AVATAR

An Intrigue in Success and in Failure

As an experience, it is singular and frankly amazing. As a sheer creative/technical effort and advancement to the visual potential of cinema, it's an olympic gold medal long-jump. As an ethnography, it is rich and fascinating (though it has the potential to be so much more). As an ecological survey it is staggering. As a story, it is erupting with unique specificities, and emotes powerfully though broadly. As a premise… well, its been done before. To reduce things crudely, AVATAR is an interplanetary version of The Last Samurai via Pocahontas, with a twist of the She’s All That’s “You mean I was just a bet!?” thrown in the mix. But truthfully, there is so much contained within the universe of AVATAR, a film that you necessarily experience rather than watch, that if you summarily dismiss it at any single point of criticism (viable and crucial to the whole as they may be), you are in neglect of a bounty of intriguing captivating moments and heights.

The best complement to AVATAR is that it begs questions, many important questions. Questions more immediate and important now, in this information age of astounding global connectivity and learning, than ever before. Questions I ceaselessly pose to myself, and fervently seek to answer in the way I open myself to all experiences and ideas. As I watched AVATAR, these questions bubbled to the surface and molded into the tactility of its manifestation. While it hasn’t the aptitude to truly and deeply explore and answer these inquiries, AVATAR none the less stands, as best it can for what it was made to be, as an example, a full-blooded scenario, and allows if not inspires us to think more deeply in its stead.

It asks... what is cultural identity? If cultural identity is learned through accumulation, can it be learned after the fact? Is culture fluid, or fixed? Are we born into our home, or do we find it? What is home? Is culture a matter of choice, and when does it become so? Is language culture? Can culture exist without language? Is culture only quantifiable in relativity? At what point does imitation become embodiment, or deceit transform into honesty? At what point does façade seep deeper into the tissue and simply… become? AVATAR explores a now classic scenario of “going native;” in this case a kind of elective Stockholm Syndrome, where “seeing how the other half lives” is a platform for self-criticism and learned humanism. And because of the films groundbreaking optical tactility and subsequent inclusiveness, this message effects deeply, perhaps deeply enough to actually affect a generation so swamped in the ubiquity of information and art, that nothing upon nothing shocks them.

One of the most admirable material qualities of AVATAR, a film whose fully realized sense of place and space is its presiding facility, is how seamlessly the technology of the humans is incorporated into the fabric of its orientation and usage, meaning that it is shown and therefore understood mostly diegetically, seeming to be as natural a part of its environment as a Plasma TV and a two-section couch is to the modern American living-room. There is a relationship between all the technologies that makes them seem contemporaneous as a whole, if not familial, and strikes a perfect blend between material and digital, abstract and mechanical. Unfortunately, this treatment of diegesis is not afforded to the same degree to Na’vi, where, as a result of the central plot device of an outsider “learning the ways,” higher instances of exposition are employed. Thankfully though, even those are expressed minimalistically, and much is allowed to be shown and enjoyed without words (A proclivity that, had it been applied much more liberally and as a general rule, would have engendered a great sense of earned and imaginative learning from the audience about Na'vi culture. Cameron should have watched Malick's THE NEW WORLD).

AVATAR’s other cause for accolade is its development of the strong and beautiful spoken Na’vi language, which contains its own uniquely crafted morphology, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Because the Na’vi people are so attuned to nature and its processes, the spoken language incorporates a great deal of gesture and movement in its expression. It has a clear relationship, as does most components of the Na’vi, to Native American lingustic, aesthetic, and spiritual culture.

What endeared me the most about the Na’vi language is its greeting, “I see you,” whose implication is that of a deeper sensibility of knowing, awareness, and feeling of another person. Its not just “I see you” its “I see into you.” It reminded me of the Mayan greeting “In’Lakesh,” and its response, “Ala’kin.” Roughly “In’Lakesh” means “We are different faces of each another” or more concisely, “I am another you.” “Ala’kin” is the confirmation “it is so.” Implicit here is the notion of each person being an expression of the same life and energy, a communion despite differentiation. In short, we are all one.

In Maori culture, a common greeting is for each party, with eyes closed, to place their noses to the other and take a deep breath, as if inhaling a sense of that person, both bodies taking in air and living simultaneously. This gesture is borrowed by the Na’vi and assimilates perfectly into their gestural vocabulary. But more than all that, what the functionality of these lingual flourishes touches upon the facility of language to inform upon attitudes, how its nature can affect if not determine the way thoughts are conceived, communicated, and how people relate to one another. It finds evidence in languages where words like “mine,” or “lie,” don't exist, and how within these cultures, often tribal, concepts of deceit or possession or singular self-preservation have no place. Does language form culture, or the other way around?

My main, and apparently common, quarrel with AVATAR, beyond its use of a wholly unoriginal plot premise and dramatic character arcs (get over it, AVATAR didn't invent “unoriginality”), is the fact that it posits a white man (crippled in fact) as becoming a better Na’vi than any Na’vi could be; learning their ways, leading them into battle as a warrior king, uniting their clans, communing with their deity, mating with the Chief’s daughter, etc.

This presents a bifurcated issue.

In one sense AVATAR creates a positive ideal; that not just in the sharing, but in the combination of our efforts, minds, hearts, ideologies, and convictions we can achieve great things. That in the collaboration of disperate selves and attitudes lay the greatest power.

Inversely, AVATAR employs a kind of subversion of cultural sanctity; almost an imperialism through assimilation; a reversal of imperialism through indoctrination and conversion.

This is where a film like DANCES WITH WOLVES, which AVATAR has been both properly and improperly compared to, succeeds fantastically; because in spite of his affection for and investment in the Sioux Indians, his exploration of their customs, language, and daily life, Union Soldier Lt. John Dunbar (Costner) doesn't become a Sioux Indian, doesn’t assimilate beyond a point of no return, doesn’t assume an infallible measure of acceptance (though he might hope for it), doesn’t lead the Sioux proudly into battle (The chief refuses to allow hip to assist in a war party against invading Pawnee, and later, in fact it is THEY [the Sioux] that mount an attack to save HIM from Union Army imprisonment)… and in the end the cultural divide sorrowfully asserts itself. Dunbar attests that his presence with the Sioux could only be transient, and that the oncoming storm of subjugation would separate them with inevitability. As a testament to the tact and sensitivity of his portrayal of the Sioux and the film’s enduring popularity, Kevin Costner was adopted as an honorary member of the Sioux Nation, an interesting if not ironic phenomenon in context with this discussion of cultural identity.

My other quarrel is that AVATAR, which takes place in a somewhat distant future, purports to carry such archaic and simplistic attitudes of race and personhood, and renders such standardized caricatures for its antagonists (even some of its principal cast) to inhabit. AVATAR infers that the human race is in a dire situation of survival, but inferred is all. No weight is given to that basic desperation to “find a new homeworld,” and ALL weight is given to the propensities of economic voracity, indiscriminant shows of military force, professional arrogance, etc. The scientists are sympathetic, inquisitive, and ultimately weak, the soldiers are complete goons, and “the company” is a heartless profit-seeking beast. Are these archetypes COMPLETELY out of line? No. Are they reflections of historical and extant attitudinal realities? Yes. Does racism and prejudice still virulently exist today, as in places like Uganda in which anti-homosexuality legislation is in place to criminalize homosexuality as punishable-by-death? Yes. Will racism always exist? Probably. Does it make for interesting complex drama, rife with engaging and natural ambiguity, to create a story about as “Good Guy, Bad Guy” as you possibly can? No. But does AVATAR, alongside clear inadequacy, create an utterly sweeping, broadly appreciable experience with clear lines of conflict, obvious cautionary intentionality, and a valuable lesson of understanding and collaborative existence? A resounding Yes.


Pluses and minuses considered, AVATAR wins. It is wholly interesting in its successes and failures, in its emphasis and miss-emphasis, in the ideas it delves into, the questions it raises whether it knows it or not, the enveloping experience it provides, the emotional catharsis it revels in (though tinged with more than just a little bit of “white guilt”), and the dynamism of its physicality, its surface, and its dance.

OTHER FILMS TO WATCH
These following films are virtual master-classes in where AVATAR either miss-emphasizes, treats its subjects too simplistically, or avoids opportunities for irony and ambiguity. They posit varied outcomes, degrees, and motivations of cultural integration and exchange.

THE BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY (Budd Boetticher, 1951)
THE NEW WORLD (Terrence Malick, 2005)
HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMEN (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971)

TOP 11 FAVORITE FILMS OF THE DECADE

(not in order of preference)

This was a near-impossible task, selecting only ten films from a decade of immeasurable cinematic prolificity and creativity… so I decided to pick 11. My goal, not to chose an absolute top 11, but simply to create a culturally diverse and challenging swath of dynamic films from the past decade, films that have struck me deeply and sustained their effect over time and multiple viewings, if not enriching over the span.

1. KABEI: OUR MOTHER (Yoji Yamada, Japan 2008)

For 133 min I was a member of the Nogami family. I laughed, smiled, worried, and cried with them. I inhabited the rooms of their house, I ate dinner at their table. I was wholly taken into their lives. This film is as sensitive a transposition as I’ve ever known in cinema. Maybe I just saw it when I was most receptive.

KABEI tells the story of the Nogami family in the years leading up to and during WWII. After Shigeru, the patriarch, is imprisoned for the “incendiary” content of his writing, Kabei (the children’s pet name for his wife, their mother) must carry the family (two daughters) on her own. Toru, a former student of Shigeru’s pays respects to his sensei and becomes a devoted helpful friend to the Nogami’s, developing a deep but secretive affection for Kabei… and her for him. A complex range of Japanese attitudes, in conflict and acquiescence to custom and policy, builds a grand portrait of wartime humanity.

Yoji Yamada is a man of considerable acclaim in Japan, having directed the 36 installments of the Tora-san film series, and most recently reached international acclaim for his Samurai Trilogy (Including the Oscar nominated Twilight Samurai). If there were a living director that one could call intrinsically Japanese; meaning that they can tell a story in the way only a Japanese person could tell it (despite the ubiquity of cross cultural information rendered by the 20th century), it is Yoji Yamada… but perhaps only because his subjects are Japanese. Perhaps his prevailing sensitivity, hints of sentimentality, gentle maturity, and observance of the everyday (all of which bring Ozu to mind) could benefit most any cultural context. After all, where does one culture begin and the other end if culture, like time, is fluid?

2. BABEL (Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu , Mexico 2006)
**BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES OF THE DECADE!** (Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza)

A sprawling, razing, profound, and accomplished film. Innaritu crafts an arresting proof by contradiction; by exploring the realities of emotional distance through a structural fragmentation, with narrative threads scattered across four continents, BABEL reveals the spontaneous but inevitable weave of causality and sheer humanity that connects us. BABEL reaches a new height in all aspects of cinema, most important and timely being the global scale of its exploration. BABEL is powerful and humbling enough even to dissolve the celebrity of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette. (One of the best scores of the decade.)

3. THREE TIMES (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan 2005)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Millenium Mambo,) is one of the most talented filmmakers working today, and yet despite being the most salient of the Taiwanese New Cinema directors to emerge in the mid 1980’s is almost entirely relegated to the festival circuit in the US (save for Flight of the Red Balloon). THREE TIMES explores three pairs of lovers (played by the same principal actors Shu Qi and Chang Chen) in three different time periods of Taiwanese 20th Century history (1966, 1911, 2005). Each couple incurs obstacles toward intimacy; ranging from practical circumstance, social constraint, and the aching indecision of modern freedoms (emotional, professional). But rather than a mere structural decision, THREE TIMES utilizes the nature and conditions of each “time” to inform pragmatically, attitudinally, and aesthetically upon its character’ wills, actions, and facilities of communication. Like all of his works, THREE TIMES moves with a clean breathlessness, a remarkable continuity and elliptical capturing of each moment that allows one to enter completely into its space and time. It is ravishing to behold when you surrender to its patience. And across all three vignettes, Hou evinces a spanning portrait of Taiwan, as if a kind of summation of the generations he has heretofore visited in his catalogue, if not a virtual abstract of his retroactive thesis.

4. TALK TO HER………………….(Pedro Almodovar, Spain 2002)

Almodovar at his absolute height! Full and unforgettable characters, an affecting complex moral scenario, abounding with tones of melodrama, gentleness, urgency, vitality, desperation. Critic Peter Travers said “Almodovar doesn’t just make movies. Almodovar IS the movies.” If Almodovar had only “Talk To Her” to his credit, I’d still be inclined to agree.

5. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN……….(Ang Lee, USA 2005)

Lee elicits great sympathy through this story rather than simplistic pity, an oft’ confused discrepancy. Sympathy is earned through nuance, authenticity, honesty, and complexity, whereas pity manipulates through broad, forceful strokes that lack in enriching ambiguity. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are, in the most helpless and human way, sparking a friction against their context, their time and place, their upbringing. Both of them are equally products of their environments, by degrees wanting to fulfill the tenets of what they understand as being a normal American life and to accept the limits of their potential (Ennis more than Jack). But both of them is charged by a desire (a desire that is only able to reveal itself to them after the isolation and utterly basic existence on Brokeback has worn down their conditioning) that conflicts with their upbringing and especially with the social progress of 1960’s small-town southern US. What makes this story so notable, besides the near primordial and tactile manner in which Lee explores what is truly an existential dilemma, besides the formal excellence of its execution, is that the practical and damaging consequences of Jack and Ennis’ decisions; their increasing waywardness in regards to their families, the damage Ennis does to Jack through his prevailing fear and confliction of learned and intrinsic values regarding their love, and the literal danger they bear in expressing that love in a repressive conservative social arena, are a constant element, a predominating topic in their dialogues and behaviors. Lee creates characters subject to expectation that are fully culpable for their inadequacies, their failures, their anxieties, and broken promises. Because of this complexity, not one stroke of this film speaks “woe is me.”

BROKEBACK calls from the recesses of the “pure self,” the immediate and visceral self, which verges against our means, circumstances, and loyalties always. This vergence rises between the intrinsic and the learned, the inborn and the imposed, the internal (desire) and the exteriorized architectures of society (morals, values, trends, economy, etc). It is in this ultimately primal struggle that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is wholly universal. This basic struggle is highlighted, and given a renewed significance by virtue of being a mainstream product involving a homosexual relationship. That slight but impactful irregularity calls attention once again to extremely important and relatable aspects of the human condition.

6. MULHOLLAND DR. (David Lynch, USA 2002)

Speaking mostly of the relationships shared between Lost Highway, Inland Empire, and Mulholland Drive, David Lynch is a weaver of dreams. He understands their modes, their spontaneity, their density of details, and their refracted qualities of space, time, and superimposition, like no other artistic mind. Lynch has also chosen the greatest medium possible through which to explore these anxious, passionate, and frustrated subconscious realms, which he can emulate in an absolutely singular fashion. They are remarkably full experiences, and they can remain just that, an experience, but their bevy of details, layers, and interlaced instruction are far too much to neglect. Whether you want to or not, your mind will draw lines in the constellation he has scattered between frame one and frame last. Mulholland Dr. was my first Lynchian experience. I had no idea what I was getting into, and afterwards… had no idea what I had gotten into. I saw it again the next day, and every subsequent time it’s played at the County Theater. It is absorbed into me. I consider my relationship to this film, and how it enlivens my mind to this day, my greatest cinematic love affair. (Another standout score!)

7. SPARROW…………………….(Johnny To, Hong Kong 2008)

Veteran Hong Kong action auteur Johnny To (Election, Triad Election) creates a vibrant love letter to a rapidly changing Hong Kong, to fraternal loyalty, and unabashedly to the vivacious Hollywood films of the 1950’s and 60’s. Sparrow traces a small gang of master pickpockets who eke out their living in an old quarter of Hong Kong. Their unity, however, is disrupted when a mysterious woman enters into their lives and manipulatively threads them into her own dilemma.


SPARROW, with its bright endearing center, is as close as you can get to a musical without singing, and boasts a cleanly specific, choreographed vision (as is typical with the director). Johnny To has crafted a film that rejoices in the fact that it is a film. SPARROW revels in its movements, framings, and moods, which owe as much to Charlie Chaplin as they do The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The final pickpocket showdown (slow motion, in the rain, at night… with umbrellas!)…MAGIC! (This film also boasts a light, fluttering, energetic score!)

8. SAMARITAN GIRL……………...(Kim Ki Duk, South Korea 2004)
**BEST FILMMAKER OF THE DECADE!**

“Hoping to save enough money to travel through “Europe, teenagers Yeo-jin (Ji-min Kwak) and Jae-young (Min-jeong Seo) enter into a risky trade: Jae-young becomes a prostitute, and Yeo-jin manages their business. After Jae-young is killed, Yeo-jin assumes the role of sex worker to keep their clients happy. But Yeo-jin's father (Eol Lee) discovers his daughter's secret, setting off a chain of events that bring father and daughter to a crossroads.”

Kim Ki Duk has made his name as an uninhibited architect of coarse emotional unravellings, and I recommend any and all of his films for the depths they tap into. Kim is a keen observer of small yet resonant gestures, is spare on words and yet says volumes. His films become universal this way. As inclement and tumultuous as they may seem, they contain undeniable familiarity of feeling and of desire. Kim has a unique understanding of the friction caused when emotion penetrates into the physical realm, when what we want is outside of our reach or understanding, and what it means when words are too obcsure to explain our desires. Actions speak louder than words. SAMARITAN GIRL is perhaps the most challenging and wrenching of his portraits, and stands as the perfect rubric for his utterly singular idiolect. (Kim won best director at the Berlin International Film Festival for this film)

9. THE NEW WORLD …………….Terence Malick (USA 2005)
**BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY OF THE DECADE** (Shared with ‘Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’).

THE NEW WORLD is a story written on the truth of a dream, one that leaves the trace of soil and breath upon the acres of our skin, that wets with its rains, soaks into the heart, and then warms with the beat of its rays, saying "I will find joy in all I see." Never has a film so entered into me as though through my fingertips or my lungs, so subverted my orientation as though a transposition by its wholeness and grace and movement. I am transformed by the wistful yet rejoicing remembrance, the poem of textures, of senses, of thoughts, and of conflicts that is THE NEW WORLD! And lets face it, any time Emmanuel Lubezki touches a camera he should be handed an Oscar.

10. LOVE EXPOSURE……………Sion Sono (Japan 2009)
**BEST FILM + SCREENPLAY OF THE DECADE!!!**

“Having grown up in a devout Christian family, Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) has always been a well-behaved kid. After his mother dies, his priest father is seduced by a woman who breaks his heart, causing him to torment Yu by forcing him to confess his sins on a daily basis. Of course, being a fairly normal kid, Yu has no legitimate sins to confess. To appease his increasingly demanding father, Yu is determined to become a true sinner, eventually training to become an expert at sneak upskirt photography. Pornography being the one sin no priest can overlook, Yu gets the attention he s been so desperately seeking from his dad. One day while hanging out with his fellow sinner pals but dressed like Sasori as punishment for being on the losing end of a bet Yu meets a beautiful girl named Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). Their first meeting is a glorious one, beginning with an all-out street brawl and ending with a kiss. There are only two problems: she thinks he s a woman and a devious cult leader named Aya (Sakura Ando) is carefully manipulating both of their lives.”

Little can be said of this film before it is seen. It is a singular, varied and unmitigatedly hilarious experience. And even after seeing it, words seem to fall radically short; though "revelatory" "ambitious" "epic" spring to mind first. LOVE EXPOSURE is a cinematic experience imbued with such vibrancy, complexity, spasticity, absurdity, honesty, and observance; that one cant help but feel revived of life afterward. Though writer / director Shion Sono (Suicide Club) builds so many ideas, threads, and tones, what resonates deepest is its feelings; heartfelt, ironically innocent (considering some of its rather coarse specific content), and utterly full! What stands tallest is Sono’s exploration of how externalized perceptions and unknowing misconceptions inform upon our individual processes of identity building. In a world that is now staggeringly connected, and where information is so ubiquitous it requires actual effort to be avoided, Sono’s curiosity seems most relevant.

Though lasting 4 hours, each frame is brimming with a vital energy that defies its duration, and is somehow able to remain startlingly intimate in defiance of its grandeur. As was said at the introduction of this film on its NY premier... "it’s the shortest 4 hour film I've ever seen." It goes by in a flash!

11. THE WAR (Ken Burns, 2007)

Though made for television and episodic in design, THE WAR is most certainly a film. Enormous in scope, thorough but captivating in its historical detail, an unfathomable feat of editing, garnering a fair and fantastic range of perspectives (unafraid to highlight the US’s own missteps and poor wartime practices, alongside the strides of progress and generosity).

THE WAR is historical yet radically personal. While a documentary of mostly archival materials, it feels more tactile, visceral, if not elemental, to me than even a film like Saving Private Ryan. Perhaps that is a quality earned through its combination of mediums, modes of storytelling, and the textural artistic processes involved in drawing a vast narrative with existing and new materials; the amalgam of which feels potently direct, and is given ample space to accumulate its affect across a 15hour feature. THE WAR also strikes me as a technical milestone for editing and sound design.

HONORABLE MENTION:

-Hayao Miyazaki.. all of them
-Wes Anderson… all of them
-Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola 2003)
-Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino 2009)
-Brick (Rian Johnson 2005)
-Atonement (Joe Wright 2007)
-21 Grams (Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, 2003)
-Assassination of Jesse James (Andrew Dominik 2007)
-The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach 2006),
-Lust Caution (Ang Lee, 2007),
-Autumn Ball (Veiko Ounpuu 2007, Estonia),
-A Bittersweet Life (Kim Ji-woon 2006, South Korea),
-3-Iron (Kim Ki-Duk, 2005 South Korea),
-The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003),
-CHE (Steven Sodorbourg 2008, USA),

FAVORITE DISCOVERIES OF THE DECADE:

-BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY (1951, Budd Boetticher) Director's Cut, restored to its full 124min length

-EROS PLUS MASSACRE (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1969) Shown in NY and Boston in 2008

-THE EXILES (1961, Kent MacKenzie) Rediscovered and restored within the past two years.

THE NEW WORLD -extended cut- (2005)... 10/10

“I thought it was dream... what we knew in the forest. It's the only truth.”
-Captain John Smith

Why didn't I sense it before? Why didn’t I see what is so plainly the lifeblood and success of THE NEW WORLD… that it is a story written on the truth of a dream, one that leaves the trace of soil and breath upon the acres of our skin, that wets with its rains, soaks into the heart, and then warms with beat of its rays, saying "I will find joy in all I see." Never has a film so entered into me as though through my fingertips, so subverted my orientation as though a transposition, by its wholeness and grace and movement. I am transformed by the wistful yet rejoicing remembrance, the poem of textures, of senses, of thoughts, and of conflicts that is THE NEW WORLD.

THE NEW WORLD is a history (more explicitly a history of the Jamestown settlement and the initial tenuous exchanges between Settlers and Indians) as told through the mechanism of remembrance, what one might call a multifarious sense-memory; that of John Smith (Farell), Pocahontas (Kilcher), and Rohn Rolfe (Bale), in their experiences of one another and of their lives during this irrevocable epoch, imbued with apt distraction and curiosity. THE NEW WORLD is a dream that addresses the amorphousness and poetry of its own nature, both in its spontaneous construction, visual juxtapositions, the constant interjections of natural imagery and landscape, as well as through monologue and through physical action that gain life in their overlapping. John Smith reflects upon the moments shared between himself and Pocahontas after living in her tribe for two seasons, saying “If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake…There is only this, all else is unreal.”

“I don't know where or when, just that it happened. I have tried all day to recapture the feeling. There was a scent of trees. I was the world, the world was me. A landscape is like a face.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-luc Godard)

A subjective and existential modality laced with historicity, Malick’s film is not stringently historical. This is not to say that THE NEW WORLD is not an exceptionally researched and accurately designed film, particularly on the account of the Algonquin Indian’s representations, of Jamestown’s construction and its squalid degeneration, and the lifestyles enacted by both groups. But what Mallick aspires to, what makes this film the exception and the work of art that it is, more than a text-book accuracy, is the existential and spiritual themes that brim and flourish in the world we are exposed to, in the alternate clashing and coalescing of cultural anatomies, and in the cascade of questions, conscience, and prose that snare the wind like spores inside the mind, setting fly a felt stream-of-consciousness with the voices of John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and on occasion others. And in this binary focus of a tactile history and its subjective experience, Mallick weds the polarities of the utmost external, with that of the utmost internal. History becomes diegesis, and emotion becomes something manifest.

“As the story is developed from something out of history; something that's been told over and over again, and told incorrectly in some peoples’ eyes, the most important thing…is to bring the body language of Indian people into this. To speak a language of memory… and remembering that we tell the story our own way, through our bodies.” Such is at the very core of ones experience of THE NEW WORLD, and also something embodied by settler and Indian alike, both steeped deeply in their circumstances. (Raul Trujillo; Tomocomo, Choreographer) Pocahontas varies this notion. She speaks to herself, “Come spirit, help us sing the story of our land.” And ‘sing’ she does, though not as the word commonly denotes. She sings on all levels; out loud but mostly inside her own heart, and through a private language of gestures, of natural evocations; pantomime that airs on the side of veneration and communion rather than mimic, of nature. She sings every time she touches her hand to a blade of wind, the roughness of a tree’s bark, or swims in cool waters. Even her analogies all sing a kinship with the natural world. “You flow through me, like a river,” she says of John Smith. “He is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade,” she relates of John Rolfe.

In its sensuously ponderous method, Malick’s film expresses thus: that the “new world” is in fact bifurcated, that beyond the discovery of a new land to settle by the English and the subsequent shock of alarm sent through Indian life, it is the mutual rediscovery of “home.” The frontier is also the process of ‘loss’ and ‘reclamation,’ within and without the body. It is the settlement of Jamestown, the fleeting integration of John Smith into Indian society, and the integration of Pocahontas into settler society, and then her journey to England itself. The “new world” is all these things, and it is also not. What it is, most profoundly, more than a mere adjustment of attitude, is Pocahontas’s rediscovery of her own sense of life, and a sense of how to once again “find joy in all she sees,” purely and fully. To be able to say, roaming a vast garden of unnatural design, chasing her sun and feeling the dew in the air, “mother [earth], now I know where you live.”

For some, for those who see not borders, who build not walls, this “frontier” is a constant condition, a state that exists at the intersection of soul and earth, of man and men, of tactility and ethereality. For them, such as the Algonquin people, there is no separation… that is to say, until one is explained what a ‘wall’ is, until someone stands behind one and touches it and knows their distinction from what is on the other side… and then once changed, they understand all things in terms of walls, and places them into the abstract so that they can proliferate the symbolical damage that is the worser side of their intentionality. John Smith says of the Algonquin, “They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.” These will be taught to them, as we know.

“We often try to analyze the meaning of words but are too easily led astray. One must admit that there's nothing simpler than taking things for granted.” (2 or 3 Things I know About Her: Godard)

More than anything else, we take for granted that we will be understood, or that our words, once spoken, gain some importance despite their innocuity, or the arbitrary basis of their make. “The phenomenon of ‘automatic pilot’ is universal, and a common feature of our experiences. The formulaic call and response of the salutations between human beings ("how are you" ... "I'm fine, and you?"), usually chanted out of some unspoken compunction, is but one example. When done many times over, it looses a potential connection to any real, inward emotion from which one might be motivated to utter this formula, and does not reveal or express any actual relationship between the two interlocutors; rather, this chant merely serves to further a simulacrum of human connection.” (Mike Cifone)

But some conditions breath life back into our discourses. In college I had a Japanese friend. She was an exchange student, and native of Japan. What was so exciting about our exchanges with one another, more than the exhilaration of a tactile cultural crossroads, is how her “handicap” with the English language inversely challenged my own aptitude towards it. With her own linguistic sidestepping, she offered me a reactivation of the spoken word. In our conversations, I began to reduce my expressions, sometimes to a kind of relational poetry, in order to communicate ideas, feelings, and concepts of art and culture and emotionality. And even in what might have been the most banal topics, there was a vitality, a newness, a spark in the manner of how aware I was of each word, and of its placement, and of the breadth of its potentiality. This is a reality addressed not only in the intimate communion between John Smith and Pocahontas in the wild, but also between settlers and coping with their shattered expectations of “The New World,” in John Rolfe’s acquiescence to Pocahontas’s quietude and trepidation, and between Pocahontas and the friction of life behind walls; the wall of a dress, of shoes that make walking difficult, the wall of an imposed faith, of all the things that impede her experience of nature, her mother. All of these confrontations present individuals and groups alike with a challenge against their prescribed modalities, make them question themselves as much as they question what newly surrounds them, and forces them, by degrees, into adaptation.

“What is language?” “The house that man lives in.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her)

“If all we have created up till now are mere words...” (Eros + Massacre: Yoshida Kiju)

War of Imitation

http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/ is a new blog that I've produced, dedicated to the analysis of a singular film, Bernardo Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS. I make a full-blooded case for its formal and ideological excellence, particularly on its constant intersection of those two fronts. Among many things discussed are THE DREAMER's powerful examination of imitation as a tool of not only communication but of identity building, as well as an in-depth discourse on the film's highly competent visual language.

MILLENIUM MAMBO (2001).. 9/10

"THE BLINDNESS OF THE PRESENT"

Vicky smokes, drinks, dances, has no job, and no real prospects. The best that can be said, is that she passes the time. MILLENIUM MAMBO (Qian xi man po) is a chronicle of the floating year of her life, 2001, where she drifted farthest from herself. Ensconcing in the neon bath and anonymity of the Taipei nightclub scene to escape the claustrophobia of her relationship and apartment, Vicky divides her affections between two divergent men. The first is Hao-hao, her live-in boyfriend. He is a neurotic and jealous recluse, constantly suspecting Vicky of infidelity. He enacts absurd investigative rituals upon her everytime she returns home; including stripping her down to her underwear and smelling her body for the scents of other people, rooting through her purse and wallet, and even calling the numbers of suspect receipts. Vicky resolves to break from Hao-hao once she has spent the NT $500,000 from their bank account. As arbitrary a marker as that may be, it is definitive, and therefore becomes the single fixed point of gravity in Vicky's amorphous, vice-ruled complacency. Her constant return to Hao-hao is much less a response to gravity than it is, as suggested, a complacency, a reflex to her fear of "fully being," of actualizing within a broader scheme of uncertainties (this having somewhat to do with a country, Taiwan, that is experiencing its own existential limbo). The second man in Vicky's orbit is Jack, though he doesn't distinctly overlap Hoa-hao's timeline. Jack is a rather sensitive and modestly expressive gangster who meets Vicky in the bar in which she then plays hostess. Their relationship is chaste, and there is a resonant caring that Jack emanates for Vicky, who is left reeling after her break from Hao Hao. One might liken it, emotionally, to the kind of disruption one feels after spinning in circles repeatedly, and then suddenly halting. For a moment, it seems as if the only relief may be to start spinning again, but Vicky lets the tremors run their course instead, allows those detached floating landscapes to coalesce back into a single image of her world without Hao-hao (at least, she begins this process). Jack's mind and inclinations are clear, and he is patiently wades through Vicky’s process of self-reclamation, something he helps to mend with a parenting affection. There is a tangible potential between them, but it is up to Vicky to take hold of it, or even to see it. She is however, like most of us, blind in the present.

MILLENIUM MAMBO is driven by the same mechanisms of spontaneity, naturalism, and immediacy that all Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are. However, MILLENIUM MAMBO, more than any of his earlier autobiographical extracts, has the distinct feeling of having been structured in its aftermath, and in no other case is this tactical retroaction more appropriate than in MILLENIUM MAMBO, as it is manifested through the refracted structuring of one woman, Vicky’s, memories of her 2001 year. The additional layer of Vicky’s active recollection through voice over narration channels a dimension of post-modernism heretofore untapped in Hou’s career, save for the emotionally-infused spatiotemporal complexity of GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (1995) which scrambles itself with a deceptively simple vignetted formula. What Hou has done with these two films, particularly MILLENIUM MAMBO, is apply his early generalized thesis of building intimately framed, retroactive historical clarifications of the 20th Century Taiwanese experience, to a modern context via a solitary person. In MILLENIUM MAMBO he mirrors his repeated enaction of that thesis, shared of course by most filmmakers of the first Taiwan New Cinema movement, through the narrative device of Vicky's own self-remembrance.

Like a master storyteller, Hou establishes MILLENIUM MAMBO's meandering atemporal platform in the opening shot; We are the floating lens that follows behind Vicky, strolling through a long enclosed skywalk at night, smoking a cigarette, a dull neon-blue light bathing her from above. She looks at the city around her through the incremental arched openings of the walls. She looks behind, past us, to where she has come from, and eventually Vicky leaves us at the top of a flight of stairs as she continues onward. In this act of stopping, Hou intimates that Vicki's world is not confined by the frame, nor the by the duration of a scene, nor the parenthesis of the film itself. This long uninterrupted shot is a perfect microcosm of MILLENIUM MAMBO, made most evident by the back-logging voice-over narration of Vicky’s future self. A kind of self-reflexive self-reflection is manifested as Vicky looks through the openings of the skywalk concurrent with her future self, peering through an incremental threading of memories. And of course, in a few fleeting moments of this metonym, we see a Vicky that moves forward while looking back.

A sustaining rule of observation is that Hou’s films manifest in an accumulation, rather than by causality. They tend to mirror actuality, though perhaps differently than, say, Italian Neo Realism. A film like BICYCLE THEIVES, though equal to MILLENIUM MAMBO in its reflection of a specific time and place, occurs around a clear conflict. But as per the reality of our more affluent modern times, MILLENIUM MAMBO’s conflict is appropriately ambiguous and intangible, residing in the emotive and psycho-existential, rather than in the strata of pragmatic survival. So, it comes down to the fact that Hou and De Sica aren't divergent in their aim, merely that they differ in the nature their own personal contexts.

In MILLENIUM MAMBO, scenes are long, make very few cuts, and derive their dramaturgy from a language of minutia: hanging around in clubs, domestic quarreling, cleaning up an apartment, smoking, making a drink, all coupled with a natural un-manipulative sense of human sympathy and relatability. Hou's films carry the natural pulse and texture of their time and place, and he makes it clear in structure, by his aptitude for the peripheral world ( through diegetic sound, through absence, and through the acknowledgement by characters of places and moments outside of the immediate image), that the pulse extends beyond the formal confines of the narrative. For characters, like Vicky and Hao Hao, that are so lured, or lulled by the literal pulse of club music, they are completely out of sync with the pulse within their own lives and their relationship to the world. To an extent, they invent or adopt a kind of severity, a reaction to their claustrophobic floating lives, building conflict and suspicion upon vice and aimlessness. Hou is able to capture that feeling of emotional / biorhythmic divorce with a lingering but drifting camera, a visual distortion of characters by alternating shadow and neon, and by drowning out their words with the drone of diegetic techno music.

Because voice-over-narration is often a crutch, an escape, or a deliberate superfluity, one must be discerning of its functionality. In MILLENIUM MAMBO it is of a seemingly simple, but heavily compounded significance. The fact that future-Vicki is speaking of her past-self in third person suggests, first, that she no longer defines herself by her former standards or circumstances. She looks back on her actions of that year, 2001, and realizes what kind of spiral she caught herself in. She reflects on that year as a time that informed a transition. We don’t know how much she culled from those agonies, but we are aware of her self-awareness and of the distance that she required, as we all do, to gain any kind of inward objectivity. Vicky’s voice-over-narration touches on the idea that "hindsight is 20/20." She describes situations from her past before they happen on the screen, something that gently blindsides the audience on all its occasions. Future Vicky watches these events in stride with the audience. Her recollections are imbued, not with regret or judgment, but with an understanding and an earned clarity. Not only that, but under the insinuation that each scene is a “memory viewed from above,” v-o-n puts the film into a cerebral setting, as though we are witness to Vicky’s actual memory, as well as privy to her cognitive act of remembering.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, v-o-n is yet another way of showing, within the closed text opportunity of the film, that Vicki's world doesn't simply end in 2001 with the credits. It continues to exist outside of our ability to see it. She continues to have self doubt, to wander, and to seek the avenue back to herself. This lends an additional layer of realism to the film.

TIME TO LIVE, AND THE TIME TO DIE (1985)... (8/10)

TIME TO LIVE, AND THE TIME TO DIE (Taiwanese) is a work of nostalgia in its most considered, sensitive, and articulate form. It is a semi-autobiographical extract on the part of director Hou Hsiao-hsien, concerning a family that has relocated to Taiwan from China (taking place during the mass exodus of roughly two-million Chinese to the island of Taiwan with their Nationalist leader Chiang-kai shek after Mao established the Communist “Peoples’s Republic of China.” Spanning the years of 1947-1960, the film follows the maturation of young Ah-ha, as he and his family cope with the shock of leaving their homeland. Ah-ha acclimates quickly to his new conditions, but the strain of the move and the subtle cultural alienations that plague his parents, marry to the angst of his coming-of-age and build a wedge between them. This condition of a growing generational divergence, reveals itself through Ah-ha’s siblings, such as his older sister who contends with her mother’s inclination towards “domesticity over education.” Across the film’s 138 minutes, we experience a medley of incremental moments in the life of this family; steeped in a somehow ravishing domestic innocuity, composed of family meals, children studying for their exams, Ah-ha and his gang inciting a ‘bored youth’ rebellion, etc.

Many subtle decisions on the part of filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, help to embody and express the retrospective dimension of the rather personal material that composes the film, which in context with the Taiwan New Cinema movement (1980’s-90’s), becomes a retroactive clarification of the 20th Century Taiwanese experience, void of any mainland Chinese media filter or mandate. In this sense, A TIME TO LIVE…, alternately personal and microcosmic, operates by tenants that are not necessarily narrative. Hou instead, allows the visual and aural faculties of the film to communicate a quality of recollection. “His film proceeds by accumulation rather than synthesis.” (Corrado Neri) For this reason, the film cannot be discussed in the ways of “A leading to B.” What comes to the fore, in films of this design, are tones and ideas expressed through a particular language of framing and pacing. Time and place supercede explicit narrative, and therefore it is more constructive to discuss the filmmaker’s language as it carries commentary and content by its devices, often rather than, or involving, what happens in the particular.

Hou is a master of obliquity, both by virtue of his non-causal narrative style, but by his aesthetic language of acknowledging the “outside of the picture frame” and the gaps of recollection. Translating to a brand of “indirectness,” Hou enunciates the limited capacity of memories, which are bound by the constraints of the individual’s dated subjectivities, by allowing the unseen to carry weight. Many impending social references are kept off-screen, or mentioned in passing, just as their consequences are suggested peripherally by disruptive sounds and presences; the roll of thunder, tanks rumbling on the road at night and the tracks that remain in the dirt the next morning, a startling punctuation of men on horseback galloping through the town in midday. By this manner of “omission through indirectness,” A TIME TO LIVE… suggests a certain lurking, subversive quality about the continuance of sociopolitical strife; undisclosed but particular to this time period, Taiwan has been left in the wake of the cessation of Japanese occupation.

The film also expresses these veiled realities in the terms of a child, Ah-ha, with only vague conceptions of sociopolitical issues. At the core of the film is the challenge against personal identity inherent in being severed from ones home, as well as the varied adaptivity exhibited by the older and younger generation. The children, raised in Taiwan instead of China, are almost fully detached from the existential severity of that strain. Ah-ha and his siblings are more or less born into a broken frame of reference, a convoluted impression of feeling “at home” while their parents are floating in realm of “homelessness.” This psychological conflict carries a reticent but profound violence. Those who suffer most from the detachment complex succumb to it and die; the tender but disoriented grandmother who left her heart in China (wandering, sometimes even forgetting that she is in Taiwan, asking for directions to places in her old villiage), and the Father, who’s best but ultimately exhaustive efforts were to keep his family safe and taken care of.

Like all of Hou’s films, A TIME TO LIVE… unfolds in long, lingering shots and sequences, which is a great service to the viewer by placing them on the same experiential level as the characters, sometimes literally. For example, during the “mourning sequence,” in which Ah-ha and his entire immediate family are gathered together, weeping and wailing in the room with their Father’s dead body, the camera, at one point, rests on the floor as if to say, we too have collapsed to the ground in sadness. The scene is so humbling and effective in this regard because the camera refuses to leave, distract with movement, nor was it cut to accelerate or artificially enhance it’s pacing. We get the full visceral experience unraveling in its own time. A TIME TO LIVE…’s inclusive effect (which is constantly at play) also occurs much earlier in the film during a dinner sequence. The camera rests lowly, alongside the seated family members, suggesting that the viewer is seated among them. In adopting this role, one is offered a kind of naïve omniscience. We learn things as the characters do, but are uniquely privy to everything that DOES occur, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.

Things come slowly in this film. Everything seems to happen at a naturalistic pace, due to the extended takes which exploit how long it actually takes for any dance of actions to complete itself (though I often thought they could go even longer). The visual makeup of each scene is incredibly intimate, though with a sensitivity is neither saccharine nor overly sentimental. In fact, “Hou carries out his work through a de-personalization of the narration, putting his intimate feelings at a distance and choosing a detached perspective, as if he were merely a spectator of his own story and not the protagonist.” (Corrado Neri) In effect, Hou and the viewer become synonymous in their designation. The intimacy therefore lies in a concomitance of visual proximity to the characters, and the degree of revelation concerning them.

Since most of the film unravels indoors, the camera captures low, linear, interior shots and compositions, often framing the simultaneity of interior and exterior spaces (and by extension of metaphor, public and private realms). Cinematographer PIN BING LEE mostly employs progressive axial cuts, and moderate pans (generally to keep characters in the frame.) rather than any boisterous or self-conscious displays of stylistic movement. All the self-conscious implications are carried by the viewers’ unflinching awareness of each situation. LEE's restraint helps keep the camera within a human range of motion, relating to the viewers’ own. It is also a beautiful response to the architecture of the homes, which informs upon so much of the culture. Lee’s cinematography is reflexive of the seeming simplicity of Ah-ha’s family’s lifestyle. The word “seeming” is important because the simple, calm, and ultimately gorgeous linear compositions by LEE are in fact a juxtaposition to the series of complex and affecting existential strains experienced by both the young and old; passing school, work, maintaining the household in the absence of a parent, illness, conflict of identity, adolescence.

Perhaps the most obvious visual tactic by Hou is the films palette. It is a collection of mostly desaturated greens, beiges, grays, and resonant whites (which effervesce a youthful, chaste ambiance inside the house.) Just as images degrade in time, so have these memories, the family structure, the sustainability of cultural maxims, ect. Hand-in-hand with the film’s piece-meal accrual, Hou’s muted palette evokes a sense of the passing of time by the vehicle of memory.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE (2007)….9.5/10

Hiroshi Ando is a relative unknown, having had only one of his four feature films to date breach the Japanese border, and only in a small circuit of festivals. This is an unfortunate circumstance, because the evidence of his latest work, "Boku wa Imouto ni koi wo suru" (My Sister, My love), suggests a burgeoning and sensitive talent that is being overlooked. Or, having personally only seen this newest film, perhaps he has just entered a new stride.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE is both subtle and direct in all of it's capacities, relying on the clarity of the most moderate displays of emotion, the most ginger movement of the camera, and the most delicate probing of a controversial issue; that of highschool age fraternal twin siblings, Iku and Yori, who are in love with one another, and have been so (internally) all there lives. Iku and Yori are inseparable in the sense that they are together in mind always. They also happen to sleep in the same room together, walk to and from school with one another, eat side by side at dinner and breakfast, etc. A perfect example of Ando's subtle command over convincing us of the twins' connection is in his early focusing on their hands; once when the childhood Yori is tying a small flower stem into a ring, and then shortly after in a close up of Iku's teenage hand as she leans on a window sill, pondering Yori's seeming coldness to her. All things considered, Iku and Yori's bond isn't claustrophobic. They have their moments apart, certainly, but are always thinking of the other. They are best friends with a quiet understanding of one another and a quiet way of being with one another...a quietude, beneath which resides deep emotions. The opening scene depicts Yori (the boy) offering Iku (the girl) a ring he made from a small flower as they sit alone together in a vibrant green field. While they unabashedly smile to one another, Yori says with a child’s conviction, “Iku is my bride,” leaving no ambiguity about their irregular closeness. Though the twins had made such an innocent but honest declaration of love in their youth, it isn’t until their coming of age that they acquiesce to its true breadth. Despite saccharine overtones and a lilting guitar melody in the opening "proposal" scene, there is something innately impending and unfortunate at the core of it.

Writer / director Hiroshi Ando doesn't take any easy roads with this film, allowing himself no obvious gratuities concerning sexuality or youth, either in content or methodology. Scenes unfold in long effortless takes (ranging from 10 seconds to 3 min), with a camera that alternates between a rather steady handheld dynamic, to fixed shots, to almost imperceptible glides that slowly encroach on characters. That “glide” becomes a presence within the film, a vehicle for Ando’s soft (but not underdone) handling of confused emotions, as well as a reciprocation of the metered performances within each scene. The subsequent effect is a sense of the air, a patient and full awareness of each moment, no matter its banality, and a saturation in the ponderance of every word, no matter its seeming innocuity (most of what the characters say has resonance and importance, it’s just a matter of the words coming out slowly and in their simplest terms). Suffice it to say, if a scene is better served by silence and a glance, or by the most average exchange of words, Ando won’t hesitate to leave it stripped bare, and rightfully so. Nothing is forced in MY SISTER, MY LOVE.

Matsumoto Jun (most notable as a member of the J-Pop band ARASHI, and the childish, arrogant, polarized male lead, Tsukasa Domiyouji, in the hit J-Drama HANA YORI DANGO 1&2) delivers an uncharacteristically understated and solemn performance as Yori…a performance that is allowed to unfold because of the blank slate of long takes and subtle camera movements aforementioned; a case of form fitting function. Therefore, moderately-expressed but urgently-felt emotions, as well as simple but tumultuous self-questioning propel the film, not artificially / analytically heightened tensions, nor, as one might expect of the content in relation to Japanese societal conventions, by pure didactics.

For a non-Japanese viewer it is unapparent that names carry great bearing in MY SISTER MY LOVE, and, for those adept to their meanings, suggest certain things about the twins before we even get to know them. The name ‘Iku,’ for instance, means “to go, to continue.” It can mean “fear, reverence, or awe,” and in colloquial language it means “to come” or “to orgasm.” Considering these many meanings, it becomes clear that the name Iku is perfectly chosen to embody her characters emotional awe for Yori, and is a subtle way of injecting sexuality into a very chaste film. ‘Yori’ means “other than,” “more than,” “out of.” In the vain of preference, it can take the form of “over;” such as the saying ‘Hana yori dango’ (dumplings over flowers…meaning necessity over materiality). But Yori can also mean “having a tendency towards; being close to…” The multiple definitions of this name are likewise evidence of its deliberate choosing. If you combine the twins names, though non-sensical in Japanese, it becomes something like, “other than to go,” which could be molded to mean an unwillingness to leave, an alternative to fatalism or finality, as in the way that the twins never want to be apart from one another, even if they can’t love each other to the extent that they feel. “I never want to be apart from you” Yori says. (dictionary sources; http://www.freedict.com/onldict/onldict.php - http://jisho.org/words?jap=yori&eng=&dict=edict - http://jisho.org/words?jap=iku&eng=&dict=edict)

For comparison's sake, I would liken "MY SISTER, MY LOVE" to two films; firstly Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS (2003) for its specific content concerning twins, Isa and Theo, who are also in love. But note however that THE DREAMERS is inverse to MY SISTER MY LOVE in its use of graphic sexuality and persistent sensuality (though executed aptly and artfully by Bertolucci).

The character of Matthew in THE DREAMERS, the new friend that Theo and Isa invite into their peculiar tight orbit, is like Yori in that he has an insider’s view that is also detached and objective. Isa and Theo’s father responds to something that Matthew says at the dinner concerning objectivity. He says, “We look around us and what do we see?...Complete chaos. But, when viewed from above, viewed as it were, by god, everything fits together.” He unknowingly but accurately implies of Matthew that his role will be that of an observer, an haphazard undercover agent that lives with the twins over the next month of their parents’ absence.

Ando infers something similar upon Yori within MY SISTER MY LOVE’s visual language. Not only does Yori have the top bunk bed at home, but at school Yori often hangs out on the roof, and in a specific scene he gazes down upon Iku from an open second-story window (note an OPEN window, not through glass) as she leaves the schoolyard with her friends. Ando suggests that between Yori an Iku, Yori has the greater clarity of vision. He sees farther down the track of their uncommon union after it is brought to the fore, and perceives a dark cloud that vexes him openly. But perhaps the most obvious suggestion comes from Iku herself at the beginning of the film, when her and Yori, clad in their gym uniforms, are in the school nurse’s room. Iku says to the nurse, who is mending her and Yori’s identical schoolyard scrapes, “when mother was pregnant she lied on her side to sleep, so all the brains slid down to Yori.” And after that, Iku says even more explicitly to herslef, "Between Yori and me, he is the capable one." So, when Yori begins to build a distance between he and his sister, even though he is the one who initiated the opening of the emotional floodgate, it is because he understands the inevitability of disaster. He doesn’t reach this conclusion all on his own though. Tomoka (a girl who is infatuated with Yori and who caught him and his sister kissing) plants the seed of fear within him, using her knowledge as an implied, but not explicit leverage against him.

THE DREAMERS and MY SISTER, MY LOVE also relate in the way that close council to the twins in each story try to show them the "error" of their ways. For Isa and Theo, it is Matthew who has their best interests at heart. “You won’t grow like this. Not if you keep clinging to each other the way that you do” he tells them, among many other purely intentioned, subtle and/or direct pleas towards sensibility. “Why, why are you so cruel?” Isa replies to Matthew, afraid to see his truth. For Iku and Yori it is Tomoka, a meddlesome self-interested party that tries to lure Yori out of his kindred coupling via fear peddling. But the character of Yano is the other half of this binary role of council. Yano is Yori’s best friend who is unfaulteringly honest in both his feelings for Iku, and his eventual effacing of those feelings, though pure of heart, for Yori’s sake, as revealed in two key conversations between them. "You still like Iku?" Yori asks. "I like her." Yano replies without batting an eye. "Are you thinking of stealing her away from me?" "Thinking about it...do you want me to?" Yano asks back, understanding Yori's guilt and hesitation. And a later conversation reveals his true bond with Yori, something we have sensed all along in Yano's actions and tones: Yano says, "If you waver you're done for. Don't lie about your own feelings. Using one girl to forget another is useless. Isn't it right to tell the one you like 'I like you'...even if it is your sister?" Similarly to Matthew, Tomoka says to Yori as she holds him back from chasing after a distressed Iku, “If you go after her now, things will never change.” This is true, but her motivations are pretense to her fixation. “You are so cruel” Iku says to Yori before she runs, having just found out that Yori accepted Tomoka as his girlfriend (even though he made it clear Tomoka that he doesn’t love her and that their relationship is a pathetic front). “If we keep this up, you will only get hurt” Yori says to Iku. But obviously, the hurt has already been had, and it has come from Yori himself. Or as Yano says, "It cant be helped... BECAUSE you like her." Iku is justifiably broken and, like Isa, is not prepared to face the truth in her loves’ gesture.

Subsequently, one cant help but feel the same sting when in THE DREAMERS Isa pleads to Theo, “It will always be you and me, right?” And likewise in MY SISTER, MY LOVE, Iku says to Yori, “I...can only love you, Iku.”

The second film I drew upon when watching MY SISTER, MY LOVE was Ang Lee’s BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005). The manner in which these two sets of characters, (Jack Twist and Ennis Delmar equating Iku and Yori) who are interminably drawn to one another, allow the fear of that love's "wrongness" and the assumption of grave consequence to unravel it. Pain comes from within their binary orbits, not necessarily from without. Ennis and Yori emulate one another because they share in their consuming fear of reprimand (better describes as a complacency in fear tinged with genuine concern). Hiding away in an empty dark classroom Iku asks “why can’t we hold hands in front of other people? I really don't like that. What about you?” “For me, it's ok to remain like this, if it means we can be together," Yori responds. Ennis does the same thing to Jack, by relegating their love to camping retreats on Brokeback Mountain, and rejecting Jack’s open pleas for them to move somewhere, get a cattle farm together…to live and work together. Ennis always has an excuse,, but you can see the confliction and insecurity that riddles him.“This thing gets a hold of us in the wrong place, at the wrong time…” Alternately, Jack and Iku are full and at the mercy of their love, wanting nothing besides, despite it’s flaunting of convention.

The scene in which Yori admits his love to Iku , which occurs early in the first act, is strongly akin to first love scene between Jack and Ennis, but with a complete inversion of pacing. The pitch in the explosive scene from BOKEBACK MOUNTAIN undulates masterfully, offering a confusion of push and pull and the unprepared shattering of an invisible tension as Ennis, startled from sleep by an unconscious advance by Jack, half wrestle themselves into making love. In MY SISTER, MY LOVE, that same pitch, in that same kind of moment, is drawn out and slowed to a whisper. The push and pull is the same, but it’s the difference between a hammer swing and a pin-drop, both working perfectly in their respective contexts. Yori sits down next to a warmly lit slumbering Iku, holds her hand and gently kisses it, and then hovers his face above hers, awakening her as their lips almost touch. Even after she awakes, Yori holds in his hover, and the two look straightly at one another without a wisp of air between them. Yori admits his feelings to her slowly, and his inability to restrain them any longer. He gives her an ultimatim; “Decide now. Be with me or with other guys. If you want to be with me, you will show me with a kiss. I've lied to myself, ever since I was a child. I don't want to let go anymore." "So mean...you putting this all on me. So mean...that you decided this all by yourself" she softly accuses. But Iku, after her resistant sharpness, acquiesces, and she reciprocates Yori's openness with a kiss. What’s most interesting about these kindred scenes is that both of them unravel as one unbroken handheld shot, but utilize entirely different pacing and extents of disclosure, and still manage to approximate one another's meaning and urgency .

After a second act, in which Yori underhandedly distances himself from Iku, entering a shell of a relationship with Tomoka, MY SISTER MY LOVE ends where it began. In the final sequence of the film, a reunited Iku and Yori travel together by train to the field from their childhood. “Let’s go there. We can make rings for each other and say it again [the marriage proposal from the opening scene],” Yori suggests. But what the twins arrive at is not a lush sun-bathed field, but a bristled barren patch that holds no measure of its former glory. Yori says with a kind of sullen astonishment,“As expected... We really can’t go back…to that time, and that place.” Now, what could descend into a bout of sentimental melodrama is kept in check by Ando’s sensibilities of moderation. Ando doesn’t delude with an unlikely sense of hope, or a strained delusion that the twins can perpetuate their love affair without garnering future rebuke, or that that rebuke may not eventually sour their unity. He also inversely doesn’t saturate us in melancholia or pity. Instead Ando crafts a resolution that is, in a sense perfect because it doesn’t deviate too far from the emotional center of the film and break its crucial tonal consistency. By this I mean, that in the twins’ solemn acceptance of the impossibility of their love to actualize in the way that they desire, they devastate us but don’t let us hit the ground; a metaphor held beautifully in an incredible extended handheld shot of Iku and Yori playing a childhood game of piggy-back, in which a game of jan-ken-po (rock-paper-scissors) every 10 paces determines the mule. “I lied. For Iku to be my bride...I can't do it,” Yori says in muted sobs, with Iku on his back, her hair draped over her face and his shoulder, holding on to him with such apparent love.

Unlike Theo and Isa of THE DREAMERS and Jack and Ennis of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, who choose fatalism over a future, Iku and Yori choose to consider the facts and come to a pained but rational appreciation of the impossibility of their continued romance. They choose to spare themselves unremitting suffering in the future, and are able to make the decision on their own terms, rather than concede to an imposed mechanism (not that conventions of accepted love aren’t at fault here). Iku and Yori can still be together, share with each other, and even love one another…its now simply a matter of extent. Restraining love is a painful thing to endure, especially when it is for the person closest to you…but it CAN be endured. They’ve known that kind of denial all their lives. In a way, it is a return to form for both of them. And so Iku buries the small broken flower that Yori picked the night before in remembrance of his childhood marriage proposal, leaving the icon of their love precisely where it was born. “Having the memory of this flower being here…makes me feel better,” she says. And after playing a childhood game tinged with finality, they pull themselves together, wear a smile, and walk hand in hand through a dry open field, on with their lives.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE is a minor masterpiece of centered and confident storytelling, restrained and judicious editing, and beautiful but humble cinematography, all of which combine to best serve its tone, content, and performances. Sure, Ando employs a certain conventionality in the film’s overall arc and three-act structure, but the pacing, tact, and manner of simple non-affronting candor with which he navigates that arc is what sets it apart from any commonality.