Marriage within the Kohayagawa family takes on multiple meanings throughout The End of Summer, ensuring stability within the younger generations and bringing scandal among the older, as Yasujirō Ozu weaves its humour and drama into poetic lamentations of life’s bittersweet sorrows.
Akira Kurosawa builds a complex ensemble of characters in Yojimbo’s compelling narrative of rival crime lords and Shakespearean power struggles, though it is the mysterious samurai who wanders into their midst who commands the greatest power of them all, seemingly walking straight out of Japanese mythology to save the town held hostage by a violent feud.
Japanese soldier, prisoner, and pacifist Kaji seems to live multiple lives across the modern odyssey of The Human Condition trilogy, waging his soul as the last battleground of moral fortitude in the final years of World War II, and becoming the compelling centrepiece of Masaki Kobayashi’s devastating study on humanity’s most vital essence.
Beneath Ingmar Bergman’s eloquently cutting dialogue in Through a Glass Darkly is a family struggling in the absence of spiritual guidance, magnified to an even greater extent by the isolation of the island where they are vacationing, and yet finding the chance for redemptive grace in the smallest demonstrations of love.
There is a biting dissonance at play in A Woman is a Woman, giving the impression that its characters are always on the verge of breaking out into song without ever reaching that climactic emotional outpouring, thereby turning Jean-Luc Godard’s postmodern movie-musical pastiche into a playfully formal experiment of non-sequiturs and fourth wall breaks.
The relative lack of songs in Lola should not be taken to mean that the film unfolds with any less panache, vigour, or sensitivity than a traditional movie-musical, as Jacques Demy’s brisk tracking shots and delicate editing brings a rhythmic sensibility to his musings over long-lost lovers.
