Two recent BFI Film Classics on Mikio Naruse's A Woman Ascends a Staircase and Wong Kar-Wei's In the Mood for Love.
---------------------------------------------------------------
IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE
I’ve often wondered why the British Film Institute with its Film Classics series doesn't form some kind of union with the Criterion Collection. Their respective movies overlap dramatically. Contributors to the book series sometimes appear as audio commentators on the Criterion DVDs. And the books can go into details necessarily left to the viewers’ imagination and puzzle-solving abilities while watching DVDs that have less in the way of supplementary material. The phases they go through, such as ’70s American cinema, mirror each other.
That being said, many of the almost 400 BFI monographs serve as perfect companions to the 1000+ numbered Criterion DVDs. An excellent example of this companion-like ability is reflected in the latest edition of the BFI's monograph on Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love.
The author, Tony Rayns, has contributed to the Criterion DVD of In the Mood for Love, but that doesn't hinder his critical acumen in approaching this film again. For one thing, he'd already known Wong Kar Wai for several years before then working with him on the press kit for Ashes of Time, and almost published a book-length interview with Wong Kar Wai. His experiences led to a falling out, but he doesn't go into detail in this volume. Mr. Rayns’s monograph is the second edition. In the introduction he notes that he not only has added an afterward, but has modified certain passages in the book to conform with new information since the first volume was published in 2015, about this Wong Kar Wai film from 2000, set in 1962 in Hong Kong. That's probably enough numbers for now.
Mr. Rayns is a leading western interpreter of Asian cinema with numerous articles, audio commentary tracks, and books on the likes of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Edward Yang, among numerous others. And it turns out that Wong Kar Wai is a difficult director to get a handle on. Three reasons stand out dramatically. The first reason is the director's tendency to go back and tinker with his films long after they've been released. In the new afterward, Mr. Rayns notes that when the Criterion Collection published a set of Wong Kar Wai’s major films, Mr. Rayns notes that "the set won some new fans for Wong, but it also alienated some older ones: five of the films were not only restored in 4K, but also revised, often in ways that made long-term fans decide to hang on to their old DVDs and the Blu-rays of the original versions." Second, his movies can be a little hard to follow because he prefers a non-linear narrative and unannounced jumps in time. The chaos that is Ashes of Time is an example of this, having gone through three or more versions, and I'm still not clear if there is a "finished" version of this lengthy wuxia film. In the case of In the Mood for Love, the complexity is tripled by the fact that the film is a middle entry in a loose trilogy of films, beginning with Days of Being Wild, and apparently concluding with 2046 (a room number and a year), all following the character played in this film by Tony Leung.
Wong Kar Wai emerged on the international film scene in 1994 with his third feature Chunking Express, which announced a major shift in Hong Kong cinema towards youthful vitality, unconventional narratives, and pop culture references. From there and over five subsequent features until 2004, he established himself as a major filmmaker, until he more or less vanished around 2013, as Mr. Rayns explains in his afterward. His explanation is detailed, but in essence Wong Kar Wai moved back to China, worked on a 30-episode TV series, but hasn't made a full feature since 2013 and The Grandmaster and instead re-edits his old movies.
In this version of the book, Mr. Rayns begins with a detailed account of the film, sceen by scene and even shot by shot, naming such things as the kind of noodle shop the characters visit and the kinds of dresses that Mrs. Chan wears and why. He brings a lot of detail to the creation of the film, also going back to its predecessor Days of Being Wild. In passing, he provides a miniature history of Hong Kong cinema from the late ‘40s to the new century. His next chapter focuses on Wong Kar Wai’s visual preferences. For example, he states, “There's a paradox at the heart of Wong Kar Wai’s films. They generally spring from pop culture ideas, and sometimes have generic roots, but the ways Wong frames and stages scenes and the ways William Chang edits, the shots owe little to classical film storytelling. Wong shares with many other Hong Kong directors his preference for building his scenes shot by shot (rather than following the old Hollywood model, which starts with a master shot of the scene and then inserts close-ups, point of view shots, and so on), but he tends to take his film language into areas of abstraction avoided by his contemporaries. His and William Chang's looking for discontinuities in editing, coupled with their reliance on evocative music, produces a quite idiosyncratic film syntax."
In a “catch all" chapter four, he speculates about why Wong Kar Wai doesn't show much of the adulterers in the narrative, an account of a short film Wong Kar Wai made for a benefit premiere screening of In the Mood for Love, reasons for certain casting choices, a discussion of various deleted scenes, Wong Kar Wai’s favorite kind of character actors, and a report on a short film In the Mood for Love 2001 which appeared at the Cannes festival, shown once, and was never seen again.
In a poignant, concluding paragraph Mr. Rayns writes that “Our speculations are ultimately subsumed into the film’s closing sense that an era has passed, a chapter has ended. The film is finally all about the bittersweet memory of something lost. Psychologically, Wong’s ‘off screen strategy’ is all about that loss. The film’s evasions, elisions, exclusions, disjunctions, and enigmas – even its momentary fixations on decor – are all about the imperfect retrieval of a memory, while its evocative and insistent music is all about smiling or sobbing through the parts that time has heightened or discolored or erased. The tenor of the ending is clear: time to move on.”
WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS
The greatest filmmaker you've never heard of is Mikio Naruse. Considered among the cinemagente as one of Japanese cinema’s foundational members after Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Ichikawa, Naruse is virtually unknown in the west.
To those who have seen some of his films, this is odd because Naruse had a career that spanned the silent and sound era until his death in 1969, after having made some 88 movies. For having made the west pay any attention at all to Naruse, the heroine is the film writer Audie Bock, and one of the many virtues of Catherine Russell's new BFI film Classics monograph on Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is honoring her contributions.
As Ms. Russell explains, Audie Bock organized a retrospective of numerous Naruse films, most of which had not played in America, and for many of which she provided the subtitles. The show traveled to several museums and institutions and sparked a flurry of temporary interest. After this, Ms. Bock seems to have vanished from the cinema landscape, after having produced the essential volume Japanese Film Directors, and translated Kurosawa’s autobiography into English.
I had a telephone encounter with Audie Bock once when a local institution was bringing her and some Naruse films to the city, as I had a couple of questions for her, and in my capacity as a supposed journalist, I got her telephone number from the institution and called her up. She came across as being irked by the interruption and wondered why in the heck I was bothering her in the first place when any information I needed could be found in the press release. Not a successful encounter, and I attribute it to the fact that I must come across as a fan not a professional.
In any case, in a footnote, Ms. Russell reveals that “following her incredibly valuable contribution to the field of film studies, Bock seems to have retired and in the late 1990s she won a seat in the California state legislature as a representative of the Green party.”
After an informative introduction, Ms. Russell’s book comes in two large-sized chapters, the first explaining the director’s use of locations, the woman's film genre, and melodrama and its standard characters and their variations, while the second assesses Naruse’s cinematic technique, including his use of black and white film, the two-shot, variations in lighting, direction of actors, and Naruse’s subtle editing. A concluding chapter looks at the use of voice-over in the film, actress Takemine Hideko’s contributions to the script, the transactional nature of the Tokyo hostess bars in the Ginza area, and the fascinating language of clothes and kimonos in the film.
She writes especially well about the director’s use of objects and financial transactions. “Naruse's poetic achievement in When a Woman lies precisely in the blending of the beautiful with the banal, the luxurious with the mundane. But equally, his poetry lies in the insert shot itself, a commentary and a distancing device in which Keiko’s narrative is framed as a metonymic sign of a larger social constellation of people and things.” She eventually concludes, “When a woman ascends the stairs in Japan in 1960, she does not hit a glass ceiling. There is nothing like that to hit. Instead, she opens a glass door and passes into a world where she is the center of attention, the nucleus around which men and women swirl in a dizzy dance of flirtation, booze, and money. She is a priestess of hospitality, and yet we learn from this film and it's delicate web of interconnected people, places, and things that the price of such attention and indeed pride is in her own self worth: her dreams, her desires, and her ambition. Her well-made, external self is merely a shell for someone else whom we will never know." Catherine Russell teaches film at Concordia University and wrote Critical Japanese Cinema Revisited and an earlier book on Naruse.
The quality of Naruse movies that seems to baffle westerners is the director’s singular focus on the futility of existence. Perhaps the best explanation of this quality occurs in the audio commentary track that Donald Richie made for the Criterion disc when he discusses the Japanese concept of mono no aware.
For further information about When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, another good place to turn to is the Criterion Collection website for an essay by Philip Lopate on the film.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/471-when-a-woman-ascends-the-stairs-they-endure