Kiyoshi Kurosawa

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#101 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Wed Oct 23, 2019 10:16 am

Kurosawa is preparing a shot-in-8K TV series for broadcast next spring; the title translates as "The Spy's Wife" and it's set in 1940s Kobe. Aoi Yū stars and Kurosawa's former student Hamaguchi Ryūsuke is co-writing the script.

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knives
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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#102 Post by knives » Fri Mar 27, 2020 2:14 pm

Kurosawa doing Baudelaire with Daguerrotype is the greatest thing ever. I can at least be glad about this madness that it forced me to finally go through a number of films from this king of madness and gender. For this French film Kurosawa takes his own predilections and cloaks them in a gothic romance that doubles as a love letter to the country's history of dark storytelling. In a lot of ways this is a significantly more successful version of what del Toro tried to do to Hawthorne and Poe in Crimson Peak.

Once again men are the villains and women the only ones who deserve life, but Kurosawa subtracts his humour for a more delicate tone which in its best moments is enigmatic enough to suggest the lifetimes of horror our protagonists carry in their breasts. At this point I feel comfortable saying that Kurosawa can do no wrong for me.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#103 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Mar 27, 2020 5:45 pm

How did you come across Daguerrotype? The Korean release -- or something else?

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#104 Post by knives » Fri Mar 27, 2020 5:48 pm

Boston Public Library is streaming it through Hoopla.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#105 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Mar 27, 2020 7:58 pm

knives wrote:
Fri Mar 27, 2020 5:48 pm
Boston Public Library is streaming it through Hoopla.
I'll have to check it out!

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#106 Post by kekid » Fri Mar 27, 2020 10:51 pm

it seems to be also available on Amazon Prime.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#107 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Apr 08, 2020 7:08 pm

Well I've just seen Charisma and if this isn't Kurosawa's best film, it feels very much like an incorporation of his various theses into a philosophical zenith. Within the first five minutes of this masterpiece, a character feels magnetically compelled by enigmatic humanism to act with a non-action that has dire consequences and leaves him feeling just as confused and empty as he did before. What follows is a transcendental meditation on the tension around enigmas, be them in physical forms, social constructions, or spiritual pathways. Always the gentle, eclectic provocateur, Kurosawa mixes his usual objective distance with elusiveness that forces the audience into a role of subject from information withheld. While a typical film may gradually expose us to a sensible narrative, this drops us into a state of alienation where the abstract nature of being is terrifying enough without the need to form a concrete explanation around the milieu because Kurosawa doesn’t profess to know its significance. He’s the rare filmmaker that can provoke us without being condescending, audaciously recognizing that there is philosophical malady in 'being' itself, executing an uncanny and confident approach in encapsulating how that disease manifests, but refusing to harbor anything but modesty in solving such mysteries, far more interested in how they affect us and how we engage with them.

I was genuinely perplexed by this film for a while and came away with a profound responsiveness to the various methods of coping with intangibility in meaning assignment depicted, that deeply twisted my nerves and flooded me with emotion. This film somehow manages to be both a debilitating horror film and a beautiful tone poem of serenity, balancing moments of isolative individualism, failures to articulate and engage with people and one’s physical environment to surreal terror, and spiritual awakenings in the opposite- of social connection and a harmonious bond with nature. The peace with the way things are and the unbearable irritation with such ways are transient processes, but Kurosawa lingers on each moment for long enough to capture its power and acknowledge the bottomless rabbit hole of existential concerns people finds themselves in when facing the interactions of ecological and anthropological frameworks. These concerns can be ignored in the distractions of urban life and fusing an identity with a job title or family role, but even there this anxiety infiltrates our lives. It’s inescapable, and this film asks not what it means to be ‘free,’ since such a clean, static state does not exist in Kurosawa’s view of the world, but instead asks how can we become free, subjectively and in relation to individual stressors, a movement rather than an endpoint.

It’s complex enough to fill the film with paradoxical theoretical lenses on corporeal and mystical ideas. Goro desperately wants to have it both ways and save everything with his empathic and pacifist stance on life, but is this a result of a failure to choose a side, more rooted in apathy and fear of conforming to passion behind any issue? Do the people who do choose a side suffer from the default to binary organization and safety in conforming, hiding behind passion for an idea in retreat from the unknowable? Is it possible that everyone is just finding a way to cope with these mysteries psychologically and feeling an authentic cosmic connection to the place where their personalized ethics and spiritual principles meet, simultaneously? Rather than diagnose, Kurosawa loves to question, and in doing so finds plenty of opportunities to render our world absurd whilst taking our plights seriously. It’s a sensitivity to our surreal experience that breathes life and passion into the universal truths of living rather than any one of the concrete stances the characters choose to take.

The didacticism is a call for a rejection of simplified, determined, mutually-exclusive thought, and a movement towards open-mindedness and philosophical expansion. Dualities such as good and evil, love and hate, peace and harm, or life and death all exist conceptually and are to be taken seriously but also carry with them only the level of importance we profess as agents. The existentialism is empowering and the middle ground is one of making mindful decisions based on personal conscience and ubiquitous holistic considerations, where even one’s rigidity around particulars of a pacifist-ecological or humanist position are forfeited but not the individual acts that support these ideas. Goro continues to act in accordance with the seeds of his humanity but without the strict blindness to philosophical relativism, a synthetic flexibility which is invaluable to integral consciousness. I love how the film finds its ellipses in a mirrored dilemma where Goro makes a definitive action as agent and yet retains his humanist attitude from the beginning, only now more self-actualized and comfortable with the core that drove this action in the first place, ironically by relieving himself of the constrictions of meaning. A beautiful call for participation in life and moral growth with a humility in self-awareness and balance, but every member of every group is validated in their essence as well, and Kurosawa seems to identify with each character on screen.
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I took the ending, where the captain asks "what have you done?" to Goro, who assertively declares that he's coming home, to be indicative of the appalling response of shattering the facades of tangible blueprints for evaluation via binary pragmatism. Since Goro has exploded this comfort in favor of philosophical transcendence, he is born again and free of the chains of society, though the rest of the world is not. The literal flames around him are hilarious in that this finale is framed like the end of an action movie, which humorously contrasts the contemplative metaphysical themes and range of eclectic tones that have left the 'action' movie genre as one of the few out of the equation, as well as allegorical since he has just lit the world(view) of the film, and ours, on fire!

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#108 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:15 pm

Did you see this on the rather drab DVD -- I keep hoping for a first class, really good-looking blu-ray some day.

I think that, with this film, I came to the realization that it was futile (and not all that enjoyable) to try to dissect the "meaning" in KK's films. I decided that simply jumping in and going with the flow was the best way of appreciating them. Not that they are meaningless -- but that the meaning(s) were so diverse and fragmented that there was no point in trying to distill a simple reductionist one.

This was probably my KK favorite -- until Journey to the Sea arrived many years later.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#109 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:32 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:
Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:15 pm
I think that, with this film, I came to the realization that it was futile (and not all that enjoyable) to try to dissect the "meaning" in KK's films. I decided that simply jumping in and going with the flow was the best way of appreciating them. Not that they are meaningless -- but that the meaning(s) were so diverse and fragmented that there was no point in trying to distill a simple reductionist one.
I saw a copy of the DVD and yeah it’s not great - those dark scenes early on where a lot happens I had to rewind multiple times because the action was so unclear.

I agree with you that it’s futile to verbalize the meaning, but only because Kurosawa takes the approach of an all-encompassing welcome sign to life through safe, nonjudgmental philosophy where meaning is subjective and valued as such, in pure existentialist fashion. That makes this his most self-reflexive film in a way, at least regarding his own thematic interest and style, since it becomes about what he tries to profess (or rather his anti-didacticism, which I suppose can be didactic if interpreted as a push at all towards a peripheral view) and is even more intangible than usual, about the mysteries with how we cope with intangibility. I felt compelled to spill how genius this all was but I could have easily just said this film is his own philosophical thesis and left it at that.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#110 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:36 pm

On a simpler note -- I loved Koji YAKUSHO is this (even more than usual, which is a whole lot). ;-)

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#111 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:46 pm

Agreed. He’s hilarious in Doppleganger, and gives one of the best perfs of the deterioration of the disciplined from emotional drainage I’ve ever seen in Cure, but this is a subtler composite of all the moods and responses to life’s questions that his kinetic growth follows its own internal logic in trajectory to wind up still at the cinematically ‘expected’ place by the end, which has to be one Kurosawa’s best jokes.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#112 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Apr 09, 2020 1:24 am

knives wrote:
Fri Mar 27, 2020 2:14 pm
Kurosawa doing Baudelaire with Daguerrotype is the greatest thing ever. I can at least be glad about this madness that it forced me to finally go through a number of films from this king of madness and gender. For this French film Kurosawa takes his own predilections and cloaks them in a gothic romance that doubles as a love letter to the country's history of dark storytelling. In a lot of ways this is a significantly more successful version of what del Toro tried to do to Hawthorne and Poe in Crimson Peak.

Once again men are the villains and women the only ones who deserve life, but Kurosawa subtracts his humour for a more delicate tone which in its best moments is enigmatic enough to suggest the lifetimes of horror our protagonists carry in their breasts. At this point I feel comfortable saying that Kurosawa can do no wrong for me.
Thanks for the rec, and great thoughts. Man’s preoccupation on attempting to harness onto images, moments, and time by delaying their transition into memory, intangible and gone, is futile - so recreation it is! Kurosawa has been exploring mystifying anxieties for a while, though here seems to be the clearest self-conscious crossover between his own style (or to get more personal; ‘use of self’) and his themes, straight from an early shot where Rahim sees the daughter and the camera stays on this moment in slow motion gradually lowering its pov at a snail’s pace when the ‘action’ is over before the plot picks up, as if remaining fixated on that moment for as long as possible, immobilizing against gravity in an attempt to immortalize. This film essentially admits the natural subconscious subjective motive of selfish desperation within a mindful meditation practice of neutral objective formalism, a subliminal emotional component of a calm filmmaker who uses detachment as a tool to exploring all emotions here considering his own need to issue control, a human desire, and admitting his own humanity embedded in the curious alien abilities he uses to explore his worldview. The use of ghosts and gothic horror underscores the phantom parts within ourselves that need attention, manifested as aerial sensed-objects we cannot grasp.

There is a great irony that Kurosawa acknowledges in an uncharacteristically obvious way: that the man who is obsessed with recreating and preserving the past can be so disturbed by its occurrence when that very thing happens in an unexpected way; mainly the human tool for his own vision becomes that vision, disrupting his sense of control and dissembling the role assignment of his comfort. So a new enigma is created to add to the long list of reminders that we are not in control. This is done in jest but also seriously and this is where I have a difficult time hardnose-judging the father, whose pain was emphasized enough to deliberately provide him with a complexity that allowed reason to empathize instead of dismiss. I agree with basically everything you said knives but I’m struggling to think of how men and women fit into didactic boxes when looking at Kurosawa’s oeuvre- can you elaborate? I also didn’t feel that was the insinuation here though so maybe I’ve got a screw loose.

I also saw this more as a transposed Personal Shopper than Crimson Peak, where instead of desperately searching for an enigma only to be strained and relinquish control, the characters desperately control their corporeal resources to fight the enigma, only to shift the focus of control to new resources rather than face their limitations. Here the father wants to make others immortal in a safe, earthly manner as a way of serving himself, where in that film Stewart wants to bring peace to and connect with the immortal as a way of achieving that same catharsis. Since this film’s characters reject ghosts, any presence or threat of such is itself an extension of their existential crisis, instead of a welcome validation of it.
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The great joke comes when Gourmet's wife's ghost comes at him in the greenhouse in slow motion while he freaks out in real time, a complete rejection of the very immortalized moment that we started the film off with, but now obstructing our comfort zones and unwelcome! Oh how we need the world on our terms..
Going back to your comment, the men are certainly problematic, but 'deserve' doesn't feel like a word in Kurosawa's vocabulary, who I see as supremely validating even when pointing out harmful flaws.
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Even Jean, the worst person of the bunch, acts out of twisted logic that doesn't necessitate harm in theory, and then later on emotion rather than calculated killing. He's a riddle of a human being in the corporeal world, and while responsible, is left with the best slap in the face when his own control over a mystery made not only tangible but 'his' through marriage is stripped from him. He's left with even less of a grasp on life than before: doomed to live a fate worse than the father, since he has fallen in love with his enigma and will be haunted til the end of days.

Both men meet dire fates, but I'd argue this is due to natural consequences from their own strict clutches onto power and saddle predictability, rather than rooted in karmic ramifications of moral failing.
The score is also one of the best I’ve heard in years, and all the more impactful because of how sparingly it’s employed.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#113 Post by knives » Sat Apr 11, 2020 11:16 pm

For my elaboration I'll explain when I can to this thought. It was when I was watching Loft, kind of a Universal parody with some The Ring elements, that I realized the universal thing in all of the Kurosawa I've seen (though Doppelganger twists this optimistically) men typically through ego activate the horror that controls the film while the women are the ones sturdy enough to overcome the horror. There's been multiple Kurosawa film's I've seen for example which end with the heroine observing the man dying from the horror with the sort of implication that the man didn't have the emotional strength to satisfy a good.
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Pulse sadly ending with the male lead swaying away as a result of the depression seems an explicit example.
I've yet to see a Kurosawa film which doesn't have a co-lead structure of a man and women. That they often develop a romantic idea, if not plot, seems to only focus us in on how gender is being used.

In this specific case Kurosawa twists thing about in a new fashion which for me felt informative of his methodology.
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This was the first time I can recall in which the woman lost so to speak. 2016 must have been a rough year for Kurosawa since Creepy as well though not in the same way leaves the woman unsuccessful though in that case it's in communicating to the man that he needs to self improve. I agree with you the father has a tragic air to him which is why I was think of French romances. While the wrong era he's not unlike Balzac's Goriot who any reasonable audience will feel sympathy for even if it is clear that he is the one doing some of the hoisting. Unfortunately for Kurosawa's world instead of an act of suicide the father's ego commits murder first of his wife and then of his daughter (he is after all poisoning her). I don't think you give enough credit to Jean though as someone equally deserving of pity. He is turned mad under the weight of his own masculinity and need to be a savior to one who doesn't want to be saved in that way. There's also the secondary characters who fit this model of male failures whose drive to a goal forces the central tragedy that the female character tries to fix.
I do agree with the Personal Shopper comparison which I take as an additional component to this rather multi-layered film.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#114 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Apr 12, 2020 12:15 am

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Yeah I was calling Jean the "worst person" in a silly way, which reading back was incredibly unclear, but since I don't even believe in good or bad people it was the wrong language anyways to illustrate my point - though what I meant is that he "earns" less sympathy than the father from the viewer in terms of what's shown rather than what's implied, which is a ruse. I agree with you that he evokes pity from us (I was actually trying to contest your initial point that "men are villains and women are deserving of life" which I took to imply that the men were not) and think the ending says as much, which is why I think this is all consequential rather than due to any interventionist punishment for immorality. I definitely felt a lot of empathy for him (an important shift from sympathy) at the very end when he's abandoned in a way nobody 'deserves' but that everyone can relate to on some level of an expected loss to contend with. The theme of loss in general, and how we process grief, is a wonderful concept for Kurosawa to play with from his very unique vantage point on enigmatic processing. I also really like your Goriot comparison, which never would have crossed my mind but there are a few points of entry for that excellent book if we wanted to go down that road!
As for the man and woman side-by-side across his work, maybe we've just seen different Kurosawas but I don't recall this occurring in Cure, Bright Future or Charisma and don't recall all the others well enough along that angle to call him a "master of gender," but in those others there aren't prominent female characters and even in Charisma where there are a few possible women to take this place, they seem to embody skewed perspectives (though nice and one is even his savior) compared to the male's self-actualization taking the spotlight. I think gender is successfully utilized by him but more as another tool of exploration for his philosophical interests across our social sphere. His keen objective meditative eye on our world is so eclectic that we get a deconstruction of basically every part of our world depending on how we look at it, and male-female dynamics seem like an inescapable and readily available outlet to demonstrate his attention to dynamics, though I don't think to the degree you're stressing. Maybe I just need to see more than eight of his works, but I can see how Pulse and Doppleganger can fit the basic setup, and I'll have to rewatch a few to see. I would be more comfortable calling him a master of gender if in the same sentence as he is a master of all other things related to anthropology.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#115 Post by knives » Sun Apr 12, 2020 2:01 am

And I haven't seen those three which shows how I'm also a blind man with this elephant. My women are deserving of life comment was meant in contrast to some of the men in his films who view women as figures or tools for themselves objecting womanhood in a very literal way rather than in contrast to the negative characterization the men can be seen through.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#116 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Apr 12, 2020 3:00 am

Yeah I figured as much after your last comment. You should definitely check them out, specifically Cure and Charisma which I think are his best (though I do have very fond spots for Doppleganger and Pulse for twisting their genres deep in opposing directions). I remember loving Tokyo Sonata but it's been so many years I can't compare.

Bright Future I saw most recently. I mostly enjoyed its bizarre nature which was both funny and sad as it blended sci-fi, absurdist comedy, and bitter developmental/mental health/sociological meditations ending in a place of intimacy that was a clear obstruction early on through antisocial exposition. I don't know if it clicked as well as the others, but I admired the extra eccentric dives it took.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#117 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Apr 12, 2020 9:29 am

knives wrote:men typically through ego activate the horror that controls the film while the women are the ones sturdy enough to overcome the horror.
therewillbeblus wrote:...he is a master of all other things related to anthropology.
In your different ways, you both seem to be reading Kurosawa as an heir to Imamura.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#118 Post by knives » Sun Apr 12, 2020 11:05 am

I hadn't thought of that because Kurosawa doesn't engage with sloppiness and has a different tone, but now I do see a slight connection there.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#119 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Apr 12, 2020 5:01 pm

Also, I think, some kinship to Suzuki (but also Rivette and Buneul, perhaps).

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#120 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Apr 12, 2020 5:14 pm

The influences are everywhere. Tarkovsky and Bresson both come to mind in formulation depending on the work, with a sense of humor more in the wheelhouse of those you just mentioned Michael.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#121 Post by Ferocious Detritus » Mon Apr 20, 2020 8:18 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:
Sun Apr 12, 2020 5:01 pm
Also, I think, some kinship to Suzuki (but also Rivette and Buneul, perhaps).
Also, I think, perhaps

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#122 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Apr 22, 2020 4:41 pm

Finally saw Loft. Very strange movie -- even more inscrutable than average for KK. ;-)

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#123 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue May 26, 2020 11:24 pm

knives wrote:
Sat Apr 11, 2020 11:16 pm
For my elaboration I'll explain when I can to this thought. It was when I was watching Loft, kind of a Universal parody with some The Ring elements, that I realized the universal thing in all of the Kurosawa I've seen (though Doppelganger twists this optimistically) men typically through ego activate the horror that controls the film while the women are the ones sturdy enough to overcome the horror. There's been multiple Kurosawa film's I've seen for example which end with the heroine observing the man dying from the horror with the sort of implication that the man didn't have the emotional strength to satisfy a good.
Having finally seen Loft I get where you’re coming from based on what you’ve seen, though I still don’t think this gender study stretches across his work (which we’ve already discussed). This was another genre swamp, roaming around horror, mystery, thriller sections of the library while maintaining a transcendental breath held on the domestic drama. Man and woman are so lonely and separated from one another here, that their interactions barely allow engagement. What haunts them most is what they don’t understand regardless of whether that thing is human or not.

Kurosawa’s mastery over space is put to the test as we watch these two main characters coexist with dynamic shifts in body language giving us all of our information. They aggressively use doors and other barriers to shield themselves, or sometimes Kurosawa’s camera is obstructed by obstacles in a faint respect but they nonetheless enforce his limitations. Each person is constantly moving away from the other if one is standing still, or facing a different direction if sitting, or if one watches the other it’s because they are unnoticed. There is no trust between these two people here, not even in a threatening way but a seething discomfort of invisible mass between people. It’s not strictly gender as a cardinal rule since her editor is male and she stares and faces him directly, but there is something about the unfamiliar that is frightening.

I was reminded of the first segment in La flor, which masks itself as a mummy film but really focuses on the experience of feeling alone, even when surrounded by people (or on the verge of passionate sex, in the opening shot) due to enigmatic sensations of anti-paranoia. Our heroine here, much like Elisa Carricajo in that chapter, finds comfort and enticement in the tangible allure of a supernatural presence, and numbed mistrust of corporeal relations with human beings. It’s as if we feel safer in a fantasy, or a movie, than real life.

The man and woman can face and sit next to one another in close proximity, as well as collaborate, only once they can find a commonality around this supernatural presence. It’s a pretty cool idea that feels rehashed but hasn’t been done quite like this. The fear of strangers (especially men to women here, at least initially) generalizes the gender as a default defense. The reincarnated proclaims a mission to bring death to men, which reverses the fear and allows the man to be frightened of a female aura. This bifurcation is a product of reptilian brain instincts grouping people in groups signaling danger it different from themselves- of which gender is the largest divider.

However, as people begin to acclimate to one another (like the writer and editor, or the writer and archeologist in the second half) they can participate peacefully and lower their aversions. Though there is still a natural barrier in that they can only engage around a shared external interest. Kurosawa seems to be taking us down a road of optimistic development especially in a key moment of affectionate embrace, but in reality he’s giving us a bitter pill to swallow disguised as harmony and freedom for his characters. They are trapped through their own impulses to stop themselves from sustained progress or liberation, to react to fear primarily and join emotionally in a distant tier altogether. It’s a lot easier, and safer, for a supernatural being to declare all men are evil than to try to understand one; just as it’s easier and safer for a man to try to kill this being without taking the time to hear her out. Not that each really gives the other much of a choice, but Kurosawa’s comprehension of ‘nature’ is an apt one where beings react to the Other with repellence or apathy rather than true willingness to understand- even if they continuously declare that they do!

The emotions at failing are the turning point of authenticity here, as they are in many of Kurosawa’s works, and the emotions of the two characters admitting defeat together may be the only honest moment between them where they are truly connected. The ending is also genius
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where only by collectively facing the fear and looking in the crate/coffin can they relieve themselves of this burden and bridge the gap between them. The cinematic cues take over as this masculine courage with female support (the female lead whittled down to a MPDG part) serves his self-actualization with a silver spoon. Kurosawa’s score might as well be a “That Was Easy!” button, until... wait, fear comes back? It’s not that easy? And boom, the revival of this threat causes the male to immediately lose his balance and drown. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen such a lavish take-down of toxic masculinity and dominant-position vulnerability. I knew Kurosawa had a great sense of humor, but this film felt like one drawn-out insightful joke to deliver a terrific punchline.
This wasn’t one of KK’s best, but a far more intelligent and finely tuned orchestration than its reputation suggests.

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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#124 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Jul 03, 2020 4:06 pm

Penance is an unfortunate mess that shows its strongest colors right away, abandoning its familiar hold on a mystery genre premise early in its first episode, in favor of the unsettling mystery of humanity in an antisocial male suitor. He freely admits his failure to engage through normal social behavior, while Sae admits to being “defective” based on her repression of womanhood affecting actual sexual development. Deceptively simple in psychology, this builds to strange places that become horror via unnerving methods of revealing predictable beats. For example, the slow initial honeymooning stage of romance immediately slips into a channel of creepy dread only to stew in a sterile white room with a curt but calm explanation indicating not only stalker vibes but hints of dark sorcery. Kurosawa understands how to be scary without tweaking the superficial form but letting it breathe and manipulating social behavior instead- which is far more terrifying to me!

Social contracts seem to be at the heart of the film, whether consented to or forced, rooted in the desire for possession and control, or a sense of responsibility and emotional reactivity. Most of these are bred from a shared trauma, not in witnessing the dead body but in being designated accountable by the mother, and stamped with a scarlet letter of existential doom in looming ‘penance.’ There’s a lot of humor like most of the director’s work but the bouts of dread are appropriately sharply planted within a faux-minimalist style. The second chapter, which is a huge drop from the incredible first, focuses on this kind of empowerment navigating a pit of social politics that breed knee-jerk perspectives- with a cute bow wrapped on the unveiling of her own deep-rooted mechanics for seemingly heroic behavior.

The third is also a shrug, but some eerie supernatural tropes are infused into the banal (the alien shadows flickering as the brother breaks boxes!) to make it compelling, even if it should be the worst of the bunch based on the actual paint-by-numbers story. Kurosawa’s tendency to provoke the itch of human enigmas is on display here in the question of the brother’s character that tows the line of ethical intervention based on broad, and clearly clouded, gut instincts that eventually translate into both clearer perspective and a self-fulfilling prophecy, achieving catharsis to redeem the failure of the past. The final scene where the mother calls her sense of purification as selfish destroys the trauma narrative in favor of a self-seeking one, again proving Kurosawa to be the master of competing subjective philosophies through compassionate framing with an objective core as his barometer.

The fourth chapter takes the other women’s rationalized sublimations of revenge in their narratives and lays is bare in refusing to cover up the motive behind the action for the last of the group. However this drive is also more complicated than it appears, and translates into a search for intersectional gender power with overconfidence. The cyclical aggression, that blurs any distinctive line between emotional and physical violence, continues and leads to an unexpected anti-conclusion that supposes either validity of the curse or the uncomfortably positive consequences in apathy.

The final chapter is pretty awful, focusing on the mother with a series of narrative twists that all fail at deriving any interest. I guess the meaninglessness behind everything does explore these social contracts, especially the imposed curse that has infected these women’s lives and identities, as problematically flawed in design by a partially-responsible issuer, through her own lack of honesty with herself and others. What should be ironic turns into a forced traditional murder-mystery ending, which reminded me of The Killing's 'reveals' - though nothing can beat that third season's C-movie Se7en ripoff. Anything that reminds me of that horrible show's unraveling isn't going to receive a charitable apology from me- though thankfully the first four chapters exist on their own wavelengths that each have some merit. You could easily just watch the first episode and close the book on the show, as it's Kurosawa exhibiting his most intoxicating skills by a longshot compared to the rest of this inconsistent formula.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

#125 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Jul 03, 2020 5:12 pm

Penance had a pretty great cast -- but ultimately didn't make best use of it.

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