And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type of hi
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
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Drive my car (2021)
A thoughtful and tearful ride in which the destination is a spiritual confrontation with oneself, “Drive My Car” devastates and comforts through its vehicular poetry of the sorrow from which we run, the collisions that awaken us, and the healing gained from every bump in the road.
Two years after a personal tragedy laced with unresolved resentment, Yûsuke moves to Hiroshima, a city with its own history of disaster, to put on a new stage version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, performed by actors speaking their respective native tongues. As part of the job, he must agree to have a chauffer, a condition he is reluctant to. Getting behind the wheel of his outdated, two-door model is ritualistic in its importance.
Burning bright red through the streets and highways, the artist’s car is a temple of freedom and solitude, the embodiment of the return and the departure, the way back home to his beloved and the escape from the fallout of their present. It’s in the silence of that moving space that Oto’s voice comes through the speakers via the aforementioned tape feeding him lines, a lifeline.
Unassumingly shattering, a description just as applicable to the film as a whole, Nishijima’s turn astounds for its unshowiness. As a grief-stricken husband and father masking his continued distress with professional diligence, he maintains strenuous composure until he can no longer swallow his anger towards the person he loved most. The actor’s stoic gestures provide an impenetrable fortress unwilling to give away any hint of his true self.
That energy, of wanting to remain unnoticed and unquestioned, is matched by his assigned personal driver, Misaki (Tôko Miura), a young woman in turn running from her own guilt buried in the ruins of a previous life more than a safe distance away. While observing Yûsuke’s daily rehearsals with his cast, including embattled star Kôji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a slowly constructed affinity with Misaki comes to the foreground. Miura’s modestly assertive performance amplifies a sentiment of mutual confidentiality, and later of the guilt that numbs them both.
A reserved Misaki initially limits her interaction to pressing play on his recording. But a dinner scene where he praises her smooth driving skills dismantles whatever air of servitude was left in the power imbalance imposed on them. Hamaguchi further speaks of an unspoken understanding between people in the way Yûsuke’s international thespians perform with one another from sensorial memory, often not comprehending what the other says through language but feeling alone.
Bountiful in subtle imagery from cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya, the film mines majestic visual symbolism from seemingly ordinary occurrences. Take for example a shot of Yûsuke and Misaki’s hand through the car’s sunroof holding cigarettes as to not let the smoke permeate their sacred mode of transportation—an unspoken communion of respect. Long conversations in the back seat of the tried and tested four-wheeled co-star force the camera to stay on their faces, registering the enunciation and reaction of the other without other embellishments, honoring what's being said and how the other is receiving it. That back and forth between two interlocutors nakedly spewing sincerity feels riveting in its simple composition.
- Release date: November 24, 2021 (USA)Director: Ryusuke HamaguchiNominations: Academy Award for Best Picture, MORECinematography: Hidetoshi ShinomiyaScreenplay: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa OeAdapted from: Men Without Women, Drive My Car
- Release date: November 24, 2021 (USA)Director: Ryusuke HamaguchiNominations: Academy Award for Best Picture, MORECinematography: Hidetoshi ShinomiyaScreenplay: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa OeAdapted from: Men Without Women, Drive My Car
Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
“You can’t get a head start if you aim for perfection,” a clueless moneyed entrepreneur muses during a video chat with his two shell-shocked subordinates in the new film from writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. In the context of the actual conversation the sentiment is even more inane than it sounds on the face of it. And there’s also the question if perfection itself even ... exists? The title of this movie seems a definitive statement but it’s ultimately not one that the movie itself really settles.
"The messaging resonates and Hamaguchi makes good points, but the film fails to be immersive enough to really engage the viewer. While Drive My Car grabs your attention for all of its 179 minutes, Evil Does Not Exist can barely do the same for 105. There are moments of beauty and simplicity, but not nearly enough to sustain a feature. There’s meaning to be wrung out of extended shots of trees, lumberjacking, and deer skulls, sure, but the movie’s ambivalence gets old quick."
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