Category: Masterpiece

Yasujirō Ozu | 2hr 16min

There are very few filmmakers who can accurately be called one of cinema’s great minimalists while detailing compositions with such organised clutter, revealing intimate details of an apartment building’s residents through the placement of a tricycle in a hallway, or the neat rows of white laundry hanging on a clothesline. For Yasujirō Ozu, it virtually came as second nature by the time he reached the pinnacle of his craftsmanship in Tokyo Story. There is a clean, precise order to the lives of the Hiryama family, precariously balancing traditional ideals valued by grandparents Shūkichi and Tomi against their children and grandchildren’s desire to keep striving towards a more independent future, and binding all three generations together through the meditative routines of everyday life. As the centrepiece of this narrative, they form a delicate microcosm of post-war Japanese culture, gently tugging further apart over time yet never reaching any sort of breaking point.

For Shūkichi and Tomi, negative emotions are sealed tightly behind beaming smiles and quiet hums, only ever expressing difficult sentiments in private conversations. “We have children of our own, yet you’ve done the most for us,” Shūkichi warmly thanks his widowed daughter-in-law Noriko, expressing gratitude for providing the hospitality during his visit that Shige and Kōichi were too busy to offer. They too are polite in their outward mannerisms, but are far less adept at concealing their frustration over the burden of their parents’ visit. “Crackers would have been good enough for them,” Shige scolds her husband when he buys them expensive cakes, and she can barely hide her disappointment when they return early from a spa vacation organised to get them out of the house.

Indeed, tension is rife in Ozu’s family drama, though comparing it to the bitter dynamics of an Ingmar Bergman film or the overflowing Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk reveals few similarities. Ozu’s friction does not beg for urgent resolution, but would much rather dwell in silent acceptance, evoking a Zen state that finds harmony in the paradoxes of the modern world. Smokestacks, powerlines, and train tracks impose their harsh edges on the curves of natural formations and traditional architecture, becoming the conflicting subjects of Ozu’s characteristic pillow shots. Where a more conventional director might use a simple establishing shot to transition from one scene to the next, we instead slip through elegiac clusters of exterior views, lifting us outside the narrative flow and into a state of transient suspension. Perhaps just as uncommon as a talented minimalist with crowded mise-en-scène is an all-time great editor who does not push their pacing beyond an easy, measured rhythm, and with roughly ten or so seconds dividing each cut in these montages, Ozu claims this rarified space as well.

Even beyond his pillow shots though, he remains averse to the idea of only staying in a scene for its drama, frequently cutting to an empty room before it is filled with people, and lingering there for a short time after their conversations have ceased. This is not quite the tragic neorealism of Vittorio de Sica or Roberto Rossellini, but rather a naturalism that elevates mundane, everyday living to a level of spiritual transcendence, stripping away obtrusive distractions to encompass us in a contemplative stillness. Besides one deliberate tracking shot when Shūkichi and Tomi sorrowfully head back home from Tokyo, the camera never moves, consistently sitting low to the ground at roughly the same height as the characters in their traditional kneeling position. As if following the rigorous consistency of the family’s routines, he selects a handful of these compositions to repeat throughout the film too, connecting us back to established visual beats. This does not only synchronise us with Shūkichi and Tomi’s symmetrical ‘there and back’ journey across Japan, but it also transforms the act of dutiful repetition into a formal, contemplative poetry that stretches through the entire film.

Ozu’s delicate timing and framing of these shots are also far more unified with his settings than his characters, often only observing family members from a passive distance as they drift through corridors and rooms. Just like the parallel lines and intersecting curves of the outside world, there is a geometric logic to his careful arrangement of each household item as they fill in negative space, obstruct compositions, and layer hallways with a vivid depth of field. Even when characters are not present, these homes carry the spirit of their day-to-day lives, carving out an unassuming beauty from each sake bottle, pot plant, and umbrella that sits in stasis between uses, yet which makes these spaces feel truly lived in.

As we rest in the soothing passage of these still images, time very gradually becomes visible in Tokyo Story, delicately tracing Japan’s shift away from its complicated past and into an equally complex future. As innocent as Shūkichi and Tomi are in their old-fashioned nostalgia, their disappointment in their children at times seems firmly out-of-touch with modern demands, and Shige also recalls with disdain how her father would often come home drunk late at night when she was a child. Her desire to keep moving forward is not out of place among her generation, particularly given the recent traumas of World War II and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Having lost their beloved Shōji in the Pacific War, the Hiryamas should understand this all too well, and yet the pain of his memory hurts differently for each family member. Noriko hangs on dearly to the memory of her deceased husband, but when Shūkichi and Tomi notice their son’s framed photo still up in her house, she can barely address it without making a convenient excuse to exit. Later when Shūkichi gently encourages her to let Shōji go and remarry, she accepts her new path with tender grief, finally taking on the lesson that her father-in-law has spent weeks learning the hard way.

For that older generation, the realisation of their fading relevance and mortality has trickled in very slowly. As Tomi sits atop a hill and watches her grandson play, she quietly wonders what he will be when he grows up, before pausing on a sad, poignant question – “By the time you’re a doctor, I wonder if I’ll still be here.” Later during their getaway at the hot springs, Ozu foreshadows her eventual death further with a brief dizzy spell, and at least partially suggests that the commotion of modern Japan is somewhat responsible for her ailing health. The noisy city nightlife certainly doesn’t help either, as there is a subtle restlessness in Ozu’s cutting between Shūkichi and Tomi trying to sleep, the rowdy patrons down below, and those empty, perfectly aligned slippers sitting just outside their room.

Not one to let life-changing events break through his emotional restraint, Ozu refuses to even show Tomi suddenly falling sick on the train home from Tokyo, nor her eventual death back home in Onomichi. This information is instead shared second-hand through other family members who are finally united under a single roof in grief. Ozu’s rigorous blocking of mourners at the funeral holds together a modicum of tradition that survives Tomi’s passing, and her children even contemplate their regrets over not being around more – “No one can serve his parents beyond the grave.” Unfortunately, their empathy is short-lived. Out of her father’s earshot and barely noting his loneliness, Shige tactlessly expresses her wish that he was the one to go first, and not long after she and her siblings have once again disappeared back to their lives in other far-flung cities.

As flawed as the Hiryama children may be, Ozu’s meditation on generational changes is far from a condemnation of their modern values, and much more an elegiac reflection upon the natural course of life. Following his wife’s passing, a solitary Shūkichi gradually grows more isolated in Ozu’s mise-en-scène, mirroring the upright stature of two old stone pillars as he gazes out at the rising sun, and later sitting alone among his furniture as his home’s sole remaining occupant. These settings are visual extensions of their occupants, but so too are these characters equally consumed by their dynamic environments, drifting along a steady, one-way stream into a fading past. Few directors have found such an eloquent formal match between their aesthetic and their profound contemplations, yet even by Ozu’s standards Tokyo Story stands as his most carefully composed expression of melancholy acceptance, creatively distilling the experience of time’s unyielding passage down to the transient distance between one lingering instant and the next.

Tokyo Story is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and the DVD is available to buy on Amazon.

Andrei Tarkovsky | 1hr 48min

If one were to ask Andrei Tarkovsky, applying literal interpretations to his semi-autobiographical film Mirror is about as futile as discerning the past through rigorously objective methods. After all, factual history cannot possibly take any tangible form that may be touched, smelt, and tasted by future generations the same way it could for those who were there. The moment it disappears from the present, it no longer exists even in the minds of firsthand witnesses, who now filter it through their own subjective recollections. To then attempt a faithful reconstruction of its events through whatever form of media they deem most effective only separates our current understanding of the past further from whatever truth once existed.

This is no reason to give up entirely on such an endeavour though, Tarkovsky asserts, but rather to appreciate the reflection of our imperfect humanity that is found in such evocative illustrations. It is through his cinematic manipulation of time’s subjective flow that Mirror escapes the false impression of constructed reality, and instead becomes a portal into his pre-war childhood memories warped by the dreams, doubts, and desires that have emerged in the decades since. No decent film should be interpreted purely through a literal lens, but Mirror least of all ought to be taken as such, lest one finds themselves misguidedly rejecting Tarkovsky’s profoundly spiritual meditation on family, nostalgia, and humanity’s flawed consciousness.

It quickly becomes apparent that the first-person perspective taken by Tarkovsky is a surrogate for his own, as we realise our protagonist Alexei is never quite visible in the post-war timeline. He is the source from which these memories spring forth, his face always sitting just outside the frame while he commands the non-linear narrative with pensive voiceovers and conversations, and only ever appearing onscreen as a child in the story’s pre-war timeline. That he seems to be recalling the past as an out-of-body experience is the first clue that these flashbacks aren’t quite accurate renderings, but as Tarkovsky sinks us deeper into Alexei’s pool of dreams, we come to recognise it as the mirror upon which this unseen man’s life is reflected and distorted.

It is revealing too that the figure who looms largest here is his mother. Being named Maria after Tarkovsky’s real-life mother, and thus drawing parallels to the Blessed Virgin Mary, she becomes an icon of sacred veneration in Mirror, yet also a woman with a vividly complex life just beyond the periphery of Alexei’s view. In our first meeting with her, Tarkovsky even painstakingly recreates an authentic photograph of the real Maria sitting on a roughly erected fence of sticks, gazing towards the green fields beyond her home as if expectantly waiting for an important arrival. With her face totally hidden, she seems to exist in a world inaccessible to the young Alexei, her thoughts preoccupied by ideas and emotions beyond his naïve understanding. Still, the camera pushes forwards past rustling branches and into her orbit, where we can finally see what she sees – a man approaching from the distance.

He is not her husband, we discover, but rather a passing doctor who carries a warmer demeanour than Alexei’s actual father, and who on this day happens to be walking the same path. In the grand scheme of Alexei’s childhood, this man holds very little significance, and yet it is notable that this memory stands out in the absence of the family patriarch. Though his appearances are rare, the void he leaves behind is often filled with the poetry of Tarkovsky’s own father, Arseny Tarkovsky, standing in for a traditional film score.

With evocations of Greek tragedy, physical death, and spiritual transcendence emerging from one poem ‘Eurydice’, new impressions are drawn from Maria’s reluctant slaughter of a cockerel at her neighbour’s house and her guilty departure. Though the scene eventually comes to an end, the poetry continues its gentle contemplations through black-and-white, slow-motion imagery of a mighty wind running through dense vegetation, rolling a brass ornament off a small wooden table, and billowing through translucent white drapes hung in Alexei’s home. Whether expressed in spoken word or moving image, the romantic abstractions of both father and son run strong, and merge to create a cinematic lyricism.

“I dream of a different soul dressed in different garb,

burning up like alcohol as it flits from timidity to hope,

slipping away, shadowless,

leaving behind lilacs as a memento on the table.

Run, my child, and mourn not for poor Eurydice,

but drive your copper hoop through the wide world,

while in response to every step, you hear the earth reply, its voice joyful and dry.”

An excerpt from ‘Eurydice’ by Arseny Tarkovsky

Though Arseny Tarkovsky’s words encourage his son to move on from the lost love of Eurydice, the actual struggle is far more burdensome with the weight of memory holding him down. Does the mythological figure of Orpheus’ deceased wife stand in for Alexei’s childhood, his ex-wife Natalia, or perhaps even his mother? Andrei Tarkovsky would never claim such a direct correlation, though given his Oedipal casting of Margarita Terekhova as both Maria and Natalia, the two women are tied very strongly to Greek legend. Where they split is in their characterisations – where Maria embodies divine grace, Natalia is cold and cynical, suggesting a spiritual corruption that has degraded with time.

At least, this is how Alexei perceives them, and Tarkovsky is fully aware that he is far from a reliable narrator. It is more than likely that Maria never had the face he recalls now, instead letting her take the appearance of the other most significant woman in his life, and when Alexei even admits this to Natalia he also expresses a slight suspicion of why this is the case.

“I pity you both, you and her.”

He is not alone in seeing these echoes across past and present either, as the double casting of both a young Alexei and his son, Ignat, reflects the patriarchal side of the Oedipus allegory that Natalia bears witness to. Just as Alexei’s father grew distant from his son, so too is Alexei failing to connect with Ignat, who Natalia notes in horror “is becoming like you.”

Tarkovsky does not seek so much to explain these repeated generational patterns though as he wishes to capture the raw essence of time as it passes through them, cycling in rhythms that may be more richly experienced from outside history’s traditionally linear progression, and beyond the limits of conscious thought. As Tarkovsky intercuts Alexei’s reluctant rifle training during World War II with archival footage of Soviet battles, time is compressed into a single point that weighs on the young boy’s mind. Meanwhile, those long, slow camera movements which gently drift through uninhabited rooms stretch it out into eternity, offering a retreat into the soothing reverie of his frozen dreams.

Perhaps the greatest manifestation of time’s transient passage though is in Tarkovsky’s observation of nature’s effervescent, primordial elements, moving independently of any human influence. As if brought to life by some invisible creator, a gust of wind sends a single rippling wave through a field of long grass while Alexei’s neighbour walks away, and the frequent emphasis on grass, snow, dirt, mud, and stone on the ground imbues Tarkovsky’s mise-en-scène with distinctly earthy textures. Even the setting of this cottage on the edge of a forest suggests an ominous tranquillity, framing Alexei’s childhood as a fairy tale where things that were once deemed impossible manifest with ethereal wonder.

Somewhat paradoxically, fire and water frequently co-exist in the same spaces throughout Mirror too, creating a subtly incongruent dreamscape where candles light the room of Maria’s self-baptism, while rain simultaneously trickles in from cracks in the ceiling. The water which consecrates her as a divine entity in Alexei’s mind is the same which eventually caves in the room’s ceiling, wielding an equally immense power over life and death.

Elsewhere, Tarkovsky’s floating camera pauses on a dirtied mirror reflecting the burning of Alexei’s family barn, but as it turns around and directly approaches the disaster, we note the quiet patter of rain dripping from the wooden roof. Like the grand final set piece of Tarkovsky’s later film The Sacrifice, this fiery structure becomes a theological icon of divine destruction in stark contrast to the nourishing waters of life. On an even more fundamental level though, he is composing a surreal image of primal elemental power that we, like the characters, are simply forced to gaze at in helpless awe.

From within the fragile bubble of Alexei’s dreams, we can easily see why he pities those like Natalia who claim to have never witnessed a true Old Testament miracle. For Alexei, such miracles are impossible to escape. One strange visitor disappears mid-scene, leaving no trace of their existence besides the condensation of their absent teacup, and in what may be the defining shot of Tarkovsky’s filmography Maria levitates several feet above her bed, draped in white bedsheets. “Here I am, borne aloft,” she tenderly whispers to Alexei, becoming an angelic image of maternal transcendence in the eyes of her child.

As much as sequences such as these feel like a total departure from reality, their roots in mid-century Soviet Union history remain incredibly relevant. We see them not just in the grainy newsreels of the Spanish Civil War, nuclear explosions, and the launch of a USSR balloon that tangentially connects Alexei to a broader cultural context, but Tarkovsky even takes the time to examine a portion of Maria’s life working in a printing press for propaganda under Stalin’s totalitarian rule. Her fear that she may be responsible for a misprint is understandable when considering the consequences of such an error in this oppressive era, which may see her accused of treason. Though the young Alexei is absent from these scenes, touches of an almost imperceptible slow-motion continue to suggest that they are similarly being lifted from outside their original time frame – perhaps some attempt from an older Alexei to reconstruct an alternate image of his mother through second-hand stories.

It is not uncommon for hazy memories such as these to come flooding back when one reaches the end of their mortal life, though Tarkovsky suggests that Mirror is in fact depicting the complete inverse of this. Alexei is not revisiting his past because he is dying, but as the doctor mysteriously hints after his death, he rather wasted away due to his heavy conscience. Tarkovsky’s pain can be felt acutely here, trying to resolve his guilt over perpetuating those cycles of distant fathers and overburdened mothers that were ingrained in him as a child. Even as the mysteries of the human mind continue to elude us throughout Mirror, his precise control over the raw elements of time, memory, and life keep sinking us further into its surreal depths, not so much crafting an artefact of absolute historical truth than revelling in the extraordinary impossibility of such a task.

Mirror is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, can be bought or rented on Apple TV, or you can buy the Blu-ray on Amazon.

Andrei Tarkovsky | 1hr 29min

The line of influence between Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman is an intricate one, both being European filmmakers from the late twentieth century who were equally inspired by each other’s artistry, and in turn expanded the world’s understanding of cinema as an artform. It is hard to argue with Bergman’s assessment of the Soviet director as a master “who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream,” though perhaps the greatest praise of all comes from Tarkovsky in the form of The Sacrifice.

The concerns of faith, atonement, and material reward in this modern parable could have belonged in a film written by either man, positioning us right on the edge of a potential nuclear holocaust that may destroy everything our protagonist Alexander holds dear. Still, in Tarkovsky’s collaboration with Bergman’s frequent actor Erland Josephson, his cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and production designer Anna Asp, he is clearly curating an aesthetic and tone that bears similarities to the Swedish director’s austere style. On top of that, The Sacrifice’s barren landscapes feature the stony coastlines of Gotland, a neighbouring island to Fårö where Bergman had lived and shot many of his own films since the 1960s.

Even within the very first shot, Tarkovsky is paying reverent homage to Bergman through the lonely, withered tree that overlooks the Baltic Sea, referencing the solemn imagery of The Virgin Spring as an illustration of life persevering in sterile environments. Where such a tree became part of a violent, pagan ritual in Bergman’s film though, Tarkovsky holds onto it as an icon of Christian hope. As Alexander plants it in the soil with his mute son Little Man, he relays the fable of a monk who would climb a mountain every day to water a dead tree until it blossomed back to life. Through simple faith in a methodical ritualism, Alexander believes, life can be saved from the precipice of death, and rewards may be reaped. Despite all this, he also claims to have no personal relationship with God, only finding salvation from a “defective” civilisation in his small, pragmatic actions that exact change in his environment.

Much of Alexander’s complex characterisation could be just as easily found in a Bergman film, though where the distinctness of Tarkovsky’s style begins to emerge is in the meditative pacing stretching out through this long shot. Between the two, only Tarkovsky would have been willing to play out Alexander’s philosophical discussion with Otto the postman in a single ten-minute take that refuses to push into any close-ups, choosing instead to slowly dolly the camera with them from a distance as they slowly walk inland.

It is in this minimalist aesthetic that he subtly underscores the rich symbolic details of his scenery, especially once we reach the seaside house where Alexander lives with his wife Adelaide. It is his birthday, and a small group of friends have come bearing presents, one of which is a seventeenth-century map of Europe. “Every gift involves a sacrifice. If not, what kind of gift would it be?” Otto enigmatically foreshadows, perhaps planting the thought of spiritual offering in Alexander’s mind. Later when low-flying jets pass over the house and shake its foundations, Tarkovsky’s camera does not pay attention to his characters, but rather holds on a cabinet of glassware. The vibrations gradually increase from a gentle rattle to a violent shudder, before toppling a precariously balanced jug of milk off the shelf, shattering it into pieces, and spilling its liquid contents of maternal nourishment across the floor.

Not one to encourage such explicit readings of his iconography though, Tarkovsky often strives to separate his sensual, dreamlike imagery from clear-cut interpretations, much preferring instead to hypnotise us into an impressionable state that frees us from the constraints of traditional plotting. Each shot thus delivers its own story of ineffable emotional complexity, slowing down time as the camera gently drifts by Alexander standing motionless among black trees on a snow-covered ground, or elsewhere submitting us to the rhythmic trickling of water as it leaks through a ceiling and pools on the floor. As if filtered through the prism of one man’s existential trepidation, Tarkovsky casts a delicate ethereality across the earthy textures of his mise-en-scène, capturing actors and props in precisely arranged shots that might collapse with the slightest atmospheric shift.

Especially when prophetic visions begin to intrude on Alexander’s consciousness and reveal an impending apocalypse, Tarkovsky lulls us into a soothing despair in a desolately ruined courtyard, tilting the camera downwards to close-ups of the debris below. Wet newspapers caught in a dirty stream, a single wooden chair remarkably still standing, and a glassy reflection of the ruined city above illustrate the remnants of some pending disaster, while Tarkovsky’s camera floats overhead. The black-and-white grading of this shot is devastatingly bleak, emphasising the ash fluttering through the air while light disappears entirely into the burnt interior of a wrecked car, foreshadowing a progressive colour desaturation of the entire film from the moment Alexander’s eerie dreams manifest in his reality, and war is officially announced.

The news immediately dampens the spirits of Alexander’s party, settling ominously over a composition of eerie disconnection, with each guest facing their body outwards from a round table while their gazes are fixed on the flashing television light in the background. Their reactions are diverse – after Alexander’s wife Adelaide is sedated from her hysterical outburst, he quietly disappears upstairs and begins muttering the Our Father in anxious desperation. Josephson has never given a greater performance than he does here, his breath shaking and eyes wide with tears as he collapses to his knees, frantically trying to strike a deal with the God he has not prayed to for a long time.

“I will give Thee all I have. I’ll give up my family, whom I love. I’ll destroy my home, and give up Little Man. I’ll be mute, and never speak another word to anyone. I will relinquish everything that binds me to life, if only Thou dost restore everything as it was before… as it was this morning and yesterday. Just let me be rid of this deadly sickening, animal fear! Yes, everything!”

Very slowly, Tarkovsky pushes us forward into a close-up of Alexander’s fearful face as he misses the contradiction of his intended sacrifice. If the world is to end the way he expects, then all that he is offering now will be destroyed regardless, thus rendering the propitiation useless. Still, in the madness of his terror, this goes entirely ignored. The Sacrifice does not impose judgements of whether Alexander may be a madman, a coward, or an altruist, leaving just enough in the subtext for us to find our own connection to him, though one thing is made undeniably clear – his habitual self-reliance has been rendered totally inept in the face of such immense existential dread. How can we blame him for resorting to such extreme, unfamiliar methods?

Alexander’s newfound faith is driven by fear, not love, and as a result his devotion is totally fragile. He is willing to hang all his material possessions on the tiny chance that God will bring salvation, while hedging his bets that other pagan forms of spirituality might do the same. Having learned from Otto that his housemaid Maria is a witch who can help him save the world, he approaches her with an open mind, ready to perform whatever ritual she asks.

Hunched in shame, he tells her another parable mirroring that of the devoted monk which opened the film, though this time it is a personal confession of the time he accidentally ruined his mother’s beautiful garden, despite his good intentions. Grace has been escaping him his entire life, he believes, and to recapture it now would earn his redemption. Soothing his anxiety, Maria wraps him up in a coital embrace, floating and rotating weightlessly above the bed. Jet planes continue to fly overhead, yet through this surreal, ritualistic imagery The Sacrifice offers a tranquil hope for deliverance.

In the film’s broader symbolic reflection between paganism and Christianity though, there is also a mirroring between the act of life-giving creation that Alexander performs with the witch, and the act of blazing destruction he dedicates to God in the film’s grand climax. Not content that his bizarre sexual encounter was enough to save the world, he follows through on his initial promise, stacking wooden furniture inside his house before setting it alight. Outside, Tarkovsky commences one of the single most impressive shots of his career – a six-minute take sitting several metres high off the ground, watching this giant wooden structure burn to its charred bones.

How ironic that one of the great cinematic set pieces of the 1980s emerged not from any Hollywood blockbuster, but from a Soviet director whose artistic inclinations are almost diametrically opposed to his American contemporaries. That Tarkovsky’s initial effort to coordinate this breathtaking sequence was ruined by a camera malfunction makes the feat all the more admirable, as the entire house had to be rebuilt in two weeks for the second take that eventually made the final cut. His dedication to harsh, elemental visuals pays off enormously too in the fire’s contrast against the cold island landscape around it, reflecting its dazzling orange light in the surfaces of stagnant puddles, and restoring colour to the heavily desaturated film. Beneath the enormous plumes of smoke and flames billowing into the air, Alexander is but a tiny, shrunken figure running madly about in a black kimono, trying to escape the reach of his family and the paramedics who have seemingly turned up out of nowhere.

Beyond the spectacle, it is also astounding how much character detail Tarkovsky instils in this shot. Given the sudden arrival of these ambulances, one must wonder whether Alexander’s birthday party was really a final farewell before committing him to a mental institution, which then leads us to question how much of what we have witnessed have been the delusions of an unwell man. Alternatively, this could also be evidence of a world that cannot understand his true spiritual enlightenment.

For those who take Alexander’s offering to be totally futile, Tarkovsky’s final scene keeps The Sacrifice from becoming a totally pessimistic tale. He employs his biblical metaphors with care, drawing multiple connections to the fall of man and Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac, but the only true miracle among them arrives with Little Man’s first words as he lays beneath the withered tree from the film’s opening.

“In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?”

Quoted from the Gospel of John, Little Man appears to carry on a faith that is scarce to be found elsewhere on this island, and which was tainted in Alexander’s pure self-interest. The parallels to a virtually identical miracle at the end of The Seventh Seal indicates yet another tie to Bergman too, though where the previously mute servant girl there greets Death with Christ’s words “It is finished,” Tarkovsky’s selected bible passage implies a spiritual hope. Therein lies the greatest philosophical division between the two auteurs. Alexander’s sacrifice may or may not have averted the end of the world, but as Little Man dutifully waters his father’s tree, we can at least be assured that Alexander’s demonstration has planted the seeds of faith for future generations.

The Sacrifice is not currently streaming in Australia, but can purchased on DVD and Blu-ray here.

Martin Scorsese | 1hr 52min

When low-level mafioso Charlie Cappa tentatively reaches for the flames of candles and gas stoves in Mean Streets, he does not do so lightly. There is a reverent trepidation written across his face, but also a mindful curiosity seeking to glimpse the fiery wrath of God. The act borders on self-punishment, becoming a reminder of the damnation that awaits him should he fail to atone for his sins.

“The pain of hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite. Now, you don’t fuck around with the infinite. There’s no way you do that. The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand, the kind you can feel in your heart. Your soul, the spiritual side. And you know, the worst of the two is the spiritual.”

The vast cathedral where he seeks counsel from priests radiates a grand opulence that is scarce to be found elsewhere in Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough gangster film. In the hierarchy of the Italian American mob, these characters are about as distant from the high-ranking Dons and Consiglieres of The Godfather as they are from the icons of Christ and the Madonna that decorate the church’s stained-glass windows. Instead, Charlie can often be found frequenting the underground, Mafia-owned bars of New York City, submerged in a hell that burns blazing red lights through every corner. The visual impact is daunting, though Scorsese is clearly at home here with his handheld camera effortlessly floating through its dingy interiors. It is no wonder Charlie needs to intermittently feel the fiery heat of hell to remind himself of the present danger, given how ordinary it has become in his everyday life.

For a large portion of Mean Streets, this limbo-like banality is a punishment in itself. Charlie has his own dreams of making something more out of his secret relationship with Teresa, an epileptic woman shunned for her condition, as well as starting a nightclub where he can support those he cares about. In the meantime, his time is spent carrying out odd jobs, and pulling his reckless friend Johnny Boy out of trouble. There is little plot to be found in this hangout film, but while it lacks the narrative momentum of greater gangster films such as Goodfellas, its inertness also refuses to move Charlie any closer to his dreams. If anything, the fragile grip he has on keeping his life together brings a far greater threat of them slipping even further away.

After all, it is Charlie’s neck on the line should Johnny Boy’s reckless misadventures and gambling debts put him on the wrong side of any dangerous men. Charlie’s brotherly shouldering of this responsibility is more than just a reluctant duty. It is his form of spiritual atonement, proving to himself that he has some capacity for goodness despite being consumed by a life of crime. If he can protect what he believes is a paragon of childlike innocence in Johnny Boy, then he can fulfil the directive offered in the film’s opening minutes.

“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”

The Johnny Boy that we see though is a far more unscrupulous figure than Charlie would like to think. Robert de Niro’s performance here couldn’t be more distant from his intensive take on Vito Corleone a year later, as he violently blows up a mailbox in his very first appearance and proceeds to walk through every scene with an aloof, upbeat swagger. Innocent may not be quite the right word to describe him, but rather stupidly naïve, like a sociopath who lacks the brains to recognise the consequences of his wild behaviour. Believing that there is some capacity for goodness or reason in Johnny Boy’s immature mind is Charlie’s fatal flaw, and it is through his internal struggle that Harvey Keitel delivers a magnificently nuanced performance that outdoes even de Niro’s.

The New Hollywood movement is truly alive in these morally grey characters, but it reverberates with just as much purpose through Scorsese’s location shooting on New York’s gritty streets, rundown apartment buildings, and grimy bars. The visual similarities to The French Connection are striking, following in the footsteps of William Friedkin’s crime film while developing a distinct style that audiences would identify as Scorsese’s unique voice within a few years’ time. Those scenes spent driving through the city at night with neon signs, shabby storefronts, and lights bouncing off wet roads presage the brilliant visuals of 1976’s Taxi Driver, while the heavy jump cuts, triple-edits, and montages draw a direct line from the French New Wave through to his later career.

Scorsese’s camera becomes even more creative in one reverse-POV tracking shot that hangs on Keitel’s sweaty face as he drunkenly wanders through a party, downing spirits while the world seems to sway around him. He is the disorientated centre of this shot, much like he is for the film at large, bearing multiple burdens that pile on his conscience as the wildly energetic scatting of ‘Rubber Biscuit’ plays in the background. The broader doowop soundtrack it is part of marks another innovation as well, with Mean Streets being one of the first films next to American Graffiti to use existing pop songs rather than original scores, and forging an even closer connection to the contemporary American culture that envelops and isolates Charlie.

It is a struggle for anyone in an environment so steeped in secular modernity to maintain any sort of connection to their spiritual roots, and so while Scorsese formally cuts away to those festivities celebrating the Feast of San Gennaro in the streets of Little Italy, he simultaneously frames the mafia as a mutated outgrowth of such deep-rooted traditions. Roman Catholicism does not embody pure moral virtue to these men, but rather encourages them to accept sin as a fact of life, leaving penitence as the only path to salvation.

In Charlie’s case, this relationship becomes one of unhealthy dependence, driving him into mortal peril in the hope of spiritual redemption. Blind to the fact that Johnny Boy’s soul is unsalvageable, he remains loyal through his friend’s lies and transgressions, right until their last moments together. After almost two hours of spending time with these characters, Scorsese ramps the tension up in the final act as Johnny Boy gets close to paying off his gambling debts, only to pull out his gun and foolishly threaten a loan shark. It appears to be a stroke of good luck that Charlie defuses the situation without casualties, and safety even seems to be within reach as the two men drive out of town to lay low for a while, and yet our sense of security is completely shattered when a car that has been tailing them starts shooting.

Johnny Boy’s wound in the neck seems fatal, though his fate is left decidedly ambiguous. Whether or not he survives, Charlie’s misguided path to redemption has effectively been redirected as he collapses to his knees in a position of prayer. With the gunshot in his hand drawing direct allusions to Christ’s suffering, and a burst fire hydrant dousing him in a baptismal fountain of water, Scorsese’s theological symbolism effectively canonises Charlie as a saint among gangsters. Still, the tragedy he has suffered from seeking atonement in a godless inferno is devastating. In Mean Streets, there is no saving those demons that have fallen from grace into the pits of hell. For as long as he is trapped in his own personal purgatory, Charlie must look towards the heavens to be redeemed from his own mortal sins.

Mean Streets is currently streaming on Paramount Plus, and is available to rent or buy on Apple TV and Amazon Video.

Max Ophüls | 1hr 56min

It is tempting to glamourise the life of Lola Montès, the famed dancer and courtesan who ventured across multiple continents and conducted affairs with some of 19^th century Europe’s most famous men. After all, there are few women who can honestly say that their paths have intersected with so many key historical events, and even fewer who have used each as a platform to propel themselves higher up a cultural hierarchy that once towered above them.

The metaphor is not easily lost on the ringmaster of the circus that has essentially turned Lola into a novelty attraction many years later. “Just as every single action in her life has been, every single movement of her act is fraught with danger. She risks her pretty neck!” he cries, narrating her ascension up a grand trapeze, and labelling each acrobat who catches her in their arms as a new lover.

“Paris! Destiny sends her from the famous journalist Dunarrier to the journalist Beauvallon whose newspaper had a larger circulation. The great and celebrated Richard Wagner. The even greater and very famous Frédéric Chopin falls on his knees for her. Higher, Lola, higher! With dance and music, Lola rises from the world of art to that of politics!”

At the summit of this towering web of ropes and ladders, King Ludwig I of Bavaria awaits, ready to commence what will be “the most fantastic episode of her story.” Still, there is more than a hint of phoniness in the ringmaster’s theatrical rendition. His claim that her marriage to one Lieutenant James was a happy one is immediately undercut by her recollection of his drunken, abusive behaviour, exposing the scam of this fanciful historicising. As Lola Montes progresses, this tension proves to be key to Max Ophüls’ elaborately symbolic framing device, glamourising her rise to fame while forcing her to relive decades of objectification in her neatly interwoven flashbacks.

Indeed, Lola’s eventual fate as a target of the male gaze is written into her destiny from the start, not just as a courtesan flitting between lovers, but simply as a woman born into a patriarchal culture with limited options. Whisked off to Paris at a young age to marry a banker, she quickly recognises the power of her charm and natural beauty to carve out a future of her own choosing. The attention that Lola receives wherever she goes cannot be avoided, and so the best she can do is use it to her advantage, embracing her feminine image whether she is posing for royal portraits or standing atop garish pedestals.

As Lola marches even deeper into the annals of history, the undercurrents of time and providence swirl around her, and Ophüls’ sentimental, untethered camera is there swaying with them. More than just linking one stunning composition to the next, it manifests an ethereal elegance as it cranes up and down through theatres in long takes, and tracks the movement of characters across ravishing sets. The effect is intoxicating, yet in the hands of cinematographer Christian Matras it is also totally controlled – not at all a surprise given the mark he left on the poetic realism of the 1930s, further solidifying the line of influence between Jean Renoir’s roving camerawork and Ophüls’ own distinctive visual style.

Tied up in the work of both these directors is a tension between freedom and fatalism, and it is largely through the careful navigation of the camera in Lola Montes that both are so gracefully connected. For a long time, Lola would like to think of herself as a woman with boundless autonomy, even ripping open her bodice in her first private meeting with Ludwig I just to prove a point. Nevertheless, she still recognises on some level that she is trapped within the gendered rules of high society, and Ophüls frames her as such in opulent displays of Technicolor decadence, making this both his first and last film shot in colour before his untimely death a mere two years later.

Whether actress Martine Carol is wandering through a rundown children’s dormitory of grey hammocks or draped in the finest royal garb, there is an air of delicate eminence to her, even as lush period décor and fluctuating aspect ratios press inwards like stage curtains. She is the luminous centre of each setting, asserting a screen presence that demonstrates why so many considered her France’s response to Marilyn Monroe, despite Lola’s dark wigs covering up Carol’s usual blonde hair. Cloaked in sparkling jewels and surrounded with extravagant historical décor, it isn’t hard either to see where the budget went for what was the most expensive European film of its time. Mirrors catch her reflection as she contemplates an uncertain future, transparent gauze drapes conceal her final goodbye to Ludwig, and the golden embellishments of Bavarian palaces frame her as another treasure added to the royal collection, lifting her to even greater heights as an inhuman object of imperial perfection.

The majesty of Ophüls’ production design does not cease when we cut back to the present-day circus scenes, but for as long as Lola stands onstage under the vibrant wash of red and blue lights, she is much more exposed than she ever has been before. She has certainly suffered in the public eye before, even becoming a widely hated Marie Antoinette-like figure spurned for her perceived “insult to dignity, morality, religion,” yet while courting Ludwig I she at least had the safety and privacy of the palace to protect her. As a carnival attraction, she is thoroughly humiliated, and her autonomy is destroyed. Everyone’s eyes are still on her, but there is nowhere to retreat in the middle of this stage.

After a lifetime of never finding the security she craved, this is the life she wearily resigns to. She is filled with miserable self-loathing as she escapes the March Revolution of 1848, rejecting a friend’s romantic proposition not because of his lowly status, but because she no longer believes she is worthy or capable of love.

“I’ve lived too much, had too many adventures. Bavaria was my last chance. My last hope of a haven. It’s all over… all over. You see, if this warmth you offer me, if this face which I find not too unpleasing leaves me without hope, then something is broken. Yes, it’s over.”

The Lola who is forced to recount her life through ostentatious circus acts bears a pale resemblance to the one who is said to have bathed nude in Turkey for the sultan and served champagne from her slipper. Backstage, we learn of her medical concerns that are carelessly brushed off by the ringmaster, maintaining that she performs her climactic acrobatic leap without a safety net. Just as she once lived at the top of European society with the King of Bavaria, so too does her fall risk destroying everything she once had, landing her in a menagerie of exotic beasts similarly trapped behind bars. The camera floats back over the heads of audiences lining up to stroke her hair or kiss her hand, revealing an enormous line that could singlehandedly keep this circus running for years, though it isn’t until a pair of clowns close the red curtains on us that Ophüls lands Lola Montes’ final, scathing critique. Everything from Lola’s childhood dreams to her multiple romantic affairs has been little more than a cheap show for this culture of perverse celebrity worship, seeking to degrade the lives of great women into objects of commodified, gaudy spectacle.

Lola Montes is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Paul Schrader | 2hr 1min

The debate over whether we might better understand an artist through their creations or their life is rendered meaningless in Paul Schrader’s exacting study of Yukio Mishima. With one prophetically mirroring the other, the two make up balanced parts of an equation, filling in the gaps that are left behind in the wake of the Japanese writer and soldier’s premature death. This perfect synthesis of mind and body is just as essential to Mishima’s ideological mission as it is to Schrader’s formal representation of him, with both pursuing a beauty that encompasses the equal need for words and action to create a spiritual wholeness.

“In my earliest years I realised life consisted of two contradictory elements. One was words, which could change the world. The other was the world itself which had nothing to do with words. For the average person, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first.”

As much a biopic as it is an adaptation of his writing, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters splits itself into quarters, announcing the titles of each at the very start like a contents page – ‘Beauty’, ‘Art’, ‘Action’, and ‘Harmony of Pen and Sword’. Next to scenes of Mishima’s childhood, army training, and growing resentment towards the “big, soulless arsenal” that is modern Japan, the first three chapters also intercut his life with several adaptations of his novels too, titled The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House, and Runaway Horses.

The difference between these worlds of reality and fiction is striking. There is an austere beauty to the black-and-white photography that captures Mishima’s life, eloquently teasing out his traditionalist philosophies like poetry right next to his pensive voiceovers. Long nights are spent refining the craft of his writing, considering ideals of beauty, masculinity, and death with reverence, and then boiling them down to artistic abstraction. Seeing the decay of the human body as a total loss of dignity, and regarding his own poor health with insecurity, he spends an equal amount of time honing his physique as well. “Creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical,” he proclaims, thereby embodying a rigorous discipline rooted in the samurai code of honour. Practically, this also manifests as a nostalgia for Japan’s proud history that was ousted with the introduction of democracy, and which now motivates him to restore the emperor’s rightful political power.

In contrast to the monochrome starkness of Mishima’s life, all three of his adapted stories explode with bright neon and pastel colours across rigorously curated sets, effectively becoming theatre stages bordered by darkness. Schrader does not shy away from the artifice here – every shot is imbued with the impressionistic imprint of Mishima’s artistic passion, separating these fictional tales into their own self-contained worlds. With red paper leaves fluttering around a golden temple, neon pink lights shining through Venetian blinds, and a white Shinto shrine standing askew and half-buried in a plain of white gravel, each tableaux represents a new, whimsical world that springs from Mishima’s dreams, carrying great symbolic weight.

Schrader curates his deeply sensual colour palettes in these segments with care, accomplishing a painterly aesthetic that speaks directly to each tale of beauty, art, and action. No doubt there is a part of himself that is present in his protagonists too. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, one man’s destruction of a Zen Buddhist temple asserts victory over the notion that beauty can be immortal, while Kyoko’s House follows an actor’s sadomasochistic relationship with an older woman that ends in murder-suicide, subscribing to the notion that life must end before one’s physical deterioration. Perhaps the most prescient of all though is Runaway Horses, which sees a right-wing radical attempt a coup on the Japanese government before committing suicide via seppuku.

Despite their incredible visual distinction, the parallel editing between reality and fiction is deftly executed throughout the film, elegantly fusing the two in graphic match cuts and through a pacing that hurtles forward with all the urgency of a man desperately chasing down his destiny. So too does Philip Glass’ avant-garde score match its propulsive energy with wildly fluctuating arpeggios and ever-shifting tone colours, using string quartets for Mishima’s life and a symphonic orchestra for his adapted novels. There are few composers more suited to the task of scoring a Schrader film than Glass, especially given their shared artistic obsessions with minimalism, form, and the repetition of phrases that build rhythms to scintillating climaxes.

Absolutely crucial to these persistent patterns underlying Schrader’s narrative though is a third narrative thread, distinguished from both the black-and-white recounts of Mishima’s life and his vibrantly artificial stories. Its aesthetic finds a balance between both, being shot in colour yet very clearly existing in the real world. The glimpses it provides of Mishima’s last day punctuate the start of each chapter, seeing him dress in the uniform of his private militia and set out with four of his soldiers to make a final stand against the government of Japan. With military drums joining the mix of Glass’ score, there is a gravity to these careful proceedings, culminating in the final chapter of the film where it becomes the centrepiece of Schrader’s narrative. There is no fourth short story adaptation here, painted with bright pigments. Mishima’s martyrdom is the destiny he wrote for himself a long time ago, and which he now embraces with fury and passion.

For all his flaws, it is hard not to feel some level of pity for this right-wing radical as he shouts his message from the balcony of an army garrison, lamenting the loss of Japan’s spiritual foundations and demanding that his fellow soldiers join him in restoring the emperor to his throne. The low angle that centres him as a commanding figure backed up by the giant stone building behind him is almost immediately undercut by the jeers thrown from below. Refusing to let them drown him out, he continues his verbal crusade, long past the point that anyone else would have stepped down. Realising just how lonely he is in his noble convictions though, he pauses, and finally delivers a poignant admission of defeat.

“I have lost my dream for you.”

Retreating inside to where his loyal men wait for him, he draws his samurai sword to perform seppuku. At this moment, Schrader delivers a stroke of formal genius with the concluding shots of all three of Mishima’s stories, reconciling both art and action with a burst of vibrant images that were previously withheld. The temple burns in a symbol of fleeting beauty, the lovers lay dead, and much like Mishima himself, the radical nationalist of Runaway Horses plunges a sword into his belly, pursuing a greater moral idea to his own tragic detriment. Still, the voice of our protagonist remains, poetically situating himself at the forefront of his own narrative as he bears witness to his own blaze of glory.

“The instant the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up behind his eyelids and exploded, lighting up the sky for an instant.”

Mishima does not achieve the political victory he set out to accomplish, but as a man born out of time, that was never possible. Under Schrader’s steady hand, we instead bear witness to his spiritual enlightenment, as Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters unites those dispersed fragments of his art, philosophy, and being under the consolidating bond of death.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.