The Wily Filipino

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #6.

Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate (2007)

I'm a little puzzled about Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff. A much-anticipated viewing at Barb and Oscar's left me cold, and I wonder if it's a reflection of the high expectations that always attend Films That Are Supposed To Be Good For You. (Jean Vigo's L'Atalante was one of those, but I should probably watch it a second time.) Or perhaps it's one of those films that make more sense after an accretion of various elements (life experience, "wisdom", a more expanded filmic vocabulary), like L'Avventura, but I'm not sure about that either. It makes me wonder, then, about the film's critical reception in the West upon its initial release, and whether its entry into the Canon had extra-cinematic reasons beyond my ken, but who am I to question this, really?

I recall reading a list compiled by Errol Morris in some magazine recently where he rather fatuously proclaims something to the effect that there were no such things as great movies, only great scenes. (The Thin Blue Line was a great movie however.) There are certainly a number of great scenes: the parallel crane shots that show the siblings gathering wood, the painful finale on a seaweed-strewn beach. (Foremost in my mind, though, is the scene when the indentured daughter, Anju, violently separated from her mother years before, hears a newly-arrived slave singing a song about Anju and her brother -- singing her life with her words, essentially -- and realizing it must have been learned from her long-missing mother, mourning for her children over the miles and years.) But I'm not convinced that Sansho the Bailiff is a great movie.

I think Mizoguchi's much-vaunted "feminism" is perhaps lost in translation here, especially due to the passage of time. There may, of course, be something completely deliberate here on Mizoguchi's part. The men in the film, when they're not being malicious (and the titular character himself is only a slightly bigger honcho than others, but not by much), are merely ineffectual. The brother is shown to be capable of abusing his power once he starts working for Sansho, but then foolishly squanders that power when it comes to his family. The bailiff's son is depicted as clearly possessing a sense of righteousness, and Mizoguchi sets him up as a potential savior and hero -- only to have him literally walk out of the film. The governor (and father of Anju) is exiled precisely because he has shown too much compassion for the peasants of his prefecture -- but chooses, even as he upholds his principles, to abandon his wife and children. Unlike the more stately Life of Oharu, where the dignified courtesan of the title faces her suffering with something that could even be called "empowerment", the women characters of Sansho the Bailiff are grimly handed over to abuse and suicide. Perhaps Mizoguchi's films should be called "female-centered" instead -- centered, anyway, on the fates of women and the cruelty they receive at the hands of men.

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About 20 minutes into the annoying Boarding Gate, I was wishing Olivier Assayas had made something like Hal Hartley's Fay Grim instead. The two films really aren't all that dissimilar, working within the form and generally limited grammar of the crime / thriller genre. (Assayas did tell the audience, before the film started, that he wanted to make a B-movie with a "French independent movie budget". I'm sure the French have different conceptions of what a B-movie is like, though.) All the right elements are intact in Assayas' film -- the gun in the handbag, international airports, the shadowy company that traffics in vague semi-legalities, the package of drugs hidden in the furniture, a chase that involves scurrying through the warrens of a restaurant's kitchen -- and, most important, "a woman in trouble", as David Lynch would put it. (The said girl in peril comes in the form of a disappointingly greasy-looking Asia Argento, who looks sleep-deprived for most of the film.)

But while Hartley (and Assayas' fellow countryman Godard) understood the inherent narrative silliness of the genre, Assayas overcooks Boarding Gate, immersing it in a queasy sordidness that fools the audience into thinking that there's a grander, more serious undercurrent behind its vacuity, that there's something larger at stake. There isn't. And if the sleaze was indeed the point, it misses its mark; it's not even enjoyable sleaze. (Some guy was talking angrily with another in the Pacific Film Archives bathroom after the movie, shouting, "Abel Ferrara makes ten of these films and nobody gives a shit!")

I had high hopes for the second half of the film, when Argento's character slips bloodily from the sweaty clutches of a fleshy Michael Madsen (in the sort of role that Mickey Rourke would have played twenty years ago) and ends up lost and disoriented in Hong Kong, but no such luck; Boarding Gate remains a cold and humorless genre exercise.* (It's even more disappointing considering the fact that the last time I saw Assayas in the flesh was for a Q&A session after his magnificent Irma Vep. Plus he had Maggie Cheung standing next to him. I remember very little about the Q&A, actually, except my thoughts at the time: OH MY GOD I'M BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS MAGGIE CHEUNG.)

*Actually I take "humorless" back: the one funny moment in the film comes when Kim Gordon makes a cameo appearance, stomping angrily into the movie and barking orders in Cantonese. But if you didn't recognize Kim Gordon, or didn't know who she was -- oh well.

Posted by the wily filipino at October 5, 2007 12:23 AM