Something Old, Something New...

Eli, Eli, Lema Sabachthani? (Shinji Aoyama, 2005)

I'll admit, I don't quite get why Shinji Aoyama fell out of fashion. Perhaps it's a case of gaining popularity with a non-representative entry, creating expectations that were destined to be disappointed. As wonderful as it is, Eureka, the film that broke Aoyama on the international scene, is quite atypical of his usual output. It's not just the four-hour-plus length, but what the director does with it, creating a meandering but enveloping narrative space that develops slowly but somewhat inevitably. It's a tale of grief and trauma, and Aoyama does a great job at capturing traumatic time, the stasis and the gradual peeking out.

By contrast, the other Aoyama films I've seen -- Desert Moon, Sad Vacation, and now, EELS? -- are defiantly odd mood pieces, even less wedded to the logic of narrative organization than Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films. But like Kurosawa, Aoyama trades on sonic atmospheres, the contrast between claustrophobia and agoraphobia, and an anti-psychological approach to much of his characterization. Let me clarify that last point: either Aoyama's protagonists are radically exteriorized, with no discernible inner life, or else they are so deeply damaged as to be nothing but interiority, moving through the world like trauma victims in an absurd Nietzschean comedy of nihilism.

EELS? (aka My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?) operates on two wholly incompatible scales, but Aoyama generates the flimsiest pretext with which to articulate those levels of meaning. We have a two-man experimental noise band called Stepin Fetchit (the racial subtext is completely unremarked upon), comprised of Mizui (Tadanobu Asano) and Asuhara (Masaya Nakahara). We see them experimenting with sound, spinning lengths of garden hose or drumming on objects. There's a straightforward documentary element to these sequences. Then, we gradually learn (first via a radio broadcast, then with empirical evidence) that the world has been beset by the "Lemming Virus," an illness that makes people kill themselves. 

Through an inexcusably glib narrative shortcut, we learn that the music of Stepin Fetchit somehow cures the virus. So a grandfather (Yasutaga Tsutsui) pleads with the guys to cure his daughter (Aoi Miyazaki), which, after some inexplicable hemming and hawing, during which Asuhara commits suicide, results in a lengthy solo concert in a field by Mizui. Aoyama is clearly interested in the interface between unstructured noise and the basic structures that cinema generates in time, with images providing a relative constant against the sonic mayhem. The fact that he so sloppily reverse-engineers a plot around this idea gives you a sense of how uncommitted he is to the very concept of narrative cohesion. This alone will be a dealbreaker for many, and the feedbacky screech of the music -- think Einstürzende Neubauten fronted by Yamatsuka Eye -- will drive many others away. For those left behind, EELS? is, textually speaking, truly a wide open field.

At War (Stéphane Brizé, 2018)

Were the character subtleties and neo-liberal nuances of The Measure of a Man a fluke? The writer-director returns to similar ground in his latest, which focuses on a lengthy industrial strike following an announced factory closure. And from its ideological arguments in the boardrooms and on the shop floor, right down to a melodramatic conclusion that drives the working class's plight home like a spike through the head, there's more than a touch of "Ken Loach en Francais" going on. Once again, Vincent Lindon stars, playing the hear union rep, but he is surrounded by a number of non-professionals culled from the ranks of actual industrial labor. There's no question that a vein of authenticity runs through At War. But the question is, what else has it got?

Lindon and his strikers want to meet with government reps, and then the big boss in France, and eventually the CEO of the German multinational who owns their car parts company, putting to them all the same question. If by their calculations the plant is profitable, why must 1100 French workers lose their jobs? If you've been paying attention at all to the news in the last 30 years, you know the answer to this, but Brizé's dramatic strategy is to make all these honchos say exactly what they are doing out loud, one more time for the cheap seats. 

Again, if we compare At War to Measure of a Man, in that earlier film Lindon's character faced economic uncertainty and had to make hard choices. Here, those who make those hard choices are the sell-outs, because right and wrong are crystal clear and gray areas are the obfuscation of the overlords. I guess the title is a clue here. And like any war, this one ends up taking casualties, which in no way serves to complicate the matter at hand. Rather, martyrdom serves to show us who was right all along. Despite the left-field narrative jerry-rigging that is its own indictment, this sort of cocksure moral stance almost never holds water with me.