Apr 30, 2014

4th May 2014; Agnes Varda's CLEO from 5 to 7



Cléo from 5 to 7
A film by Agnes Varda
1962/ France / Runtime: 90 mins
4th May 2014; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater


This movie shows us Cléo, a beautiful  French singer, who is afraid of getting the result of of a test from her doctor. She is counting out the minutes until she learns the results from tests. That time she spends from 5 to 7 in the evening is told  almost in real time on celluloid by director  Agnes Varda. 

Despite the dire premonitions that point to the titular heroine's grueling psychological marathon, Cléo from 5 to 7 moves with grace from one emotional extreme to the next. Whenever Cleo  finds herself drifting too far into melancholic self-pity, she blithely puts on a devil-may-care grin—most stunningly in the penultimate scene in the park when she sashays Marilyn Monroe-style down stairs in the Parc Montsouris in order to face her impending diagnosis.We follow her for two hours while she cruises through the streets of Paris.


Director Varda quietly follows Cleo’s  wanderings about Paris, but not in the conventional discrete fashion of Hollywood montage sequences.  Instead, as Richard Roud has said “Little is omitted, there are no ellipses.  The streets and cafes of Paris, the taxis and the cinema, are seen as they really are and as they appear through the eyes of a woman who is tracked by death.”  

This is a film whose debt to Varda’s life as a photographer is always immanent: Paris has rarely been photographed with such clinical precision.  Paradoxically, this is a relentless first-person narrative.

Hers is not a naturalistic, hostile universe, it is a universe which simply is, and will remain, after Cleo leaves it, and it is the need to speak this deep truth, to tell of the way that the universe shrugs its shoulders and says “eh...” even to our greatest personal upheavals, which is the philosophical foundation of Cleo from 5 to 7.  It is a truth that we, like Cleo, can never realize until we are confronted with a challenge to our own existence so total that the universe’s quiet disinterest in us can be made this plain.



Agnès Varda


Agnès Varda was born on May 30, 1928 in Brussels, Belgium. Agnes Varda’s remarkable life behind the camera has always been that of an exception.  As a member of the otherwise male preserve of the French New Wave, she has always stood out, sometimes unwillingly; by mere virtue of her gender, she was a symbol for feminists in the European film industries, and with her renaissance-woman production economy (she is often the producer-screenwriter-director of her films, as well as occasionally) she exemplifies the complete auteur.



In the four decades since Cléo from 5 to 7, Varda has directed many films, and created at least three other esteemed masterpieces: 1977's One Sings, the Other Doesn't, which is the overtly feminist message movie Cléo from 5 to 7 is often given credit for being; 1985's Vagabond, one of the key art-house films of the '80s; and recently, 2000's The Gleaners and I, a widely lauded essay film somewhat in the style of Chris Marker. In a way, Marker was probably always the Nouvelle Vague/"Left Bank" filmmaker that Varda perhaps most strongly resembled, in their shared love for the power of photography, their completely unforced attitudes toward interpretation, and a warm sense of cinematic playfulness. One can't help but compare Marker and Varda to the curious and rambunctious kittens, a significantly entrenched motif in Marker's canon, in Cléo's apartment. Those kittens would grow older and direct the world-wise A Grin Without a Cat and The Gleaners and I, but Cléo from 5 to 7 serves as a reminder that even the most cunning, ruthlessly intellectual filmmakers can also create wondrous playgrounds, so long as they're in touch with their own giddy paradoxes.

Apr 1, 2014

6th April 2014; Koreeda's STILL WALKING


Still Walking
A film by Hirokazu Koreeda
2008 / Japan / 115 minutes/ col
6th April 2014; 5.45pm
Perks Mini Theater
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.in/


A family haunted by a long-dead son gathers to remember him but spends most of the day consumed by old resentments and tensions in this quiet, compelling Japanese drama. The story, covering 24 hours, centers on the Yokoyama clan, whose first-born died rescuing a drowning boy. The dear departed, Junpei, is very much present as the three generations pass the time preparing food, eating and talking, with the children playing, watching and listening. There's a brief trip to the cemetery and a few other outside scenes, but most of the film takes place in the grandparents' house.

The central figure is Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), Junpei's brother and an unemployed art restorer. He's resented by his gruff father (Yoshio Harada), a retired physician who had hoped Ryota would study medicine, as Junpei did. To make matters worse, Ryota has married a widow with a 10-year-old son.


 Also present are the matriarch (Kirin Kiki), who, like her husband, measures Ryota against the impossible standard of his brother; Ryota's sister (played by the single-named and squeaky-voiced actress You), who would like to move her family into the parents' house; and the siblings' children.

 

The compositions are graceful but not static, and  director Koreeda is a careful observer of small things.The director, Koreeda has said that, though the story was inspired by the deaths of his parents, he hoped to make a film "brimming with life." He's succeeded. 



If anyone can be considered an heir of the great Japanese  film maker Yasujiro Ozu, it might be Hirokazu Kore-Eda, the writer and director of "Still Walking." In "Maborosi" (1995), "After Life" (1998) and "Nobody Knows" (2004), his first three features and now in this film, he has produced profoundly empathetic films about human feelings. He sees intensely and tenderly into his characters. Like Ozu, he pays meticulous attention to composition and camera placement. Acting as his own editor, he doesn't cut for immediately effect, but for the subtle gathering of power. His actors look as if they could be such people as they portray.






Hirokazu Koreeda

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda was born in Tokyo in 1962. Originally intended to be a novelist, but after graduating from Waseda University in 1987 went on to become an assistant director at TV Man Union. Sneaked off set to film _Lessons from a Calf (1991)_. His first feature, Maboroshi no hikari (1995), based on a Teru Miyamoto novel and drawn from his own experiences whilst filming _August Without Him (1994)_, won jury prizes at Venice and Chicago. The main themes of his oeuvre include memory and loss, death and loss, and the intersection of documentary and fictional narratives.


In a short period of time, Hirozaku Koreeda has gained a solid reputation as one of the most significant figures of contemporary Japanese cinema. His oeuvre is currently comprised of eight films including his television documentary work with TV Man Union, Inc. and his narrative films (After Life, Maborosi) which reflect the contemplative style and pacing of such luminaries as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang. He has become a cinematographic tightrope walker who almost unnoticeably switches between fictitious and real territories, between narration and invention, the private and the public.