Still Walking 2020

The notion of cinema as therapy is dangerous: not only can’t cinema replace therapy, using cinema as therapy can be harmful to mental health. Yet The Mourning Forest (2007, dir. Naomi Kawase) comes at such a right and crucial time that I can’t overlook its therapeutic power. Amidst the purgatory that is the world in 2020, The Mourning Forest was exactly the film I needed. 20 minutes into The Mourning Forest , there appears to be a facility for the elderly or those in mourning. The stench of (inevitable) death emanates in the room. But in this deadly environment, we’re looking at a birthday celebration. These grand concepts of life (birth! death!), contrasted through ordinary rituals (which is an oxymoron; how can a celebration be low-key?), remind me of Edward Yang’s  Yi Yi (2000), my favorite film of all-time. The Mourning Forest shares what I love so much about Yi Yi  – how a film can be so small yet so big, so big because it’s small. The Mourning Forest , especially ...

In his late post-WWII prime, Yasujirō Ozu left such an indelible mark on the genre of family gendaigeki that it’s impossible, to me at least, to watch any modern family drama and not see his legacy. That viewpoint of automatically defaulting everything to Ozu is lazily reductive and often misconstrued, but in Tokyo Sonata (2008, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa), I do see explicit and implicit homages to Ozu, in both style and theme. Tokyo Sonata is a flawed but still fascinating attempt to acknowledge then break free from Ozu’s influence, to update Ozu for the 21st century, and to marry the violently different styles of Ozu and K. Kurosawa. Tokyo Sonata , just in the title, unmistakably acknowledges the many “Tokyo xxx” films by Ozu, especially Tokyo Chorus (1931). 47 minutes into the film, during the conversation between Megumi and Takashi about Takashi’s enlistment, there’s suddenly a very Ozu-esque graphic match cut of two talking heads looking just slightly off-camera (see .gif). Bu...

In All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001, dir. Shunji Iwai), many conflicting modes of filmmaking are on display, from pristine, saturated 35-lookalike digital cinematography to overexposed night vision and DV home video, from planimetric wides of stunning vistas to jump cut, tight handheld. But the most transgressive of all these various choices is the film’s liberal use of onscreen text. Onscreen text is one of the big no-nos of filmmaking, as we all know the mantra “show, don’t tell,” and text is a direct violation of that. But Iwai uses movement to make his text cinematically compelling, and uses text to embrace the thematic contemporaneity of his film’s universe. The biggest obstacle onscreen text faces is stasis. For the audience, suddenly having to read text while watching moving images has the considerable effect of halting momentum. Filmmakers have devised myriad ways of working around this problem – animated text bubbles are a common one in the digital age – but I’ve never see...