famous brigand, Tajomaru, is a swaggering ruffian who sees himself as a proud warrior. (Unfortunately, Mifune’s braggadocio performance here is, as it was with a similar portrayal of his in Seven Samurai, so over-the-top that it becomes ludicrous and off-putting.) Tajomaru straightforwardly confesses that he robbed the man, tied him up, and then forcefully seduced his wife, who succumbed to his masculine charms.  Unable to bear the shame of having sexually given in to the bandit, the wife then says that one of the two men must die.  So the two of them engage in a lengthy (three minutes of screen time) sword fight, and Tajomaru boastfully relates how he killed the man.  During their battle, the wife ran away into the woods and disappeared.

So at this point, the crime appears to have been solved.  A man has confessed to the crime and explained his motives.  When we return to the “present” at the Rashomon gate, though, and see the woodcutter’s continued consternation, it is clear that there are still unresolved aspects to this tale. 

3.  The Wife’s Story
It turns out that the slain samurai’s wife was found, and she gave her own version of what happened, as told here by the priest.  In her flashback account, she was raped, not seduced, by Tajomaru while her tied-up husband looked on. Tajomaru then departs without killing the husband.  Afterwards the wife goes to cut the ropes tying up her husband with her dagger and beg his forgiveness, but his cold look of rejection horrifies her.  The unbearable feeling of guilt causes her to faint.  When she wakes up she sees that her husband has been stabbed in the heart, and we are given to believe that she killed him.  Afterwards she tried to commit suicide in various ways to erase her guilt before she was found by the authorities.

But there is still another account to be told.

4.  The Samurai’s Story
Even though the samurai husband is dead, his testimony for the magistrate is obtained through a medium (memorably played by Noriko Honma). In this tale, the wife is easily seduced by the bandit, after which she urges Tajomaru to kill her husband. Tajomaru is appalled by her selfishly ruthless attitude and rejects her. The wife manages to run away from Tajomaru, who returns to the samurai and unties him before departing. The only honorable recourse left for the samurai is to commit suicide, which he does.  Before losing consciousness, however, he reports that “then someone silently approached me. . . that person gently withdrew the dagger from my heart.”

Back to the present at the Rashomon gate, the commoner wonders how the woodcutter could have known certain things (in particular that the samurai was killed with the wife’s dagger rather than with Tajomaru’s sword) that he supposedly had not witnessed.  The woodcutter confesses that he in fact did witness the murderous encounter in the forest, but had avoided mentioning it in his testimony in order to avoid further involvement in the affair.  He then gives his account.

5.  The Woodcutter’s 2nd Story
In the woodcutter’s new version of what happened, Tajomaru is much more gentle to the wife and after their sexual coupling begs her to be his wife. But the wife scornfully dismisses the manliness of both her husband and the bandit, and she tells them they must fight it out to the death to see who is man enough to take her. The two men then timidly engage in a long clumsy scuffle (five-and-a-half minutes of screen time). By the time Tajomaru has almost accidentally killed the samurai, the wife has run away, and Tajomaru is too exhausted even to run after her.

Back to the present at the Rashomon gate, the three men ruminate over the three tales.  They all wonder if the world is only filled with people who perpetually lie to advance their own selfish desires. The commoner, who represents the voice of cynicism, says that the only time a person doesn’t lie is when he says he is going to lie.  Is there no innate decency embedded in the human soul?

They then encounter an abandoned baby wrapped in kimono with an amulet to ward off evil spirits that has been left at the gate.  The commoner wants to steal the kimono and amulet, but the other two men admonish him. When the woodcutter offers to take the baby to his home and care for him, the priest says that the act has restored his faith in human decency.  With that the woodcutter heads home carrying the baby and with a renewed faith in the world, as the film ends.


The way Kurosawa tells the entire story cinematicaly has some interesting elements in its own right. Each of the three scene locations has its signature visual stamp:

• The Rashomon city gate setting is drenched in a heavy downpour, giving one a feeling of enclosure and helplessness in the face of powerful external forces.
• The forest setting, with its heavy foliage, conveys a sense of entanglement and confusion, where each tale is a unique and obscure path through the woods.  Kurosawa’s editing further emphasizes confusion by repeatedly breaking the camera axis on successive editorial cuts.
• The magistrate’s court, with its fixed camera location, gives one a feeling of openness, as if a light is shining down and attempting to expose the truth.

In contrast to this atmospheric environmental mise-en-scene, the acting is relatively stagy, particularly the overwrought theatrics of Toshiro Mifune, as the bandit, and Machiko Kyô, as the wife. In addition the background music of Fumio Hayasaka is noisy, intrusive, and does not harmonize well with the narrative.

But it is that narrative structure that most fascinates.  The three tales told by the bandit, the wife, and the samurai are all self-serving and all contradict each other. All three tales depict the narrator as principled and more or less heroic, whereas the woodcutter’s final tale depicts all three of the principals as weak and flawed.  So most people presume that the woodcutter’s tale represents the objective truth and corrects the earlier flawed stories. 

But is this true?  Actually the woodcutter’s tale is an addition of Kurosawa’s; Akutagawa’s original story, “In a Grove”, only had the earlier three accounts, none of which was clearly the truth.  But why should we accept the woodcutter’s final story as the objective truth?  After all, he is the only person in the story who has clearly lied to the magistrate (by saying he did not witness the crime).  And why would the dead samurai, speaking through the medium, have a reason to lie?  Shouldn’t his tale be true? 

One thing that is common to all the stories, and so is likely to be true, is that the wife wanted her husband to die.  Another truth we might conclude from the evidence is that the woodcutter stole the wife’s dagger from the scene of the crime and then concealed his theft (which casts further doubt on the veracity of his account).  When the woodcutter exclaimed that the samurai had not been killed by a sword (as was claimed in the bandit’s story and the woodcutter’s own second account), the commoner inferred that the woodcutter must have been present at the scene and had subsequently stolen the wife’s jewel-handled dagger. And according to the samurai’s account, he felt someone approach and gently withdraw the dagger from his body as he was losing consciousness.  All of this suggests that the woodcutter has his own selfish motives and that his second account is not entirely accurate.

The larger question posed by Rashomon is whether it is possible to find the truth at all? Akutagawa’s original story suggests no, but Kurosawa’s relatively uplifting add-on ending suggests yes. The cynical commoner doesn’t think so, but the idealistic priest resists letting go of his belief that there are some innate and inviolable values inside the human breast – and a commitment to the truth is one of them. 

Another issue, perhaps one even more important for the participants than truth, is that of honor.  Each storyteller is obsessed with honor, and tells a story that emphasizes his or her honor. 

• For the bandit, Tajomaru, everyone in his story is heroic, and he sees himself as the greatest hero.  Painting a picture of himself surrounded by quasi-heroic figures enhances his own honor when he overcomes them.
• For the wife, the issue is shame.  She feels so humiliated that she doesn’t want to live (or her husband to live).  She cannot bear to live in a world where people have contempt for her.
• For the samurai, the emphasis is on personal honor and who has it.  He sees his wife as utterly dishonorable, in contrast to whom Tajomaru, the bandit/rapist, is depicted as having a certain degree of honor.

In 1950 for Japan, and for the rest of the world, too, not long after the devastations of world war, perhaps there was still too much of an obsession with honor and uncovering objective guilt.  Is honor an objective attribute or merely a social perception? Indeed the ultimately fruitless search for honor cannot be dissociated from the search for objective truth. So today we have a relentlessly advancing surveillance state that is attempting to scoop up all narrative information and build a “big data” knowledge base of objective truth in order to uncover objective guilt.  But this massive surveillance will only diminish the world in which we live and interfere with the authenticity of our personal interactions.

In fact the quest for both objective truth and honor are attempts to derive, from the individual narratives that we construct from our experiences, an ultimate and objective judgement that warrants our lives. But what really warrants our lives is love, which has virtually nothing to do with “objective” truth and honor. In loving encounters, it is a matter of our authentic interactions and how we make them true to ourselves and to our loved ones in those personal narratives, not to the outside world and its objective glare.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “In a Grove”, (1922), translated by Takashi Kojima, feedbooks, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4205.pdf.
2. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “Rashoumon” (1915), translated by René Malenfant, feedbooks, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4254.pdf.
3. Akira Kurosawa, “Akira Kurosawa on Rashomon”, The Criterion Collection, Novebmer 6, 2012, http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/196-akira-kurosawa-on-rashomon.

“Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles” - Zhang Yimou (2005)

Coming just after his two big-budget wuxia martial-arts extravaganzas, Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004), Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Qian Li Zou Dan Qi, 2005) was a welcome return to his previous, more intimate, cinematic style.  Zhang’s wuxia films were flashy visual spectacles bristling with technical craftsmanship, but they were also schematic and cartoonish, with confused narrative messages in conflict with his previous themes.  Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles returned to Zhang’s earlier (and, to me, much preferred) thematic style that concerns an ordinary individual’s attempt to find authentic engagement in a complex social environment.

As I have discussed earlier [1], Zhang’s early themes centered around an individual, often a woman, who struggles alone in an effort to find fulfilment in a traditional patriarchal society.  In this respect there were two stylistic approaches. 

1. Carefully staged historical dramas set in richly atmospheric environments that exuded an expressionistic aura to the dramas.  These included Jú Dòu (1990), Raise the Red Lantern, (Dà Hóng Dēnglóng Gāo Gāo Guà, 1991), To Live (Huózhe, 1994), and Shanghai Triad (Yáo A Yáo, Yáo Dào Wàipó Qiáo, 1995). These films all featured Zhang’s artistic and romantic partner, Gong Li, as the protagonist.
2. More open, naturalistic dramas set mostly in the present day and often featuring a mostly nonprofessional cast drawn from the contextual setting.  These include The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiū Jú Da Guān Sī, 1992), Not One Less (Yí Ge Dōu Bù Néng Shāo, 1999), The Road Home (Wŏ De Fù Qīn Mŭ Qīn, 1999), and Happy Times (Xìngfú Shíguāng, 2000).

Zhang’s second, more naturalistic, approach came to the fore after the breakup of his relationship with Gong Li [2], and Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is a continuation of that second pattern.

While I criticize Hero and House of Flying Daggers for the artificiality of their stories, this is not to suggest that the structures of those narratives were too simple.  Quite the contrary, those films had highly convoluted narrative structures involving numerous cases of masked identity and narrative u-turns.  Nevertheless, the psychological believability of those films was minimal, and in each case the whole enterprise seemed to be almost a stunt.  Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, on the other hand, has a natural psychological motivation to it, but it still has a rather interesting narrative structure, too. 

What makes that narrative structure interesting in this case is that Zhang and his script writer, Zou Jingzhi, have woven the issue of authentic engagement (the always characteristic quest of Zhang’s protagonists) into and throughout the plot elements of the story.  This is a film about meaningful communication and how difficult it is to achieve, even with all the modern technical accoutrements available today to facilitate communication.

The story of Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles concerns an elderly Japanese man who travels to China in order to make a gesture of support for his seriously ill son, who is an academic specialist on Chinese folk art.  The protagonist father cannot speak a word of Chinese, and most of the Chinese people he encounters in the story cannot speak any Japanese.  So the problem of communication is an ever-present issue in this telling.  Incidentally, given the difficulties that the Japanese and Chinese have had with each other over the past century or so (and still have today), the concern here to bridge the two cultures is a background theme that may elude English-speaking audiences. 

As a matter of fact, some of the film was shot in Japan with a Japanese film crew, and the look-and-feel of the mise-en-scene of that portion is quite different from and less fluid (in fact more awkward and staged) than the main portion of the film shot in China.  In addition, the Japanese portion featured professional actors, while the Chinese portion featured nonprofessional actors, other than the visiting Japanese father.

The cast of the film included the following principal characters:

• Gouichi Takata (played by veteran Japanese actor Ken Takakura) is the father who works  and lives alone as a fisherman on the Japanese seacoast.
• Kenichi Takata (never shown), is the seriously ill son in the hospital.
• Rie Takata (Shenobo Terajima), is Kenichi’s wife.
• Li Jiamin (Li Jiamin – he plays himself) is a Chinese Nuo opera performer.
• Lingo (Qiu Lin, he plays himself) is a local Chinese tour guide in Lijiang.  He knows almost no Japanese.
• Jasmine (Jiang Wen, she plays herself) is a Chinese tour guide working for a travel agency.  She can speak Japanese.
• Yang Yang (Yang Zhenbo) is the eight-year-old son of Li Jiamin.

The story of the film concerns Gouichi Takata’s (I will refer to him as Takata) quest to do something meaningful for his son.  But in fact his quest turns out to be five separate quests with specific goals, which make up the five acts of the narrative.  Each of these five quests fails to achieve it’s originally conceived goal, but it is up to the audience to decide what may have been achieved by the end of the film.  All the way through, we are dealing with the problems of communication, which the story delves into and examines.  After all, as the script wisely reveals, communication comprises several aspects:

• the narrative context (which includes the narrative goals and the roles of the participating agents);
• the specific roles of the given communicants;
• the message (both how it is coded and how it is interpreted).

All these aspects appear in different guises as the individuals in this story attempt to achieve authentic engagement.  But making things even more difficult is the fact that Takata is an extremely taciturn man: even when he speaks with fellow Japanese people, he barely says anything and merely maintains a blank, stoic countenance no matter what is said to him.

Act 1: Takata in Japan (1-10 minutes into the film)
In the beginning, Takata travels from his fishing village to Tokyo to visit his estranged son, Kenichi,  whom he hasn’t seen for at least ten years and who is being treated in a hospital.  Thus the

Goal of Act 1: Takata to meet his ill son and somehow make amends for whatever is keeping them apart. Takata, in voiceover, alludes to something he has done in the past that offended Kenichi – apparently it was his decision to move to an isolated fishing village after the death of his wife.

When Takata arrives at the hospital, though, he finds that Kenichi, still harbors a grudge and refuses to see him.  Kenichi’s wife, Rie, is conciliatory, however, and wants the father and son to repair their relationship.  Hoping to help, she gives Takata a videotape of some hand-held film footage Kenichi had taken  that was used in a TV documentary covering Kenichi’s  academic studies of Chinese folk opera.  This one concerns Kenichi’s attempts to see the performance in southwest China of a traditional Nuo opera, “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles”, which is a famous tale from the classic epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms about ancient China, in which the warrior Guan Yi makes a perilous solo journey to reunite with his warrior comrade Lord Liu Bei [3].  On this occasion Kenichi was unable to film the performance, because the lead performer, Li Jiamin, was hoarse and unable to sing.  So the documentary video shows Li Jiamin promising that if Kenichi returns on another occasion, he will be given an excellent performance of the opera.

Later Takata gets a phone call from Rie informing him of the crushing news that Kenichi has been diagnosed with liver cancer.

Outcome: goal not achieved and situation seems hopeless.

Act 2: Takata in Lijiang (10 - 27 mins)
Takata doesn’t want to give up, though, and is now looking for some gesture he can make for his son.  He comes up with a new goal:

Goal of Act 2: Takata to travel to Lijiang China and make a film recording of Li Jiamin performing the opera, “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles”, which he can then give to his son so that he can complete his study.

Takata arrives in Lijiang and speaks with two tour guides, Jasmine and Lingo, who inform him that Li Jiamin has been imprisoned for criminally assaulting someone who made derogatory remarks about his own bastard son.  There are numerous communication problems here, since Takata is visiting a provincial village where only Jasmine speaks Japanese.

Outcome: failure to meet Li Jiamin in Lijiang

Act 3: Takata at Li’s Prison (27 - 48 mins)
Takata is stubbornly insistent on returning to Japan with something so he now comes up with another goal.

Goal of Act 3: Takata to go to Li’s prison and film his performance of the opera there.

It is not surprising that Takata is quickly rebuffed in his attempts to get inside the prison to film Li Jiamin.  Making matters worse is the fact that the only fluent Japanese interpreter, Jasmine, is now occupied with other touring assignments and so only the bumbling and nearly inarticulate Lingo is available to communicate Takata’s wishes to the officials. So Takata comes up with another means of communication.  He records a film of himself talking into the camera and tearfully pleading to the government authorities to let him make a film for his dying son.  Of course this is all in Japanese, so the preoccupied-by-day Jasmine is given a copy of the film to make a translation of the transcript and fax it back to Takata.  Then the film, with its Chinese-translated transcript, is shown to the prison authorities.  The emotive aspects of film communication do the job here, and the prison authorities are moved to grant Takata’s request to film Li Jiamin inside the prison.

However, when the arrangements are made and Li Jiamin is summoned to perform, he is unable to sing.  This time it is because he is grieving for his son (whom we later learn he has never seen).  Li Jiamin cries out that he missed and envies his son, because that boy, at least,

“can cry and say what he wants to say in public”. 

This, in fact, is one of the messages of the film.  It’s not so much a political complaint about official censorship as it is about the pervasive tendency in society to force us to mask our true feelings.  Only a child is not subject to that coercion.  So Takata’s quest is again stymied.

Outcome: failure to film Li Jiamin in prison.

Act 4: Takata in Stone Village (48 - 85 mins)
But Takata is stubborn.  He now decides to go to Li Jiamin’s native town, Stone Village, and bring the boy to the prison in an effort to cheer up Li Jiamin.  So he has a new subgoal in the service of his primary goal.

Goal of Act 4: Bring Li Jiamin’s son back to the prison so that Li Jiamin will be able to perform the Nuo opera.

Lingo now drives Takata in a tractor to the even more remote location of Stone Village, where communication is even more difficult. There are only Lingo and village people to talk to, and  cell phone communication (to speak with Rie and Jasmine) is only sometimes available.  Takata does manage to get a call from Rie, however, in which she informs him that she has told Kenichi about his attempts to film the opera in China and that Kenichi has been moved by the gesture.  She says  Kenichi exclaimed that it is the best thing his father has ever done for him.

Takata finds Li Jiamin’s son, Yang Yang, in the village, and after some negotiations manages to secure permission to take him back to Li Jiamin’s prison to see his father.  They all head back in the tractor towards Lijiang, but somewhere in the rugged limestone wilderness the tractor breaks down.  Yang Yang runs off and disappears into the craggy canyon landscape, and Takata heads out looking for the boy.

When Takata finally finds Yang Yang, he is faced with his most difficult communication problem yet.  There is no shared language, no cell phone communication, and not even a shared cultural understanding.  It is just an eight-year-old Chinese boy from the village with an elderly Japanese fisherman stuck together in the wilderness.  At this point, they are both lost and do not know how to find their way back to the truck, so the two of them look for shelter in the canyon.

But they do happen to find a way to communicatively understand each other.  It happens when Yang Yang runs off to find a place where he can privately evacuate his bowels.  Takata comes upon the boy and photographs him in the act while holding his nose from the stink.  This makes them both laugh, and they bond together.  Thus a visceral act that we all share (but hide from each other by convention) helps the two of them find a common ground and resulting communality. 

They now try other means of communicating with the outside world: Takata uses his camera flash to signal any potential rescuers of their location.  Then he and Yang Yang use his fishing boat whistle to make further loud auditory signals. 

Eventually, the two of the are rescued by the villagers.  But now Takata, sensitive to the feelings of his new friend, Yang Yang, realizes that the boy ran away because he doesn’t want to be reunited with a father he has never seen.  So in the interests of not wanting to coerce the boy into a potentially traumatic father-son confrontation, the now more sensitive Takata abandons his goal for Act 4 and decides to return to Lijiang without Yang Yang.

Outcome: failure to bring Yang Yang back to Li Jiamin.

Act 5: Return to Li Jiamin’s Prison (85 - 104 mins)
Takata now heads back from Stone Village to Lijiang with a new goal.

Goal of Act 5: go back to the prison to show Li Jiamin the photos he has taken of Yang Yang.

On his return Takata receives another call on his cell phone from Rie in Japan.  She informs him that Kenichi has died peacefully, and she recites to Takata some of his last words – he thanks his father for his supportive and heartfelt gesture and says that he, himself, was drawn to folk operas,

“because they mirror my life. . . .  I’ve come to realize that I am the actor behind the mask. . . . My true feelings have eluded me. . . I now see that loved ones should not mask their true feelings for one another.”

Now back at the prison, Takata shows Li Jiamin the photos he has taken of his son, Yang Yang, which brings the prisoner to tears again.  Unaware that the reasons for filming the opera are now gone, the prison officials and Li Jiamin insist on now giving Takata a really good performance.  So to please them, Takata silently assents and begins filming Li Jiamin singing and dancing in the role of Guan Yi as the film ends.

Outcome: Takata’s missions have all ostensibly failed, but his gesture was received by his son, and he has done something to meaningfully connect Li Jiamin and his own son, Yang Yang, together.

Communication is the real subject matter of this film, and attempts are made all along using various media to make contact:

• Internal monologues.  As the center of focalization, we hear Takata in voiceover talking to himself.  Since his verbal communication with others is so minimal, this is a crucial  means to understand Takata, both for the audience and for Takata, himself.
• Phones and faxes. Telephone and fax communication is used throughout the film. This is essential for Takata, because he needs to keep calling Jasmine so that he can use her as a translator between himself and Lingo. But as the action moves into more remote locations, cell phone communications become less of an option.
• Signals. Takata and Yang Yang use the camera flash and the boat whistle to send signals to the outside world.  This is a desperate call of “I am here!”.  When he is finally driven away from Stone Village, Yang Yang signals to him from the rear with the boat whistle one last time.
• Movies and photos. The film medium itself is a constant theme of communication. There is Kenichi’s own movie footage, which tells Takata something about his son.  Takata’s movie of himself provides a means of communicating his desire to film Li Jiamin to the prison officials. And Takata hopes to make a film of the Nuo opera that will communicate something to his son.  Movies can be crucial means of communication, but they always involve someone playing a role, and as Kenichi mentioned in his final letter, there is always the real person who may remain hidden behind the mask of the role player.
• Physical gestures. In the end it was physical gesture of Takata jocular holding his nose between his thumb and forefinger that established a moment of emotional contact between himself and Yang Yang in the canyon.  Note that some of the most meaningful communicative acts in the film occur when various men (Takata, Li Jiamin, and Yang Yang) are shown wordlessly crying to express unconsciously their feelings.

The crucial role played by the physical gesture is an indication that embodied, physical closeness is essential for authentic interaction.  This is why Takata hugged Yang Yang before he departed.  And this is why we kiss the ones we love.  But in the final shot of the film, Takata is alone again on the shores of his Japanese seacoast.  There is noone with whom he can make this kind of intimate interaction.

★★★½

Notes:

1. Hero, The Film Sufi, 3 October 2009, http://www.filmsufi.com/2009/10/hero-zhang-yimou-2002.html.
2. Howard Feinstein, “Life After Gong Li”, The Guardian, 16 June 2000, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2000/jun/16/culture.features1/print.
3. For further film reference to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, see my review of Red Cliff  (2008), http://www.filmsufi.com/2009/07/red-cliff-john-woo-2008.html.

“Thirst” - Ingmar Bergman (1949)

After debuting as a screenwriter with Torment (Hets, 1944), Ingmar Bergman was already directing his ninth film, Thirst (Törst, 1949), five years later at the age of 31. By that time his cinematic repertoire had evolved into his signature blend of stageplay theatrics combined with vivid and dynamic cinematography. In fact Thirst seems almost like a mannered artist’s study piece, illustrating how the filmmaker explored some of the extremes of his artistic palette.

Thirst was originally released in the UK as Three Strange Loves, which I think is a better and more apt title for the film.  Its story revolves around the ruinous romantic relationships associated with three psychologically troubled women, and it is based on a collection of stories written by Birgit Tengroth.  This was one of the few Bergman films that he did not co-script. In place of doing that, he arranged for a different level of story involvement by recruiting Tengroth, who besides being a writer was a veteran actress, to play one of the lead roles in the film, and he consulted her on how some of the scenes should be interpreted.

The film begins by showing a married couple, Bertil (played by Birger Malmsten) and Rut (Eva Henning), arising in their hotel room in Basel, Switzerland at the conclusion of their vacation.  One of the very first shots is one that lasts 200 seconds and shows Rut wandering around the hotel room engaged in routine activities that reveal her generally compulsive nervousness.  This kind of very long-lasting shot that follows the movement of characters as they move around a room becomes a visual motif and appears frequently.  Because of the considerable character and camera movement, the shots are not at all static, and they reveal what must have been a very carefully worked out cinematic choreography.  After awhile, Rut sits down in the bed and starts reminiscing into a flashback scene concerning an earlier love affair with a married man named Raoul.

This flashback sequence shows Rut, at the time a 20-year-old ballet dancer, in love with military officer Raoul (Bengt Eklund), who is a domineering male chauvinist.  There is a particularly interesting 4-minute shot showing Raoul’s wife paying a hostile visit to Rut at her apartment, in the middle of which Raoul shows up. From a cinematographic standpoint, this may be the high point of the film.  The unwinding of this relationship is soon revealed.  Rut becomes pregnant, and Raoul denies his fatherhood and any responsibility.  Rut then has a late-term abortion, which results in complications leading to her sterility and the ruination of her ballet dancing career.

The action returns to Rut and Bertil, who begin what will be a constant bickering for the rest of the film.  Each complains the other is still carrying the torch for a past romance – in Rut’s case it is for Raoul, while Bertil is accused of still having some involvement with an emotionally troubled woman named Viola (Birgit Tengroth).  Rut and Bertil then board a train headed back to Sweden.

The action now switches to Viola in a different location, presumably back in Sweden.  The death of Viola’s husband, prior to her involvement with Bertil, left her with serious psychological problems. She is being treated by a psychiatrist, Dr. Rosengren (Hasse Ekman), who, it turns out, is, himself, a sadistic narcissist. Rosengren wants to seduce Viola, and he uses his clinical authority to torture the poor woman into subservience to his evil desires.  There is another interesting cinematic sequence here – a 90-second shot of Rosengren and Viola in very extreme closeup, facing each other.

The action returns to the quarreling Bertil and Rut again, now on the train, and there are other long shots – one  almost 4 minutes in duration and another of 3 minutes – of them interacting within the tight confines of the railway car.  Actually, the quarreling is rather one-sided.  Rut is always the instigator, and though her rapidly changing moods lead to quick reconciliations, she increasingly reveals herself to be neurotic.

Rut now reminisces about her experiences prior to her involvement with Raoul, when she was in ballet school and was emotionally bullied by her eccentric school mistress, in response to which she was comforted by her friend Valborg (Mimi Nelson). Valborg is solicitous, maybe a bit too overly so, and we later learn that she is a lesbian. 

The action shifts to the present, where Valborg runs into Viola on the street. It turns out that they were classmates in secondary school, which closes the circle of linkages between Rut, Viola, and Valborg.  Valborg invites Viola to her apartment, where they have an extended conversation leading up to an attempted seduction of Viola by Valborg. The topic of lesbianism was basically out-of-bounds for explicit presentation in the media at this time, and Bergman complained that censors cut much of the footage from this scene.  

Valborg’s attempted romantic embraces horrify the already troubled Viola, and she rushes out of the apartment and eventually drowns herself off a nearby harbor pier. 

Back on the train, Bertil has been suppressing his growing aggravation over Rut’s incessant nagging and explosive temper tantrums.  There is a scene showing him finally killing Rut, but it turns out to be a dream.  When he wakes up, he is glad to discover Rut still alive, and they embrace in the closing shot.

Although the film ends on a moment of uplift, this is basically a dark story of suffering people.  A major theme seems to be the power of memory – particularly unhappy ones – and how they exert a hold over our lives. Rut is obsessed with how her affair with Raoul both made her maternally sterile and ended her ballet career.  Valborg says that her past experiences have led her to reject men entirely and to seek comfort in another direction. Viola’s grief over her husband’s death (prior to the events depicted in this film) is so unendurable that she can no longer live.  But these experiences are merely sequenced and don’t seem to suggest a comprehensive picture.

In fact as a basic narrative, Thirst has some serious flaws.  Although Rut and Bertil are presented as physically moving on the train, there is no actual narrative movement to the film. All we have is a collection of dysfunctional personalities that make no progress towards resolving their problems.  Rut comes to be seen as an insufferable harridan who is evidently suffering from bipolar disorder.  Viola is opaque, since we never get to see how she came to her miserable state.  The same is true for Valborg, who is only seen briefly.  The men are even more unfathomable.  Raoul is a singularly unsympathetic egotist.  Rosengren is so evilly manipulative that we wonder if he himself may be suffering from some psychopathy.  And Bertil’s submissive passivity also seems quizzical.   It is presumably easier for an actor or actress to play such a theatrical role, since the speech and gestures can be outlandish and therefore outside the scope of customary behaviour, but this leaves out any subtlety of expression. In the end we viewers don’t understand or empathize with any of these characters, which reduces any involvement we might have in the narrative. This leaves the final supposed reconciliation of Bertil and Rut as completely unmotivated. It is all just an artificial way to end all the suffering we have seen so the theater lights can be turned on. So I would say that the virtues of this film lie in its cinematography (including some theatrical mirror reflection shots [1]), not in its narrative.

★★½

Notes:

1. For further discussion of mirror shots, see the review of Torment (1944).

“Charulata” - Satyajit Ray (1964)

Charulata (1964) is thought by many to have been Satyajit Ray’s finest film, and indeed Ray himself said that it was his personal favorite of all his works. Certainly it is one of Ray’s most polished and aesthetically ambitious efforts. It seems to me that it is with this film that Ray fully asserted his own personal artistic dominance. He mentioned at the time that he decided with this production to take his time and get what he wanted.  So he wrote the script and storyboards, composed the main musical themes (although he used some existing songs, including some written by Rabindranath Tagore), helped design the sets, and for the first time personally took over control of the camera [1,2].

The story of the film is based on Rabindranath Tagore’s novella Nastanirh (The Broken Nest, 1901) about a neglected wife in a wealthy Bengali milieu.  In that story, the young cousin of a wealthy Bengali aristocrat comes for a visit and strikes up a friendship with his older cousin’s young wife.  Although Indian wives have always been expected to have limited contact with men outside their families, much closer associations with cousins and brothers-in-laws have always been accepted.  And in the wider, extended family context of India, cousins are considered to be essentially “brothers” and are even referred to as such.  So the visiting “cousin-brother” in the story strikes up a close friendship with his cousin’s wife, which gradually begins to stretch the limits of acceptable intimacy.  In the end it leads to the “broken nest”.


What has always fascinated Indians about this story is that  it seems to reflect Tagore’s own personal experiences [3].  When he was growing up, Tagore was very friendly with his older brother Jyotirindranath’s child bride, Kadambari Devi.  Rabindranath was twelve years younger than Jyotirindranath, but he was only two years younger than his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi, so the two youngsters spent a lot of time together and became close companions, with common interests in poetry and art. However, shortly after Rabindranath had an arranged marriage at the age of 23, Kadambari Devi committed suicide, and it has always been assumed that her close relationship with Rabindranath Tagore figured into this tragic event somehow.  Indeed when Satyajit Ray managed to examine Tagore’s actual manuscripts for Nastanirh, he noticed Tagore’s marginal notes connecting the story’s main character with Kadambari Devi.  However, because of the great reverence with which Tagore is generally held in Indian society, these personal associations and their implications have always been a delicate issue, in fact almost considered off limits for artistic treatment.  Nevertheless and despite these issues of social propriety, Ray went ahead and developed a carefully nuanced treatment of the story.  And he did not avoid the Tagore association; by setting the film in 1879-80, he placed it at a time that roughly matched Tagore’s youthful experiences.

But adding to these personal complications here is a further speculative layer associated with Ray’s own rumored relationship at this time with his lead actress, Madhabi Mukherjee.  These personal ingredients, however, are not really my focus.  My primary interest is the work of art as it stands by itself and what it means to us today.  Charulata has several interesting thematic layers that make the film much more than a culture-bound love story.

One obvious theme that attracts the most discussion about the film is the role of women in modern society, particularly Indian society. To what extent were educated Indian women expected to conform to a restricted domestic role? And to what extent was their intellectual independence to be encouraged? Charulata’s intellectual development in the story directly relates to these questions.

Another, more subtle, theme in the film concerns the degree to which one can communicate deep aspects of human experience by means of the written word.  It was Ray’s belief that the crucial moments in life go beyond words, despite the fact that the main characters in Charulata are very much concerned with crafting words correctly [4,5].  But by summoning up their poetic gifts, the two main characters in the film seem to be trying to express things that are outside the normal scope of textual expression.  So the success of his film very much depended on his actors’ dramatic talents of expression that went beyond the spoken word – that is, in terms of facial expressions and gestures.  Fortunately, he had a cast that responded to his direction by giving outstanding performances in this regard.

There are really only five characters of interest in the film.  But that doesn’t mean the film is limited in its scope – as with many of Ray’s films, we get a multi-perspective views of all these characters with multiple focalizations.

• Bhupati Dutta (played by Shailen Mukherjee) is the wealthy 35-year-old Bengali aristocrat whose primary interest is the success of his newly launched and politically liberal newspaper.
• Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee) is the would-be poet and first cousin of Bhupati.  But he is treated (in accordance with Bengali tradition) like a brother-in-law of Charulata (i.e. like a brother of Bhupati).
• Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee) is Bhupati’s young wife.
• Umapada (Shyamal Ghoshal) is Charulata’s older brother.
• Manda (Gitali Roy) is Umapada’s wife.

Most of what we come to know about these characters is not through what they articulate, but through their facial expressions or idle remarks. This is especially true with respect to Madhabi Mukherjee’s wondrous performance as the title character. Her emotive facial expressions, particularly her worried frowns, drive the film and give life to what otherwise would be static scenes. Soumitra Chatterjee, too, is superb, as usual, in evoking the natural compassion and wonder of his character.

In addition to the two themes I have so far mentioned, perhaps the most significant theme of the film lies at the philosophical level.  It corresponds to notions treated by Soren Kierkegaard in his treatise Either/Or – the conflict between the aesthetic existence and the ethical existence.  According to some interpretations of Either/Or, Kierkegaard was suggesting a progressive movement from the aesthetic to the ethical, but I don’t think it was that simple. In my view, what Kierkegaard discussed concerned a tension that is never fully resolved.  It is this aesthetic/ethical tension that fully emerges in the fourth and final phase of the film.

The story of the film passes through four phases:

1.  The Lonely Wife
The film begins showing Charulata idly wandering around the interior of her wealthy mansion looking for something to amuse herself. Her husband Bhupati is preoccupied with his newspaper business and barely notices her. At his dinner, Bhupati talks noisily with his mouth full of food and not attending to the delicate courtesies of social interaction. We get the impression that Charulata was a child bride and that their relationships is cordial, but not close. Later on there is a shot showing Charulata looking wistfully at a servant woman holding a baby and presumably pondering her own childless, and hence unfulfilled, state. 

Ray uses a visual motif here, by showing Charulata looking at the world through her opera glasses.  She may need to do this on account of near-sightedness, but the opera-glasses symbolize Charulata’s non-involvement with the world.  She is only a spectator.  Since (we later learn) she is very intelligent, she spends much of her time reading the leading novels of the day, notably those by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who was a prominent romantic novelist and Bengali nationalist.

To lighten his work load, Bhupati invites Charulata’s good-for-nothing brother Umapada and his wife, Manda, to come live with them hoping that will make the household more interesting. Umapada is entrusted with the financial operations of the newspaper, leaving Charulata and Manda at home together. But Manda’s tastes and educational background are rather crude, and her presence does not reduce Charulata’s boredom.

2. Cousin Amal Arrives
Interrupting this slow, languid setting at about the 20-minute mark of the film, a rainstorm suddenly brews, and seemingly along with it a human rainstorm appears, too – Bhupati’s cousin-brother, Amal.  The 23-year-old Amal has finished his college studies and has arrived for an extended stay.  His interests are not in practical affairs, but in poetry and literature, interests he shares with Charulata.  The contrast between Bhupati and Amal is striking. Bhupati is orderly, logical, and methodical.  He’s interested in the practical problems facing modern Indian society.  Amal, on the other hand, is a free spirit interested in the eternal mysteries of life and art.

On one occasion in the large bed chamber, Amal discusses with Charulata and Manda a contemporary topic – the New Woman versus the Traditional Woman. The two roles depicted may not seem that different from our modern perspective, but it is interesting that the question of the proper role of women in society has never left us. We are still trying to work that out.

3.  Amal and Charulata
The next phase concerns the deepening relationship between Amal and Charulata.  Amal has been tasked by Bhupati to relieve his wife’s boredom by encouraging her literary interests.  In the early scenes Amal appears rather self-obsessed and given to theatrical poetry recitations and song recitals.  But when he and Charulata go out into the estate garden, the richness of nature seems to open up their horizons.  There is then a justly famous 11-minute scene telescoping events over a period of time that shows them discussing poetry in the garden.  Charulata spends her time joyously swinging on a swing hanging from a garden tree, while Amal lies on his back nearby trying to dream up inspired verse worthy of his ambitions. 

Charulata so treasures these moments that she urges Amal not to publish the verses he composes in her company. She wants those words to belong to just the two of them. This is not just a trivial request. When words are exchanged in discourse, there is always a contextual bond between the sender and recipient that cannot be decontextualized without losing something vital. For Charulata, Amal’s composed words are her words – they were sent to her and written into a personalized notebook that Charulata had prepared for Amal. 

Her feeling of satisfaction with this sense of personal engagement is somewhat weakened, though, when she realizes that Amal’s encouragement of her writing was apparently done on the instructions of her husband.  And much further to Charulata’s consternation, Amal then goes ahead and publishes his poetry in a literary magazine anyway.  He is thrilled, because it is apparently his first publication, but Charulata is disappointed with his apparent self-involvement and betrayal of their private discourse. So we are left to wonder whether the swing scene represented real movement towards freedom or merely back-and-forth stasis [6].

Charulata’s only option now is to play that public game, too. She struggles to write something of her own, and after numerous false starts, succeeds! She gets her memoire published in an even more prestigious magazine than the one that published Amal’s work. Now she and Amal are equals and truly engaged on the interpersonal plane of things. But this level of engagement is leading to stress-inducing feelings of love. Seeing Amal’s dilapidated slippers, she gives to him the hand-made slippers she had been making for her husband.  Finally, in a moment of emotional weakness, she breaks down and momentarily embraces Amal.  This passionate gesture was about as far as Ray could go within the moral conventions of Indian cinema at the time.

4.  Ethical Concerns

Meanwhile Bhupati’s world of progressive political engagement is moving forward, too. He and his fellow Bengali Brahmo progressives are thrilled when the British Liberal Party wins the  election back in England, which portends a more liberal attitude towards their Indian colonial activities. While they are celebrating with a concert party, Umapada robs Bhupati’s safe and secretly departs the estate with Manda. We subsequently learn that Umapada had been mismanaging Bhupati’s funds since his arrival and that Bhupati’s newspaper is now bankrupt.

Amal and Charulata are blithely unaware of this treachery, as they now engage privately in a witty alliterative game involving only words that begin with the letter ‘B’.  But Amal is starting to worry about the larger implications of their relationship.  When Bhupati tells him about Umapada’s perfidy, he says that what really disturbed him, more than the material loss, was the idea that someone close to him would blatantly cheat him right under his nose.  For Bhupati, meaningful life entails living according to higher ideals.  He says:

“If a man I put such trust in shows not the slightest respect . . . then what have we got?  How do we go on living?” . . . . Is there no honesty?  Is it all just sham and lies?"

Amal silently takes it to heart. He realizes that he has undermined Bhupati’s trust, too, and has unintentionally gone down a path that will destabilize Bhupati’s marriage with Charulata. Amal hastily packs his bags and departs the estate, leaving only a cursory good-bye note on the table.

Charulata is crushed by Amal’s departure, but she tries to conceal her disappointment.  She returns to using her opera glasses, signifying that she has gone back to being a spectator rather than an active agent.  Bhupati eventually finds out about his wife’s disappointment and finally realizes that he has not only lost his newspaper (his political life), but also his wife (his domestic life).  He goes out in his carriage to contemplate.  When he returns, the frowning Charulata is there to tentatively receive him.  She reaches out her hand, and the film ends with a freeze frame showing their hands not quite touching. 


Ray used a variety of aggressive cinematic techniques to tell the story of Charulata. This was facilitated by the fact that almost the entire film was shot in the studio [7].  In addition to his restless tracking camera that prowls about through all the interior scenes and gives visual movement to the character interactions, there were numerous relatively tight closeup reaction shots showing the three principal characters (especially Charulata) worried about how things will play out.  To focalize on a character, particularly on Charulata, there were a number of full-facial tracking shots following her as she moved forward (the camera tracking backward at pace) through a room.  These tracking closeups included shots of Charulata’s face on the swing, as she swung back and forth – her face remains in closeup as the background shifts wildly to the to-and-fro, thereby conveying Charulata’s joyous liberation..

However, the final freeze frame of the film doesn’t work at all, as far as I am concerned. It has been compared to the final freeze frame of The 400 Blows (1959), but there is a smooth transition and buildup to that final shot in Truffaut’s film, whereas the final shots in Charulata are awkward and look like jump cuts. Ray apparently intended to convey a relationship that was hanging in the balance, but that particular maneuver failed to deliver.

As I mentioned at the outset, many critics regard Charulata as Satyajit Ray’s greatest film, while others dismiss it as too slow and languid.  Your appreciation will depend on whether you tune in to what I consider to be the real philosophical theme of the film.  It comes back to the philosophical duality evoked by Kierkegaard. While Amal and Charulata represent Kierkegaard’s aesthetic focus (the “Either”), Bhupati represents the ethical side (the “Or”).   Underlying this is a cognitive duality – the tension between (a) creativity and (b) mechanical, logical analysis.

In this respect Bhupati is a decent, ethical man.  He tries to follow the rules.  He means well, and he strives for a world in which justice prevails and the common good thrives.  His concerns center around how practically to build a world that achieves these aims.  By deliberately and rigorously following such a path, he believes that a progression towards a better world can be achieved.

However, though Bhupati and Charulata are both good people, they are not a good match – they are not soulmates. The possibilities of higher fulfilment lie in the direction of the relationship between Charulata and Amal. Though they would not deny Bhupati’s aims, Charulata and Amal seek something beyond Bhupati’s just world. This is a world where human creativity rises above the mechanics of ethical rules. The world they seek is a mystical union – one of love, but not just carnal passion.  However, Amal comes to see that in his present circumstances, he cannot go further without compromising the larger concern of social harmony.  He makes his compromise and abandons Charulata.  But this compromise in this instance is a tragedy, and this is fathomed individually by each of the main characters at the end.

★★★½

Notes:

1. Ray’s takeover of the film camera apparently led to an eventual break with his customary cinematographer, Subrata Mitra, who only worked on one further Ray film after Charulata.
2. Whether or not the director/auteur watches the action through the camera lens (and so only sees what is within the frame) must have a significant influence on the cinematic outcome.  I remember seeing distinguished Italian director Ermanno Olmi remark in an interview that he always operated his own camera, in contrast with Federico Fellini, who he claimed never looked through the camera lens.   Is your favorite director an Olmi or a Fellini?  It would be interesting to catalog which directors are like Olmi and which are like Fellini.
3. Clifton B. Seely “Translating Between Media: Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray”, Keynote Address, The Twelfth Annual Tagore Festival (2000), Champaign-Urbana, IL, USA.
4. Andrew Robinson, “Ray on Charulata”, Charulata, The Criterion Collection, 2013.
5. Moinak Biswas, “Writing on the Screen: Satyajit Ray’s Adaptation of Tagore”, Forum Media 6, November 2003, .
6. Neel Chaudhuri, “Charulata: The Intimacies of a Broken Nest”, Senses of Cinema, April 2004, .
7. Marie Seton, Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray,  (1971), Indiana University Press, pp. 180-185.