Re: Third Window Films
Posted: Sun May 04, 2014 9:41 pm
Spoilers:
Isn't Anyone Alive?, the first film in over a decade by Sogo Ishii (sorry, Gakuryu Ishii!) was really great, though I could see how it could infuriate a lot of people. Imagine the general apocalyptic plot of Kairo (there appear to be a couple of obvious allusions to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films, particularly in the filmic techniques used in specific scenes of the Kairo-motif of panning across from a two shot to an isolated character just outside of frame and then back again; or the Doppleganger-motif of arbitrarily breaking a scene apart with windowboxing and letterboxing, then even further down into diptychs or triptychs to suggest certain characters communicating or isolating others) crossed with a bit of the steadily dwindling characters of something like Battle Royale (albeit without the literal onscreen text keeping score!), crossed with a Samuel Beckett style absurdist comedy of characters waiting for an arbitrary end to come, with a final scene that really channels Melancholia! Although despite both this and Melancholia including scenes of birds dropping out of the sky, Isn't Anyone Alive? is much more obviously comic in its approach to the situation compared to Melancholia's more blackly comic depressive funk!
Isn't Anyone Alive? is picking up and then discarding genre tropes (of deadly viruses run amok from secret US labs hidden in Japanese University hospitals, human experimentation in immortality gone awry, urban myths and so on) left and right in such a way that I think anyone approaching it as a kind of horror film or thriller is going to have an extremely negative reaction to it from having such ideas toyed with then dropped. Rather the film is much more the Samuel Beckett-style absurdist comedy of relationships, as we get introduced in a detailed manner to five or six groups of two or three characters in three or four separate locations and then juggle between them in a very impressive manner. Suddenly characters start to arbitrarily start choking and dying and the bulk of the film is simply that: characters watching other characters inevitably dying without being able to do anything about it.
I must admit that the film did make me wonder whether anyone in Japan knows how to do CPR, compared to just standing around waiting for the person to stop convulsing on the floor! At least one of the characters, the mother, tries it out but much too late and in kind of a half-hearted way! The one other character who vaguely tries CPR (a doctor at that, although "just an ENT doctor" as a couple of the other characters note disappointedly!) even seems to be pumping someone's stomach instead of their chest! I like to assume these complete lack of skills by the vacant characters surrounding the dying ones are meant to have a satirical point, but I'm not entirely certain of this!
I particularly liked that the film in its initial half hour sets up various kinds of 'human activities' or conflicts, such as a chap having a meeting in a café between his new girlfriend and his pregnant ex-girlfriend about abortion and/or child support and who is going to have access to the baby; or the trio rehearsing a musical number in a lecture theatre (actually for the guy in the café and his new girlfriend, though none of those groups interact in the film itself); or the trio having a meeting in a park about their 'urban legends' university project in progress; or the brother and sister conflict; or the mother and son issues; and so on. All of these various plot strands are presented as narratively interesting for the first half of the film but become completely useless by the end, and I think that they are presented in such a way to emphasise the arbitrariness, and eventual pointlessness, of human existence in the face of inevitable death. I think the dawning realisation that none of these plots will actually develop into any kind of narrative salvation for the characters is kind of the entire point of the work - I loved that realisation that for me came about halfway through the 'corridor scene' in the hospital, but I could imagine that it might upset other viewers who could feel that the film was just messing them about, even laughing at them, for trying to get involved with the plot of the film.
The comedy of this film really comes in the way that the death scenes are handled, as a lot of the themes of the film come about by the way that the characters meet their demises (I particularly like the scene where one of the girls returns to the park location to find her final friend dead, breaks down in tears over the body, and then when comforted by one of the other students recognises him as the Japanese pop star who has been making quite an impression with all the girls on the campus and cannot stop herself from involuntarily snapping a picture of him on her mobile phone! Then breaks down into tears again when she realises that she has got no friends left to text the photo to!) There are a few quite disturbing scenes at the start when the film is still in 'thriller' mode, but as the film goes on and narrows down into the few groups of characters left things become much more absurdist. I particularly like the extended sequence (albeit intercut with other ones) that I'm going to dub the 'Bunuelian corridor of death' sequence in which seven of the characters meet their ends in different kinds of ways, from actually rehearsing their own death scene, to stealing someone else's last words, to having too long a final speech that they die in the middle of it(!), to a person begging for a date getting the "not even if you were the last man alive" response in the middle of a woman's dying gasps; to someone dying leaving a tape to their unrequited love that turns out to be a recording of them singing an awful song really badly which is still going on when someone else then starts dying, begging that the awful song be turned off so that they don't have to die whilst listening to it! (Like the lack of attempts at CPR, instead of actually turning the tape recorder off for this other person to die somewhat peacefully, they just leave the hideous music running whilst standing around watching the guy die in aural agony!)
The 'corridor of death' scene(s) are also beautifully staged, with the corridor being half glass walled and bright and half enclosed. At the end of the sequence the camera and the final character are both situated at the mid-point of the corridor, with three bodies in the enclosed section and three in the glass walled section. The last character standing is sort of trapped between an equal number of bodies on either side of them (as is the camera in the shot-reverse shot cutting) and ends up dying alone as sort of the ironic remainder in a balanced equation.
This more broadly comic sequence inside the hospital corridor is then immediately juxtaposed with the final sequence in the natural world that brings to mind Melancholia in its setting (as well as in its special effects laden ending) but also gets far more interestingly philosophical than Melancholia did - one of the remaining characters is a terminally ill girl who speaks of how terrible it is to die knowing that the world will go on without you, and that in some ways she will be happy if the rest of the world dies before she does. She also 'mercy' kills a couple of people during the course of the film! So this turns morality on its head - the pregnant mother dies on a pavement in the midst of a pointlessly futile attempt to escape (from what? Death itself?) apologising to her unborn child, while the girl who murdered the other woman in the café love triangle only did so because the woman didn't want to leave her dead boyfriend, calling him her husband at the very end. Ironically the terminally ill girl doesn't get to be the last one to die either. Is being the last person alive in a world where everyone else is dead a form of death in itself? At the very least abandonment! The theme seems to be that eventually everyone has their plans, their ideas, their hopes, frustrated by absurd and illogical circumstances completely out of their control and the film beautifully expresses this.
Isn't Anyone Alive?, the first film in over a decade by Sogo Ishii (sorry, Gakuryu Ishii!) was really great, though I could see how it could infuriate a lot of people. Imagine the general apocalyptic plot of Kairo (there appear to be a couple of obvious allusions to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's films, particularly in the filmic techniques used in specific scenes of the Kairo-motif of panning across from a two shot to an isolated character just outside of frame and then back again; or the Doppleganger-motif of arbitrarily breaking a scene apart with windowboxing and letterboxing, then even further down into diptychs or triptychs to suggest certain characters communicating or isolating others) crossed with a bit of the steadily dwindling characters of something like Battle Royale (albeit without the literal onscreen text keeping score!), crossed with a Samuel Beckett style absurdist comedy of characters waiting for an arbitrary end to come, with a final scene that really channels Melancholia! Although despite both this and Melancholia including scenes of birds dropping out of the sky, Isn't Anyone Alive? is much more obviously comic in its approach to the situation compared to Melancholia's more blackly comic depressive funk!
Isn't Anyone Alive? is picking up and then discarding genre tropes (of deadly viruses run amok from secret US labs hidden in Japanese University hospitals, human experimentation in immortality gone awry, urban myths and so on) left and right in such a way that I think anyone approaching it as a kind of horror film or thriller is going to have an extremely negative reaction to it from having such ideas toyed with then dropped. Rather the film is much more the Samuel Beckett-style absurdist comedy of relationships, as we get introduced in a detailed manner to five or six groups of two or three characters in three or four separate locations and then juggle between them in a very impressive manner. Suddenly characters start to arbitrarily start choking and dying and the bulk of the film is simply that: characters watching other characters inevitably dying without being able to do anything about it.
I must admit that the film did make me wonder whether anyone in Japan knows how to do CPR, compared to just standing around waiting for the person to stop convulsing on the floor! At least one of the characters, the mother, tries it out but much too late and in kind of a half-hearted way! The one other character who vaguely tries CPR (a doctor at that, although "just an ENT doctor" as a couple of the other characters note disappointedly!) even seems to be pumping someone's stomach instead of their chest! I like to assume these complete lack of skills by the vacant characters surrounding the dying ones are meant to have a satirical point, but I'm not entirely certain of this!
I particularly liked that the film in its initial half hour sets up various kinds of 'human activities' or conflicts, such as a chap having a meeting in a café between his new girlfriend and his pregnant ex-girlfriend about abortion and/or child support and who is going to have access to the baby; or the trio rehearsing a musical number in a lecture theatre (actually for the guy in the café and his new girlfriend, though none of those groups interact in the film itself); or the trio having a meeting in a park about their 'urban legends' university project in progress; or the brother and sister conflict; or the mother and son issues; and so on. All of these various plot strands are presented as narratively interesting for the first half of the film but become completely useless by the end, and I think that they are presented in such a way to emphasise the arbitrariness, and eventual pointlessness, of human existence in the face of inevitable death. I think the dawning realisation that none of these plots will actually develop into any kind of narrative salvation for the characters is kind of the entire point of the work - I loved that realisation that for me came about halfway through the 'corridor scene' in the hospital, but I could imagine that it might upset other viewers who could feel that the film was just messing them about, even laughing at them, for trying to get involved with the plot of the film.
The comedy of this film really comes in the way that the death scenes are handled, as a lot of the themes of the film come about by the way that the characters meet their demises (I particularly like the scene where one of the girls returns to the park location to find her final friend dead, breaks down in tears over the body, and then when comforted by one of the other students recognises him as the Japanese pop star who has been making quite an impression with all the girls on the campus and cannot stop herself from involuntarily snapping a picture of him on her mobile phone! Then breaks down into tears again when she realises that she has got no friends left to text the photo to!) There are a few quite disturbing scenes at the start when the film is still in 'thriller' mode, but as the film goes on and narrows down into the few groups of characters left things become much more absurdist. I particularly like the extended sequence (albeit intercut with other ones) that I'm going to dub the 'Bunuelian corridor of death' sequence in which seven of the characters meet their ends in different kinds of ways, from actually rehearsing their own death scene, to stealing someone else's last words, to having too long a final speech that they die in the middle of it(!), to a person begging for a date getting the "not even if you were the last man alive" response in the middle of a woman's dying gasps; to someone dying leaving a tape to their unrequited love that turns out to be a recording of them singing an awful song really badly which is still going on when someone else then starts dying, begging that the awful song be turned off so that they don't have to die whilst listening to it! (Like the lack of attempts at CPR, instead of actually turning the tape recorder off for this other person to die somewhat peacefully, they just leave the hideous music running whilst standing around watching the guy die in aural agony!)
The 'corridor of death' scene(s) are also beautifully staged, with the corridor being half glass walled and bright and half enclosed. At the end of the sequence the camera and the final character are both situated at the mid-point of the corridor, with three bodies in the enclosed section and three in the glass walled section. The last character standing is sort of trapped between an equal number of bodies on either side of them (as is the camera in the shot-reverse shot cutting) and ends up dying alone as sort of the ironic remainder in a balanced equation.
This more broadly comic sequence inside the hospital corridor is then immediately juxtaposed with the final sequence in the natural world that brings to mind Melancholia in its setting (as well as in its special effects laden ending) but also gets far more interestingly philosophical than Melancholia did - one of the remaining characters is a terminally ill girl who speaks of how terrible it is to die knowing that the world will go on without you, and that in some ways she will be happy if the rest of the world dies before she does. She also 'mercy' kills a couple of people during the course of the film! So this turns morality on its head - the pregnant mother dies on a pavement in the midst of a pointlessly futile attempt to escape (from what? Death itself?) apologising to her unborn child, while the girl who murdered the other woman in the café love triangle only did so because the woman didn't want to leave her dead boyfriend, calling him her husband at the very end. Ironically the terminally ill girl doesn't get to be the last one to die either. Is being the last person alive in a world where everyone else is dead a form of death in itself? At the very least abandonment! The theme seems to be that eventually everyone has their plans, their ideas, their hopes, frustrated by absurd and illogical circumstances completely out of their control and the film beautifully expresses this.
