Reel Frontier
by Chris Dashiell

I get jealous when I read accounts of big city film festivals. All those interesting movies - and I probably will never see most of them. Well, there is an annual film fest here in the naked pueblo - a modest affair, no competition, no stars, mostly short works from regional talent. Film snob that I am, I use the opportunity to watch the few features or interesting revivals that make it here from the wider world. The pickings this year were slimmer than usual, but the three screenings I chose to attend were worth my time.

This year's visual stunner was Taboo, veteran director Nagisa Oshima's subversive samurai drama. The film's spatial sense, and the movement of the camera, is majestic, classical. The dominant colors are brown to dark blue, with most of the exterior action taking place at night. I mention the style first because Oshima's ability to transport the eye to an unfamiliar world is the key to the film's power. The story and the words are like ornaments along the movie's edge - the real meanings are in the images, and then only hinted at, like a partially deciphered code.

At a school for samurai warriors in the mid-19th century, young applicants are tested and chosen by the commander and his captain, Hijikata (played by Beat Takeshi). The two fighters that are chosen are Tashiro (Tadanobu Asano) and a long-haired, androgynous-looking youth named Kano (Ryuehi Matsuda). Although Tashiro and several others in the school become obsessed with Kano as an object of desire, vying with each other to be his lover, Kano himself seems uninterested - neither welcoming their advances nor rejecting them. As the story proceeds, the stirring of these erotic impulses in the midst of a society governed by a strict, repressive code of honor creates unpredictable complications.

The precise visual style is combined with a dry sense of humor to make Taboo an unsettling experience. One can't help but imagine Oshima's delight at having action icon Takeshi play a man bemused, against his will, by the spell apparently cast on his warriors by a pretty boy. Although Takeshi's character doesn't "lean that way," as the film puts it, he finds himself treating Kano differently than the others, as does his commander.

The enigmatic young samurai is at the center of various subplots. In one, an incompetent older warrior almost gets them both killed. In another, a lieutenant is ordered to introduce him to women by taking him to a brothel - instead, Kano interprets this as an amorous advance by the lieutenant. Mysteries hover about him - Why has he come to the school? Why doesn't he cut his hair short like the others? Who is responsible for the murder of one of his lovers?

In the first half of the film, Oshima uses occasional scene titles to break up the story into segments, creating a distancing effect while emphasizing the classical flavor. In the mean time, the story sets us up to accept the rigid mores of the shogunate as the normal condition of public life, but contradicts this assumption with every private expression of desire. At times the film seems like a sardonic parody of samurai films, daring you to look past its deadpan take on honor and courage.

The critics have tended to interpret the film in the dullest and most literal terms - as a statement that homosexual desire has an inevitably destructive effect on military and social discipline. Kano is seen as a conscious instigator of chaos. Perhaps Oshima wants that mistake in perception to be possible, as a sly challenge to the viewer. But I think if you pay attention to the film's last scene, and its multiple points of view, you will see that the meaning is almost exactly the opposite of what the reviewers think. The secret of Taboo is about hatred, not seduction, violence, not sex - the hidden desire for revenge in a man, and in the social order.

The always provocative Oshima has received a mixed reception for this film, his first in fourteen years. Samurai film lovers seem to hate it. Devotees of the psychological approach to character react with confusion, since anything beneath the elaborate social mask is only hinted at. Count me among the film's fans. It seems to me a work of extravagant beauty - I fell into its world without resistance, was enveloped by its strange, heated atmosphere, and left the theater in a contented daze.

The big hit among the reissues was Rififi (1955), Jules Dassin's French heist film, in a beautifully restored print with new subtitles. Fleeing the blacklist, crime film veteran Dassin took an offer to adapt a potboiler by Auguste Le Breton ("rififi" is the author's made-up slang for big trouble), and the result was this exciting hybrid of American toughness and Gallic cool.

Aging criminal Tony (Jean Servais), back in Paris after a stint in prison, is approached by his old friends Jo (Carl Mohner) and Mario (Robert Manuel) to help them pull off a small jewelry heist. After taking revenge on the dame (Marie Sabouret) who had betrayed him, Tony ups the ante on the job, turning it into a major operation, and calling on the help of a safecracker from Milan named Cesar (played by Dassin himself, under the name of Perlo Vita).

The four men case the joint and figure out how to neutralize the alarm system. Then, in an amazing 33-minute long sequence, without dialogue or music, they carry out their plan, drilling a hole from the floor above, entering the store by a rope, and slowly cracking the difficult safe. I don't know if I've ever witnessed an audience being that quiet for that long. Dassin creates marvelous tension, and it is fascinating, and a bit humorous, to see how totally coordinated the four crooks have to be in order to succeed.

Of course, in the movies circa 1955, crime still didn't pay, so the rest of the film is about how the best plans go awry, in this case through the interference of a rival gang. The final sequence, with Tony racing against time to save Jo's kidnapped child, is expertly paced and edited, with a great high-speed ending - Tony wounded, in his car with the kid, who is oblivious to the danger, frantic point of view shots showing Tony's impending loss of control.

Rififi's view of women, the whole tough-guy misogyny act from film noir, is exaggerated to the point where it's just laughable. The fedoras and the cute gangster nicknames and the sultry nightclub singer doing the title number - it was probably over-stylized even for its time. On the other hand, it has Servais, with his noble, sour, weather-beaten face. The performance is hypnotizing - he carries the film past all improbabilities. And Dassin's direction is admirably taut. I think it's his best work.

There had been plenty of previous heist films. John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle had set the tone five years before. But Rififi's gritty sense of professionalism, and its nostalgia, became the source of countless imitations. There's nothing deep about it. It's just entertainment. But in that respect it does its job better than anything currently in theaters. To see an almost 50-year old black and white film on the big screen, and enjoy the hell out of it, and realize that everyone else was enjoying the hell out of it too - well, let's just say I was in heaven.

Obstinately staring into the heart of darkness, Roy Andersson's Songs From the Second Floor offers the bleakest - and weirdest - vision of the modern predicament I have seen in many a year. The audience was quiet again - this time in shock. The film consists of a series of discrete episodes, done in long-to-medium shot, all except two or three of them with a stationary camera. Although there are recurring characters, there is no linear organization to the scenes. The locations - bedrooms, offices, a lonely railroad station, a taxi - all have a seedy, disquieting atmosphere about them.

Gradually, a few facts come to light. Society is in a state of collapse. The markets have failed catastrophically. Long-time employees lose their jobs; roving gangs beat up strangers for no reason; everyone is trying to leave the city, resulting in a monstrous traffic jam; crowds of people walk down the street in a line, each one flagellating the person in front of him.

One distinct character emerges - a morose, overweight businessman (Lars Nordh), who has burnt down his furniture store to collect the insurance, wanders through the chaos in a stupor. He visits one of his sons in a psychiatric ward - the young man used to be a poet but gave up in despair and now doesn't speak. The father becomes enraged at the son and has to be dragged away himself by men in white coats. In later scenes he runs into the ghost of a man he once cheated, and gets involved with a huckster who is trying to get rich by selling life-size crucifixes.

Describing such elements doesn't adequately convey the film's mood and method. Songs From the Second Floor is about the loss of humanity in a world without a spiritual dimension. A recurring statement by one of the mental patients - "Jesus was killed because he was a good man" - is contrasted with the scheming of the crucifix salesman and the venality of the church. In one scene, a little girl is interviewed by a room full of old people. Later, we see her led out blindfolded. On the left are the priests, on the right the citizenry - all dressed up for the occasion. The girl is led to a platform on the edge of a pit, and then a woman walks up behind her and shoves her in. Later, in what looks like a hotel bar, the celebrants drink and talk about how they've done all they could - the scene is punctuated by graphic vomiting.

No, it's not a light comedy. But Andersson does employ black humor and mordant satire. A magician makes a horrible mistake during his "sawing-a-man-in-half" routine. A group of financiers meet at a long table, discussing the dire financial situation - eventually we become aware that a gypsy with a crystal ball is sitting there with them. A military ceremony is held in a hospital to honor a great general on his birthday. The general sits in a crib, drooling and shaking the bars. His bedpan is changed during the ceremony.

This is the first feature-length film in 25 years for the veteran Swedish writer/director Andersson, who has been a close associate of Ingmar Bergman. It's a dark, eerily quiet movie, a whispered but scathing attack on the status quo, ripping off the veneer of civilization to reveal the lost, frightened animals beneath. Yet for all that, there is a feeling of rueful sympathy for the human beings trapped in the nightmare. Movie reviewers sometimes have the silly habit of saying that a film is "not for everyone." Well, this one is for everyone, whether they like it or not.

©2002 Chris Dashiell
CineScene