The Eternal Daughter

 

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER         B                                                                                   Great Britain  USA  (96 mi)  2022  d: Joana Hogg

I have a husband I neglect completely and I don’t have that much time left, and I don’t have a family beyond you.  I don’t have any children, I’m not going to have anybody to fuss over me when I’m your age.                                                                                                                        —Julie Harte talking to her mother Rosalind (both played by Tilda Swinton)

“No one wants to talk about mortality, and I regret to this day that I was never able to have that conversation with my mother,” Hogg confesses. “I was too fearful of it … I didn’t want to upset her by bringing it up.  But it would have been on her mind, and it would have maybe been a relief to have a conversation about it.  But it just didn’t happen.” (No One Wants to Talk About Mortality - The Atlantic).  From the maker of The Souvenir (2019) and THE SOUVENIR Part II (2021), with Tilda Swinton taking on a more grownup version of the role her daughter Honor Swinton Byrne played in those films, a fictionalized version of the director herself, with Tilda playing the mother, while this one features Tilda in both roles, playing mother and daughter, where you get to watch Tilda Swinton talk to Tilda Swinton in what amounts to a one-woman show.  Hogg collaborated with Swinton on her 1986 short graduation thesis film, Caprice, having known her since they were both ten year old boarding school students at the West Heath Girls’ School in 1971, the former boarding school of Princess Diana, while Hogg is also the godmother of Swinton’s daughter, each mentored by artist, poet, and filmmaker Derek Jarman, loaning Hogg her very first Super 8 camera which she used to make that first short film, only to collaborate again with Swinton on The Souvenir films, with this viewed as a finalizing coda, blurring the line between fiction and memoir.  This becomes a self-reflective memory piece on family and the limits of artistry, as sometimes the process of creating art trespasses into the personal and may have an unintended consequence, exposing family secrets that when released publicly take on a whole other life, creating open wounds that may never heal.  Martin Scorsese is an executive producer on all three films, where there is a printed conversation between them when this film was released, MARTIN SCORSESE AND JOANNA HOGG IN ....  Essentially a two woman film, with Swinton in both roles, this defies audience expectations, creating something minimalist, yet immediately recognizable, as it looks like something we’ve seen before, resembling the Gothic imagination of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), but without the nastiness.  In fact, the two women couldn’t be more polite, which has a way of smoothing over the rough edges, but the atmospheric surroundings constantly remind us of something deeply unsettling.  With a dark and moody opening, a car arrives in the darkness, as if immersing viewers onto the foggy moors of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), resembling the somnambulistic quality of a Guy Maddin film, as it has that same neon green color scheme and melodramatic yet overly somber musical score, which happens to be Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Béla Bartók - Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, I YouTube (9:02), part of the background music used in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), though the two films use different parts of it.  Yet it’s a haunted house movie, told in the old Gothic style, with a minimum of characters onscreen, mostly a woman and her elderly mother along with their dog (Tilda Swinton’s own Springer Spaniel), where they are seemingly the only guests staying at this old gargoyle-covered countryside hotel that seems tucked under bare trees in a foreboding landscape of dim lights and everpresent fog.  Shot during the isolation of the Covid pandemic on Super 16mm by Ed Rutherford, who also shot two of her earlier works, actually filmed at Soughton Hall in Wales, a 15-bedroom Georgian estate built in 1714 which has never been used in cinema before, though judging by all the peripheral noises and an everpresent camera exploring all the nooks and crannies, this eerily empty hotel appears to be haunted, as if something is constantly lurking nearby, where the omnipresent fog raises certain expectations, creating an environment that overwhelms so completely that it amounts to a character of its own.  But this is simply the framework of a story Hogg wishes to tell, which may be her most personal effort yet, but it’s concealed within a claustrophobic environment that is as telling as anything the characters have to say, literally sweeping viewers into this cacophony of discordant sounds and ominous imagery that is always shrouded in darkness, where the bottom line is that memories haunt us, creating a unique experience that couldn’t be more eerie and ominous, as if plunging us into the depths of the subconscious, out of which emanates a film about loss or impending loss, and an exploration of grief.    

Not much actually happens in this film, requiring a great deal of patience, offering only the barest outlines of a story, and much of that is filled with benevolently perfunctory conversations between mother and daughter, where you really have to dig deep to find meaningful material here, as so much of it plays out on the surface level, leaving plenty to the imagination, yet what’s unseen seems to haunt the living.  Julie is a middle-aged filmmaker taking her elderly mother Rosalind to Wales for her birthday (the same characters in The Souvenir), booking several days in an isolated old manor, a place her mother used to frequent, as it was once owned by her Aunt Jocelyn, spending plenty of her childhood there during an evacuation from the war while attempting to escape the bombs targeting nearby Liverpool, revisiting it many times even as a young woman.  But like many of these old homes in postwar Britain, due to taxes and increased expenses, they’ve been converted to country hotels, and while they promise peace and quiet in the comforts of the countryside, they immediately feel anxious when the chilly desk clerk, Carly Sophia-Davies, has no record of their reservation, or their request for a specific room overlooking the garden, instead she seems completely indifferent, having difficulty finding any available room, claiming the hotel is full of guests, even though they seem to be the only ones there.  Having the dining room to themselves, and the full run of the place, the clerk is equally disinterested about Julie’s request to close the windows and shutters in the rooms above them that seem to be continually banging from the wind, keeping her up all night, as she roams the empty corridors, with the clerk claiming none of the other guests have complained.  Immediately we question our perception of reality, as there’s obviously something going on behind the scenes, with the deadpan clerk absurdly adding a bit of levity to an overly somber film, as she seems constantly annoyed and reluctant to accommodate any of Julie’s requests, caught up, apparently, in her own personal struggles, occasionally seen arguing with a partner that is picking her up in a red sports car with the techno music cranked up as they are leaving the grounds.  While she brought her mother to an old familiar place in hopes it would trigger her memories for the film she wants to make, with each room reminding Rosalind of personal anecdotes she would never have thought of otherwise, she hopes to memorialize her mother before she dies by secretly recording their conversations.  Feeling guilty that this is done without asking consent, Rosalind is reluctant to share, finding herself easily distracted, not really providing the answers she is looking for, carrying a white plastic bag of letters and photographs that she intends to go through, while Julie spends her time working in the attic, the only place with a reliable Wi-Fi signal, making no headway at all on writing a screenplay, obscured by her own challenges, as she’s continually kept up all night, left ruminating on questions swirling in her head about the ghostly events that surround her in a lonely hotel without guests, becoming a film about the creative process and the emotional turmoil it involves.  Much of this is shot through mirror reflections, or long shots down empty hallways, with a spectral figure seen peering through the window, where it’s more suggestive than real, offering various versions of the self, never really addressing any of Rosalind’s concerns openly, as memories aren’t always clear and concise, and can feel muddled, as if lost in a haze, with only moments of clarity.  Nonetheless, Julie only wishes for her mother’s happiness, growing deeply distressed when she learns of so many sorrowful recollections, with memories of war and tragic loss, including a miscarriage, leaving her filled with regret, unaware of the heavy weight she’s been carrying, which may explain her writer’s block, growing deeply uncomfortable, a manifestation of something a younger version of her character Julie says in SOUVENIR II, “I don’t want to see life as it was.  I want to see life as I imagine it to be.”  Filtering someone else’s life through our own existential prism, it only accentuates what we don’t know or understand about those we love, as reality often conflicts with our ideas of the truth.             

While this film made plenty of Best of the Year lists, listed at #3 by Reverse Shot, Best Films of 2022 Reverse Shot, and #5 by the Film Comment poll, Film Comment Announces 2022 Best-of-Year Lists, it’s not an easy watch, particularly finding something substantive out of it, as it definitely loses something if not seen in theaters, where it might otherwise feel overly dark, with so much hidden underneath the tapestry of spooky images, borrowing heavily from the British horror tradition, including Jacques Tourneur’s fog-shrouded NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957), Jack Clayton’s superb adaptation of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw in The Innocents (1961), Herbert Wise’s ghost story THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989), and of course Stanley Kubrick’s haunted house thriller THE SHINING (1980), which was shot in England.  The use of horror recalls the deeply buried resentments in Ingmar Bergman’s Bergman, Two from the 70's: Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten) (1978), featuring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as mother and daughter, veering into shockingly unexpected emotional outbursts, while this is a portrait of Hogg’s relationship with her own mother, who died while she was editing the film, leaving her plagued by guilt, associating the film with her death, making this her version of Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015).  Essentially a film about women whose problems manifest as failures of expression, suppressed desires, and thwarted ambitions, the idea began back in 2008 when Hogg was planning a film about her relationship with her mother, but she was too close at the time, unnerved by the idea of poking around exploring very painful memories, but the passage of time allowed her to consider a different way of approaching the subject, knowing she would make a film about it one day, recalling “We often went on trips together to stay at hotels, sometimes near relatives, and so it was very directly taken from that experience with her.”  Swinton is understated throughout, providing the needed believability in each character, a stabilizing force in stark contrast to the impressionistic maze of Gothic horror that is a constant visual motif, with suggestions of a supernatural presence hovering nearby, which may be a metaphor for death, and while nothing jumps out of the dark striking fear in anyone’s heart, the horror of memory is everpresent here.  While Julie tries her best to care for her mother, she is shocked at her mother’s reactions to a return to what was a family estate, flooding her memories with an overwhelming rush of sad emotions, leaving Julie disheartened, wondering what she’s done bringing her there, but her mother is more firmly grounded, reminding her daughter, “That’s what rooms do.  They hold these stories.”  From an imagination perspective, this film is wonderfully impressionistic, offering fleeting memories, but also long-forgotten correspondences, worn-out paperbacks, long walks with the dog, and formal dining in an empty room, with only four things on the menu, catered to by the disinterested desk clerk who always seems to intrude at the exact wrong moment, invariably interrupting their train of thought, though they always insist they are having a “very lovely time,” leaving things in a state of paralysis, as if stuck in time.  The birthday dinner itself is surreal, with Julie meticulously wanting things done a certain way, becoming anxiously exact, but when the moment arrives the film swerves in a different direction, altering the look of reality, challenging our perceptions, and infusing a different understanding of the mother/daughter relationship which is at the heart of the film.  It’s clear that you can know someone without really knowing them, as evidenced by this family home that was once filled with importance and life, but transformed over time to an empty vessel, a decaying remnant of what it once was, where the physical space of the building is a ghostly presence.  Looking upon our pasts, and the people that matter to us, an emotional chasm exists between how we remember the past and the present, with all its complications.  Memory is fluid, as it comes and goes, never straightforward, which may explain the multiple shots of mirror reflections, working with more close-ups, allowing the characters’ reactions to be observed in greater detail, adding an existential element, and a different version of autobiographical filmmaking, as there’s something unknowable about this hotel and its inhabitants, and a tremendous gulf between the conversations we would like to have with our mothers and daughters, and the ones we actually end up having. 

The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka)

 

Hayao Miyazaki at work

THE BOY AND THE HERON (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka)             B                                    Japan  (124 mi)  2023  d: Hayao Miyazaki

Aging directors are a prominent theme of the day, with recently released films by Martin Scorsese at age 81, Ridley Scott at age 86, Ken Loach at age 87, to which we can add Hayao Miyazaki at age 83.  It’s an interesting phenomenon, as these old guard directors have in many ways defined their respective generations, setting the standard for others to follow.  In the world of Japanese animation, Miyazaki literally has no peers, standing out as the last of the hand-drawn animators who painstakingly construct each shot in a cinematic universe that has otherwise been taken over by computer generated imagery, like Disney (Disney's Computer Animated Movies) and Pixar (List of Pixar films), where their shift from hand-drawn animation to CGI animated films has led to their skyrocketing box office success, where FROZEN (2013) became the first Disney animated film to gross $1 billion at the box office, while for Pixar it was TOY STORY 3 (2010), which actually features Miyazaki’s Totoro as a character.  While that’s what kids in America are drawn to today, there is really no one else in the entire universe of film like Miyazaki, a living legend and beloved visionary in a category by himself, standing at the apex in the world of animation, which never gets the same credit as live-action film, yet animation is cinema, and the depth of Miyazaki’s artwork has no peers, described by Guillermo del Toro as working on the same level of artistry as Mozart and Van Gogh. Already destined for immortality, films like this simply aren’t being made anymore, though occasionally the director seamlessly blends computer-generated imagery into his own works (water, for example).  Co-founder of Studio Ghibli in 1985, now entering the seventh decade of his career, Miyazaki is a revered, one-of-a-kind artist whose brilliant aesthetic mixes perfectly composed craftsmanship with recurring themes of humanity, introducing a striking maturity for young viewers, where simplicity is combined with the profound.  Renowned for telling stories about resourceful children navigating their way through tragedy and adversity, merging the fable-like inspiration with characters placed in realistic and historically well-defined contexts, Miyazaki leaves a lasting legacy for future generations, yet because of the exacting standards he sets for himself and his studio staff, Studio Ghibli has been unable to find a worthy successor.  Making his first film since The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2014), a fictionalized homage to aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Zero fighter plane, the Japanese title of this new film references the 1937 novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino, initially published as a series for young people, becoming a defining coming-of-age book of the postwar generation emphasizing spiritual growth, coming at a time when society rewarded boastfulness, unlimited confidence, and self-promotion over integrity, kindness, and simplicity, turning into a morality tale that suggests viewing oneself at the center of the world is a mistake, encouraging young adults to think about what lies beyond themselves as they strike out on their own.  The book was given to a young Miyazaki by his mother, having a profound influence on his life, mixing elements of his own autobiography into the dreamlike story, which is not an adaptation of the book, instead turning this into a fantasy adventure that draws inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, yet also feels like a child’s version of Homer’s The Odyssey, with a young child entering a magical world fraught with a series of inherent dangers, yet also filled with unparalleled beauty and seemingly unfathomable mysteries before returning safely home to his family.  

Set in 1943, the penultimate year of the Pacific War, as the 12-year old protagonist, Mahito Maki, is modeled after Miyazaki’s childhood, losing his mother Hisako who is killed in a hospital fire during the hectic opening moments as air-raid sirens pierce the night in the firebombing of Tokyo, where people appear as ghostly phantoms, a blur of fear and fire compounding a feeling of helpless chaos as Mahito frantically races through a panicked crowd to try and reach her.  A year later Mahito’s father Shoichi remarries his wife’s younger sister Natsuko, and similar to Miyazaki's father, owns an air munitions factory that manufactures fighter plane components for the Japanese Imperial Army, with the family evacuating from the city in order to avoid the relentless American bombing campaign, moving to his bride’s more peaceful countryside estate, where they live with several old maids.  Suffering from inconsolable grief afterwards, the transition is particularly hard on Mahito, finding it difficult to accept his stepmother, where an incident of bullying at his school reveals a rigid class system, where most of his classmates come from unassuming farming families who resent the upper class city kid, which leads Mahito to injure himself to avoid having to return, and during his convalescence he discovers Yoshino’s book with an inscription from his mother, who never got a chance to give it to him.  Encountering a gray heron that seems to be taunting him, it lures him down a rabbit hole at an overgrown, abandoned tower that seems steeped with mystery, supposedly built by a man who amusingly “read too many books and went insane.”  Warned not to approach, as it’s dangerously dilapidated, with no upkeep whatsoever, his curiosity gets the best of him, as the heron claims his mother is still alive and only entering the tower can save her.  Hesitant at first, refusing to believe what he hears, suspecting it’s a trap, Natsuko, who is pregnant, inexplicably disappears into the tower one day, so he enters with one of the old maids to save her, but they quickly find themselves caught in an alternate universe where the heron can actually speak, discovering he is actually a small man inhabiting the heron’s body, who somewhat reluctantly ends up serving as his guide throughout this strange netherworld that seems to abide by its own rules, at times feeling more like a nightmare.  Grappling with inner conflicts and insecurities, Miyazaki emphasizes the transformative power of overcoming personal challenges, drawing a distinction between the film and Yoshino’s novel, yet both share an existential theme of finding yourself at a moral crossroads, forced to make decisions as you mature, learning certain things in life which can only be understood through experience, essentially revealing how individuals navigate and come to terms with a world characterized by strife and loss, conveying resilience in the face of conflict and grief, offering viewers a choice between emulating the chaos of Japan’s warring past or forging a different path, with an underlying theme of spiritual growth, rebirth, and personal transformation.  For some viewers the life cycles may bear similarities to Kim Ki-duk’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER…AND SPRING (2003), with its Buddhist themes of reincarnation, but the film’s center of gravity is more driven by humanist themes.

Nearly all of Miyazaki’s films confront mortality in some form or another, a suffering at the disappearance of loved ones, yet this may be his grimmest effort, a film laden with death and darkness, a metaphor for the war years, where it’s impossible to understand what happens in the aftermath of such great loss, where only Japan has endured the mass annihilation and radioactive aftereffects from the atomic bomb.  Mahito struggles to adjust to his new life, as he’s just a grieving boy who’s trying to process the inexplicable cruelty of life, leaving him angry and prone to acts of violence, as he’s someone who wants to retreat from reality, sadly wanting nothing more to do with it.  But the gray heron won’t let him do that as it continues to pester him, luring him into a fantasy realm filled with ghosts of the past, where death is a more prominent theme, like Charon’s voyage in the mythological underworld of the dead, featuring glimpses of starry skies, ghost ships, treacherous seas that no longer produce fish, ravenous pelicans, an army of human-sized, man-eating parakeets, and powerful wizards.  Much of this doesn’t make sense, feeling more abstract and funereal, finding themselves on the precipice of the apocalypse, often feeling flawed and unfair, yet he has to figure it out with the help from friends he meets along the way, including Kiriko, a swashbuckling sailor who is a younger version of an old maid at the estate, Himi, a young fire spirit who is Mahito’s biological mother as a child, while Natsuko is her younger sister who has hidden away somewhere to give birth, the Warawara, or bubble spirits that surface to be born in Mahito’s world, and Natsuko’s great-uncle, who rules over the world as a wily old wizard with great powers.  While this may not be as transcendent or aesthetically pleasing as some of the best Miyazaki films, featuring a more tormented and problematic character than in the past, the tone appears harsher, more gloomy and melancholy, especially the blood-stained, self-inflicted injury, which is a gruesome sight, yet the probing gravity of such weighty material is nothing less than inspired, as one can feel overwhelmed by the sheer range of artistic ideas on display, beautifully complimented by a moving score from Miyazaki’s longtime musical composer, Joe Hisaishi, The Boy and The Heron Piano OST | New Ghibli Film Soundtrack YouTube (19:15), adding luscious textures and a melodic connection to what we’re witnessing, all part of the beauty of the imagination.  This also feels like A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, as the autobiographical and deeply personal nature of the film seems to relate to the development of a young artistic mind, where the apocalyptic nature of the subject matter gives way to the power of making art, which is at the core of an artist’s existence, yet art and imagination are not substitutes for reality, but tools to learn how to live, and how to deal with death, becoming an emotional journey about letting go of despair and coming to grips with personal tragedy.  Like Hamlet’s perplexing question on the meaning of life, Miyazaki searches for answers in Yoshino’s novel, as Mahito discovers introspection and learns to overcome his personal resentments and embrace hope and optimism, ultimately finding healing and acceptance with his new family.  Like so many other Miyazaki films, sensing the needs of others seems to awaken the very soul of the young protagonist, where learning to make sense of a confusing world is a hurdle we all must face growing up.  Loss and grief are a part of everyone’s life, yet that is no excuse to pull away and avoid contact with the ones who care about you, as being connected to other people and the world around you may at times seem daunting, but it’s an essential part of living.