Letterboxd Reviews #4

It’s been a while since I published a compendium of Letterboxd reviews so, of course, here are two at once. In the past couple of years, I’ve been writing more and more on Letterboxd, Mostly just brief snippets and short texts, but I like them all, however small, however fragmented they may be, and I’m keen to keep a record of them here. So here we go. Part two of a bumper crop. In case you missed it, here's part one. The texts in this post were written between September 2024 and February 2025, and are presented in alphabetical order. I hope you enjoy reading them. 

Bad Day at Black Rock | John Sturges, 1955

A nation scarred by war: the men who fight come back with a pain that drives compassion; the men who can't are left with nothing but hate and anger, and nowhere to aim but home. Flowers grow through the dust of the desert from unmarked graves, but nobody picks them. There's no place for beauty in Black Rock, but there can be. A film about rebuilding America by rooting out the darkness. The flowers are there, it's just a matter of finding them.

The Conformist | Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970

A man trying again and again to assimilate into whichever crowd will have him, only he doesn't fit anywhere, never able to flow with the currents of anything beyond self-preservation and stuck in a spiral of people dancing around him, enjoying a rhythm he can't find. A spare part of a man at best, and, when it comes down to it, an impotent one. Lacerating in its depiction of how fascism serves as the most appealing shortcut to power for worthless men like this, men who crave a feeling of importance without having to do anything to earn it. Men who have meetings in large offices in marble buildings, their voices reverberating loudly to no one. It's so easy to sound important in a cavernously empty room.

Cloud | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024

An online world of slippery motivations and directionless anger brought into reality by the shattering of the illusion of anonymity. A lack of culpability dragging everyone closer to hell. Kurosawa fills it with frosted glass, dirty polythene, tattered curtains; obscured windows into other worlds. Usernames and aliases, lies and scams. The shift to violence comes when the fog clears and the masks slip, and one true fact brings the whole thing down. All that's left is a void of money where love used to be, and the only thing that sparks a smile is a symbol on a screen changing from "for sale" to "sold".

Golem | Piotr Szulkin, 1979

Shadows and blindness, and a total lack of information. A fake man's desire to understand a world in which everyone knows more than he does, as he's pushed deeper into a maze by the lure of learning something. Fix this watch, carry this oven, poison those birds. But no questions, just demands. No choices, no alternatives. A lot of narrow staircases, thin corridors, grey concrete streets. One path laid out for him. Blunt, bleak, crushing. Everyone has cataracts but the eye doctor is dead.

Hard Truths | Mike Leigh, 2024

Leigh has always had a thing about potted plants, and flowers in vases, and here they are again. Life without life, separated from nature and reliant on human care and attention. A big, empty house, all light but no air, and no decoration. Just sanitised surfaces and people tiptoeing between them, scared to leave a mark or make a sound. Everyone exists in the orbit of Pansy (another flower). Her defeated husband, who fixes radiators in other people’s homes, and her son, always wearing headphones, who wants to fly. Elsewhere, her sister and her nieces are always warm, always out in the world, enjoying life. For Leigh, it’s impossible to be happy without letting life in. When Moses buys his mother flowers, she anxiously puts them in a vase, only for Curtley to throw them into the overgrown garden when she leaves the room. This home is no place for flowers. And so it goes on.

In The Wake | Takahisa Zeze, 2021

A police procedural, with a murder investigation framed as a search for justice of a different kind. Zeze spends very little time on the police work, focusing instead on building all these characters from the horrors of the 2011 tsunami, and the pain they have had to endure in the nine years after. Everyone has lost something, and so everyone understands the impulses that drive such murders. Choices in context, and Zeze exhaustively draws that context for everyone involved. A bit too contrived in its linking of all these people, but an immensely powerful study of corruption and inhumanity all the same — visualised beautifully by the fully dressed but faceless mannequin decorating the office of a politician running for office on a ticket of welfare reform.

Pale Flower | Masahiro Shinoda, 1964

Blank faces, slumped shoulders. Life as a succession of larger and larger bets, and searching for thrills within the rigid systems and protocols of high-stakes card games and yakuza turf wars. A film about playing games to feel alive, and playing with nothing to lose. Prison is just time spent somewhere else. Financial losses mean nothing. And so everyone hurtles towards oblivion, trying to feel something in the process before there's nothing left to feel.

Rancho Notorious | Fritz Lang, 1952

A quest for revenge borne from tragedy. A film that opens with a kiss and ends with a death, all loaded with emotion, but Lang muddies the waters by having it all play out under the fake skies of a different kind of world. Corrupt politicians held in custody on election day by the men set to take their place. A rigged game in a makeshift casino designed to make winners feel lucky. Everything is predetermined. Even this man's revenge becomes an obligation, something that he will achieve simply because he has nothing else to do but achieve it. And so the seasons pass. Summer comes round again and the chase continues in perpetuity. He thinks he's acting out of love but that's long since rotted away. He can only gesture towards it, faking and weaponising it as he moves further and further away from the man he used to be. His only propulsion is revenge. And once that's gone, there's nowhere left to go.

Suzhou River | Lou Ye, 2000

Stories as mythical creatures, their allure stemming from an unquashable mystery. Mermaids probably aren't real, but maybe they are. Maybe doppelgängers are, too. A wounded man tells a story of lost love, first through his own eyes, and then through someone else's. Imagined events, told perhaps as self-deception, perhaps as a way to make a painful reality less banal, or perhaps because this is how things really happened. It’s impossible to know anything with certainty. A glimpse of a mermaid in a muddy river, flowing endlessly past the shells of derelict buildings and seen through the imprecise lens of a handheld camera. Everything is true and nothing is. All there is to do is find a glimmer of something to hold on to in the mystery. And isn’t that why we tell stories?

Tausend Augen | Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, 1984

Surveillance and voyeurism as routes to hell, numbing all feeling from life and pushing people towards a catatonic pursuit of money but nothing to spend it on. Only engaging with the world with curiosity brings happiness, be it watching movies or sketching people or going to zoos or dancing. Also features Jean-Marie Straub delivering a lecture on marine biology, and Wim Wenders stealing a VHS copy of Dr Mabuse the Gambler from a video store. A truly alien object.

License To Live | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1998

License To Live | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1998

A classic Kurosawa ending. A postcard found among the belongings of Yutaka Yoshii, a 24 year old whose decade spent in a coma following a car accident has cast him adrift from his past life. His parents are no longer together, his sister lives overseas, and the family business has long since shut down. Yutaka, a teenage boy thrust suddenly into adulthood, is no longer a priority for his family, and his only guidance as he re-enters society is Fujimori, an old friend of his father’s who runs a small fish farm on the land of what used to be Yutaka’s home. A grubby, world-weary man who drives a flat-back truck piled high with old refrigerators, Fujimori has no obligation to look after Yutaka but takes him in anyway, and gives him the time and the space to build a new life for himself.

On the front of the postcard, a view of the New York City skyline; and on the back, a blank space for writing. There’s a whole world out there for Yutaka to find, a world away from this plot of land on the edge of Tokyo. But this postcard is as close as he’ll get to any of it. His world has become very small, and any idea of a future life, of hopes and dreams and things left to come, has been discarded and forgotten between the pages of a book. Instead, he tries in vain to rebuild an idea of childhood that remains broken beyond repair. This postcard is everything that Yutaka has had taken from him by his accident, and everything he has given away in trying to bring his past back to life. An untravelled world, and stories that won’t ever be written.

Tokyo Sonata | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008

Tokyo Sonata | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008

Originally published 4th May 2015 on my Tumblr. I'm moving some old writing from there over here because it's nice to have it all in one place. It's also nice to look back once in a while.

On the wall of the family home at the heart of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata is a clock emulating the style of a Piet Mondrian painting: a grid, created by intersecting black lines, with a horizontal blue rectangle in the top right corner, and a smaller vertical red rectangle on the left, surrounds a small clock-face in the centre. It appears on screen maybe twice in the whole film, but it stands out as an image of imbalance among the regimented interior design of this typically Japanese home.

Imbalance within a family unit is very much Kurosawa's primary concern in Tokyo Sonata: Ryuhei, a strict middle-manager of a healthcare equipment firm, is suddenly left unemployed after his company relocates to China to cut costs. Too proud to tell his family, he continues the pretence of his daily routine as he searches with hundreds of other men for a new job. As he struggles to find work, he takes his frustrations out on his family: he won't let his young son, Kenji, take piano lessons, or his older son, Takashi, join the US military, and he doesn't tell his wife, Megumi, anything; because of this, his family gradually spirals out of control.

Kurosawa cuts back and forth between these micro-plots (and others, including the younger son's accidental "bullying" of his teacher after he's punished for something he didn't do, and Ryuhei's odd friendship with a fellow unemployed man lying to his family) as they unfold, and, initially at least, they seem relatively unassuming, ending abruptly before they have chance to develop into anything outwardly dramatic. At one point, Ryuhei arrives home late to find his wife asleep on the sofa. He wakes her up and goes to bed, while she's left there, arms raised in search of a husband to help her to her feet. This moment suggests a breakdown in their relationship, but Kurosawa has no interest in drawing attention to its importance: it's the accumulation of these brief moments that makes his cinema so destructive — and when Tokyo Sonata finally goes, it goes hard. The predominantly static compositions of the first half give way to quick tracking shots, while the reserved characters finally show emotion; the cramped offices and houses become vast shopping malls and empty roads, and the episodic structure becomes a parallel narrative, with flashbacks and a dream sequence, as each character tries to escape their own life.

The idea that they need to escape their lives because they've fallen into chaos so quickly is terrifying, if only because it could happen to anyone, at any time, and because it's entirely out of our control. This is the kind of idea that Kurosawa thrives on: in Cure, a detective tries and fails to control an apathetic young man who manipulates people into killing each other, while Pulse presents a world in which a lack of human connection is the catalyst for total annihilation. Both of these films end with their respective problems unresolved, yet Tokyo Sonata ends on a high. At their lowest points, both Ryuhei and Megumi wish they could start their lives over, but the film ends with a moment of familial unity. Enjoying life together as a family is more important than money or pride. The Mondrian clock is never seen again.

Cure | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997

Cure | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997

Originally published 19th January 2015 on my Tumblr. I'm moving some old writing from there over here because it's nice to have it all in one place. It's also nice to look back once in a while.

The world of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure is a blank space. Almost entirely interior, the rooms occupied by the unlucky characters are uncluttered and bare, painted off-white and meticulously organised. Posters, the few there are, are geometrically pinned to walls, while the desks and shelves boast small filing cabinets and folders. The only unregimented space in the film belongs to its antagonist, amnesiac drifter Mamiya, whose apartment is littered with books on personality disorders, mesmerism, and psychoanalysis, six month old leftovers and the decomposing corpse of a monkey, tied to a pipe with its arms and legs folded across its body.

Mamiya is manipulating people, who he meets in seemingly chance encounters, into murdering somebody close to them through a form of hypnotisation. His methods are shown in long, mostly static sequences but never explained, and his motivation is never addressed. His odd presence in scenes, nonchalantly luring his victims in conversational circles before stunning them with the flame from his lighter or the slow trickle of a spilt glass of water, stands out immediately as something that shouldn't be there: in his first scene, he suddenly appears on a beach; later, he appears on the roof of a building.

His abrupt appearances make no logical sense, but Kurosawa seems more interested in the idea of how a man like this can exist in such a calm world than trying to explain his actions. Mamiya shows no empathy when his experiments turn people into murderers, as if he's testing his abilities on lab rats, not human beings, and, as the police finally work out who he is, the revelation of his solitary existence suggests a disconnect from both society and basic human interaction — which, in Kurosawa's cinema, is the root of all evil.

A Collection of (Short) Reviews

Some short impressions / reviews / whatever, written between June 2015 and last week, all taken from my Letterboxd, and all revised to be a little less fragmented. I like them, and I'd rather they were all in one place — so here they are.

Autumn Tale | Eric Rohmer, 1998

The way Rohmer shoots conversations between two people in this is fascinating. Characters talk objectively about their love lives together in a two-shot, before, usually as one of them says something the other doesn't agree with or want to talk about, one of them leaves the frame. The camera stays as it is, leaving one character alone in a shot made for two, while Rohmer cuts to the other in a shot of their own. The conversations continue as if nothing has happened, cutting back and forth between the two shots, and the characters generally reunite within one frame after talking a little more, but the distance between them in these brief moments, however small, feels enormous, suggesting a divide between them that bubbles under the surface of every word they're saying.

An Autumn Afternoon | Yasujiro Ozu, 1962

Calendars and clocks, usually placed right next to each other, seem to take up space on the walls of every building. One of the clocks, in the eldest son's small, modern apartment, needs to be wound to stop it from stopping, and the calendar in the hyper-Americanised bar shows two months on a single page. Ozu isn't just making us aware of time and its passing, but also how indefinite and imprecise time can be. That clock could have stopped hours, days, even weeks earlier, and the date could be represented by any of the numbers on the calendar. The present becomes harder and harder to grasp — an uncertain period between the past and the future, tradition and modernity, men and women, East and West, the old and the young.

The Color of Money | Martin Scorsese, 1986

A retired pool hustler turned whiskey salesman drinks a can of Coca Cola in a practice room after working on his game, as if to embrace the new-school, sugar-rush attitudes that have made him obsolete. His maniacally arrogant new protégé values the short term thrill of a victory over the long term reward of making people believe you're a loser and taking their money when you show them that you're not. There's no time to wait for craft anymore. It's about the rush. Quick money for a quick game. Coca Cola sells by the can while his whiskey fills boxes in storerooms. It doesn't sell anymore.

Homework | Abbas Kiarostami, 1989

A series of very simple 1-on-1 interviews in which Kiarostami (wearing sunglasses indoors, sat behind a desk) asks several schoolchildren about their homework that, collectively, paints a picture of a generation of children failed by education, both in school and at home. As the interviews mount up, patterns begin to emerge: stories of violent schoolteachers, illiterate and impatient family members, the importance of cartoons; and the accumulation of these similarities creates a sense of universality, that education in Iran is failing not just at this school, but across the entire country. Away from the interviews Kiarostami observes life in the school: in particular, a school-wide religious ceremony of remembrance that quickly descends into chaos. The students are asked to repeat the words of a religious song the headteacher is singing, but their attention drifts. They talk among themselves and play with their friends, not because they're disrespectful, but because they have no comprehension of why this ceremony should be respected. Dictation and repetition does not create understanding. Kiarostami emphasises this by silencing their singing ("out of respect for the ritual", an adult perspective), instead focusing on the indifferent, unknowingly offensive behaviour of the students, while the teachers simply continue, seemingly oblivious to the problem in front of their eyes.

In The Mouth of Madness | John Carpenter, 1994

Carpenter's tight framing and slow panning offers a world of potential horrors offscreen, forever out of sight: an unfathomable danger that may not exist, emanating from a place that's impossible to accurately comprehend. A town, not on any map, and only found following a bizarre transportive nightmare, is the source of a demonic plague affecting the readers of a smash-hit horror novel, and viewers of the smash-hit movie adaptation (a lot of people across America (at least)). But is it really happening, or is it a fiction? Nothing is concrete. It's an illogical movie, or one that at least has its own logic: roads impossibly loop back on themselves, people disappear in one place and reappear somewhere totally different. Something is making people do crazy, monstrous things, whether it's real or not. Cultural hysteria or supernatural force: what's the difference?

Lady in the Water | M. Night Shyamalan, 2006

Shyamalan loves closed-off, self-sustaining communities (the farm in Signs, the village in The Village, etc), in which some kind of unfathomable alien threat is closing in from outside. Here, the threat is so strange: a fantasy in real life, but taken seriously to the point that nobody questions it. A water nymph appears in the pool of an apartment complex, and the concern of the characters isn't "who are you really?", but rather "why are you here?" and "how can I help you?" The entire community runs with it, and everyone in the complex has a role that they take without question. Total, unwavering faith. Hearing is believing. Action is never in doubt.

Loft | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2005

The stagnation of an award-winning author out of ideas, commissioned to churn out a generic, marketable romance novel and embroiled in a ghost story that may or may not be a fiction. "The eternal corpse," used here to describe a 1000 year old "mummy" preserved virtually intact by the mud of a swamp (mud that the author inexplicably coughs up, as if to reject the idea that preservation of past glories will be any part of her future), could be equally used to summarise a genre that, by 2005, had perhaps run its course for Kurosawa (his only other classifiable horror movie since then, Retribution, was released the following year as part of a J-horror series in the pipeline since 2004). A funeral of sorts, then, and what a send off it is — flitting gleefully between classic Kurosawa accretion of tension and an exaggerated, Twixt-like visual flare (swirling fog on a lake, cartoonish green corpses, incongruous whip pans and fade outs), this bizarrely constructed narrative, complete with flashbacks and dream sequences contained within blurred layers of fiction and reality, is significantly less concrete than its face value suggests. And then there's the devilish ending, only muddying the waters further. A bewildering line in the sand.

Masques | Claude Chabrol, 1987

Perhaps the quintessential Chabrol movie. Makes literal his interest in masks by presenting each character as a false version of themselves, generally used to hide their real, somewhat surreptitious motivations. The match-making for the elderly TV show, with its assertive "applaud!" signs and love-heart number cards being an interesting parallel to this idea of an ever-present falsehood clouding reality — although perhaps a more interesting one would be the game of tennis that the show's host and his biographer briefly play, if only because of tennis's unusual status as a sport in which a player can score more points and win more games than an opponent and still lose the match.

Private Fears in Public Places | Alain Resnais, 2006

Connections based on (literal) divisions: walls, windows, curtains, bars; relationships based on untruths: false names, sexuality, miscommunication, the difference between hearing and listening. If nobody is what they appear to be then nobody really knows anybody, and we're all doomed to be disappointed and alone, with or without another person.

PTU | Johnnie To, 2003

To equates respecting the police to respecting a violent gangster who could kill you for not bringing him a beer quickly enough in a restaurant — and why not, when the cops spend so much of their time covering up their own mistakes and incompetence by planting drugs on the innocent, stealing evidence from crime scenes, and torturing people for information, instead of what they should be doing: solving crimes, catching bad guys; all under a misguided code of brotherhood. The fact that the absurd conclusion is a triumph for some and an embarrassing failure for others is particularly damning — people who slip on banana skins are invariably clowns.

Ready Player One | Steven Spielberg, 2018

The gamification of culture is the death of culture. No new ideas in 30 years, just commodified nostalgia, malleable avatars and usernames; cross-brand fantasies played out ad infinitum. The Oasis is a desert, a cultural wasteland, a "place" that Spielberg seems to simultaneously be wary of and have deep reverence for. Specially designed game suits translate digital sensations to physical ones, but they don't cover mouths and tongues — nobody can tell what's real anymore. A race for extraordinary IRL power quickly becomes a URL war for freedom, fought by regular people wearing VR headsets in the streets of a city but lost in a fake world, going through the motions of punching and kicking and shooting each other without physically connecting with anything.

The Unknown Girl | Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2016

Indigestion and vomiting, the benefit of release. Haenel's doctor encourages confession: her patients speak and their illnesses disappear, her ex-intern speaks and becomes a doctor again; but she processes her own guilt in silence, embarking upon a frustrating investigation that she's not equipped to handle while the world around her gets smaller and smaller: a promising career and a dead-end job, a spacious flat and a duvet on an office floor, and a literal hole in the ground that she can't climb out of without someone passing her a ladder.

Retribution | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2006

Retribution | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2006

“I felt lonely for so long. Since then, all my senses, memories, and emotions as a human disappeared one by one, and only despair was left at the end.”

The pain of Kurosawa’s ghosts is the perpetual despair of lost love, and an agonising emptiness impelled by the loneliness of the modern world. In Retribution, two ghosts in red dresses embody this pain in oppositional ways: a woman taking revenge on those who she believes killed her through inaction and neglect, and a detective’s ex-lover pretending to be alive to spare him the anguish of her death. One's dress is vivid red, unadorned, invasive; the other's is more muted, emblazoned with red flowers and splashed with the green of their leaves. An evocative emptiness and an imitation of life, a murderous rage and an enduring love. Both are stuck irretrievably in death, and neither can leave life behind — but empty rage can be satiated. Fake flowers never die.

Seance | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2000

Seance | Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2000

A waitress serves coffee to a man sitting alone in a diner. An unplaceable splash of red appears in the corner of the reverse shot, so sudden and so quiet that it barely draws the eye. But, of course, it ultimately does, and when Kurosawa cuts back, the ghostly figure of a woman has inexplicably filled the seat next to the oblivious man. Something that barely registered a moment ago is now impossible to ignore - so now what? Life can never be the same having seen something impossible. Kurosawa's cinema in three shots.

London East Asia Film Festival 2015 | Journey To The Shore, Kaili Blues

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.