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Tokyo International Film Festival 2024: Dementia, Optimism and Béla Tarr
Teki Cometh ⓒ1998 Yasutaka Tsutsui / Shinchosha ⓒ2023 TEKINOMIKATA I was delighted to be invited to the Tokyo International Film Festival, which came with the particularly desirable bonus of being elsewhere during the US election cycle’s final days. Taking into account the time difference on my date of return, I hoped an election-night nailbiter would let me fly back in unperturbed ignorance, but… The route back flew over the international date line; the metaphorical obviousness of literally going backwards in time to the States was too hamhanded for my taste, albeit appropriately overstated in keeping with the bludgeoning that’s about to occur. Before that hammer fell, the city more than lived up to expectations—if you get bored in Tokyo, it’s possible you have literally no interests—but fortunately the festival’s 38th edition showcased some movies that made stepping away worthwhile.
Tops among these was the main competition’s eventual picture/director/actor winner, as awarded by a stacked and credible jury (Tony Leung, Johnnie To, Ildikó Enyedi, Hashimoto Ai, Chiara Mastroianni). Yoshida Daihachi’s Teki Cometh introduces long-retired 77-year-old French literature professor Gisuke Watanabe (Nagatsuka Kyozo) during his routine-down-pat morning: first rinsing his face, then the rice that’s been soaking overnight in the cooker; grilling mackerel; manually grinding coffee; finally sitting down in front of his computer and getting to work. That labor-intensive AM regimen is seen a few more times, its changing culinary components the only alterations to a repetitive cycle that must inevitably be disrupted for a narrative to emerge. Money worries aside, Gisuke otherwise seems to be leading an pleasantly calm senescence, and the initial drama is almost subliminal: the wisp of a flirtation with a former student (Kumi Takiuchi), the occasional annoyance of a less-gracefully-aging neighbor yelling at a passer-by about dogshit he’s convinced she’s leaving outside his gate. Hints of perversity are equally understated, as when a student helping Gisuke clean out his closet finds a pair of binoculars. For birdwatching? “More Rear Window than The Birds,” Gisuke cracks. The student marvels that this high-minded man could have dabbled in voyeurism; “Did you learn nothing from French literature?” Gisuke responds. He specialized in theater (Racine, Marivaux), but at a bar Gisuke meets Azumi (Yumi Kawai), a French lit student into Boris Vian, Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras—authors whose fervid output seems closer to his carefully-concealed proclivities than his buttoned-up area of study, and whose scholar he seems not-so-covertly attracted to accordingly.
Teki is adapted by writer-director Daihachi from a novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka, whose best-known works (at least those in English translation—this isn’t) were translated into anime form as The Girl Who Traveled Through Time and Paprika. Daihachi has found an equally slippery but much lower-key live-action container for this; the first dream sequence unexpectedly punctuates that low-key facade, but by the third and fourth time it happens, it seems clear Teki is less crossing the imagination/reality line than envisioning something like dementia. Daihachi made clear he’d disagree with that reading at the premiere Q&A: “To me he wasn’t suffering from cognitive impairment, and that was intentional. His imagination had just run wild. I have no personal experience with dementia, but considering how clear his mind was up until that midpoint, I think he intentionally let his mind run amok, re-experiencing events from his past in new ways.” Either way, the simultaneous emotional intensification and narrative disintegration is both unnerving and poignant, aptly landing between a Japanese reference point (Junichiro Tanizaki’s Diary of a Mad Old Man, whose elderly protagonist’s voyeuristic fascinations seem apposite) and a French one (Alain Resnais’s Providence, whose equally disreputable aging center collapses his family life into the novel he’s working on). A pathos-begging portrait of a more-or-less benignly cuddly old man curdles into something more rounded, accurate and uncomfortable. Whether dementia or deliberate, Gisuke’s loss of control ironically enables him to more clearly confront his past—e.g., for a woman in his visions to state clearly that what he thought were pleasant memories of dining/drinking with her when she was his student would more accurately be termed harassment.
Worse yet, Watanabe receives a series of emails warning that “the enemy” (the titular Teki) is advancing from the north, taking over the streets and so on; a man priding himself on his global perspective and condemns Japanese small-mindedness is not immune to the aging person’s temptation to get Facebook-pilled. At the climax, Gisuke envisions hordes of dirty-faced people running through his home; intentionally or not (and the “death of the author” has multiple possibilities in this context), Teki functions as a portrayal of an old person who doesn’t see a loss of control as their preordained waning but seeks an alternate explanation (the world is wrong!) and ends up getting seduced into paranoid conservative fantasies about filthy, dangerous invaders that need to be opposed, or possibly shot. Aging doesn’t bring wisdom, rather susceptibility to virulent reactionary fearmongering, a scenario with particular resonance this week/year/for the rest of my life.
Production company 12 Oaks’ website offers a generic outline of what to expect from Wang Di’s The Vessel’s Isle: “An amazing 180-min debut feature with sophisticated images, sound and minimal dialogue.” I have seen many, many films describable in exactly those terms, in which duration often stands in for an excellence which never arrives; this one begins with a very long nighttime shot of Jia Zhangke’s cousin/once-regular performer Han Sanming wandering through a deserted building. Reflected water casts shadows on the wall as his fiery torch illuminates the decrepit space’s walls, confirming that we are in the Tarkovskian Zone. But the second shot, while still in the same slow cinema idiom the rest of the film will iterate, is less familiar, a pan circling past its starting point as it laps 360 degrees. Beginning from a phone cord wrapped around a woman’s foot, the camera very, very deliberately performs a circular turn around her room, subtly changing its height en route to return slightly above from where it launched while remaining attentive to the space’s visual particulars, like how green wallpaper are diffused behind semi-transparent drapes. It’s not new to capture a small interior with the textural precision of a gallery artist, but Wang quickly (or, I guess, slowly) establishes that his specific take is compelling.
Vessel’s plot is a skeleton: performers credited as Young Man (Zhu Congran) and Young Woman (Ye Zhaoyue) meet at an obscure rural Chinese hotel in 1999 (where Sanming lurks around the fringes as “Drunk Dumb”), just about get it together to have a tentative affair, go their separate ways. In this kind of film, it would be a shock if people actually did speak more than once every 20 minutes: “Have you always been so quiet?” the woman asks the man in a probably unintentional self-reflexive moment that got a snort out of me. Wang’s iteration is most conspicuously different on two counts: first, that’s there’s not just a score, but a lushly romantic one arranged for an actual string section rather than a synthesizer replicant, with composer Li Jiazheng’s work sometimes reminiscent of the more sumptuous parts of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtracks. Secondly, it’s no accident that the poster credits colorist Xie Yingying as prominently as DP Pu Wei. (I’ve grown very fond of this on-set image of cast and crew thoughtfully smoking away; the director is second from right.) Divided into three cryptically titled parts, the film’s first section locates an unbelievable number of red-and-green pairings in every shot: rusty hotel railings set into relief by the forest behind, the Young Man’s red shirt likewise set into relief by that forest, green Christmas lights framing the red lettering of the hotel’s sign—on and on and on, to an extent that’s potentially gimmicky but undeniably impressive in its on-a-budget ability to keep finding those colors in ways that present as organic to the environment (after all, that forest is right there) while remaining unmissably heightened. The movie heads towards an extended blue-white section before synthesizing its palate in the final shots. Vessel iterates slow cinema structures to new ends the same way Ed Ruscha painted gas stations: to find unexpected majesty in the decrepit and banal, and to use those unexpectedly generative places for perspective and color studies.
The other two Chinese features I saw were less rewarding. Ye Xingyu’s Three Castrated Goats is an irritable lockdown comedy heavy on nightmare bureaucracy interactions between Hongfei (Hui Wangjun), visiting his rural family to transport said goats to another location, and COVID-protocol-crazed local authorities who break out drones to surveil the population. I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed the film more if its English subtitles weren’t torturously difficult to keep up with, but the rhythm and tone seemed off regardless while lurching from one testy quasi-comic encounter to another. It was, however, illuminating to see mirror image xenophobias at play in very particular internal Chinese perspectives on pandemic origin conspiracy theories, as in the exchange “I heard the COVID came from the US.” “Not Japan?” The other brief highlight came when GoPros were attached to goats running around, thus giving us something new: GoatPro. (For my interview with the director of another animal-forward feature, Black Ox, click here.)
I have to admit to being drawn to Three Castrated Goats primarily by its excellent title, but had higher expectations for, and therefore was more disappointed by, Wei Shujun’s Mostly Sunny. Wei’s previous feature, Only the River Flows, was a mid-’90s-set noir that, thanks in part to highly grainy 16mm, succeeded uncannily like looking of the time was set in; its mystery underwhelmingly petered out into hallucinatory inconclusion, but the look and mood were striking. Listed on Letterboxd under the title “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” a rendition of which kicks off the film, Sunny’s opening song, bright lighting and lack of grain immediately announce Shijun’s intention to make a completely different work, this one a less rigorous riff on Yi Yi that similarly sets the dissatisfications of a materially flush but otherwise morose society into relief via a dubious “spiritual leader” ready to fleece the unwary looking for answers. Where that latter part was a relatively small subplot in Yi Yi, it takes greater prominence here via Jia Zhangke’s amusing performance as the leader of a “Sunshine Club” whose potentially fraudulent activities attract the authorities’ attention. Jia’s beaming leader preaches optimism via a relentless series of bromides that aren’t that different from The Secret or any number of minor cults in the “manifest your dreams (but also donate to me)” vein. One of his biggest believers is the mentally challenged Wu You (Huang Xiaoming), whose gradual disenchantment with unjustified perpetual optimism is catalyzed when his beloved mother (Hsiao-Fen Lu) is diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer, something you definitely can’t will your way out of it. With both brutal succinctness and capitalist reverence, a doctor observes that “If there was a cure, Steve Jobs wouldn’t have had to die from it.” It’s an anomalously sharp line in a generically humanistic film whose muted trajectories seem secondhand regardless of Wei’s ongoing visual facility.
One of two features from Adilkhan Yerzhanov this year following his Fantasia premiere of Steppenwolf, Cadet is the first Kazakh narrative about a boy being bullied I’ve seen since 2013’s Harmony Lessons, a movie that—given that combined specificity of setting and topic—I couldn’t help but recall as a reference point. (It’s my destiny to be a Fahrenheit 451 memory bank for semi-remembered festival films long after their last DCP glitches out.) But where Emir Baigazin’s film used Haneke-esque framing and the international language of arthouse rigor, Yerzhanov goes full early-aughts J-horror with a muddy grey-yellow palette and a teen boy, Serik (Ratmir Yusupzhanov), whose tousled head of hair looks right for that genre but is out of place at a military school, an implausibility explained away by his aichmophobia (the fear of sharp objects!). Serik and mother Alina (Anna Starchenko) arrive at their new desolate Kazakh home—she to teach, he (hopefully) to learn rather than getting forced to flee as he has so many times before. Constant homophobic taunting and physical violence begin immediately, but beyond corporeal threats there are also ghosts—and, per that J-horror guiding light, their goal isn’t to scare the shit out of viewers, merely to creep them out. Yerzhanov regularly crowds the boy and his mother into marginal places within the frame, asymmetrically overwhelming them within institutional spaces or against bleak landscapes in a look that’s sophisticatedly ungainly.
A suspicious death brings the arrival of an investigating police officer (super-charismatic Sharip Serik), who gathers crime-scene clues while repeatedly muttering “holy fuck” in a bit ripped from The Wire. (It’s not clear to me that anything else in the film is supposed to be funny, other than that officer’s unimprovable line when confronted by a spirit: “Well, if you’re a ghost, tell me something that I don’t know. What’s the name of Boney M.’s lead singer?”) The nature of the allegorical evil is eventually clearly spelled out: the boys are being possessed by malevolent spirits of war which return at 14-year intervals tied to Russian belligerence—the invasion of Chechnya in 1996 and of Georgia in 2008. Cadet climaxes on Feb. 21, 2022, the date of Putin’s speech kicking off the Ukrainian war. Continuity with the past? Not so! “Nobody was executed in the Soviet Union,” the school’s leader practically hisses. “The Soviet Union was a wonderful country.” Yerzhanov makes his thematic intent justifiably unmissable, while his stylistic vigor and flair for the inexplicable adds a welcome frisson of the uncanny to that bluntness in a lively two hours slightly let down by an inevitable, rather than harrowing, ending.
Yerzhanov premiered two movies this year; Kaori Oda premiered two at the same festival. The more straightforward of the two, Underground begins as a pleasingly cryptic light show, projecting images onto subterranean bodies of water and cranking up the “what is this?” factor with the kind of loud ambient soundtrack I habitually spend hours working to. No narrative is introduced as such when a woman (Yoshigai Tao) enters the picture and ventures out to those underground spaces, whose historical dimensions are eventually, and surprisingly straightforwardly, explicated by a historian who tells stories of Japanese civilians who hid there during World War II and their encounters with both local military and American invaders. What starts off as enjoyably internalized personal symbolism is fleshed out to be didactically clear and less interesting.
Though it initially seemed like just servicing of local interests, Oda’s other premiere was more productive. Taking its title and attendant mostly-caps styling from the event it documents, FUKUSHIMA with BÉLA TARR records the Hungarian legend conducting a two-week filmmaking workshop in February of this year. While this doesn’t really need to be three hours (culled from ten total) for any reason other than matching the durational bulk of Tarr’s work from Sátántangó through The Turin Horse, the time goes by quickly enough. Like Werner Herzog, Tarr is a once-maverick filmmaker turned comparatively-institutionalized teacher of his own film school (this builds upon his similar endeavors in Sarajevo, one iteration of which Oda participated in). Like Herzog, Tarr has been meme-ifying himself for posterity; where Herzog favors comically grandiose pronouncements in his unshakeable German accent, Tarr’s interview weapon of choice is a constant stream of hyperbolically nihilistic profanity, all “shits” and “fucks” dismissive of any attempt to burrow deeper at his intentions or methods. It’s a fun but limited act, one I feared would wear thin over the film’s running time. But paid to be a generous mentor, Tarr does his part, gamely sitting for regular sessions with seven students. After some initial gnomic blasts about seeking out truth, humanity, etc. his advice turns out to be more concrete than expected, as when telling the filmmakers to hold their shots longer than seems useful, less for durationality’s sake than to have enough footage—you can always cut down, but you can’t build up what isn’t there.
Tarr gets along with six of his mentees, but the seventh is both his bane and the documentary’s blessing. Where others often begin vague regarding their intentions before Tarr beats some specifics out of them, he never quite succeeds with that last one—the only non-Asian, who keeps talking about her special connection with Japan and why she can’t explain what she wants to film, only that she knows it’s in her heart. Otherwise on his best behavior throughout, Tarr starts losing it: “I understand. You said it ten times. ‘My heart!’” Though he approves of the footage she eventually shows him, he bluntly dismisses her idea of filming a calligraphy master writing out key theme words as “stupid.” This brought hearty laughter, as I suspect the student’s plan registered as coming from a place of well-intentioned but nonetheless at-a-distance exoticism. Her repeated appearances brought similar audible response, and I held my breath as Tarr dressed her down by spelling out the fiscal responsibilities even the most stringent director has to concede to, reminding her (and us) that to make a movie, you have to be clear on your plan in order to convince many people: crew, investors, TV stations, other funding bodies. He might have added “festivals,” the first and sometimes last stop for both movies like those he made and the one he’s speaking in; I was very gratified to have attended this one in particular.
