From Russia With Obviousness

A remake of "12 Angry Men" makes heavy-handed what was already pretty much so.

Delicacy, on the other hand, is the operative mode of Jan Troell’s superb “Everlasting Moments.” Delicacy and a certain scrupulousness, both hallmarks of the 77-year-old Swedish master’s sensibility, are certainly apt qualities to bring to bear on what is, in large part, a film about the play of light and shadow. This is a turn-of-the-century story of a working class housewife and mother who, in the midst of hard times that are getting ever harder, discovers photography and becomes something of a master of it. When the gentle, almost angelic Maria’s husband Sigfrid is banned from dock work, Maria (Maria Heiskanen) tries to pawn a good Contessa camera she won years before in a lottery but never used. Sebastian (Jesper Christiansen), the kind proprietor of the camera shop Maria brings it to, encourages her to use it before giving it up. And so she does, opening up a new world for herself while increasing tensions in her own household — Sigfrid, besides being a drunk and a bully, is also a self-righteous clod who’s determined to keep Maria pregnant (at one point, it’s difficult to figure out the size of their brood) whilst he philanders and doesn’t work much.

In the hands of a certain stripe of American filmmaker, the storyline would have Lifetime written all over it: “Oppressed Woman Finds Fulfillment (And Profit!) Through Realizing Her Creative Potential.” But Troell, who co-wrote the story with wife Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell, and delegated the screenplay to Niklas Rådström, refuses to rush the plot, instead letting detail after detail of the daily lives of the characters settle in. He never soft-peddles the penury or the brutality in those lives, but lets it flow in and out of what is ultimately a vision of beauty: the beauty of Maria’s deceptively simple/humble photographs, and the beauty of light itself, superbly captured in every frame by cinematographers Mischa Gavrjusjov and Troell himself. And this universal vision finally makes the film’s women-and-creativity theme resonate all the more deeply.

Whither the omnibus film? Multi-story features showcasing short, thematically-linked works by all manner of celebrated directors were a desirable way of facilitating international co-productions in the post-New Wave ’60s. The form yielded largely hit-and-miss, but sometimes intriguing, results such as “Ro.Go.Pa.G.” (Rossellini! Godard! Pasolini! Gregoretti!), “The World’s Greatest Swindles” (Chabrol! Godard! Polanski! Horikawa! Gregoretti again!), “Love and Anger” (Bellocchio! Bertolucci! Godard and Pasolini again! Etc…) and “Spirits of the Dead” (Vadim! Malle! Fellini!). The form burned out quickly, but never entirely died; recent attempts to revitalize the anthology film have, finally, been largely as hit-and-miss as the first wave was — except for “Four Rooms,” the self-conscious evocation of the New Wave from Tarantino, Rodriguez, Rockwell, and Anders, which was pretty much all miss. 2006’s “Paris, je t’aime” took the novel approach of enlisting 22 directors to make very short shorts, one for each of the city’s districts (of which there are twenty, but some of the directors were teams). “Tokyo!” continues in the city-as-theme vein, albeit in a pretty slack fashion. The three-episode film, with contributions from the very idiosyncratic non-Japanese directors Michel Gondry (French, now working mostly in America), Leos Carax (French, hardly working) and Bong Joon-ho (Korean), is a peculiar one — it could be said that the sum of its parts is greater than its whole.

All three episodes are pretty diverting themselves. Gondry’s “Interior Design” begins as a faux-mumblecore tale of two kids who come to the big city to fulfill somewhat undefined ambitions and end up miserably bickering about nothing much for a while. Then, Gondry being Gondry, the story takes a left turn, and the female protagonist (Ayako Fujitani) turns into a wooden chair. And then discovers she can morph back and forth between wood and flesh at will. The command “make yourself useful” has never been considered in quite so wry a way before.

Carax’s “Merde” is the most audacious and absurd of the three. Here, a red-bearded, green-suited malingerer, played with near-obscene brio by Denis Lavant, emerges from a sewer to the strains of Fukasuku’s “Godzilla” theme music. He is exceptionally rude to the general populace, which gets him arrested and tried, but which also makes him something of a media hero, which in Japan can be a very odd thing to be.

Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo,” about a shut-in’s fateful encounter with a pizza delivery girl (at least that’s what it’s about at first) seems a bit understated coming from the director of “The Host.” But it builds up a nice head of eccentricity, and is perhaps the most beautifully lensed (by Jun Fukumoto) of the three sequences.

So what’s not to like? Well, maybe the context, or the lack thereof. The Gondry and Bong sequences, in particular, strike one as having only provisionally to do with the city of Tokyo. Indeed, Gondry’s segment is adapted from a graphic novel by girlfriend Gabrielle Bell called “Cecil and Jordan in New York.” And Bong’s shut-in could just as well have sealed himself up in Seoul. Only Carax’s picture engages the city and its culture directly, via Carax’s very particular (and much missed — this is his first film of any kind in almost a decade) mix of bile and spectacular irony. The other two have no compelling reason to be set there (despite the fun Gondry has with some of the city’s more oddball apartment complexes). This is the sort of nit I’m usually loath to pick, and I’m not sure just why it bothers me in this case. It probably won’t bother anyone else interested in new work from these three directors.

Glenn Kenny is our guest critic for the month of March.

[Additional photo: Denis Lavant in Leos Carax's "Merde" in "Tokyo!", Liberation Entertainment, 2009]

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