Dan Santelli shares with us his favorite ‘new to him’ watches of 2022! In alphabetical order.

by Dan Santelli, Staff Writer

Apaches (dir. John Mackenzie, 1977)

27 minutes of elemental, distilled dread predicated on the sadistic device of anticipating and witnessing the death of five children. They're crushed, drowned (in shit!), bludgeoned, and poisoned, and it's all lensed in the kind of po-faced, unaffectedly clinical gaze that could be mistaken for Alan Clarke. This was purportedly commissioned as an educational short on the dangers of playing around farm machinery, but it's so humorlessly grim that it drifts into the morbidly hilarious and becomes a countryside Grand Guignol. A glorious prank.

Apaches is streaming on YouTube at the time of this writing.

The Bedroom (dir. Satô Hisayasu, 1992)

A fatalistic Satô cri de douleur from sexual purgatory that doubles as a dutch-angled transmission of Halcion brain drip for the dissociated – those who’ve receded into themselves, their grief, their paranoia, driven by compulsions in order to feel something, anything. I’ve written previously on this site about Japan’s preeminent intellectual pervert, and this is yet another unsettling pinku-eiga packed with jabs at Japanese societal norms and expectations and his usual preoccupations, namely the commingling of alienation, techno-surveillance, voyeurism, reality/fantasy interplay, depersonalized feelings, and vaguely dystopian cityscapes.

In some respects, The Bedroom (sometimes titled An Aria on Gazes or Unfaithful Wife: Shameful Torture) is exactly what you expect from Satô. On the other hand, this 1992 entry seems to be the turning point in his career where his pent-up anger becomes subordinate to a bizarre empathy and tenderness directed at the pained, unfulfilled characters (see also Kyrie Eleison). Or, perhaps, it could be that Satô regular Kiyomi Itō is so good at articulating this specific, resonant tenor of hollowed-out, depressive angst that it becomes an emotional focal point for the abstract material to bounce off of. (Or, maybe it's an amalgam of the two.) Satô's economic visuals and imagination never cease to surprise me, as he makes everyday urban exteriors appear alien or sinister while imbuing everyday appliances (like video cameras, refrigerators, and mirror shades) with an ominous suggestiveness that'd make David Lynch proud. I could’ve done without a sordid cameo by the late murderer/cannibal Issei Sagawa, but, all in all, I'm so tuned to Satô’s wavelength that, at this point, I doubt I'll ever actively dislike one of his movies. This left me feeling empty in the best possible way and further proves this guy was way ahead of his time.

The Bedroom is streaming on Rarefilmm at the time of this writing.

Dreaming the Reality (dir. Tony Lou Chun-Ku, 1991)

Family bonds and dead-end futures inform this gloriously messy and intoxicating HK Girls n’ Guns actioner film that runs the Godfrey Ho playbook of narrative schizophrenia, intercutting two seemingly disparate plot lines that marginally coalesce around the midpoint. However, the presence of rhyming themes and incidents (siblings, injuries, inability to escape circumstances, etc.) imbues the contrasting threads with some accidental poetry. Genre stalwarts Moon Lee and Yukari Ōshima are sisters resigned to their lives as assassins, while Sibelle Hu and Ben Lam contend with working-class hardship and oppressive gangsters. As blatant and clunky as they are, the odd bouts of under-sussed soulfulness and poignancy heighten the impact of the violence and bloodshed when it comes in full force. Sibelle Hu smokes like a chimney and still runs away with the movie. Hell of a climax.

Duvidha (dir. Mani Kaul, 1973)

Formally enigmatic and emotionally connotative, Duvidha is a ghost story haunted by societal constraints and gender expectations, one not so much recounted as remembered. It’s both fractured and fragmented, painterly and ascetic, a film wherein formal severity articulates the mythic and modern. Gestures denote meaning, still-life frames convey tonality, and still images operate as half-forgotten impressions amid the concrete flow of moving images. The film is a masterclass in negative space and expressive hues of dust and vermillion, bristling with meaty underpinnings alluding to the politics of desire, the meaning of marriage, the varieties of entrapment, the struggle for pure love and feeling. Above all, it depicts a love story between a commodity and a simulacrum, wherein a happy lie bests the sad, cruel truth; a dream built on quicksand.

Duvidha is streaming on MUBI at the time of this writing.

Forever a Woman (dir. Tanaka Kinuyo, 1955)

A magnificent, sweeping tearjerker from Tanaka Kinuyo, in which a poetess’ rise to prominence coincides with a breast cancer diagnosis, that throws everything into the broth: divorce, illness, desire, unrequited love, social pressures, self-understanding, and more. Fundamentally, Tanaka views the life of Fumiko as one predicated on her contending with various forms of entrapment, and Fumiko’s grasping of this positions her in, as scholar Audie Bock (in writing about Naruse’s women) put it, a “condition of trapped awareness.”

Structured like a somber procession toward the distinguished moment of existence, there’s an unexpected liveliness here that complicates and dynamizes the miserablist premise, best signified by Tanaka framing poetry as the one liberating force in Fumiko’s life, wherein she acknowledges and universalizes her suffering in a decisive act of sublimation. (As an aside, Fumiko composing poems that “exaggerate” her life serves almost as a meta-deconstruction of the melodramatic form.) Better yet, the decision to characterize everyone beyond the easy good/bad binary makes the histrionics that much richer and impactful when they come at us full-force toward the end. Initially devastating, the transcendental implications of the ending now register, in their way, as uplifting.

Side Note: Its reissue title, The Eternal Breasts, seems a more appropriate one, and not just because of the spiritual undercurrents.

Goodbye CP (dir. Hara Kazuo, 1972)

My third Hara Kazuo documentary, and very much in the vein of the others. Frank, confrontational, intimate, and deeply empathetic. The camera invades spaces from an observational gaze, never removed or remote, instead invoking a roaming, curious subjectivity, with Hara and crew rarely interfering unless follow-up or intervention is required. There’s no plea for easy pity or sympathy here, just straightforward, uninflected glimpses of lives struggling to exist within a culture that shuns and dismisses them for their disability; the clever use of asynchronous sound engenders viewer alienation, effectively paralleling the subjects' collective sense of detachment in the world. The poetic back half lacks the immediacy of the first, but the nakedly emotional finale is staggering in its humanity and subdued anger. Hara gives noble filmmaking a good name.

The Heroic Trio (dir. Johnnie To, 1993)

Hong Kong’s answer to the early 90s superhero sweepstakes sees then-gun-for-hire Johnnie To exploring the possibilities of zero-gravity action and breathless narrative propulsion. It’s all feverish razzle-dazzle, balletic wire-work, garish color palettes, jolting camera-batics, and relentless movement. When the camera isn’t lunging toward the people and action, actors are compensating; it’s practically a study of bodies and technology in constant motion. This upholds the voguish tendency to dress all superhero settings in retro design (the sets exist somewhere between Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman & Robin), but it also undermines the contemporary ethos with three kickass ladies of action and increasingly gynocentric concerns. It may be a lot of sound and fury, but To stages it like a magician whose act is nothing but prestiges; you're wowed even if you can't keep up with the trick.

Level Five (dir. Chris Marker, 1997)

Chris Marker tackles hauntology in this profoundly dense, confounding, exhausting, and distressing work, a film about questioning visions, their narratives, and the memories they make and erase. In Level Five, Marker plumbs philosophical depths in hopes to gain an understanding of the Battle of Okinawa while crafting yet another ruminative essay on the interplay between memory and history. Yet that hardly imparts what a complex web this weaves, freely and fluidly flowing between disparate ideas (human hierarchies, the influence of power/systems, cinema, reality/falsehoods), dropping one and picking it back up later, sometimes hybridizing one with another, all of it organically coalescing as if this is just a walk in the park for Marker. Where this hits hardest is the human core about the varieties of grief that transpire in the face of death (be it a loved one passing or a meaningless atrocity) and the interrogation of cinema/images (how they tell truths and lie to us) that briefly positions ghosts and memories as intangible offshoots. It’s also rife with Marker oddities, like the saddest scene to feature a toy parrot imaginable and some glorious video toaster effects as a cherry on top. Consider these mere impressions from a baked noodle because I need to see this again, just to make sure I got everything.

Made in Hong Kong (dir. Fruit Chan, 1997)

A deliberately allegorical and deeply pessimistic sign-of-the-times wherein alienated youths embody the tenor of estrangement and anomie in post-Handover Hong Kong. Parental abandonment, bad omens, downward spirals, life in squalor, recursive use of barriers, destructive tools (namely guns and knives), ephemeral distractions. A life of crime seems the only way to cope even as it positions one to commit violence against their fellow countrymen. As an allegory, this comes off as potent if somewhat limited due to Chan’s broad strokes and explication tactics, but his forceful, energetic direction relishes detail and feels very lived-in, to the point that it establishes a riveting tension between neorealist observation and 90s postmodern “cool” — it arguably subverts the latter. (The 90s action memorabilia may inspire comparisons to Besson, Tarantino, and Stone, but I couldn't shake the allusions to Nicholas Ray and Rebel Without a Cause, except, in contrast to Jim Stark, Moon is explosive rather than implosive.) In Chan's eyes, post-Handover life for the younger generation is a one-way ticket to the grave. Even Moon’s nightly orgasms are treated as, in the words of the French, petite morts. Quoth The Expelled, “no life, no future.”

An Ode to Yakuza (dir. Masumura Yasuzo, 1970)

Neglected Japanese master Masumura Yasuzo once again subverts viewer expectations, this time by using the assignment of an ostensible yakuza film to flesh out the incestuous dynamic in Hawks’ Scarface, resulting in a full-blown auteurist exercise in social psychodrama that’s both expectedly perverse and improbably emotional. Minoru wants his half-sister, Akane, to fulfill his idea of a better life for her, an upshot of both tumultuous upbringing and a longing to sexually possess her, while Akane speaks to the non-conformist desire to be the nail that sticks out and escape the various projections of desire coming her way. Even with the sporadic pacing issues, it's a masterclass in the gradual shifting of perspective, as well as yet another Masumura film about outsiders fighting for control against a system that advances prearranged life trajectories and uniformity.

Here, the Masumura Core obtains new vitality in the synergy between his 70s preoccupations, namely broiling class tensions and the capacity for female agency in Japan, and hallowed yakuza themes like entrapment, ownership, and brutality (all dramatized literally in the opening scene before permeating the remainder on metaphorical and psychological levels). On a formal level, the trademark unbalanced composition and impassive, flattened gaze are present, but now the negative space often consists of a haunting blackness, as if the characters are standing on the precipice of an abyss that threatens to engulf them. Unease and claustrophobia underscore the visual schema, obsessed with intersecting lines in the set design and the triadic blocking, while the narrative fixates on dichotomies (rich/poor, tradition/modernity, parents/children, men/women, etc.) and doubles (two unions of half-brother/half-sister, two families, two inheritances, two mirroring institutions: corporate Japan and the yakuza).

You cannot overstate the consistency between this, The Hot Little Girl, and Play It Cool, all produced in 1970, and they’re all, to some degree, thematic precursors to Masumura’s terrific Lullaby of the Earth, which would ultimately excise the male quotient for total female subjectivity. All four films are mournful affairs that see characters striving to surmount the societal expectations and limitations that undergird their everyday experience, the films’ conclusions are variously inconclusive.