Month: March 2015

LFM Reviews When Marnie Was There @ The 2015 New York International Children’s Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. For young Anna Sasaki, coming of age is a particularly dramatic process, in a dark psychological kind of way. She is like a character out of Daphne du Maurier or Mary Roberts Rinehart novels, who has been sent to spend the summer in a bucolic marshland that could have been painted by the Impressionists. Nobody would be better suited to realize her new environment than the Studio Ghibli team, but alas, this will be their final release for the foreseeable future. While it lacks the tragic sweep of its immediate predecessors (Princess Kaguya and The Wind Rises), Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There is an appropriately intimate goodbye that packed the house for the opening night of the 2015 New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Sasaki is far too sensitive to make friends easily with her classmates. Her stress-aggravated asthma does not help, either. After a particularly severe attack, Sasaki’s mother Yoriko sends her to stay with her extended relatives, kindly old Kiyomasa and Setsu Oiwa. However, as a foster child, Sasaki has difficulty accepting any of them as family, including Yoriko, despite their genuine concern.

To humor Setsu, she makes a few half-hearted efforts to befriend some of the village girls her age, but Sasaki prefers to make sketches on her own. One of her favorite subjects is Marsh House, an abandoned mansion only intermittently accessible during low tides. Strangely though, a young girl named Marnie seems to live there with her ominously gothic servants. Sasaki and Marnie are drawn to each other like lonely kindred spirits. At last, each feels they have finally found a true friend. Yet, Marnie’s penchant for vanishing without a trace confuses and sometimes hurts Sasaki.

From "When Marnie Was There."

It does not take much deduction or intuition to figure WMWT is some sort of supernatural story, but it still holds some profoundly resonant secrets. It certainly looks like a Studio Ghibli film, which means it is lushly gorgeous. As with The Secret World of Arrietty, his previous film as a director (also based on a British YA novel), Yonebayashi fully captures the beauty and malevolent power of the natural world. Frankly, it is rather impressive how quickly and yet how smoothly he can change the vibe from sunny pastoral to psychological suspense. There is even a scene in a supposedly haunted grain silo that evokes the mission tower staircase in Vertigo, fittingly enough in a film featuring a titular character named Marnie.

WMWT is a deeply humanist film, brimming with forgiveness and empathy. Through her POV, we will acutely understand how coming to terms with the past will allow Sasaki to carry on and embrace life. As a potential sign-off from Studio Ghibli, that’s not bad. Amongst their storied output, it probably ranks somewhere in the middle, but had it come from just about any other animation house, it would represent their crowning achievement. Granted, the opening act is a little slow getting it in gear, but overall, it is remarkably astute emotionally and refreshingly life-affirming. Highly recommended, When Marnie Was There screens again next Saturday (3/7) at the SVA Theatre, as part of this year’s NYICFF.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on March 4th, 2015 at 10:12pm.

LFM Reviews The World of Kanako @ The 2015 Film Comment Selects

By Joe Bendel. Showa Fujishima has made just about every parenting mistake a father can make and invented some that are uniquely his own. Not surprisingly, he really hasn’t been around much to see the results. At least that allows him to cling to a few willful misconceptions regarding Kanako. However, when his estranged ex-wife begrudgingly requests the ex-cop’s help finding their missing daughter, he learns far more than he bargained for in Tetsuya Nakashima’s The World of Kanako, which screens during the 2015 edition of Film Comment Selects.

Prepare to have your head messed with. Nakashima will fracture his timeline nearly beyond recognition and do his best to represent Fujishima’s warped perspective. The former copper now working as a rent-a-cop always had anger management issues, which directly led to his personal and professional disgrace. He is supposed to take drugs for his temper and mood swings, but they do not seem to be working, even though they might somewhat skew his perception of reality.

Kanako has already been missing for five days before Fujishima’s ex finally asks for his help. Intuitively, he assumes her disappearance is linked to the punky gang kids she has been hanging with, which is largely correct, but his presupposition that Kanako is an innocent victim will be rudely disabused. He soon learns she is up to her neck in drugs and pimping out classmates to well-heeled pedophiles. She was also apparently somehow mixed up in the suicide of her classmate Ogata. We will learn just exactly how so in flashbacks seen through the eyes of Boku, a secondary POV character, whose experiences with Kanako will parallel those of poor Ogata.

Meanwhile, Fujishima’s hostile former colleagues are more than happy to treat him as a suspect in a gangland-style killing perpetrated at the minimart he was ostensibly guarding. It turns out Kanako’s world is a small world when links turn up suggesting a connection between the convenience store massacre and her disappearance. Fujishima is in for a lot of pain and humiliation, but he will deal out plenty more to anyone he considers a potential suspect or accomplice.

Man, Kanako is dark, even by the standard Nakashima set in his previous films, Confessions and Memories of Matsuko. However, unlike the seamlessly constructed escalation of Confessions, WoK is a bit of a rat’s nest, compulsively flashing forward and backwards and liberally tossing unreliable perceptions or downright hallucinations to the point where many viewers will just drop the narrative thread and stop caring altogether, despite the occasional tongue-in-cheek hat-tips to 1970s exploitation cinema. The form of the film is enough to give you a headache, separate and apart from the rampant cruelty it depicts. Based on Akio Fukamachi’s novel, WoK is a nihilistic indictment of just about everything—that’s nihilism spelled with a capital “F” and a capital “U.”

To his credit, Kôji Yakusho doubles down over and over again as the violently erratic Fujishima. It is a messy, let-it-all-hang-out performance, but Yakusho takes it to such dark places, it is ultimately rather soul-scarring. Nana Komatsu is ethereally evil as the deceptively innocent looking Kanako, while Satoshi Tsumabuki chews the scenery with swaggering glee as Det. Asai, the sucker-sucking cop who apparently thinks he’s Kojack. Ai Hashimoto manages to add a thimble full of humanity to the film as Kanako’s estranged and disgusted middle school friend Morishita, but such figures of decency are few and far between in Kanako’s world. Frankly, it is hard to fully judge Kanako’s former homeroom teacher, Rie Higashi, but (Matsuko star) Miki Nakatani’s performance is truly riveting and maybe even redemptive.

From "The World of Kanako."

If this is what life is really like for Japanese middle and high school students, I would immigrate if I were a parent. It is hard to imagine a more exhausting film than WoK, for reasons of both style and content. It is clearly the work of a genuine auteur, who does not get his just international due, but Nakashima really demands a great deal of indulgence this time around. Lacking the tightness of Confessions and the pure gut-wrenching emotional payoff of Matsuko, it just starts to feel like it is piling it on after a while. For those who enjoyed cult hits like Confessions, Lady Snowblood, Audition, and the real Oldboy, but found them too artificially optimistic, WoK will give you the straight shot of bile you crave. Recommended accordingly for ardent Nakashima admirers, The World of Kanako screens this Thursday (3/5), at the Walter Reade Theater, concluding this year’s Film Comment Selects.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on March 4th, 2015 at 10:11pm.

LFM Reviews Faults

By Joe Bendel. They do not use an initial article. Claire’s cult merely refers to itself as “Faults.” “From a fault comes a change” they like to say—and they seem to think a big apocalyptic one is coming. That is why they do not have time for children, or “parasites” as they call them. Okay, that sounds a little creepy, but it still isn’t as nuts as Xenu and the thetan madness. Her parents will hire a disgraced cult expert to deprogram her, but nothing will go according to his plan in Riley Stearns’ Faults, which opens this Friday in New York.

Ansel Roth was once a bestselling cult investigator with his own television show, but a case that went sour cost him just about everything. He now lives a hand-to-mouth existence giving seminars in third-rate hotels, where he transparently hawks his self-published follow-up book, to pay back Terry, his loan shark-ish manager, who fronted the printing costs. Who would attend his speaking engagements? The truly desperate, like Claire’s parents, Paul and Evelyn.

Although Roth had essentially quit the de-programming business, he agrees to help the couple, largely due to the motivation supplied by his manager’s enforcer. Yet, as soon as he abducts the young woman and commences the process, strange complications start to arise. Claire is unusually calm and pre-possessed, answering his questions without a lot of rhetorical contortions. On the other hand, her parents start to acting in suspicious ways that might suggest a history of emotional and perhaps even sexual abuse. Nevertheless, Roth is under pressure to get this deal done, so he can pay off his overdue debt.

Given the potentially lurid nature of its subject matter, it is rather impressive how low-key and subtle Stearns’ treatment is. He takes his time establishing Roth’s bitter and nebbish character through some wickedly droll black comedy. The stakes are considerable throughout the chess game he plays with Claire (played by Stearns’ real life wife, Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but when things take a macabre turn, it is more amusing than alarming. Granted, we have seen many variations on the film’s big twist before, but the smaller helper-twists are quite clever.

From "Faults."

It is a shame award season never seriously considers genre films, because Leland Orser’s lead performance merits that sort of attention, just like the dynamite Nick Damici in Late Phases. He masterfully alternates between comedy and tragedy, without breaking stride. He and Winstead crackle together in their sparring sessions. Lance Reddick (the hotel manager in John Wick) is also all kinds of hardnosed as Terry’s muscle, Mick, while John Gries chews plenty of scenery as his weird boss.

There are several spots in the third act Stearns could have played up much bigger, but that matter-of-factness makes the film quickly appreciate in viewers’ consciousness, in retrospect. Look, sometimes less really is more. In fact, Faults is a cool example of how a highly effective genre hybrid can be whipped up on a limited budget. Aside from maybe one sequence, the whole thing could have been shot in a low-rent motor lodge. The finished product is a great showcase for Stearns and his consistently strong ensemble of character actors. Highly recommended, Faults opens this Friday (3/6) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on March 4th, 2015 at 10:11pm.