Cabo Negro

 

Writer/director Abdellah Taïa

CABO NEGRO           B                                                                                                         France  Morocco  (76 mi)  2024  d: Abdellah Taïa

This has a kind of Waiting for Godot vibe, as two young queer students from Casablanca, best friends Soundouss and Jaâfar (Oumaïma Barid and Youness Beyej), arrive at a luxury villa in Cabo Negro, a beachside community in northern Morocco, while awaiting the arrival of an older American from New York, Jonathan, who is renting the villa for the month of August and lent them the keys, yet never arrives.  While there are indications Jonathan and Jaâfar are former lovers, Soundouss is also excited about the arrival of her girlfriend Soumaya who remained behind in Casablanca, sending her inflamed messages, where expectations are high that they will spend a carefree month in the sun, swimming on the beach, living a comfortable life, where the idyllic setting offers a reprieve from surrounding social and political upheavals.  This beautiful locale has the makings of your typical Éric Rohmer film, who set many of his films along the sunny shores of summer beach holidays, where the sensual atmosphere and youthful carefree vibe became a staple of French cinema, though the Moroccan director has chosen an altogether different path, choosing a minimalist, near documentary approach with quiet observation, and while the film’s languid sensuality is undeniable, it’s difficult to comprehend the motivations behind the character’s actions.  Born in Salé just outside Rabat, Abdellah Taïa is the first Moroccan writer to live openly and unapologetically gay, eloquently writing a coming out confession to his family (Homosexuality Explained to My Mother), publishing several novels ('A Country for Dying' Review: A Fresco of Departures, Real ...), while currently living in Paris and writing in French, where any notion of home remains elusive, as back home he is viewed as a “traitor,” with Morocco’s biggest-selling newspaper denouncing him, while also attacked by other Moroccan writers, journalists, and politicians, with many suggesting he should be stoned.  Realizing at an early age that words were used to denounce the LGBTQ community, making them feel dirty and despised, where families often cast out these children as misfits from society, and for that reason he is wary of how language is used to portray gay people, who remain extremely vulnerable to acts of violence, as gays are routinely demonized as evil by religious and political entities, making them ashamed of who they are.  There’s an expression from the American South, “Watch the dog that carries the bone,” in other words watch the messenger.  Growing up, the director felt he was all alone, with no one in the world able to identify what he was going through, leaving him isolated and alone, where he had to navigate his way through troubled waters in a society that offers no refuge, only hateful rejection.  Offering a very low-key sense of what it is like to be queer in Morocco, and still be a practicing Muslim, his goal is to make cinema accessible to those same LGBTQ youth growing up today, offering them inclusive avenues they may not have felt or known about, yet it’s clear this is a man on a mission.  Taïa was present at the screening and he’s an unusually gifted speaker, highly intelligent and emotionally compelling, where his command of language in both mediums is thought-provoking.

Largely due to the director’s mistrust for how language can misconstrue reality, this is more of a moody, atmospheric film filled with deeper meaning, with very little dialogue and long silent pauses, where the scale of the film remains small, and the plot purposefully oblique, allowing viewers to recognize other aspects of storytelling, where that initial euphoria turns mysteriously dark and melancholic, growing more circumspect as Jonathan avoids all attempts at contact, refusing to answer his phone, and remains completely out of touch, while Soumaya has similarly distanced herself from Soundouss, leaving her down in the dumps.  This strange turn of events leaves them both perplexed and dismayed, suddenly finding themselves unable to pay the rent or buy food, as if stranded on an island with no provisions, yet rather than return home they decide to stay and make the best of it, walking to the beach each day, soaking up the sun, and just enjoying the simple pleasures of living.  But Taïa throws in a few wrinkles we haven’t seen before, as hiding in the forested path to the ocean is a group of Africans awaiting their chance to be smuggled across the sea into Europe, where direct eye contact is made, but no words are actually spoken.  Similarly, when a lone stranger follows them, rather than turn him away, they actually offer him food and a safe place to sleep for a night, discovering he’s just been released from 3-years in prison for a crime he never committed.  When they run out of food, they both stand along a wall at night waiting to be picked up by random strangers for paid sexual hookups, a social realist reflection of early Fellini films, expressing a harsh reality that exists side-by-side with their upscale accommodations.  Making things even more disruptive, the villa owner arrives unannounced in an angry mood, where he’s not pleased to see they are not Jonathan, who apparently has a history of renting the villa each summer.  Nonetheless, they treat him with respect, offer him sweetened tea the way he likes, but he’s aloof and standoffish with them, believing they are misfits and undesirables, eventually giving them an ultimatum to leave, but only after he orders Soundouss into one of the empty rooms where he rapes her, giving them three more days, which is like a dark cloud hanging over their heads.  This beguiling feature is a clever examination of upended expectations, homophobia and sex tourism, and an ambiguously sexy vacation thriller, reckoning with queerness within the prism of Arabic and Muslim culture, as Taïa adds artistic rigor to confront age-old beliefs while maintaining a compassionate gaze for all his characters, where the end result displays an unexpected intensity.  

As Jaâfar is paying respects to his father’s nearby grave, another man, Mounir (Julian Compan), runs into him asking for help, as he’s searching for his grandmother’s grave, but he’s French and can’t read Arabic.  He’s invited back to the villa afterwards, where we learn he was rejected by his family for being gay, and despite his grandmother’s prolonged illness, they wouldn’t allow him to see her before she died.  Yet his grandmother was everything to him, as she fully embraced who he was with no reservations, and made him feel loved.  This heartrending story allows the viewing audience to understand the true meaning of the word “tolerance.”  It’s important to understand the director’s motives here, as he’s targeting the LGBTQ youth in Morocco who have no desire to run away to Los Angeles to find freedom, but want to find a way to live in their own country, as difficult as that may seem under strict Islamic laws that view homosexuality as a punishable offense that may lead to prison terms or even death (The Islamic State's Views on Homosexuality).  Even in this idyllic setting, these kids need to navigate their way through a difficult path, as Morocco is no longer the gay and lesbian paradise of the 1970’s, home to Jean Genet (and William S. Burroughs in the 50’s) and a regular destination of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but is a country that criminalizes and persecutes the LGBTQ community, and while disheartened, they don’t lose faith or change their values to reflect the harshness inflicted upon them.  Instead they freely reach out to others, making a celebratory feast of couscous and invite a group of African exiles awaiting safe passage, people who would never be invited into a villa like this, as it caters to a wealthy white elite with plenty of money to spread around.  These communal experiences are the heart of the film, like dancing with strangers, as they offer ways to live their lives freely accepting the differences in others, who are nonetheless embraced, with no lectures or self-absorbed tirades to make themselves feel good, but simply because it’s the right thing to do, creating a world filled with fleeting interactions and temporary connections, embracing the cultural Moroccan messages without the divisive rhetoric.  Taïa got the idea for the film by following an Instagram account of two young gay Moroccans, only to notice that over time the girl goes mysteriously missing, yet he notices they exhibit powerful signs of a vibrant new iGeneration trying to express themselves, despite the aggressive government response of denunciation, living for the moment day by day with a sense of longing and hope, yet openly thriving outside established rules.  This gave him the framework for a story, where he could add his own fictional embellishments, creating LGBTQ protagonists whose voices blend together forming a unique stream-of-conscious mix, deciding they can no longer wait for societies to change, instead creating a safe sanctuary through their own bonds of solidarity amongst themselves, sharing meals and their own loving experiences, offering a sense of grace even while there are turbulent forces around them fomenting social and political violence.    

Zero Focus (Zero no shôten) (1961)

 

Director Yoshitarô Nomura

author Seichō Matsumoto

screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto

ZERO FOCUS (Zero no shôten)          B+                                                                                  Japan  (95 mi)  1961  ‘Scope  d: Yoshitarô Nomura

sagging clouds
alone facing
the raging waves
I feel sadness
first trip to Noto

—Seichō Matsumoto poem carved into a stone near the Yase Cliff (Yase no Dangai) on the Noto Peninsula, Matsumoto Seicho's "Zero Focus" and Noto 

Not your ordinary Japanese film, a mix of a slow-burning character study and a tense psychological thriller, this is arguably the most overtly film noir style of all of Nomura’s films, one of eight films the director made adapting the works of Seichō Matsumoto, an Akutagawa Prize-winning author in 1952 and the consummate crime fiction writer in Japan with more than 450 crime stories, where his works tend to focus on the minute details of crimes and the impact they had on society.  Perhaps because Japanese government censors banned detective novels during the war, declaring them unpatriotic, Matsumoto got a late start writing in his early forties, becoming Japan’s highest paid writer, politically left-leaning and popular with Japanese audiences, but his downbeat novels were emblematic of the postwar pessimism in the turbulent years following atomic annihilation, foreign occupation, and waning nationalism.  Taut and tightly constructed, the screen adaptation is co-written by Yōji Yamada, a director in his own right, maker of THE TWILIGHT SAMURAI (2002), and Shinobu Hashimoto, a frequent collaborator with Akira Kurosawa, including RASHOMON (1950), IKIRU (1952), and SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), writing more than 80 screenplays, where this has a distinct literary style with existential voiceovers and duplicitous characters, mixing an underlying Hitchcockian sense of dread with postwar Japanese social commentary, evolving into a multi-layered, convoluted plot taking us down a rabbit hole of intrigue and shocking revelations, each one drawing us into this labyrinthian flashback structure that grows ever more unhinged.  Notable for its use of three women as the lead protagonists, very much ahead of its time in that regard, especially for crime thrillers, probably the most women-centered noir you’ll ever see, described as feminist noir, as it simply was not done at the time, especially in the paternalistic Japanese society.  The son of a silent film director Hōtei Nomura, the still mostly unheralded Nomura may be one of Japanese cinema’s best kept secrets, working as an assistant director for Kurosawa on The Idiot (Hakuchi) (1951) and spending his entire career for the Shochiku film studio.  Japanese noir has a very distinct sensibility, with shifting values of modernism, including the postwar American occupation, skeptical views of progress as well as ambivalent views of the past, existential angst and paranoia, a fatalistic sense of doom, with a reevaluation of social and gender roles for those struggling on the margins.  In this film, prostitution is an underlying theme, but barely touched upon, focusing instead on the psychological ramifications, where there is an effort to transform one’s life from the cruel realities of the past, but reintegration into mainstream society proves more difficult than it seems.  Mizoguchi’s OSAKA ELEGY (1936) was one of the first critiques of gender issues, examining the darker side of sex workers (the director’s older sister was sold into prostitution when he was a child), realistically exploring a young woman’s victimization and descent into prostitution, while Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949) takes noir in a new direction with a police procedural in the ruins of postwar Tokyo, utilizing a near documentary style where the camera moves fluidly through crowded streets, following a detective through Tokyo’s poverty-ridden streets for one entire reel without any dialogue, capturing the physicality of the people, the style, the mood, especially the heat, contrasted against Western influences, the introduction of a gun, baseball, white suits, dancing girls, the blues, jazz, and classical music, with Kurosawa training his eye on Japanese postwar corruption.  This film explores the trauma Japanese women had to endure following the country’s defeat in WWII mixed with revelations of corruption and prostitution during the American occupation, where rampant poverty and limited options forced some into prostitution, having to work very hard to escape that shameful past, which could prove tragic if it becomes known, where a panicked fear eventually leads to murder and suicide.  This gritty black and white noir is the first of two film versions, as a color adaptation was released nearly 50 years later by Isshin Inudo in 2009.

The question of how much we really know about our married partner is a popular device in thriller fiction, bringing comparisons to Hitchcock and his films such as Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), but this film also draws heavily from Vertigo (1958), accentuating a psychological hysteria that is further exaggerated by the swirling music of Bernard Hermann, while here it is a similarly provocative musical score by Yasushi Akutagawa, known primarily for his films with Kon Ichikawa.  Merging Japanese social realities with the pictorial and symbolic qualities of Japanese landscapes, it’s hard to think of another film that utilizes a steep cliff overlooking a swirling ocean below as well as this one does, described by local police as a beautiful natural vista, but also a popular spot for suicides.  At the center of the story is Teiko, Yoshiko Kuga, who worked with Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Ōshima, and Ozu, a Tokyo woman who is seen at the outset getting happily married to a man ten years older than her, a very successful advertising executive, Kenichi (Kōji Nanbara), supposedly the man of her dreams, though they met through a centuries-old family tradition of Miai, which is more of a suggested rather than arranged marriage, with representatives from his company singing his praises at the wedding, where they appear to have a very happy life ahead of them.  As he’s been promoted to the head office in Tokyo, he takes a short business trip to the offices in coastal Kanazawa to finalize his business dealings there and arrange for his new successor, Zero Focus (1961), directed by Yoshitaro Nomura. #film ... TikTok (2:41), but as the days pass, to her dismay he never returns.  Neither the company nor the police have any idea what has happened to him, but lacking any sense of urgency, she decides to search for him on her own, at first with the help of his employer, but eventually on her own, bringing with her a pair of old photographs she found among his things, but little else to go on, uncovering a series of unexplained deaths and sham suicides as well as a mountain of details that suggest he was living a double life, circumstances not even his co-workers knew about.  Assuming the role of private detective, the more she learns, the less she knows about him, as she searches for clues among a web of lies and deceit that shroud a secret life he was leading, traveling to the western provinces, where it quickly changes to deep snow, which falls relentlessly, but you never know what’s buried underneath, turning even more somber when Kenichi’s brother Sotaro (Kō Nishimura) also intervenes and investigates on his own, but things quickly go awry.  Yet what stands out are the uniqueness of the locations, including a gorgeous seaside route along the railway, with stops at the Hakui Station and the Sanmiyo Station (discontinued in 1972), with breathtaking footage of the coast up to the Noto Peninsula on the rugged north Japan sea coast, which was also featured in Shōhei Imamura’s final film WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (2001) and also Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi (Maboroshi no hikari) (1995), a film that also deals with a missing husband and has many visual parallels.  In what is essentially a whodunit, she is dumbfounded to discover the exact same locations as the photographs, one of which is Kanazawa Castle in the snow, while the other is a small wooden house along a barren, windswept coast in a desolate, economically backward region, with dilapidated houses still built largely out of wood and in many respects unchanged since ancient times, with a high wall of fortified sticks built to keep out both the water and the wind, where the community is sketched out with an almost documentary detail, discovering hidden meanings layered underneath, yet perhaps the most unique aspect is the continued use of voiceovers to express her changing state of mind, filled with unanswered questions, where the mystery only deepens.

This film is like a puzzle box with hidden storage spaces that require intensive brainpower to unlock, as the deeper we get into this moody, atmospheric journey the more difficult it becomes to comprehend, where the real beauty is the secluded location of the windswept Noto Cliff, which frames the dizzying climax, surrounded by an omnipresent dark and dreary, yet tempestuous sea gushing below that recalls Grigori Kozintsev's HAMLET (1964), shot mostly on location in beautifully composed ‘Scope by Takashi Kawamata, where the bleak final act is given a grandiose and surreal stage for such high-wire emotional histrionics, delving into the ever-deepening mystery surrounding Kenichi’s secret life and disappearance.  Adding to this unique theatricality is the dizzyingly exaggerated, Lady Macbethian performance of Sachiko (Hizuru Takachiho), the wife of a wealthy industrial magnate, Mr. Murota (Yoshi Katō), a friend of Kenichi, yet what’s intimated is a much earlier relationship, as in 1950 the missing husband used to be a street cop in Tachikawa near the American occupied airbase when Sachiko was working as a prostitute catering to American soldiers, something she has kept concealed all this time, yet it’s a past that she cannot escape, which is a classic noir theme.  The things that people will do to keep their secrets from being exposed is uncanny, and Sachiko is involved in multiple levels of dirty dealings that the police have erroneously determined were either accidental deaths or suicides.  The degree to which the police are clueless is a bit mindboggling, but the only one savvy enough to actually uncover the interconnectedness and underlying motives behind all these disappearances is Teiko, whose relentless investigation puts her life in danger, as everyone else who came remotely close to unraveling these mysteries ended up dead, so the fact she’s standing precariously close to the edge of a cliff feels more than a little ominous.  Of course the music only amps up the tension, unleashing waves of explosive revelations that grow stranger by the minute.  While we were led to believe that it was Kenichi who was the enigma, Sachiko is a powderkeg of hidden secrets that take this in an entirely different direction, becoming a feminist examination of the postwar predicament for women, many forced into unwanted sexual relationships, as though they were mere objects, denied any feeling of humanity.  This is the essence of the Japanese noir modern woman, an unsettling figure outside the conventions and traditions of marriage and family, existing on the margins of society, expressing individuality and independence by means of a self-imposed isolation, often resorting to and relying upon their exposure to criminality to find their way out of what they perceive as life-threatening situations.  Few films convey a dire sense of desperation like this one, as if a noose has already been placed around Sachiko’s neck, suffocating not only from the choices she’s made but the consequences that come from their exposure, shown in a flurry of flashback sequences that unravel with differing RASHOMON-like interpretations.  Teiko is the lead protagonist, but Sachiko is a mystery woman/femme fatale who becomes an avenging angel of death, while yet another woman from the past surfaces, Hisako (Ineko Arima), a reception girl of the agency’s Kanazawa branch, who turns out to be Kenichi’s common-law wife, and is equally mystified by his strange disappearance, yet she and Sachiko have similar pasts, where the three women are drawn together into the precarious final moments that only grow more melodramatically delirious.  It’s a dense and often confounding film that requires plenty of subtitling, as it’s a whirlwind of rapidly changing events, each with their own deeply unsettling conundrums that have been buried under the surface, finally coming to light.