Little Friend

“Is that the one that starts like a social realist family drama and ends like an Emir Kusturica film?” asked Chris Bourton, who’s crashing on our spare bed for the second half of the Edinburgh Film Fest. I intuited that he meant Shinji Somai’s MOVING.

The film follows twelve-year-old Tomoko Tabata, who gives just about the most entrancing child performance I’ve seen. Her parents are separating and she’s acting out, somewhat. Various schemes are devised to bring her estranged parents back together, but without success. In the end, the only solution is to become an adult.

This is accomplished, as so often in Somai’s films, with an experience of fire and water, in this case involving a burning dragon-boat at dusk — and this is where the resemblance to Kusturica and TIME OF THE GYPSIES can be felt. And it feels perfectly natural to reach this extraordinary point having started at the family dinner table.

Dinner table by Beverley and Elliot Mantle.

Somai serves up many of his trademark long takes, but since this is one of his later films he’s perhaps less fetishistic about shooting everything as a sequence shot. His edits never feel like he’s compromising with necessity, though — they are organically part of the plan.

At one point, little Tomoko dines with a very old man and his daughter. He mentions having a son and she asks where his son is.

He responds with a gesture.

And several expressions of wisdom and wonderment cross her little face… and she looks up and shouts, “Thanks for the food!”

MOVING is moving, and it’s cinematically sophisticated, and it’s a mature film by one of the best filmmakers of the 80s and 90s.

Fun in the Desert

Thelma Schoonmaker was in town (yay!), participating in a forum on digital restoration. As a sort of discussion piece (but much more than that), we got to see the 8K restoration of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, which has been fine-tuned since its appearance in Cannes (which makes this a world premier, in a way). Which inspired me to make the following geeky observation —

Gasim (I.S. Johar) abandons his belt and gear in the desert as he wanders, lost in LAWRENCE —

David Niven dreamily discards his kit on the beach in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.

Lean’s contribution to Powell’s films as editor is well known (49TH PARALLEL, ONE OF OUR AIRCRAFT IS MISSING), but maybe there’s room for further consideration of Powell’s influence on Lean? Here, the shot height and framing isn’t the same, but there’s a similar feeling of the distracted character being towed along by the tracking camera, as if on invisible wires.

Lean’s camera takes the position of the sun, beaming brutally down on poor old Gasim from on high, whereas Powell’s hugs the earth as if afraid of falling upwards to heaven — the frame positions Niven as caught precisely between heaven and earth, wearing the horizon as a belt.

When Gasim is lost, Niven makes the desert as abstract as possible — there’s the giant painted sun, and shots which lay a featureless blue rectangle atop a featureless manilla rectangle with a straight flat horizon joining them like to slices of cut card. In Gasim’s shot, even the horizon and sky have been mislaid. Yet Gasim is traveling left-to-right, and Lawrence is going right-to-left, so in such a flat world they MUST find each other.

Freddie Young, ace DOP, talked about LAWRENCE containing only one special effect shot, a painting of the sun. And indeed, the commitment to doing everything for real is still awe-inspiring. If a filmmaker tried some of these shots today, the audience would simply assume they were digital effects. But Young didn’t quite tell the truth — there’s also a shot of twinkly stars which is faked up (skillfully), and if we want to really nitpick there are some studio scenes with fake backdrops by production designer John Box and his team. The various solutions to filming at night also involve some trickery —

PROBABLY this whole shot is an interior set, but even if not, that moon is definitely on a stick. Gorgeous, though, isn’t it? MUCH gorgeouser in 8K, though…

The Sunday Intertitle: A Girl Called Bruce

“The Magical Kingdom of Shortened Fingers.” I think that’s part of what the above says.

The Shinji Somai retrospective began with an appropriate rainstorm outside — Somai’s characters are always getting soaked to the skin. In this one, PP RIDER (aka SHONBEN RAIDA) three kids (Jishu, in his waistcoat and tie, Jojo Kawasaki in his sleeveless T-shirt, and the tomboy girl named Bruce in her male drag) set out to rescue the school bully from kidnappers — so they can get their revenge on him for a scuffle at the start of the film.

The subject is sort of John Hughes meets The Hardy Boys, but the style is HIGH — practically every scene is an elaborate single take, with the camera crabbing through the scene, while voices from further ahead filter though onto the soundtrack — what’s going on up ahead? We’ll find out soon! In one scene, galaxies of soap bubbles serve this purpose, drifting into frame from the shot’s future. (At the end of MOVING, Shomei’s child protagonist is asked where she’s going: “The future!” is her forthright reply.)

Plus, I can’t think of a John Hughes film with so many bags of white powder figuring in it.

Bruce seeks the cathartic effects of water.

Festival director Chris Fujiwara has been inviting some of the Japanese filmmakers in town to help introduce the films, which gives an insight into how important Somei is in his homeland, and here the Hughes analogy does seem somewhat apt — his films encapsulated the pangs of adolescence for a generation (though he also made purely adult films in a way Hughes never quite managed). Atsushi Funahashi (NUCLEAR NATION) talked about Shomei’s love of water, and how his characters are always throwing things back and forth — he traced this tendency into the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a former Somei assistant. And Toshi Fujiwara (NO MAN’S ZONE) talked about Somei’s gradually emerging mythical side, and those trademark sequence shots, which have a unique flavour in Somei, different from Mizoguchi, Tarr, Welles. Since Somei shoots almost every scene in a one-er, I’m particularly intrigued by his occasional decisions to cut within a scene…

And everybody is always bursting into song, but not as in a musical — these are naturalistic singalongs and recitals, except they’re not quite naturalistic at all.

Definitely a unique sensibility already apparent.