Journal Entries
"Love Letters" and "April Story," Two Films by Shunji Iwai
Posted Jul 2, 2002
Already, before “Love Letter” and the short “April Story,” just on “Lily Chou Chou” and “Yentown” I’d been puzzling my taste for the work of director Iwai. He seems to enrage more than one critic I read, yet I’m able also to dote on critical icons Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Miike, and the like whose talents may exceed Iwai’s. Part of it may be Iwai’s use of space. There’s a rare silent, title forgotten, whose action for a reel or two floats between a sunlit kitchen and a just slightly brighter backyard. Camera and character choreography are so unobtrusively informative that, transported into the scene, I could have navigated the set spontaneously. I knew where the cabinets and table were, the windows, the door to the rest of the house. I knew what each side of the door to the yard looked like, how far it was from a tall hedge opposite, and that there was no step up from yard to kitchen. Plot and characters are gone from me, but the black-and-white kitchen and yard–with no tie to my life–I’ve never lived with kitchen open to a yard–are unforgettable. I’m not saying Iwai does quite that, but each film contains intriguing spaces. I don’t know where in “Lover Letter’s” junior high the library is, but there’s the displacement between the two young women’s towns, the group walking the highway that killed(Yes, it made me think of poor Arthur Dent; and much as in “The Guide” the protagonist here manages to bypass the destruction.)the presumed address, the overlapping presences when mourning woman visits her counterpart’s town: all things that could be mapped. Also mapable is the fact that that though the dead fiance's mother clearly has more in common with the doppelganger than with the mourning heroine, she never meets the former. “Yentown’s” refugee town’s existence outside the city doesn’t mandate transitions presented as road trips, yet most are. What I retain of “Lily Chou Chou” are rice fields under brightly lit overcast skies, the river of heads in which the murderer pursues with the current, then flees against it, school rooms and rape warehouse sunlit, residences often night lit. “April Story” contains a shot or two that seem to have been taken from the floor Ozu-style, I think I could make my way around its bookstore, and the dry fly-fishing lessons certainly represent an odd displacement. If you liked “Love Letter,” you should seek out and watch “Whisper of the Heart,” by a minor director, since passed away, at Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. (It’s on the Studio Ghibli Box Set, ebay and elsewhere.) By the time you hit the animated film’s library, you’ll know what I mean.
The DVDs on which I watched these–they happen to have been Korean with English or Korean subtitles but are presumably identical to the Japanese issue–hold clearest image I’ve seen. 4x zoom yields a viable image, and even 8x is this side of pixellated.
No idea what the odds are of Iwai having read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but my reference above makes me wonder to what extent "The Guide" may be, deep, deep down, a Iwai-like tearjerker.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Jul 2, 2002
Climbing Poems
Posted Jun 30, 2002
LOST TOGETHER
At the bottom as too
often happens I lost
being lost. I couldn’t
go back now I knew.
The way back, known,
the path ahead,
remembered, held
no lure.
At the bottom as too
often happens I woke
and knew that even
if I fell back
I wouldn’t dream
your voice flowing under
icy scree
I trod.
At bottom as too
often happens I knew
you couldn’t have hiked
lost long beside
my delighted not knowing
which blue lake
below pointed
home.
At the last as it had to
my pain at losing,
too, even your
way home blossomed
to joy at the horror
damp behind
craggy skies in
your eyes.
SUNSPOT
don’t look! I told myself
not blinded but not knowing
I stepped anyway and stepped again
and only then thought
I fell not badly one
boot rocked a granite plate
one knee reddened a knob below
I didn’t look I saw
the hole clear the ridge east
tear slowly cloudless gray and my eye
you knelt I stood you stood
I saw it destroy
shadows in the hair that flees your cap
it tore your shoulder neck cheek then
it was your eye
until my eye healed
LOVER LOST
blue turns white-turns
wrong turn? what turn?
meadow where
which
green lake blue take
this ledge No! take
don’t go
wait
chew watch breathe think
that chink No! drink
down stretch
step
this!-hop-this! reach
next? well-just touch
here? how?
don’t
turn look down won’t
think not don’t what
take gain
when
blue sky not
okay hop! blink
breath found
now
is this is NO!
stepdownslidedon’t
NO! fall
NO!
past? twist down bounce!
clown! bounce grab stone
what? wet?
moss
whose WHAT? fingers
ice? too WHO? fast
slide roll
can’t
is this am I
going you WHO?
NOW? die
NO!
what? what?-twist! STOPPED!
what? stopped! what? why?
think breathe
“HEEELLLLLPPP!”
Discuss this Journal entry [4]
Latest reply: Jun 30, 2002
fjg
Researcher U197461
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."