Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari)

 

 

MABOROSI (Maboroshi no hikari)                           A                                                              Japan  (110 mi)  1995  d:  Hirokazu Kore-eda

A candidate for one of the most poetic and beautiful films ever made, a teardrop inside which all of one’s life can be examined again and again from differing perspectives, drawing parallels in structure and eloquence to Yasujirō Ozu and Hou Hsiao-hsien, as the motif of trains, telephone wires, tea kettles, and the use of medium shots are a constant, with no close-ups, retaining a respectful distance, evoking the fragility and overall quietness of Naomi Kawase’s SUZAKU (1997), which this film thematically mirrors, both dealing with memory and traumatic loss, while also recalling Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991), as each shot in this film feels perfectly chosen, composed with a meticulous eye by Masao Nakabori who favors shooting in natural light.  If there were a director working today emulating this style, it might be Bi Gan, whose luminous works include 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) (2015) and 2019 Top Ten List #6 Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan) (2018), particularly in the brightness of the colors red and green.  This is a completely different tragedy, hauntingly sad, but also a nocturnal film with only brief glimpses of light, where there are reoccurring images whose significance takes on the importance of human characters.  The film is a quiet, precise observation of one young woman’s spiritual odyssey recovering from her husband’s suicide, a moving and profound examination of her grief and the impact of death on the living, where Maborosi means illusion or mirage, though the Japanese title is more instructive, Maboroshi no Hikari (The Light of the Illusion).  Screenwriter Yoshihisa Ogita adapted a 1978 short story by Teru Miyamoto, the first feature film by this director, working previously as a documentary filmmaker.  The music by Taiwanese composer Chen Ming-chang (who also provided the score for several Hou Hsiao-hsien films) is hauntingly beautiful in what can only be described as one of the more tender and eloquently spiritual (Buddhist) film experiences ever, moods expressed with a variety of darkness and light, where a poetic emptiness and stillness prevail, which express the absence of life in the heroine, examining the relationship between the visible and the invisible, exteriors and interiors, from which all other activity and purpose comes, carefully revealing the flavor and texture of her everyday life. 

The film opens in the town of Osaka where Yumiko, beautifully played by fashion model Makiko Esumi in her first acting experience, is initially seen as a small child running across a bridge trying to stop her senile grandmother from leaving, convinced she needs to return to her home town to die, leaving the child devastated and forever haunted about being unable to stop her.  The theme is established right away and the bridge becomes one of the early reoccurring themes, a bridge of transport taking her grandmother across to the other side, to death.  Then Yumiko sees an image of a boy her age sitting atop a bicycle, appearing for quite some time in a still light, and she whispers his name, followed by darkness on the screen for some 30 seconds.  The name is whispered again, but this time (as if summoned from a dream) the boy is Yumiko’s husband Ikuo (an early appearance of the great Tadanobu Asano), who flashes on a lamp asking her to go back to bed, flicking the light back off again after gently reminding her, “I’m not the reincarnation of your grandmother.”  The bicycle becomes another reoccurring theme, along with cars, buses, trains, boats, all modes and stations of transit, outside car noises heard from a darkened room, dimly lit stairs, and always a reoccurring theme of light, suggested by the everpresent kerosene lamp and light bulbs.  She sits behind him riding his bicycle in the night, feeling comfortable and happy, even after he resorts to theft after his own bicycle was stolen, both seen happily painting it a new green color.  One day, the husband returns the bicycle on his way to work, preferring instead to walk, seen carrying an umbrella as Yumiko follows him down the stairs, out the door, and watches him walk away, smiling and happy.  But she never sees him again, as, without warning, he walks in front of a commuter train on his way home from work that night, leaving her alone with a 3-month old son, utterly devastated and confused, sitting in an empty room looking at photographs of their life together, spending years afterwards retreating from life.  While grief is a central theme of the film, as it was in his earlier TV documentary HOWEVER… (1991), which similarly follows the repercussions of a suicide, yet here Yumiko is always filmed from a distance, never allowing interior access, which remains shrouded in mystery. 

After the passage of time (all happening offscreen), a second marriage is arranged by a neighbor to Tamio (Takashi Naitō), a widower with a small daughter living with his elderly father (who rarely utters a word, often seen smoking alone) and most of the film examines this new life in the small, coastal town of Noto, a fishing village tucked under snowy mountains, actually shot on location in Wajima and Uniumachi on the northern tip of the Noto Peninsula facing the Sea of Japan (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Uniumachi,+Wajima,+Ishikawa+928-0065,+Japan/@37.3994055,136.8518637,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1svAClo8jmtzYPZgrwBXjt7g!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DvAClo8jmtzYPZgrwBXjt7g%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dsearch.gws-prod.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D360%26h%3D120%26yaw%3D0%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x5ff12f111ba92311:0x4aefd0bc526d048f!8m2!3d37.3950548!4d136.8508654), arriving to an empty railway platform and a deserted station where no one is there to greet them.  Her new husband apologizes profusely when he arrives late, blaming problems at work, eventually showing her off to the community.  Images of a dark, empty room filled with shoes introduce viewers to the communal festivities of her wedding dinner filled with family and friends surrounding a long table, with plentiful serving of saki and the singing of songs.  There is a wonderful scene of the couple making love on a hot afternoon, completely shadowed in darkness, yet it’s one of the few moments of happiness, ever so briefly revealed, as unanswered questions hover over their lives, including secrets and concealments about the profundity of Tamio’s love for his first wife, described by others as the love of his life, which was never revealed to Yumiko, played with tender grace and a delicate restraint by Esumi in a remarkable performance that barely contains her grief, continually retreating into an interior emotional landscape that defines the film, foregoing plot, mostly told through bold visual choices, using spectacular changes of seasons from winter to summer, demonstrating a meticulous blending of color, shadow, music, and sound effects.  Haunted by Ikuo’s unexplained suicide, Yumiko grows obsessed by a small bell she gave him one day attached to his bicycle key, stirring up dreams and vivid flashbacks occurring while performing the mundane task of sweeping the stairs, invoking ways that loss alters us forever.        

Nothing is wasted by this director, who values simplicity itself, creating a remarkably profound and contemplative film that simply glimmers in its own sublime beauty, creating something close to perfection, where the camera almost never moves, the editing is spare, accentuating sorrow through stillness, effectively revealing the barrenness of the human soul.  Sitting alone in a small, darkened bus stop, the bus comes and goes, yet Yumiko remains fixed and immovable, revealing the stark originality of this filmmaker, spotting a Buddhist funeral procession off in the distance, with the sound of bells, all dressed in black, walking in single file, as the snow falls upon them in silence as they approach the ocean.  Walking some distance behind, Yumiko joins the procession, silhouetted figures against a tumultuous ocean under a darkened sky, but remains apart, separated, and alone, using imagery reminiscent of Angelopoulos, providing a lingering meditation on death, wondering if mourning ever truly ends.  In this hushed quiet of poetic transcendence, her husband searches for his missing wife in his car, driving along the shore, eventually spotting a lone figure standing next to the billowing flames of smoke from a funeral pyre, the smoke reaching up into the sky.  As he approaches her standing by the ocean in a long shot, she turns to him, and they begin walking back, still apart, never joining.  Breaking their silence, filled with heartbreak, she asks, “I just don't understand!  Why did he kill himself?  Why was he walking along the tracks?  It just goes around and around in my head.  Why do you think he did it?”  Tamio calmly answers, “The sea has the power to beguile.  Back when dad was fishing, he once saw a maborosi ⸺ a strange and beautiful light ⸺ far out to sea, and it would be shimmering in the distance, as if beckoning to him.  I think it can happen to anyone.”  In the light of a new day, utilizing another long shot, Tamio is patiently trying to teach her son how to ride a bicycle, holding the shot for a considerable length until it continues offscreen, where the entire town is framed with only the sounds of this small family experience.  Yumiko sits next to the father-in-law on a porch overlooking the sea, and from a dark, empty room inside, a window reveals the ocean, a window to the soul where only from darkness may there be light.

Silence

SILENCE                   C-                   

USA  Mexico  Italy  (159 mi)  2016 ‘Scope  d:  Martin Scorsese

Christ did not die for the good and beautiful.  It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.
— Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield)

A recent student at Oberlin College complained to the university administration about not being warned of the suicide scene in Sophocles Antigone, claiming the play triggered strong emotional impulses, and that he, someone who had long been on suicide watch, should have been warned.  Similarly, this is the kind of film that should come with an adult warning attached, as the content is not for everyone, and may cause severe emotional trauma for some viewers, as they will be subjected to witness multiple murders and actual torture techniques for the next several hours.  This warning should not be underestimated, as some may find it difficult to sleep afterwards or to rid themselves of many of the predominate psychological images, some of which are utterly horrifying.  The Japanese may take great offense to this film, as they are portrayed in much the same vile manner as the Nazi’s in World War II, where they come to personify pure evil in the eyes of the audience, which may be a credible position for their 17th century historic actions towards outsiders, but it is hardly one of understanding or objectivity, where it’s hard to think of another film where one culture is portrayed in such a damningly negative light.  Initially screened at the Vatican in a room full of 300 Jesuit priests before it was shown to the rest of the world, adapted from Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel about Jesuit priests suffering oppression and torture in Japan during the 17th century, the film may actually bring this controversial writer a wider audience, as there has long been speculation as to why he never won a Nobel Prize for literature.  One theory is that Endō remains too controversial in Japan, where he was always regarded as an outsider, converting to Christianity at age 12 before the war, persecuted as a Christian during his schooling, suffering the prejudicial consequences for having adopted the religion of the nation’s enemy, as even today less than 1% of the Japanese population is Christian.  Another is that Endō never shied away from controversial subjects, describing the appalling vivisections conducted by the Japanese military during World War II on captured American airmen in his early 1958 novel, The Sea and Poison, while also probing the dark corners of human sexuality, exploring pedophilia and sexual sadism in his 1986 novel, Scandal.  Yet Silence is a novel that captivated Scorsese, a former Jesuit student, having re-read the novel “countless times,” where his version is described as more faithful to the novel than Masahiro Shinoda’s earlier movie version in 1971, one that Endō felt was a travesty and did not do justice to his novel, particularly in the all-important climactic scenes.  It should also be pointed out that Pope Paul VI, in a sermon at Nagasaki shortly after the novel was published, urged people “not” to read Endō’s book, calling it blasphemy.  With that in mind, Scorsese’s more contemplative rendering shifts the tone, where instead of a straightforward act of heresy, showing a priest cracking under psychological pressure, the imprisoned priests in question undergo a severe personal struggle where they grapple with their faith, forced to doubt the very existence of God, much like Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s questioning the existence of God in Auschwitz, yet that internalized struggle between doubt and faith lies at the heart of what it is to be human.  

Given to him by Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, the two stars of Boxcar Bertha (1972), Scorsese first read the novel a year after the release of THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST (1988), a film that created a storm of controversy over a dream sequence where Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene.  While religious themes have held a prominent position throughout Scorsese’s films, as early as Mean Streets (1973), where the Harvey Keitel low-level mobster character has a running dialogue with God continually struggling with the idea of trying to be a saint while living in sin.  At one stage in the director’s life he considered joining the priesthood, spending a year in the seminary, but this film has been a passion project in development for over twenty years, becoming something of a personal obsession, eventually hiring Rev. James Martin, a highly regarded Jesuit writer and priest, working closely with the writers and actors to maintain religious and historical accuracy, initially gathering the actors for a 7-day silent retreat at St. Beuno’s, a Jesuit spiritual center in north Wales, while the lead actor Andrew Garfield completed a 30-day retreat over a six month period, where according to Martin in an interview with the New York Times (The Passion of Martin Scorsese - The New York Times), “On retreat, you enter into your imagination to accompany Jesus through his life from his conception to his crucifixion and resurrection.  You are walking, talking, praying with Jesus, suffering with him.  And it’s devastating to see someone who has been your friend, whom you love, be so brutalized.” It is this particular point of view that guides the film, where the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier first brought Catholicism to Japan in 1549, but by the next century the religion is outlawed, suppressed through the torture of missionaries and their followers, who we see crucified on wooden crosses, splashed in the face with scalding water from natural springs as the water is then dripped over their heads in a sadistic measure so that they can feel the pain of every single drip.  Part of the film is narrated by an unseen Dutch trader, who communicates by letters with Portuguese Father Alessandro Valignano (Ciarán Hinds), including a last letter recently received, though written years ago, reporting Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), one of the last missionaries sent to Japan, committed apostasy, officially renouncing his religion after being tortured, and hasn’t been heard from since.  Two of his pupils, Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) refuse to believe this is possible, and against the recommendation of their leader, insist on following Father Ferreira to Japan in order to find him and learn the truth.  On the journey, led by Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), an alcoholic fisherman who has fled Japan, reminiscent of Kikuchiyo, the Toshirô Mifune character in Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), the film follows the missionary’s point of view, where much of the interior narration comes from letters written by Rodrigues reporting back to his superior.  While we watch men crucified in the ocean, eventually drowned by the rising tide, we learn Kichijiro lost his entire family, as they were burned alive through a ritual known as fumie, under the military authority of the Japanese shogunate, where imprisoned Christians were ordered to step on a religious icon to repudiate their faith, a piece of copper impressed with an iconic image of Christ or the Virgin Mary, while members of their family would be put to death to help persuade them to make the right choice.   

While we learn that the Japanese Christian believers represent the backbreaking poverty of the Japanese peasantry who have lost all other faith, evidently hoping for a peaceful afterlife, the film plays out as a hellish prison drama, like the Siberian gulags, or concentration camps, as both Rodrigues and Garupe separate in order to have the most influence, but both are immediately arrested and their influence minimized.  Like something out of the Roman Colosseum, the Japanese toy with these Christian missionaries for sport, as personified by the psychological mind games from an Old Samurai (Issey Ogata), the man pulling the strings behind the scenes, also known as the Inquisitor, in a reference to Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor from his novel The Brothers Karamazov, an imposter to the throne who has all the power but no moral ethics, along with his henchman, a Satanesque interpreter, Tadanobu Asano from Harmonium (Fuchi ni tatsu) (2016), sadistically dangling their followers, who are murdered one by one, as an incentive for the priests to renounce their faith, calling them vain and arrogant, “The price for your glory is their suffering!” while ridiculing their beliefs, “Our Buddha is a being which man can become.  Something greater than himself, if he can overcome all his illusions.  But you cling to your illusions and call them faith.  Your Creator is all-loving and all-merciful, so you believe.  Then why does he give people so much suffering on the way to heaven?”  Reminiscent of the Cambodian scenes from APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), few films express human atrocities as raw and graphically as this one, where the unending torture and explicit murder scenes may be too much for some, as the gruesome human nature depicted is heinously grotesque and as atrociously vile as anything you’re ever likely to see.  Why the viewers are subjected to this degree of graphic horror on display is a subject of speculation, as there are certainly more poetic ways of depicting the same without resorting to such relentlessly graphic means, where the only other film that comes to mind is the gory spectacle of Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), a bloody debacle of human wretchedness on display, where in each case whatever meditative or religious spiritual value the film potentially offers gets overwhelmed by a dominance of endless brutality, where tens of thousands of Japanese Christians were persecuted, tortured, and killed over the 250 years that the religion was outlawed, as the ban was not lifted until 1873.  That’s not to say there aren’t poetic moments in the film, but they are lush expressions of scenery and landscape, such as the tribute to Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) (1953) when the priests are initially brought to Japan, becoming engulfed in an expressionist fog bank where they take on the spirit of a ghost-like floating vessel suddenly lost in the gloom.  If ever there was ominous imagery to describe becoming lost along the way, this is it, and it precedes everything else that follows.  The procession of torturous incidents all lead to a climactic moment where Rodrigues, the last remaining priest, becomes the only person that can put an end to the atrocities, but only by renouncing his faith, where they pull out all the stops by unveiling an ever serene Father Ferreira to help persuade him, as he’s a man of consciousness who has already accepted this reality.  It’s a grim moment of hellish rectitude, where many more will be slaughtered, where the repeated prayers by Rodrigues remain unanswered, continually wrestling with the idea of God remaining silent in the face of so much wretchedness and misery, as the barbarism of the human condition feels like a stronger, unstoppable force.  The priest believes it is his destiny to suffer a Christ-like martyrdom, but is greatly surprised to learn he will also be undermined by a Judas-like follower.  The question then becomes, does Christ allow an essentially evil act, a religious denunciation (as the apostle Peter once denied Christ three times before his resurrection), in order to obtain a greater good, an end to human slaughter?  If it is done to save himself, then the answer is a resounding no.  But if it saves the lives of others, isn’t that what Christ would do?  Rather than ending the film on this precipitous moment, more follows, where they remain under Japanese control, never allowed to leave the island, forced to repeat this act of apostasy over and over again through the years, yet they are given back their own lives in cooperation, where Dutch merchants describe them as “the lost priests,” muted and restrained, seemingly communicating with no one, resigned to living their last days in a silent daze, retaining some semblance of inner solitude where in the end, their questionable acts can only be answered by God.