Category: 1985

Akira Kurosawa | 2hr 42min

Akira Kurosawa is no stranger to adapting Shakespeare, but the connection between King Lear and Ran was not always intentional. In its early pre-production stages, the inspiration was a parable regarding Japanese warlord Mōri Motonari, who is said to have taught his sons the value of family through demonstrating the unbreakable strength of three bundled arrows. It was only when the Shakespearean parallels started to organically emerge that Kurosawa began playing into its resonant character drama. Such rich source material is not enough on its own to ensure a successful final product though. It takes a director like Kurosawa to fully understand the full cinematic potential of a text like King Lear, balance that with dramatic power struggles between its key players, and transpose it onto a setting as alive with historical beauty as feudal Japan to create something this immense in scope and emotion.

Sweeping battles are pitched against giant grey castles and rolling green hills, but it is in the thousands of costumed extras where Kurosawa lets loose with some of his most gorgeous colour compositions. The three main armies in question carry flags bearing the signature primary palettes of their leaders, charging in formations that demonstrate Kurosawa’s well-established flair for blocking and choreography on a colossal scale.

In one of the film’s most spectacular sequences, we watch in a long shot as red and yellow factions face off on either side of a burning fortress, its glowing flames complementing the heated colours below. In another, Kurosawa keeps his camera behind the galloping legs of a cavalry regiment to peer at the opposing military force firing their muskets from the remote safety of the woods, their targets falling into view right before our eyes. Few action films pay such attention to tactical warfare, but the conflicts of Ran are consistently authentic in how they are shaped by the intelligent strategising of leaders, rather than the basic, heroic actions of individuals.

It is only natural for Kurosawa to keep a distant perspective in epic battle scenes such as these, but even when he turns his camera to the unravelling family relations which have fuelled these conflicts, he still keeps his camera fairly remote in wide shots. After all, even on its most personal level Ran is still a family saga stretching over decades, and so capturing an ensemble of well-defined characters allows Kurosawa to paint out their relationships and statuses in immaculately blocked compositions.

Take two of the most fascinating players in this struggle – Hidetora Ichimonji, the elderly warlord, and Lady Kaede, his scheming daughter-in-law whose family he destroyed in his conquest for power. Though we witness few face-to-face encounters between the two, their relationship is as vividly illustrated as any of the others. Together, Tatsuya Nakadai and Mieko Harada deliver the two most outstanding performances of the film in these roles, patiently developing their characters across years of trauma and rage.

When we first meet Kaede, she has been married to Taro, Hidetoro’s eldest son, for many years. Perhaps for all this time she has been helplessly resigned to her station in life, grateful that she at least survived the massacre of her family. Perhaps she has been waiting for the day her husband will inherit the land that was stolen off her parents, so she can eventually claim it for herself. Either way, she is incredibly resourceful in her manipulations, quickly adapting to new developments by slyly attaching herself to whoever holds the most power at any given time. In the space of a single scene, we watch her threaten to kill, seduce, and then draw sympathy from Jiro, Hidetoro’s second eldest son. She has no other long-term objective than to see the downfall of the family which took everything from her, even at the expense of her own life, and this hardened sense of nihilism sticks with her right to the end.

Though Hidetora is our protagonist, he may also be considered the villain of the piece, having foolishly set in motion the sequence of events which lead to the conflict between his three sons. He is a man who built a life off of slaughtering thousands of innocents, and now in his old age he is left to powerlessly watch that empire crumble, ashamedly recognising that his own children may possess the same evil that resides within him. He is not granted a quick, easy death that might spare him the pain of life’s consequences, but instead he lives long enough for the anguish to wear away at his soul. His skin turns grey, his white hair grows long and wispy, and he mentally retreats into his past where he is haunted by the spirits of those he killed.

Within Hidetora’s perspective, Kurosawa frequently inserts formal cutaways looking up at clouds, as if searching for a sign of some divine power. When all is well in his domain, the sky is notably much lighter than when there is conflict, but with no other reassurance, Hidetora is left a lonely, raving madman, cut off from both the heavens and the earth.

The long shot that Kurosawa leaves us with ties this idea off on a particularly nihilistic note, lingering on Tsurumaru, a blind man who has only played a minor role in this narrative, but whose symbolic presence has been incredibly potent. Tapping his way across the edge of castle ruins, he stumbles and drops his precious image of Buddha to the bottom of a gorge. Viewed from a distance, Tsurumaru is but a tiny silhouette, and now without even the icon of his faith to protect him he is left with nothing. To Kurosawa, this is the entire world – ignorant to the danger which lies ahead of us, and abandoned by our gods. For all the epic battles and characters that fill out Ran’s immense, complex narrative, every single development is at its core motivated by a simple, seething bitterness towards humanity’s existential isolation.

Ran is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes and YouTube.

Krzysztof Kieslowski | 1hr 49min

Even for Krzysztof Kieslowski, No End is an exceedingly sombre affair, exhuming the voice of a recently departed lawyer and haunting his widowed wife, Ulla, with visions of his apparition. It has been four days since Antek’s passing, as he informs us in the opening minutes, and he has borne witness to all of it, from the immediate aftermath of his heart attack right through to his funeral. Behind him, Ulla lies motionless on their bed, incapacitated from the grief. Elsewhere, his final client sits in prison awaiting trial, having illegally organised a factory strike after the introduction of martial law. Along two parallel paths, Kieslowski follows both the personal and political implications of Antek’s untimely death, binding them together under the shadow of Poland’s Communist authoritarianism.

Though he is our entryway into this story, Antek steps to the side right after his monologue, from this point on only appearing as a mysterious presence vaguely interfering with the lives of those he left behind. His impact is ambiguous, implicitly leaving a red question mark on a legal document and making a fellow lawyer drop his watch. Even when we do see him, his appearances are often only fleeting. While Ulla meditates, his hand slips into the foreground to pick up a glass before retreating, and later when she is describing his presence to someone else, Kieslowski cuts away to his hands playing with the holes in her stockings.

The longer she mourns, the greater her love for him grows, but she also evidently has trouble expressing this to anyone. In one scene that sees her sleep with an English tourist, she is driven to tell him of the powerful union she shared with Antek, though only in Polish so that he cannot understand. Perhaps Kieslowski himself is making a point here about the inherently unique and honourable qualities of Poland’s Solidarity movement, which Antek embodies. The crushing loss of this Polish push for workers’ rights and social change simply cannot be comprehended by anyone not directly affected by it.

It is in the courtroom drama side of No End that Kieslowski elucidates this metaphor a little more, centring Artur Barciś and Aleksander Bardini respectively as a political dissident and his new lawyer. Both men would later go on to play significant roles in Kieslowski’s Dekalog series, particularly Barciś who bears witness to each individual episode as a silent, supernatural entity. In the role of No End’s Darek, that neutrality is exchanged for fervent passion, trying to make himself a martyr of the suppressed Solidarity trade union that was rapidly terminated by the Polish government’s imposed martial law. Here, the ghost of Antek serves as an even greater reminder of that pacifist resistance movement, physically absent yet still active in the minds and memories of Poles.

Though Darek’s lawyer, Labrador, possesses a warmth and genuine desire to help his client, his convictions are not as strong as his predecessor’s. He wins Darek’s case, and yet it doesn’t feel like victory. There is nothing brave or impressive about a Solidarity leader getting off with a slap on the wrist. As Antek stands in the courtroom with them, the insignificance of this entire trial gradually sets in.

In constructing an allegorical narrative with so few direct representations of Poland’s political landscape, Kieslowski often keeps No End at an intellectual distance from audiences wishing to grasp its historical details. Due to censorship, the word “Solidarity” is not even mentioned anywhere in this screenplay. Where it does connect is in its solemn representations of devastating political defeat, likening it to the death of a loved one and the hopeless depression that follows.

It sinks in very subtly, but this despair does take root in this ensemble of subdued performances and Zbigew Preisner’s slow, grim music. If No End is a eulogy, then his church choir, strings, woodwinds, and organ make up a liturgical underscore, ploughing along in grave unison as if brought together under a common cause of shared melancholy and reverence. Just as these musical instruments move as one through haunting minor progressions, too does this overwhelming sense of loss spiritually unite Kieslowski’s characters throughout the film, together commemorating a death that carries demoralising implications across multiple levels of society.

No End is currently streaming on Mubi and The Criterion Channel.

Peter Greenaway | 1hr 55min

A Zed and Two Noughts opens and closes with two pairs of deaths, its very structure marked by a symmetry that Peter Greenaway is compelled to tease out in meticulous detail. It is a fixation which extends to the pair of co-dependent twins at the film’s centre, both zoologists who bury themselves in their experiments to cope with the recent losses, attempting to reckon with the very nature of birth and death that spells out the fate of every life on Earth. The other obsession which carries them through is Alba – the woman whose car collision ended both their partners’ lives, and who is now recovering in hospital after having her leg amputated. It is a disturbingly twisted sort of love which forms between the three of them, driven by the same desire to understand that which has ruined their lives.

But for Oswald and Oliver Deuce, none of their studies or affairs are attempts to achieve some greater power over their own mortality. It is knowledge they crave, sorted by neat labels and classifications. The zoo they work at is the perfect setting for this taxonomical compulsion, where creatures are kept in cages and examined like objects. The zebra becomes a powerful running metaphor for Greenaway, representing the duality of all life in its black and white patterns, as well as in its very name reaching from one end of the alphabet to the other. Later in the film it falls victim to the twins’ experiments, embodying both life and death in its decay, but that isn’t before we watch several other living organisms suffer the same fate in the name of science.

Therein lies the basis of the Deuces’ primary experiments: observing the decomposition of organic matter through time-lapse photography. Greenaway returns to these sped-up sequences over and over, and beneath the decay of plants and animals Michael Nyman’s jaunty score of baroque strings, woodwinds, and harpsichord playfully underscores it all, like a crazed dance growing more frantic with the Deuces’ growing ambitions. Each new subject is a progressively more complex life form than the last, and thus Greenaway sets in motion a formal evolution that we anxiously anticipate will end with the most biologically advanced animal of all.

In fact, there is very little at all separating these humans from the creatures they pick apart, but it is evident that the Deuces take great comfort in this, using their studies as a way they can understand themselves. It is with this in mind that Greenaway builds an artificially gorgeous world of colour and symmetry around his characters, where they live within perpendicular lines and patterns of duality like zoo animals in enclosures. It is worth drawing comparisons with Michael Powell, another British director who preceded Greenaway by roughly 40 years and who similarly innovated the use of colour in film to draw out the perverse fascinations of his characters, though Greenaway’s designs are a little more ostentatious with their confronting depictions of nudity and body horror.

The hospital is one such setting we return to frequently where Greenaway’s visions manifest on a grand scale, enveloping a one-legged Alba in a cavernous white room of clinical curtains and bare furniture, though breaking up the sterility with flower bouquets on a table directly in front of here. Often accompanying these florals are Oswald and Oliver, and even when she eventually moves back home into her spacious pink bedroom Greenaway continues to block them in similarly balanced compositions. Each time we return to this set it is always a little more symmetrical than the last, as these twins gradually merge their styles into one indistinguishable look and Alba eventually decides to have her remaining leg amputated.

Greenaway possesses the sensibilities of both a painter and a scientist, and although this strange mix often creates a cold distance between him and his characters, its precision allows for an intensified focus on their disturbed psyches. It is especially mirrored in the expressionistic laboratory where pulsating pink and blue lights create off-beat visual rhythms with the flashing cameras, each one illuminating an exhibit of decomposing organisms. In one of the few tracking shots present in the film, Greenaway speeds his own camera down a row of these displays, overtaken by the same frenzied excitement as that of our mad scientists.

To them, it is the observation of life and death which gives it meaning, and it is through this reasoning that they try to ensure that they do not live or die in vain, turning one of their cameras on themselves. Greenaway is sure to emphasise a contrarian position here in an ironic twist of fate that sees their camera destroyed, maintaining that while the rules of nature remain unyielding, they serve no spiritual purpose other than the propulsion of its own existence. A creature put on display in a zoo or exhibition is a lonely thing indeed, but as we come to recognise in the final minutes of A Zed and Two Noughts, even lonelier is a creature with no spectators at all.

A Zed and Two Noughts is not currently available to stream in Australia.

Woody Allen | 1hr 22min

The story of The Purple Rose of Cairo is so simple it might as well be a fairy tale, or perhaps a fable for twentieth century America. In such dire times as the Great Depression when jobs were being lost and poverty was widespread, the escapism of the movie theatre could let that all fade away for a few hours. Down-on-her-luck waitress Cecilia is no exception. Hollywood gossip is her matter of expertise, and the cinema is where she falls into a dreamy daze, consumed by fantasies acted out by stars who never acknowledge her in return. That is at least until she catches the eye of archaeologist Tom Baxter, a character from the other side of the silver screen. All of a sudden he is walking out of the frame and into reality, much to the shock of her fellow theatre patrons and his fellow movie characters.

At this point in Woody Allen’s career, The Purple Rose of Cairo was about as childishly whimsical as he had gotten, but as much as he indulges in the fanciful imagination of the piece he is also in complete control of this delicate balance of conflicting tones. It is namely the incongruities between reality and fantasy that come to a head as Cecilia herself tries to sort one from the other, painfully considering how she can live a life of bright idealism while trapped in an abusive marriage. The touching vulnerability that Mia Farrow summons up in this role is of an entirely different kind to that which she displayed in Rosemary’s Baby. It is both naïve and disillusioned, seeing the world as it is yet choosing to turn away from it to absorb another where people are “consistent and always reliable.” How crushingly magnificent she is as well in simply sitting and letting her reactions tell entire stories, moving between smiles and tears as Allen dreamily dissolves between her face and the movie screen, forming a bond between the two that cannot be destroyed by anything that happens outside that darkened room.

But at the end of each movie session the lights inevitably turn back on and Cecilia must once again return to a life where happy endings are rare, and where the most one can really hope for is a bittersweet reconciliation with misfortune. As she discovers, the idealism of fiction can provide an aspirational standard that may inspire positive values and self-confidence, but this is not always enough to wrestle with any issues of real substance. “Where’s the fade out?” Tom asks as he and Cecilia begin to kiss passionately, unfamiliar with a world where sex is not simply implied. His chivalry and romance are certainly desirable, but his claims that he only possesses those since they were “written into my character” suggest that anything that was not instilled in him at conception is not something he can grow to understand.

In this self-aware layering of film conventions within other film conventions, Allen’s comedic writing and directing is simply superb, and demonstrative of the depth of his talent even when not crafting an all-time great screenplay such as Annie Hall. Fourth walls are broken in the most literal manner possible, characters within the ‘fake’ movie reference their own artificial existence, and then every so often he punctures the lightness of the story with a stab of black comedy, addressing the potentially disastrous consequences of both real and fictional worlds meeting. As we learn at one point, the black-and-white characters up on the movie screen are damned back to an empty void of nothingness each time the projector is turned off, and in a narrative twist further along the actor who plays Tom also gets tied up in the farce, complicating the matter with cases of mistaken identity.

This rather simple premise doesn’t outstay its welcome either, as within the film’s brief 82-minute run time Allen keeps the narrative moving in exciting directions, turning his lovingly stylistic construction of a classical black-and-white Hollywood movie into a transgressive artistic choice when the fourth wall is spun around and Cecilia enters Tom’s fictional world. The film grain and slightly tinny sound quality is authentically rendered in detail, but even greater is the montage of their “night out on the town” that affectionately plays into silent film techniques in tremendous ways, creating gorgeously layered collages through multiple exposures. The Purple Rose of Cairo is just as much an ode to the world of movies and moviemaking as it is a fable warning against the temptation to use them as a replacement for living, though it is through its intelligent, enthusiastic screenplay and one of Farrow’s most touchingly sweet screen performances that it transcends its already imaginative premise.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Martin Scorsese | 1hr 37min

There is a version of After Hours which might play out more as a straight farce or screwball comedy, as we follow corporate yuppie Paul Hackett along a twisted journey through a bad night that only keeps getting worse. He has two simple objectives in mind: get home, and, if he can find the time for it, get laid. He wanders through the apartments, clubs, and streets of New York, ingratiating himself with strangers who might offer him solutions to one or both of his goals, though oftentimes when we get our hopes up, they are quickly dashed by some extraordinary turn of events, each one more utterly absurd than the last. After Hours is truly Kafkaesque down to the very fabric of its premise, dragging us through an oppressive nightmare that erodes our faith in a chaotic universe that only ever cooperates with itself at the worst possible times.

But Martin Scorsese’s pointed critique is not aimed at some metaphysical force that exists entirely beyond the control of humans. This trap which Paul has worked himself into is one devised by industrial America, setting up an inefficient system that rejects nuanced judgement in favour of clumsy, automated assumptions. Of course, much of After Hours takes place outside the sterile offices where such bureaucracies are created, but beyond those walls, corporate culture continues to shape urban life in its own awful likeness. It is omnipresent and inescapable, even when the lights are turned off and everybody has left the building. For Paul, there is no existence outside work – there is simply eight hours of soul-sucking fatigue, and then another sixteen hours of the same thing.

As such, it isn’t the setting of New York that feels like its own character so much as it is the society, made up of artists, bartenders, businessmen, cab drivers, and burglars. The extent to which coincidences underlie each of Paul’s interactions with these people is rigidly formal in its development, as unrelated misunderstandings and minor accidents from early on later interweave in a series of increasingly unlucky diversions, to the point that it isn’t just the whims of fate holding Paul back from getting home, but the active efforts of an angry mob operating under the misguided belief that he is a criminal who must be brought to justice. Even as After Hours traverses dark territory including suicide and drugs, Scorsese’s screenplay remains wickedly funny, particularly as Paul grows self-aware of his own ridiculous situation, and at one point, after witnessing an entirely unrelated murder, bleakly muses:

“I’ll probably get blamed for that.”

Early on a horrific plaster sculpture evoking Edvard Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’ is used to foreshadow the sort of torment nightmare that awaits Paul, but by the end of the film this comparison is fully literalised as a shell within which Paul is trapped, unable to move, speak, or even scream out in pain. It should be no surprise that the woman who moulds this sculpture around him is just another false ally in a long line of them, and yet her betrayal does pack an extra sting given the moment of tender understanding the two shared. “I just want to live,” he tells her honestly, cutting through the miasma of confusion that pervades the streets of New York outside the bar where they slow dance to Peggy Lee’s hauntingly existential rendition of ‘Is That All There Is?’

The subtext is potent all through the film, but in this moment as Paul becomes objectified in the most literal sense of the word, Scorsese’s metaphors rise to the surface in an overwhelming wave, washing over and incapacitating the young upstart. It only makes sense that with his eventual escape from his physical encasement comes the rising sun, and an all too convenient drop-off out the front of his workplace just as his colleagues file in. With no other choice but to sit back down at his desk and start another day of work, he remains a feeble commodity, lacking any ability to achieve his most basic personal goals. In a mirror of the very first shot, Scorsese’s camera hurtles through the office at a breakneck pace, frantically turning corners with no destination in sight, damning Paul back into the crowd of suits he came from. There is no end to the modern-day nightmare that After Hours so dismally paints out – it is defined by the absence of anything that gives life meaning, isolating Paul in a limbo with no partner, no friends, and no home.

After Hours is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.