1. The Age of Innocence (1999)
Martin Scorsese, with Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder. Based on the novel by Edith Wharton (1920).
A wonderful story of unfulfilled love set against the backdrop of gentile upper-class society in 19th-century New York, where the outwardly polished manners were in sharp contrast to the harsh, hidden machinations. The title is an ironic comment on this.
Newland Archer is engaged to marry the beautiful but superficial May Welland - who, like him, belongs to the creme-de-la-creme of late 19th-century New York society - but falls in love with her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who has recently returned to her native New York, scandalized by a failed marriage to a European aristocrat. But the Countess is also a breath of fresh air in the stifling, rule- and duty-based New York society, and she makes Archer dream of greater things than just a conventional life. But the society around them closes ranks to block their budding relationship...
Scorsese emphasizes in the film how these upper class people are characterized by their possessions and the food they eat. The Victorian rooms are crammed with furniture, paintings, lamps, plants, feathers, flowers, and the food, filmed from above on expensive china, is gorgeous to behold. The movie was shot mostly in traditional homes in Troy, New York.
Most importantly, Scorsese uses the medium of film to capture and magnify the implied eroticism in the unfulfilled relationship between Archer and Ellen Olenska - caressing the folds of her dress, kissing her shoe, or inhaling the scent of a parasol he believes to be hers are moments of incredible sensuality. Scorsese aptly demonstrates that the most powerful love stories are those that are never consummated, and the sexiest movies are those in which the lovers keep their clothes on.
The performances are perfect: Michelle Pfeiffer shines with an inner light as Ellen Olenska, Winona Rider brings out May Welland's girlishness as well as her cunning, and Daniel Day-Lewis looks both handsome and intelligent as Newland Archer. Scorsese has made an elegant and intelligent adaptation of Wharton's novel that is wonderfully uncharacteristic of his usual work.
[Based on my blog article on Classical Novels and Film)
2. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes)
Werner Herzog, with Klaus Kinski.
The story of an expedition of Spanish conquistadors through the jungles of Peru and down the treacherous Huallaga River in 1560 in search of the legendary land of gold, El Dorado (a fictional story invented by the natives to lead the invaders to their doom). The rude adventurers, led by Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), are driven headlong into destruction by their hubris and greed.
The theme of the voyage across an unknown river in a threatening nature, from which invisible enemies besiege the boat, is of course borrowed from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Aguirre manipulates and instills fear in the group he is supposed to lead. One by one, the expedition members die of heat, food shortages, power grabs, and various illnesses until Aguirre is left alone. Kinski plays Aguirre with breathtaking ferocity, like a force of nature ready to strike. He perfectly embodies the violence and greed with which Europe subjugated much of the world in the colonial era, but also the arrogance and hubris.
The movie was shot in Peru. It's the first of several Herzog feature films in which the actual, arduous process of making the film (on location, in the middle of nowhere, and with the help of the locals) mirrors the plot about swashbucklers rushing into the untamed wilderness in search of greatness. Aguirre/Kinski, in fact, functions as a loose stand-in for Herzog himself.
3. Air Doll (2009, Kuki Ningyo)
Hirokazu Kore-eda, with Bae Doona. Based on the manga by Yoshiie Goda.
A Pygmalion-like story about a life-size inflatable sex doll that develops consciousness and turns into a real woman. In the worst case this would have been a raunchy sex comedy, but in Kore-eda's hands it became a meditation on what it means to be human.
The doll (called Nozomi, "Hope") belongs to a grumpy, middle-aged waiter who has dressed it up in a maid's costume and engages in endless conversations with it after he returns home at night. The reclusive man apparently prefers the plastic doll to a real woman because he doesn't have to communicate with another living being. He takes her for walks and sits with her on a bench, the same long scarf around both of their necks - the height of loneliness.
But one morning (when the waiter is at work) the doll magically comes to life ("finding a heart") and - dressed in the fetishistic maid's uniform her owner bought for her - starts walking around the neighborhood, an old part of Tokyo. By mimicking her neighbors' speech and actions, she learns to fit in. She even gets a job in a video store, makes various friends (giving the director the opportunity to show more lonely lives, such as an old man who always sits on a park bench, a single father of a young daughter, a middle-aged hotel clerk who worries that a younger woman will soon replace her, etc.), but above all, develops a mind of her own. The first part of the movie shows us how the living doll learns about the new world around her. Her wide-eyed wonder at everything in the world is beautiful to watch.
Eventually, she learns what it means to be human, and we begin to care about who Nozomi is. She starts to hate her sex slavery with the waiter and falls in love with a shy young guy who works in a video store (the waiter eventually buys a replacement doll). Unfortunately, she is made of plastic, which is easy to rent. When she loses air, the young clerk blows her up through the valve in her belly button, which turns into a real love scene. However, the air doll doesn't learn that an unavoidable element of life is dying, which will lead to a critical mistake...
The living air doll is played by the perfectly cast Korean actress Bae Doona, who brings a lot of depth to her difficult role. The fluid cinematography is by Taiwanese cinematographer Ping Bin Lee. A wonderful movie, sophisticated and sensitive, focusing on the loneliness of urban life and the question of what it means to be human.
4. An Autumn Afternoon (1962, Sanma no Aji)
Yasujiro Ozu with Shima Iwashita, Chishu Ryu, Keiji Sada and Mariko Okada.
A gentle domestic drama about middle-class family life, with a central story about the dilemma of whether a young woman of marriageable age should marry or stay home to care for her widowed father. The film was made at a time when young women in Japan were urged to marry before 25, but rather than preach social convention, Ozu emphasizes the naturalness of the cycle in which children leave their parents and strike out on their own, even if they would prefer to stay in the warm, old nest.
Chishu Ryu plays a widower, Hirayama, who lives with his daughter (Shima Iwashita) and a younger son. The daughter Michiko is a sassy, modern type who tells her father and brother in no uncertain terms that there will be no dinner if they come home late. A far cry from the demure Setsuko Hara of the late 40s and 50s, Ozu reflects the changes in society.
The oldest son, played by Keiji Sada, is married to Akiko (Mariko Okada). They live in their own apartment (in a danchi, an apartment complex of which many were built starting in the sixties) and struggle to make ends meet, as the young couple is heavily into consumer goods - currently they want both a refrigerator and golf sticks, and dad is always good for a loan. Akiko is also an outspoken modern woman, played by Mariko Okada in the same role as in Ozu's Akibiyori. She keeps her husband on a tight leash, also financially. This last Ozu movie is really very funny.
Hirayama is an auditor in a chemical company. He has two drinking buddies, Kawai (Nobuo Nakamura) and Professor Horie (Ryuji Kita) - the latter has just remarried to a young woman who could be his daughter, which leads to jokes about certain proto-Viagra pills he supposedly takes - and we see the inside of many bars in this movie.
The "Mama-san" (Kyoko Kishida, the heroine of Suna no Onna) of a favorite watering hole resembles Hirayama's late wife. Hirayama was the commander of a ship in the war, so she plays on his nostalgia by making him listen to the "Warship March" (a piece that later became a perennial favorite in pachinko halls). But now, in 1962, Hirayama jokingly concludes that it is good that Japan lost the war: the country is peaceful and prosperous after all.
Hirayama and his two friends invite their former teacher "The Gourd" (Eijiro Tono, known for his role as Mito Komon in period films) to dinner and then bring him home, where they meet his daughter Tomoko (Haruko Sugimura), who has become an embittered old maid. Hirayama wants to spare his own daughter this fate, and since Michiko is already 24 (women should marry before the age of 25, was the traditional philosophy in Japan), he starts looking for a husband for her. Both father and daughter hide their true feelings about this marriage.
Michiko likes one of her father's colleagues, but they discover that he is already engaged - she has waited too long. So an omiai (arranged marriage) is arranged with someone anonymous to us as viewers - we don't even see him in the movie - and the last image of Michiko is in her colorful wedding kimono with the traditional tsunokakushi headdress.
After the ceremony, Hirayama goes back to drinking (Mama-san sees his morning clothes and asks if he has been to a funeral. "Something like that," he replies) and comes home a little tipsy. He feels his age and the loneliness that comes with it. Marrying off his daughter is like losing the war again, so maybe some good will come of it.
The English title of this movie may sound elegiac to us, but two things should be noted here:
1) Autumn in Japan is not a season with sad or dark connotations; on the contrary, it is a time of blue skies when the sweltering heat of summer finally gives way to pleasant coolness. It is a time when people get active again with sports and hiking and when the appetite returns.
2) The Japanese title of the movie is literally "The Taste of Sanma," where "sanma" is a type of mackerel (not mackerel itself, which is saba; sanma is usually translated as "Pacific saury"). This inexpensive fish is a delicacy in September, and that is the season to which the movie refers. In fact, there is (even) more eating and drinking in this "food movie" than in other Ozu films. We also see Ozu's own favorite dish, tonkatsu (deep-fried pork), pass by. Sanma, however, is missing from these menus - it was a simple fish for home cooking and thus probably hints at the "home atmosphere" Hirayama will miss when his daughter leaves him. On the other hand, this movie is full of sake drinking, and the French gave it the title "The Taste of Sake (le gout du sake)"!
Bright color photography by Atsuta Yuharu. Ozu died shortly after completing this movie, on his 60th birthday. His grave at Engakuji in Kamakura bears no name - only the character mu ("nothing"). An Autumn Afternoon is the final masterpiece of a truly great director, a summation of his entire career. A serene movie full of understatement, it shows us that in our lives, too, we should quietly follow the cycle of nature.
[Based on my previous blog article]
5. Angels and Insects (1995)
Philip Haas with Mark Rylance, Patsy Kensit, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Based on the novella "Morpho Eugenia" (included in Angels and Insects) by A.S. Byatt.
A Victorian naturalist, William Adamson, has returned from the Amazon jungle to his native England, where he is at the mercy of a wealthy patron, Sir Harald Alabaster. He has lost all his possessions and most of his insect specimens in a shipwreck, but Sir Harald kindly hires him to classify his chaotic natural history collection and gives him refuge at Bredely Hall. William also falls in love with the eldest of the three Alabaster daughters, Eugenia, with the speed of a man who has spent ten long years in the jungle. He is of a different (=lower) class than the aristocratic Alabasters, who form a close-knit family, but - also to his own surprise - he is welcomed into their fold and into the arms of the coldly beautiful, very blonde and very white-skinned (yes, "alabaster") Eugenia. This is despite the vehement opposition of one of her half-brothers, the brutish Edward.
Thus William becomes an awkwardly grafted addition to the wealthy family. Of course, things are not what they seem, and just as in original Victorian fiction, a hasty marriage is never a good idea, as there are usually some skeletons in the closet. The only person at Bredely Hall with whom William gradually develops a real friendship and has meaningful conversations is another hanger-on, the assistant governess Matty Crompton, a mysterious dark fairy. William begins a study of ants with her, and they even write a book together on the social system of the local ant colonies. Interesting parallels are drawn between human society and the insect world. It is also from her that William finally learns the shocking incestuous secret of the Alabaster family - and realizes his own painful lack of insight and perception.
The movie features stunning "insect colored" costumes and is probably the only movie in which a woman believes she is being attacked by large moths. It was shot on location at Arbury Hall, Nuneaton. The movie is rather understated and quietly acted and moves at a deliberate pace, but that suits the subject. Of course, the issue is much larger than just a case of incest in an English family: the film shows the dangers of inbreeding, not only in the biological sense, but even more in the cultural sense, when the ranks of a small in-group are closed and people from other cultures are treated as outsiders. It is a regression to a state of tribalism. Brexit, of course, is a recent example of this unfortunate tendency.
100 Greatest Films