Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of its American release on September 2, Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence seems even more melancholy these days. Its two pop stars turned actors are no longer weaving their magic; David Bowie returned to his home planet in 2016, Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also composed the film’s searching score) left us in March of this year. The movie unfolds during World War II, on the Japanese-held island of Java, where stands a grubby POW camp. The camp’s commander is Captain Yonoi (Sakamoto), slim and elegant and young and beautiful; his English equivalent is the newly arriving prisoner Major Jack Celliers (Bowie), also slim, elegant, young and beautiful. This might be a love story for the ages if not for its setting. Then again, maybe it is anyway.

Though the film opens with a kerfuffle involving a Korean prisoner who apparently tried to have his way with a Dutch prisoner, it’s not so much about repressed homosexuality (although that’s in the mix) as about diametrically opposed forces that have more in common than not. The Mr. Lawrence of the title is prisoner Col. John Lawrence (Tom Conti), who speaks fluent Japanese and has struck up something of a friendship with the camp Sgt. Hara (Takeshi Kitano). These two men reach towards each other, grateful for the opportunity to relate as men and not as soldier/prisoner. I wouldn’t say Ōshima avoids homoeroticism so much as indulges it in a sidewise manner — Celliers grinning as he eats a flower, and so on. Really, the movie pits beauty against brutality, nature against the death machines war tries to make out of men.

It’s an exceptionally odd film, with more dialogue about physical frailty and moral guilt than you’d expect. Roger Ebert was nonplussed by the war between the movie’s two acting styles — the mumbly, sardonic British and the shouty, severe Japanese. (Bowie said Ōshima micromanaged everything the Japanese actors did, but left the British actors more or less to themselves.) But one of the contrasting forces here is the difference in repression; neither the Japanese nor the British generally have the language to express what they’re feeling, so they sublimate it in distinctly weird ways. (The face of the typical blustery, get-on-with-it British soldier is Jack Thompson as the POWs’ commander, until Yonoi wants to replace him with Celliers.) There’s a longish flashback in which Celliers reveals his secret shame — that he protected his disabled little brother, but only up to a point. The Japanese and the British have different languages, different cultures surrounding shame, and their seeming to share a weird Venn overlap of psychic land, wherein shame is the common subset, is part of the point.

Ōshima lets Tom Conti deliver the movie’s message, that nobody was right and everyone got dominated by brutal authority. (Conti seems to bring that same queasy wisdom into Oppenheimer as Albert Einstein.) The acting is mainly performed at a pitch of extremes. Yonoi and Celliers stare at each other across many kinds of no man’s land. Human connections between the groups, when made at all, are fleeting and almost abstruse. Hara has a bluff, affable relationship with Lawrence; he gets tanked on sake and gives Celliers and Lawrence a reprieve from death, because someone else was tortured into confessing to the offense (smuggling a radio into camp) and, hey, it’s Christmastime. 

Christmas, of course, hits differently in Japan than in the Western world; it’s a secular day meant for families to get together. The final image finds Hara, his smile taking up half the frame, reiterating his yuletide wishes to Lawrence, as per the title. Ōshima probably isn’t saying anything as simple as that Hara and Lawrence, and Yonoi and Celliers, are part of the same family of man. We’re free to imagine how these men might have greeted each other in another time and place. They seem to see themselves in one another, and vice versa. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence acquires depth and emotional scope the more you dwell on it, and it’s very much designed (to be honest, it’s borderline poky) so that we can dwell on it. It gets at the way soul-sickening self-recrimination can be a bridge to someone else’s common guilt. Put a corresponding political layer over all that — Japan and Britain facing their own sins of empire — and we have a true forgotten great film.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter

It was Cleolinda Jones, that consistently amusing and insightful pop-culture blogger, who pointed out a simple fact: “People in Dracula don’t know they’re in Dracula.” What this means is, not only do the characters not know that someone named Dracula is bad news, they aren’t aware of all the vampire tropes we’ve seen a thousand times, so we have to watch them get wised up, sometimes impatiently. Which brings us to The Last Voyage of the Demeter, where the characters don’t know they’re in one chapter of Dracula. Most of them aren’t even named in the book.

The movie is based on a section of Bram Stoker’s novel dealing with the trip Dracula makes by ship to London. The short passage is creepy and allusive, told in terse semi-sentences by the captain, powered by our imaginations reading between the lines. The film, directed by Norwegian horror journeyman André Øvredal (Trollhunter), turns the story into what Øvredal has described as “Alien on a ship in 1897.” Like a lot of critics, I appreciate what they were going for — a moody old-school monster mash — but the result is aggressively boring. 

The characters are standard-issue placeholders defined by a couple of Screenwriting 101 habits or beliefs, not filled out by personality or action (though David Dastmalchian is commanding as usual as the saturnine first mate). The hero is Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a doctor with experience in astronomy and general ship’s duties. He winds up on the ship after saving the life of the captain’s grandson. There is also a woman, Anna (Aisling Franciosi), who stows away on the ship and drops a lot of infodumps about a creature her people call Dracula. He’s the one, she says, who’s been slinking around the ship, warming up by killing all the animals on board and then picking off crew members one by one every night.

The main problem is that there’s no intrinsic interest in or mystery to any of this, since we know how it ends, although the writers extrapolate as much as they can. It’s a long wait between killings, and the killings are never very impressive or even distinct from each other. Someone is foolishly alone on the ship after dark, and Dracula rushes forth from the shadows, and the blood-draining commences. Dracula is played by Javier Botet, a creature actor in the mold of Doug Jones, and he’s covered in latex that makes him look like a man-sized bat monster. So the movie envisions Dracula solely as an almost-wordless beast who might as well be the xenomorph from Alien. Ultimately he’s just a slasher. We know that Dracula has a human form so as to travel among humans, but we don’t see one here; apparently he just needs to put on a hat and suck in his bat wings and he can pass as a regular human tourist in all that London fog.

All the ideas that might have made The Last Voyage of the Demeter fresh or intriguing or even witty are muscled aside in favor of tediously shot kill scenes, which we might overlook if the entire structure of the thing didn’t point to them as the gory crescendos, and if there were anything else of note going on. I’d say it was a waste of a good premise, but what about this story, as told here, needed to be told? (The best treatment of the events aboard the Demeter remains chapter 7 of Stoker’s novel.) If Dracula is ultimately a slasher here, then this is ultimately a slasher movie despite its trappings and literary pedigree. As such, it is fatally uninteresting.

Sorcerer

When William Friedkin died on August 7, the press of course referred to him in terms of his hits: “the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist.” Friedkin was also the director of 1977’s Sorcerer, a movie he might have preferred to be remembered by. Of all his films, it was his favorite, “the only film I’ve made,” he said in 2017, “that I can still watch.” It ended up being one of his biggest flops, having gone way over budget at great physical risk to the cast and crew; the making of Sorcerer was often as nerve-wracking and nightmarish as the movie itself is. 

Based on the premise of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear, which also inspired H.G. Clouzot’s 1953 classic of the same name, the film comes close to being a pure-cinema riff on the frustrations of machines and nature and how they are aligned against the will of man. Four men hiding out in a Colombian village are selected for what looks to be a suicide mission: using a couple of broken-down trucks, they must convey old boxes of dynamite, which has leaked highly unstable nitroglycerine liquid, over two hundred and eighteen miles of bumpy, treacherous jungle roads — and the most rickety-looking suspension bridge you’ve ever seen — so that a burning oil well can be blown up, dispersing the fires. The men are Scanlon (Roy Scheider), an American wheelman for thieves, on the run from a mob boss; Kassem (Amidou), a terrorist who targeted an Israeli bank; Victor (Bruno Cremer), a stockbroker who fled jail time for tax fraud; and Nilo (Francisco Rabal), an icy hit-man.

Friedkin and writer Walon Green (The Wild Bunch) introduce these men in pre-plot vignettes to establish what they seek to escape. They are offered a large sum of money by the American oil company to perform this mission. In either film version, I think we’re meant to take the story as a metaphor for how capitalism grinds everyone down, though Friedkin tends to let subtext take care of itself; he gets much more juice out of the central challenges, which pit truck against nature and sometimes against itself. Humans create machines to master nature, but here the machines are jerry-rigged and half-dead, and the jungle is robust, throwing many obstacles in the protagonists’ path. (There are no heroes here.)

The legendary (or if it isn’t, it deserves to be) bridge sequence, in which first one truck and then the other seems to exhale stoically and try its luck over the splintered boards and unlikely ropes of that bridge, can still get us to lean forward in our seats and wince audibly, even though we know that nobody died filming it, and the bridge itself was part of hydraulically assisted movie magic. Friedkin, a master of tension, can make us forget all that. Then there’s the fallen-tree sequence, which inspires a Treasure of Sierra Madre-like gust of sardonic laughter from the hit-man, before the terrorist — who has experience with bombs — figures out a way to clear the path. The physical realism is oppressive, reeking of a sense of futility. The men, feeling every inch of the slow 218-mile drive, strain against the elements to attain freedom, which isn’t guaranteed.

I don’t want to get into a contest between Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear. Both are masterful in their distinct ways, and the Clouzot classic has won (and earned) a spot among the Criterion-anointed canon, while Sorcerer, this surly and downbeat thing that could serve as a comment on Vietnam, got chased out of theaters in 1977 by the post-Vietnam bag of candy nobody knew they’d been waiting for, Star Wars. The writing was scrawled in blood on the wall: Friedkin’s taste for antiheroes or flawed heroes, which had stood him in good stead in his previous two hits, was now as much a thing of the past as Clouzot. Disagreeable main characters eventually found a home on HBO and elsewhere on the dial; they were, by and large, no longer welcome in theaters, though Friedkin kept trying. But he could never quite get behind the heroic code or perfect people doing perfect things. Right up to the end he asked, with his usual impatient tenor, “What the fuck is wrong with us? Why do we do this shit?” and to try to answer the former, he made movies exploring the latter. Sorcerer was maybe the clearest example of his mission, of his question. Give it a shot. 

The Unknown Country

This is going to be one of those “in a lesser film” reviews, because Morrisa Maltz’s lovely, becalmed indie feature The Unknown Country keeps declining to do things that a lesser film would do. For instance, we meet our young protagonist, Tana (Lily Gladstone), as she hits the road. Her grandmother has recently died, and Tana is invited to the wedding of her cousin out in South Dakota. She stops for gas late at night, and a man filling his truck nearby stares at her creepily. We tense up, expecting something bad to happen. When she leaves the station, the man’s truck follows her. Then it turns off somewhere, and we never see him again. Maltz has evoked one of the many worrisome incidents that can befall a woman traveling alone without amping it up into the melodrama of a lesser film. For all we know, the man was just lost in his own thoughts, not registering Tana at all, and he just goes on his way.

Similar things happen elsewhere in the film, reminding us that someone in Tana’s situation is vulnerable, but not making us watch her endure anything terrible. Now and then, the movie stops and lets one of the people Tana encounters tell his or her story. Morrisa Maltz filmed scenes with some non-actors talking about themselves, giving The Unknown Country the flavor of a fiction/documentary hybrid, as in some of Chloe Zhao’s films. One of these people is a male store cashier who seems overly flirty until we learn he’s not interested in Tana that way — he’s just one of those harmlessly flirty-with-everyone people you sometimes meet. 

It’s good that Tana’s journey is mostly only internally rough on her, because Lily Gladstone — who got some acclaim for Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and, later this year, will appear on many more people’s radar for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon — is a gentle and friendly presence and makes Tana worth following and caring about; we don’t want to see any harm come to her. If her Tana likes someone onscreen, we like them, too. Tana drives, stops at motels (we hear from the owner of one of the motels), hangs out with family or new friends — it’s a road movie dedicated to finding the odd humanity in the people who pass in and out of Tana’s path, especially those who, like Tana (and Gladstone and much of the cast), are Native American.

The car radio tells us that the story unfolds sometime after the 2016 presidential election; it speaks of a divided nation. But the nation Tana drives through — from Minnesota to, ultimately, Texas — doesn’t seem divided, which suggests that the division is at least partly a media construct. Tana doesn’t encounter any red-hat wearers; most of the folks she does run across are nice. The Unknown Country is a refreshingly “soft” drama — it doesn’t crank up our emotions, it isn’t needlessly traumatizing. The drama inherent in the loss of family and the regaining of family is enough. The movie is made out of the moments and scenes that would be the first to get edited out of a, well, lesser film. It lingers and observes but is crisply paced and crosses the finish line at barely over 80 minutes. It puts no strain on our patience or on anything else. We relax into it and stay relaxed.

I’ll remember the waitress who talks lovingly about her many cats. I’ll remember the motel owner, and the Korean guy Isaac (Raymond Lee) who keeps Tana company for a day or so, and the wedding of Tana’s cousin, an actual wedding incorporated into the film. (Yet the wedding happens only a half hour in — a lesser film would make the wedding a big dramatic or comedic climax.) I’ll remember that strange guy at the gas station, whose story I almost expected the movie to break off for a couple of minutes and tell. I’ll remember Flo, the 90-year-old go-getter who cuts a rug every Friday at the local dance hall. And I’ll remember Tana, such a kindly and welcoming presence, the sort we need more of everywhere. We need more of this sort of movie, too.