Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011)

From the first frame to the last, Jiro Dreams of Sushi (dir. David Gelb) is an absorbing documentary. OK, stylistically, the film may not have excavated new territories, but its presentation of the main character, sushi maestro Jiro, was exquisite, thrilling, even a bit unnerving. I disagree with those reviewers complaining that the film reveals too little of the human drama and the rifts between the members of the family; for my own part, I must say that I liked the quite strict focus on work, the routines, the learning and the future of the business. Jiro is a man for whom life is work and work is life. His small and seemingly - but only seemingly - unpretentious restaurant (drenched in Michelin stars) is a stage for this man's calling: to make the perfect sushi. He is 85, still active, still trying to achieve his goals. For him, the perfect bite of sushi means an almost-Platonist attempt to reach an ideal, or to materialize an ideal. This requires hard work. Jiro is hard on himself, and he his hard on everyone else, too. The film crew follows Jiro, his two sons and their apprentices. We are taken along to the fish market, where we learn what a good fish looks like. We see the crew in action, preparing the delicacies (just watch watch the kind of effort the ... massaging of a tuna-fish requires. It's quite unbelievable if you haven't seen it.) For Jiro, ten years are nothing. To become a master takes time, a bloody amount of time. Repetition is the essence of how he presents work - that, and attention.

I liked the film because it provides no interpretation of Jiro's work ethic. You have to look and judge for yourself: how could this sort of dedication be understood? Is it about work? What does work mean here? Is it mania? And what would you say about Jiro's stern striving for perfection?

I would not like to work for a guy like Jiro, nor would I like to eat at his restaurant (the waiting list is three months): I can't imagine what it is like to eat those bites of sushi while you are scrutinized by Jiro's eagle gaze. This is nonetheless a documentary that held me in its spell and raised some important questions about work and dedication to work.

You Can't Take It with You (1938)

Even though I am not crazy about Frank Capra's populist movies, You Can't Take It with You was a surprisingly enjoyable movie experience - a nice comedy with a few funny quirks; I couldn't help being a little charmed by its lively and light take on tough stuff like property and class (the only red flags in this film is one of the characters who though it would look nice to print a few red flags). Capra's films are usually not filled with ambiguous plot developments and in-between characters: right is right and wrong is wrong (and alienated labor is exemplified by a man sitting in a boring room engrossed by an adding machine). This is the case also here, even if the good side comprises a crazy bunch of people who would much rather play than work. And perhaps this was what I liked about the film: at least here we have an all-American film with no particular enthusiasm about work morale. The message, one with which I would not take issue, boils down to this: dancing and crafting home-made fireworks is much funnier than hunting for a business contracts! (But of course one could point out that the contrast between business on the other hand and merry, creative activities on the other are very typical.) I'm not sayin' this is Thoreau or anything like that, but You Can't Take It with You offers one or two healthy handfuls of scepticism towards what is usually considered Serious Adult Stuff. Then again, one can interpret the message of the film from the point of view of one of the goofy characters, who has made up his mind not to pay income tax - one should be allowed to do whatever one pleases, shouldn't one? oh well. One reviewer remarks that the film could be a critique of capitalism for its colonization of utopian spaces. That kind of makes sense here. In this film, there is no innocent acquisition of money, no good capitalism. But the film is confined to a individualist perspective: you should do what you like. If your job is boring, why do it?

Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

When I was 16, Ulysses' Gaze (dir. Angelopoulos) was a great film. You know, profound. Re-watching it a bunch of years later proved to be excruciating (and very, very boring). Oh. My. God. This film tries so hard to be deep, to be pensive, to provide an overarching story about Europe, the fate of Europe, and the nature of man, grief and love and loss and memory and ... well, post-communist regimes looking for a path. Angelopoulos' film is spelled EPIC and that's part of the problem.  Harvey Keitel tries his best, and Erland Jospehsson is sympathetic, it's just that the film's grandiose aspiration is bound to fail. And it fails. This is not to say that all scenes fall flat - the image of the gigantic Lenin statue drifting on a barge is beautiful. Most of the time the dialogue is heavy-handed, the sweeping and slow cinematography seems derivative and the perspective of the entire film appears to be quite self-righteous - a film about the magnificence of cinema, the mystery and enigma of the moving image; but I never feel that I grasp anything essential about cinema - what happens is that I get annoyed by the pretentiousness and self-indulgence of the film (which has not to do with its being slow or inaccessible). The story has several levels. On the concrete level, it's about a guy who travels from country to country looking for a few reels of early cinema. But the story is also about the fate of the Balkans, Greece, nationalism, war, the past. // It is easy to think of directors who have the skills and power of attention to create a stunning scene out of a seemingly haphazard or commonplace situation. Angelopoulos works in the opposite direction. His scenes are composed to the extent that they appear stifled. There is no life left in them, they are weighed down by the desperate quest for MEANING. Roger Ebert awarded the film with one star. "A director must be very sure of his greatness to inflict an experience like this on the audience...." // This is the kind of film where EVERY SINGLE female person is attracted to this elusive main character A (as in Angelopoulos) - after two minutes in the company of this man who moves around like a zombie and talks in quasi-poetic mumblings, all of these women's hearts start throbbing for this guy; everywhere he goes, women's secret and innermost emotions are unleashed. zZzZ.

India Song (1974)

Before I watched India Song, I didn't even know that Marguerite Duras was also a director of films. If you expect the typical literary film, talky, with a very slight attention to the medium of film - think again. India Song is something else, a hypnotic masterpiece of slow motion bourgeois decadence (but the decadence does not look alluring). There is no dialogue in the typical sense of the word. Instead, the film fuses dreamy&slow images (repetition is often used) and polyphonic narration. Sometimes it is easy to combine the voices and the images, but at times the relation is not straightforward (non-synchronous sound), nor is there a clear linear story to follow. It's a beautiful movie, but what kind of beauty is it? Duras' brings forth a world that is more dead than alive, real life only intruding as an outsider, a sudden rupture. India. Sometimes during the 1930's. A string of men pursue a bored consular wife. A big mansion. In several frames, the camera approaches the mansion from the outside. It looks abandoned, decaying. Desolate surroundings. Are the people we see in the film dead? There are hints of death, suicide, but it is not clear. People dance. Sometimes we see them through mirrors. A piano is playing. The same song, over and over and over again. The camera shows the piano, but nobody is playing it, but we hear the music. The effect is eerie. People lie on the floor. Perhaps they have had sex. They look like puppets, very, very still - they look dead. A man expresses his love for the woman. Voices explain it. A sudden rush of emotion shatters the numb and languorous atmosphere of the film, his desperate screams haunt the group. There is also another story, a fractured story, but it is important: we hear a beggar woman. We never see her, but we hear her voice, and her story is told. I suspect there is a connection between the beggar and the consular wife. The characters' world is a narrow one. They seem locked up within these strange social patterns, they seem locked up within their bodies. On some level, this is the kind of story one comes across in Graham Greene novels: the alienated colonialist, at home nowhere.

The visual style and idiosyncratic storytelling of India Song have some similarities with the films made by Resnais, perhaps, most of all, Last Year in Marienbad (and yeah, the connection is not accidental, Duras wrote Hiroshima, mon amour). These films are enigmas, but they are not films that make you engage in the kind of work where you are supposed to reassemble fragments into a coherent story. India Song defies that kind of intellectualistic approach.