Film Reviews by AP

This is a film about Master Chef Chu and his three daughters. The eldest is a chemistry teacher whose Christianity has saved her from terminal depression following what we understand to have been a love affair; the second, gifted with her father's skills but never encouraged to further them professionally, is a high-flying executive with an airline company; the third is still a student, busily stealing her best friend's boyfriend. Every Sunday, they are expected to turn up at their father's for Sunday dinner which he cooks. At the first of these he says he has an announcement to make, but is unabale to make it because he is distracted by his second daughter's criticism of a dish and by a call from 'Uncle Wen', a longtime Master Chef colleague in a topflight hotel restaurant as they have a problem with four dishes they are preparing for a banquet. He ups and abandons the dinner, dashes to the hotel, is welcomed into the kitchen and saves the evening. But it becomes evident that Uncle Wen has to taste the food Chu cooks because Chu has lost his sense of taste - much as he has lost his taste for living?

This meal establishes much about the relationship between father and daughters that the film concerns itself with: a father devastated by the loss of his wife years before, doing his best to look after his children, almost certainly anxious not to be deserted by them, but also unable to articulate how he feels about them. The plot is given extra interest by a second family who are clearly very close to Chu's - a young divorcee, her daughter and, later on, her fearsome mother who clearly makes a play for Chu which he appears to encourage.

Meanwhile, the youngest daughter makes good headway with catching her man and the eldest catches the sports teacher in her school after suffering from a series of mischievous love letters. The middle daughter, the one who's a chef manqué, is doing well at work and a promotion to the airline's Amsterdam office is imminent. Her life is complicated and saddened further by an office affair which ends when she discovers something about her older sister.

One of the film's strengths is that this domestic drama is given a number of twists, some unexpected, others sensed but effected with dramatic suddenness. Another one is that Ang Lee is very good at keeping us interested in all three daughters as well as their father by following their stories clearly. Altogether, lovely cinematography, excellent cooking scenes - including a comic one of two young men trying to catch a chicken for the pot - scenes that introduce us to the wide variety of Chinese cuisine beyond the UK takeaway experience, and a sensitivity to human relations, especially between Chu and his second daughter, make for a a rewarding film. Quite long, but I didn't find there were any significant longeurs.

Not a great film, but I wanted something to enjoy, and this fitted the bill neatly. There's nothing to add by way of plot synopsis to what already exists on Cinema Paradiso other than to say it rambles along in the way a western trail movie can do. Occasionally it reminded me of 'The Outlaw Josie Wales' in the way it moves from set piece to set piece. For me, this did not detract.

What I really enjoyed were the the two central performances. Bronson seemed to be relaxed and enjoying himself, ditto Mifune. Good to watch them walking: Bronson with his easy stride, Mifune with his characteristic shoulder swagger. And, of course, they are both good in the fight scenes, either between themselves or when tackling their opposition, either the left-handed Gauche and his Mexican bandits or the Comanches. Ursula Andress looks good, but isn't, I'm afraid, much of an actress, and set against Mifune who is terrific at saying so much with his face and his glances, she's something of a disappointment.

Overall, good ol'-fashioned fun.

Having sat through "The Idiot" recently and found it pretentious and tedious, it was good to return to Kurosawa at his storytelling best.

Like "High and Low", "Scandal" is a drama, but whereas the later film is, I think, very intense and exhaustingly compelling, "Scandal" moves rather faster without losing any of its tension. Sometimes in his films I think Kurosawa allows himself overlong, lingering moments when protagonists have to make choices : there are some in "Scandal" which edge towards that, but I thought they pulled back just in time, and the changes in camera shots and angles helped avoid dullness.

"Scandal"'s story involves a painter, Mifune, who offers a woman he doesn't know, Yamaguchi, a lift on his motorbike from a beauty spot to a local inn where they both stay in separate rooms. Unknown to Mifune, Yamaguchi is a famous singer who is the constant target of the gutter press. She has come away from the city, hoping to avoid their attentions. Alas, they are hanging around and capture a photograph of her in an innocent pose with Mifune which, taken out of context, appears compromising. The photograph is published by a magazine clearly interested in exploiting Yamaguchi's celebrity status and not caring a fig about whether or not what they print is true. They rely on celebrities not wanting to sue them for fear of further publicity, expense, and a high likelihood that they do have not have enough evidence to disprove the magazine's claims.

Mifune, however, decides to sue and eventually persuades Yamaguchi to join him. They are represented by a lawyer, Shimura, who, drunk, presents himself to Mifune one night. Mifune takes him on: he, Mifune, is a man who is prepared to trust someone whom he recognizes as basically a good man, though, as the drama proceeds, his faith is sorely tested as we observe Shimura, who is not a successful practitioner, who has a daughter suffering from TB, and who drinks and gambles, fall prey to bribes from the magazine's editor.

That's the set up, and it's enhanced by a subplot involving both Mifune's compassion for the dying daughter and her father's love for her and sense of guilt that he has not the strength of character to look after her. Suffice it to say that, as is often the case with Kurosawa's films, there is a climactic moment of redemption, but it is impressively muted, enigmatic even, and avoids a fully resolved 'happy ending'. The drama is further maintained by our being encouraged constantly to wonder if Mifune is going to fall entirely either for either his co-defendant, Shimura's daughter, or his long-term model.

As the Cinema Paradiso information points out, the film is a lacerating attack on a part of the press that exploits privacy both recklessly and ruthlessly. He also, of course, recognizes that people fall for this stuff, and his use of witness statements during the trial emphasise this. "Scandal" rings as many bells today as it must have done in 1950. Furthermore, it is also interesting to see developing themes that are recognizable in Kurosawa's work as a whole: I found myself, for example, thinking of Mifune in "Red Beard" as his compassion and patient understanding of other people weaker than him was revealed, or in "The Bad Sleep Well" where his determination to right wrongs is the driving force of that film.

This is a film that worked well on several levels for me. The narrative intermeshes a takeover bid by the protagonist, Gondo, of National Shoes, a kidnapping and the payment of the ransom, and the detective work that leads to the arrest and conviction of the kidnapper. Much of the first half is dramatically very intense, set either in Gondo's house that looks down over the shanty town where the kidnapper lives, or on a train from which the ransom is to be thrown. The second half is a police procedural which is as carefully constructed as the detective work.

This framework allows Kurosawa to offer the audience a lot to think about. Gondo is effectively a self-made man who believes in good quality shoes, and has worked hard to resist the trend to make shoes that are throwaway fashion. Faced with what he believes to be the kidnap of his son, only to discover that it was in fact his chauffeur's son who has been taken, at first he refuses to pay the ransom. Then, under pressure from both his conscience and his wife's restrained implorations, he agrees to forgo buying the shares that would have given him control of National Shoes and phones the bank to get the money. Gondo is played by Mifune, whose acting is exemplary: I was particularly struck by the dignified, courteous businesslike manner he uses when, after 45 minutes of violently shifting emotions, he calls his bank manager. It is the beginning of his discovery of his humanity.

Humanity is clearly a quality lacking in the National Shoes executives who want to improve profits by producing third rate shoes. Kurosawa uses 'Bo'sun', an elderly senior detective who's seen it all, to act as a moral reference point: his disgust with the absence of co-operation from the National Shoes executives in the police investigation to find the kidnapper is specially notable. Similarly, the detective leading the investigation team, reflecting apparently Kurosawa’s own sense that Japanese justice was getting soft, is determined to pursue a course of action that will allow him to push for the death penalty for the kidnapper.

But even the kidnapper is allowed his point of view. Kurosawa does not flinch from sending him to his death, but in his final scene in which the kidnapper speaks in prison face-to-face with Gondo, he is allowed to voice his sense of the burning inequalities in society that led him to take such desperate actions. Nevertheless, it is Gondo Kurosawa holds up for our approbation: his career ruined by paying the ransom, he has taken up a position with another shoe company which he hopes to build into a success. He knows he has to strive, but Mifune’s performance shows he has learned a certain humility: gone is the overbearing assertiveness we did not admire in the first part of the film. Kurosawa’s perennial theme that life is about learning how to be better is set against the kidnapper’s uncompromising surrender to his hatreds.

The other major thing that struck me was the depiction of the police as both efficient, dedicated and motivated by a humanity that we cannot but admire.

There is much else to admire in the film: the depiction of heroin addicts; the use Kurosawa makes to newspapers to espouse what he wants to promote as his moral line by having them represent Gondo's payment of the ransom as laudable; Japan’s opening up to western cultural influences; the quietness and dignity of Gondo’s wife; the visual composition of each scene; Mifune’s use of telling gesture, and his ability to act even with his back; the clarity with which the police assemble their evidence; cameos, such as that of the tram worker who recognises exactly where a tram was travelling by listening to the sound of it on a police recording of a phone call… All in all, I felt this was as near to a novel as a film can get, and that made it a film that, as a former English teacher, I felt I could ‘read’ perceptively. Recommended.

... but not, probably, the film you'd save from the waves if you were on a desert island. Nevertheless, it's certainly gone straight into my Top Ten films of all time. The reviewer in 1001 Films to See Before You Die uses the word unrelenting to describe it, and I agree. It is mesmerisingly terrifying, not in the way of the Hitchcock thriller where the horrors occur in intense bursts preceded by well constructed periods of suspense, but simply in the intensity of anxious expectation all the time. The young boy, the protagonist, who becomes a partisan, is the figure with whom we see things, and, with him, I found my brows furrowing and my eyes widening as the series of appalling events casually unfolded - history and war going about their everyday business. With Hitchcock, I often want to hide behind the sofa/watch through spread fingers: with 'Come and See' I couldn't: its truthful awfulness holds you with the force of the Ancient Mariner.

I loved this, and the Blu Ray has some interesting 'bonus material' about Ophuls' techniques and character. The film itself consists of three adapted Maupassant stories, the first one very short about youthful spirits resisting, unsuccessfully, encroaching old age. The second one is probably the one the film is most remembered for in its sunlit pastoral world of Suisse Normande in contrast to the friendly but busy and dimly lit urban night world of a brothel, albeit a respectable one. The storytelling is remarkable for the way the prostitutes' lost innocence is so sensitively evoked. The third story, and not the one originally intended by Ophuls owing to production costs, is a smaller cast and more bitter than sweet. Ophuls' achievement seems to me twofold. First, there's his capacity to conjure mood, especially that of the joy of the moment and the ensuing sense of its passing into memory at the same time as looking for the way of making the best of the moments that follow. The second is his camer work, not restless, but almost always moving and this gives the film an energy, sometimes vigorous, sometimes much less so, even gentle, but always engaging. In this film there is also a very engaging narrative voiceover, inviting you to enjoy being entertained.

I imagine it's sacrilegious to say anything unappreciative of Ray Harryhausen, but I did find his special effects quite badly dated now. Mind you, there's plenty of modern CGI out there that doesn't work for me, especially big battle scenes using ridiculously large numbers of moving pixels or whatever. Nevertheless, I enjoyed watching old artistry at work and British mainstream classical actors managing to keep straight faces. Tim Piggott-Smith plays a rare role as a goody, and the young leads do a good job. The best of the monsters for me were the scorpions and Medusa, and the make up for Calibos is dramatic. Good stuff with a beer and a packet of popcorn.

I'm working steadily through Mizoguchi, and it's clear he makes films about how men don't make life easy for women, This film is no exception. I thought there were two main strands: Akiyama's professorial assertion of the acceptability of adultery and Ono's single-minded world of business. Akiyama thinks it's all right to go off with Ono's wife who feels ignored by her husband, but he's furious with his own wife, Michiko, who, as a samurai keen to retain her family's reputation, has had to spend a (sexless) night in a hotel with her cousin, Tsutomo, owing to a rainstorm. It is clear the cousins love each other, but Michiko is able to resist her temptations, while Akiyama isn't. Furthermore, Akiyama attempts to steal and cash in the deeds of Michiko's property. At the same time, Ono, who is also Michiko's brother, tries to borrow money from her for his failing business by asking her to mortage her property. By the end of the film, the only one to have saved face is the honourable Michiko.

I enjoyed the film, but found it a bit meodramatic. Nevertheless, the working-out of the inevitable tragedy was compelling enough to keep me watching, as was the acting all round.

I agree with VW. The print is blurry, lacking definition, and the night scenes are direly unseeable. (I've always found 'Throne of Blood' best defined in terms of varying greyness, and of Kurosawa's major films, it's the one I least like.)

Thus the two stars.

The story, however, though standard fare, was good enough to grip and I enjoyed seeing Mifune under the direction of someone other than Kurosawa.

I must have watched this at a susceptible moment, because I found it very moving, though some scenes are, I felt, too extended and I was conscious of my feelings being worked on. Nevertheless, the story of a young, western-dressing bicycle-riding teacher taking on a class of little children on an island where the economy is stone-quarrying or fishing/farming, becoming their friend as they go through life, marrying, losing her husband etc etc, was told with enough candour to have me in tears a few times. The teacher is both kind and keen to teach her charges about life in the wider world, but she finds it hard to toe the patriotic line when war is declared and her careful but consistent opposition to it - an opinion confirmed by the death of several of her grown up boy pupils - holds our respect. I respond intensely to people being good to each other, and there were many moments of that for me in this film in praise of committed gentleness.

I thought I wasn't going to enjoy 'Pigs and Battleships' - I don't like people being nasty or cruel to each other when the setting is believably realistic, which this movie is. Set in a Japanese port, presumably in 1960 when the film was made, it presents the story of Kinta, a small-time hoodlum/yakuza, and his girlfriend, Haruko, who works in a small bar in the redlight district servicing American sailors. Kinta's gang have a small business looking after the pigs that they sell to the US Navy through a 'big boss' who is Chinese Mr Chen who has a deal going with Mr Sakiyama, a Japanese American. It's a world where everyone knows the 'price of everything and the value of nothing'. This beastliness, however, is not allowed to dominate the film: sure, it's there in everything - the violence, the sexual exploitation, the thieving, the debt, the rape, the murder, abortion - but we are allowed to laugh at these unhappy people as well, even if the laughter is uneasy. Kinta makes a mistake and his gang leader beats him up with reluctant determination; that leader thinks he has cancer, but Kinta stole the wrong X-ray and it's only an ulcer; a shoot up is something the yakuza are not very brave about, and the police clearly have an understanding with them. Haruko, Kinta's father and the gang leader's factory-worker brother are the moral heart of the film: each knows what is right, and Haruko escapes to her uncle in Kawasaki, where we hope a better life lies for her. The piece is energetic and emotive and I enjoyed it.

I've seen Imamura's later version of this film which appears in 1001 Films to See... I liked that as well, though it has a certain grim factor attached to it and the cachet of having been filmed in conditions that I understand forced the performers into being method actors.

This earlier version of the story is played as if it is a theatre performance. There are painted backdrops and theatrical lighting effects - very good ones - and excellent realistic-looking scenery. The performances are naturalistic, however, and the mother-son relationship at the heart of it I found very moving. This contrasts with the second son's selfishness and the gluttony of his girlfriend. The gluttony is an important element of the narrative as the peasant community is always on the verge of famine and has an understanding that once you reach 70 you have to go to Narayama Mountain to die. An elderly male friend of the mother has not come to terms with this and his desperation and hunger (his family will no longer feed him) contrasts with her dignity and acceptance of the appropriateness of it being her turn to die. She considers herself blessed by being left on the mountain during a snowfall as she will have a quick death.

I liked both films, but for a gentler, more dignified meditation on the imminence of death rather than a sense of the cruelty of life, this version has my current preference.

I'm just reviewing 'Early Spring' (with mild spoilers).

I so wanted this film to end as indeed it did, on a note of strongly moderated wary hopefulness and optimism reflected in the peacefulness of the landscape and the ambiguous image of the train (departing? passing through? full or empty...?).

Nevertheless, it is a film whose narrative unfolds at length. I don't, on reflection, think it would benefit from cuts. As one would expect from Ozu, this is not an action movie and its drama is slow to emerge as the drama of the ordinary and everyday often is.

Much, I think, depends on Ozu's occasional, but pointed focus on the strains of being a 'salary man', a strain highlighted by the couple of scenes of commuters going to catch the train at Kamata station. There's one particularly striking episode in a bar in which the young Shoji listens to the reflections of the bar owner - a former salary man who worked in the same company as Shoji (the TOA Firebrick Company), and who got out - and a man with only a little time left before retiring on what will be a pension that is less than he hoped. This perhaps explains why Shoji, and his circle of office friends, spend so much time playing mah-jong in the evenings – to obliterate the dreariness of their daily life and prospects; and it explains why, in turn, Shoji’s wife, Masako, finds herself spending so many lonely evenings at home on her own. Together with what seems, to this European viewer's eye, a marked reluctance on the part of the Japanese male to speak of his feelings to his wife and womenfolk, Shoji’s internalising of the misery of his ‘grindstone’ life creates a distance between him and Masako which, by the time the movie begins, has gone far enough for Masako to turn down a chance to spend time with Shoji at the weekend on a hike with his friends. And it is during this hike that 'The Goldfish' starts making a play for him. You can guess the rest of the story more or less, but then I find Ozu is so good at making the ordinary exceptional.

I found this a very rewarding movie.

I'm someone who finds some Japanese directors very sympathetic, in particular Ozu and Kurosawa. (I don't quite 'get' Mizoguchi.) I think this is because their style is, mostly, self effacing (which is probably why I don't much enjoy Kurosawa's showier productions like 'Ran' or 'Throne of Blood' where the craft and style rather eclipses, for me, the significance of the story). I like stories of the ordinary, the everyday, the unexceptional that, under scrutiny, is illuminated and elevated to the status of exceptional.

So I'm now exploring directors who have not come to my attention before, and Kawashima is one of them. I enjoyed this film of his - a story about a man, a petty thief in the last days of the Shogunate when American and European interests are changing Japan irrevocably. The thief is a man skilled at living on his wits and he has a talent for technology being able to mend musical watches and make his own printing blocks and ink. He knows he has TB, and enters an 'inn' (brothel) in Shinagawa to enjoy himself mightily with some friends. He is, however, unable to pay and ends up paying off his debt by making himself indispensable to all the longterm employees, male and female, at the inn and thus earning tips. Finally, he runs off to find the European doctor who diagnosed him and to seek his assistance as his TB becomes worse.

Although the thief is at the heart of the film, carrying it along with his energetic zest for living, Kawashima enjoys developing his minor characters. There are prostitutes playing one client off against another, constantly looking for a man who will marry them so they have somewhere secure to go after they are no longer able to earn their keep; there are the grasping brothel owner and his wife, practised in the arts of tight-fistedness and exploitation; there is a gang of revolutionaries (though some of them see themselves as terrorists) planning to set fire to the Foreigners' Quarter; there are the several clients; there are three male servants who have known virtually nothing other than the brothel and who have no prospect of escaping it (including, intriguingly, a half-European one who is revealed to have been abandoned at the brothel by a prostitute long ago); and there's the owners' son, a drunk, who manages, with the hero-thief's help, to escape with the daughter of a carpenter who has sold her to the brothel because he is too poor to keep her.

I enjoyed this narrative immensely. It's pacy and full of intrigue, and in the second half the ingenuity and good-nature of the thief is compelling. Indeed, it is this good nature and joy in living that, for me, is the strength of the film. The man knows he is dying and is determined to extract from it every last scruple of pleasure and delight in his natural gifts that he can. Kawashima perhaps overplays the pathos towards the end as the narrative becomes increasingly punctuated with the thief's coughings, but the final episode abandons them as the dying man pulls off his final trick and makes his escape along the shore disappearing into the future? his death? his cure? - but certainly a future on his own terms.

I don't think the modern day opening was of much importance, though it may have more significance to a Japanese viewer. I think we are required to suspend our disbelief quite considerably at the gullibility of ssome of the male clients, but maybe it is not so unlikely if we consider they are, more often than not, drunk, and their judgments turned by the prospect of sex.

Thoroughly enjoyable.