The first few seconds of Celine Song’s decades-spanning, poignantly lived-in debut feature, Past Lives, are about assumptions. As cinematographer Shabier Kirschner’s camera slowly pushes in on our three protagonists—Nora (Greta Lee), Hae-sung (Teo Yoo), and Arthur (John Magaro)—sitting at a bar together, an off-screen couple remarks on what could possibly be the relation between them. One of them conjectures that Nora and Hae-sung are a couple, while Arthur is their tour guide. The other thinks that Nora and Arthur are the couple in question, while Hae-sung is their Korean friend. All the while, Kirschner’s camera continues to unwaveringly move forward, until Nora is the only person in the centre of the frame, her face laced with both a sense of mild excitement and deep uncertainty. The answer to the couple’s inquiry, as it turns out, is far more complex than either of them could have anticipated.
As the film jumps back 24 years, we’re thrown into Seoul, South Korea, where we promptly learn that Nora (then called Na-young) and Hae-sung were childhood friends with an unusually close bond, to the degree where both their parents would eventually set up a date for both of them to further strengthen it. With a relative economy of narrative, Song patiently traces the innocence of a burgeoning young relationship set against the backdrop of the apartment-laden cityscapes of Seoul, one steadily formed in the backseats of sedans, stone installations in parks, and the open dirt fields behind an elementary school building. Such stylistic modesty, tangible attention to detail, and atmospheric patience remain consistent throughout the film’s layered yet ostensibly simple narrative. It’s here we get the first taste of how this film chooses to elegantly move through months’ worth of development, change, and time. (...)
With an understated commitment to her already established sense of atmosphere, Song proceeds to distinctly separate her two protagonists through the details surrounding their individual locations halfway across the globe. Seoul and New York both serve as bustling urban centres for their respective countries, and it’s once again in things like the minutiae of the apartments Nora and Hae-sung live in, the people they meet, and the career paths they take, that we get to immerse ourselves in the divergent paths on which they’ve grown. (...)
For such a tightly driven character drama, Song’s primary cast of three faithfully plays their way through the emotional intricacies of her deceptively straightforward character dynamics. Lee, for one, plays Nora ineffably and with great immediacy, down to all of her intensely human contradictions in both identity and romance. With a deeply lived-in portrayal, Lee understands that Nora’s American identity as tied to Arthur, alongside her Korean identity as tied to Hae-sung, seems to have created an earth-shaking reckoning with her own upbringing and adulthood. It’s astonishingly difficult to emotionally balance Nora’s commitments and progress in her career with her lingering vestiges of youthful excitement and longing, but Lee executes that tightrope walk with significant grace.
As the film jumps back 24 years, we’re thrown into Seoul, South Korea, where we promptly learn that Nora (then called Na-young) and Hae-sung were childhood friends with an unusually close bond, to the degree where both their parents would eventually set up a date for both of them to further strengthen it. With a relative economy of narrative, Song patiently traces the innocence of a burgeoning young relationship set against the backdrop of the apartment-laden cityscapes of Seoul, one steadily formed in the backseats of sedans, stone installations in parks, and the open dirt fields behind an elementary school building. Such stylistic modesty, tangible attention to detail, and atmospheric patience remain consistent throughout the film’s layered yet ostensibly simple narrative. It’s here we get the first taste of how this film chooses to elegantly move through months’ worth of development, change, and time. (...)
With an understated commitment to her already established sense of atmosphere, Song proceeds to distinctly separate her two protagonists through the details surrounding their individual locations halfway across the globe. Seoul and New York both serve as bustling urban centres for their respective countries, and it’s once again in things like the minutiae of the apartments Nora and Hae-sung live in, the people they meet, and the career paths they take, that we get to immerse ourselves in the divergent paths on which they’ve grown. (...)
For such a tightly driven character drama, Song’s primary cast of three faithfully plays their way through the emotional intricacies of her deceptively straightforward character dynamics. Lee, for one, plays Nora ineffably and with great immediacy, down to all of her intensely human contradictions in both identity and romance. With a deeply lived-in portrayal, Lee understands that Nora’s American identity as tied to Arthur, alongside her Korean identity as tied to Hae-sung, seems to have created an earth-shaking reckoning with her own upbringing and adulthood. It’s astonishingly difficult to emotionally balance Nora’s commitments and progress in her career with her lingering vestiges of youthful excitement and longing, but Lee executes that tightrope walk with significant grace.
Yoo, meanwhile, portrays Hae-sung as a man whose devotion and vulnerability, even in the face of growing cultural distance between him and Nora, makes for a compelling hopeless-romantic protagonist, especially one with a subtly refreshing dose of self-awareness. Magaro walks a sharply fine line as Arthur, playing a man who compassionately allows Nora to parse through her longing for Hae-sung out of a refusal to submit to a clichéd, forbidding sense of envy. However, he understandably finds himself confronted with his own place in their marriage. He’s now facing a new side of Nora through a fresh understanding of her cultural roots, all of which are filtered through one seemingly sporadic and ephemeral man from her past.
~ Past Lives (FR)
The early 1970s was a beautiful and traumatic time for cinema. The density of really interesting films seems higher than at any other time since. Being a child of the 1960s, there were two films I remember watching on television that really shook me up, stirred my senses, played with my little mind, and left a lifelong impression. They were unlike anything I’d seen before and both had unexpected endings that shocked me to the core.
The first was Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man and the second was Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, both made in 1973 and originally released together as a double feature! Don’t Look Now is distinguished by being an intriguing supernatural mystery bracketed between the most harrowing, intensely affecting opening sequence, and one of the most nightmarish finales. Anyone who’s watched the film won’t need me to remind them because these scenes can never be unseen! (...)
The film is based on the 1971 short story from the collection Not After Midnight by Daphne Du Maurier, the author who’d already provided source material for several classic movies—the best-known being Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963). Although faithful to the central plot and core theme, things changed dramatically in the transition from page to screen.
The well-to-do but sad couple in Du Maurier’s original story are dealing with grief over the loss of their child. In that version, their daughter has died of meningitis prior to the start of the story. (...)
The death of the daughter, this time by accidental drowning, is a montage masterclass and a truly traumatising piece of cinema. It’s difficult viewing for anyone and overwhelming for any parent. The way in which John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) ‘sees’ the impending tragedy building, almost as if he’s outside the reality of the film and watching it with us, suggests he has some psychic power straight off the bat. This is held back as a late reveal in the original story but here it’s as if Baxter has an insight into the director’s foreshadowing. When we start to understand this, our approach to the film is altered and it becomes less of a personal drama and more of a mystery thriller with supernatural clues. The viewer is sucked into dialogue with the work and invited to interrogate it scene by scene on both an intellectual and emotional level.
~ Don't Look Now (FR)
However, there is one filmmaker who was perhaps even better than Bergman at communicating life’s greatest questions through stillness: Yasujirō Ozu. There is something completely transcendental about Ozu’s filmmaking style, and undoubtedly his static camera has much to do with that. It creates a serene tranquillity that few other visual artists have ever been able to match. And due to the utterly unique aspect of this stasis, many have questioned what the stillness in Ozu’s cinema symbolises.
So what is the absence of movement in Ozu’s work conveying? While it could be nothing at all, many have reflected on how the static nature of Ozu’s camerawork reflects his thematic intentions. In his book, Transcendental Cinema, Paul Schrader dedicates a lot of thought to understanding the stillness in Ozu’s cinema. Primarily, he describes it as mirroring tenets of Zen art, such as mu, meaning negation: “The basic principle of Zen art is the first koan of Zen, mu, the concept of negation, emptiness, and void. Emptiness, silence, and stillness are positive elements in Zen art, and represent presence rather than the absence of something.”
The first was Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man and the second was Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, both made in 1973 and originally released together as a double feature! Don’t Look Now is distinguished by being an intriguing supernatural mystery bracketed between the most harrowing, intensely affecting opening sequence, and one of the most nightmarish finales. Anyone who’s watched the film won’t need me to remind them because these scenes can never be unseen! (...)
The film is based on the 1971 short story from the collection Not After Midnight by Daphne Du Maurier, the author who’d already provided source material for several classic movies—the best-known being Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and The Birds (1963). Although faithful to the central plot and core theme, things changed dramatically in the transition from page to screen.
The well-to-do but sad couple in Du Maurier’s original story are dealing with grief over the loss of their child. In that version, their daughter has died of meningitis prior to the start of the story. (...)
The death of the daughter, this time by accidental drowning, is a montage masterclass and a truly traumatising piece of cinema. It’s difficult viewing for anyone and overwhelming for any parent. The way in which John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) ‘sees’ the impending tragedy building, almost as if he’s outside the reality of the film and watching it with us, suggests he has some psychic power straight off the bat. This is held back as a late reveal in the original story but here it’s as if Baxter has an insight into the director’s foreshadowing. When we start to understand this, our approach to the film is altered and it becomes less of a personal drama and more of a mystery thriller with supernatural clues. The viewer is sucked into dialogue with the work and invited to interrogate it scene by scene on both an intellectual and emotional level.
~ Don't Look Now (FR)
However, there is one filmmaker who was perhaps even better than Bergman at communicating life’s greatest questions through stillness: Yasujirō Ozu. There is something completely transcendental about Ozu’s filmmaking style, and undoubtedly his static camera has much to do with that. It creates a serene tranquillity that few other visual artists have ever been able to match. And due to the utterly unique aspect of this stasis, many have questioned what the stillness in Ozu’s cinema symbolises.
So what is the absence of movement in Ozu’s work conveying? While it could be nothing at all, many have reflected on how the static nature of Ozu’s camerawork reflects his thematic intentions. In his book, Transcendental Cinema, Paul Schrader dedicates a lot of thought to understanding the stillness in Ozu’s cinema. Primarily, he describes it as mirroring tenets of Zen art, such as mu, meaning negation: “The basic principle of Zen art is the first koan of Zen, mu, the concept of negation, emptiness, and void. Emptiness, silence, and stillness are positive elements in Zen art, and represent presence rather than the absence of something.”
If we look at Ozu’s most renowned work Tokyo Story (1953), which professional directors voted as the best film of all time in Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll, we can see how the composition of shots reflects this line of thinking. Ozu lingers for long periods in empty spaces, with a still camera and a silent background: an empty living room, a lone chair, and an abandoned street.
These objects take on a subtly portentous significance. They defy the traditional rules of filmmaking, rules which Ozu essentially rewrote. There’s no apparent reason for Ozu to cut to a vase, a tree, or the skyline—so why does he do it? Therefore, if we want to comprehend the importance of stillness in Ozu’s cinema, we must first understand his use of the pillow shot.
He calls these innovative changes to form “pillow-shots” because he judges them to be similar to the pillow-words. Also known as makurakotoba, it’s a stylistic trait of classical Japanese poetry from the Heian Period, stock epithets and adjectives that tend to serve a decorative function rather than modifying the meaning of the nouns to which they are appended. This perfectly describes the pillow shot: they serve no functional purpose. They don’t bridge to a new scene, nor do they reveal the location of subsequent action. Instead, they are merely moments of total stillness, opportunities to reflect on life as it passes us by.
The city and the trees. These are the first two things we see in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023): a wide shot of Tokyo at dawn, and an angle looking up at a leafy canopy against a dark blue sky. The former feels like an establishing shot, the latter like a mental image—fitting, since we next see the protagonist, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), opening his eyes in his modest home, awakened by the sounds of a solitary street sweeper outside. Perfect Days lives, in essence, between these two tableaux. It’s a city symphony about a man who appreciates the patches of nature and light he can find in his concrete world, and it’s a film about how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.
Perfect Days also happens to be a movie about bathrooms. Its impetus was an invitation that Wenders received in 2022 to visit Tokyo Toilet, a collaborative project to build seventeen unique, high-tech public bathrooms—each conceived by an acclaimed architect, artist, or designer—in the ward of Shibuya. The endeavor’s original aim was to highlight Japanese hospitality in time for the 2020 Olympic Games, which, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, ended up being delayed until the following year, when they were held without spectators. After being tasked by Tokyo Toilet founder Koji Yanai with developing a new way to showcase the bathrooms, Takuma Takasaki—a writer, producer, and award-winning advertising creative director who shares credit with Wenders for the Perfect Days script—reached out to see if the director might be interested in making a series of short documentaries about them. (...)
Yet there’s nothing rushed or undernourished about Perfect Days. In fact, it might be the most patient film Wenders has ever made. The camera takes its time lingering on Hirayama’s face and his methodical, graceful movements, watching him as he quietly goes about his daily routine and his job as a bathroom cleaner. He wakes up every morning, spritzes his flowers, puts on his Tokyo Toilet jumpsuit, drinks his breakfast, and drives his cramped van through the streets, listening to old cassette tapes of the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and Otis Redding. At each stop, he shows dedication to his work: he wipes down every corner of the bathrooms, diligently cleans the retractable bidets, and even uses a little mirror to ensure he has covered all the tough-to-get spots.
It would be difficult to imagine a less “cinematic” subject. Perfect Days has very little story or traditional character development. Instead, it has Yakusho—a revered Japanese actor who has played everything from cops to samurais, from frustrated office workers to murderous madmen—portraying that most elusive of figures: a contented and peaceable human being. Hirayama doesn’t say much, and his face betrays no particular inner unrest. Instead, he works, he observes, he smiles, he glows. The actor conveys happiness, but he doesn’t forsake the mystery required to keep us captivated.
During his lunch breaks, Hirayama looks up at the trees, fascinated by the delicate dance of sunlight on the leaves, snapping photos of it with an old film camera. A title at the end of the movie defines the Japanese word komorebi, which refers to the way light and shadow filter through foliage—something that “only exists once, at that moment.” Hirayama’s black-and-white pictures, which he edits ruthlessly and keeps tucked away in meticulously organized boxes, all seem to be attempts to capture this impermanent phenomenon. He’s an artist, but we don’t sense that he will ever do anything with these photographs. They themselves are, in a way, impermanent. In the film’s periodic “dream installation” passages, orchestrated by Donata Wenders (the director’s wife and an artist in her own right), Hirayama’s photos are interspersed with images from his daily life—creating the only moments when the film seems to leave the material present. But unlike most dream sequences in cinema, these do not offer any clues about our hero’s psyche. If anything, they reflect a mind at ease with itself.
~ Perfect Days: Where the Light Comes Through (Criterion)
Perfect Days also happens to be a movie about bathrooms. Its impetus was an invitation that Wenders received in 2022 to visit Tokyo Toilet, a collaborative project to build seventeen unique, high-tech public bathrooms—each conceived by an acclaimed architect, artist, or designer—in the ward of Shibuya. The endeavor’s original aim was to highlight Japanese hospitality in time for the 2020 Olympic Games, which, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, ended up being delayed until the following year, when they were held without spectators. After being tasked by Tokyo Toilet founder Koji Yanai with developing a new way to showcase the bathrooms, Takuma Takasaki—a writer, producer, and award-winning advertising creative director who shares credit with Wenders for the Perfect Days script—reached out to see if the director might be interested in making a series of short documentaries about them. (...)
Yet there’s nothing rushed or undernourished about Perfect Days. In fact, it might be the most patient film Wenders has ever made. The camera takes its time lingering on Hirayama’s face and his methodical, graceful movements, watching him as he quietly goes about his daily routine and his job as a bathroom cleaner. He wakes up every morning, spritzes his flowers, puts on his Tokyo Toilet jumpsuit, drinks his breakfast, and drives his cramped van through the streets, listening to old cassette tapes of the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and Otis Redding. At each stop, he shows dedication to his work: he wipes down every corner of the bathrooms, diligently cleans the retractable bidets, and even uses a little mirror to ensure he has covered all the tough-to-get spots.
It would be difficult to imagine a less “cinematic” subject. Perfect Days has very little story or traditional character development. Instead, it has Yakusho—a revered Japanese actor who has played everything from cops to samurais, from frustrated office workers to murderous madmen—portraying that most elusive of figures: a contented and peaceable human being. Hirayama doesn’t say much, and his face betrays no particular inner unrest. Instead, he works, he observes, he smiles, he glows. The actor conveys happiness, but he doesn’t forsake the mystery required to keep us captivated.
During his lunch breaks, Hirayama looks up at the trees, fascinated by the delicate dance of sunlight on the leaves, snapping photos of it with an old film camera. A title at the end of the movie defines the Japanese word komorebi, which refers to the way light and shadow filter through foliage—something that “only exists once, at that moment.” Hirayama’s black-and-white pictures, which he edits ruthlessly and keeps tucked away in meticulously organized boxes, all seem to be attempts to capture this impermanent phenomenon. He’s an artist, but we don’t sense that he will ever do anything with these photographs. They themselves are, in a way, impermanent. In the film’s periodic “dream installation” passages, orchestrated by Donata Wenders (the director’s wife and an artist in her own right), Hirayama’s photos are interspersed with images from his daily life—creating the only moments when the film seems to leave the material present. But unlike most dream sequences in cinema, these do not offer any clues about our hero’s psyche. If anything, they reflect a mind at ease with itself.
~ Perfect Days: Where the Light Comes Through (Criterion)
Christy Hall’s two-hander directorial debut, Daddio, reaches for the poetic grace that once animated the theatre pictures of Louis Malle and Robert Altman 30 and 40 years ago. Though in the end it’s not quite up there with My Dinner with Andre (1981), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), or Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), we revel in its suggestive aroma anyway.
The conceit isn’t anything novel: after landing at JFK, on her way up the 678 and then off to the 495 for Midtown, Girlie (Dakota Johnson) starts chatting with her cabbie (Sean Penn), and slowly but surely, like in a psychoanalysis session, she pours her deepest secrets out from her gut like she’d never have with friends and family. It might not sound like much, but the two leads’ charms stay with you, and their dynamic keeps turning corners you didn’t know were there, and before long you may find yourself forgetting your initial scepticism towards the minimalist premise.
Playing Christy’s self-insertion, Dakota Johnson (Cha Cha Real Smooth) is at her most sensually sensitive and emotionally layered. At 34, she may not be bringing to her character the same richness and vulnerability that Julianne Moore or Sissy Spacek did at a similar age—she doesn’t entirely give herself over to the camera—but she has the sureness in her screen presence to suggest that she’s capable of much more. As Girlie the blondie, her radiance is warm and musky. When she speaks and gestures, she’s in the air—afloat, airborne. Even in press interviews, you feel soothed by her velvety timbre. Yet her goody-two-shoes breeziness isn’t soft and sultry like Marlene Dietrich. Returning from a visit to her sister in their Oklahoma hometown, Girlie’s self-control doesn’t translate into the sneering aloofness of the classic femme fatales. The cabbie tries to elicit a conversation and doesn’t draw a blank. “You can handle yourself,” he says, deducing from her confidence with a vulgar old-shoe like him.
As Clark, Sean Penn, with his friendly-neighbourhood tenor we’ve come to expect of old-school city cabbies rotting in their front seats, emanates in his breaths the smell of garlic and tobacco. Emerging onto the scene some four decades ago with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Penn is one of those New Hollywood method actors who prided themselves on their masculinity. In Daddio, he taps his fingers on the wheel and plays the tunes in his head, then seconds later he’s off rambling about getting screwed over by the apps and running on empty with his veteran life as a taxi driver. Girlie wasn’t that put off by him. For her, his vulgar mannerisms and gravelly voice are what’s enticing her, but she draws a line, too. (Apparently, she has a pet peeve about men around her using the word “panties”.)
Daddio isn’t feminist in the traditional sense. It’s not only contemplating passive misogyny and a woman’s unease towards masculine crudeness, but also her confusion over her temptations by these men who sexualize or try to get close to her. Christy Hall has reached down into her feelings, unresolved and self-contradictory as they may be, and projected them onto Girlie (she even has her born a blonde Oklahoman like herself). With Dakota’s character as the angle through which she examines her sexual and physical opposites, Christy tries treating them with the respect she has for herself and looking at them in the way they actually are—whatever’s behind their gregarious swagger. She cherishes knowing them, relating to them as fellow persons, rather than a contact in your social media.
As it generally goes in wars of the sexes, the process of forming mutual respect with your rival is one of gradually letting down your guard, piece by piece, quid pro quo. As is clear from the outset, both characters are troubled by their dissatisfactions in their relationships, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re perfect for each other: the young Girlie’s trapped in a problematic relationship with a married man by her own Oedipus complex, and the older Clark needs Platonic satisfaction over having been of use for Girlie. So dating philosophies were thrown around, and personal secrets were exchanged, and in between the lines you detect their insecurities before they’re revealed for you: Clark has a sarcastic routine about being a “Clark” or a “Vinny”, and Girlie finds the Boolean certainty of computer science reassuring, and so on. And they let you in on it, too. The film gradually builds up the momentum for the emotional discharge at the end, so when it comes it not only isn’t mawkish enough to cloy you, but it surprises you and chokes you up in a way that you couldn’t have predicted, especially with how primal Girlie’s exploration of her traumas went.
~ Daddio (FR)
Some memories are best left alone, but one doesn’t know that until one tries to relive them, sometimes to great disappointment. A book or movie that occupies a hallowed place in the mind from when it was first encountered in childhood or young adulthood may not be as wonderful when reencountered decades later. The times have changed, as has oneself. I have deliberately not rewatched Il postino for this reason, preferring to remember it as I saw it with the young woman who would become my wife, when it was a romantic and political touchstone that helped bring us together. Perhaps the movie would be as wonderful now as then, but why risk it?
It was a gamble, then, to rewatch Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998), which I first saw when it came out in theaters. I remembered the plot well enough, about a way station through which the newly dead transit on their way to eternity. A small staff oversees the operation, which appears to be a bit underfunded, judging by the spartan rooms, the aging infrastructure, and the lack of heat, evidenced by how everyone is bundled up inside as the weather turns to winter. The dead are told that they have a few days to choose one brief memory from their lives, which the staff will recreate on film, to serve as the infinite loop that they will see in perpetuity.
I loved the movie back then for its melancholy and its measured descent into an emotional revelation, the profundity of which lingered, and the welcome news is that I still do. If anything, the movie feels more insightful to me now, two decades later and after the passing of my mother, than it did at a time when I did not yet know death. Part of the magic of the movie comes from its balancing of philosophical questions about death, memory, and film with a story and style that are understated in tone and design. The Hollywood version would probably involve a soaring orchestral score, exaggerated emotions, and an explanation of the mechanics of the premise. After Life—Kore-eda’s second fiction feature, which brought him international acclaim and helped pave the way for later masterpieces such as Shoplifters (2018)—is resolutely not that film. It has little music beyond that provided by an off-tune house band composed of the way station’s workers; just one emotional outburst, which involves only some kicking of snow, alone, by Shiori (Erika Oda), an upset eighteen-year-old member of the staff; and no attempt to justify the world presented. (...)
One could ask all kinds of things about the functioning of this process: Who’s doing the recording, and where are the cameras? How extensive are the archives? Instead of a god, is there only an archivist or archivists, working endlessly without judgment? But these are questions that After Life quite happily declines to answer. Kore-eda refuses to get bogged down in unnecessary details that might be interesting in world-building but that are extraneous to his central focus on character and feeling, as well as on the decision-making that has enormous consequences for individuals.
~ After Life: In Memoriam (Criterion)
***
[ed. For whenever these get to my streaming service. Also like to see more Wong Kar-Wai movies (and Christopher Doyle cinematography): 2046; The Grandmaster; Chungking Express; Fallen Angels. See also: The Movies of Wong Kar Wai, Ranked from Worst to Best (IndieWire).]
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