by Daniel Santelli, Staff Writer

If you missed the first part of this two-part Best Discoveries article, you can read it by clicking here. With that out of the way, allow me to present Part 2 of my Best Discoveries roundup.

The Day I Became a Woman (dir. Marzieh Meshkini, 2000)

I’d meant to revisit this 2000 Iranian film by Marzieh Meshkini before finalizing this list, if only to see if I could glean even more from it. It was a movie I really liked a lot upon first watch, but certain stretches have embedded themselves in my memory, to the point that it’s grown in my estimation. It’s a triptych of stories about women, each covering a specific stage of life (adolescence, adulthood, old age), that deals with the hardships of living within a repressive culture, both contending with those restrictive parameters and striving to circumvent them. Each section has its own narrative arc, but the real arc is found in the style. The first operates in an observational mode, the third veers into poetic allegory, and the second balances both sensibilities; the intent behind all three stories, however, is firmly rooted in social realism. Here are my initial impressions, originally posted to Letterboxd:

Seeking/enacting agency and liberation within repressive spaces. Replete with t transportation devices (bikes, rafts, carts, etc.) that reinforce the unbridled urge to surmount the strictures and escape; the omnipresent seaside at once encloses and serves as a reminder of greater possibility past the horizon. Meshkini's film becomes increasingly symbol-laden yet the emblems never stunt the poetry, and the gradual shift from social realism to poetic allegory is so fluidly handled it’ll likely take a second viewing to fully appreciate the subtlety with which she pulls it off.

Attica (dir. Cinda Firestone, 1974)

Using existing materials, director Cinda Firestone crafts a riveting, angry documentary in which she declares the American justice system an institution that favors dehumanization over rehabilitation. The first-half operates like a Peter Watkins film assembled from actual documentary footage. There’s instant urgency and disquieting suspense in the early scenes that crosscut between the prisoners’s demands for reform and the New York State Police filing in for the retaking, but Firestone’s attentiveness extends to underscoring the inmates’s thoughtfulness (pleading for humane treatment and rehabilitative opportunities), the police’s immorality (lying to the media and, later, the committee), and the notion that the system is corrupt and broken. She occasionally falls back on obvious contrasts for didactic purposes, but, mostly, it’s her ability to sculpt points out of raw footage with ease and without overt intrusion that leaves the greatest impression. You can see echoes of this in films like Waco: The Rules of Engagement, but Attica plays as more relevant and vital nearly fifty years later because we’re still talking about the same damn thing. Calling this an advocacy piece would be specious because it assumes some would prefer criminality over humanity.

Attica is available to stream on YouTube.

Pinku x Deux: Kyrie Eleison (dir. Hisayasu Satô, 1993) and A Gap in the Skin (dir. Takahisa Zeze, 2004)

CW: Both features contain scenarios involving graphic sex, assault, and mental illness.

Things are about to get a little weird here. It’s time we talk a bit about the pinku-eiga, aka. Japanese softcore, as this next pairing comes to us from two of more renowned practitioners of pinku: Hisayasu Satô and Takahisa Zeze, two of the notorious “Four Devils”. To be sure, their work is an acquired taste, but these films are hardly your run-of-the-mill Skinemax fare, but rather transgressive, bizarre visions wrought by creators who supplied the requisites while seeming to retain an astounding level of creative autonomy. Of the films of theirs I’ve seen, Satô’s work tends to involve dissociated loners trapped by society and their own obsessions, and at times suggest perverse spins on the works of William Gibson and J.G. Ballard, whereas Zeze comes off as a little more down to earth with his interests (trauma, rural/industrial settings, his characters’ interiority, and, yes, fish) and seems inspired by European art films as much as psychology and domestic issues.

A voyeuristic, vaguely transhumanist techno-depressive hallucinogen from one of Japan’s preeminent intellectual perverts, Hisayasu Satô’s Kyrie Eleison teems with paranoia, dejection, and a weirdly touching streak of empathy. This outwardly hybridizes the paraphernalia of The Conversation and Videodrome, but inwardly approaches something nearing a pinku riff on Dr. Mabuse. It stars Kiyomi Itō as an achingly pained snoop by trade and out of necessity, invading people's privacy by wiretapping their premises so as to assist others in their conspiracies and mitigate the detriment of alienation through perceived connection with her quarry. She is the Hisayasu Satô protagonist at their most essential, right down to the extrinsic sarcasm and riddles, and star Kiyomi Itō’s dilemma oddly parallels the deluded sense of connectivity birthed by social media platforms over a decade later. The threat of depersonalization is a mainstay here, as Satô builds a strangely underpopulated universe wherein the production of technology outpaces our ability to process it, and video drugs are both the cure-all and new religion for those suffering and perplexed. Some wonky plotting and a rushed climax hold this back from near-masterpiece territory, but the relay remains intact, and Satô's grasp of reality is consistently unnerving. And for the record, Kiyomi Itō rules.

Whereas Kyrie Eleison verges on dystopian speculation, A Gap in the Skin is firmly rooted in reality, albeit a stylized one. It’s another of Takahisa Zeze’s emotionally raw saunters through post-industrial suffering and the primal despair of survivors living on the fringes of society. This time, he trades the formal austerity of his earlier pinku masterpiece, Raigyo (a somber meld of ennui and bleak sex), for a more spontaneous but no less poetic camera style. It can be hard to get a handle on the narrative here, partly due to Zeze’s elliptical narration, erasure of exposition, and the aunt and nephew’s inability to communicate beyond grunts, cries, and simple statements (they’re both intellectually disabled), but if you can find a way into this cold, bleak, and very physical film, you may be moved by the visceral charge of the characters' push-pull dynamic. In short, he wants to retreat and die, she wants him and herself to survive and escape; they both trudge their way through various symbolic environs, their journey occasionally tinged a sickly jade by Zeze’s filters. This is a very difficult and upsetting film, yet Zeze’s tactile style and use of direct sound (possibly lavalier mics) impart a palpable intimacy and helplessness that allows his musings to bypass misery porn by way of conviction and the sheer clarity of vision. This is not an easy sit, but it further solidifies Zeze as the real deal.

Center Stage (dir. Stanley Kwan, 1991)

As if a prestige biopic got infiltrated by The Conformist. A hall of mirrors, a cinematic Matryoshka doll, a subversion of that most staid of genres, there’s almost no way to approximate, in such a short space, the richness of Stanley Kwan’s impressionistic look at Chinese silent film actress, Ruan Lingyu. At once spellbinding and aloof, cerebral and melodramatic, Kwan tinkers around with our expectations of filmed biography as much as the movie folds in on itself. Levels of reality segue and clash, personal lives and filmed fiction mirror each other, and cinema and history rhyme at first before film recreates those latter fragments that’ve been lost to the sands of time — as the superimposed title card reads, “film no longer available”. These are impressions of a life undermined by the image that’s been created for her, at work and in public, with the film studio doubling as a signifier of oppression and a stand-in for authority at-large. Do I need to say that Maggie Cheung is positively luminous?

You can read further thoughts on this film here.

Center Stage is now available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

2 x Naomi Kawase: Suzaku (1997) and Shara (2003)

Perhaps the best way to approach Naomi Kawase, Japan’s foremost woman filmmaker and among the most unique film artists in the world today, and her debut, Suzaku, is to first focus on what’s absent. In the film, she distills the Japanese domestic drama to a state of purity and zen, earning comparison with Ozu and Maborosi-era Kore-eda. A train tunnel is partially constructed but never finished, leading to the slow dissolution of an entire family. The setting is a rural mountain town, isolated from the modern world to the point that it’s been forgotten by all but the nature that enshrouds it. Suzaku is almost a mourn for a time when living without the reliance on those outside your village was possible, while also acknowledging the implacable flux of life; “the impermanence of things”, a teacher notes while lecturing about The Tale of the Heike, itself tending to promulgate Buddhist philosophy (although unread by me at the time of this writing).

Kawase excludes outsized gestures and emotions and gives greater emphasis to small disruptions of the everyday, the passing of time (via trees blowing in the wind or a hard cut to “fifteen years later”), the makeup of spaces and locations (her camera seeks to memorialize them, lingering lovingly and attentively on their stasis), and the unspoken/implied feelings between parties that are nonetheless understood. There’s a pleasing chiasmus to the narrative, revisiting situations with different contexts and emotional currents, a gambit that reflects the ebbs and flows of existence. Her clarity of vision suggests a remembrance of things past, a projection of a reality that’s palpable and known, and the occasional intermixing of fiction and documentary becomes a formal expression of what seems to be the core conceit: to capture the essence of life itself, at its most essential.

And then there’s Shara, which operates as much a portrait of community as it does as one of individual healing. This film continues Suzaku’s preoccupation with melding fiction and nonfiction forms, narrative mirroring, and coping with loss; thematically, Shara distinguishes itself by focusing on one person’s ongoing reckoning with grief after everyone else has moved on. It’s lensed almost entirely in an observational style, with the camera occasionally "happening on" or reacting to events/situations — now and then suggesting the presence of a spirit. There are two instances in which a privileged moment achieves the sense of transcendent wonder Kawase strained and failed to conjure in The Mourning Forest: the cleansing festival rain and the final shot solidify her ability to harmonize her physical and immaterial fixations.

Born in Flames (dir. Lizzie Borden, 1983)

A scorcher too hot to handle, Lizzie Borden’s dystopian speculative mockumentary plays like Peter Watkins discovered punk and intersectional feminism and doubled-down on the progressivism. At once, unmistakably a product of Reagan’s America and a timeless treatise on the never-ending revolution: the quest for social reformation; the longing for egalitarian ideals; the obligation to organize and inform others of oppression experienced; above all, the need to feel seen and know you exist. As storytelling, this moves like a bullet fired from a gun and hits just as hard, effortlessly engaging with politics and ideology — a deeply felt sense of being ignored and righting past failures runs throughout, as does the almost unbearable urgency, and there’s even a provocative glimpse of the role woman capitulators play in slowing progress — while bearing the immediacy of a thriller and a prescience that’s too unnerving to explicate. Much has been written about this in other circles, so we can leave it at this: it’s totally radical and will very likely leave you charged up. If you haven’t seen it, go watch it. If you’ve seen it, go watch it again.

Midori (dir. Hiroshi Harada, 1992)

CW: Midori contains depictions of child sexual abuse, trauma, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. Viewers discretion is strongly advised.

There is no debating it. This unabating 47-minute anime, concerning the hardship experienced by a 12 year-old girl, is, hands down, THE discovery that is going to be for almost nobody – it’s absolutely cursed. An agonizing shock to the amygdala, Midori is one of those OVA fever dreams that forces the viewer to redefine the parameters of depravity. How does one describe Hiroshi Harada’s one-man passion project (animated over the course of five years), in which jerky DIY animation achieves some of the most wretched, disgusting imagery you'd hope to never see, not to mention some of the hardest, darkest emotions to bear. It’s about as viscerally harrowing as they come.

As told through vibrant candy colors, surreal digressions, and mind-bending still frame cels that emit despair, agony, and profound misanthropy, this grotesque ero-guru transmission, charting the suffering endured by Midori (which includes degradation, molestation, and psychological fracturing), could ultimately be read as a bizarre allegory for Japan falling victim to Western influence’s seductive allure. The primary theme of Midori is subjugation, not just the eponymous character being abused by the sideshow but the sideshow succumbing to the magician's power, fundamentally relying on him to thrive. 

Why is something like Midori worth our time? Why would anyone want to subject themselves to such a miserable film? It’s tempting to relegate this to the extreme cinema canon, yet Midori is not a psychotic lizard-brained anime provocation in the vein of, say, Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend. I’d argue it quite thoughtfully and tangibly relays an experience of abject adolescent suffering, even as it shreds the envelope by means that are occasionally vile and always transgressive. When Midori is brought up in conversation, the focus seems to fall on the shock imagery, but, for me, it’s the uncanny way it externalizes and articulates Midori’s interiority through form (and not just content) that makes me want to crawl out of my skin, be it by imparting those feelings of entrapment and universal distrust onto viewers or even framing her “romance” with the pedophile magician as a bright spot. If one of the reasons for engaging with movies is to see and understand the world through another person’s eyes, then Midori gives us a perspective that, while hard to take, seems vital to helping us better fathom the more despairing side of humanity. The grotesqueries and animation are pure artifice, but the emotions evoked feel raw and true.

Many movies explore the fallout of traumatic experiences, but this is the arsenic-laced fairy-tale that tries to paint what the actual trauma might've looked like to a child. The experience is painful and numbing, but I sense a conviction at work that, like with the similarly-themed Harmful Insect (2001), makes the journey worth taking. The final image operates as a powerfully direct and spare evocation of complete utter hopelessness. Lost in a literal blankness, there’s nobody around to hear you shriek into the abyss. I’m tempted to argue that at least Midori knows she still exists, but the closing song’s lyrics tell another story.

You can watch this universally banned OVA on Vimeo.