Dispatch #2 from CIFF - Tokyo Sonata (2008, Japanese)

Tokyo Sonata may be the one of the best Kiyoshi Kurosawa film I’ve seen, but it’s not necessarily my favorite. There’s something so . . . normal about this narrative, which is miles away from Doppelganger, or Charisma, or even Bright Future. All of those films had a streak of crazy in them so wide that it was impossible to mistake any of them for a mainstream film. Tokyo Sonata struck me more as a lightweight Shohei Imamura film, with dollops of crazy, but nothing that really managed to take off on its own. (Perhaps not surprisingly, parts of Sonata reminded me of Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.)

That being said, Sonata is generally quite a lovely film. The story of a Japanese salaryman who gets laid off and must, out of pride, protect his family from this knowledge, takes strange (occasionally harkening back to themes from Doppelganger and Bright Future) and dark turns before finally righting itself at the end. It’s an almost eerily lovely film to watch – many frames are so carefully shot, warmly lit, and loaded with meaning that they in fact reminded me of nothing so much as the photography of Jeff Wall. Still, I felt myself hoping for the loopiness of an old-school Kiyoshi Kurosawa, which never quite made itself fully felt, even with a late-stage intrusion from the awesome Koji Yakusho. (Who may just be one of my most favorite actors, ever. I think there’s good reason that he’s spent time with both Imamura and Kurosawa. The man is mad.) Overall, I felt Sonata to be a bit scattershot, perhaps somewhat under-inspired, and occasionally obvious – but I liked it quite a bit. Go figure. Sometimes there’s just room enough for a quirky little family melodrama, even if it may not always be quirky enough for my taste.

A Boy and His Dog (1975, USA)

This was one of those really, really strange films that I saw in high school or perhaps earlier, at the recommendation of my father. Yep, I grew up in a really interesting family. In any case, I remembered only snippets of A Boy and His Dog, but reading Brian Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man recalled it for me – it must be the post-apocalyptic wasteland and callow young heroes that the two narratives share, though I must admit that beyond their relative youth and unflappable (almost) romantic pursuits, Vic and Yorick don’t really have much in common.

A Boy and His Dog takes place in the U.S., or what’s left of it, in 2025, not long after World War IV. Vic (a very young Don Johnson) and his sole companion, a psychic dog named Blood, roam the wasteland that was once Phoenix (no irony intended, I’m sure), searching for food and female companionship, though not always in that order. After meeting a suspiciously lovely young girl, Vic is convinced into following her home, a place far different than the kill-or-be-killed environment that he and Blood inhabit. Or is it?

That’s when things get kind of awesome. The vision of Americana that Harlan Ellison and L.Q. Jones dream up is pretty incredible, and in some scary ways, not entirely unbelievable. (Especially under our current Presidential administration. Maybe all those Kennedys wouldn’t have been so bad.) In any case, with the recent resurgence in post-apocalyptic fiction such as Y and The Road, A Boy and His Dog is most certainly worth a look, particularly for its tongue-in-cheek take on Cold War paranoia and the comically bleak view of what happens to humanity after the (at the time) inevitable happens.

Dispatch #1 From CIFF - Heaven on Earth (2008, Canadian)

It’s a shame that Deepa Mehta directs with such a heavy hand, because the stories she tells are important. In her latest film, she focuses once again on the Indian diaspora, the texture of which she evokes perfectly – the endless relatives packed into a small house, the plain white walls and bright highlights of a Toronto temple – but this time her focus is domestic violence, both mental and physical. Bollywood superstar Preity Zinta plays Chand, an Indian bride married off into a cold family living in a similarly frigid Canadian landscape. From the start, it’s obvious that Chand’s new husband, Rocky (Vanesh Bhardwaj) sees her more as a burden than as a helpmeet, and it’s only a matter of time before his physical aggression towards his bride erupts. Divorced from her support system back in India and unable to fend for herself, Chand begins to cope in a rather unusual way, if indeed it can be said that she is coping.

Stories like this are few and far between in Indian and Indian diasporic filmmaking, which is why I forgive Mehta some of her extravagances – poorly thought-out black-and-white segments, and a somewhat head-scratching departure from the narrative in the second hour – to focus on what she does well. Both Zinta and Bhardwaj are very good, and though the composition of Chand’s new family is a bit uniformly depressing for my taste, Mehta and her cast does a very good job of evoking subtle differences in character. No one here is a caricature of an Indian or an NRI (Non-Resident Indian). It’s a shame that Mehta is not a better stylist of either narration or visuals, but as I’ve mentioned already, she has a careful eye for the details of this particular kind of life. Chand’s Canadian home felt like a real place, and her struggle is sadly all too real as well.

The Chicago International Film Festival

The Chicago International Film Festival is in its 44th year, and I’ve been attending screenings for four of the six seasons I’ve lived in Chicago. For a somewhat eccentric and generally ignored festival, I’ve seen some really interesting films in the past few years - The Taste of Tea, Kontroll, The Machinist, and The Savages are a few highlights – and I’ve come to see the festival as an opportunity to see foreign films, along with a few interesting domestic ones, months ahead of Chicago’s sometimes glacial independent theater release schedule. (Jeebus, sometimes I really miss L.A.)

Ahem. In any case, this year I’m going to try to see a few more films than the 2 or 3 that I usually get to, so over the next two weeks, you should see reviews of movies to watch out for (for good or ill) when they finally hit theaters or rental places near you. So far, I have tickets for Deepa Mehta’s new film, Heaven on Earth, the controversial Italian Mafia movie, Gomorrah* (the author has a hit out on him!), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, and El Norte, a third cinema film I’ve been hearing about for years, and will finally have the opportunity to see. I’m hoping to pick up a few more tickets as I go, but I’ve unfortunately already missed a few things, like Wendy and Lucy and The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, that I really wanted to see. Such is the nature of festivals, I suppose.

*Sadly, I missed Gommorah, due to a wicked hangover. It happens.