I take the train to London a lot but rarely do I spend my
time in transit wisely. Ideally, the ninety minutes I am afforded per journey should
be spent reading or writing, but I often find myself running down the battery
of my phone solving a wordsearch or a sudoku puzzle, which, while stimulating
enough to engage my mind in short bursts, is far from productive. On Saturday,
set for my only day at the "zeroth" edition of the fascinatingly
programmed London East Asia Film Festival, I thought I'd turn off my phone and bring
a book for a change. I had recently picked up some second-hand novels destined
to add height to the already towering "to
read" pile in my bedroom, so perhaps, I thought, it would be wise to make
a start on finally working my way through them. I finally decided on Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami as
my novel of choice, and set about reading it on the train. It's, admittedly
only from the forty pages I've read so far, a fascinating novel, following two
very different stories that slowly begin to converge. The first, about a 15
year old boy running away from home, is told in the odd chapters; while the
second, initially, at least, relates to a strange event during WWII in which
sixteen children mysteriously collapse in a forest, and is told in the even
chapters. As a structure, it works well, and both stories are, again, at this
early stage, compelling. But one section in particular stood out to me. Early
in the first story, Kafka, the young protagonist, is talking to a librarian, Oshima,
who tells him:
"According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend, there were
three types of people," Oshima says. "Have you heard about
this?"
"No."
"In ancient times, people weren't simply male or female, but one of
three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words each
person was made out of the components of two people."
A variation of this idea can be applied to Kiyoshi
Kurosawa's Journey To The Shore, which, along with six other movies,
received its UK premiere at the festival. The film follows a young
widow, Mizuki, as she deals with the sudden return of her long-dead husband,
Yusuke, who drowned at sea three years earlier. He, or rather his ghost, takes
her on a trip across Japan to visit all the people, both "like me"
and "like you," dead or living, he has befriended since his death,
including an old newspaper man, a young couple who own a restaurant, and the
residents of a bucolic village in the mountains. On the journey, Yusuke is
shown to be very much alive, able to interact with the world of the living, and
able to be interacted with in return. One scene shows a visibly perturbed small
boy on a train tentatively walk over to Yusuke and touch his leg, before his
mother, oblivious to the effect Yusuke is having on her child, instinctively rushes
to pull him back. Straight away, Kurosawa is blurring the lines between life
and death, and not just with Yusuke. Mizuki's first pre-return appearance sees
her lifelessly navigating a lonely life, drained of all colour and vitality, meekly
nodding along to the passively offensive remarks of a disgruntled mother angry at
the lack of progress her daughter has made in learning to play piano under
Mizuki's diffident tutorship.
Neither Mizuki or Yusuke could accurately be described as
alive/alive or dead/dead. Instead, they both seem to occupy the same space in
between these two poles, existing as exclaves from the worlds that possess
them, simultaneously separate and tenuously connected. But being alive/dead and
dead/alive are not the same thing, and the subtle metaphysical differences
between the two lovers are pulling them further apart. Each encounter they have
on this ostensibly romantic journey exposes the gulf between life and death further.
At one point, Mizuki sees the ghost of the newspaper man in the street and
rushes over to say hello. He doesn't see her, as if she's not there at all, and
carries on with his work before inexplicably disappearing, leaving Mizuki
standing alone in the street. Later, the very much in love couple are walking
together along a street in town, and Mizuki turns to Yusuke to tell him:
"this is my favourite moment ever." Yusuke seems unmoved by this, and
later he brings it up in a conversation about the relative benefits of their
differing states of existence, as if to suggest its significance was entirely incomprehensible
to him.
And maybe it was. Aside from the occasional wry smile,
Yusuke never shows any genuine emotion towards his wife, or anyone alive, and only
during a heated encounter with a fellow ghost does his stoic facade slip, and
even then only for a second. This inability to connect on an emotional level
seems the only difference between being dead and being alive in Journey To The Shore, and Kurosawa, as ever, subtly suggests this
rather than dealing with it literally. The clothes of both characters, for
example, at first seem lifeless. Mizuki initially wears a dull navy blue
cardigan, a grey buttoned-up shirt, and a loose grey a-line skirt during her
day-to-day life, and pale grey pyjamas at night. Yusuke arrives in a mustard
yellow coat, a burgundy jumper, and grey-blue trousers; all muted shades of
typically bright colours. As their romance (re)develops, even as long gestating
issues in their marriage start to emerge, Mizuki's self-confidence returns, and
her clothing gradually becomes more vibrant: grey shirts are discarded in
favour of brilliant white ones, dour skirts make way for a pair of royal blue wide-legged
trousers, and the cardigans disappear completely. Similarly, as Yusuke begins
to act on his irrepressible human impulses, namely to have sex with his wife,
which he refused out of hand earlier, his clothing also shifts from dull to
vibrant, and he starts wearing a bright blue track jacket and red checked
shirt. They're happy again.
But Yusuke's embrace of humanity ultimately marks the end
of his relationship with both his wife and the world of the living. Their second
chance at love energises Mizuki but, no matter how much he tries to mask it,
Yusuke is and will always be dead. This romance is inevitably doomed from the
start, and plays out that way, perhaps explaining (to some degree, at least) the
widely negative reception Journey To The
Shore received at its Cannes premiere. But Kurosawa uses its conventions as
a mannequin, of sorts, adding layers to craft a low-key but deeply affecting study
of what it is to live without living; dead/alive, alive/dead. Early on, Mizuki
discovers the newspaper man cutting glossy images of flowers out of magazines,
before adding them to the gorgeous faux-botanical collage above his bed. When
his ghost suddenly disappears, presumably to an afterlife, the mural
disintegrates to dust. Impressions of life can die too.
Though not necessarily about life and death, although it
quite easily could be, Chinese director Bi Gan similarly blurs lines with his
mystifying debut, Kaili Blues. Occupying
a constantly shifting space somewhere between dreams and memory, the film follows, as far as I can tell, several
disparate events related to two doctors working in an empty hospital in the
tropical town of Kaili. The younger doctor, an ex gang-member, searches for the
nephew obsessed with drawing clocks his brother abandoned while he was in
prison. His older colleague gives him some items: a cassette tape, a Hawaiian
shirt, an old photograph; to return to a former flame of hers in one of the towns
he passes through on his journey. As he travels, he finds himself in a strange
village that exists outside of time. Memories overlap. Sadness pervades. Time
becomes an abstract concept.
This description hardly seems to do it justice. Kaili Blues is an easy film to get lost
in, but there are clues to help navigate the labyrinth. Repetitions emerge, both
through images (a spluttering moped, cupping marks on a man's back) and of
words (usually in the form of names, or questions asked by the doctor relating
to his search), which act as landmarks to provide context for the images we're
seeing. But no sooner than a vague sense of clarity appears, the film veers off
in a totally different, seemingly illogical direction, and the helpless feeling
of mesmeric confusion returns once more.
The most notable example of this shift, one surely
destined for a kind of arthouse notoriety, is the elaborate 40 minute unbroken
shot which follows different characters around the streets of a small village.
Entirely handheld, though the methods of transportation are difficult to
ascertain (at some points it seems as if the camera-operator is simply walking
behind characters, while at others the camera travels too quickly and steadily
for that to be the case, but there's no obvious transition from transport to
foot or vice-versa), the shot is an astonishing feat of choreography. But, far
from a boastful display of arrogance, the extended scene impressively illustrates
Kaili Blues' surreal dream logic. One
strand of the shot focuses on a young woman as she leaves work to watch a band
play in the village square. She walks to a small dock, bumping into a young
moped driver who likes her, and takes a boat across the river. When she arrives
on the other side, she buys a pinwheel, and again bumps into the young man with
his moped, who takes the pinwheel, breaks it, and follows her as she walks
across a large, seemingly often overlooked bridge back across the river. She
walks past the workplace she just left, telling her colleague that the band is
about to start, before arriving in the village square at the precise moment the
band begin to play their first song. The young man makes her a new pinwheel.
Then Bi Gan shifts to follow a different character, and the shot continues.
This is a place in which things line up perfectly in ways
that simply don't happen in reality. It's an odd scene which, while not
entirely representative of Kaili Blues
as a whole, certainly echoes its concept. A subjective procedural, in essence,
in which the nostalgia, hopes, regrets, and sadness of the doctor's search blur
together to form an overwhelming haze, not obscuring reality so much as
wallowing in a frustrated and convoluted thought process. Or maybe it's
something else entirely, it really is impossible to know for sure. But, however
impenetrable it may seem on a first pass, Kaili
Blues is a puzzle worth
struggling with.