Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu May 17, 2007 7:34 pm 
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Island histrionics

Tubokawa's droll, extremely offbeat little film Aria uses its setting on the island of Hokkaido to examine a hermetic world of Japanese histrionics and quirks--notable among them shyness and determination -- and perhaps shame and deference to ancestors and spirits of the dead. Ota (Masayuki Shionoya) is a recently widowed, and very reticent, piano tuner and the film opens with him at work. By an irregular path this leads to an aged puppeteer named Kuzo (Masao Komatsu) and a mysterious young woman, Kako (Mariko Takahashi) who says she's the puppeteer's daughter, who helps Ota go looking for the piano Kuzo's wife used to use to accompany his performances and at the same time for a special remote beach where Ota's wife wanted her ashes scattered. Ota is burdened with a sense of shame for not having paid any attention to this wish and so having been up to now unable to fulfill it. All he has to go on is a little torn snapshot of the beach, which, of course, looks more or less like any other patch of ocean and sand.

The grief-stricken Ota has been living with old friend Kojima (Simon Yotsuya), who has a clock collection and repair shop. This is where an initially disdainful Kuzo comes by to leave off his weirdly lifelike doll, "Miss Aria," for repairs. Kuzo's bustling, incompetent apprentice, Senju (Sojuro Kataoka) appears to pick up the puppet and he becomes a part of the story, especially when Kuzo collapses at a performance Ota has gone to, and later dies in the hospital. There is a brief moment of bonding between Ota and Kuzo in the hospital room when the latter confesses he has long ago lost his wife and still misses her. His dying wish was to have the piano found, and it's at this point the film turns from desultory character study to whimsical and mildly supernatural road movie.

On the little journey around the island's nearly deserted beach areas various individuals are encountered, including an old man who runs a restaurant, who has a map to show where the beach is and seems to know the location of the piano; another old person, a woman hitchhiker who sings about the sea; and the keeper of a shrine surrounded by statues of foxes. Chaplin meets Fellini as Ota livens up a bit, clearly inspired by the young lady, Kako, and Senju puts on a little mustache. Finally it begins to seem that the young woman, rather than the puppeteer's daughter, may be a fox spirit or the reincarnation of the piano tuner's wife. Come to think of it, the puppeteer's hauntingly lifelike doll itself seemed like some imprisoned spirit.

Aria is a tiny, tiny film but its frailty is not without firm assurance. Here, Hokkaido becomes a setting where Japanese tentatativeness and understatement have their own sense of style and rigor. Tsubokawa uses an appropriately quiet visual manner, with Ozu-like static shots predominating. Tsubokawa's first film was the intriguing Clouds of Yesterday, a silent evocation of bygone cinema, which was even more slow-moving and more in debt to Italian film, but lacked the storytelling ability revealed however obliquely here. It was shown at last year's SFSIFF and I wrote: "Tsubokawa's sadly grainy and hard to follow Clouds of Yesterday is steeped in cinematic sense and may be a rough hint of fine work to come." Only for the patient, Aria nonetheless will utterly charm some with its quiet rewards.

Shown as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2007.

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