For those with a minimal tolerance for holiday fare, Drink and Be Merry just might be your new favorite Christmas movie.
Though it's hardly as dreamy or surrealistic, Adam Volerich's low-budget debut is a worthy successor to Tyler Taormina's 2024 Christmas Eve in Miller's Point in terms of its strikingly original approach to a holiday that presents emotional, financial, and other challenges for some of us.
Not to be a total Grinch, but my patience for Christmas songs, movies, and tropes that I've seen and heard over and over again for decades on end grows thinner every year, so I get pretty excited when a film deviates so clearly from the usual cutesy, materialistic, or soap operatic playbook.
The $80,000 film also looks and sounds fantastic, thanks to top-flight cinematography from Volerich and Jack Mannion and production design from Christina Coleman. The glowing Christmas lights help, but all of the spaces are inviting, and the filmmaker, a podcaster and Rutgers professor, makes inventive choices involving black and white stock and practical effects.
The use of chapters and minimal sets lends Drink and Be Merry the feel of a filmed play, somewhat comparable to Richard Linklater's recent Sardi's-set Blue Moon–which was filmed entirely on a sound stage in Richard Rodgers actor Andrew Scott's native Ireland–though considerably more down-scale and rooted-in-real locations.
I won't say too much about the plot, since this is mostly a dialogue-driven piece, though compared to Peter Hujar's Day, which revolves around two people in one apartment, Drink and Be Merry is practically maximalist–no shade whatsoever to Ira Sachs' two-hander, which I greatly enjoyed.
Volerich, whose name may be unfamiliar, has filled his feature with familiar faces from numerous films and television shows, and the entire cast is very good, especially Yellowstone actor Jefferson White, who co-produced.
Basically, we spend a few days around Christmas 2019 with White's down-on-his-luck actor Chet, mostly at the New York dive bar he owns and operates, but also at the second-story apartment he shares with his "Ma" (a warm and delightful Siobhan Fallon Hogan).
Along with White and Hogan, I was particularly struck by the way the film doubles as a character actor showcase, and every performer, in all their idiosyncrasies, gets the chance to shine. These mostly post-middle-aged actors deserve bigger parts than what they usually get, and they earn Volerich's faith, especially The Wire veterans Delaney Williams, who played Jay Landsman, and Brian Anthony Wilson, who played Det. Vernon Holley. Between the two, they–mostly Wilson–have 284 credits at the IMDb.
Really, though, they're all impressive. Actor and stuntman Billy Smith (pictured above left) has appeared in two Martin Scorsese and two Clint Eastwood films, whereas actress and writer Sophie Zucker (Dickinson, The Chair Company) adds some prickly, youthful energy to the proceedings.
To be clear, Chet, who strung up the lights, loves Christmas, though he doesn't love his life, which hasn't turned out quite like he hoped, but it's the older regulars who supply most of the film's hard-bitten, low-key comedy.
Though they tease Chet about his Christmas cheer and his one lousy bit part, they see him as someone who still has time to get himself out of the ruts in which they feel stuck. If you can't tell, this is also a film about the way men talk to each other about sensitive issues, mostly by talking around them or by making jokes that aren't really jokes, because it's easier than being open and vulnerable.
Granted, romance even blooms for one of these sadsacks before sputtering out. Still, it's better to have a moment of happiness than none at all.
Nonetheless, this isn't a depressing film, even if it isn't as jolly as your average Christmas outing--not least because most everyone has a problem with the bottle, though that's a given with a barfly film. If anything, the bartender and his customers have each other, which is also better than having no one at all. One even turns out to have a pretty great partner, and a mishap near the end suggests he might stop taking her for granted.
If the characters are throwbacks in terms of language and belief systems, Volerich shows them learning to become more open-minded. Though I wouldn't describe the film as a noir or as an homage to independent filmmaking in 1970s New York, it may appeal to fans of those forms.
The closest analogue that comes to mind isn't a Christmas movie at all, but rather the Ross brothers' hybrid documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, which takes place entirely in a set-bound dive.
To quote the director's statement: "You know this bar. Maybe you were a regular. Maybe you were just passing through. But you sat, and you sipped all the same. The Bartender treated you well. The Barflies bantered with each other. And the Jukebox was already playing someone else's song. Wood paneling. Dirty bathrooms. Cheap drinks. No food. Cash Only."
If you spark to that description of the many dive bars across the country that have stumbled, struggled, and shuttered due to the pandemic, gentrification, and other obstacles, I recommend seeking this one out.
Drink and Be Merry is currently making its way across the US. No Seattle dates, but it's available on VOD (Prime, Fandango at Home), Blu-ray, and DVD through X4 Pictures. Images: Adam Volerich/Bearly There Media.
Another piece I wrote for Reel News, SIFF's now-defunct publication for members, in 2002 (it was never online, because that was a different time). I've lightly revised it from the
original text and added new images.
Long live melodrama, and let us stress the quality of Douglas Sirk.
--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
Although his directorial career lasted for over 40 years, including the German films he made in the 1930s and 1970s, Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is best known for the melodramas he made for Universal between 1954 and 1959, including such enduring classics as Magnificent Obsession (below right), All That Heaven Allows (above), Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life. (All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind are now available on DVD from The Criterion Collection.)
That isn't to suggest there aren't other entries in his filmography that are worth a look, like 1947's Lured with an excellent Lucille Ball or 1949's Shockproof with a screenplay fromSamuel Fuller, but few are as well known or as widely appreciated.
If it could be said that any one person did everything they could to give melodrama a good name, it was Douglas Sirk.
As Todd Haynes (Poison, Velvet Goldmine) explains in the production notes for his unapologetically Sirkian new film, Far From Heaven, "While the look and style of those '50s melodramas are anything but realistic, there's something almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths of those films. They are hyperreal, that's why we call them melodramas. Because they are about the kinds of things that are close to our private, personal lives, like falling out of love with somebody.”
Since Sirk's heyday, unfortunately, melodrama has, for the most part, fallen into disfavor. Nowadays, to describe a film as "melodramatic" implies that it's over-done: the acting too "big," the music too loud, the story line ridiculous, if not completely implausible. In the 1979 BBC documentary, Behind the Mirror: A Profile of Douglas Sirk, portions of which appear on the All That Heaven Allows DVD, the director agrees when host Mark Shivas suggests that Sirk meant the term literally: as a marriage between music and drama, as opposed to drama that is, like the title of Nicholas Ray's scathing 1956 attack on middle-American complacency: Bigger Than Life.
The All Movie Guide describes melodrama as a genre that focuses on "human emotion, illness and physical hardship." Further, it is often "critical of social and political climates and mores but can include domestic portrayals which are romanticized." D.W. Griffith's 1914 Birth of a Nation and Lewis Milestone's 1944 The Purple Heart are cited as examples. It's also noted that, "Lucid distinctions exist between good and evil, hero and villain, right and wrong, and rule oriented society." Fortunately, such distinctions aren't always so clear in the films of Sirk and those he has inspired.
Born in Hamburg in 1900 (or 1897 according to some reports) to Danish parents, Claus Detlev Sierck moved to Munich to study law after the First World War, then later to Hamburg to study philosophy. His life as a director began in Germany; first in theater, but then in film once the Nazis began to exert their censorious ways. His theatrical background should come as little surprise; Sirk's work has always been very "theatrical" in the best sense of the word. Along the way he changed his name to the more Teutonic-sounding Detlef Sierk.
In 1934, he was hired by legendary movie studio Universum Film AG (UFA), and they released his first feature film, April, April!, the following year.
But then, in 1937, the left-leaning Sirk and his Jewish wife, Hilde Jary, fled Germany altogether for short sojourns in France, Holland, Spain, South Africa, and Australia, eventually settling in the United States, some time between 1939 and 1943. His directorial reputation preceded him.
That Sirk would go on to make some of the most quintessentially American motion pictures of the 1950s isn't what makes him unique. That, once ensconced in the States, he would change his name to something less Germanic isn't either. The same could easily be said of his German-born UFA compatriots Billy Wilder and, to a lesser extent, Fritz Lang--not that Lang was a lesser director, just that "quintessentially American" are two words that don't fit the monocle-sporting Lang or his Expressionistic work quite so comfortably. But Sirk wasn't an auteur in the same way as Wilder and Lang, which may go some way towards explaining why his significance and influence have taken so much longer to grow and to take root in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s and Todd Haynes in the 2000s.
Right: Douglas Sirk and his wife, actress Hilde Jary
In that sense, Sirk would almost seem to have more in common with French-born B-movie maestro, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie). Like Sirk, Tourneur wasn't known as much for his taste in material as for the stylistic miracles he worked with the screenplays he was given such that he could, time and time again, make one cinematic miracle after another out of the studio-generated material that came his way.
That said, Sirk would, like Billy Wilder in Double Indemnity, go on to work with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in 1956's There’s Always Tomorrow,one of non-fiction filmmaker Errol Morris's favorite films.
As with Tourneur, Sirk wasn't known for casting the biggest stars, or at least the most critically acclaimed--Tourneur's stellar noir Out of the Past with Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, is a rather notable exception to the rule.
Not to take anything away from the handsome Rock Hudson (Magnificent Obsession) or glamorous Lana Turner (Imitation of Life), but Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman they were not. Then again, it's hard to imagine those Hitchcock stars fitting as neatly into the artificiality of a Sirk production.
On the other hand, although Turner's Lora is on screen more than anyone else in Imitation of Life, which was remade, like Magnificent Obsession, from John M. Stahl’s 1930s version, and gives one of her finest performances--it's the lesser-known Susan Kohner as the light-skinned daughter of Lora's Black maid (Juanita Moore) who steals the show. Consequently, she and Moore would garner the film's only Oscar nominations. (Surprisingly, Kohner would not capitalize on that early success. Her subsequent filmography may be sparse, but her writer/director sons, Paul and Chris Weitz of American Pie and About a Boy fame, seem fully prepared to make up for that).
Prolific and openly gay producer Ross Hunter was behind these films and others that Sirk, the closeted Hudson, and Turner made, whether together or separately, including 1959's Pillow Talk with Hudson and Doris Day and 1966's sub-Sirkian Madame X, which gave Turner one of her last juicy roles. Sirk and Hunter made a total of 10 films together, many shot by Sirk's "secret weapon," Russell Metty, including Imitation of Life, his last American film and biggest commercial success.
Meanwhile, Sirk's films with Hudson total an impressive eight. While he can't lay claim to having discovered the former Roy Harold Scherer Jr., many have credited Sirk for Hudson's matriculation from contract player to leading man.
Sirk was preparing to direct another film with Turner and Kohner when he was beset by health problems and the production was shelved. Instead of whiling away his days by the pool, he returned to Germany where his health improved, leading to speculation that the refined intellectual--who hasn't just been described as "Brechtian," but who actually worked with the progressive playwright early in his career--had literally grown sick of Hollywood. And he never looked back, though he would eventually exchange Germany for Switzerland, where he spent the last several years of his life.
Right: Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Ross Hunter on the set of Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk
The late-1950s, though, was an odd time for Sirk to leave the States, just as his work was starting to find favor with the influential critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave, like François Truffaut. Although they wouldn't burnish his reputation to the same degree as that of other commercially-successful directors, like Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock, the seeds were planted for a full-blown critical reassessment.
As Truffaut wrote about the Technicolor extravaganza Written on the Wind, as featured in the 1994 essay collection The Films in My Life, "This is movie-making unashamed of what it is, with no complexes, no hesitations, simply good workmanship." Like American film critics David Thomson and Andrew Sarris, he was also fond of Sirk's 1940s potboilers with George Sanders, but feels he really blossomed in the 1950s--much like that lilac bush in 1944's Summer Storm--and was impressed by his bold use of color. "They are," he theorized, "the colors of the Twentieth Century, the colors of America, the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics." And with that, he would also predict the affluent end of 1960s America as depicted in Mike Nichols' The Graduate.
In the pages of the same journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard would commend 1958's A Time to Love and a Time to Die,as excerpted in Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, for his "delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope."
In Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1995 essay collection Placing Movies, the Chicago Reader critic claims that Sirk's Erich Maria Remarque adaptation (left) would, in turn, become "an important source for Les Carabiniers (1963), particularly the shooting of a partisan woman who denounces her assassins (a Russian peasant in Sirk's film, a French girl quoting Mayakovsky in Godard's)."
The UK caught on in the 1970s and sang Sirk's praises in the pages of Screen, by way of a retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival, and in the publication in 1971 of Jon Halliday's interview collection Sirk on Sirk.
Around this time, more significantly, his American work made a deep impact on young German actor and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As Thomas Elsaesser elucidates in his essay, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles" from the Museum of Modern Art's 1997 Fassbinder compendium, "Fassbinder's discovery--documented in an essay he wrote in 1971 on six Sirk films he had just seen--proved momentous; it rehabilitated a then almost-forgotten director and renewed interest in a genre that was to gain considerable critical prominence in subsequent years: the Hollywood family melodrama."
Regarding Written on the Wind, his favorite of the six, Fassbinder (pictured with Sirk to the right) sums up his attraction: "The good, the 'normal,' the 'beautiful' are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one's compassion." (Gosh, it almost sounds as if he's describing his own work.) About Dorothy Malone's Marylee, a "bad girl" with heart, a searing performance for which she would receive an Oscar, he wrote, "I love her as I rarely love anyone in the cinema" (Robert Stack, who found a new kind of fame in the 1990s as the ghoulishly stone-faced host of Unsolved Mysteries, would also receive a nomination).
About The Tarnished Angels (below left), an adaptation of William Faulkner's Pylon, which featured many of the same actors and was shot in B&W CinemaScope, he wrote, "Sirk looks at these corpses with such tenderness and radiance that we start to think that something must be at fault if these people are so screwed up and, nevertheless, so nice. The fault lies with fear and loneliness. I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film."
Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, released the same year as this essay, was his first to fall directly under Sirk's sway. He would even go on to work with him after his return to Germany to teach. Elsaesser goes so far as to describe Sirk as "the perfect elective father for the fatherless Fassbinder."
With 1973's Ali, Fear Eats The Soul, the acolyte would up the ante by taking on All That Heaven Allows. In the original, Jane Wyman's upper class widow falls for Rock Hudson's younger man, who happens to be a gardener and a bohemian.
Her college-aged kids and country club associates do all they can to put a kibosh on the relationship. What is her (individual) happiness worth compared to their (collective) reputation? Very little, apparently. In Ali, Fassbinder complicates the situation further by adding race to the mix, since the younger man is an Arab (Fassbinder's lover El Hedi ben Salem).
Fassbinder by way or Sirk cleared the way for Pedro Almodóvar, François Ozon, and Todd Haynes, who, unlike Hudson, have made little effort to hide their sexual orientation, but then, they grew up in very different times, let alone countries. In Elvis Mitchell's New York Times review of the Spanish filmmaker's latest, Talk To Her (Hable con Ella), he notes, "Mr. Almodóvar's purview started out as a lewd, slapstick version of the heightened melodrama of the 50's director Douglas Sirk: if Magnificent Obsession had starred a sexual Lucille Ball. But the director has moved past candy-colored Fassbinder with a sense of humor." (And Ball really did work with Sirk.)
Mitchell seems to feel that Almodóvar has only really come into his own by moving away from the frenetic Sirk-isms of his early work and, since I'm also more enamored of his more recent films, like 1995's The Flower of My Secret (La Flor de mi Secreto), 1997's Live Flesh (Carne Trémula), and 1999's Oscar-winning tearjerker All About My Mother (Todo Sobre mi Madre), I'm inclined to agree.
Really, though, it's more that Almodóvar has thrown off the freneticism, never a part of Sirk's oeuvre, while hanging onto the rest, like the focus on women--including trans women and those of "a certain age"--and a brilliant use of color. All About My Mother, after all, much like Imitation of Life, revolves around an actress and mother and the women in her orbit, though I believe Sirk's influence has been more of a boon for Ozon and Haynes.
Though the French filmmaker adapted his most recent feature, star-studded musical murder mystery 8 Women (8 Femmes, below), from an obscure 1960s stage play by Robert Thomas that feels like Agatha Christie with a side of kink, it sure looks like Sirk, right down to the deer in the snow at the beginning--an obvious tip of the chapeau to All That Heaven Allows, which Ozon claims to adore. As he explained to Paris Expatriate earlier this year, "I love his movies. They are very simple but very stylish. I love the color, the mise-en-scène. He makes a Greek tragedy out of a simple story."
It doesn't hurt that one of Ozon's previous films was a 1999 set-bound adaptation of Sirk protegé Fassbinder's play Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Gouttes d'eau sur Pierres Brûlantes) or that he had already made another, 1998's Sitcom, about a suburban family with some rather serious problems (dad's a giant rat!). Granted, the latter is more black comedy than melodrama, but the idea of a beautiful home that feels like a prison provides a link with Sirk.
The 1950s-set 8 Women, with its kitschy jewels-and-flowers opening with all the words in pink script, essentially reproduces the falling-diamond opening to Imitation of Life. The period outfits, including furs and leopard-print coats, and immaculately-coiffed divas--Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, and Isabelle Huppert in the Agnes Moorhead role--only serves to confirm the connection. The comparisons to Almodóvar don't hurt much either.
Then there's Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. Sirk, whose adherents include gay filmmakers John Waters--All That Heaven Allows is his favorite film--and The Deep End's Scott McGehee--a big fan of Written on the Wind--may not have been gay himself, but as Haynes joked to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this fall, "He was a German intellectual, so he was close, I guess." He adds that producer Hunter was "a flamboyant gay fellow in that period."
Though Haynes takes Fassbinder's lead in using All That Heaven Allows as a jumping-off point, his film is even less of a remake. As he explained to Eye Weekly prior to a sold-out screening at the Toronto International Film Festival--even Roger Ebert was shut out--it isn't "about the '50s in America. It's about filmmaking in the '50s in America and the language of Hollywood filmmaking at that time. Everything is filtered through a California-sound-stage mentality."
Haynes reunites, after Safe, with Julianne Moore for the story of Cathy, a well-off housewife living a life of "quiet desperation" in 1950s Connecticut--my hometown of Hartford, to be exact--until confronted by the sexual confusion of her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) and a "forbidden" attraction to her sympathetic black gardener, Raymond (24's Dennis Haysbert).
Says Haynes, "Creating a '50s-era melodrama today and playing it straight, smack in the midst of this pumped-up, adrenaline-crazed era, might seem a perplexing impulse. Yet the strongest melodramas are those without apparent villains, where characters end up hurting each other unwittingly, just by pursuing their desires. To impose upon the seeming innocence of the 1950s themes as mutually volatile as race and sexuality is to reveal how volatile those subjects remain today and how much our current climate of complacent stability has in common with that bygone era."
And yet, by making such a film in 2002, he can tackle these subjects with a greater degree of, well, frankness--hence the name of Quaid's character--than Sirk or his 1950s contemporaries George Cukor or Vincente Minnelli ever could, including an on-screen kiss between Quaid and a male paramour. It goes without saying that that would have been unthinkable during the Production Code-era in which Sirk produced his most lasting works.
By reviving his legacy with such obvious affection, while commenting on it at the same time--an acknowledgment that many of Sirk's best films were commentaries at heart--Far From Heaven seems likely to stand as the ultimate homage to his work. If it encourages even a few curious viewers to seek out All That Heaven Allows, let alone other Sirk masterworks, Haynes will have done more than enough. That it's destined to rank among the year's best is the coconut-covered icing on the red velvet cake.
There will always be those who write off Sirk as glossy and insubstantial, while others revel in his work due to its perceived "subversiveness," as if everything must have a hidden meaning and nothing can be taken at face value, but as Sirk once said, "There is a very short distance between high art and trash." I believe his true worth lies in the way he transformed that trash, or "rather impossible" material, as he charitably put it, into art.
As Fassbinder exulted, "I've seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them were the most beautiful in the world." And in that beauty, he found truth. As Andrew Sarris predicted in The American Cinema, "Time, if nothing else, will vindicate Douglas Sirk as it has already vindicated Joseph von Sternberg. Formal excellence and visual wit are seldom as appreciated at first glance as are the topical sensations of the hour." Clearly, that time is now.
Kathleen Fennessy writes about music and film for Amazon.com, The All Music Guide, and Tablet. She considers Todd Haynes' psychodrama Safe one of the finest films of the 1990s and wouldn't mind if the filmmaker worked as often with Julianne Moore as Douglas Sirk did with Rock Hudson.
This review originally appeared in Bob Ham's Portland film screenings newsletter Daily Projections some time on or after September 14, 2016.
HOOLIGAN SPARROW
(Nanfu Wang, 2016, China/USA, 84 minutes)
At times, Nanfu Wang's vertiginous documentary, Hooligan Sparrow, feels like a spy thriller as she does her best to keep up with Chinese women's rights activist Ye Haiyun, code name Sparrow, her unstoppable subject.
There are clashes with police, government stooges, and other antagonists who aim to curtail Sparrow's activism and to force Wang to stop filming.
Instead of opinion editorials and other conventional forms of communication, Sparrow engages in high-risk activities in a country infamously adverse to free speech. Aside from videos, protests, and photo projects--some featuring art world star Ai Weiwei--she once offered her services to migrant laborers for free in order to publicize the plight of sex workers.
Wang, who lives in New York, returns to her native China to document Sparrow's work. She swiftly finds that national security agents are monitoring her actions, simply because she's walking around with a video camera, so she switches to concealed micro-cameras.
When they meet for the first time, Sparrow and her sister activists are organizing a protest against a Hainan Province principal who coerced six underage girls into prostitution.
Sparrow's attorney, Wang Yu, notes that China's protection laws for women and children are not strictly enforced. Furthermore, there's a loophole in the child prostitution law that allows government officials to skate free (the principal explains that the 11 to 14-year old girls were intended as "gifts").
Wang continues to document the outcome of their action. Though they garner messages of support across the social media sphere, Sparrow suffers beatings, arrest, detention, raids, and death threats. A group of men, presumably paid government thugs, even holds up a banner outside her apartment building that reads, "Sparrow, you whore, get out of the city."
The police, who seem to see her as a nuisance, do little to help, despite the fact that her 13-year-old daughter could also really use their protection.
The situation becomes even more fraught when Sparrow's apartment manager kicks her out, and no other building will take her, even as she travels to two other provinces to secure housing. At the same time, the police are questioning everyone who knows the filmmaker. Sparrow copes by depending on the kindness of family members, while Wang evades detection by avoiding hotels stays, train travel, and all other transactions that require identification.
If Wang never gets to the bottom of the reasons why Sparrow has decided to risk her life for a cause--other than the fact that Chinese women can only benefit from her advocacy--it doesn't weaken her film in any way.
Instead, she provides a you-are-there look at the risks one Chinese activist faces on a daily basis. Though the hazards can be disheartening, it's hard not to notice that she's rarely alone. From her daughter and boyfriend to her friends and associates, Sparrow is never completely isolated. Whether that will be enough in the years to come is an open question, but she's launched a movement that can only gather strength with time.
Images from Austin Film Society (Sparrow alone and with associates) and Doc NYC (Nanfu Wang). Hooligan Sparrow is available on DVD from Kino Lorber and on VOD from Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital platforms.
In honor of Park Chan-wook's Donald Westlake adaptation, No Other Choice, I've revived a piece I wrote for SIFF's Reel News about the festival's 2002 quartet of Emerging Masters. Park was joined by Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, and Miike Takashi.
I was first introduced to the South Korean filmmaker's work when SIFF programmed Park's third feature, 2000's Joint Security Area, aka JSA, and I've been a fan ever since (SIFF also introduced me to Audiard's work when they programmed his second feature, A Self-Made Hero, in 1997).
I'm glad Park is still going strong, with eight features since 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, first in a trilogy with Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, though I regret that both Reel News and Emerging Masters are things of the past. (This piece has been lightly revised from the original text.)
THE LATEST CROP: SIFF'S 2002 EMERGING MASTERS
Each year SIFF selects four directors from around the world who have, within the span of a decade or a handful of films, established themselves as potential cinematic masters. This series celebrates outstanding talents whose films reveal an original vision or point of view and a grasp of craft that sets them apart from the preponderance of filmmakers, clearly establishing them as artists of a high order.
These are directors with the ability to break into the mainstream of American filmgoers' consciousness in the near future.
Past honorees have included Tom Tykwer (Wintersleepers, Run Lola Run), François Ozon (Under the Sand, 8 Femmes), and Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People).
PARK CHAN-WOOK
First out of the gate is Park Chan-wook, dubbed a "giant in the Korean movie world" by The Korea Times. Park is the director and co-writer of powerful political thriller Joint Security Area (Gongdong Gyeongbi Guyeok, SIFF '01), which became the biggest box office hit in South Korea within weeks of its release. JSA (pictured above) was also a local Seattle favorite, where it won SIFF's New Director's Showcase Special Jury Award and was a Runner-up for the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Film.
Although some critics have compared it to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon--high praise indeed--the twisty, masterfully shot (in Super 35mm) motion picture reminded this viewer more of John Frankenheimer's iconic Richard Condon adaptation The Manchurian Candidate,but with a greater sense of humor.
Park was born in Seoul and graduated from Sogang University, a Jesuit institution, with a degree in philosophy. He also worked as a film critic and started directing in the early-1990s (The Moon is…the Sun's Dream, Trio), but JSA was the first of his feature films to gain worldwide exposure.
As The Korea Times notes, "His works have always been about socially neglected people, such as the three heroes in Saminjo (Trio): a struggling saxophone player playing gigs in cheap nightclubs, an uneducated tough guy, and a single mother."
Even before the release of JSA, Park was working on the screenplay for his latest release, riveting crime drama Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (above), which, like JSA, was shot in widescreen and, like Trio, concerns a group of "socially neglected people," and the ways in which their lives intersect.
Sympathy reunites Park with two favorite actors: Song Kang-ho (Shiri, SIFF ’00, The Foul King, SIFF '01) and Shin Ha-kyun (Save the Green Planet!). He has cited the hard-boiled detective fiction of American writers Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and Ernest Hemingway for its inspiration.
JULIO MEDEM
Like Park, Spain's Julio Medem didn't start out as a filmmaker--not formally, at any rate--but as a medical student at Basque Country University. While there, however, he wrote about film for a San Sebastian newspaper.
Medem bridged the gap--some would say gulf--between film criticism and filmmaking by teaching himself cinematography using his father's Super 8 camera and shooting a series of inventive short films in the 1980s before releasing his full-length debut, Vacas (Cows, SIFF '92), in 1991. He was off to an auspicious start. The Basque-set historical fantasia won an award for Best New Director at the 1993 Goyas (the Spanish Academy Awards).
From his short films to his most recent feature (left), Medem has continued to reveal a boundless fascination with fate, romance, and the fine line dividing reality from illusion.
He has become known and renowned for the sensuality, lyricism, and sophistication of his imagery, inspiring comparisons to such stylistic brothers-in-arms as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 Years of Solitude), Carlos Saura (Carmen), Raoul Ruíz (Time Regained), Luis Buñuel (That Obscure Object of Desire), and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive) with a little Emir Kusturica (Underground) thrown into the mix. Empire has described him as a director of "daring intelligence, stylish invention, and visual dynamism."
As he explained to The New York Times' Leslie Camhi in 1999, his approach towards each film is largely visual and intuitive: ''When I'm working, if I come up with something that has a very clear and concrete meaning, I almost always put it aside.'' Medem has long been a favorite of SIFF audiences, who have been able to enjoy every one of his films thus far--although The Red Squirrel (La Ardilla Roja, SIFF '94), which was supposed to be part of 1993's slate, was, unfortunately, delayed until the following year--many would probably agree, however, that it was worth the wait.
His other films include Tierra (Earth, SIFF '97), nominated for the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, The Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Los Amantes del Circulo Polar, SIFF '99), nominated for a Golden Lion at the 1998 Venice Film Festival and Best Screenplay at the 1999 Goyas, and, his most recent, Sex and Lucia (Lucía y el Sexo), nominated for Best Screenplay and Director at the 2002 Goyas.
JACQUES AUDIARD
France's Jacques Audiard was, essentially, born into the world of film, since his father is screenwriter Michel Audiard (The Night Affair), a favorite dialogue writer of French great Jean Gabin. Michel passed away in 1985.
His son got his start as an editor, playwright, and screenwriter before turning to directing with 1994's acclaimed See How They Fall (Regarde les Hommes Tomber), winner of the Best New Director Award at the 1995 Césars (the French Academy Awards). The intense noir received precious little exposure in the US despite the participation of Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist) and actor/director Mathieu Kassovitz (Amélie).
Like Audiard, Kassovitz is a second-generation cineaste--his father is writer/director Peter Kassovitz.
It was, in fact, the uncanny resemblance between Trintignant and the elder Kassovitz that led Audiard to again cast the veteran actor in his darkly comic 1996 follow-up, A Self-Made Hero (Un Heros Très Discret, SIFF '97).
Kassovitz, who made 1995's La Haine, his own well received directorial debut, had already been cast as Resistance "hero" Albert Dehousse; Trintignant was added as the same character in later years. A Self-Made Hero went on to win the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival.
With his latest film, Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres), Audiard takes a more direct, less stylized approach than that of A Self-Made Hero. The kinetic psychological thriller is marked by impressive performances from Vincent Cassel (Kassovitz's La Haine and The Crimson Rivers, SIFF '01) and Emmanuelle Devos (La Sentinelle, SIFF '93) and concerns the unconventional--and potentially deadly--relationship that develops between an insecure, hearing-impaired secretary and an aggressive, recently-paroled ex-con. It resulted in another success for Audiard, winning awards at the 2002 Césars for Best Writing, Best Editing, and Best Actress (Devos). Audiard was also nominated for Best Director and Cassel for Best Actor.
All the while, Audiard has continued to write for other directors, including Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty Institute (Vénus Beauté, SIFF '00), another multiple-César winner, and Read My Lips looks set to increase Audiard's steadily growing and richly deserved international reputation.
MIIKE TAKASHI
Last, but certainly not least, is Japan's Miike Takashi, who got his start by assisting legendary director Shohei Imamura (The Eel) in the 1980s.
Since then, the tireless Miike has directed countless made-for-video and television productions, honing his considerable chops all the way. Starting in the mid-1990s, he has increasingly been at the helm of theatrical features, such as The City of Lost Souls (Hyôryuu-gai), Dead or Alive (Hanzaisha)--which features what must surely be one of the most infamous opening sequences of all time--and Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1), among others.
The word "prolific" often accompanies mention of his name, along with other such colorful words and phrases as "graphic," "hallucinatory," "jaw-dropping," and my personal favorite: "flamboyantly weird," but don't be fooled by that first word. As Sight & Sound's Tony Rayns, an early champion, has noted, Miike is prolific in the way that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was prolific, if closer in spirit to Joseph H. Lewis. "Almost all of [his films] are interesting and some of them phenomenal," Rayns raved.
The best way to describe Miike, however, is probably the simplest: anything goes. There's literally nothing this man won't try.
As such, he's been compared to everyone from Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter) and Takeshi Kitano (Hana-bi) to Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and even the "Godfather of Gore," Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast).
His themes include those associated with Japanese actioners from Suzuki's 1960s cult classics to today--primarily the yakuza and the drug trade--but a surprising number of his films are more than just hyped-up action fare, since he also takes the time to grapple with discrimination against foreigners, both non-Asians and non-Japanese Asians, and other more sober-minded topics.
As for versatile, well, The Happiness of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no Kôfuku), just happens to be a family-oriented musical, though one unlikely to be mistaken for The Sound of Music anytime soon, despite the mountain-setting similarity. Zombies, stop-motion animation--Happiness has it all.
To date, Miike's most significant cinematic achievement must surely be the artful, if extremely disturbing Audition (Odishon, SIFF ’00), which won the FIPRESCI Award at the 1999 Rotterdam Film Festival "for its narrative freedom, technical mastery of genre and the inventivity [sic] of an important new and prolific director." (That word again!) It's the film that put Miike over the top, as it were, with raves in The New York Times and other major publications. He couldn't have been more pleased. As he exclaimed to BBC Online's David Wood in 2001, "This [success] is something I am very excited by. I like to work hard and to work fast, refining my skills, but to have a film receive such a good response worldwide goes beyond my wildest dreams."
And, with that, here's to more powerful thrillers, wild dreams, weird nightmares, and other delights from this year's crop of Emerging Masters at SIFF: Park Chan-wook, Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, and Miike Takashi.
Kathleen Fennessy writes about music and film for Amazon.com, All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com), and The Stranger. She has also contributed to Microsoft Cinemania, Film.com, and The Anchorage Times, among other websites and publications. She has been a SIFF volunteer since 1994.
No Other Choice plays IMAX theaters for one-night only on Dec 8 and returns for a regular run in Jan. Images from the IMDb (Park Chan-wook with Lee Byung-hun, Shin Ha-kyun, Song Kang-ho, and Lee Yeong-ae on the set of Joint Security Area, Julio Medem and Paz Vega on the set of Sex and Lucía, and Miike Takashi in Hostel), Rotten Tomatoes (Park and Song on the set of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), DVD Talk (Cows), Variety (Jacques Audiard / Courtesy of Shannon Besson), Metacritic (Mathieu Kassovitz in A Self-Made Hero), and Screen Slate (Happiness of the Katakuris).
REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND / Reflet dans un Diamant Mort
(Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, 2025, Belgium/
Luxembourg/Italy/France, 87 minutes)
Belgian filmmaking couple Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet recreate and recontextualize the imaginative Eurospy films of the 1960s and '70s–with lacings of Italian comic book and Mission: Impossible iconography–in the stylish, fast-moving action thriller Reflection in a Dead Diamond.
The prototypical version of these films featured rugged men and glamorous women, mod outfits, bold interiors, inscrutable storylines, disorienting dubbing, and swinging scores. Forzani and Cattet's followup to 2017's horror western Let the Corpses Tan revolves around men chasing after diamonds--and each other--and the women who help or hinder their quests…before giving way to something more multi-layered and self-referential.
Over the course of their 24-year career, the duo has mastered the art of the outré assemblage through tactile closeups, multiple exposures, colored gels and filters, animated sequences, bursts of intense violence, and vivid sound design–heavy on the squeaking latex–that conjures up images of Toby Jones feverishly hacking away at produce and other squishy items in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio. (Fittingly, Strickland voices one of the screams in The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears.) Their fourth feature film is no different.
Further, most effects appear to be practical, which definitely adds to the appeal. There's a certain weightlessness to computer-generated effects that has always kept me at arm's length; everything in a Forzani-Cattet production, no matter how outlandish, feels palpable and weighty.
They begin with Diman (Italian actor Fabio Testi, Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere), a retired spy at a hotel café on the Côte d'Azur sipping a cocktail while watching a brunette beauty (Sophie Mousel) soaking up the sun.
Throughout the film, they intercut closeups of his brown eyes, a signature Sergio Leone move (though Testi doesn't appear to have worked with the spaghetti western pioneer). It's something they've been doing since their 2009 directorial debut, Amer, so it also counts as their signature move.
When the brunette takes off her bikini top and reclines, the sun catches a certain diamond piercing, something that never appeared in any James Bond movie, even as this one incorporates tropes associated with Sean Connery's iteration of the British spy…and that of his brother Neil, who starred in Alberto De Martino's 1967 Eurospy entry Operation Kid Brother, an inspiration Forzani has described as "very pop, very psychedelic, very fun."
Diman wears a holster and gun under his white suit jacket, a nod to Dirk Bogarde's desperately lonely composer Gustav von Aschenbach (left) in Luchino Visconti's Thomas Mann adaptation Death in Venice, and carries an attaché case filled with spy gizmos, like a silver ring with laser eye that allows him to see through walls and other surfaces.
When the brunette, a guest at the same luxury hotel, disappears, the septuagenarian ex-spy sets out to solve the mystery. In the film, she appears to leave for a yachting excursion with John (Yannick Renier, Jérémie Renier's older brother), a handsome spy convinced she has information he needs about his client, oil baron Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw, star of the original Belgian Professor T), so he attempts to torture it out of her.
When that gambit fails, his female associate (Céline Camara) attempts to seduce Strand while wearing a silver grill and a Paco Rabanne-style palette shift with a red jewel in the center that does interesting tricks, like dispatching a ninja crew in a sequence that reminded me of Elia Suleiman's black comedy Divine Intervention in which one Palestinian woman puts five Israeli men in their place. In this case, even the palettes have powers.
John also has one of the fancy rings, which he uses to see through a poker hand--cheater!--suggesting that he's a younger version of Diman, or that Diman is imagining all of these things. John also walks a red carpet, attends a press conference, and re-enacts the torture scene on a movie set, suggesting that his every action is staged and directed. Or that Diman, possibly suffering from dementia, can't tell the difference. Not until the end credits did I clock that John's last name is Diman, so yes, same guy, but that doesn't unlock the intentionally-ambiguous screenplay's every secret.
In its early stages, the women in the film don't make out too well.
Instead of the asphyxiating gold paint of Guy Hamilton's Goldfinger, one ends up coated in black oil paint--like one of Yves Klein's cobalt-clad human paintbrushes--and things only get worse from there, though everything is too stylized to qualify as misogynistic, especially once Forzani and Cattet introduce the Satanik-inspired Serpentik (mostly French-Vietnamese choreographer Thi Mai Nguyen, but sometimes Barbara Hellemans, Sylvia Camarda, or other performers), a latex-clad sphinx who obliterates a roomful of manly men with her metal talons, stiletto heels, and hook-filled extensions.
As Forzani told Anton Bitel in 2020, "When we made our short films, in one… it was a man who was killed, in the other it was a woman. We wanted to be equal in the violence [both laugh], and in the male and female aspect."
Throughout, there's plenty of crushed glass and torn flesh–Amer used sea salt in similar ways–recalling both Lucio Fulci and Miike Takashi, though possibly more inventive than either.
And that's just scratching the surface–pun intended–since there's also naked sword-fighting, murder by foosball, comic book panels that come to life, a Black opera singer (singer/actress Kezia Quental) inspired by Diva's Cynthia Hawkins--the filmmakers even include Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez's "La Wally" on the soundtrack--an eye-popping op art carpet, and Maria de Medeiros in platinum blonde hair and deep red lipstick. (Sadly, some critics have conflated Quental, also Black, with Camara, even though the two women don't look much alike.)
Forzani and Cattet have studied their gialli and fumetti neri well.
Though the films are otherwise quite different--no zombies appear in this one--I'm also fond of Michele Soavi's 1994 fumetti neri adaptation Cemetery Man, which sprung from the pages of Italian comic book author Tiziano Sclavi's 1991 novel Dellamorte Dellamore. Sclavi's work, however, came later, unlike Mario Bava's 1968 Danger: Diabolik, an adaptation of Angela and Luciana Giussani's Diabolik series, to which Reflection in a Dead Diamond pays direct homage.
Though few lines struck me as funny–not least because Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet prioritize imagery over dialogue–a number of abrupt or unexpected edits made me laugh, even as the actors always play it straight. If they never wink at the audience, the filmmakers and steadfast editor Bernard Beets do just that with their clever juxtapositions, ensuring that things never get too heavy no matter how close they dance to the edge.
DP Manuel Dacosse, who shot all four of their features, also deserves credit for his stellar work for the duo, in addition to other strong visual stylists, like Lucile Hadžihalilović (Évolution) and François Ozon (Peter von Kant).
For those not tuned to their fantastical, fetishistic frequency, this thing will be a chore–even at 87 minutes–but for the rest: a bloody good time awaits.
HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND / Kare no ōtobai, kanojo no shima (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1986, Japan, 90 minutes)
Welcome to my island Hope you like me, you ain't leaving. –Caroline Polachek (2023)
Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, who passed away in 2020 at 82, was one of Japan's foremost antiwar filmmakers, a master of the experimental short film (for both theatrical and advertising purposes), and the go-for-broke genius behind the most bonkers horror-comedy musical ever made–though Miike Takashi's multimedia zom-com Happiness of the Katakuris comes close.
That's only a sampling of Ôbayashi's many talents, but most people probably know him best for House, aka Hausu, one of the Criterion Collection's crown jewels, to the extent that they've even produced a perennially popular, bright orange, cat-face t-shirt. I doubt we'll see a t-shirt for, say, Au Hasard Balthazar any time soon, but I swear I would wear it if they produced one.
I'm unaware of any antiwar messaging embedded in His Motorbike, Her Island, his 17th motion picture, but Ôbayashi was an endlessly inventive filmmaker, and I wouldn't put it past him.
Nor is the film thoroughly experimental, though it incorporates avant-garde techniques–freeze frames, jump cuts, varied aspect ratios, and rhythmic shifts from black and white to color.
(In an archival interview included with the new release, Obayashi acknowledges that he added the cuts simply to get the run time under 90 minutes in order to screen as part of a bill with director/producer Haruki Kadokawa's crime thriller Cabaret.)
All told, it's one of his most accessible efforts, though still unconventional by most any standard, then and now.
In Ôbayashi's nouvelle vague-inspired take on the Japanese biker movie, future v-cinema star and Miike favorite Riki Takeuchi (Dead or Alive), in his feature debut, plays Koh Hashimoto, a music student, part-time delivery driver, and motorbike obsessive in Obayashi's native Onomichi. There's a girl in Koh's life, his boss's younger sister, Fuyumi (Noriko Watanabe), but his bike always, always comes first.
Though screenwriter Ikuo Sekimoto drew from Yoshio Kataoka's 1977 novel, the way Koh consistently refers to his bike as a Kawasaki W3 plays like the handiwork of a man who made thousands of television commercials.
Koh, in other words, comes across like a pitchman. It's funny, but not in a way that makes him seem like the butt of a filmmaker's joke–though he's a fairly single-minded fellow–and I may be reading more into it than I should, but the fact that it's a Japanese make rather than an American one, like Harley Davidson, feels like home-country pride on Ôbayashi's part, though Japanese biker films do tend to favor Kawasaki, Honda, and Suzuki.
In his opening narration, Koh declares, "My day-to-day life at the time was a complete mess," indicating that the film will recreate past events. He goes on to describe his dreams as "monochrome," a partial explanation for the extensive use of B&W, but not a complete one since Ôbayashi often switches between the two within sequences in a way that seems more stylistic than thematic. He admits as much in the archival interview, explaining that an all-B&W film might have seemed pretentious or nostalgic, so he considered using B&W for past and color for present, but in the end he opted for a more random scheme, much like a B&W manga with the occasional color panel.
After Kho gets in a scuffle with his boss, Hidemasa (Tomokazu Miura), who insists that he formalize his makeout sessions with Fuyumi, Koh decides he would rather spend time alone with his motorbike, which excites him more, so he visits nearby Iwashi Island where he meets Miyoko (Kiwako Harada, older sister of Tomoyo Harada who appeared in several Ôbayashi films, including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time). She admires his bike and snaps a few pictures. It's a fleeting encounter, but she makes an impression.
When he returns, Kho takes up with Fuyumi again, but without much enthusiasm.
During a night-time biking excursion, they pass a nude couple on a bike–a possible reference to the cover of Flower Travellin' Band's 1970 album Anywhere. Fuyumi looks shocked, but Koh, inspired, asks her to take off her clothes. This makes her deeply uncomfortable, but she strips down to her lingerie. Later, they have sex, but she cries before and after. Not exactly a great start to a relationship.
On another break that establishes his loner tendencies as much as his unhappiness with Fuyumi, Koh visits a mountain spa, where a nudie cutie catches his eye. When she turns around, he realizes it's Miyoko, aka Miiyo.
She's everything Fuyumi isn't, and he's smitten. She's ebullient, uninhibited, and recalls Jennifer Connelly with her flowing black hair and thick brows. After the bath, he gives her a ride back to the inn where she's staying.
He's finally ready to break up with Fuyumi, which leads to a joust with Hidemasa, a fellow motorbike enthusiast. Kho wins the fight, which Ôbayashi depicts in quick, abstract cuts. Later, he drops by local speakeasy Michikusa to blow off some steam with Ogawa (Ryōichi Takayanagi), his best friend.
To his surprise, they run into Fuyumi, who sings a sad song from the stage. Ogawa doesn't understand why he would break up with such a sweet girl. "All she knew was crying and cooking," Koh sniffs, and indeed, she cries the entire time before running off the stage. Unlike Koh, the widower in Miike's Audition would have been thrilled to meet such a delicate flower.
Finally single, Koh is thrilled to receive a letter and photographs from Miiyo (they would probably be texting today). During their first phone conversation, he gets out his guitar and sings her a song, the first indication that he's also a songwriter, and the second that this film doubles as a musical. Miiyo invites him to visit her island. "I felt very close to this strange girl," he says in voiceover.
That night, Koh dines with her and her grandfather (Takahiro Tamura), who admits that he spoiled her, before joining them for the Obon Festival where the islanders sing and dance in traditional garb to honor the dead.
Back in town with Miiyo, Kho visits Michikusa to find that things have changed. Fuyumi, of all people, is now the house vocalist. No longer dressed in loose, girlish clothing, she wears a fitted red dress and a more sophisticated hairstyle. Miiyo, who shares her interest in singing, goes on stage to perform Koh's song, "Sunshine Girl." (Harada also sings the film's theme song, "Living for Your Love.") Instead of getting jealous, Fuyumi marvels, "She's a great girl." Ôbayashi never explains this shift in confidence, but suggests that the breakup with Koh freed something in her.
Though he once told Miiyo, "Don't be jealous. You’re no match for S3 horsepower," she was, in fact, jealous, and so, unbeknownst to him, she reached out to Ogawa who helped her to secure a midsize license. Now she can go out riding with Koh, Hidemasa, and his other biker friends.
Koh doesn't know what to think about this development, and fears she'll get hurt, though she impresses his biker buddies--"She's one of those motorbike prodigies," Hidemasa enthuses, "people like you just don't have the gift"--as she takes one lap after another. She next sets her sights on a 750cc license.
Though Koh harbors chauvinist tendencies, Miiyo can be reckless. She always wears a helmet, but loves to race around in the rain. Then again, she and Koh live in a damp region. He gets so upset during one excursion, that he slaps her and calls her an idiot. She slaps him back and adds a few punches for good measure. (Fortunately, he only does that once.) "You're gonna die," he laments. Instead, she disappears–taking his bike with her.
Until that point, Ôbayashi has leaned as heavily on the film's action set pieces as its melodrama, but things don't converge the way that combination might suggest. The film isn't a narrative version, for instance, of Jan and Dean's classic 1963 teen-tragedy single "Dead Man's Curve."
In her very good commentary track, Samm Deighan explores the 22-year-old Miiyo's death drive, an understandable reaction, though I didn't see it that way. She's such a bright and lively presence that I didn't sense any desire to die, though the scenario isn't worlds away from David Cronenberg's Crash or Julia Ducournau's Titane. It's hardly that extreme, and there's no body horror, but both Koh and Miiyo relate to their bikes in a sexual way, even if Ôbayashi handles this with more PG-rated subtlety than not.
Not long before Miiyo disappears, for instance, she embraces Koh's bike–in the rain, of course–as if it were a human being or an extension of his body, which isn't too far off the mark (she's also wearing a wet white t-shirt without a bra, bringing yet more sexuality to an-already charged scenario). And when she's racing around, she's in her element to the extent that it's quite possibly a turn-on. If she gets hurt, in other words, it was worth the risk, which isn't the same as wanting to die, though Sekimoto's screenplay suggests that she's going to and that it will have been worth it.
Someone dies at the end of His Motorbike, Her Island, so it's a tragedy for them, but Koh and Miiyo remain intact, or at least that's how I read things.
There's just enough ambiguity to suggest that the final sequence is a daydream or a fantasy, though the film lacks the supernatural phenomena, like possession and time travel, frequently associated with Ôbayashi's work.
Mostly, the film is a good time with fun characters--initial boorishness aside, Koh can be quite the charmer--and that includes Fuyumi and Ogawa, who also come into their own. Biker movies tend to exclude women, to make them bystanders, or to push them to the front as in 1970's Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss with the immortal Meiko Kaji, but Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's unique take splits the difference. It's only when Koh meets a woman who loves bikes as much as he does that he can truly love another human being.
It's fitting then that, once reunited with both Miiyo and his bike, a life dominated by monochrome dreams finally springs to full, vibrant color.
His Motorbike, Her Island is out now on a Cult Epics Blu-ray loaded with extras. Beyond the informative commentary track and illuminating interview, the release includes visual essays on the Japanese biker movie and Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's hometown. Images from Hollywood Theatre (Kiwako Harada), The Criterion Collection (House t-shirt), DVD Beaver (Riki Takeuchi), the IMDb (Takeuchi and Harada), The Cinematheque (Noriko Watanabe), an X/Twitter (Tomokazu Miura with Takeuchi and Harada).
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
