Director Focus – Beyond Four Corners

Senaryo/Yonetmen – Nuri Bilge Ceylan

In a conversation I held with a friend recently, I ventured to mention in jest, that only in Ceylan’s films you begin your exploratory journey towards a complete comprehension of the character only to find that, at the end, they appear more obscure than they did during your initial acquaintance with them. But, in retrospect, what was said in jest seems veritably aphoristic in this swirling vacuum of limitless depths. My experiences are now recollections as I look back a week after clattering endlessly in eight boundless films crafted with the true fabric of cinema.

I began, as many do, with his highly decorated feature, Winter Sleep. A narrative perpetually covered in snow, as its appellation might suggest ; it seems so long ago that my recollections of this particular film look now like vestiges in that very same snow. This was the first step of eight, a significant one in itself, which challenged the idea implanted by arguable utterances delivered by Syd Field, as he so self-assuredly posits – “A character must effectively overcome obstacle after obstacle to attain his dramatic need”.

But what do I say about Winter Sleep, a film seemingly with no obstacles, no hurdles, or even a destination towards which its protagonist, who seems to display no dramatic need, can carry himself? Does this mean that its edifice is implicitly brittle, or it is a weak film for not giving its audience a tangible end? But, I surely must not detract from Syd Field’s words which, though inherently generalizing all films, were specifically intended to provide tyro screenwriters the ability to navigate and create a script that could garner readership which is by no means inferior to this different and sinuous path. One could contest that the plot points of the film have been so well glossed by Ceylan that it can only be known to him – implying that Field’s maxims still hold true. I digress to mention this to maintain that paths in film-making aren’t inherently restricted to one and once a writer familiarizes himself with a few fundamentals he can then restructure his film and stray away from his initial toolkit.

But coming back to the tale concerning the wet snow (a slice of Dostoevskian phraseology), the only way I can recapitulate Winter Sleep is by calling it a seeming progression of character in voluminous conversations shored up by aesthetically charged bursts of protracted silence. It was only when I made the subsequent steps, all being minor and major deviances temporally, that I realized that this description applied above is equally fitting for his other features as well. I’ll address this feature in more detail when I approach the cluster of films that Ceylan made in the 2010’s.

However, before I proceed further, I should establish firmly the path I wish to proceed upon, so that the circuitous tracks of film-making aren’t themselves described by maundering phrases and sentences. I would like to first trace the path that I followed to reach the end of his oeuvre, comprising of the elements that make up his films before wrapping it up.

The film that I followed up the first with was Climates, which to my pleasant surprise was directed and acted by Ceylan and his wife, Ebru. The film opens with the pair rummaging through the ruins of a site, separated by a few paces, with the wife looking at her husband in an estranged manner. She bridges the distance by moving closer to embrace her husband before distancing herself again. Perching down on a mountain-top, she stares at the camera. She begins to weep and snivel looking at the camera, looking at you, without cessation – and you begin to feel uncomfortable at first instance. Ceylan protracts this uneasiness until you begin to realize, without a word being said, the entirety of the emotional gulf that separates her from her partner. It was at this juncture between the title interjection and the subsequent scene did I slowly begin to grapple with the overwhelming depth of visual exposition that permeates every feature of his.

But, from a conversational viewpoint, he doesn’t fail either. There are two striking instances of exchange that to me are the paragon of conjunction between visual and verbal storytelling. The first follows a beach-side dinner the couple share with their friends in Kas. She remains silent as the husband converses with his friend, and shows visible signs of contempt by shrugging and gazing afar. When the hostess departs, he briefly questions her decision to avoid wearing a coat realizing that the air is chilly ; the exchange soon escalates and is followed by pockets of silence and intermittent accusations before receding to that prolonged absence of dialogue that Ceylan uses so astutely to accentuate these sparse exchanges.

The second instance is even more pronounced. It takes place when Ceylan is separated from his wife and seeks out an old friend to resume an affair they might have had. Relenting at first, she opens the door to allow him inside. They both sit down for a smoke and as the quick lighting of a cigarette is followed by the charring sound of burning tobacco – it seems oddly parallel to the tension between them that awaits a nudge from her to convey assent.

From Climates, I moved on to Three Monkeys. This visually urban narrative follows the lives of three individuals – a mother, father and son. The father is called to act as a substitute for his boss’s crime, while the mother and son await the payment that was promised for accepting incarceration, with the mother having an affair with her husband’s boss. You might think that in any formulaic feature, this premise looks ripe to exploit. Any director could easily sensationalize by hammering away at this potency for drama. Ceylan, unsurprisingly to his acclimatized viewer, does exactly the opposite by internalizing all the conflict and inflates it to attach a sense of profoundness, over and beyond what would be found in a pedestrian affair drama.

I’m not a big fiend or advocate of awards, but I can at times understand their merits. Ceylan did bag the best director category at Cannes for this feature and I could understand why the conductor won and the work didn’t. Three Monkeys works as a film precisely for the reasons I stated above ; it doesn’t adhere to tried and tested storytelling for a storyline that is otherwise commonplace. The merits of writing don’t shine through at times but, where it does shine through is the last leg of the film, when the narrative comes full circle as the father clears his head by visiting the mosque before approaching a migrant with no relations to take his son’s place for a crime. His deep rumination of this act is also enhanced by the fact that Ceylan tracks him from behind, obscuring his face, as he does in other films as well.

My mild disappointment with Three Monkeys was soon reconciled by Distant. The reconciliation was almost immediate – when the quintessential long shot using a stationery camera trained on a man trundling through the snow to reach the road to hitchhike to Istanbul. Distant as a title is in every way a perfect encapsulation of the relationship between every character the film houses – an estranged relationship between the two central characters and their own relationships with society. Yusuf comes from his industrial town searching for a job at a port and lodges with Mehmet, a freelance photographer who had drifted towards Istanbul many years earlier in search of a job.

I think the first thought I had when the end credits rolled in were – “ I have had films make me feel ecstatic, plaintive and angered. Distant has made me feel frightfully alone”. On script, the film couldn’t be more than 50 pages, and yet it runs over 90 minutes. It just involves Mehmet and Yusuf straggling through malls, airports, parks and beach-side curbs. But I had to ask myself – aren’t many relationships resemblant of the one these two men share ? Fractured ones papered over to work for practical purposes without its participants realizing how vital this string-held counterpart is to their otherwise hollow lives.

There is this one particular scene, where Ceylan sets the camera down for an entire sequence. Mehmet, earlier during the day was held to his word by a friend, who points out that his ambitions to be like Tarkovsky have slackened and he has resigned to subsisting off these commercial shoots. He decides to sit down and watch on DVD a version of Stalker to reminisce with Yusuf beside him. Once Yusuf excuses himself, the former switches to a soft porn video and makes himself comfortable. He scrambles to change the video as Yusuf shuffles back into the room, hoping he would go away. He doesn’t and stands breathing down his back for a painfully long duration. I smiled and asked myself – would that illusion of discomfort be possible had there been a single cut in the entire sequence?

Before I began the film, I learned that Mehmet Emin Toprak, the wonderful actor who played Yusuf, passed away after returning from an ecstatic screening in Ankara owing to a road accident, driving the new car his efforts had rewarded him with, towards Yacine, his hometown. I should note that at this juncture I hadn’t fully grasped the autobiographical undertones that pervaded the director’s early works. Mehmet was Ceylan’s cousin, and was, until a few years ago, relatively obscure. It wasn’t until I ventured onto Kasaba and Mayis Sikintisi, his first two directorial ventures, did I realize how deep an influence his life in the Turkish countryside wielded over his career.

Both Kasaba and Mayis Sikinitisi are so closely intertwined that I cannot separate them – one film is about the making of the other. And the cast is replete with Ceylan’s family and neighbors as he tracks their life in the country and their residence in Yacine. Kasaba, the film which was Ceylan’s directorial debut follows the lives of two children and their family – a scholarly father, an outcast nephew and a wistful set of grandparents. For large parts, the early stretches of the film gave me strong flashes of Pather Panchali with a Turkish backdrop before it veered off into a conversational direction anent the struggles of country life and faithfulness to one’s roots. When I immediately followed it up with Mayis Sikintisi, it shed light on the genesis of the film and Ceylan’s choice to cast his parents as actors in both films, and even a brief appearance in the earlier mentioned Climates.

With this early jaunt complete, I believe it equipped me well to understand how much Ceylan had grown as a filmmaker to achieve those three magnificent films that carved him a name in world cinema – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep and The Wild Pear Tree – each one so brilliant, that it becomes unutterably difficult to verbalize your emotions when you finish them.

Let me start with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, whose title alone could pique one’s interests. Like Distant, this film too opens after a brief overture of three men with a stationary camera set to cover end-to-end the Anatolian mountain range. Three police vehicles rumble along from the far end of the frame only to stop at the middle ; a suspect is dragged out and is questioned before being crammed into the vehicle again as they exit through the other end of the frame. A deliberate synchronization of the temporal and spatial use of the re-iterated beginning-middle-end maxim used to start and finish a scene and the orange hue of a setting sun underscores the near-perfect cinematography that is consistent throughout the film.

But, technical credit aside, it was with this film that I believe Ceylan and his wife truly matured as screenwriters. A search party organized to find a man’s body across a trying terrain find themselves on the fringes of their mental and emotional states. A prosecutor and doctor – much like the memorable banker and doctor of Dickens’s A Tale – converse about the strange death of a woman, who is possibly the prosecutor’s wife, whose identity isn’t revealed as he continues to allude to her death in the third person, much like Mr.Lorry does about the doctor’s illness in the Dickensian tale with much delicacy and precision.

This emotional space afforded for each character allows them, through their performances, to distend the presence and impact they can have, even if they seem relatively obscure in the progression of events. This pattern repeats itself in Winter Sleep as well, with peripheral characters able to impart within the short spaces they get a profound impact.

Winter Sleep, being the first film in this Turkish incursion of mine, was indelible because it was quite frankly the best place to start. It follows Aydin, a retired theatre artist, in search of everything and nothing, always sure and unsure, ideological and practical – at constant loggerheads with his wife and sister, both incidences underscored by such brilliant exchanges of dialogue that really makes the viewer covet for more. He condemns the lack of principles in the local imam, yet shrivels away like a poltroon from the boorish brother of his when he chooses to confront him. This boorish brother, Ismael, sears himself so brilliantly with the least screen-time by displaying a fierce pride in privation when he is confronted with an abhorring attempt at philanthropy by Aydin’s wife.

But, this director whom I have grown fond of reserved the best of his powers for The Wild Pear Tree. As I was watching the film, I was enraged. I had a bone to pick with this man who I had no connection with for he had plagiarized my life without even knowing it. It follows Sinan Karasu, an aspiring writer, a recent graduate who struts around with a contemptuous air, sneering with haughtiness at all those uncouth souls who pass through life with no notion of the wonders the literary world possesses ; as I write this, I realize I have given a very accurate description of my own self-assured behavior at times. But watching the film itself provided a larger check on my demeanor than the frequent ones I seemingly process.

The relationship with his father, his relationship with his mother, his sister and even his social circle were in many ways vastly different, yet remarkably semblant. Even the relatively small characters, like the conversation between him and a schoolmate for whom he had a inchoate passion are cut up in such fine fashion. She is to be married to a jeweller, twice her age, and she rues this decision of hers by giving Sinan a decisively aggressive bite on the underlip – but it isn’t overt, and much less contrived. Ceylan toys with the surroundings of rustling leaves and the wind stealing over them before focusing on their intimate exchange through the canopy.

I have come to a consensus within myself that when it comes to writing modern, inflated, and shockingly realistic conversations – Ceylan’s writing trio or duo are the paragon to be looked up to. I haven’t seen better dialogue in the swathes of contemporary films I pass through or have passed through. There is this scene, that is ineffably good that I can’t wrap my head around how a director holds the visual illusion taut while pouring an ocean of dialogue that at times is a rapid patter, a slow re-iteration and a languid dismissal. It follows two imams and Sinan, as they stagger downhill having a theosophical conversation, a philosophical tete-a-tete and a smattering of small talk all rolled into one, concluded by one imam saying – “We are all water sloshing in a glass”.

But, let me make an important digression here. I have noticed in Ceylan’s films the free rein that he gets to direct these films. In a conventional Hollywood studio, his scripts would be in the bin before the reader finished the opening conversations. When I stumbled across a comment by a perspicacious redditor during some internet lurking session of mine, I realized that leeway is directly proportionate to the budget of the film.

Have your pick between Roma and Y Tu Mama Tambien – both being Cuaron’s features made in Spanish and shot in Mexico on very meagre resources. And both of them, in my opinion, are his best features. The leeway granted to him would be significantly lesser than what would be afforded to him in say Prisoner of Azkaban or other mainstream ventures he directed. When the budget is big, the production company cracks down on directorial decisions. When the opposite is true, the director’s call on what is apposite and isn’t is almost always final.

I’ve seen this across film industries interspersed throughout the globe. Wong Kar-Wai has more leeway to shoot Chungking Express or Fallen Angels compared to The Grandmaster, financed by a major mainland production company. One could argue that once a director establishes a reputation, his decisions are not so likely to pop up on the executive’s radar. But again, that is decided by the cost attached to a decision and I believe Wong harbored a passion for a big-scale project and made the sacrifices willingly.

However, in Ceylan’s case, he is strictly a no-compromise director and I love him all the more for it. He gets a larger purse to operate with as his rising reputation wells up beyond Turkish borders and he still sticks to his decisions and is even more audacious with each film – a striking feature in an auteur that sets him as a class apart to the rest. Even his later films aren’t exactly big budget – they are relatively inexpensive.

Well, I guess I draw the line for today’s post here. I have been in equal degrees wastefully descriptive and unusually enthusiastic but I ask someone who has watched Ceylan’s films – will it ever be possible to verbalize those gyrating emotions installed in you by the mere act of watching them? I have tried my hand at it and I will knead the keyboard keys once more when I can get my mind rattling again with thoughts I purchase with time from some other auteur in this never ending list spanning directors from Norway to Thailand whose names increase by droves in my watch-list.

The Sweet Child of Technicolor – El Loco Pedro Almodóvar

When we loaf about in societal gatherings, that is ones in more traditionally collective societies, more often found in the countryside than in urban spaces, we tend to see a certain child constantly beside his mother who would be gesticulating and conversing boisterously within a circle of women.This child does not partake of the conversation and listlessly gazes at the interlocutors. A silent observer of this diminutive version of the feminine universe. This boy is Pedro Almodovar.

Born in La Mancha, his upbringing at home was limited. He was soon dispatched to a religious boarding school with his parents hoping that their bookish son would soon develop pious feelings in his bosom and devote his life to the teachings of Christ. I can only laugh. If anybody is vehemently detached from the Church, and harbors a spiteful vista of that religious world, it has to be Pedro. His impish duo of Zahara and Paca in La Mala Educacion steal the ecclesiastical ornaments to get themselves more money to fritter on drugs. But surely his characters aren’t representative of his heretic nature?

In Dolor Y Gloria, his latest work, and evidently autobiographical to a large extent, Pedro fondly jokes, through Antonio Banderas, that he is an atheist when the pain he suffers is bearable and prays feverishly when it is intolerable. After all, across liminal periods in history, whenever the materialists make strides by publishing more and more to substantiate their point, avid philosophical consumers imbibe it and calm themselves down, but in moments of immense pain and suffering, the phrase “Dear God” is no longer a contemptuous utterance, but a febrile plea to the very being they actively reject.

But his religious inclinations aside, this post is solely to address, rave and rejoice in the redoubtable career of this marvellous auteur and his choice to revolve in this feminine universe and his love for lurid colours that shimmer and dazzle to no end in his illustrious career that spans over four decades. It is solely due to this that I chose to make my first post in five months as expansive as possible, to address as many dimensions of this particular artist as possible.

A good place to start with is why I chose to entitle him, albeit fondly, as El Loco? Starting from his early days with Carmen Maura up until the latest installment in his oeuvre Dolor Y Gloria , the most commonly used phrase has to be El Loco. His central characters are always zany to the extant that they would be called out as eccentric by their milieu, which by itself is more often than not an idiosyncratic coalesce of people. This zaniness is most prominent in the film that exalted his name as a true auteur in the international arena, which was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Pedro is excessively fond of these delusional outcasts, who love more than what is acceptable, cry more than what is acceptable, vacillate more than what is acceptable. They try to kidnap the women they love, as in Atame!, when a recently released inmate from a sanatorium kidnaps an actress in her own house to convince her of his love for her, or they try to slake their impossible obsession with gladiatorial death by treating their sexual partners as the bulls they would otherwise face within an arena, as happens in Matador, or they murder to obtain like the covetous Antonio in Law of Desire, or equate and place their own tribulations above that of a war-torn nation, much like the ever oscillating Leocadia in The Flower of My Secret.

Throughout his early years as a budding filmmaker, Pedro tried to conflate dramatic elements with comedic elements. By forcing the benign social deviance to such extremes, he achieves a sense of hilarity in his films. In Nervous Breakdown, when Pepa hosts the two policemen who have come to enquire about a phone call from her telephone, she tells Carlos to serve everyone a spiked gazpacho, including the cops themselves. Going from the decision to spike herself to the decision to spike everyone lends her the quality of thriving on extremes.

When a delusional man does something far more appalling than is expected of him, it can either provoke laughter or a terrible shock, with both reactions being contingent on the circumstances. When Robert kidnaps the alleged rapist of his daughter to avenge her recent death in The Skin I Live In, it seems to be acceptable for such an individual. But when he performs a vaginoplasty on the rapist to slowly morph him into his late wife, his actions can astonish those who thought he couldn’t go further.

But I’m merely teetering on the edges of Almodovar’s universe, I’m limning the far flung orbits of the throbbing heart of his universe. I am yet to move closer to it. As we course through the veins of his artistic body, another prominent theme that features in all of his films but isn’t overtly striking is his unduly focus on sexual vengeance ; And what better film to start with than Carne Tremula.

Carne Tremula is the quintessential lust trumps all modern fable. In Pedro’s films, the demarcation that indicates that a director has switched from heterosexuality to homosexuality doesn’t exist. His films anchor purely on the sensual relationship between two characters. When two individuals express sexual desire, its merely sexual desire. He doesn’t force the marginalized narrative and coerce you into seeing them any differently. And that’s a refreshing breath of air from the cramped, contrived narratives that throng the theaters to lionize what it means to be a marginal group. By not pushing any designs to change your way of thinking, he has already avoided seeing them as the other. It may not seem much today, but it meant a lot not to differentiate in the 80’s, with Pedro himself being homosexual.

I chose to make this sinuous detour at this juncture before I went on to speak about eroticism in his films and I felt this understanding of Pedro’s narrative needs to be made clear. As I was saying, Carne Tremula is a fairly straightforward tale of sexual revenge, and probably the most overt in all his films. A wrongly indicted man has pent-up emotions of rage towards the couple who were the sole reason for him being sentenced. He vows to ravage the woman when he steps out as she questioned his virility before he was wrongfully jailed. However, he gets involved with another woman and soon forgets his schemes to sexually avenge his lost years. When he confesses this desire to the woman he held guilty, she resolves to go away after allowing him to satisfy his desire – and that particular point in the film is a perfect catharsis of built-up sexual tension which culminates in unarguably the most erotic scene I have had the chance to witness in a film. What unfurls is a shivering passion to satiate a long held desire of vengeance, with a sweat filled aura pervading the scene to give it a sensation that is insomuch not vulgar but the cinematic definition of pure erotica.

This theme of sexual vengeance has been ever present in all the phases of his film-making career and has manifested in various degrees. It is again noticeably present in The Skin I Live In, which focuses on a man exacting vengeance by metamorphosing his daughter’s rapist and keeping her captive only to copulate with her later. In Broken Embraces, a rich despot hatches a plan to avenge his wounded pride by murdering his mistress and her new lover with whom she has run away. In La Mala Educacion, vengeance spurs vengeance as a priest tries to thwart the vengeful child he once molested and who is now out to expose him. It has even existed in a minor degree in his later films like Julieta, where a mother who has indirectly caused the death of her husband by arguing upon his affair finds herself subjected to the vestige of the wrath that spurred her in the first place, holding her accountable in the form of her daughter. This undercurrent is not absent from his earlier films either, with Antonio setting out to find the former lover of his current one in Law of Desire, after it has come to his notice that they still hold a passionate correspondence, with the sole intention of murdering him.

As I have amply listed the instances of sexual vengeance, I now progress towards the innermost fold of his throbbing heart, arriving and piercing its center. The central motif of his most dazzling films – motherhood and loneliness. The period between 1999 – 2006 is his most illustrious period, with each film as ambitious as its predecessor. The crown jewels that he produced during the height of his vividly colourful powers – All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Volver.

I find it amusing that my very first foray into this world was with Almodovar’s All About My Mother ; I had given his films 12 chances to topple the first experience I had with him, and although they had all come incredibly close, they couldn’t dethrone my first tryst with him. It was poignant that his beloved mother passed away during the year All About My Mother had released. Pedro adored her and owes much to her for bringing him up in adversity and in ways it is through this film he pays homage to his mother and all the women she introduced him to in her feminine universe.

The film is centered on the relationship between a dreamy son and his single mother, living in Madrid and working as a nurse, as he harbors dreams of becoming a writer. As she fixes dinner for them both and settles down to watch Bette Davis’s All About Eve (even here we find echoes of Pedro’s inspiration), and the boy poses an unseemly, albeit intimate question to his mother – “Would you prostitute yourself for me?” for which she replies “I’ve already done just about everything for you”.

In many ways, this utterance strikes one as a bit odd, as it calls upon what is it that she has done for her son. Soon, her son is crushed along the rain drenched gravel by a speeding car and she is left screaming, hopeless and alone. From here on, the movie completely revolves in la universo feminino – men who have become women, men who wish to become women, jaded women, jilted women, mothers, sisters, daughters. We soon learn that Manuela, the central character, once worked the street in Barcelona before hastily leaving her husband to flee to Madrid while concealing her pregnancy. She rekindles an old friendship while in search of her husband and finds solace by stalking the theatre cast of The Streetcar Named Desire, chasing whom her son was sent to his untimely death.

But more than plot or progression, what really stood out and made its indelible mark on me is the true candidness of conversation. A male director cannot write such sequences between women unless he well and truly is a part of that universe. Men have, since time immemorial, stood from afar while depicting women, and with the exception of few, have always given them unfair portrayals. Women have had the ability to adroitly present a man given that history is littered with stories about men to no end. This space of femininity has always been enclosed and has seldom been accessed by men. Pedro’s close upbringing with women in all possible gatherings and in day-to-day life has enmeshed his presence as a stalwart observer. The film ends with a befitting tribute to every woman who has and is still inspiring his work, and it reads as follows –

“To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider…To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.”

Having addressed one masterpiece I move on to another in Talk to Her. The film opens with two men gazing intently on a silent theatrical performance, with one man shedding tears and the other observing him with a fleeting glance. We are shown that the fleeting observer works as a nurse in a medical institution for people in a coma and the other a journalist. Both men seem to have an ocean of loneliness welling within them, and this is most striking in Benigno, the nurse at the hospital, who works day and night to look after a girl who before her untimely accident had been the sole happiness in his life, completely unaware of his love for her. For the entirety of his adult life, Benigno has been a caretaker and has not had much contact with society and observably with women of his own age. Without divulging too much, I watched an incredibly maudlin affair, not affected in the least, unfurling as it absorbed and toyed with ideas such as loneliness, volition, and brotherly love between its two central characters who find themselves at the end of the film to be closer than they could have imagined at its start, with a perfect interjection of a short silent film, which I was lead to believe actually existed until I had looked it up.

The third piece in this marvellous period of film production – Volver has to be, at the same time, conventional and personal as it strikes upon all the chords he keeps closest to his heart and holds taut. The film is about a mother, her daughters, and her grand-daughter who hail from La Mancha in Spain. Carmen Maura features in this film after almost a two decade hiatus of collaboration with Almodovar as the zany grandmother. A father tries to rape his stepdaughter which ends up in his murder. The mother is left to deal with it and tries to do so without the aid of her sister, who has to face a bizarre occurrence of her own, with their dead mother returning to life. Their neighbour in the village has lived alone and seeks an answer regarding the disappearance of her mother which she believes is known only to her neighbour’s dead mother. In this splendidly taut narrative, Almodovar highlights the fraternal relationship that exists door-to-door in Spain’s villages, the mythical beliefs of this society (an allusion to the underlying vein of magical realism present across the Spanish world) and the generational recurrence of strained relationships between mother and daughter and the absence and neglect of frivolous fathers, while not failing to take a jibe at Spain’s ever present trash television which consistently vulgarizes by its mere actions the personal space of individuals.

Having finished this Spanish sojourn of mine, I found myself before the ripe fruit of Almodovar’s own life – Dolor Y Gloria. A life that has been for two scores largely personal, would finally be shown on screen, although corrupted fondly by fictional details. Starring his two favorites – Antonio and Penelope – the film follows his own life and relationship with his mother and his upbringing as he grapples with the current revelations in his life, his love for Chavela Vargas and his flame from the past during the raucous days spent in Mexico City. In this intimate address to his fervent patrons, he divulges his tribulations and struggles with body and mind and a passionate play that speaks of his young love and struggles with drugs as he looks back upon an illustrious career spanning forty long years. I rejoiced everytime I could glimpse at the ever-bookish young Salvador, devouring his books in the cave he calls his home, quarreling with his mother and making peace with her and acknowledging her claim that he has failed her as a son.

But foolish as I am in my half cursory and half impassioned recollection, I have failed to address the aesthetical aspect of this child of Technicolor. In Cannes, Pedro mentioned he grew up during the age of Technicolor – the superimposed reels of colour conflated to give a final, dazzling, contrasting product. Most of his films have a wide and wild use of colours to convey the mood and sometimes even a tonal shift as they transition from a lighter shade gradating into a darker one. The colour manifests in sartorial decisions, decisions regarding production design and even hues added in the editing room. However, his fanatical use of contrasting colours doesn’t convey a larger purpose or set a general tone for the film, as it does in a Wong Kar-Wai film, and only serves to be representative of the auteur’s upbringing and fondness for visual gradations.

Pedro stresses on his need for Madrid through Salvador in Dolor Y Gloria. Why is that so? Pedro is the child of La Movida Madrilena, the counterculture revolution in the arts that took place in the late 70’s following the end of Francoist Spain, which ushered in a new era for Spain and was marked by economic growth. He made his first features during these years and owes everything to the theatres and streets of Madrid for serving as the origin of his inspirations and as the receivers of his own work. It gave him his first financial break as a director after his long stint as an administrative assistant and propelled him to fame. In many ways, Madrid manifests itself through Pedro. Spain manifests itself through Pedro. And with that I draw to an end my long journey in España

As I conclude this post, I’d also like to add that I will not post with the same fervor as before, but limit myself to posts where I actually have the ability to expand on a motif or theme as I progress from director to director as I am doing so now. You can watch out for my next post on Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish auteur.

Red Beard – Reflections

Red Beard is not an easy watch. Let me explain. The film, split into two halves, spans a duration of 180 minutes. But the length was never an obstacle. Set during the Shogunate of the 19^th century, it takes time for you to settle into a world that is distant in every sense. Watching movies that originate from the west never seem difficult, given that shared ideologies percolate through the borders of each country. But Japan, as small as it may seem, is a world in itself before the intrusion of the west. But I don’t like to value experiences based on pleasantries. As Wilde says at some juncture, the experience takes precedence to the fruit of the experience. I was far from disappointed when Red Beard concluded.

Red Beard follows the life of Noboru Yasumoto, a young doctor, well versed in Dutch medicine, aspiring to be the Shogunate’s personal physician, finding himself pigeon-holed into some rut, as he deems it, in the countryside of Edo, the modern day Tokyo. He is to be the understudy of Kyojo Niide, or otherwise called Red Beard, for the difficulty that may arise in pronunciation of his birth name. The clinic that operates to tend to the poor is under his supervision, and we are shown the downtrodden state of Japan’s poorest.

I’m not going to typify the average viewer’s attention span, as I myself took a while to get accustomed to the descriptive, yet slow paced narration. Kurosawa takes his time to establish Edo. Mind you, Red Beard released in 1965, well ahead of the traditional Japan that we witness in the film. Even the native inhabitants of Japan would have to be bridged to their past. We understand that Yasumoto is enraged that he has been appointed to do menial tasks instead of aiding the Shogunate, and refuses to comply with Niide’s commands. He rebels, in the hope that he will be dismissed from service, but Red Beard does not pay heed to his petulant actions. He still wishes to reform him.

As I kept viewing, I began to realize how distinct and masterful Kurosawa is in envisioning things. The way he communicates a scene through only visuals is what makes him the great filmmaker that he is. For large parts of the film, there are no dialogues. Let me seek an example to shed light on this. Early on in a particular scene, Niide asks Yasumoto to observe the final moments of a dying man, stating that those are the most solemn moments in his long life. Yasumoto, unable to witness it, is relieved when he is called upon to operate on a young girl alongside Niide. Unable to process the grotesqueness of the operation, with the girl convulsing on the table, Yasumoto faints. Throughout both scenes, Kurosawa’s blocking amplifies the way you perceive the events. He manages to keep the girl and Yasumoto within the frame, and places Yasumoto in the centre, with both his aiding doctors on the side, while still having the girl within the frame. It’s masterful staging, merely because the grotesqueness of the scene never slips away. I’m afraid I can’t refrain from borrowing Wilde’s aphorisms, and as he states, the ugliness of things make them frighteningly real.

Something apart from his blocking that fascinated me was how he never smudges the illusion of scenes by cheaply infusing a cut. One of the scenes that had me on the hook was a single, long, uncut take when Yasumoto is confronted by a delirious woman who has been confined in a separate chamber constructed outside the clinic. As she begins to talk about her tormented past, the scene edges closer with each revelation, moving in from an initially wide shot, until we see both their faces. None of it required a cut, but in most modern films, directors and editors abuse cuts to build cheap, ineffective scenes. One may argue that it is insignificant, but, to an audience, it makes a worldly difference, subconsciously.

If I had to draw examples on his visionary style, I’m afraid I’d have to expound on each scene in the movie. But, what made me different to Red Beard was it was storytelling, within storytelling. It had characters talk about their lives, in a way that was narrating it. Sometimes, Kurosawa lets you have the conciseness of an image to aid you. Otherwise, he lets the characters speak or act out the events of the past. The latter is much more preferred when he wants you to see what it does to Yasumoto or Niide, who listen to these poor patients that have arrived at their door. Filmmaking is all about choices, and choices that don’t involve forethought often turn out to be poor ones.

But what fascinated me was the cultural set-up of an unscathed, medieval Japan. It is extremely fascinating to know that around the same time, the likes of Huysmans and other novelists were working on expanding the dimensions of artistic thought, while western medicine began to inculcate psychology as a more formal study, whereas Japan still relied on physiologists to tend to both body and mind. Their examinations do not involved structured studies to assess their patients mentally. They view them through the lens of commonplace citizens, and attribute their misfortunes to the plagues of politics and aristocratical profligacy. Japan’s poor were not merely poor, they were trampled on in every sense. They try to undo years of mental torture through ways that are instinctual and not systemic.

For the aspiring doctor in Yasumoto, the film is a passage of enlightenment. He takes the path of abolishing the notion that being a doctor is a comforting task, owing to his perception that his services would be limited to the Shogun. He understands that the stench of the poor has a reason, that their torn dresses are from labour and abuse, their coarse voices from eating nothing but the gruel that they are confined to eat, unlike the sake he can have at will. It is not through hardship does he learn, but through observation, slowly taking in the world he hadn’t known. He is aided by Niide, who teaches him what it means to be a doctor. It is merely beyond the task of tending to examination and administering medicine. It involves forming a tryst with those at your mercy, and to regard them with infinite pity and compassion.

There is an amazing passage right after the film opens for the second half. After rescuing a girl from a brothel, Niide places her in Yasumoto’s care. Kurosawa has spoken highly of classic literature, and holds Dostoyevsky in admiration, and the inclusion of this storyline is inspired from the author’s Humiliated and Insulted. We watch Otoyo, the young girl and Yasumoto form a relationship as, at first, he tends to her to alleviate her mental woes, before falling into illness himself, and in a reversal, Otoyo now tends to Yasumoto. The entire passage involves very minimal dialogue and at some points no dialogue at all. We observe actions, decisions and gazes but never does a tongue move. There is something truly profound in motion, than oration. I was able to indulge more and more in the second half of the film after soaking in this epoch throughout the first half. I was able to appreciate it better and was appeased by its storylines.

Is Red Beard philosophical? Kurosawa’s affinity is without doubt to Humanism and Existentialism. Without moving into conceptual definitions or saving it for another post, it was clear that the film is a commentary focused on vehemently admonishing spoilt riches and starved peasants. It tries to tell through its characters that, their actions in their lives give it meaning, more than their social standing. The decisions of a caretaker or the defiance of an emancipated daughter from her abusive mother, all involve characters trying to establish meaning to their own lives beyond their typified roles in society.

I had a sudden thought as to how my earlier viewings of Japan before its modern makeover compared to Red Beard. I had watched Silence, but that was through the eyes of the west. It had showed Japan in a mystical sort of way. But, such was the theme of that film. I had seen films on a transitioning Japan, as an imposing, dictatorial nation state. But, the humanist aspect of Japanese people themselves had revealed itself to me through this film. I do have memories of watching Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, but that seems distant, and I would most certainly love to watch it soon in this Director Focus series of the Japanese Master. Red Beard, apart from giving me a completely different cultural immersion, has helped me understand visual choices in a scene. It fascinated me and gave me thought than trying to appease me emotionally. I guess that would be due to my distance from this world, a world which I’m looking forward to explore.