As an unprecedented success overtaking Titanic at the Japanese box office and becoming the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, winning worldwide acclaim and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Spirited Away has since solidified its stature as the preeminent Japanese animated film—an amalgam of dreamlike Japanese myth that has surpassed what is Japanese, exhibiting a timeless universality. The story is that of a girl, Chihiro, who follows her parents into what seems to be a derelict amusement park that they have discovered, having strayed from the highway into the dense thickets of an eerie woodland. After spotting a buffet stall, her parents begin eating, and Chihiro, wandering on her…
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As the whimsical and wingless angel, second class, Clarence voices the fundamental theme of It’s a Wonderful Life, embodying its spirit of undying hope and resolute buoyancy: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” In the intimate town of Bedford Falls, New York, George Bailey envisions a future of travel and achievement, hoping to jettison his hometown and experience success in the world. But a series of disappointments confines him to Bedford Falls, where the Bailey Brothers’ Building and Loan awaits him; forgoing travel as well as college, George remains in the family business to…
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In Playtime, Jacques Tati creates a delightful modernity satirizing urbanity, technology, and confusion, delivering a paean to a hapless humanity dwelling in Paris, regimented with absurd furniture, lookalike vehicles, and countless windows of transparent glass. This is the tyranny of a time engulfed by the history to come, sometime between the pager and the internet, when the novelty of towering industry was still a fascination, and an endless, bewitching perplexity. The opening credits appear over a sky mottled by clouds, leading into a Paris featuring the latest architectural marvels and the uniformity of a new era. Two nuns strolling abreast enter a building through glass doors, strolling into a concourse…
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In long shot, supine in his apartment at 6:00 p.m., Jef Costello lies in bed with a cigarette whose smoke plumes into the window light. Punctuated by the chirps of a bullfinch in a cage, the portentous quietude of the room prevails until a quote of the samurai’s code appears onscreen, reading as follows: “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle…perhaps…” The final word of that quote is a knowing gesture of the director, Jean-Pierre Melville, who fabricates both the quote and the book, “Bushido”, to which he attributes it; the quote sets the tone of a…
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A lone waif plies the strand and searches for firewood, pottering with a walking stick until a group of children, running wildly to her, calls her back home as one explains that “there’s a man here. He came on a big motorcycle. He says Rosa is dead.” Returning with the waif, the children find their mother in tears bartering with an oafish, swarthy gentleman, who in exchange for 10,000 lire has bought the very waif called by the children. A woman more lugubrious than woebegone, having spoken to the strongman whose name is Zampanò, the mother says to justify her daughter’s competence that “she’ll do what she’s told. She just…
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The superlative film of the neorealist movement, Bicycle Thieves plays as tragedy. Having endured unemployment and penury, Antonio accepts a job for which he needs a bicycle; he procures the bicycle at the cost of bedsheets, which his wife has sacrificed, amplifying the indignity of their living conditions; and he goes about his first day with success, after leaving his son, Bruno, at the pitiable filling station to which he is to return that evening. But after Antonio leaves his bicycle against a wall, a reprobate steals it, making off into the distance and leaving Antonio where he started—in penury, indignity, and squalor. If this misfortune fails to convey the…
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After falling for the stratagem of his compatriots, the French, who have ousted him as traitorous and cowardly, Parolles in the fourth of act of All’s Well That Ends Well makes a provocative self-assessment: “Who knows himself a braggart, / Let him fear this; for it will come to pass / That every braggart shall be found an ass,” after which he says, betraying a resilience to ignominy, “being fooled, by foolery thrive. / There’s place and means for every man alive” (Shakespeare 4.3.323-326, 4.3.328-329). A sycophant epitomizing the crude and the disloyal, Parolles possesses a quality endearing him to the audience and rendering him rascally and likable: honesty. He…
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In the antepenultimate stanza of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, published with an anthology of his work in 1842, Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes that “Howe’er it be, it seems to me, / ’Tis only noble to be good. / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood,” commemorating the humanity of its author as much as the honorable sentiments of civility and altruism. The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets, contradicting these sentiments with psychopathic charm and hauteur, exhibits a cunning exacting revenge on the hypocrisies of British classism. Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini, heir to the dukedom of the majestic Chalfont, is the psychopathic protagonist intent…
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The Kid is an unerring film of the Chaplin oeuvre from 1921, when the freshness of his appeal was still to meet its apex in masterworks such as City Lights, and his genius as a silent comedian of the cinema, as capable of evoking pathos as hearty laughter, had yet to overtake humankind. Though the runtime of the film barely exceeds sixty minutes, a density of feeling and action in so brief a time is a rarity that Chaplin undertakes, delivering to his audience this spectacle of the streets. From a charity hospital a woman exits, carrying an infant that is to become a foundling; this is confirmed by the…
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The apex of the Janiculum and the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola constitute the backdrop of the sacred and the profane, which in The Great Beauty concern those inhabitants of the city of Rome. This location of the opening scene has as its precedent the Trevi Fountain, to which the film La Dolce Vita brought not only renown but notoriety. While the latter film brought to the world the vision of Fellini and of Roman squalor, The Great Beauty achieves something more meditative and interior than its predecessor; artful and mordant, La Dolce Vita created a social critique that The Great Beauty, using characterization and lively dialogue, subordinates to the quest of…
