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Mr Sausage wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:53 pm There are no Chinese actors in the movie, or even Chinese speakers. All the Chinese characters are played by Japanese actors speaking Mandarin phonetically. I don't even speak a Chinese language, and I could tell immediately that something was off.

Mr Sausage wrote: Thu Mar 16, 2023 11:14 pm Road to Eternity: Part 1

Spoiler

In a grim irony, Nakadai, one-time prison reformer, now finds himself jailed and subject to the cruelties and abuses he had sought to ameliorate. And that's the point the section drives at: that the camp and the barracks are two names for the same thing. One of the benefits of long-term story-telling like this is that you can pattern more widely, create parallels and echoes across a greater expanse of narrative. By itself, this section is a good, if familiar, indictment of military training. As part of the whole, we can see how much the barracks recapitulates what we saw in the work camp. This is where the brilliance starts to show, in the larger structural organization that can create this layered social critique. For instance, it is bad enough to see the men routinely beaten and humiliated for the smallest perceived slight, but worse when we remember every time that same thing happened to the prisoners and camp workers. The impression is that Imperial Japan treated its soldiers, the very men it depended on to secure its aims and for whom it was presumably governing the country, no differently than it treated its lowest and most exploitable social stratum. The movie also makes an implicit critique that functions as short hand: we are given little access to the functioning of the army brass, the decision makers; but because we have spent so much time with the decision makers at the camp, the parallels let us know that the brass works no differently, and with no less greed, selfishness, and pettiness.

The movie continues the strongest element of No Greater Love, the careful attention to the social structure of its chosen microcosm. Like the workers' camp, the barracks feels like a living entity, crammed with people and structured around a tangle of hierarchies, motivations, and duties that aren't easily reduced. The narrative feels less leaden, too: there are fewer scenes of intoned speeches, blunt moralizings, or lame romantic conversations. Almost every scene is fraught in some way or another, with violent or absurd intrusions peppering most interactions, and smaller conversations always shadowed by someone's hostile eyes. It allows Kobayashi to play to his strengths, ie. his gift for action. The opening scene sets the atmosphere perfectly: the men roused from bed without warning and beaten, one-by-one, without reason or recourse. Such will be the rest of the movie. It becomes so absurd that, by the end, Nakadai is being screamed at even for daring even to walk a couple steps out of bed without permission--and this in a hospital! Usually hospitals in war films serve as a kind of reprieve, but even here the prison-feel persists.

One of the darker aspects is the fact that Nakadai's resolve in the face of evil, his willingness to stand up for virtue, is, apparently, exactly what the brass like in a soldier, and they keep trying to promote him despite his utter distaste for everything he sees. Somehow, trying to be a decent man in spite of his training seems to be turning him into precisely what the training intends--an utter absurdity the film thankfully doesn't belabour.

I enjoyed myself here. The film felt less overtly didactic, more willing to make connections and draw parallels to make its points. It's still a guilt-sodden, self-flagellating story, but it's not as caught up in ideas of duty and virtue, or even ideas at all. It's a much smaller, more focused story. I look forward to the second part.

Mr Sausage wrote: Thu Mar 09, 2023 2:14 pm

Spoiler

Random observations:

-The movie is handsomely shot. The scenes at the camp are full of an impressive pictorialism: lines of men snaking up and down the hills; masses of workers lining the walls of the mines; windswept plains full of grasses extending to the horizon. And all shot in scope with elegant camera movements, long takes, and deep focus. The movie looks terrific. Perhaps too terrific: there's a level of sweat and grime the movie declines to show. But its visual beauties never feel inappropriate.

Sloper wrote: Fri Mar 10, 2023 2:54 pm

Spoiler

For one thing, we spend a lot of time watching the characters’ faces, and for all the obviousness of the dialogue I think the acting can be really complex and subtle at times. Nakadai’s character is frustrating at times, and there is something a bit tiresome about this ‘type’ – the principled young man fighting the system. But the frequent close-ups of Nakadai (reacting to whatever fresh horror he’s been confronted with) go beyond mere righteous outrage. You can see from tiny gestures, like twitching eyelids or shifts in his facial muscles, that he’s struggling to process his feelings, bottling them up, becoming (or trying to become) more hardened in order to deal with the trauma, perhaps reflecting on his own callousness and self-absorption. This gives some weight to the various confrontations where people question his values, motives, or basic humanity – every choice he makes about how to deal with this job, or even about how to process it in his own mind, feels consequential, and there’s never a simple ‘right’ choice.

Mr Sausage wrote: Mon Mar 13, 2023 5:04 pm No Greater Love: Part 2

Spoiler

As expected, Nakadai's humanistic ideals are brought to a crisis when an equivocal escape attempt results in a barbarous scene of execution. But the situation is weird, because while it's set up as "will Nakadai do the right thing?", it's not a situation where he bears any special guilt. He wasn't there and he made none of the decisions. Indeed, he tries his panicked best to avoid the execution. But the film puts him through the moral wringer anyway, with all sorts calling him a murderer or implying the state of his soul as at risk. And all to the least complicit man at the mine. That the moral situation is resolved by Nakadai begging the army to stop, something he had been doing all along...I'm not sure what personal moral step that is, or what that resolves besides convincing the prisoners he is on their side with his willingness to risk his life for them. I guess it just proves how far he's willing to go for his ideals. A weird situation all around, born of the movie's need to keep its main character pure while still forcing him to endure a moral reckoning, complete with physical suffering.

Which brings me to the main weakness of the two sections: the movie is exploring moral simplicities. The movie does a terrific job representing the impossible complexities of the camp as a social and political entity, and yet it's mostly uninterested in those complexities as a moral situation. Unlike, say, Imamura, who would've explored the effect this messy social context had on human behaviour, Kobayashi prefers simple, classical oppositions: human and inhuman; murderer and not; duty and not. Nakadai's right hand man puts it more gently. He says, while drunk, that Nakadai is "straddling a fundamental contradiction and trying to justify it", but in a more sober light declares that Nakadai is "willing to pay the fare [of humanism] no matter how high." The point is plain: this is all or nothing; the labour camp is antithetical to humanism on all fronts; you can either support it or resist it.

knives wrote: Mon Mar 13, 2023 6:54 pm

Spoiler

There’s no real discovery to be had and Kobayashi as a resulting isn’t a researcher nor an observer.