29Sep08
It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-five-year career as a writer-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes for another project, provisionally titled Radishes and Carrots (once again, as it happens, the story of a daughter about to marry and leave her father, though the parent in this instance was to have cancer, the affliction that would bring Ozu’s life to an end); and there is every reason to believe that, had he lived on, the Japanese master would have continued completing films at the steady rate of one a year. Sadly, however, that’s not how things turned out, and consequently An Autumn Afternoon has come to be regarded by many as Ozu’s “testament.”
An Autumn Afternoon is not the director’s best-known film, nor is it the title that most of those familiar with his work would cite as his greatest achievement; both those particular superlatives would probably be best applied to Tokyo Story (1953). And some might even argue that the earlier film’s generally more somber tone and final funereal scene—complete with unusually explicit philosophical commentary (“Isn’t life disappointing?” observes a young woman, to which her sister-in-law simply replies, “Yes, it is,” with a considerably less simple smile)—make it a more fitting swan song. Still, in its exquisite refinement of Ozu’s style and themes, and its general air of nostalgia and loss, An Autumn Afternoon does in fact feel like a summation of his career—and it is, after all, his final masterpiece.
29Sep08
After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal something of his personality.
Perhaps disappointingly, he rarely wrote about the directing or editing of his films. It was only the creation of the script that interested his diary, and Ozu kept a day-by-day account of the progress, noting when certain scenes were written.
He writes more fully about the films of other directors. On August 31, 1934, he and fellow director Mikio Naruse enjoyed Scarface and then talked about it while having pork cutlets. A year later, he goes alone to see Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, which he calls “a really successful comedy.”
Ozu does not like everything he sees, however. January 24, 1951: “Read the scenario that [Eijiro] Hisaita wrote for Kurosawa’s The Idiot. Incomprehensible!” Later he saw A Japanese Tragedy, directed by one of his former assistants, Keisuke Kinoshita, and found it to be “an ambitious film but badly made and without any real interest.” On the other hand, in 1955, he finds Naruse’s Floating Clouds “a real masterpiece.”
What Ozu does not describe about his own films is recorded in another set of diaries (some fifty-five volumes) that were kept by Yuharu Atsuta, Ozu’s longtime cameraman, and published in 1989. He writes about location hunting, photographing, editing, and gives dates and times. “August 16, 1953, Onomichi. Tokyo Story location. Chishu Ryu, shooting starts at 5:30 a.m. Also view and shot of train.” In addition, this actor was keeping his own diaries, Ofuna Journals, published after his death in 1993, which contain many details of the filming of Ozu’s works.
22Sep08
The cinema of Aki Kaurismäki has been tickling viewers for more than two decades without so much as cracking a smile. With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent, often immobile compositions, his films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet by some cinematic alchemy Kaurismäki’s black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house scene. His characters, living on the fringes of society, beset by economic woes and trapped in workaday monotony, are lovable in their loserdom, human and familiar even at their most forbidding. None of Kaurismäki’s films better express his talent for finding humor in desperation than those that have come to be known as his “Proletariat Trilogy,” elegantly shot and edited tales of chronic working-class dissatisfaction.
On the larger film scene, Kaurismäki might himself be considered something of an outcast; despite an ardent following that began to form around his festival-circuit surge in the late eighties, and the undeniable influence his deadpan aesthetic has had on American independent film, he remains something of a quarantined figure, trapped in his nation’s wintry nowheresville along with his soulful characters. And that’s probably okay with him. In 2001, when asked how his films fit into contemporary world cinema, he responded, “A small globe has no importance. It’s the same story: people try to survive in the world where they were born.” At their core, that is what all his films are about, survival in a very specific place, the nation of his birth, among those excluded from the fruits of capitalism.
18Sep08
Though we fully expected our special edition of Max Ophuls’s long-unavailable The Earrings of Madame de . . . to garner a lot of attention from movie lovers everywhere (this is, after all, the film that elder statesman Andrew Sarris now deems “the greatest film of all time”), we must admit that we’ve been taken by very pleasant surprise by the excited response we’ve been getting to one of the other Ophuls films we released this month, Le plaisir. The New York Times’s Dave Kehr, indeed, focuses his review of our trio of Ophulses—also including La ronde—almost exclusively on Le plaisir, which he lauds as “perhaps Ophuls’s most abstract, most musical film,” noting appreciatively that “it is good to see this neglected, comparatively unknown movie getting its moment in the sun.” In his New Yorker movie column this week, Richard Brody also trains his eye on Le plaisir, a triptych of stories about life’s compromises and the limits of happiness, holding it up as prime evidence of Ophuls’s brilliance: “His elaborate traveling shots suffice to make Max Ophuls one of cinema’s great stylists, but, as seen in Le plaisir, what makes him a great director is his fusion of style and substance.”
Which isn’t to say that the other two Ophuls releases haven’t gotten their due. In Time Out New York, David Fear singles out La ronde, the director’s “ode to carnal knowledge,” for its sophistication: “La ronde’s . . . tour of a social jungle is the perfect example of how to turn a dirty joke into high art. No one, not even Lubitsch, could make smuttiness seem so elegant and refined.” And for the beloved Earrings of Madame de . . . , USA Today’s Mike Clark and Slant’s Fernando Croce make special note of the seventy-six-page accompanying booklet, including, Croce writes, a “splendid appreciation by Molly Haskell.”
15Sep08
For those of us who rank The Earrings of Madame de . . . at the top of our list of all-time favorite films, the mystery is why our passion isn’t universally shared. Every year, thanks to committed revival houses, new members are recruited to our cult, but Ophuls’s masterpiece never seems to attain the universal accolade of “greatness,” automatically granted to movies like The Godfather or Citizen Kane. To most people, “great” means “big,” inescapably masculine and bold, and probably Important with a capital I.
This in turn implies an effort with a socially redeeming political or quasi-political ambition, a dissection (and, often covertly, a celebration) of the ways of powerful men. Is Ophuls often left off of those lists because the German-born director and man of the world made films about women, and in the case of The Earrings of Madame de . . . , a period film about an upper-class woman whose cushioned existence is light-years away from that of the ordinary people of contemporary cinema and the toilers in the margins of life? The “woman’s film” label shouldn’t be a handicap in this day and age, as it was in the early sixties, when Richard Roud defended Ophuls with faint praise in a monograph: “What are Ophuls’s subjects? The simplest answer is: women. More specifically, women in love. Most often, women who are unhappily in love, or to whom love brings misfortune of one kind or another.” Ophuls’s star rose during the cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies, when auteurist and feminist critics elevated the “woman’s film” along with such culturally underrated genres as the gangster film and the western. Yet even in this reappraisal, the “guy films” got more respect.
15Sep08
Max Ophuls acquired an enviable reputation both on-screen and behind the scenes.
Most actors, male or female, loved him, and if technicians complained of the amount of work necessitated by his remarkably fluent and complex long takes involving tracks and cranes, they usually succumbed to his charm, patience, and dedication. It is Lola Montès, in Ophuls’s last film, of the same name, who tells us that “for me, life is movement,” but she clearly speaks for her director. He was faithful to the principle on many levels. In the course of his career he made films in various countries and languages (German, Italian, French, Dutch, and English—two of his finest were made in Hollywood), settling in France after World War II for his final output of fully achieved, mature masterpieces.
Clearly, Ophuls loved, and (up to a point) identified with, women: the great majority of his films are strongly female-centered. Yet one hesitates to call him a feminist, with the overtones that term has accrued over the years. Legend has it (and as John Ford once told us, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) that he invariably took cut flowers to his mistresses but potted plants to his wife—a habit that has a certain outmoded charm but would not go down well today. Even in the complex couplings of La ronde, our sympathies are generally directed toward the women, the men (especially the older ones, the patriarchs) frequently self-centered and insensitive. The Ophuls woman is invariably defeated, dying, perhaps, of heart failure when her husband kills her lover in a duel over her (Louise in The Earrings of Madame de . . .), or trapped, like Lola Montès in her (literal) cage, or in the case of The Reckless Moment, where Mrs. Harper temporarily assumes the head of the household, replaced, once again by the returning patriarch.
It is in the four late French films (La ronde, Le plaisir, The Earrings of Madame de . . . , and Lola Montès), all of which are mostly centered on women, that Ophuls’s obsession with mobile camera work is allowed its fullest liberty and extravagance.
15Sep08
In the too-brief life and art of Max Ophuls (1902–57), La ronde was a momentous film, a turning point. It represented a homecoming of sorts, though “home” was a rather fluid concept for Ophuls, who was born in Germany, worked in the theater there and in Austria during the twenties, made films in Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands in the thirties, and spent the forties in the United States. La ronde was made in France, where the filmmaker had been a citizen since 1938 but had not lived for a decade; it was an adaptation of perhaps the most famous and most scandalous play of fin de siècle Vienna, Reigen, by Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931); its cast consisted mostly of French actors but also included the Italian Isa Miranda, who had starred in his marvelous La signora di tutti (1934), and one echt Viennese, Anton Walbrook. It was, like Ophuls himself, thoroughly, unmistakably, unapologetically European, and you can almost hear him sigh with pleasure to be back on his home turf of the Old World. He never again strayed far from the Continent, his terra firma.
Schnitzler’s play—written in 1897 and 1898, privately printed in 1900, published in 1903, first performed (in Budapest) in 1912, and not staged in Vienna until 1921—was ideal material for the filmmaker’s return to his roots. It’s an ingenious piece of dramatic construction. In the first of its ten scenes, a prostitute picks up a soldier, who in the second scene romances a chambermaid, who in the next scene is ravished by her young employer, and so on until the end, when a count spends the night with the streetwalker from the opening scene and the play comes full circle. The elegant structure manages to convey both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior. Love doesn’t last, but it makes the world—the hermetic little world of this play, anyway—go round.
