This film was inspired by the actual case of the revival of the moribund Sumo Club at Rikkyo University, director Suo's alma mater, and the team's subsequent success (shortlived, as it happens) in the intervarsity sumo competition. It appears on first sight to conform to that well-known genre of Hollywood movies in which a motley group of no-hopers is taken in hand by a maverick coach, and moulded into an efficient team that ultimately triumphs over its adversaries. Here too it is not just winning that counts, but the character building of individuals who in the process learn to overcome their feelings of inadequacy, and acquire self-confidence and self-validation.

Ever since their collaboration on Yellow earth (1984), Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have pursued separate career paths, but they have retained a common obsession with the investigation of the past and the ways in which contemporary Chinese culture and political practice are rooted in history.  They both came to international prominence with Yellow Earth, but as fellow students at the Beijing Film Academy and scarred survivors of the Cultural Revolution, they shared with other members of the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers a desire to express in the medium of cinema their hopes and fears for national regeneration after the tragic excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Of the two, Chen Kaige is the more contemplative, Zhang Yimou the more elemental. Chen is a poet and scholarly intellectual;  Zhang Yimou is a visual artist who worked as a still photographer and cinematographer before he became a film director.

Springtime in a Small Town (Chinese title: Xiaocheng zhi Chun) is a remake of - and homage to - Spring in a Small Town, a 1948 B&W Chinese film classic. The new film has been enthusiastically received and highly praised by reviewers unfamiliar with the original film version^[1]. Those of us who love the first version are inclined to be less enthusiastic – a common response to re-makes of great films.

 

^[1] See Peter Kemp’s review in Sight & Sound, July 2003, and Peter bradshaw’s review in The Guardian, Friday, June 13, 2003.

Spirited Away scooped the Academy award for Best Animation this year, but it is not Miyazaki’s best film. Like his other films, it creates a richly detailed fantasyland and is stunningly beautiful. The central character, as often in his films, is a young pre-adolescent girl, a Miyazaki variant of the shojo. The feminine stereotype of the shojo (young woman) in Japanese popular culture can be excruciatingly cute. They are usually immature, between childhood and adolescence in age, pretty, and sexually innocent. They love animals, pets and babies, and are sensitive to the suffering of other creatures (human and non-human) whom they nurture and coddle. Miyazaki’s heroines display these characteristics but they are also assertive, adventurous and courageous – like the conventional male hero.

The heroines of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997) also display social commitment and a crusading zeal.

Like Imamura and Oshima, Shinoda was a university-educated intellectual who was employed by Shochiku as an assistant director in the early fifties and felt stifled by the company’s conservatism. But he was less openly rebellious than the other two and took the opportunity of learning a great deal about filmic technique, editing and shot composition by working conscientiously as assistant to all of the company’s leading directors. At Waseda University he had specialized in theatre history and lacked training in visual art. When finally allowed to direct in the 60s, he broke dramatically with Shochiku tradition by employing radical young poet (later noted underground playwright) Terayama Shuji to write scripts and emerging avant-garde composer Takemitsu Toru to compose discordant scores for his films. However, long after he had left Shochiku and had achieved critical recognition for his period art movies (especially Double Suicide),  he admitted that he learnt a lot from working under Shochiku stalwart Ozu Yasujiro, and had studied his methods.

Nobody Knows is the third Koreeda feature to be exhibited at international film festivals and to receive theatrical release on the art cinema circuit. Highly regarded by critics, his cinema is a contemplative cinema, far removed from the action cinema and other popular commercial film genres. His films are concerned with the material and spiritual conditions of ordinary people living in limbo – between life and death, normality and abnormality, isolation and connection. His early films, television documentaries and dramatic features, demonstrated an interest in people unable to produce, face or relinquish memories of the past. His first feature, Maborosi (1996), was a beautifully shot and sensitively directed film about a woman who is emotionally frozen in a state of mourning and melancholia. His more unusual second feature, the teasingly philosophical After Life (known in Japan as Wonderful Life, 1999), focused on a disparate group of people who are located literally in Limbo – the land between death and the after-life - and faced with the difficult task of selecting one outstanding happy memory from their past lives.   

In its classical rigour and restricted narrative focus, In the Mood for Love (Chinese title: Hua yang nian hua), seems to signal a shift in Wong Kar Gai’s cinema. Normally his films, like the novels of Carson McCullers, focus on a number of loners, all of whom suffer from unrequited love. A loves B who loves C who loves D who loves A; every one of them is existentially and terminally alone and disconnected. This film centres on the relationship between just two characters, a pair of potential lovers. (In his last film, Happy Together, he had already presaged this shift. In that case, it was a pair of homosexual lovers.) The visual style of In the Mood for Love too is more restrained, less disjunctive, than that of the earlier films. Chris Doyle’s characteristic flash pans and wildly distorted camera angles, that produced almost abstract expressionist streaks and flashes of colour, have been abandoned, to be replaced by a more classical use of composition and more disciplined detailing of claustrophobic spaces - congested interior (domestic and work) spaces and narrow alleyways. No doubt Doyle’s absence (due to other work commitments) and his replacement by (Taiwanese art cinema director) Hou Hsiao Hsien’s regular cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bin, contributed a great deal to the more classical look of the film.

The story is another version of The Emperor and the Assassin, Chen Kaige’s historical epic, which told how the Qin (aka Yin or Chin) Emperor brutally suppressed and occupied the warring states of ancient China, unified the nation under his rule, and survived assassination attempts by Zhao dissidents. In Zhang Yimou’s version, the Emperor’s ruthless treatment of regional lands, peoples and rights is glossed over; he focuses on the exploits of, and dissension between, the small group of would-be assassins. The dissident politics disappears in an ultimate affirmation of national imperialism – to the dismay of many critics in Taiwan, Singapore and the US. Both the Taipei Times and the Straits Times attacked the film’s whitewashing of Qin’s legacy and its national-imperialist polemics. Critics in the US magazine, The New Republic, deemed it “a beautiful film that makes a truly ugly argument”, and a hymn of praise to “the biggest hero of them all: the almighty state”, while Jim Hoberman in the Village Voice went so far as to compare the film to Leni Riefenstahl’s celebration of Nazi ideology, Triumph of the Will.

Based on best-selling novel by Fumiko Hayashi, a popular woman writer who died in 1951. Stars Hideko Takamine - who worked frequently with Naruse and Kinoshita – and Masayuki Mori (who is also teamed with her in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs).
Yukiko and Tomioka meet in Indochina during the war. They are both assigned by the forestry dept of the govt to work in Dalat; he as a bureaucrat with expertise in forestry and she is a typist. The only Japanese woman in the office, she is desired by one of the officers named Kano but she spurns him, fixing her attentions on Tomioka, a married man, who is the object of her desire.