Category: Non-English Film

Almost immediately after watching a film directed by Yasujirō Ozu, I forget all the details I have just seen. His films are like a gentle breeze to just ride along in the moment. While the events portrayed are undoubtedly important to the characters, there is no pressure or urgency for the viewer. 27 year old Noriko wants nothing more than to just live her days as a companion to her widowed father. Unfortunately everyone else thinks it’s way past time for her to be married. Post-World War 2 Japan adds complexity as the country and its people were re-evaluating their identity both by choice and as forced by their occupiers. Setsuko Hara’s Noriko is dutiful, self-sacrificing, and unwilling to rock convention, but her facial expressions betray the words she speaks.

Desperate men will undertake desperate acts. Four Europeans, stuck in a South American desert town where the only way out is by plane and the only way to afford a ticket is to have jobs not afforded to foreigners, learn for themselves when they are offered the chance to earn $2000 to transport nitroglycerine through perilous roads in order to extinguish an oil well fire hundreds of miles away . A good percentage of the film is spent with the men in town: their relations with each other, the desolation of the location, and the stranglehold the American oil company has over all of the town’s inhabitants. Once the trucks get on the road, there is not another film that exhibits as much tension. There’s the sense that the watcher themselves need to be careful as possible to get the vehicles safely to their destination. I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath until they had safely passed one obstacle or another.

If I’m going to subject myself to a war film, I prefer it to be the grim, realistic type versus the flag-waving, patriotic version. I have never seen another as dark as this one. More than once, I thought to myself that it would have been better for a character to have died than to have continued with the narrative set out for them. Filled with facial close-ups, every actor conveys the feelings of the soul-emptying desperation and despair of existing in a place under siege, none better than Aleksei Kravchenko as Flyora, a young Belarussian teen conscripted into the partisan forces. Is it no surprise that one of the best Russian films ever is so incredibly bleak?  

Gradually working through Bong Joon-Ho’s filmography, I’m more than happy to pay attention to works by other Korean directors. Like many of that director’s films, this one has some interesting commentary on social status and the invisibles in society. The primary invisibles in this case are a young man whose possessions other than a motorcycle are literally the clothes on his back and an abused housewife. Kim Ki-duk, the director here, makes incredible use of silence in this work, which makes the little dialogue between the two main characters much more powerful. There are other Korean films I’ve watched thus far that I love more, but this does make me want to seek out others.