Ten (2002)

Directed by Abbas Kiarostami.

Ten is a film composed of ten sequences, all of them shot from within a car travelling around Tehran.  The driver is a woman in her thirties, middle class and well-dressed.  She talks with her passenger in each sequence – her son is the passenger in three sequences, the others feature her sister, two other female acquaintances, a prostitute and an older woman.

The film is shot using a dash-board mounted camera aimed at either the driver or her passenger.  Occasionally the camera is directed outside the car, but for the most part the exterior is visible only as a background to the speaker.  In each sequence  the camera is aimed primarily at either driver or passenger – sometimes solely, sometimes with brief cutaways.  In 10 on Ten (2004) Kiarostami delivers ten short talks on his film-making method with particular reference to Ten.  He places the camera in his car and talks as he drives, with rural Iran passing in the background.  It is a filmed seminar, but filmed in the director’s characteristic style.  He believes that the enclosed space of the car intensifies the conversation, while the side-by side spatial arrangement frees the characters to engage, disengage and divert as the mood takes them.  However, Ten stands alone, needing no explication.

The actors were non-professionals, and rather than giving them a script Kiarostami outlined the general content of the scene and left them to improvise.  They drove off accompanied only by the camera – no director, no camera operator.  A shooting ratio of 15:1 allowed Kiarostami to select as he wished, but his minimalist direction is complemented by minimalist editing. The driver is played by Mania Akbari, a painter who subsequently became a filmmaker; in the film her son and her sister are played by her actual son and sister, Amin Maher and Roya Akbari, doubtless enhancing the improvisation.

Kiarostami likes to use non-professionals playing characters based loosely on themselves – or, as in Life and Nothing More, on himself.  They are often filmed travelling in cars; sometimes the journey is significant, sometimes, as in Ten, the encapsulation of the car is primary, but always the reflection of Iranian society becomes visible in the microcosm of the travelling car.  The day-to-day of gender politics in Iran is played out in the front seat.  He does not ask his actors to create characters, but to be themselves in the circumstances he outlines to them.  This is certainly not a documentary method, since the outline is fictional, but the actors express their own reality through the scene.

Although Kiarostami regards Ozu as amongst his greatest influences, he stands much more in the cinéma vérité tradition of Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker and the Italian neo-realists, most notably Rossellini.  Oppenheimer’s monumental The Act of Killing is a recent film in this tradition.  Paradoxically, Kiarostami’s use of small, mounted digital cameras makes for a less intrusive presence than has previously been possible in the realist tradition.

For example, consider the sequence in which the driver gives a lift to a pious older woman who is heading to a tomb to pray:

The older woman, who wears the very conservative chador, presents herself as extremely religious – in contrast to the younger, higher class and obviously less religious driver. Obviously, because she wears only a headscarf that doesn’t completely cover her hair, unlike the hijab which we see her sister wearing elsewhere in the film.  The entire sequence shows only the driver, and we see her reaction to what she is being told.  From time to time she adjusts her scarf a if to cover more of her hair, and when they arrive at the mausoleum the older woman pressures her to go in and pray.  The tensions generated between a fundamentalist government and a more liberal middle class permeate this encounter; the matter of the covering of women’s hair is revisited in a touching sequence later in the film.

Chief amongst the other passengers is the driver’s son Amin, who looks about ten years old.  In the first of his three appearances he and his mother have a fierce argument in which he is alternately overbearing, aggressive and accusatory. He is angry because she has divorced his father, gaining the decree by accusing his father of drug use.  He is the outraged defender of his father’s honour, and not at all interested in her explanation that without the manufactured complaint the divorce would never have been granted by the religious authorities.  She becomes more angry in response to his furious intransigence, and nothing is resolved.

Although the other sequences also offer the chance to reflect on women’s roles in Iran, there is no heavily-signalled message; in this respect Kiarostami does resemble his admired Ozu, leaving room for a flow of sympathy that never settles on just one character.  To achieve this under the rigours of his shooting method is a marvel, and also a justification.

 

The Wind Rises (2013)

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

At the age of 73, Miyazaki has declared that The Wind Rises is his last film as director.  An animator since 1963, he founded Studio Ghibli in 1985; one of his regular collaborators was Isao Takahata, director of Grave of the Fireflies.  Amongst his many great films are Princess Mononoke, My Neighbour Totoro, Porco Rosso and his masterpiece, Spirited Away. All of his major films have been fantasies involving supernatural beings or fabulous worlds, but in his final film he turns to biography – a fictionalised life of the Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Zero fighter.

His films involve simple, traditional animation techniques, and look quite old-fashioned alongside modern Disney-Pixar computer-driven animation of the Toy Story type.  He uses a large colour palette, emphasising bright, saturated colours and naturalistic landscapes, richly detailed cityscapes and vigorous, stylised action.  Editing, frame composition, point -of-view and “camera” angles and movement are far closer to conventional cinema than most animations.  Despite the fantastic elements in his work, Miyazaki couches them in a visual realism. His chief protagonist is usually an adolescent or young adult – though in Porco Rosso it’s a flying pig – and frequently they encounter fantastic or supernatural beings.  These beings may be difficult to deal with, some are even quite destructive, but they are never outright evil.  Though his protagonists normally behave decently and are courageous and resourceful, they are not overly virtuous – Miyazaki’s world is profoundly Buddhist, and “good” and “evil” are unhelpful in understanding it.  Most frequently they are female, and in the manga/anime tradition, facially they look more European than Japanese.
His films are also marked by images of flight; his characters take to the air using planes, dirigibles, broomsticks, dragons, friendly  neighbourhood monsters – and in the beginning of The Wind Rises, dreams of flying.

For Miyazaki, a complication arises from the fact that airplanes have largely been developed with military applications in mind.  Even in his dream at the start of the film, when Jiro meets the Italian aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, the fantastic plane Caproni has designed is equipped with bombs under the wings.  A strong theme of anti-militarism runs through all of Miyazaki’s work, never didactic, but always present.  Given that Jiro is best known as the designer of the Zero, beauty and destruction embodied in one machine, Miyazaki has staked out an interesting problem for himself.

Jiro’s character is central to the problem.  There is no reason to think the real Jiro Horikoshi was in any way ambivalent about the destructive purpose of his creations – his criticism of Japan’s attack on the USA was solely in terms of the inevitability of defeat.  Miyazaki’s Jiro accepts the task of designing warplanes because he is devoted to his art.  In his dream-encounters with Caproni and in a few other scenes he hints at a distaste for military applications, but this hardly affects his obsessive commitment to the work.  In his dealings with others, he is a straight arrow – upright, loyal, brave, loving – light without shade, sugar and starch but no vinegar.  There is no overt explanation of his love of flight, but his dreams give a sense of its intensity:

Jiro’s dreams convey  the inner meaning of his obsession – the freedom to pursue one’s art without restriction, beyond the reach of quotidian gravity, to experience the exhilaration of creation.  Repeatedly, via Caproni, Miyazaki disavows the destructive consequences of Jiro’s work, – of his lifelong pleasure-seeking – but weapons designers always knows what they are doing, even if the results go beyond their intentions.  Kalashnikov designed the AK47 for patriotic motives, and was unhappy with the way it was adapted and used in civil disturbances and insurgencies throughout the world.  Leo Szilard worked to produce the H-bomb because he believed the Nazis were working at the same task, but when it became clear that this was not so he was unable to prevent the H-bombing of Japan.  When the dream of the weapons designer – of the creative mind – is realised, it moves beyond the creator’s control.

Historic events anchor the story in places.  As a young man, Jiro is travelling to Tokyo by train when he meets a young woman, Naoko.  Suddenly an earthquake occurs – the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923:

Miyazaki scarcely touches on the earthquake’s devastation, although it is estimated that well over 100,000 were killed.  Perhaps Miyazaki assumes that a Japanese audience would know about this, but here and elsewhere one senses that history is something that happens around Jiro without disturbing his obsession.  In the aftermath of the quake, Jiro rescues,Naoko, and her injured servant.  Some years later, Jiro and Naoko meet again and marry.

Later, Miyazaki refers briefly to the Depression, and on a trip to Germany Jiro encounters evidence of Nazi oppression.  At the end of the film there is an oblique reference to WWII, as Jiro and Ciproni talk and a flight of Zeros skims by.  There is no mention at all of the Sino-Japanese war, in which some of Horikoshi’s planes certainly took part.  Given the strongly anti-militarist and anti-war themes in many of Miyazaki’s films this is puzzling, at least for a moment.  I’d suggest that in 2013 direct criticism of Japan’s role in the wars in China and the Pacific would be politically and commercially unwise, at least in the home market.  Miyazaki’s work is deeply loved in Japan, and around the world, but in his farewell piece he avoids provoking controversy.

Often, the film industry abandons directors before they can abandon it.  Even the greatest directors can experience a tailing off in their as their work draws to a close, producing lesser films at longer intervals.  Ford, Hawks, Welles and Chaplin all ended their great careers with undistinguished films.  Miyazaki has taken a different path, deliberately ending his career with this valediction.  It is the story of a brilliantly creative young Japanese who worked successfully within an established industry to produce masterpieces; Miyazaki tells a story that holds a distant mirror to his own career.

Nebraska (2013)

Directed by Alexander Payne.

There’s a great narcissistic injury inflicted by ageing. The body declines, the valuable social roles become progressively fewer, less significant, more frustrating.  But as longevity increases, the number of people experiencing this injury has vastly increased, with great economic and social consequences.  A minor consequence, but one that interests me, is the change in the demographics of the movie audience.  There’s a lot more people for whom action blockbusters, Marvel Comic movies and date movies hold little appeal, but give them what they want and the box office will reflect it.

There is a steady demand for “growing old disgracefully” movies,  comedies and  comedy dramas in which the protagonists fight back against the losses and stigma of ageing – movies like Calendar Girls (2003), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) and Quartet (2012), all of which give some sense of victory over ageing.  Philomena (2013) is another in which an elderly star gives a commanding performance, one in which the “old lady” stereotype is constantly and comically subverted although the film is essentially a drama.

Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) presents the facts of age and death in the form of a tragedy, but Payne takes a less direct approach in this astringent comedy-drama about an old man who knows all too well that he is nearing his end, but stoically refuses to acknowledge it.  In a film career of over fifty years, Bruce Dern has typically played the menacing, slightly deranged heavy with a wide-eyed, hostile stare.  His leading roles are few – Hitchcock’s Family Plot (1976) and the sci-fi movie Silent Running (1972) come to mind (in the latter his two co-stars were droids) but now at 77 he has given the performance of his career in Nebraska.

Woody Grant (Dern) is in his seventies and in poor shape, physically and mentally. He has received a bogus letter from a mail order house, telling him he may have won a million dollars if he comes to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim it.  He sets off from his home in Billings, Montana, to walk to Lincoln.  The police pick him up by the highway and his son David (Will Forte) goes to the station-house to collect him.  Returned home, Woody is berated by his wife Kate (June Squibb).  His sons, David and Ross (Bob Odenkirk) are concerned about him, but Woody stubbornly sets off again at the first opportunity:

Why is Woody obsessed by the lottery letter?  His family regard it as a sign of age-related deterioration,  a problem to be managed; better, implicitly, if he would stay at home and decline into death with whatever grace he can muster.  Since this seems impossible, David agrees to take him to Lincoln, and on the way they stop at Rapid City, where Woody gets drunk and has a fall.  We learn that Woody has a history of heavy drinking. While he is being stitched up, David calls Kate to arrange to meet up in Woody’s home town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, on the way to Lincoln.

In Hawthorne , David and Woody visit Woody’s brother, who sits silently watching football on TV with his obese, aggressive, unemployable couch potato twin sons Cole and Bart.   Woody takes a chair and watches with them.  It’s a dismally comic picture of a dying family in a dying town.  Later, in a bar, as David and Woody talk we learn that Woody is an alcoholic, that his marriage to Kate is loveless, and that he appears to be possessed by a deep, decades-long depression.  In a bar, perhaps to big-note himself, Woody reveals that he has won the lottery and by the next day the whole town knows of it.

Kate arrives by bus and she, Woody and David visit the graves of Woody’s family at the Hawthorne cemetery.  Kate speaks her mind about the dead – not a very generous mind, and apparently oblivious toWoody’s presence.  He says nothing, stands in the background, but he is obviously shrivelling inside.

Worse is to come.  Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach), a former business partner of Woody’s, presses David with a dubious claim for money he says he loaned Woody long ago.  The next day Woody’s extended family show up to greet him, congratulating him on his good fortune.  The family reunion involves Woody, his brother and the other male relatives sitting silently watching football on TV.  When some of Woody’s relatives demand a share of his winnings Kate puts them to flight, but Cole and Bart later waylay Woody and steal his letter.  Through various encounters we learn more about Woody’s past – that he suffered PTSD after the Korean War, that he unwisely entered a loveless marriage with Kate which he soon regretted, that Ed probably cheated him when they ran a mechanic shop together.  Finally, Woody and David go to the bar where Ed now has the letter.  They retrieve it, but not before Ed humiliates Woody and makes him a laughing stock.

Most of Payne’s films have male protagonists who are emotionally adrift, unhappy in their work and either alone or unhappily paired.  This legion of the maimed includes Matthew Broderick, Jack Nicholson, George Clooney, Paul Giamatti and now Bruce Dern.  Dern’s Woody is initially the least sympathetic of them all, and although he changes very little we begin to understand him as details of his life slowly emerge.  When he reveals that he wants the million dollars primarily in order to leave something to his sons, he no longer seems bizarrely delusionary – merely desperate to do something to redeem a failed life.

David is the character through whom we see Woody, and David is the one who sticks up for Woody with Bart and Cole, with Ed and finally with the company that issued the letter.  In a bittersweet ending David helps Woody retrieve some sense of dignity, a little afterglow before the night.