De los pares impares que he visto últimamente y que más me han impresionado recomiendo: “Sleeping man” de Kohei Oguri y “The taste of tea” de Katsuhito Ishii, casualmente vi primero la segunda y de forma totalmente azarosa la primera, y a pesar de que en apariencia no tienen nada o poco que ver tuve la sensación de que eran la misma película, transformando lo que era un reflexión sobre la muerte en “Sleeping man” en un canto a la vida en “The taste of tea”, luego busqué información por la red y resulta que Ishii admitía que su principal fuente de inspiración había sido la película de Oguri, honestidad cinematográfica poco frecuente, las dos están disponibles en la red si bien la de Oguri sin subtítulos de ningín tipo (creo) pero os aseguro que es tan deslumbrante formalmente que casi es preferible.
Hay muchísimos más ejemplos, uno por persona para no pisarnos
Review:
Oguri's Deep Sleeper
Oguri Kohei's Sting of Death ("Shi no toge," 1991), a masterfully dark portrait of a philandering novelist and his wife he unwittingly drives insane, concludes with the couple slowly preparing themselves for the sleep therapy that will supposedly cure her illness.
Five years later, Oguri's much-awaited next work, Sleeping Man, begins with the lead character Takuji (Ahn Sung Gi) already in a somnambulant state, having fallen into a coma after an accident in the mountains. The motif of sleep links the two films, but one asks just what it is that must be cured in Sleeping Man?
The much celebrated director's previous films, Muddy River ("Doro no kawa," 1981), For Kayako ("Kayako no tame ni," 1983), and Sting of Death (winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes), have revolved around deeply conflicted characters who must overcome contradictions in the social world.
The exquisite photography of these laconic and deliberately paced works has served both to reflect and concentrate attention on these internal dilemmas.
Sleeping Man, however, marks a change in Oguri's style. The story is simple, almost non-existent. Takuji's coma sparks his family and friends in a rural town to confront their relationship with him and with others, such as the Indonesian hostesses who work in a local bar. Yet even when Takuji eventually dies, these tableaux of everyday events and conversations never reach the level of the internal drama of Oguri's previous films.
It as if cameraman Maruike Osamu's picture postcard shots of Gunma have overcome the characters to render the film an antidramatic symphony of images.
A cynic would smirk that this is due to the fact that Gunma Prefecture actually financed this film to the tune of 300 million yen, the first time a local government has supported a fiction feature film in Japan.
But it is clear Sleeping Man is not a drama of inner psychology, but of external entities like nature and humanity. Oppositions are not between the characters, but between the larger forces they represent: the moon and the sun and the mountains and the rivers.
The sleeping Takuji, who was a lover of mountains both at home and abroad, is associated with the moon and silence as he nears death. His friends, in fact, try to call him back from the dead by making as much noise as they can. One of these noise makers, Takuji's best friend Kamimura (Yakusho Koji), increasingly becomes linked with the sun as he basks in a rainbow towards the film's end.
Oguri has thus left the gritty black and white realism of Osaka's Muddy River to enter the incredibly colorful world of myth and legend set in his native Gunma. Takuji's coma, and that which must be cured in Oguri's cosmology, is less a personal problem than a matter of both celestial and earthly significance. His sleep, it seems, is meant to rectify the natural order and humanity's place within it, to rejoin the mountains and rivers and bring back the sun to the community (the film begins and ends with the same shot, only the first is at night and the second at day).
Sleeping Man, however, is not in the form of an ancient legend. Myths of the land from bygone days tell of a space confined and enclosed, one which has no outside. On the contrary, Oguri's Gunma is criss-crossed with markers of the foreign. Takuji the traveler is played by Ahn, a Korean film star, and these cosmic proceedings are born witness to by the hostess Tia, brought to life by the great Indonesian actress Christine Hakim.
Tied to the river and the sea, she is the one who glimpses Takuji's "ghost" and is spectator to the changes in the mountains.
While featuring the mystic and the mysteriously spiritual, Sleeping Man is fundamentally set in an age of trains and cities, where people move from place to place. In his international humanism, Oguri in the end is offering us a simple, but beautifully told legend for modern times.
Reviewed by Aaron Gerow Kinema club
The taste of tea review by Tom Mes. midnight eye
Who would've thought? After directing a now very passé looking self-consciously post-Tarantino crime comedy and a enormously annoying film about people screaming at each other, I wasn't particularly eager to see what Katsuhito Ishii would be taking on next. His self-chosen exile in animation already seemed to have become semi-permanent, particularly when he also contributed to the animation sequences of pal Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1.
But here he is, back again with a feature film that is a radical change from the throwaway superficiality of his earlier work. The Taste of Tea is a rather delightful look at the eccentricities hiding just beneath the calm surface of ordinary life, touching, funny, imaginative and pleasantly low-key. Even if it is a bit long.
Working from his own original screenplay for the first time, Ishii shows us the everyday goings-on of the Haruno family, a quintet (mom, dad, teenage son, little daughter and grandpa) living in a small countryside town north of Tokyo, expanded to a six-piece during the stay of their city slicker uncle Ayano (Asano). The eccentric grandpa (an artificially aged Gashuin, the pipsqueak hitman of Ishii's debut film Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl) is only the tip of the iceberg of the quirks that run in the family. Mother Yoshiko (Tezuka) is attempting to return to her old job as a cartoon animator by making a hand-drawn short at the dinner table, father Nobuo (Miura from A Tender Place) is a hypnosis therapist who occasionally practices on his own family, son Hajime (Sato) is a vat of raging hormones after the arrival of a pretty new classmate (half-American Tsuchiya, also seen in Kamikaze Girls), and daughter Sachiko is bothered at inopportune moments by her own giant-sized double, who hangs around sitting on buildings and staring at her.
Presenting a colourful collection of oddballs for main characters is a habit Ishii hasn't quite shaken off, but thankfully their foibles here are handled in a refreshingly offhand manner. In a languid, episodic story (there is little or nothing in the way of a plot) that works surprisingly well for most of the running time, we get to spend time with each member of this little contemporary tribe and how they go about achieving their personal goals, as well as take a few sidesteps to spotlight the activities of a number of peripheral characters.
It's this attention to individuals that mostly effectively marks out Ishii's third feature from his earlier work. The script of The Taste of Tea takes a magnifying glass-like approach, enlarging and ever so slightly distorting moments from everyday life that would normally pass unnoticed in the daily grind. The playful use of CGI complements this approach very well, with images like a commuter train emerging from Hajime's forehead, Sachiko's gargantuan double, and a planet-sized sunflower providing striking visual manifestations of the characters' inner worlds.
Not everything Ishii puts on screen works as well. The animation sequence is a bit too otaku-like to be credible as Yoshiko's creation, as well as coming off as indulgence on the director's part, and there are perhaps a few sidesteps too many, resulting in the aforementioned overlength. Although the proceedings are never less than pleasant, you do get the urge to tune out around the two-hour mark. Perhaps Ishii was trying to pull an Ozu with his 143-minute family chronicle - the title certainly tries to evoke the ambience - but he's not there quite yet.
A final nod must go to the fine performances (Asano just keeps getting better and better), not only in the lead roles but also in the numerous supporting parts, which are populated with cameos by famous faces, including the great Susumu Terajima, Gohatto's Shinji Takeda, SMAP member Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, rising star Ryo Kase, sultry Party 7 and Antenna starlet Akemi Kobayashi, and Evangelion director Hideaki Anno.
The Taste of Tea certainly sheds new light and new promise on its director. In retrospect, perhaps Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl and Party 7 were necessary hurdles on the road to finding his own voice. If that's the case, then if Ishii can curb just those few remaining indulgences there should be some delightful works just beyond the horizon.
The buried forest -Umoregi by Tom Mes .midnight eye
David Lynch was once quoted, in an interview for French TV, as saying: "We all have personal tastes. Where they come from, we don't know, but those tastes can evolve or devolve. What worries me is that, in the present time, those tastes are devolving. Very few people are engaged with what is on a screen and what is in a painting. It's just a one-way, hollow thrill."
In other words, we have become so accustomed to a form of entertainment that reduces the receiver to an entirely passive spectator, that we no longer remember how to be active. We've lost the capacity to navigate our own way through a work of art. If it's a cliché to point the finger squarely at Hollywood, it is a fact that the Hollywood style of filmmaking has come to be seen as a kind of default form of cinema - the basic, proper way to make films - and all other forms, styles and approaches are regarded as alternative, viewed only in opposition to the Hollywood model. The American dominance in both the market and the writing of film history has created this impression and keeps it alive.
Let's take the silent cinema as a comparison. Not only did viewers in the early days of film have to rely almost solely on visual information - which demanded a much more active role from the audience in 'decoding' those images - but the films themselves were far more diverse, experimental and challenging. However we might like to see ourselves, 100 years ago cinema-going audiences were more sophisticated, capable and open-minded than those of today.
Lynch's words perfectly voice the concerns and philosophies of the director of The Buried Forest, Kohei Oguri. In what seems like an active form of resistance to the feverish pace of film production in Japan, Oguri has directed only five feature films in a 25-year career. The impact each of them has made, on the other hand, has been formidable. His 1981 debut Muddy River (Doro no Kawa) got him an Oscar nomination, a slew of festival prizes and a top spot in many Japanese film critics' top ten lists. Every film he has made since has gone on to similar acclaim, peaking with a Jury Grand Prize and a FIPRESCI award at Cannes in 1990 for The Sting of Death (Shi no Toge).
With each subsequent production, the balance between images and dialogue in Oguri's films has continued to tip over in favour of the former. His previous film Sleeping Man (1996, one of the movies that established Koji Yakusho as the premier actor of the decade) was so overwhelming in its use of landscape, that even Oguri's former student Katsuhito Ishii was inspired to abandon the love of rapid cutting and comic book characterisations he displayed in Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl and Party 7, and make his own attempt at Ogurian cinema with The Taste of Tea.
The Buried Forest, like Oguri's previous films, is an attempt to reawaken our capacity to interact with images. The casual viewer might complain that there is no story, but they would be wrong. There is no plot, perhaps, but there are stories aplenty. There are little stories everywhere in the rich, radiant images of The Buried Forest, and Oguri gives us the time to find and read them all. He holds his shots and makes minimal use of the moving camera. The state-of-the-art HD material the film was shot on, whose detection of light is as close to that of the human eye as any lens or camera has ever gotten, gives the images a life-like luminosity, whether shot by day or by night. Oguri's landscapes are breathtaking in their richness and detail, but they are not the self-consciously imposing vistas of white elephant filmmaking or the dullness of pictorialism - The Buried Forest was not shot in Cinemascope and is only 93 minutes long. Instead the film is an attempt to create truly rich visions in which the viewer can almost lose himself.
That same richness is applied to Oguri's human characters, who form part of those landscapes instead of being overwhelmed by them: three teenage girls passing the time by telling stories of camels and whales, a layabout youth whose goal is to keep a giraffe-shaped balloon afloat, an old lady whose obstinate refusal to be sent to a retirement home becomes the talk of the town, and the discovery of the petrified forest that gives the film its title and which reminds the townsfolk of the things that exist beyond their day-to-day worries and frustrations. Oguri tells all their stories with an imagination so fertile it regularly overtakes reality.
Some films can be summed up in words - in fact, doing this in as few as possible has become the benchmark of quality for the aforementioned Hollywood model of filmmaking. For others, like The Buried Forest, no amount of words can suffice, because words are exactly what they are not about. Checkmate for the film critic, then, but limitless possibilities for the viewer.
Entrevista de Tom Mies con Katsuhito Ishii. Midnight eye
Oguri's films are very different from your own work.
True, but Oguri was my filmmaking teacher in university. He always reprimanded me in class in a way you normally don't experience when you're an adult. Every time I wrote an essay or something he would lash into me, telling me I was worthless. He was pretty harsh and quite scary too.
In the end I gave up on filmmaking and switched to animation and eventually started directing commercials. But later when I saw his film Sleeping Man I was really moved by it. I felt he'd made a great film. It reminded me of what he always told me in university, that it's not necessary to compose a scene from many cuts, one long take can be enough. I used to believe the opposite and tended to use lots of cuts. When I saw Sleeping Man I finally understood what he'd told me.
But still, your own work is very different.
The type of film is very different, but I definitely was strongly influenced by Sleeping Man. I printed out images from the film and kept those with me as a kind of talisman.
Which aspects of it influenced you?
His persistence in the use of landscape. The normal tendency in Japanese films is to use a landscape to show the passing of time or explain the required circumstances for the scene to come, in which case the landscape itself has no meaning. In Oguri's film it can't be replaced by anything and it has an inherent tension. Also, because there is very little action in his films every cut gains in significance. He does a similar thing with the juxtaposition of landscapes from scene to scene. By doing so he keeps the viewers on their toes all the time.
