Spring Cleaning
Kelly Reichardt and Kinuyo Tanaka
Watching
Ornamental Hairpin (1941)
I’ve been watching a lot of Japanese movies, mostly because there’s no shortage of them to go around.1 This one by Hiroshi Shimizu, blissfully only 70 minutes long, is set at a hot springs in the mountains that attracts people of all ages seeking to get away from the city for a while2. One of the visitors, the strapping bachelor Nanmura (a still-fairly-young Chishu Ryu), steps on a sharp hair ornament in the water and badly cuts up his foot. A day later, the bathhouse receives a letter from one Miss Emi (Kinuyo Tanaka), inquiring after a lost hairpin. When she comes around to collect it, she learns of the indirect injury she caused and decides to stick around to see to it that the convalescent Nanmura can get back up on his own two feet. The other male guests at the spa are meanwhile eager to play matchmaker.
This movie is light on close ups and heavy on the medium shots. When Nanmura and Emi meet for the first time, Shimizu shoots them from one room over so they are framed by the sliding doors, reinforcing the emotional reserve of the situation. It takes almost 30 minutes for all the players to get moved into place, after which point Shimizu structures the rest of the film around four scenes of Nanmura practicing to walk, cheered on by two children and a fretful Emi. His routines increase in difficulty from “walk between these two trees” to “cross these raging rapids on a narrow bridge” to finally “climb this set of 40 steps” (if we’re being honest those last two probably should have been swapped). Here, we finally get cutaways to Emi’s face, where we watch as her hopes that Nanmura will recover are gradually overcome by fear that, once he does, he’ll leave her life forever.
These labors of Nanmura made me think of scenes out of silent films that are built around physical performances in lieu of dialogue. There’s plenty of talking in this film but I could tell that Shimizu had cut his teeth working in, and taking inspiration from, the silent era. (Indeed: of the more than 150 movies he directed, the majority were silents.) Nowhere is his prowess at storytelling without words more clear than in the film’s closing moments, a montage of Emi retracing Nanmura’s steps at each of the sites of his walking exercises after he has left her behind with only her emotions to remember him by otherwise.
Love Under the Crucifix (1962)
Speaking of silent films, Kinuyo Tanaka’s career in the Japanese film industry began as an actress in silents, including many directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Her most well-known roles were to be in Kenji Mizoguchi films, in the back-to-back The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954). It was around the time of her Mizoguchi collaborations that she began making movies herself, starting with 1953’s Love Letter and ending in 1962, after six films total, with Love Under the Crucifix. Though she acted in some of these, she mostly held supporting roles and ceded the lead performances to other actresses.
The most efficient way of describing Love Under the Crucifix is as Sirkian melodrama, but make it feudal Japan. Tanaka opens with a scene on a battlefield, in between skirmishes, that seems to promise action in the vein of a Kurosawa samurai epic. Instead it’s a fakeout, a prologue for a tale of doomed love between a tea master’s daughter (Ineko Arima) who falls for a married Christian samurai (Tatsuya Nakadai). Both of these characters are based on real figures: the former, Ogin, was the daughter of Sen no Rikyu, the influential tea ceremony innovator who popularized wabi-sabi; the latter, Justo Takayama Ukon, after the events of this film would be exiled to the Philippines (and much later, in 2017, would receive beatification under Pope Francis). Partway through the film, a national ban on Christianity is introduced, also historically accurate (for reference, Shusako Endo’s Silence is set a few decades after the events of this film).
I fell asleep for a bit in the middle and, as this was a screening at the Smithsonian, it will likely be a while before I get to revisit it to get the narrative details right. As I alluded to with the Sirk comment, Tanaka’s command of colors is striking, with many shots, especially exteriors, approaching saturated extremes. Meanwhile the interior scenes, where the hushed deliberations of love take place, reminded me a bit of similar scenes in Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (1953), moodily lit and precisely framed. After the screening I overheard a woman talking to the programmer and comparing the film to Mizoguchi’s Crucified Lovers (1954), which I had incidentally also watched a few weeks earlier. In both films crucifixion is introduced early and looms as a punishment reserved for adulterers and lawbreakers. In the Mizoguchi, a couple caught in it are paraded through town to foreshadow the doomed fate of the main characters, whereas Tanaka frames a similar scene of a woman being carried on horseback to her punishment as an inspirational moment for Ogin. (The woman’s crime? She rejected the advances of a nobleman; a bit of a reversal of Ogin’s situation, then, but an empowering reminder for her to stand by her convictions.)
Ukon’s refusal of Ogin’s advances is rooted in his Christian faith but something about it is unusual. Tanaka’s overall treatment of Christianity in the film feels more anthropological than empathetic or even critical. It’s a historical fact about the period she’s dramatizing, but the actual content of Christian faith is left unexplored. This could just be a consequence of the film’s being told from Ogin’s point of view—the foreignness of Ukon’s beliefs would make more sense if we’re meant to only understand Ogin’s side of the story. Though it could also be that Tanaka simply lacks the proximity to Christianity that enables filmmakers in other cultures to be more specific in their depictions of it. Either way, I’d be interested in hearing more takes from people who didn’t doze off.
Showing Up (2022)
It seems to be fairly widely accepted among film critics that Kelly Reichardt is one of the best American filmmakers we’ve got. I’ve never kept up with her work—2019’s First Cow was the only other film of hers I’d seen until now—and I have never felt any real draw to it, so I went in to Showing Up neither with skepticism nor anticipating much from it exactly.
Showing Up is set around an art college in Portland. It’s populated by characters who unearthed lots of dormant memories from my youth: of sculpture gardens and docents, local art teachers who gave lessons in their basements and lofts, and friends of my mother who ran small arts businesses above garages or in warehouses. Lizzy (Michelle Williams) works an administrative job at the college while keeping up her own practice as a sculptor in her spare time—which isn’t nearly as much time as she’d like.
We meet Lizzy as she’s gearing up for a show and fending off minor obstacles left and right. She hasn’t had hot water in her apartment for weeks and her neighbor/landlord Jo (Hong Chau) is too busy preparing for her own exhibit to make fixing it a priority. Lizzy’s cat breaks a pigeon’s wing and she somehow ends up having to care for it (and flushing $150 down the drain to have a veterinarian inform her the bird is “a little stressed”). There’s a constant threat that something will happen to Lizzy’s sculptures before the big day, as much from external forces (knocked over by a scampering cat, perhaps) as internal (throwing one across the room in frustration, which Lizzy seems on the verge of doing once or twice).
We get more than just incidental glimpses of Lizzy at work, but otherwise the rest of the art in the film is shown only in flashes between scenes. Lizzy, who sloughs from work to home and back again with an almost permanently furrowed brow, doesn’t change or grow so much as she braces and endures. There are no lessons learned; the hot water doesn’t come back on (the bird does pretty well for itself, though). But there are moments of grace: Lizzy taking her freshly-fired sculptures out of the kiln and handling them with minor awe, or gently petting the head of the shoebox-bound pigeon she’s grown attached to. I found Reichardt’s images to be more intentional than memorable. It’s one of those movies where the camera is always exactly where it needs to be, no more and no less. No single shot is as charged with emotion as the last shot of First Cow, for instance, though maybe your mileage will vary.
Reichardt does two things in particular that I think are an immense credit to her and her film. First, nobody ever waxes philosophical about The Purpose of Art or even just the meaning of their work. There’s no grand statement about why art—why this art—matters. It’s simply given that people will, and should, make art. Second, all the art is just the right size for the movie: the obvious handiwork of artists dedicated to their craft but not so good that it would feel out of place in a side street gallery in the Pacific Northwest. It’s funny to think of a movie with such modest ambitions competing at the Cannes Film Festival (which it did, last year). I imagine a lot of Reichardt’s devotees are grateful for whom she makes movies about as much as for how she makes them. On this latter point, I don’t know if I’m quite on her low-key wavelength, but on the former point I guess I can count myself among the admirers.
The best of these has definitely been Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes (1954). I watched it two months ago now so no more words on it here aside from a general two thumbs up.
There’s also a dozen masseurs who all appear to be blind, a detail that struck me as random except, as it turns out, this is a real thing.