Cycling Chronicles: Landscapes the Boy Saw [2004]

Cycling Chronicles perhaps remains among the most surprising departures in Kōji Wakamatsu’s career and indicative of his ability to defy perceptions by reinventing himself. Arguably best known (albeit, tad reductively) for his towering role in the sexploitation genre in Japanese cinema – viz. “pinku eiga” or pink films – this late career work was, instead, a sombre, low-key, brooding and lyrical film. However, that said, the defiantly non-conformist, underground filmmaker’s radical politics – his long-standing critic of Japanese societal malaise and its dark, troubling history – were emphatically on display here, be it in its evocation of the themes of alienation, disaffection and dysfunction, or in its bristling commentary on the country’s past mired in war-mongering, colonialism and despotism. Largely devoid of a conventional narrative arc, it’s centered on a nameless teenager (Tasuku Emoto) who’s cycling around – seemingly aimlessly, but in monomaniac frenzy – around the country. As he traverses through the bustling city of Tokyo, few smaller towns, and across the ravishingly shot landscapes – from seasides to mountains – we get to know through a few hazy, tad lackluster flashbacks that he’s recently killed his mother for reasons not clarified. And, along the way, he has a few intriguing chance encounters – with a disgruntled old man haunted by the scars of WW2, an elderly woman of Korean origin who was brought here many decades back as a “comfort woman”, stray fishermen who’re forced to survive in the fringes – that eloquently underscored Wakamatsu’s political angst. While the finale felt too heavily laden with Sisyphean symbolism, various aspects of the film – the old man’s long, discomfiting and deadpan monologue, the moody sense of existentialism, catchy soundtrack and arresting visuals – made it a disorienting, meditative journey.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Koji Wakamatsu

Genre: Drama/Existential Drama/Road Movie

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan 

Once Upon a Time There Was One Country [1995]

 Kusturica’s riotously allegorical, unhinged, extravagant, sweeping, farcical, bitingly satirical and darkly ironic retelling of contemporary history of Yugoslavia – a country that, as the title so poignantly makes it clear, doesn’t exist anymore – was 5 ½ hours of dazzling anarchy, exhilarating madness, subversive exuberance and trippy fever dream like few others. This grandiose work, interestingly, had two versions – the 3 ½ hour theatrical cut, released as Underground, which won Kusturica his 2^nd Palm d’Or, and this expansive long-cut that was shown on Serbian television; while the former was a fabulous achievement in itself, the filmmaker’s epic, delirious and incendiary vision arguably realized its full potential in the broader miniseries canvas. Set over half a century from 1941 till around 1992, it covered three crucial chapters in the country’s turbulent past – the Nazi occupation during the WW2, the Tito years during the Cold War era, and the devastating Yugoslav Wars that tore the country apart – through a complex ménage à trois between Blacky (Lazar Ristovski), a gregarious, anti-fascist, fearless Communist resistance leader; Marko (Miki Manojlović), a self-serving, duplicitous and slimy antagonist, and Natalija (Mirjana Joković), a stunningly beautiful, popular and opportunistic theatre actress who both men are in love with. While they start out as inseparable friends and fellow guerilla partisans, Marko tricks Blacky into an underground shelter and concocts an elaborate ruse in order to keep him there, while he steal his girlfriend, becomes an arms trafficker and gets wealthy, until all hell breaks loose. Filled with outstanding set-pieces, surreal splashes, lively ensemble cast, jaundiced world-views, carnivalesque atmosphere, unpredictable narrative arc, extraordinarily foot-tapping brass score and a profoundly heartbreaking finale, this was filmmaking at its most bravura, hyperbolic and unforgettable.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Emir Kusturica

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/War/Historical Epic/Miniseries

Language: Serbian

Country: Serbia

Shoah [1985]

 Shoah is a staggering work and a monumental achievement in every conceivable sense. Around a dozen years in the making and clocking at 9 ½ hours, it necessitated French intellectual, filmmaker, documentarian, journalist, academic and Holocaust chronicler Claude Lanzmann to travel around the globe – France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Greece, Israel, USA – in order to unearth, meet and interview his myriad subjects – victims and survivors, witnesses and bystanders, perpetrators and collaborators – by coaxing them into delving into traumatic memories, sharing gut-wrenching experiences and revealing dark episodes, and thereby examining the “what”, analyzing the “how” and ultimately hoping to comprehend the “why”. Gargantuan in scope, scale and ambition; radical in its form in that it was bereft of archival footage and therefore composed entirely of testaments, interactions and glimpses recorded in the “present”; in equal parts political, historical, philosophical, journalistic and existential; and, alternatively horrifying, disquieting, poignant, combative and devastating; this wasn’t just an astounding and towering cinematic achievement, it possibly also remains the single most important film on one of the most macabre chapters in human history. The anachronologically structured documentary broadly focused on four extermination camps – Chelmo, Sobibór, Treblinka and Aushwitz-Birkenau – along with the Warsaw ghetto. The dreary exteriors were recurrently juxtaposed with first-person accounts by individuals recounting stories of industrialized mass murder, dehumanization, banality of evil, uprisings and scarred memories, and featuring, among others, surviving Jewish inmates and Sonderkommando members (the indelible sequence featuring the barber Abraham Bomba was obliquely referenced by Sivan and Khleifi in Route 181), the Resistance, Holocaust historian, SS officers and guards at the camps (whose faces Lanzmann secretly filmed without permission), Nazi bureaucrats, train and wagon drivers, and Polish residents from adjoining villages.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Claude Lanzmann

Genre: Documentary/Political History

Language: English/French/German/Hebrew/Polish

Country: France

The Wind Will Carry Us [1999]

Kiarostami achieved a sublime confluence of austerely realist portrayal and metaphysical meditations – intermingling narrative build-ups with wry asides, and stylistic simplicity with formal rigour – with The Wind Will Carry Us. That it capped a stunning run of cinematic gems Where Is the Friend’s Home? onwards, was subtly manifested via elements from some of them – be it the maze-like housing pattern in the above film or the underplayed humanism in Life, and Nothing More… or the transformative journey of a man through unanticipated interactions in Taste of Cherry. The film began with a disarmingly long-winded voyage of Behzad (Behzad Dourani) – an inquisitive, cynical man with a dry wit and love for poetry – and his colleagues, engaging in rambling conversations while they’re travelling from Tehran to an impoverished Kurdish village. Close to their destination they meet Farzhad (Farzhad Sohrabi), a young, intelligent and studious boy from there, who guides the last leg and with whom Behzad develops a beautifully affecting friendship. As it eventually emerges, the protagonist is heading a small crew who’re there to document the mourning rituals that the villagers carry out when someone – in this case an elderly lady – approaches death, but introduces themselves as engineers to mask their motive. Interestingly, we never see his colleagues or the elderly woman, leave alone the rituals as the latter’s frail health, ironically, starts improving. Kiarostami, instead, covered the sardonic man’s journey as someone navigating through a myriad interactions with the people there – the kid, a telecom worker, his shy girlfriend, a weather-beaten matriarch, a school teacher, a profoundly philosophical local doctor – during his elongated stay at this hamlet with a near surreal architecture and surrounded by ravishingly beautiful landscapes.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Rural Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran

Through the Olive Trees [1994]

 Cinema doesn’t get any more quintessentially metatextual or delightfully self-reflexive than Through the Olive Trees, the enchanting final installment in Kiarostami’s endearing ‘Koker Trilogy’. It was also the funniest and the most formally playful of the lot, mixing situational humor and gentle satire – but suffused with empathy, warmth and humanism – while portraying the lilting simplicity of village life, a quirky romance, the enervating process of movie-making, and thereby a lyrical examination of how cinema interacts with the world that it’s attempting to capture, delineate and interpret. It revolved around the behind-the-scenes making of Life, and Nothing More…, the trilogy’s second part, which in turn was about searching for the actors (Babek and Ahmed Ahmedpour) who’d played the kids in Where Is the Friend’s Home? In other words, it had Kiarostami directing a man (Mohamad-Ali Keshavarz) who’s playing a filmmaker and a stand-in for Kiarostami, and who in turn is directing a film within the film where another man (Farhad Kheradmand) is also doing the same! A key strand here involved the deadpan and dogged romantic pursuit by Hossein Rezai, a young bricklayer, desperately trying to woo Farkhonde, who adamantly refuses to respond to his relentless courting as her family has turned him down for being homeless and illiterate; and, ironically, the young lady – with a surprisingly firm voice of her own despite being a person of very few words – plays Hossen’s on-screen wife in the film being produced. Kiarostami made engrossing use of long shots, long takes, POV shots and deliberate repetitions; memorably captured the people, their lives and the landscapes; and ended the film with a sumptuous final shot that unforgettably summed up the human comedy contained therein.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Rural Drama

Language: Persian

Country: Iran