“Two Film Models at Cannes: Exploring Childhood and Crime in Japanese and Argentine Cinema”

It can be in Japanese or English, or also in the language of the hosts, the words spoken by the people will represent a language but whatever they say they are covered by another that contains them: the language of cinema. In it there are variations, unavoidable idiosyncrasies, but a shot of Mr. Kore-eda refers to a dialectic that has little to do with his slant-eyed compatriots. A translator once confused his prose with that of Yasujiro Ozu; he lacked hearing. Kore-eda’s journeys into childhood always evoke, even if it sounds implausible to suggest it, a tradition closer to that of Steven Spielberg. The characters may speak Basho’s language, but bilingual shots abound in his cinema: there are shots of California, there are also shots of the island where Miyazaki honors all those who have not yet reached the age of non-belief, to the adult world. Isn’t that the sequence of the happy children in the denouement of Monster (Kaibutsu) a postcard from a childhood seen in one of the filmmaker’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Kore-eda has the occasional notable film, several interesting ones, some curious ones, and there is no shortage to its credit of those of dubious prestige and that without the covering of canine laurels could bring about the misfortune of having been recognized as rubbish. Without a doubt, of the Japanese of our time, Kore-eda Hikorazu is the most universal of all, because he is the one who best channels what the West codifies as an expression of the Whole. That’s not to say that Japanese culture isn’t revealed in Kore-eda’s films, and in that sense, Monster It can be seen as a compendium of moorings adjusted to an ancient culture. The microscopic bureaucracy that the film reveals, with its constant mannerisms invested in behavior and translated into customs, is monstrous, beyond the more or less benevolent intentions that may have guided the filmmaker.

The filmmaker’s specialty is childhood. He insists on this theme, as other filmmakers have done with more or less attractive obsessions. In his films, childhood is a preferential stage, a vulnerable age in which consciousness still perceives what is in front of the eyes without the intricate coding to which every man and woman is subjected in the culture to which they belong and in the Japanese in particular. In Nobody knows, one of the best to his credit, his clairvoyance in this regard was sublime, because it was preached about a peculiar situation in which children had to take care of themselves and cultural impositions diminished due to the absence of adults, the guarantors of its transmission . In Monster It would be better if the adults were not there, but they are there and in some cases they are too harmful for the well-being of the children. In what some parents do and in what is perpetuated in an educational institution, the oppression of the symbolic system that shapes the Japanese being is felt. The unrestricted adherence to the rules and the compulsion to recognize and execute them are shown here as a tragic and parodic destiny. By the time the boy’s teacher is suspected of mistreating his student, all of his colleagues reflect a circumspect hypocrisy. Maintaining appearances before everything and everyone is a priority and a mandate.

The underlying theme of Monster it is the mockery of the inadequate and the enjoyment of a majority that is known to be us who exercise cruelty against those who cannot be seen as equals or are identified as strangers. The friendship that is cemented between the two children who go to school, both with dissimilar difficulties, and the paradoxical relationship of horror and opaque affection with the teacher are the starting point of other subplots seen from a changing perspective. On the other hand, the philosophical perspectivism popularized by Kurosawa decades ago in Rashomon It serves to review some situations that have decisive implications in the lives of the characters and in a somewhat bombastic game of the story, as if there were some hermeneutical wisdom in that change of perspective. And there isn’t, it’s pure narrative strategy, an elegant distraction and a way of trafficking complexity as a cultural asset.

So described, Monster seems to be a movie that speaks only in its own language. In truth, he sometimes babbles in his own language, but almost always falls into another that can be spoken by everyone from ET to Bambi’s acolytes. The three shots at ground level that open the film and the easy melodies by the great Ryūichi Sakamoto, to whom the film is dedicated, are conceived in the prevailing universal grammar that forges preconceived emotions, in this case, about friendship and childhood. whose rhetorical effect is as effective as it is neutral. In other words, Kore-eda’s kitsch is a convenient shortcut, a watered-down neutral orientalism. Scenes with children can convince and move the distracted.

the start of The criminals It places the character with what is fair and necessary. Tango sounds, Buenos Aires can be seen, its buildings of an architecture that is not really so old are contemplated geometrically, the streets are recognized and among the crowds the protagonist is seen walking. He is one of us, one of the many men who collects his money and waits for the end of the month, hoping to have something and be able to do something other than just go back to his job. In the initial minutes, Rodrigo Moreno introduces an idiosyncrasy and also prepares everything to recognize a drama that in this case is unquestionably universal: one lives to work, it seems to be an inexorable way of life. The eloquence of that preface is admirable. Synthesis of a dilemma that will have to be questioned and eroded from within its core. It is an admirable introduction. Moreno also knows how to film his city, which is not from the province, but rather a metropolis.

The criminals it was presented by the artistic director of the festival, Thierry Frémaux, a gesture that should not go unnoticed, because it does not always present the films of Un Certain Regard. The highest authority of the festival rarely dedicates his time to filmmakers less committed to the history of the festival. The Argentine film crew took the stage with Moreno, who pointed out that the duration of the film was a little less than that of the World Cup final. Frémaux got the joke, as did the audience, and all was well.

Without hesitation, it must be said like this: The criminals It is Moreno’s best film, the freest he has made, the most loving in his filmography and also the most beautiful. Who had filmed the trees and mountains of Córdoba like Moreno? Who has waited so gratefully for the exact hour to take advantage of the light of dawn or sunset and take care of the matter of the world illuminated by the glorious splendor of the sun? Moreno films with manifest love the streets of the city and the pizzerias, in the same way that he waits for the exact moment to transmit the effort of the wind to move pines and birches.

In The criminalsthe filmmaker borrows the general idea of ​​the vernacular masterpiece hardly a criminal. On this occasion, like that, an employee (here, from a bank, in the Fregonese, from a company), calculates all that he would earn throughout his life and realizes that he can steal the same sum of money assuming that if he turns himself in and hides the money he will only have to spend an acceptable amount of time behind bars. Better six years in jail, or three for good behavior, than twenty-five more years signing day after day. To carry out the plan, the character needs an accomplice, a co-worker. He finds it, and they follow the conceived plan.

Unlike Fregonese’s magnificent film, in Moreno’s the plan may perhaps turn out well, and even better it turns out that the freedom to which the characters aspire is the same one that the film conquers as it progresses. Who can properly cite Bresson, JL Ortiz and Pappo? Once the criminals alluded to by the title arrive in Córdoba, one to look for a place to hide the money, the other to do it later, another film unfolds before the eyes and ears, one that celebrates the pleasure of existing.

The pleasure of existing is also the pleasure of filming. It would be necessary to dedicate some time to recognize the aesthetic reasoning behind the four or five chained fades that do not resemble practically anything that is usually done with that never outdated but anachronistic resource. The juxtaposition of the forest and the city, in the conceived form, is of an unquestionable visual presence. What to say about the sounds? Moreno even manages to film the wind in the best Ivens tradition. If he was able to do so, it is because he reasoned in advance that in order to see it, one must first listen to it, and this requires the filmmaker to conceive a frame that contains it without bending it. The wind thing is undeniable. What to say, for example, about the sex scenes in The criminals? What happens with the musical choices and some love scenes is perfect. The passion of the lovers, the rising temperature of their bodies, has its correlate in the sixteenth notes that mark the rhythm of the open notes that are integrated into the panting, a counterpoint too beautiful to miss.

But the greatest greatness of the film resides in how it empirically demonstrates that the only living god on earth, money, according to Bresson, is an unhappy god. It is preferable to bathe in a river, kiss the one you love and read verses by Ricardo Zelarayán. There are states of the soul that money cannot buy. Moreno felt the desire to film an inventory of everything that cannot be valued in any currency. The world’s materialistic abundance is priceless and filmable.

Roger Koza / Copyleft 2023